Disturbances in the Field (36 page)

Okay, smartass, then why weren’t the first two taken?

Aha! God moves in mysterious ways. His wonders to perform. “Because it was done for you and prescribed for you, and in a manner had reference to you, originally from the most ancient causes spun with your destiny.”

I also hear the dying voice of Edith croaking to me, an Edith not as she was or even became, but beyond herself, pushed still further back into her ancestral past; an old Jewish lady with a heavy accent and Yiddish intonation, but she still retains a certain Upper East Side savvy. Croaks: So this, Lydia, after all your hemming and hawing, this is the conclusion you come to? What are you,
meshugah?
This is your life, all your nice accomplishments and you’re drowning in guilt?
Vey is mir!
Plus with up there someone spinning threads like a fairy tale! You, on purpose, they picked out? What’s the matter, you don’t believe in accidents? You think you can be the boss of this life? All right, so maybe once in a while you thought it would be nice to be free. Since when is that a sin? Even your smart friend, what’s his name, you know, the psychiatrist, psychologist, what’s the difference, the one who I never liked the way he looked at you, a married woman and to my son, even him and his modern ideas didn’t teach you anything?

No, Edith. I think I was not meant to be a mother. I trespassed into the wrong myth.

Oh dear, she says, resuming her usual voice and diction. Oh dear, oh dear.

Zeit gezunt, mein kind,
she whispers, and sinks back into her grave.

I lost my children because ... Ah, at last it comes! Because I did not want them in the first place. Not for themselves. For me. To prove a point. Because they, those two, were an experiment in pride. And you mustn’t experiment with human lives! Everyone knows that! Mustn’t, mustn’t! Stand up against the wall so I can smack your face. Back and forth and back and forth with a flick of the hand, the gifted, experienced hand. Mustn’t play games, Lydia!

Still, the experiment was a success. The operation was a success, but the patients ...

One of the most beloved and talented girls in our class in college died eight years after graduation, trying to save her child. I read about it in
The New York Times.
I lay on a blanket at Jones Beach reading the paper while Victor splashed around in the surf with Althea and Phil. It happened in a house in Cambridge, Massachusetts: the four-year-old boy had found a cigarette lighter upstairs. Before the firemen arrived she had run up the flaming staircase to roll him in a bedspread and toss him out a window. The child was saved, but she died of burns and asphyxiation. Steffie had done well after college. Done good, that is. She was a lawyer of some repute. Deep in the South, Birmingham, Selma, she accompanied voters to the polls, talked protesters out of jail, defended activists. Even in college, we had known she would serve good causes and serve them well.

“Look at this,” I said to Victor when he came back to the blanket. As he read, I dried the children, squealing and jumping (alive!) under the towels.

“How awful. But which one was she? I don’t remember any Stephanie Rosenberg.”

“Of course you do. Steffie Baum, then. She was the small, very pretty one who wore her hair a different way every day and had a lot of boyfriends? She used to sneak out at night. We thought she was very daring. She sang in Gilbert and Sullivan—Patience, in a blue gingham dress, don’t you remember?” I was starting to cry, rubbing my eyes with sandy hands.

“Oh! Of course. She was almost the valedictorian but someone else got it in the end.”

“Yes, that’s right. That’s her. She went out with your friend Ray Fielding for a while. She wrote an article about the slums around the college and that we should pay attention, and she got the Service Award. She also loved Mallomars. And she never slept with George, either. She had to really like them.”

“This is terrible,” said Victor, and he sat down on the blanket. “Wasn’t she the one who got all those Patient Griselda poems printed in the paper?”

“Yes ...” I looked around. “Where are they? Oh Lord, they’re in the water again.” We leaped up.

When we got home I called Nina and Gabrielle, and George, who had sung but not slept with her. They had seen the article too, two and a half inches on the obituary page. I talked on the phone all evening, about Steffie Baum, now Steffie Rosenberg that was. And about that awful child. Careless, disobedient wretch, to kill his mother.

Steffie, how I envy your fate. Why wasn’t I given a chance to be a hero and save them? I would have, just like you. Even though I wasn’t as useful or as large-spirited as you, still, I swear I would have done it too. And not for pride, either. For real. For it
was
real. It became real. I became it. I too would have gone through the fire to pull them out, dammit. But then, you were always a step ahead.

