I WAS NOT EXAGGERATING when I told George that Victor was like The Shadow. He calls two or three times a week. His reasons, in the order in which he presents them: First, to see how I am. Fine, I say. I would not complain to him if I were dying. Next, to see if the apartment needs any repairs that apparently only he is capable of making; when I say no, his doubtful “Oh?” is rimmed by a wistful halo, like a note captured by the soft pedal. To ask about mail from sources unaware of his change of address. I report the auto insurance bill, a bill for his father’s new hearing aid, his alumni magazine, Columbia, a Scientific American, and flip through the junk: Project Hope, Push to Excel, Gray Panthers. His last chance to tell the National Rifle Association to go to hell. I omit the appeal from Zero Population Growth, which advises that if each family limited itself to two children a better world would ensue. I’m not sadistic. And finally, to see how Phil is. This last, far from being least, is the real reason for the frequent calls. Althea he sees: they go walking on weekends, through parks and galleries. Together they looked at Picasso’s monumental (fat!) bathers. She told me he stared for a long time. And I always thought he preferred the more subtle figures of Matisse. Once they stopped for a drink; he bought her a Bloody Mary and she was thrilled. I thought it superfluous at her age. He does not need to resort to seduction. Young girls can forgive their fathers nearly everything, especially if the fathers are good-looking, witty, vigorous, and all the rest.
But Phil is unreconciled. He feels his father has done a dastardly deed, leaving his wife of nineteen years after a tragedy, in her moment of greatest need. Leaving him—but this he does not say. It is easier to be angry on my behalf. He is puzzled that I do not show more indignation. Where is my pride? I suppose Phil’s reaction is a “normal” one. I begin to see, after all my worrying, that he is a most normal boy, in the stereotypical way of his age: plays ball, keeps his room in chaos, is awkward but eager in pursuing his first romance, with Ilana, the trigonometry girl, enjoys the music of outrage (Rolling Stones, no satisfaction, anywhere; I rather like it myself), eats erratically, sulks, and disdains communication with me. Years ago, when he was more individualized, I thought I knew him, but this normality I find hard to penetrate. I know him only through the intimate declivities of his outgrown jeans, handed up to me—with each pair I stitch a wider hem. I am taller than average, but from his growth I get the illusion that I am shrinking.
I try to soften his heart towards his father. It is only fair, since I am the only one who understands why he left. Much of the time, now, I am able to regard Victor with a certain numbed objectivity. I no longer go about enraged. Since that one night with George—no, since that moment when he asked was it because of Victor and I saw that it was not—Victor seems distant, abstract. He is a sexy man who has suffered severe misfortune. This view, I know, is unfashionable. What is fashionable is not objectivity but self-help, with solipsism as its informing vision, and realpolitik for technique. However, Victor is a man who lost two children and I don’t wish him to lose a third. I know what his devotion is like: he would not survive it. Look what he has had to do to endure the loss of Vivian and Alan—rush to the embrace of some fat old mama. For God’s sake, his own mother had some class. She endured her goddamn cancer with class. Couldn’t he imitate the better type of person? Still, he deserves his son.
Much of the time I am this paragon of fair-mindedness. Only one little rip in the screen of my objectivity: when I hear his voice on the phone—how am I, the apartment, the mail, Phil—then I become a fury. He becomes real and I become something savage out of myth, which is also unfashionable.
Summer is approaching. June, as the song says, is bustin’ out all over. The children will be going away and I have a project to undertake. I will learn to live alone. A secondary project: I will learn to ride on buses again. City buses, to start with, in the hope that someday I will be able to look at those black-windowed, sealed long-distance capsules without turning away and rubbing my eyes. Not tears. They are a sliver of metal in the eye. Come winter I will work on snow, tramp in it, scoop it in my hands, make angels, and maybe someday ski. I may take a bus to a ski resort and plunge down a hill, then take the ride home on the dark road, simply to know its true measure, as Thales might have done. For the way that dark ride looms distorted in my head offends my sense of harmony.
