The War Between the Tates: A Novel

by Alison Lurie

  “I know it does,” he had replied.

  “You’re nuts,” said his roommate cheerfully. “The way I look at it, the more I screw the better I work.” But time proved him wrong: he received a grade of only B-plus on the important exam, while Brian was rewarded for his abstinence with a straight A.

  3

  JULY FOURTH. IT IS summer now, the time of year Erica Tate once liked best. The climbing roses are in bloom over the screen porch; the students have gone home; the town is green, sunny, silent. Her husband’s affair with that girl is over. Erica wants to forget it, and she is trying to forget it. She knows this is the only way. It is not enough for her to forgive Brian; what she must do is get the whole thing out of her mind entirely. Then and only then, can life go back to normal.

  And if not now, when? It is a warm, soft evening, unusually quiet Jeffrey and Matilda are not playing the phonograph or the radio or quarreling or talking on the telephone; they are away, at the fireworks show in the stadium. The sun has just set, and the sky beyond the porch, behind the apple trees, is layered with white and rose chiffon clouds, like a nightgown Erica had when she got married. She sighs.

  “What?” Brian says, looking up from his coffee and the Village Voice.

  “I was thinking about the children,” says Erica, who is not aware of having sighed aloud. “I’m not sure we should have let them go alone.” She uses the word “we” with an effort, for it is Brian who gave permission for the excursion.

  “They’re not alone,” he says impatiently. “They’re with three thousand other people.”

  “That’s what bothers me. Among three thousand people there’s sure to be some bad characters.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Most of them are kids. Or students.”

  “What difference does that make?”

  No reply. Erica opens her workbox and selects a spool of thread. Lately she has been much troubled by fantasies of awful things that might happen to Jeffrey and Matilda, fantasies which she fears from her reading may also be wishes. But adolescence is a precarious time, and crowds at night are dangerous. Somewhere in the huge, dark stadium there are teenage hoods looking for boys like Jeffrey to rob and bully; there are depraved older men looking for silly, reckless young girls like Matilda. But it is no use saying this to Brian. He doesn’t care what happens to the children—No, worse than that; he himself is one of the bad characters. He has already seduced a girl half his age.

  Erica looks up at her husband, an important professor aged forty-six, well dressed, small and compact in build, with a handsome, steady face, reading the paper. What had happened between him and Wendee was three months past. He just didn’t think about it any more, he had told her last week, with such casual impatience that she at last believed him. He doesn’t think of Wendee; he doesn’t think of her, Erica; he doesn’t think of the children. What does he think of, for heaven’s sake? No doubt, of recent American political history; of the Cold War, about which he is writing a book.

  It seems to Erica horribly unfair that she should continue to find herself brooding, almost obsessively, about a girl she has never seen, while Brian, who has lain naked on top of this girl and partly inside her on his office floor, is able to forget.

  But why his office floor? Well, because there was a blizzard outside, Brian had explained stiffly, and they didn’t want to walk to Wendee’s apartment in College-town and back again; there wasn’t time. It was details like that which caused trouble. If Erica had known either more or less it would have been better, she thought. Instead she had just enough information to be able to visualize the scene. She involved herself emotionally by the imaginative effort of completion. As if she were watching television on a defective set, she created a whole reality out of speckled hints and blurry shadows. She created the naked arms and legs on Brian’s floor, which was of vinyl mottled green-gray and glossy with institutional wax, slightly chilly and dusty to the touch; the hissing of the radiator, like a coiled iron serpent; the sleet and snow beating and melting down the office window.

  This vision and others like it come to Erica against her will and desire at the worst possible moments, blotting out will and desire. When Brian touches her, even casually, she stiffens. When they lie together she cannot free herself of the thought that every gesture he makes, every caress, has been sketched on Wendee’s body; that every whispered word has already been breathed into Wendee’s ears; every sigh of passion—

  “What’s the matter?” Brian asks.

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “You made a noise. You were groaning.”

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  —That Brian should have forgotten only made it worse. If he had loved the girl passionately, seriously, that would have been more tolerable. Had they been carried away, snowed under by a blizzard of real feeling, they would have had some excuse. Instead Brian tried to excuse himself by assuring Erica that the affair had been minor, casual. “It just wasn’t that important,” he had said several times, as if unaware how much this devalues both of them.

  Erica sighs again and rotates the skirt she is hemming. Of course some professors became involved with their students; she knew that. Girls got crushes on them—it was a recognized occupational hazard, which had existed when she was in college. It had never happened to Erica, but several of her friends had at one time or another thought themselves in love with some professor. Conventional morality being different then, they did not undress in offices so readily, but tended more to tears, declarations and gifts of homemade fudge and homemade verse.

  But there is a new sort of student now: less romantic, much more matter-of-fact about sex—and Wendee apparently is one of them. Suppose you are a middle-aged professor, and such a girl comes into your office and boldly declares that she wants to. sleep with you—no strings attached, no emotional commitment. It is, after all, the stock situation of most men’s fantasies. Erica could see how many might jump at the chance.

