Disturbances in the Field Read Online Free Page A

flakes of snow glistened on his lashes and in his sporadic beard, where some gray hairs had lately shown. He kissed my cheek under the amused eye of the doorman, pretending to doze in a corner.
    “So, how does it work?”
    “It was fine in the shop. The guy said if it doesn’t work here it’s because nothing works here unless it’s hooked up to the cable. We’re due north of the twin towers.”
    His sister Lily urged this used TV set on us last week, when we made our semiannual visit to Westchester. She led us into the wood-paneled den where it sat neglected on its wheeled metal stand. “Take it, please,” she breathed in a smoke-filled voice, bobbing her lacquered head up and down. “Believe me, you’d be doing me a favor.” Lily can seem to be breathing down your neck though she is four feet away. Like Victor she has forceful presence, and like their mother, Edith, she is well-polished, but the presence is suffocating and the polish sticky. “Let Vivie or Alan have one of their own. My family is so spoiled, they won’t look at black-and-white any more.” Lily’s munificence surprised me, but when we got the TV home the mystery was solved. All we could coax out of it were parallel lines and snow. “I thought so,” remarked Alan. But Victor, defending the family honor, said all it needed was a minor adjustment.
    “How much was the minor adjustment?” I asked.
    “Forty bucks.”
    “If it doesn’t work, it’s eleven seventy-five a month to hook it up to the cable. That’s a lot of money, considering they don’t watch that much.”
    “Well, we’ll see when I plug it in. It’s awfully slippery out there, Lyd. Maybe you should take the bus and I’ll pick you up.”
    “No, I’ll be careful.” I held the elevator door for him. “By the way, you’re going to be asked how to weigh air.”
    “Air?” His face, as it vanished upwards, was turning pensive. His children’s needs were serious business to Victor. Suddenly I felt guilty again—I could have asked Nina how to weigh air.
    It was impossible to go more than fifteen miles an hour along the curving, icy Drive. I thought about George’s illustrations of the mother and the crying infant. It didn’t seem to have occurred to him that the child might be a disturbance in the mother’s field. When my infants cried, particularly the first two, my impulse was not to run and comfort them but to hide my head under a pillow, which I sometimes did. Of course most of the time I went to comfort them, but I didn’t run. Well, all that was beside the point; George idealized mothers. The point was the word “need.”
    I couldn’t see how any need worthy of the name was ever fulfilled once and for all. Everything from that infant’s first unanswered cry is unfinished business. New needs may arise daily, as George said, but we still must keep placating the ancient ones, like jugglers who set a dozen plates spinning, then dart up and down the line frantically keeping them all awhirl. Sure, the old needs can be temporarily quelled (what George airily termed “receding to the background”), but only to rise again, tyrannical. Alan says, after eating lasagna, “I don’t want to eat for a week,” but the next morning rises ravenous. Grownups feel the same way about sex; certainly George does, or did when we were intimate, more than twenty years ago. (Love, though, may be a luxury. At least I have seen people—my old friend Esther—live for long periods without it.)
    Needs are deceptive, too, the bark worse than the bite. When my father died and I painfully threw out the shell collection and other clutter, I saw that one could do without a lot and remain the same person, whole and intact. And yet there must come a point. ... Supposing the stripper, after removing the G-string and the rosettes on her nipples, peeled off the patch of hair and the breasts themselves?
    I parked the car on 120th Street opposite Riverside Church and made my way through the snow