And so I call Victor one afternoon at his studio. No more phone off the hook for the advancement of art. That is one habit shocked out of him. Soon he will break down and get a machine. (“But it rings, Lydia. That’s the trouble.”)
“Lydia, this is a surprise.”
As soon as I hear his voice I feel furious. It comes on like a sudden siege of fever.
“I called to ask if you’d mind taking the car over the summer. I really don’t need it and it’s more trouble than it’s worth. I’d rather take buses.”
“Well ... sure, if that’s what you want. But it’s much safer for you to have it at night. That walk from the bus stop.”
“I can always get a lift from someone. Or a taxi.”
“All right. I’ll take it on Saturday. I’ll be over to see Althea. Will you be home?” he asks hopefully.
“Victor, if you’re in, I’m out. Oh, if you’re coming up this time, ring the bell. I had to change one of the locks.”
“Why?”
“It broke. It was old.”
“Can you have a key made for me, then?”
“A key? Why? You’re not living here.” He waits, his silence sad, proud, and humble at once. He is appealing to my better nature. Also in the silence is something sexual, some reminder of intimate times, when we asked things of each other and received. A very heady mix. “Oh, all right. When I get around to it.”
“I waited for Phil outside of school yesterday but he wouldn’t even speak.”
“You did? Well, I’ve tried to talk to him about it, but you know Phil. He doesn’t like something, he removes himself.” Victor doesn’t pick up that tossed-down glove. His response is silence, this time opaque, a wall. “He got a summer job as a lifeguard in a Y camp upstate. I assume that’s okay with you?”
“I don’t like all this secondhand information. I want to hear from him what’s happening.”
A pity I’m not the vindictive type: time was when I got my information about Phil secondhand from you, baby. “I don’t like it any better than you do. Althea wants to work as a mother’s helper. Some rich people out in the Hamptons with two little kids.”
“First I want to know who they are, everything.”
“I’m sure she’ll tell you. When has Althea ever failed to give details?”
“What about you? Do you have any plans?”
Plans, you fucker. What do you think, Paris, Rome? Learning solitude is my plan. “Public transportation. And I’ve got lots of work. A lot of things are coming up in the fall.”
“You’re not short of money, are you? I’ll make a deposit tomorrow.”
“Why should I be short of money? I didn’t retire when you left. But since you mention it, it’s hard to balance the checkbook when I don’t know what checks you’re writing. I had to work on the last statement for an hour. Maybe we should have two accounts.”
This sort of petty skirmish never interested Victor much. “I’m sorry. I’ll keep you informed. You haven’t even asked how I am.”
“I can tell how you are. I’ve known you long enough.”
“Tell me, then. We’ll see if you’re right.”
“Victor, let’s not do this. Let’s just be civil.”
“I don’t want your kind of civility. The checkbook! What nonsense. You know very well there’s a two thousand dollar credit line.”
“Yes, but I don’t like getting those little slips saying they had to put money in the account. I feel like I’m being reprimanded by Big Brother.”
“It’s not a reprimand. It comes out of a machine. I’ve told you a dozen times, they love to extend credit. That’s how capitalism works. Think of it as a pat on the shoulder—we’re good citizens.”
“My father told me never to live on credit.”
“Lydia, I am not going to talk about this kind of shit. What we need to talk about is them. We should sit down and go through every little detail we can remember. To try to understand. We are the only two people in the world who could do that together.”
“I can do it alone.” I do. It is sweaty work.
“Lydia.”
Formidable man. Humbled and frustrated, he stands firm, like Phil. I did love him. Hearing his voice say my name like that—a bit hoarse; a cold, maybe—gives me a sexual pang in the midst of the fury. It feeds the fury. “I’ll leave the car keys on the kitchen table. Let’s not torture each other, okay? You left because it was too painful, so why are you creating more pain?” I hang up, and the fury and the sexual pang both subside. In a little while, through some obscure inner mechanism, he becomes distant, a man I once lived with, a sexy man who has suffered severe misfortune, now living with someone else.
