Disturbances in the Field (7 page)

“Well, uh, I wouldn’t say I believe it in the sense you mean, no. But I do, uh, understand it,” Nina stammered. She could be imperious drilling Esther by rote. When it came to defending a position, she had to blink a lot. “It has to do with a kind of relentless thinking, Esther. Carrying something to the very end, like a clue in a mystery, even if you don’t like where it leads. It’s more honest that way. It seems to me, at least.” She cleared her throat and recrossed her legs.

Esther stared out the window at the November rain; she was silenced, braiding the fringes of the beige curtains. She rarely carried any clue to the very end. “I’m cold,” she said finally. “Where’s my bathrobe?”

“I put it in the wash. I was doing my own things and I thought you wouldn’t mind,” said Nina.

“I don’t. Thanks. But it doesn’t help the fact that I’m cold. Unlike some people, my body temperature moves, hot to cold, cold to hot.”

“Close the window, then, and wear mine.”

A truly Christian gesture, seeing that Esther was such a slob. She had grown up with three generations of messy, uncommunicative family living under one creaking, leaking roof in Chicago. “You bourgeois types wouldn’t believe them!” she told us condescendingly, and we couldn’t. There were a senile maternal grandmother, an incontinent paternal grandfather, aunts and uncles who dropped in and out, besides her parents and three older brothers. Like a commune? Gaby suggested. No, no, not at all like a commune. No Brook Farm. No principles. Just a collection of people, barely a family. There were vague investments they shared; living under one roof made the money go farther.

Esther’s people, as she called them, took their own meals at odd hours, nodded cursory greetings in the halls, and lived for the most part in pajamas. There were cats, her mother’s. “Her warmest feelings were reserved for the cats. She held them all the time. Me, never.” It was like a poorly run hotel, she said, no one minding the front desk. “And I. I was an afterthought. An accident, I mean. I’m sure they weren’t still doing it. He probably fell on her in his sleep, or something like that. I was a grown man’s wet dream.”

Her father didn’t talk much to his children, but he would sometimes warn her brothers against the corruptions of capitalist success. (Not much danger of that, Esther noted with relish. One was in the army and one worked as a garage mechanic. The third built sculpture out of debris.) “My father was a leftist when he was young. An organizer.” A twinge of pride seeped through, like light through a slit in a curtain. “He got disgusted, I guess, in the thirties when the war came. He gave it up.” When, wearing her baby-doll pajamas, she ran into him in the kitchen at midnight, both in search of leftovers and surprising the water beetles into a frantic scurrying, he hardly gave her a glance. “But he shared the food. You’ve got to give the devil his due. Anything he found, he gave me half. Each according to his needs, you know.”

On warm days, atavistically, Esther might wear bedroom slippers to class if she could get them past Nina. It was Nina who reminded her diplomatically to get her shoes reheeled, to hang up her skirts so they didn’t crease, to buy new bras when the old ones lost their shape. Nina was uncomfortable seeing large breasts flop around. Perhaps she reminded her about taking showers too: whenever I met Esther ambling down the hall in her ancient green flannel robe, a wet towel slung over her shoulder, pinkish skin aglow and golden curls dripping, she would announce with a certain belligerent pride, “I just took a shower,” as if I couldn’t tell, or needed to know for the record.

“I am a product of will over chaos,” she declared every so often. “How else do you think I got here?” Leafing through a
Guide to American Colleges and Universities,
she had liked the sound of the small women’s college abutting the great university, and she liked the distance between New York and Chicago. After a few bitter remarks about private education under capitalism, her father agreed to pay the bills, though he considered the venture pointless. “If you think you can find a better husband there than here, be my guest.”

“That wasn’t so bad. That I could take. It was my mother who nearly did me in. ‘New York! My, my. Do you really think you can manage? I wonder who looks after you girls.’ Looks after! I don’t think she looked after me from the first morning she deposited me at kindergarten. ‘But if you feel you must, dear, I certainly wouldn’t stand in your way.’ Stand in my way! She wouldn’t stand, period. She was always lying down. Reclining, you know, on one of those old-fashioned chaises, sort of like Mme. de Stael awaiting her guests. She took naps on and off all day long and never bothered to comb her hair when she got up. She would powder her face, though. She was overpowdered. She had a powdery look, you know what I mean? Like you had an urge to sort of dust her off.” Esther could keep us laughing, but it was unwilling laughter. I hoped she was exaggerating. “‘Be sure to take good care of yourself out there, Essie. The change of air ... You were such a delicate little thing when you were a baby.’ Nine pounds four ounces. Delicate! And she only nursed me for two weeks. Two goddamn weeks. She said I bit. She said I was born with teeth. ‘Remember, if you don’t like it you can always get on a plane and come back home.’ Home! Sure, so I could join her and we could rot together. Of course she wanted me home—who else would do the shopping and cooking, such as it was.”