V
ICTOR AND I NO
longer make love. We lie side by side chastely in the new king-sized bed. Like brother and sister, yet brother and sister side by side each night might not be so chaste as we. I don’t like the new bed—too large, ostentatiously large. It was Victor’s idea. He is not ostentatious, he simply wants to sprawl. He would like to make love sprawled at an angle, feeling an expanse of usable space around him. Only when we were discussing a new bed two months ago did he reveal these yearnings. “Do you mean to tell me you felt cramped for over nineteen years and never said so?” He became mock-pensive. “No, I wouldn’t put it like that—cramped for over nineteen years. That would be overstating it. But as long as we have a big enough room now ... Wouldn’t you like to feel space around you?” “I don’t care about space at those moments. Why don’t you go ahead and pick whatever sort of bed you like, love, and I’ll lie in it.”

The bed is really two beds hooked together. One sheet, but I can feel the crack clearly dividing the territories—his, hers.

We lie awake together, sometimes clasping hands, flat on our backs like the flat figures carved on sarcophagi, shadows of the substance entombed beneath. I’ve always liked his hands, warm, dry, and rough, the fingertips especially rough, from working. I rub my fingertips against his, a sensuous, asexual exploration. We lie for hours, mostly silent, now and then speaking into the dark.

“I can’t stop wondering what it was like,” he says.

“Quick, I’m sure. They hardly knew.”

“Do you think they might have been asleep?”

“I doubt it. It was only six o’clock.”

“But maybe they were tired out from the skiing.”

“Maybe.”

We lie still for another half hour.

“The fire,” says Victor.

“I don’t think they felt much. It was very quick.” Quick and erratic. The phases of fire, Heraclitus said, are craving and satiety. It throws apart and then brings together again; it advances and retires. Also cruel: “Fire in its advance will catch all things by surprise and judge them.”

“But their clothes were charred.”

“They were? How do you ... ?”

“The down jackets. I mean just the ... the backs. The man took me aside and showed me, in a bag. He said we could have it but I left it.”

Again. He has become a spring. Victor, who wept only five times before in my presence. When his mother was dying, then died. Once in despair that he would never sell another painting, and once when the first two were babies and things were so bad between us we thought of parting. Last when on the platform at a disarmament rally a paraplegic Vietnam veteran strained to rise out of his wheelchair and throw his arms around the speaker from Japan, most of whose family had been wiped out in Hiroshima but whose two daughters lived on diseased. Death-in-life, the wrinkled, elegant Japanese man called it. And now so readily. I, who wept vicariously for movies and books, weddings and assassinations, massacres in Cambodia and bombings in Israel, am dry.

He is crossing over from his side to mine to be soothed. I take his head on my breast and stroke his hair, but say nothing. He would probably like it if I spoke, crooned something, but I feel ungiving. I have nothing to croon, and I don’t like this new bed he chose. After a while he moves back to his side, switches on a lamp and picks up the book which for a week or so has been lying open, face down, on the nighttable, one side gradually fattening, the other shrinking: a work of Malinowski that he read long ago in college—
Magic, Science and Religion.
A book filled with myths.

Less often it is I who speak into the dark.

“Maybe they should have had seat belts.”

“There are no seat belts on buses, Lydia.”

“Maybe there should be.”

“Then they would have been trapped. It would have been worse.” Worse? What is worse? “Do you think they were sitting together?” “I don’t know. Did they usually, on those school trips?” “I don’t think so. They must have been sitting with their friends.” “Which one was her best friend now? I lost track.” “Monica.” I pause. “She was that redheaded girl, Monica.” Victor clears his throat, a recognition of the fate of Monica. “I guess Alan was sitting with Joel.”

Vivie was fickle, but Alan had the same best friend for years. Joel escaped; concussion, burns up and down the left side of his body.