Well, and what of her? The facts lie disassembled like pieces of a model airplane kit, defying you to fit them into a coherent whole. She is fifty-one. She runs that Montessori nursery school downtown. She is from Oregon and is a widow, childless. Conservatively dressed. Knows something about painting. She doesn’t smoke and drinks only “a few drops” of wine (this from Althea). What does she think, then, when he swigs bourbon and rolls joints in the middle of the night? Maybe he doesn’t need to, with her. Maybe she rocks him in her fleshy arms, crooning to her little boy not to cry. Yes, I can see how consolation from strangers might be an exotic spice, very tasty. Also from Althea, she has bamboo shades in her living room, an avocado plant, a finch she lets out of its cage (where is the white shag rug?); she has bifocals and big breasts; she is “slightly chubby and has a lot of gray in her hair, but is still attractive.”
“Why ‘but’?” I asked.
“Well—” drawled Althea. “You know.”
“I don’t know any such thing. You’re supposed to be the feminist, but you have all the typical prejudices. You should say, ‘She is slightly chubby and has gray in her hair, and is still attractive.’ You probably don’t need to say ‘still,’ either. Do you think girls with flat stomachs and dewy skin are the only people men could like? Do you think sexuality ends at forty, or thirty?”
“I can understand your bitterness, Mother.”
Oh God, the voice of the helping professions is heard in the land. “I am not being bitter about her. On the contrary. I’m defending her.”
“Well, if you’re defending her,” Althea flared up, “it’s probably because you’re glad it’s her instead of some really young girl with a flat stomach. For your own pride.”
Teen-aged daughters are not kind. Vivie was, she did not cut to the quick, but she was only ten. I mean nine—her birthday wasn’t till April. No doubt she would have come to it too. Just as Althea will eventually temper justice with mercy.
“That may be,” I conceded. (“That may be,” I read in an assertiveness-training book in the drugstore, is useful for dampening critics or weakening adversaries before pressing on with one’s own suit.) “But it so happens my stomach is quite flat. Look!” I stood up, sucked in my breath, and pulled at the waistband of Phil’s jeans to show her how much room I had.
“Oh Mom! You’re a panic.”
“I try to keep you amused.”
“But it shows that you’re the one with prejudices.”
I kept silent.
“Also,” Althea went on, “she talks a lot but with long pauses in between sentences, and in the pauses she stares at you with these very searching green eyes. You’re not sure whether she’s done talking or not, or what she’s searching for.”
“I’d rather not hear any more. I didn’t bring this up to begin with, remember?” I started clearing the table. Phil was eating with liana at Burger King.
Althea smoothed plastic wrap over leftovers, attacking each spontaneous wrinkle. “I can do the dishes.”
“No, tonight’s my turn. You do them often enough. You’re altogether too helpful and domestic. Go out, live a little. Have another hole made in your ears, I don’t know what.”
“I’ll keep you company.” She shinnied up onto the washing machine, where she could keep an eye on me. “Mother, can I ask you a question?”
“Yes. Talk loud, the water’s running.”
“Does everyone have multiple orgasms all the time? ... Can you hear me?”
“Oh yes, I can hear you just fine. That’s loud enough.”
“Well?”
“No. I don’t know. Not all the time, I wouldn’t think. At least ... Where did you hear that?”
“In a book Diane loaned me. It says women have great unused potential. It sounds like everyone ought to be going around constantly ... you know. I mean, what about from your personal experience?”
“I can’t seem to recall. It feels like ages ago.”
“Oh Mom, come on. You’re being evasive.”
I looked up from my dishes. “Althea, are you trying to tell me something?”
“Sort of.”