  But she would never have expected it of Brian. She had always thought of him—he had thought of himself, and apparently still does—as a serious, responsible person. He saw a reason and purpose to life; he disliked frivolous and meaningless pleasures. He therefore had little time for things like watching television and going to large parties. Occasionally, for instance when alone at large parties where TV programs were being discussed, Erica had regretted this. But simultaneously she had admired Brian for his position; valued his influence. Without it, she sometimes thought, who knew how shallow her life might have been, how much time she might have wasted? The world would be a superior place if most people in it were like Brian Tate, she often thought.

  And all this virtue had been false. Brian had sat opposite her night after night, as he is sitting now, and delivered his moral opinions, blaming his friends who got involved with students, listening to her accuse herself of being a bad mother, while all the time—

  “Amusing letter here on those women’s rights protesters,” he says, lowering the Voice and looking at her over the top margin. “Did you read it?”

  “What?” Erica turns her head, pushing aside her hair, which needs to be cut, washed and set.

  Brian repeats himself; ending with a little chuckle which invites her to join in.

  “Oh. Yes.” Erica does not laugh; she smiles briefly. “I saw it.” She does not say she read it, which would not be true. She hates the Village Voice, and it also bores her. Their subscription is about six months old—it dates, that is, from the beginning of Brian’s involvement with Wendee, and might well, Erica considers, have ended with it. Instead the paper keeps on coming, full of dull, obscene political articles and advertisements for light shows and used Army coats. That Brian still reads it means to her that he has secretly abandoned the adult side and gone over to the adolescent enemy, represented by Jeffrey, Matilda, Wendee and all their invisible friends.

  “This about their list of grievances,” Brian says, chuckling encouragingly.

  “Mm, y
es,” replies Erica, who has no idea what he is referring to. It is not enough; Brian returns to his paper, disappointed.

  All right, so he is disappointed. But how can he expect her to laugh with him now at women, at their grievances; above all at a letter? How can he not be reminded of another letter, a really amusing letter?

  As a matter of fact, one of Erica’s first ideas after reading that letter had been that it was intended to amuse—that it was some sort of esoteric joke. A colleague had sent it—Leonard Zimmern, perhaps; there was no Wendee. Another possibility was that Wendee existed but was mentally deranged; and her husband no more responsible than she, Erica, had been for the men who used to call up and breathe at her over the phone when they lived in Cambridge. If you have a certain appearance, these things happen to you.

  When Brian called that night she said nothing. She waited until he was home again and then brought out the letter, explaining in what sounded to her like an unnaturally flat, bleak tone how she had come to read it. Giving it to him felt strange: she had so often in the last eighteen years handed over other letters and watched Brian read them, waiting for his comments, his judgment—often for his solution. It was as if she now hoped that he would explain Wendee’s letter away. He would tell her calmly, convincingly, that it was all a joke; a preposterous fantasy that had nothing to do with them.

  Because it was unlikely, wasn’t it, that such a letter should have anything serious to do with people like Erica and Brian?

  But Brian had admitted that it did, merely offering, over and over, the wrong excuse: It was nothing, it had meant nothing, it was not important, and anyhow it was finished. He was only sorry she had ever had to hear of it. (Were there, then, other things of which she had not had to hear? Brian declared there were not, but how could she trust him now?) He expressed regret, pain at having troubled her—but all as if he were apologizing for having come home with dirty clothes. He had walked into a bog by mistake, and got mud on his shoes and socks, even on his pants—a nuisance, but they could be sent to the cleaners; Brian himself was not muddy, in his opinion. He did not realize that he had betrayed not only Erica, but himself; that he had become permanently smaller and more ordinary.

  And he had made her smaller. The wife who is betrayed for a grand passion retains some of her dignity. Pale-faced and silent, or even storming and wailing as in classical drama, she has a tragic authority. She too has been the victim of a natural disaster, an act of the gods. But if she was set aside merely for some trivial, carnal impulse, her value also must be trivial.

  What is so awful, so unfair, is that identity is at the mercy of circumstances, of other people’s actions. Brian, by committing casual adultery, had turned Erica into the typical wife of a casually unfaithful husband: jealous and shrewish and unforgiving—and also, since she had been so easily deceived, dumb and insensitive. Her children, by becoming ill-mannered adolescents, had turned her into an incompetent and unsympathetic mother. And the bulldozers grinding toward them over the hill surrounding them, had turned Jones Creek Road into Glenview Heights, without her lifting a finger.

  It was like being on stage. The lights change from amber to blue; the scenery alters behind the actors: the drop curtain showing cottages and gardens is raised. The villagers have not moved, but now they appear awkward, small and overdressed against the new backdrop of mountains and ruins. And nothing can be done about it. That is the worst thing about being a middle-aged woman. You have already made your choices, taken the significant moral actions of your life long ago when you were inexperienced. Now you have more knowledge of yourself and the world; you are equipped to make choices, but there are none left to make.

  What Danielle said is true, Erica thinks: it is better for men. Brian has an important job, he makes decisions, he uses his knowledge, he gives lectures and writes books and votes at meetings for or against and lies on his floor on top of graduate students and gets up again. But for her there are no decisions, only routines. All she can do is endure.

