Disturbances in the Field (8 page)

And as if this were not enough, Anaxagoras, prosaic man of science though he was, went him one better. Not Love and Strife, but Mind “took charge of the cosmic situation. ... Mind set in order all that was to be, all that ever was but no longer is, and all that is now or ever will be.” That suited me fine. No death, and Mind in charge.

Nina did not share my relief. “It’s not any ultimate truth. It’s only part of an ideological sequence, and naturally it gets a little more sophisticated as it goes along.” She paused to light her weekly cigarette. “All of this has been completely superseded by modern science, of course. It’s only of interest historically, and maybe poetically.”

I wanted to protest but I didn’t know how. Nina was admittedly the smart one, and already she was stammering less.

“I’m not so sure they’ve been superseded,” said Esther. “Look, Anaxagoras says there’s a little bit of everything in everything else. Black and white have the seeds of gray. Food has the seeds of the blood and bone it’s going to help make. That’s pretty clever. It’s not so different from your periodic table of ninety-two elements or however many there are. Everything starts from—”

A neighboring door snapped brusquely shut. Loud, ponderous footsteps.

“Oh-oh, the witching hour,” Esther moaned. “Honestly, we ought to make a scarecrow some night, just to make Mrs. Ramsey’s job more exciting. She hardly ever gets the thrill of discovery.”

The college had lately adopted the progressive policy of allowing males—presumably the boys from across the street—to visit in the dormitory rooms till midnight Thursdays through Saturdays, provided the doors were kept ajar. This was an advance over the former policy of allowing males only in the small ground-floor rooms known as beau parlors and equipped with floral-upholstered sofas, provided, again, that the doors were kept ajar and all four feet remained on the floor. (Nothing specific about feet was enjoined in the new rule.) For enforcement, Mrs. Ramsey, a short squat woman, made the rounds at midnight in her tight black rayon uniform and black oxfords. Mrs. Ramsey was wasted on us: her face was so impassive that she might have policed on a much grander scale, in a sheikhdom, a sultanate. Fortunately for some, her heavy tread gave a few seconds’ notice. She granted a warning knock before flinging doors wide. I wondered if anything could jar that face—a naked male, maybe with an erection, maybe inserting it into willing flesh ...

“Hi there, Mrs. Ramsey,” Esther called brightly, springing from the bed. “Not a thing here to worry about! See?” She yanked open the door of the closet. One half was an orderly array of dark smooth clothes obediently on their hangers; the other a jumble of stripes, prints, peasant skirts swirling into each other, shoes heaped on the floor like abandoned auto parts, a green slicker painfully lopsided on a hook that pierced its shoulder, two enormous straw hats sliding from the top shelf. Esther dashed back to lift the bottom of the bedspread, inviting Mrs. Ramsey to have a peek, but the woman, unfazed, had turned to go. Maybe beneath her face she was contemptuous. Her toneless words trailed after her: “Please keep the noise down.” Esther leaned out the open door and called down the hall,
“Cherchez l’homme!”

“Listen, listen to this.” Gabrielle had been reading all the while. She would not object to such antics, nor would she take part. “Empedocles says some wonderful things. This is very
a propos:
‘It is in the warm parts of the womb that males are born; which is the reason why men tend to be dark, hairy, and more rugged.’”

“I guess that has been superseded by modern science,” I said, and Nina smiled faintly.

“‘Abstain entirely from laurel leaves,’” Gabrielle read on. “Oh, and this one is very passionate: ‘Wretches, utter wretches, keep your hands away from beans.’ I wonder why. Oh dear.” She sighed and fluffed out her long hair, just washed and drying at the open window.

“What’s the matter?”

“‘I wept and mourned when I discovered myself in this unfamiliar land.’”

She looked up, her eyes filled with tears. She had been brought to this strange land as a child of five. Her parents were French, her father in the diplomatic corps. Could a small child really feel that kind of pain? Or could she summon tears for Empedocles?

“That’s how I felt,” said Esther, “when I came to New York, even though I was glad to leave home. That’s why I went to see the ocean with a boy I didn’t even like and let him paw me. I was so lonesome. That’s why I got mono, or whatever that sickness was, and the only thing that kept me here was imagining the satisfaction on my mother’s face if I gave up and went home.”