“Well, well.” I kept scrubbing, but I made sure to smile at her. What’s done is done. “This is very interesting. Who ... uh ... that new one, Jeremy? Or is Darryl back on the scene?”
“Jeremy. Darryl is going out with someone else.”
“So. Well, well.”
“Mother.” She laughed. “Is that all you can say, well, well? Are you so shocked?”
“No. No, it’s okay. I’ll get used to it. I guess it had to happen sometime.”
“It was long overdue.”
“Oh, really?”
“I think so.”
“So how is it? Is it all right to ask?”
“Oh, fine, fine,” she said with labored cheeriness. “Except ...”
There followed a technical discussion. I was pleased to hear myself strike just the right note of reassurance: light, almost breezy, but meticulously informative. Inside, though, accompanying my wise, motherly cadenza, was the same simpleminded basso continuo: Well, well. Well, well—so little Althea with her childlike face is having the orgasms I am not (except in my sleep; do they count?). Am I the retired dowager, having passed down the scepter? Are there not enough to go around? (As a matter of fact, the American Psychoanalytic Association once devoted several hours at a national conference to whether female orgasms during sleep were pathological. No! I said in disbelief. You better believe it, George said. Male orgasms are never pathological.)
“Listen, though,” I concluded, drying my hands on Phil’s pants. “All this talk about orgasms is all very well. But birth control is the thing. At your age that’s infinitely more important.”
“Oh, I know all about that,” she retorted. “We did that in school. I know where to get everything. Would you believe, there was a girl in my class who thought you might get pregnant by swallowing it?” She giggled. “Good thing you can’t. I would have had Darryl’s. Would you mind black grandchildren?”
“Althea! Coming from you, who were his close friend, that remark is in extremely poor taste.”
For an instant she had Alan’s deadpan look, fraught with mischief. “I wouldn’t say it was such poor taste.”
“Oh God!” I rolled my eyes to the ceiling. “Why couldn’t I have had a daughter who was demure and reticent?”
Her face suddenly changed; in the silence she seemed to age. “You did.” Then she put her head on my shoulder and cried, and said the bedroom felt so empty, there was no one to whisper to at night, she couldn’t get used to sleeping all by herself. After a while she lit a cigarette and coughed. I had to give her a glass of water. I remembered how I had stopped nursing her—cold turkey—years ago, because I imagined she was sucking the life out of me. Now I am older, confident; I could nurse a baby easily but it is too late; there is no one left. I gave her water.
Slightly chubby, eh? Gray in her hair but still attractive. A finch? What am I to make of that? Nothing. It adds up to nothing.
When I tell Gabrielle about this peculiar blank distance I have come to feel in regard to Victor—the abstract Victor—how I cannot even work up any jealousy worthy of the name, only a weak curiosity, an insubstantial nastiness, she says that is quite natural: I am still disoriented over the loss of the children. My psychic energies are diverted elsewhere; for the moment I have none to spare. She discourses like a researcher who has just discovered the cure for cancer (something so obvious as to have gone unnoticed). I listen with respectful interest. What she is doing is called, in current argot, being supportive. I shouldn’t knock it. It is well-intentioned and soothing, if you permit it to be.
“Be patient with yourself, Lydia. After all, you can’t be expected to respond fully to more than one crisis at a time.”
Who is expecting anything? That was not what I meant at all. We are having lunch in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art. It is a breezy, sunless early June day. Despite the bleak chill of the weather there is a crowd. Somewhere in forests the foliage is lush and green, but past the stone wall opposite our table, the tops of bare branches on trees either dead or retarded splay out like fingers against a sky white as bone. All I expect at the moment is to eat my lasagna in peace. More and more I love to eat. I love every hot sensation on my tongue.
