Disturbances in the Field (51 page)

She was tearing off bits of lettuce and munching them rhythmically, as Alan’s old hamsters used to do. “What is the field, though? It sounds like Bloomingdale’s on a Saturday.”

For all her saintliness, I wanted to get up and put my arms around her. “Life. The whole works. I don’t know.”

Gabrielle shrugged and munched. “I was never good at broad inclusive visions. I see one thing at a time. I’m the hedgehog. Or is it the fox? I could never even remember which was which.”

“This business with Victor, you see ...” I knew I shouldn’t, but she had touched me, and the wine prodded my tongue. “I need him, but I can’t ... when he’s there it doesn’t work. He needs, oh, maybe he needs this fat lady, but I doubt it. What he really needs is me. The disturbances are so thick, though, we can’t begin to see each other through them.”

“Lydia.” She reached over to take my hand. “Maybe you could try to talk plainly to him.”

“Plainly? Plainly, the disturbance is ... What we both need is for that bus not to have crashed. We need
them.
” I regretted it the minute the words were out and I saw the muscles of Gabrielle’s fine face go slack with impotence and pity. Yet I didn’t stop. “Remember that quote from Schopenhauer, when we lived in the apartment together, about the endlessness of desiring? Like the fisherman’s wife—for every wish that’s satisfied a new one springs up. God, he was so wrong. If I could have one wish I would be satisfied. I would not be like the fisherman’s wife. I would never ask for anything again.”

She murmured something sympathetic and squeezed my hand—what more could she do? It puts people in a terrible position, speaking like that. In bed with George was one thing, but over lunch at the Museum of Modern Art? No, this would never do.

Gabrielle was upset: she said she was going to give in and have chocolate cake for dessert.

“You might as well bring one for me too.”

As we dug into the gooey frosting, I said, “I feel much better seeing you eat.”

“Why, do you like to see me fat?”

“No, I like to see you uncontrolled. Gaby, I have a great idea. Take the afternoon off. We’ll go to the beach. You can pick up your lint tomorrow.”

“The beach! It’s freezing.”

We both looked up at the unpromising sky. “It won’t rain, though. This is the best kind of day to see the ocean.”

We went uptown to get my car (Victor’s car, technically, and its farewell jaunt with me at the wheel), even though the indestructible green Volkswagen bus was parked less than half a mile away. Gabrielle did not drive. She did not ride a bike or ski, either. She no longer did anything that required traveling linear distances. She was superb at tennis, where you perform cunning maneuvers in a box.

There were more people on the boardwalk than I expected to find: mostly old people in slow pairs, taking the salt air, and a pack of kids on bicycles making the ancient planks grunt beneath them. Down below, the expanse of sand was dotted by soda cans and crumpled paper wrappers; the sea was greenish-black like an old crepe dress, with the breaking surf a crocheted collar; in the sky, gray shifted over gray, and way off on the horizon was a dark ship. From the cold railing of the boardwalk I might have measured just how far off, had I needed to. After Thales of old, that spacy, inveterate bachelor who believed all things had their source in water, I could have measured the angle of my line of vision to the ship, then rotated that angle around and projected a line that would touch earth, who knows, maybe not far from where I lived.

“It’s terribly windy,” said Gabrielle. Her hair was blowing everywhere, in her eyes, her mouth. She laughed and dug a barrette out of her bag to clip it back.

“Do you mind it?”

“Not really.”

“When I was a kid and we went to the beach in the summer, I used to want the air to be very still, no wind at all. It can’t be—there’s always wind at the edge of the sea. Once in a great while for a few seconds it would stop, I could hear it stop, and I wished it would stay that way. But over on the bay side of the Cape, where my sister liked to go, it was very still. Not a stir in the air, sometimes. Some days hardly a ripple in the water. When we studied those Eleatic philosophers in school, that’s what I was reminded of, those windless static days at the bay. And those few seconds at the ocean, that never lasted. Do you want to go down?”

“All right,” she said.

We took off our shoes and walked down a rickety flight of stairs. There were no other people on the sand.