“So you’re glad you stayed?” asked Nina.

Esther looked around at all of us. “Now? Sure! Sure I’m glad I stayed. I’m fine now.”

We all went home for Thanksgiving, and on the first day back Nina tucked in the lower right-hand corner of her mirror, the place where some girls kept photographs of their boyfriends or families, a three-by-five card. On it, typed, were the questions that members of the sixth-century
B.C.
Pythagorean Brotherhood asked in their daily examinations of conscience: In what have I failed? What good have I done? What have I not done that I ought to have done?

“What is that supposed to be, a mother substitute?” Esther demanded.

Nina smiled. She rarely tried to justify herself.

“You told
us
we took it too personally,” I reminded her.

She smiled.

We pointed out that the card was inconsistent in spirit with what was ranged on the dresser top just below it: Revlon Touch & Glow liquid make-up, Jean Nate spray cologne, Nivea cream, Cutex colorless nail polish, an ashtray with tortoiseshell barrettes for her mass of black hair, perpetually bridled, silver-handled hairbrush, five lipsticks. She accepted our teasing and said, “It may be best to stay in balance by keeping one foot in the real world and one foot in the ideal.”

“And who said that?” Esther wanted to know.

“No one.” She smiled in earnest this time. “I made it up.”

On the three mornings we had The History of Philosophy we would meet downstairs at a quarter to nine and walk over together. Nina began not appearing. “She was already gone when I woke up,” Esther reported. “That’s odd, isn’t it?” She would greet us in class, composed as ever, maybe a bit quieter than usual. Since Nina was not the kind you could interrogate, Gabrielle, the ever-resourceful, undertook some research. The Pythagorean Brotherhood, she learned, followed a moral and mystical regimen for purifying the soul and attaining wisdom. “‘They performed their morning walks alone and in places where there was appropriate solitude and quiet; for they considered it contrary to wisdom to enter into conversation with another person until they had rendered their own souls calm and their minds harmonious. It is turbulent behavior, they believed, to mingle with a crowd immediately on arising from sleep,’” she read to me. “Is that what we are, a crowd?” We were wounded.

“She’s probably working on her memory, too. Listen to this. ‘To strengthen their memory the students began each day, on first waking up, by recollecting in order the actions and events of the day before; after that they tried to do the same for the preceding day, and so on backwards as far as they could go, taking care to make the order of recollection correspond with the order in which the events had actually occurred. For they believed that there is nothing more important for science, and for experience and wisdom, than the ability to remember.’”

I tried it for three days and gave up. I could remember many things, but not in the order in which they occurred. They regrouped themselves in thematic patterns like music, as if memory were coaxing life to make more structural sense than it possibly could. “Do you really do it?” I asked Nina, alone. She nodded. “It helps keep things in order.” “I thought you had things in very good order.” “Oh no, Lydia. Inside is all turmoil.” Her face was troubled. Unblinking and unsmiling, it seemed to cover webs of complexity. But I couldn’t press her further. The others were about to join us; we were having a Chinese dinner on Broadway to celebrate Nina’s nineteenth birthday.

The pre-Socratics were superseded. Only in poetry did they remain unsurpassed. Earth, water, air, and fire. The way up and the way down, eternal and reversible. Professor Boles confessed she had lingered too long under their spell; now we must move more swiftly. Past Plato and Aristotle and the medieval schoolmen. The weather grew cold as we progressed in a northwesterly direction to encounter three Continental Rationalists, three British Empiricists, and three German Idealists. Cunning minds indeed, to have arranged themselves in geographical triads.

“I think, therefore I am?” It was just after Christmas vacation and Esther, fresh from the homestead in Chicago, was in a querulous mood.

“I think, therefore I am? I don’t get it. It doesn’t sound authentic.”

“But it’s as simple as can be!” Gabrielle exclaimed. “He wants to start from scratch. How do you know you’re there? Because someone is asking that question.”

“Yes,” said Esther, “I realize
that
much. But before I even ask the question—not that I personally would ever ask such a question, I have never had such high-class doubts. But all right, suppose I had. Before I would even hear that clever little voice asking that clever little question—God almighty, I feel, I touch, I smell, transitively, that is. I mean, thinking is a pretty advanced thing. If the guy wants to be primitive he’s got a long way to go, if you ask me. Throw me one of those cigarettes over there, would you, Lydia?”