“It’s the women who believed their lives were in perfect order who get hysterical. The ones who took all the comfort and security for granted and never examined anything, never went through any real changes. Look how Ellen Kimberly carried on when Frank left. For ten years that marriage was a lie. A TV commercial. Everyone knew it except her. In your case it’s very different. You had your hard times. And you do things, you have a life of your own. You never depended on Victor for every gratification. Very likely this numbness is a sign of strength. You’re keeping it at arm’s length for your own safety. You always had good instincts.”
Yes, they do carry on, don’t they? They have one-night stands with strangers, they tell off old friends, adopt a more flamboyant style of dress, take up radical politics. Yet Rosalie did that sort of thing long before her separation; maybe that was why her husband Karl called it acting out.
To Gabrielle’s speech I replied, as to Althea, “That may be.” She never used to bother to say the obvious, though. This reasonable, stylish analysis was never her style. Does it shake her security to see me shaken? Or do I drive her in desperation to clichés, as I did Victor?
“Besides, Lydia, I would not be at all surprised if he came back, and sooner rather than later. You two were so close. Going off to this woman is not a matter of rejection, or finding someone preferable. It’s a way of coping with”—she lowered her lids for a moment and pushed on bravely—“the children’s death. But it’s a completely irrational act. A desperate act. He’ll realize that.”
I couldn’t risk another “That may be”; Gabrielle was not stupid. While she theorized I became fascinated by what she was doing to her food. She was once again on the Scarsdale diet, revivified by scandal. She is always on some diet—their names and ideologies change. But this diet was clearly more serious-minded than the others; the intellectual sophisticate’s diet, one that could exert a strong influence on an otherwise independent mind. At least Gabrielle seemed deeply committed. She had brought an extra, empty plate back from the cafeteria line. With a fork and spoon handled like surgical instruments, she took from the platter before her and placed bit by bit on the empty plate a scoop of coleslaw, three black olives, two slices of tomato, and several strips of Swiss cheese and ham cut julienne style. The only things left on her original plate were lettuce leaves, half a hard-boiled egg, and a radish. She then brought forth from her Channel 13 canvas bag a small can of Bumble Bee dark tuna, chunk style, packed in water, and a tiny can opener, which she wielded with the deftness of experience. She emptied the tuna onto the lettuce with a certain detachment, the way you dish out food for a pet, food that could have no possible connection with your own organs. Finally she sprinkled her meal with vinegar and raised her fork. I was overcome with compassion.
“There’s no need to torture yourself like that. You’re not fat at all.”
“I feel gross.”
“You may feel gross but you aren’t. You have that feeling because you judge your body by a dancer’s standards. The average person does not have, or require, a body like a dancer’s.”
“I can’t help it. I danced for so long. You can’t possibly know what it’s like to feel gross. You can eat all day long and burn it up. Don’t think it’s easy to eat with you, Lydia.”
“Yes, I fall upon the food of life! I burn!” We burst out laughing. “Is that really such a bad line? ‘I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!’? Or were we just naive to laugh at it?”
“Well, I may be the wrong person to ask, since I’m not a Romantic. I don’t go in for those great swings from the depths of suffering to rebirth. It strikes me as rather manic.”
“Okay, with that caveat, is it a bad line? In your opinion.”
“Yes, it’s bad. It’s pure self-pity. And the image is ludicrous. He took himself so seriously that he lost the critical faculty.”
“I see. Would it bother you very much if I ate your cheese and olives?”
She gave me a wry look. “Go right ahead, what’s the difference?”
“You have a very nice body,” I told her, being supportive as I reached for the plate. “It’s luxuriant. It connotes spiritual amplitude. Being a little rounded does not make you unattractive, you know.”
“Oh yes?” Very French. “And how would you know?”