“I used to look at the beach from the top of a high dune and I saw three broad stripes. The sky, the sea, the sand. It was all so harmonious. I loved it.” I smiled at her, huddled in her jacket, hands deep in her pockets. “I must have had the same sense of infinity and order that the Greeks were after. And it did seem static. Even the ocean, because that constant movement is really only one impulse, repeating infinitely. Did you ever have those sensations?”

“Yes, but not back then. We went to France every summer, to those green and rust-colored villages where we had family. It was all very close and cozy. Even the sky seemed low.”

We sat down some yards from the edge. “I still have those absurd feelings about harmony and beauty and order,” I said. “I expect to find them somewhere, holding up the world. Hah! That’s one of the perils of a happy childhood. I’m sure Nina doesn’t have any such expectations. It’s like those principles you were brought up to feel were unalterable, and even though you’ve gone beyond them in your thinking, they’re still in you, and you can’t help measuring things against them. And when I see that the world is otherwise, I’m as stunned as a child. Music has harmony and beauty and order—it’s the only place.”

“You’re lucky to have that. You were right, the sea is wonderful on this kind of day. Almost black.”

Just as she spoke we heard garbled voices moving on the wind, then felt a rush of air. A group of eight or ten pale bodies in black bathing suits ran past us. Big sturdy bodies, men and women both; monumental, like Picasso’s bathers. They dashed through the surf and gamboled in the breakers like overgrown children. The mood of the sea was rough but not dangerous. We watched, astonished.

“Who are those strange creatures?”

“They must be the Polar Bear Club,” Gaby said. “Remember Esther told us about them? That time she came with Ralph. They swim all year round, in any weather.”

“They are definitely a disturbance in the field.”

“I think they’re admirable. They are what makes it a field. Otherwise it’s just a big black mass. It must be so cold, though. I wonder what makes them do it.”

In less than five minutes they came racing out of the ocean towards the shelter under the boardwalk. As they passed us, water shook from them; I could see the goose bumps on their skin.

“Esther married that jerk Ralph because he took her to see the ocean,” I said. “God only knows why she married the other one. Who ever has a sensible reason? If I hadn’t married Victor none of this would have happened.” You got married, I did not say aloud. You needed the apartment so I moved in with him. Holding me in his arms, after that first time, he offered to help me find a place but I said, No, now I want to live with you. Now? he said. As opposed to when? A half hour ago? “We set something in motion—I keep thinking that. Sometimes I wonder if I ever loved him. Or if I could have avoided it.”

“Of course you loved him. You still do.”

“They talk of falling in love, but there is a moment where it’s voluntary, where you consent to fall. I liked him. And then I let it loose. I slept with him so much I got to love him. I mean, I loved what he made me feel.”

“Love does not bear such close analysis,” Gaby said.

“I never did before. When you don’t have it is when you analyze it.” I stood up and walked towards the water, rolled up my pants and got my feet wet. Not as cold as I expected. “Want to swim?” I called back into the wind.

“Are you crazy?”

“It’s not bad. Come on.”

“No.” But she came closer. “You’re not serious? What are you going to swim in, anyway?”

“Oh, in my scanty little undies, I guess. Do you find that too appalling?”

“You’ll catch cold.”

I laughed and took off my clothes. Gaby seemed distressed as she glanced around the empty beach. I went in quickly, the way I used to as a child, letting the first one splash me and diving into the next. I swam fast to get warm, heading for the stretch beyond the breakers as I had done hundreds of times before. The salt smell was wonderfully strong. Soon I was warm, but I kept on swimming hard, careful to stay parallel to the shore. The water was warmer than the air—I kept my head under as much as I could. Once I looked up to wave to Gaby. She was walking along the edge in the same direction, her eyes fixed on me. She waved back and called to me to come out. But I felt I had barely begun, and I knew that from the shore swimmers always appear frighteningly farther off than they are. I kept on because I was loving it, the strenuous, Lethean pleasure of it, and because it would be so deadly cold when I finally did come out and remembered everything. When I next looked towards shore I saw her walking into the water. She was in over knee-deep, holding up her skirt and calling. I veered round and swam to her. It took only a moment.

“What’s the matter? Why’d you come in?”

She was shivering so hard her teeth chattered. “You were too far out.”

“And
you
were going to save
me?”

