Disturbances in the Field (56 page)

Karl shook hands all around. He was dressed in a suit and tie; he must have been coming from his office. Karl, it struck me anew, bore a remarkable resemblance to Sigmund Freud, his spiritual ancestor, with the trim, graying beard, the kindly yet somewhat dismayed set of his features. He had a kindly stance too, leaning a bit forward as he greeted us.

“Nice to see you again, Lydia, and looking so well.” The last time I had seen him was February—he came with Rosalie to pay a condolence call. They brought
marrons glacis,
which Victor and I finished in bed, watching some late movie. I noticed even then that they consorted a good deal for a couple who had ostensibly separated.

“Thank you. It’s good to see you too, Karl.” Unfortunately, thanks to Rosalie, I could not see Karl without an accompanying image of greasy pots and socks left on the floor, and yet he still appealed to me. He seemed right for Rosalie, ballast without which she might whirl off somewhere, hanging on to her bow.

“How’s the ‘Trout’ going?”

“Oh, you’d better ask Rosalie that. She’s afraid I’m going to ruin everything, even though I assure her I’ll come through.”

Rosalie approached, swirling a Mexican poncho over her head. We stepped out of range. “It’s just that I don’t get how you can withhold it or ration it out. Give and you’ll have more. Loaves and fishes.”

Besides the facial resemblance to Freud, Karl is also a Viennese Jew, one who managed to get to this country during the war as a teen-ager, all alone. It is possible that he too clawed his way through the forests of Poland, or rather Austria, leaving behind him a broken, doomed family, but he never speaks of it, at least not within my hearing. That journey is inside him, however, and may be why he once found the vagaries of Rosalie so alarming, as well as why he can now resolve to endure them.

“Are you ready, dear?” He is positively courtly. I can’t believe it, about the raised bread knife.

“Lydia, want a lift?”

“I’m going with Jasper.” I give a frosty glance. She shakes her head and mutters under her breath as we part.

Jasper and I drive in comfortable silence. He is probably hearing Schubert and hardly aware of my presence. Through the glasses his myopic eyes squint at the twilight streets. His profile is angular, the cheek concave like a medieval stone saint’s.

“Want a cup of coffee?” I ask as he pulls up at my building. This is a formality. He never does.

“Thanks, but I’d better not. Frank is waiting for me. He cooks fancy dishes. Can’t let them spoil.” He grins boyishly. Jasper, lately, has begun to reveal details of his private life. Perhaps he didn’t have one before.

“I thought you’d gained some weight. You look terrific.”

“Thank you. How are the kids doing?”

“Fine. Althea’s having a great time at school so far. Phil is coming to the concert. You’ll see him. Are you worried too?”

“Lord no.” He turns to face me. His mouth is stern, but I’m used to that by now. “How long have we been playing together, Lydia? Nine years? Ten? I’m not worried. Carla is very good, and Howard of course. It’s a matter of trust, isn’t it?” The stern lips relax into a wry smile. “I trust that if you need to collapse you’ll have the good grace to do it afterwards.”

“Jasper.” I can actually feel my heart speed up in response. “Thanks.” I lean over and kiss him on the mouth, close-lipped but sweet. God knows why I felt compelled to do that. We move apart and stare. He kisses me in return, the same brief way, and we start to laugh.

“Is Rosalie back with her husband?” he asks.

“Looks like it.”

“You women. You certainly do flit around. It’s beyond me.”

“You’re becoming a wonderful type, you know? You’re going to be the most straitlaced middle-aged deviate anyone could imagine.”

He makes a face of mock offense. “I beg your pardon, I’m only thirty-six.”

“Oh God, a wit besides. What are we coming to?”

“So are you going to do the ‘Spring’ Sonata with me up in Massachusetts? We’ve been talking about it for two years. It’s so gorgeous. And you know it’s perfect for us.”

“Why?”

“We’re both such romantics underneath. What could be more romantic? All that ripply, sinuous stuff. What a chance to indulge.”

“Oh, I don’t know if I am any more. I played it with Greg Parnis years ago. We were not bad—I still have the tape. Well, maybe we should, why not? It’d be fun to work on.”

Jasper whistles the opening theme of the last movement, a jaunty bit where the violin and piano echo each other half a slippery beat behind. I whistle my part too and for a few seconds we manage to keep the thing aloft, but it’s awfully tricky, whistling to that funny, disjointed beat; our whistles start tripping and stumbling over each other and we end up dissolved in laughter.