“Esther, I didn’t know you could cook.”

“Will over chaos.” She ripped open a sample pack of cigarettes. “I’d be happy never to see a pot again for the rest of my life. The kitchen positively reeked of cats, the garbage piled with all those open cans. I tried, believe me. But you can’t get rid of that smell. It’s an indestructible smell. No one else seemed to smell it except me—they were inured.” Nina shuddered. She loathed cats, like her mother before her. “Well, anyway, then she would turn back to her needlepoint. Discussion of my education is finished. She was always doing needlepoint: cats, horses, zebras—she hung them all over her bedroom. Her big excursions were going out to the needlepoint shop. She’d get all dressed, and powdered, naturally, and put on this dark green coat with little foxes’ tails hanging from the collar that made her look like something in those cases at the Museum of Natural History. She would come home all atwitter with a new piece of burlap or whatever the hell it is. Take a plane home! I would rather have died than gone home. Do you remember—well, I guess you wouldn’t; I hardly knew you all then, except Nina—that first semester I spent three weeks in the infirmary? Everyone thought I had mono, I had all the right symptoms. But I think I was having some kind of collapse. I wouldn’t let them call home. I threatened to hang myself if they did. But they made me compromise. I would call my mother and say I wasn’t feeling too well and just sort of chat, so Dr. Peters wouldn’t be in any trouble, I guess in case I died or something. Peters must have listened in on the extension, because after that she didn’t bother me any more about calling. She gave me pills.”

“But why was your mother like that?” Gaby asked. “What happened to her?”

Esther was surprised by the question. “I don’t know that anything special happened to her. That was how she was. I never really thought much about why.” She shrugged and lit another sample cigarette. “Her sister was like that, her mother, maybe I’ll get that way too. Maybe it’s in the genes.”

It was Nina’s and Esther’s room we gathered in because my roommate had to go to bed at eleven-thirty; she claimed her brain cells could not function on fewer than eight hours of sleep. Until eleven-thirty she sat hunched over her desk in her flowered flannel pajamas with feet, like Dr. Denton’s, winding her lank brown hair around her fingers and squinting over thick biology textbooks whose colorful diagrams of inner organs were unsettling. Particularly unsettling was the female sexual and reproductive system, viewed in profile section. To me it was a woman bisected vertically. I have seen that profile many times since, in gynecologists’ offices and in those booklets that explain sex and menstruation to little girls, and still it appears so remote from what some writer called felt life.

My roommate, who came from Denver, ate bananas while she studied. In her open, easy accents, she told me the virtues of potassium. Like me, Melanie was always hungry and always slim. She let the peels pile up on her desk, so that the studious evenings unwound in a sensuous banana aroma, like incense. Mornings brought the bittersweet smell of rot. To offset the banana peels I ate oranges, the large, thick-skinned kind. Orange peels left out overnight do not stink. But sometimes I ate the peels as well. The fleshy white part kept some of the sweetness of the pulp; the closer I got to the outside, the more tart. I loved the bumpy texture but I took very small bites because of the acid. Melanie never thought this slow, luxurious nibbling at the rinds was at all peculiar. She also never seemed to mind my turning on the light in the middle of the night, if I chanced to awaken and panic at the dark.