I didn’t say how. The garden of the Museum of Modern Art is really an awful place to eat, crowded, noisy, overpriced, and especially prey to winds. The wind gets trapped between the concrete and the glass, battening at people and statues alike. Those massive stone figures are more than invulnerable and indifferent; they seem hostile to the chatting lunch crowd. Water ripples black and forbidding in the neatly squared trough, while the sage Balzac regards all with a sublime, avid scrutiny, amassing data for another human comedy. Usually a couple of people with semi-familiar faces come over to remind us of where we have met before, and after exclaiming at this coincidence, move on. This had already happened to each of us today and might again. Nonetheless we were eating here because it is near Gaby’s office, and she likes to take quick looks at the paintings she has seen dozens of times before. In school she flexed her ankles and knees while she wrote her term papers; never a time-waster. Also, she chooses places lately that will distract me, get me “out of myself.”
“Lydia, are you there?” She tapped my wrist—three rapid taps with the tips of her fingers. “You look like you’re drifting off somewhere.”
“I was thinking about the way we always talk about ourselves. That weekend when Esther was over, for instance. We used to talk about real things. And now the more we know about real things, the less we say.”
“Well, what real things would you like to talk about?”
“I don’t know. The state of the world. The state of the subways. You sound so serene. Is your serenity for real? I’ve wondered for a long time. I can’t make you out any more.”
“It’s real. I thought you didn’t want to talk about us, though. I got the impression I was boring you.” A muscle below her left (blue) eye twitched. Found wanting? Even at this late date she worried that if she were boring I might decide not to be her friend.
“No, no. You’re not boring me. How silly. I meant the way we talk about ourselves. The worst things in our lives. Don’t tell me that’s what friends are for. I’d like to hear the good things. Remember Pascal? If all we can do to avoid the ... the black hole is to seek diversion, if everything is ultimately diversion from—”
“Distraction is more like it,” she corrected crisply.
“Do you translate it distraction? That’s funny, I always thought of it as diversion. I guess because it sounded like it: divertissement.”
“Technically you’re right. But I’ve always wished he had used distraction. It seems more in keeping with the rest. It’s more serious, after all. Anyone can seek diversion, without being in a state of dread. But distraction is something you need more desperately. Well, never mind, I know it seems pedantic. Go ahead.”
“No, it’s good to be precise. Anyway, we should share our diversions, or distractions. That way we each have more diversion. Surely that’s better than sharing our black holes.”
“Surely.” She grinned with her old schoolgirl slyness. “So?”
“So tell me something. Tell me about the magazine. It’s never dull or stupid. You must be awfully good to manage that.”
“I am. People think it’s glamorous, but I’m a drudge. To keep it in shape I run it like a dedicated housewife who goes around picking up every bit of lint on the rug every morning. You think that’s funny. Well, I suppose it is. You don’t want to hear about the day-to-day housework, though. I’ll tell you about a burgeoning social trend I have discerned through my telephone contacts with eminent writers. The latest thing for a certain type of writer, a male writer, often a professor, somewhat over forty with at least two novels or books of poetry to his credit and two hairs on his chest, is to divorce his wife and take in a doting youngster. Most but not all of these men write about sex, alienation, and aging, and the male intellectual’s Judeo-Christian angst over these three items. Their tight interrelations. The girls, meanwhile, are talented literary types just out of college. Upon graduation they go into service, as it were, the way the same type became governesses in Victorian novels. They serve as housekeeper, muse, and concubine all rolled into one. Ellen Kimberly’s daughter did it, in fact. Ellen thinks it’s an honor, like being a page to a senator. Actually, if you took these fellows out of their jeans and cut their hair and put suits on them, they’d look not much more thrilling than a Senate committee. There ought to be a law.”
“Shouldn’t you at least call them women?”
“I’m not an ideologue, Lydia. If they were women they’d know better.”
“Were we so different? Oh, I know the men we married were different, but in essence, what we did?”
“Me, you mean. I know what you’ve always thought. But I didn’t sacrifice anything much when I stopped dancing. The fact is, I wasn’t all that good. Don didn’t really interfere. We do it to ourselves.”
“Well, he certainly doesn’t interfere now, at any rate. Did you make a feminist out of him, or what?”