Among the chewed pencils, tangled beads, hairbrush crammed with shed gold hair, and crumpled paper on Esther’s dresser top, were half a dozen open sample packs of cigarettes. I reached over and picked up a miniature blue box with white and yellow trim, containing six cigarettes. “Hit Parades. Hit Parades are the absolute worst, Esther.” I tossed them over.

“I know.” She shrugged. “But listen, they’re free.”

We didn’t yet know about tar and nicotine. Once a week bland-faced young salesmen in business suits walked through the smoking section of the library offering free samples of atrocious new brands. Esther accepted them indiscriminately; when the young men pulled out their market-research questionnaires she responded that they were all terrible, but she would take another of each, thank you. She seemed always short of money, and practiced other small and arbitrary economies—denying herself a four-dollar scarf in winter, or a dollar movie at the Student Center. Her father provided a checking account, but she used it as little as possible. I imagine that self-denial made her feel closer to this father who barely acknowledged her existence and also warned her brothers against the corruptions of capitalism.

She lit up a Hit Parade and tossed the match, still aflame, across her bed into the heavy, mud-colored ashtray she had made in high school and brought with her all the way from Chicago. She was proud of it. She said it was the only decent thing she had ever made with her own two hands besides sandwiches and stews.

“Esther, someday you may set this place on fire. I worry when I get into bed and you’re still smoking in the dark. I can see the little orange circle flashing around.”

“Sorry.” Esther leaned over to reach her ashtray and blew out the match; her breath sent up a black spray that drifted down to settle on the bedspread. “Oh well. Sorry again.” She tried to brush off the ashes but they smudged. “Anyhow, there is one thing I like about Descartes. Here. ‘To accept nothing as true which I did not clearly recognize to be so ... nothing more than what was presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly that I would have no occasion to doubt it.’ In other words, don’t believe anything until you’ve proven it for yourself.”

“Well ... not exactly,” said Nina. “Not in science. It would be absurd to start from scratch every time you devised an experiment. Some things we take on faith, from past research.”

“Nothing on faith! Nothing on faith! Isn’t that what it says right here? I don’t believe there’s an unconscious mind. I don’t believe there’s a God. I’m not even convinced there are little protons and electrons. Give me a microscope, let me see for myself.”

“I’ll vouch for them,” said Nina. “Won’t you take my word for it?”

“No. You believe what you’ve been told. Didn’t you believe in heaven and hell for the first fifteen years of your life?”

“This sort of jejune discussion is not what Descartes had in mind,” Gabrielle said severely from the floor. “Not what he had in mind at all.”

“Jejune?” said Esther with a lively flick of her curls. “Jejune? Is that French?”

I also found the three Continental Rationalists disappointing, but I tucked in the right-hand corner of my mirror the sentence that most intrigued me: “The effort by which each thing endeavors to persevere in its own being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing itself.” Spinoza. I didn’t really know what it meant, but I hoped that I would in time, and that it would be worth the wait.

Gabrielle, in a royal blue leotard and tights, sat with the soles of her feet touching, her class notes in the parallelogram formed by her legs. She was eating Pecan Sandies. Every few moments her long bare arm would extend mechanically up towards the bag on the windowsill. She rarely indulged that way, only when she was getting her period and craved sweets, but it was the night before the final exam. I was replaying Professor Boles’s voice in my head; I heard tones and intervals, with words giving them boundaries and shape. The hard part was restoring meaning to the words. Nina’s and Esther’s duet was a distraction.

“Entelechy, Esther?”

She was smoking ravenously. “Entelechy. Each thing’s essence moves from its potential to realization. Aristotle.”

“Very good. What are the four ways? Or she may call it the four causes of a phenomenon. With an example.”

“Material, formal, efficient, final. The example in the book is a house. But a house is so unoriginal. If she asks that I’m going to use something else. A shoe.”

“Why not start with the house?” Nina cajoled. She was eating too. She had even kicked off her black pumps, and sat curled in her chair, a box of Mallomars on her lap.