We were not together in the room very much: for hours every day I used a piano practice room on campus, while she peered into a microscope. Weekends I went to free concerts or lay on my bed reading, eating oranges and an occasional banana; she was out with her boyfriend. Each May we chose to room together again. After graduation we said good-bye warmly, embracing through our identical commencement robes. I think it was the only time we touched. She still sends me Christmas cards from Maryland, where she is a professor of gastroenterology at Johns Hopkins. From Melanie I learned about coexistence, and since then, when Victor and I have had bad spells, thwarting each other’s groping efforts at contact, I have suggested that we try simply to coexist till things improve. I envision us like Melanie and me, for four years sleeping, eating fruit, working, dressing and undressing, demanding little, feeling the mild good will which Aristotle says does not involve intensity or desire yet is a kind of inactive friendship: the parties wish each other well but would not go out of their way to do anything for each other. Victor has no interest in coexistence, though. Victor wants all or nothing.

Gabrielle’s roommate was quite a different matter. An anachronism, years ahead of her time, Steffie Baum slept guiltlessly with the boys across the street. She even stayed out overnight. Apparently a network of Columbia students rented some cheap apartments nearby for their rendezvous, and worked out careful schedules, but I knew nothing yet of the details. Steffie was a small, curvy girl with a pretty face and large, unapologetic blue eyes that could hold a steady gaze longer than anyone else’s; Steffie was never the one to avert her eyes first. Her other impressive feature was her hair, satiny and long enough to sit on. She changed its arrangement each day as if to demonstrate her infinite variety: loose and flowing, a tight bun, two braids resting on her bosom. Whatever the hairdo, she moved through the dormitory halls and in and out of the shower with an enviable easy languor. We assumed this easy languor came from the carnal knowledge we lacked. We may have mixed up cause and effect.

(Technically I didn’t lack it. There had been a boy in high school who pushed his way through once, quickly, in the dark. He offered me a challenge and I accepted, to show I was afraid of nothing, at fifteen. But in spirit I was still virginal. I hadn’t felt much except shock at my own daring.)

Steffie was the sort who could do everything well and remain likable. She got excellent grades (a history major), though she cut classes to the legal limit. She sang in the Gilbert and Sullivan Society. She wrote for the school paper. The year she did theatre reviews she asked friends along on her pair of press seats. I got to see
The Threepenny Opera
and studied the musicians while Steffie took notes with a little pen that had a flashlight on top. She tried to organize a tutoring program for children in the slums bordering the college, and when her recruiting failed, since it was hardly an era of activism, she tutored on her own. And yet with all this, she managed to tiptoe down the corridors long after signing in for the night. In sneakers and ponytail she looked like a runaway child, a bag over her shoulder containing a toothbrush and comb, the next morning’s books, and a nightgown—she didn’t wear pajamas like the rest of us. Some boy had taught her how to unlock the door to the emergency exit with a pair of pliers so the bell wouldn’t ring. We shook our heads with worry. She was never caught, though, and for that we called her lucky.

She might have been one of us, but we kept her just outside our inner circle. That world would claim us all too soon. We deferred it. It was not an era of voluptuousness, either; it was the late fifties, a quiescent time. Except when Steffie appeared mornings after, unchanged, efficient and alert in class, I felt a bit of a fool. I was always competitive, and the sight of her gave me a vague physical unrest.

“Aha! So there is change after all! Everything is not so static. I knew it. I knew it,” Esther cried in triumph. It was nearing Thanksgiving and fittingly, we had reached the Pluralists: Empedocles, mystical poet, Professor Boles announced, as if he were about to enter from the wings. And Anaxagoras, prosaic man of science. Thank goodness they happened along—Parmenides had brought matters to a dead end with his fixed and eternal universe.
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
Nothing can come of nothing, she quoted. Speak again. And these two spoke, clearing a middle path. All was not constant change, they concurred. But nor was all immutable. Beneath the undeniable evidence of change was something enduring, something that abided. No power could take it
all
away. A vast relief eased through me as Professor Boles unraveled the plot, grinning like a master detective, her wild gray hair afloat.

Back to the beginnings again: earth, water, air, fire. But not as simply as before. The four elements are the roots—and how we loved that word, roots; it gave us a sense of getting intimate with truth. Every mortal thing is made of the immortal elements in diverse combinations. An intricate dance, the four roots forever mingling and separating, cleaving and riving, world without end. And what propels this fantastic parade? Ah, Empedocles, what a romantic. Love and Strife. Love joins together, Strife axes apart. “And I shall tell you something more.” Oh yes, Empedocles, by all means speak again. “There is no birth in mortal things, and no end in ruinous death. There is only mingling and interchange of parts, and it is this that we call ‘nature.’”