“Oh, I gave that up. I realized it has to be done before age ten.” She paused to eat her radish. I was relieved to hear her sounding more like herself. “He doesn’t not interfere for the right reasons. I think it’s a mixture of chivalry, laziness, even fear. But I can’t quibble over motivation any more. As long as the situation is satisfactory ...” She looked longingly at my lasagna. “I’ve never craved total communion, like Nina. I don’t think I’d like it. I like privacy. But look, we’re back to ourselves again. Let me see, what distraction can I offer you next?”
She assessed me with those shrewd eyes. As a girl she let her splendid auburn ponytail fan out over her back, but now her hair was cut razor-straight, not quite reaching her shoulders, framing her face. The fine lines of her face had grown less fine, it was true, but they still reflected for me her excellent mind of like refinement, which her Continental parents in the diplomatic corps trained her not to display too readily. It is a mistake to underestimate her. The opening clichés are mere distractions, while she busies herself observing, gathering data, weighing and measuring.
“Would you like to talk about Ronald Reagan?” she asked. “Cutbacks in school lunches? Have you heard ketchup may be considered a vegetable?”
“Enough.” I laughed. “I want to hear about your serenity.”
“Pascal always made me uneasy. True, you take up something to distract you from the emptiness and before you know it you need distraction from your distraction. It becomes self-defeating, an endless chain. Running the magazine is a bit like that. Not that I don’t believe in it, or do it better, possibly, than anyone else could. But I also do it simply to do something, the way other women take courses or play cards. And yet with all that, I couldn’t see believing in God to escape the chain. I suspect that’s the biggest diversion of them all.”
“At least you avoid the emptiness.”
“It depends on what you consider emptiness. I enjoyed it when the babies were small and I sat in the park in the sun for hours, and then cooked dinner and waited for Don to come home. I didn’t feel like a thinking reed.”
“It’s amazing how you’ve altered history to make it tolerable. You hated sitting in the park. I know because I sometimes sat there with you. Do you know how many times you said your brain cells were decaying? Why did you look for work in the first place? Anyway, you couldn’t go back to that now, Gaby. Imagine, a woman your age sitting in a playground all by herself. Shocking.”
“I guess not. I could take other people’s babies to the park, maybe? It’s such a pleasant image, in hindsight. Sitting on a bench in the sun. No phone calls or deadlines.”
“That diet is making you light-headed.”
“It’s very possible. Give me some of your wine, would you? I could use it.” She drank half a glass at once. “Look, I’ll tell you about what you call serenity. It’s simple. I just accept things.” She smiled in an oracular and irritating way.
“Oh Gabrielle! You sound like that woman—what was her name?—who announced that she accepted the universe.”
“Margaret Fuller, yes. The really good line, though, was Thomas Carlyle’s response: ‘She’d better.’”
“And you like that?”
“It’s true, isn’t it?”
“No. Some people enjoy fighting all the way. And it’s also lacking in charity. So besides the universe, what is it exactly that you accept?”
Gaby pulled her jacket around her shoulders. It was growing chillier, and the lunch crowd was thinning. She pushed away the plate of lettuce, gazed at the statues, and fiddled with an earring. When she spoke at last, she had that elusive, un-English rhythm of pauses between syllables. “I accept that no matter how hard I worked I would never have been a great dancer. I did better with words. I don’t think verbal people make great dancers. I accept that I can’t change the way I was brought up; those early things can’t be eradicated and it’s a waste of time trying. That my life is a patchwork of compromises and perhaps I like it that way, stitching together pieces that don’t match. That no sudden revelations or great changes are going to—”
“Ah, I thought that once. You’re mistaken.”