“We’ll do better than that, I trust.”

“Thanks for the ride, my dear. Till tomorrow.”

“Do you need any help with that?” He points to my bag of fruit.

“No, I can carry it fine. See you.”

Before I even reach my door I hear it: not the usual early evening stillness I can’t get used to, but a flurry of young voices. Jabbers and giggles. I hang my jacket in the hall and stand listening.

“Oh, but the way she said it. I thought I’d die!” A girl’s bubbly voice.

“I honestly don’t know how she can keep a straight face.” Phil, loud and exhilarated.

“I don’t think she
can
move the muscles of her face. I think she has paralysis of the face, if there is such a thing.”

“Masturbation. No. ‘Mas-tur-ba-tion.’” The girl’s voice goes deep and nasal and takes on a pseudo-cultivated accent. “‘This afternoon we will discuss mas-tur-ba-tion. I’m sure we all know what that is.’”

Howls, screeches, groans.

To deposit the fruit and get to the bottle of Scotch in the kitchen I have to walk through the living room. I don’t want to spoil Phil’s party. I’ll glide through invisibly, wave if necessary. I make it to the doorway.

“Oh hi, Mom.” Surrounded by allies, he’s not at all abashed that I should come upon this secret face of his, the genial face kept in reserve. I have to control my own face, smile back as if he gives me this greeting every day with eyes wide open and frank. It’s I who feel bashful meeting them. “This is my mother,” he declares without irony, in a voice that has shed its choked constraint. “And this is—let’s see, starting at the bookcase—Nick, June, Toni. Ilana you already know.”

“Hi, Ilana.”

“Hi, Lydia.” A pert, chorus-girl flick of a flat hand, palm front. I like Ilana the informal, the gray-eyed, freckled, and red-haired, bosomy in her salmon-colored T-shirt.

“David and Jose,” he winds up.

“We have this sex education course,” Ilana tells me. “We’re not sure we’ll make it through, though. We might die laughing first.”

I sneak a glance at Phil, who doesn’t even blink, but dips his hand along with the rest into an immense bowl of gorp on the floor in the center of their circle. The living room is strewn with sweatshirts and knapsacks and sneakers. It is wondrous. The kids themselves are a World Federalist’s dream, a medley of the races of the earth, drinking egg creams. George brought over two bottles of seltzer the other day, but Phil must have gone out and bought the extra milk himself. That too is wondrous.

“Don’t mind the mess, Mrs. Rowe,” Toni, the Oriental girl, says. “We’ll clean it all up before we go.”

“I don’t mind. I like it. Just ... carry on.” I leave them to make my drink. I was afraid I’d inhibit them but my fears prove groundless. From the kitchen I can see the black girl, June, continue her impersonation.

“‘I’m sure you’ve all heard various myths concerning masturbation.’” She switches on a leering, mechanical smile. “‘Now, what are some of the myths you’ve heard?’”

“Blindness? Rings under the eyes?” They inspect each other’s eyes.

“My dick-o will fall off?” the boy called Jose whines. “Oh my God!” he gasps in falsetto, clutching himself.

A jumble of cries: “Oops! Catch it, quick! Over there! Microsurgery can do wonders.”

Convulsions of laughter. Rolling on the floor. How long since Althea’s friends sat there performing such antics? Long; Althea’s friends have been long past that. The gradations in those years are subtle, the stages brief. I have forgotten how much I liked this barely-sixteen phase. I like the irreverence, the anarchy, the absence of control. Then it vanishes. They become proper, law-abiding citizens. They become us.

“That’s nothing compared to menstruation. You missed it yesterday,” Ilana says to Phil, beaming a sassy smile. “You cut, you delinquent youth. ‘What myths have you ladies and gentlemen heard about mens-tru-a-tion?’”

“If I wash my hair it’ll fall out?”

A boy reaches over to grab a clump of hair. “Look at this! Comes off right in my hand.” Paroxysms.

I take my drink and slip quietly through the room, making an effort not to limp. I can walk right if I concentrate. The limp teeters on that line between voluntary and involuntary. Sometimes I worry that it will cross over to the wrong side and become a species of tic like the woman on the bus had. Or like Mr. Zeitlowitz.

“You’ll poison any food you touch!”

“Help!” One boy grips at his stomach and pretends to retch, another tosses a fistful of gorp back into the bowl.