“I panicked, watching you. I just suddenly panicked. Let’s get out. I’m freezing.” We ran out. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking.” She rubbed her eyes as if to awaken.

“Ah! Well, I do! Jesus Christ!” I shouted at her. “If someone wants to drown herself they swim out,
that
way.” I pointed. “Not in the direction of goddamn Queens!” I hopped around and shook the water off me. “I was doing just fine! I happen to be a model swimmer. It’s my only other talent. By the time you got out there I would have had to save you. Shit, we don’t even have a fucking towel. Who comes to the beach without a towel!”

“What are you so angry for, Lydia? Can’t you understand I meant well?”

“I’m angry because there I am endeavoring to persevere in my being and you think I’m a suicide! I’ll go when I’m good and ready. I’m not ready. And anyway, I wouldn’t leave you holding the bag. I haven’t lost all sense of decorum, after all.”

“Thanks. I’m delighted to hear it.”

“It’s lousy to be so misunderstood. When I really needed you two weeks ago, you had to go to a goddamn dinner, and now when I’m having a good time, you come to save me. Where the fuck are my clothes?”

“About a mile in that direction,” she snapped.

We started walking.

“Oh, Gaby,” I said softly, “it’s more like a hundred yards.” In the car I turned the heat up high, and we sat for a while and warmed up. I told her I was very sorry for all I had just said, I did understand her gesture and would treasure it. Would she accept my apology? She answered, a bit distantly, that of course she would. Of course. She accepts everything, indiscriminately.

H
APPY FAMILIES ARE NOT
all alike; possibly, unhappy families are not all unhappy in different ways. Phil and Althea left for the summer. The next day, I began by studying the couple sitting opposite me on the downtown bus, some fifteen years older than Victor and I, in advanced middle age. The woman, a protruding-bone type, looked hollowed. She had strong wrists with long narrow hands, rather like mine, that clasped and unclasped jerkily. Her face was layered with make-up. Her stiff hair was artificially streaked, as though someone had emptied a bag of feathers over her head. She sat taut in the stifling heat, a bird of prey, while beside her sat her quarry: a smallish man who appeared to have recently shrunk, with waxen cheeks and wavy white hair that had a yellowish tinge. His face might have been mobile and expressive once, but it expressed nothing now except the most sullen indifference. Her face expressed much—irritation, scorn, most of all fear disguised as imperiousness. Words, in an unexpectedly rich and full voice, poured wetly from her red lips as from a pitcher.

“I don’t know whether to have the wine or the champagne. If I have the wine I don’t know whether to have red or white. They say white goes better with chicken, but it’s not a hard and fast rule. I’ve served red with chicken and no one ever complained. I think I’ll get the red on the way home. More people like it. It goes down easier. Champagne is too good for them in the first place and secondly it’s expensive. Well, maybe in the long run not so expensive because they drink less of it. Still, it makes everything seem so elaborate. I don’t want it to seem over-elaborate. Besides, you can keep what’s left of the wine but you can’t save champagne.”

She was glossy and animated, expensively dressed, but he was shabby, in loose dark pants and worn shoes. With effort he prepared to speak: breathed, swallowed, wet his lips with his tongue, raised his head but not in her direction. “Get the champagne.” An asphyxiated voice, an accusing weariness.

“The champagne?”

The champagne? I was surprised too, after such cogent reasons. He didn’t look like the sort who would want a party to seem over-elaborate.

“Yes, the champagne. Why not?”

“All right, all right. Champagne. If you say so.” The right side of her mouth stretched over in the direction of her ear, exposing the row of molars, then snapped back into place as if on a rubber band. Twice. Pause. A third time. A tic. She sighed and her chin rose bravely again. Again she poured from her pitcher, and I drank, enthralled. “I have two kinds of salad, the potato salad and the bean salad. I have the potatoes all boiled, I just have to chop in some onions and peppers and add the dressing. I’ve still got to do the bean. I could use some help with the bean.” Was there the faintest trace of coyness, supplication, desire in that imperious voice? Something sexual, a reminder of intimate times, when they had asked things of each other and received? He didn’t commit himself; a meager nod. “So what do you think, should I use more of the red beans or the white? I think the white taste better.” Tic.