“Are going to happen in me, I was going to say, not to me. This is who I’ll be for the duration. Also that I got what I wanted, and God, did I regret it. I wanted Don to get off my back. For air. I even made inane remarks about his getting interested in someone else—remember?—so I wouldn’t be the target of all that devotion. Well, he did, a couple of years ago, and it was not fun. We do shape things for ourselves, you know, lay the groundwork early on for certain events. Like plotting a mystery. Oh, I don’t mean a freak accident, Lydia. That’s different. But you have to be very careful what you long for.”
“I never knew a thing about it.”
“There wouldn’t have been any point in whining. But it was awful. I don’t mind saying it now. He knew exactly what he was doing and why, though we didn’t talk about it at the time. We have a way of silently playing into each other’s hands. We’re very well attuned in many ways. For better or worse.”
“So that’s what he meant the other day, about forgiving and forgetting. And you weren’t sorry then that you hadn’t ... Remember, that time years ago?”
“It’s not a question of an eye for an eye. It just wasn’t in me.”
“That was before your women’s group.”
“A women’s group can’t undo your history. It wouldn’t have made any difference. I’m not one to lie and hide. Why, do you think you would have done differently?”
“If I had ever wanted to,” I said, “sure, I think I could have. But then I’m more greedy than you.”
“I don’t see you dashing around now.”
No. Thank you for staying, I had said to George as I kissed him good-bye the next morning, before the children came home. And when I told him it was the nicest thing that had happened to me in a long time, he understood perfectly that I could not make a habit of it. “I said, if I wanted to.”
“Incidentally, Lydia—Don asked me to mention this but I’ve been hesitating. I didn’t know how you’d take it. An old friend of his is in town for a few weeks on business, from Chicago. An awfully nice person, bright, pleasant. He does real estate, or something in that line. He’s a bit at loose ends, not knowing many people. I’m sure he would love to go out to dinner with someone. What do you think?”
“Distraction, eh? I’m not such terrific company these days.”
“You’re very good company. You seem as lively as ever.”
“Do I? That was one of the things that bothered Victor. Well, tell me, I’ve been out of it for so long, what exactly is expected on a date of this kind?”
“I imagine all that’s expected is that you eat your dinner and converse. You certainly wouldn’t have very much trouble there. Anything more should be optional.”
“I don’t know. I’ll think about it. Let’s get back to matters of consequence. How did you manage to accept Don’s little fling?”
“It wasn’t a little fling. It was a mess. He’s such a romantic, he wouldn’t know how to have a little fling. Everything he does is quite thorough.”
“So?”
“You’ll laugh at me,” she said, and drank some more of my wine. “But I remembered that quote in Nina’s kitchen, from Epictetus. ‘Everything has two handles, one by which it may be borne, the other by which it may not. If your brother sin against you ...’”
“Oh yes, yes, I know, don’t pick it up by the handle of his injustice. After all, he’s your brother, the comrade of your youth. That’s the handle. Really, all that Christian charity is sickening.”
“You were just mentioning charity, Lydia. And it’s not Christian. It’s Greek.”
“Can’t you stop being an editor for a little while?”
“You’re a true friend,” she said kindly. “Another self, was it? You’re offended for my sake. But you needn’t be. It passed.”
“I am offended at how sanctimonious you sound! You’re just too good to be true. Do you hope to be canonized? That was part of your upbringing too.”
“You’re missing the point entirely. I wanted him back. That was the truth of it.” She looked at her watch. “I ought to head for the office pretty soon. Do you want to go in and see the paintings?”
“In a minute.” I still had a bit of wine to finish. “Did George ever tell you about disturbances in the field?”
“No. What is that?”
“It’s from some psychological theory about emotional needs and such. In an ideal world, let’s say, you would seek what you need and immediately be satisfied, without any complications, and also, you would be able to satisfy people who need things from you. Of course in the chaotic actual world this rarely happens—thus we have neurotics and frustrated people—and what prevents it from happening is called disturbances in the field. The disturbances are, I guess, circumstances, other people, acts of God, whatever. It’s derived from field theory in physics. A framework for looking at events.”
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.