  It is darker out now. The sky still holds some light, but its color is leaching away; the layered clouds have become gray and mauve. Brian folds his paper. “I’m going to put those stones on the trash cans,” he announces.

  “What? Oh, good,” Erica says dully.

  Often recently the Tates’ garbage has been disturbed at night by dogs or some wild animal. In the morning they find the cans overturned and bones, crusts, vegetable peelings, and shreds and chunks of wet newspaper scattered about.

  Brian crosses the yard. In the shadows by the trash bins he feels around for the three large rocks he has brought down earlier from the old stone wall behind the vegetable garden. He finds two, and lifts them heavily into place on top of the garbage cans. But he cannot locate the third rock—his hands, groping, meet only thready long grassland the slightly greasy rounded flanks of the plastic cans.

  As he starts around the house to get another rock, swearing quietly to himself, Brian passes the screen porch, which appears to him as a cube of artificially lit yellow space blurred by wire screening. It contains porch furniture, two lamps, and a beautiful woman who is sitting in a white wicket armchair, intermittently sewing. Though she does not know he is looking at her, she wears an expression he has seen often lately—one of melancholy and injured feelings.

  How long is she going to keep this up, for God’s sake? What more does she want from him? He had been unfaithful, which was not a good thing. All right. He has apologized; he has done his best to minimize the duration and importance of his affair. He has made considerable efforts to behave just as before or better: to go places with the children and inquire about their activities with a show of interest; to converse with and make love to Erica with a show of enthusiasm. He is careful never to make any remark which might even remotely recall Wendy. Officially, he has forgotten her.

  It would be reasonable, certainly, for Erica to forget her also, Brian thinks, crossing the loose uneven earth of the garden in the thickening dusk, since she knows that Wendy has left for Southern California, and for ever. He had told her about this as soon as Wendy announced her plans, assuming that she would be as relieved as he was, and that she might as well be relieved a fortnight sooner.

  And he was relieved. Wendy’s reaction to the end of the affair—her animal wails, her stunned-silences—had frightened him. He had tried to tell himself that it was a healthy abreaction: that she was just getting rid of all her feelings at once. When she was across the continent she would forget him, probably long before he had forgotten her.

  None of what he had predicted and hoped for happened. Wendy’s departure did little for his wife’s morale—and nothing for his own, since it never actually took place. At this very moment Wendy is still in Corinth, hanging about the campus and suffering.

  Brian had foolishly hoped and imagined that they would remain friendly: that Wendy would continue to come to his office, though perhaps less often, and talk to him. This had proved impossible. As soon as she got inside the door she began weeping; sometimes quietly, sometimes so loudly that he feared Steve Cushing next door would hear. Presently he had to ask her not to come any more, for her own good. The sentence of banishment was difficult to enforce. At first she continued to appear anyhow, though apologetically and always with an excuse—some academic question only he could answer, the promise of being perfectly good and just bothering him for a second. But almost at once she would begin to gasp for breath, to sob. Brian had to give up his habit of calling “Come in.” When he recognized Wendy’s knock, or, thought he did, he had to get up from his desk and go to open the door, not too far. “I’m sorry, but I can’t see you,” he would have to say in a forced calm tone, if it was she, or, “You know we agreed you wouldn’t come here this week,” and shut the door again. Even then Wendy did not always go away. She would wait for him to come out, shuffling up and down the Jar end of the corridor, or sitting in the chair outside Dorothy McCall’s office across the way, like the pile of unclaimed student pape
rs that sometimes occupied it. Brian removed this chair, hiding it in the men’s washroom. Wendy was not discouraged, but sat on the floor, her small plump feet, in tan fringed moccasins—or, as the weather grew hotter, bare and gray-soled with dust—sticking out in front of her so that people had to step over them. If he objected to this (“What will it look like to, for example, Mr. Cushing, Mrs. McCall, Mr. Lewis, your sitting here all afternoon?”) she would wait farther off: on the stairs, or below in the hall—sometimes pretending to read a book, sometimes staring at the notices of past concerts and lectures and roommates wanted on the bulletin board. She did not care who saw her there or what they would think. And this lack of social shame, like her lack of emotional and physical shame, gave her a tremendous advantage in the wars of love. She knew what she wanted, and wanted it wholly. She was not divided against herself as Brian was; one voice crying Halt, another Forward, a third railing about responsibility.

  For Brian too was in pain. It had been hard for him from the start, and soon became horrible to have to act the part of a cruel, heartless person; to see Wendy look every day more like a child who is beaten every day; to sit in his office and know that this child is waiting outside his door or somewhere else in the building.

  And not in vain: because when Brian did leave the office and found Wendy still there he could hardly refuse to speak to her. Struggling to contain emotion, she would present her excuse, ask her question, and Brian would answer it. Then, “How is your book coming?” she would ask breathlessly, looking up at him, reminding him that she believed its completion would mark the end of her banishment. He would make some noncommittal reply. To say that the book was going well would have implied that reprieve was at hand; to admit that it was going badly would have implied that her self-sacrifice (and his own) had been useless. For two or three days thereafter Wendy would not appear.