Disturbances in the Field Read Online Free Page B

humming the Beatles song I’d heard in Alan’s room. “Blackbird singing in the dead of night, Take these broken wings and learn to fly. All your life ... It was one of those brilliant, glittery snows that ought to emit some glorious sound with each crystal falling to earth, something transcendent like a Bach cantata. I turned to watch it falling on Grant’s Tomb, that dumpy monument made grand at night by floodlights, in whose aura the snow drifted with a golden tinge. It was covering the layer of ice and the older, blackening snow, softening the silhouettes of cars and dampening the intermittent sound of crunching tires. I stuck out my tongue in a sudden craving for the cold, ran it across my lips and swallowed. Then I shivered. I had so much. Better to reason not the need. Adventures, shells on a string, were nothing: all that mattered was the essential impulse of the surf that swept them to shore for us avid collectors.
    I got into the building feeling high on snow. I brushed it from my coat, stamped it off my boots. Jasper, our trio’s violinist, was standing near the elevator. I felt like throwing my arms around somebody, but shy, angular Jasper, his face austere as a hermit’s, was definitely not the one. Even my exuberant greeting seemed to alarm him. He shrank into his narrow pea coat and gestured to me to precede him into the elevator. “Jasper,” I cried, “we really must do something grand and passionate next, something like Brahms or Shostakovitch.” He frowned and nodded, as at a zany stranger, and I became subdued. Those moments of spiritual plenitude, induced by extreme heat or cold, never last long anyway.
    Rosalie, the cellist, early and tuning up, welcomed us with a wild wave of her bow. I could have thrown my arms around Rosalie—I had in the past, in appreciation—but the moment was gone. Appreciation: for nine years Rosalie’s rich talent and gypsyish air had flavored our West End Trio and kept us invigorated. An ample woman of about fifty with coarse dark hair, dark skin, and large, classically shaped features, Rosalie claims her maternal grandmother was an American Indian married to a Polish Jewish immigrant. How this could have come to pass I do not know. Rosalie is full of unlikely stories made credible by her vibrant narrations. Her deep voice billows through the air—I envision a wave bearing Rosalie’s voice aloft. She gestures with her bow for emphasis, so it is dangerous to get too close.
    We were doing Mozart tonight, preparing for the spring Friday evening series. During her pauses in the music, Rosalie, as always, bit her lower lip and listened keenly, hugging the warm amber cello between her knees like a lover. When I first met Rosalie I worried that such a woman would lavish sentiment on every phrase, but she plays with nuances of restraint, with powerful understatement that can bring tears even to our eyes, Jasper’s and mine.
    Mozart went well. We barely needed to talk—we three had been together so long. When we took a short break Jasper struggled out of his turtleneck sweater and left the room, as he frequently does during breaks. Jasper, a young thirty-five, enjoys playing with Rosalie—anyone would—and as he plays, the accumulated suppressed emotion of his private life, to me unknown, oozes deliciously into the music, to be drawn back in abruptly at the final note. But he is wary of her sensuality and her careening bow. Left alone, Rosalie and I lit up. Smoke makes Jasper cough. I went to peer out the window at the snow, while she hitched up her voluminous peasant skirt, rubbed an edge of the cello absently against her inner thigh, and continued the ramifying story of the demise of her marriage. She was recently separated from a psychiatrist who appeared unobjectionable in public.
    “Everything I did, for fifteen years, he said it was acting out.”
    “Acting out! Someone else just mentioned that to me. What exactly is acting out?” Of course I knew: outlandish