I shut the door of my bedroom. Happiness has come to Phil and I am glad. A fine thing, too, to be educated and to relish one’s education so.
Brava,
courageous teacher of the nasal voice and the straight face. And
bravi,
boisterous outspoken children who can laugh away their discomforts. When I was a girl there were indeed whispers going round that it might be dangerous to wash our hair during menstruation. But could Phil even dream that his great-grandmothers in Eastern Europe probably visited a ritual bath after each period and had to show a bloodless white cloth to the guardian at the door before their husbands could screw them once again? Does June imagine that her ancestors in Africa shut women up in isolated huts every month for the duration? Does David understand that they bound his grandmother’s feet so she would not run away from her biological fate, and as a result here he is, cozy in these United States?

They have a Beatles record playing now, Vivian’s favorite—the
White Album,
whose theme she insisted was animals. “Blackbird singing in the dead of night”—so loud I can hear every word clearly—“Take these broken wings and learn to fly. All your life, you were only waiting for this moment to arise. You were only waiting ...”

I was only waiting for this moment to lie down, after the rotten rehearsal. I undressed and stretched out. Way across the bed, on Victor’s nighttable, was the book he had been reading just before he left. Bronislaw Malinowski’s
Magic, Science and Religion,
opened and turned face down. Myths in abundance. I had never touched it all these months but I did now, slithered over the wide stretch of Victor’s side and reached for the book. Let’s see, at last, what myths were on his mind. What put him to sleep nights, after we lay silent or had our desultory talks or made our grim love? Victor, it appeared, had been reading about the ghosts of the deceased in the Trobriand Islands. The ghosts go to an island called Tuma, where they enter the earth through a hole especially made for that purpose, a passage Malinowski coyly calls “a sort of reversed proceeding to the original emergence.”

Oh Victor! Is this what fed your dreams? While I slept, or stole into Alan’s room (not Vivian’s, not to startle Althea, be a mother at all costs) and stood in the dark fingering the furniture, testing the bed to see what it had felt like to be Alan and lie there safe, knowing parents lay right across the hall strong and ready for any sort of rescue? While I lay there breathing in pain you were dreaming about the souls of the dead crawling back into the earth, a reverse proceeding? God, I wish you had told me. No, you were right not to. I might have shrugged and said something dismissive, told you to go to sleep. You were right to leave, a reverse proceeding. Better than staying with me in a snowy pit in the earth.

“Even more important,” says Malinowski, “even more important is the fact that after a span of spiritual existence in Tuma, the nether world, an individual grows old, gray, and wrinkled; and that then he has to rejuvenate by sloughing his skin.” Me. You sloughed me like an old skin. “Even so did human beings in the old primeval times, when they lived underground. When they first came to the surface they had not yet lost this ability; men and women could live eternally young.”

They must have done something, committed some bodily sin, masturbated or washed their hair during menstruation, to suffer so huge a loss. For all the myths show self-indulgence punished by a stripping away. Just look at them go! those treasured indispensables—penis, hair, eyesight, clear skin. Tough. Let the body have its way and you lose, you lose. Careless and pleasure-loving and greedy, having babies beyond your fair share ... With all my schooling I should be above such superstition, but it seems I’m not. Reason has flowed in and out of me light as air, leaving no trace except an image of the flying hair of Professor Boles. So okay, tell us, Bronislaw, what did we do to lose eternal life? Since surely we all did it, in the person of the original offender.

They lost the faculty, however, by an apparently trivial, yet important and fateful event. Once upon a time there lived in the village of Bwadela an old woman who dwelt with her daughter and granddaughter; three generations of genuine matrilineal descent. The grandmother and granddaughter went out one day to bathe in the tidal creek. The girl remained on the shore, while the old woman went away some distance out of sight. She took off her skin, which, carried by the tidal current, floated along the creek till it stuck on a bush. Transformed into a young girl, she came back to her granddaughter. The latter did not recognize her; she was afraid of her and bade her begone. The old woman, mortified and angry, went back to her bathing place, searched for her old skin, put it on again, and returned to her granddaughter. This time she was recognized and thus greeted: “A young girl came here; I was afraid; I chased her away.” Said the grandmother: “No, you didn’t want to recognize me. Well, you will become old—I shall die.” They went home to where the daughter was preparing the meal. The old woman spoke to her daughter: “I went to bathe; the tide carried my skin away; your daughter did not recognize me; she chased me away. I shall not slough my skin. We shall all become old. We shall all die.”