“They must have been hungry. It was six o’clock.” I had packed lunches, but lunch was a long way back. Alan couldn’t stand mustard. He made me put margarine on all his sandwiches, even salami. Salami with margarine is outrageous, I tried to explain, but he didn’t understand. Did they buy a snack for the trip home? They started out with three dollars each in their pockets, two bills and four quarters. Vivian might have dropped some on the slopes. Well, so they were hungry. So? If they had stopped on the way back for a snack. If some kid had complained that he was starving and couldn’t they please stop. If this same kid had then eaten too much or too fast and implored the teacher to make the driver stop again so he could get out and throw up. Then the driver could have stepped outside for a moment too, to clear his head. Any of this might have saved them. Usually there is that sort of kid on school trips. Why not this time?

“What did they have for lunch?” Victor asks. “I don’t remember.” I do remember, but I will not say. That is going too far, going overboard.

We lie silent awhile longer, with the crack between us, till we fall asleep. Who knows, maybe we fall asleep at the same moment, like a simultaneous orgasm, a voguish goal in our youth, vestige of the era of togetherness. Something one mastered, like a souffle. We wake early on far sides of the bed and roll closer together; he studies my face. My face: he could look at it forever and not get bored, he said when we first made love, but I sensed he meant it as a painter, not as a lover, and was disappointed. Later on, older and less romantic, I grasped it was far better that he should mean it as a painter. Right now I’m not sure how he’s looking at it. Eyes alert in a sleepy, craggy face, he studies, maybe touches, and we get up. We go into the bathroom together; he showers, I pee and brush my teeth. He shaves, I shower. Such proximity implies that we are very close. In fact we are very estranged. For once, not at all similar. We are going about this process very differently. “Handling it,” as George would say. But some things are too hot to handle.

And yet our nights are not without diversion. We peruse the TV listings for late movies.

“Oh, the one about the
Titanic!
I must see that. Rosalie always used to tell me about it.” In the distant past, she told me about the musicians who keep on playing while the ship goes down. The best part, she said.

“I saw it years ago at the bar, before we were married, but not the whole thing.”

“That night, that’s what you said you were watching.”

“What night?”

“When you came over to my place. The night Gaby and Don got married. You brought your harmonica and played part of the ‘Trout.’”

“Ah.” He smiles. “How could I forget? You were so touched that you, uh, proposed.”

“I accepted, you mean.”

“Well, why quibble now? Okay, let’s give it a whirl.”

We pile up pillows, and sitting side by side, hand in hand, Victor sipping Jack Daniel’s, we enjoy the sinking of the
Titanic.
The musicians, playing aslant and wet as the great ship lists, as families split, chaos threatens, and people’s true natures are ruthlessly bared by disaster, are inspiring indeed. I can see why Rosalie held them up as an example, joking yet earnest, when my children were small and I had to struggle to get to rehearsals, against the lure of weariness and inertia. They play till the very end, serenading death and mocking it. Not to keep up morale, nor to shield their spirits from the inevitable. They play because it is the best way to spend their final moments; they play to prove that something of them abides to the last breath.

Once upon a time a movie like this one might have made me weep: women and children setting out in lifeboats, fathers left behind to drown. I sit and smoke; Victor yawns. During the last quarter of an hour or so he plays absently with my hand, places it on his leg, spreads the fingers, draws designs on the back, traces the outlines of the fingernails, rides the bumps of the knuckles. Very estranged. Afterwards we agree it was a terrific movie. An emotional workout. “Good show,” says Victor, and kisses my hand, rubs it along his lips. He flicks off the set and dims the lights so we lie in near-darkness.

“Lydia? Do you think Althea sleeps with any of those boys who come over?”

“I don’t think so. I think I could tell. But then who knows what they do these days? Maybe she used to with Darryl.”

“With Darryl? She was barely sixteen then. You think so?” There is a prurient tinge in his voice.

“They must have done something together.”

“I wonder what it’s like when you’re so young. I wasn’t that young when I first started.” He pauses. “They—”
They,
in that tone, is a code term. “They never got to feel any of that.”

“No.” Alan had reached the stage of pushing and poking girls he liked. Vivie found the idea of romantic love laughable. But Victor, I can tell, doesn’t want to talk about them tonight. Victor wants to talk about sex. Why just now is curious: the sinking of the
Titanic
was scarcely an aphrodisiac.