The War Between the Tates: A Novel

by Alison Lurie

  As well as rehashing the past, Brian has time to think about the future. He curses aloud as he contemplates the student conferences and the committee meeting that must now be canceled, the new hotel reservations that must be made, the twenty-dollar bills that must be withdrawn from the bank; the renewed negotiations with Wendy, who will have to be convinced of the reasonable thing again, and driven to New York again. This time he must keep her away from Linda Sliski, and from Erica and Danielle. He must not let her visit her family; he must not let her out of his sight for a moment.

  Brian feels an angry exhaustion, a kind of battle fatigue—almost a desire to give up the struggle. But he cannot afford to give it up. If Wendy remains pregnant, she will expect him to marry her. Erica will expect this too, and so will Danielle, and Linda, and presently Mrs. Gahaghan, and all Wendy’s sisters and cousins and aunts. He can imagine how they will all set upon him, using every unfair weapon in the female arsenal: tears and scoldings, injured looks and righteous nagging, sexual blackmail and moralistic whining and threats of suicide. He can see them now in his mind, a band of harpies charging toward the New York State Thruway over the nearest icy hill—hair flying, claws outstretched—followed by dozens more, hundreds, a whole monstrous regiment of women.

  The men of his acquaintance will not stand with him against this onslaught, though they will censure him if he goes down before it. Brian recalls the earlier imaginary unanimous opinion of his colleagues on the Curriculum Committee that for him to break off his long-standing alliance with Erica Tate and suddenly form one with Wendy Gahaghan would be morally and politically indefensible. In a few cases this opinion will make no difference; whatever he does, Hank Andrews will remain his friend, and Donald Dibble his enemy. But if he marries Wendy, Hank’s wife (an elegant shy young woman who quietly admires Erica) will not invite them to dinner very often. John Randall’s wife (a well-bred elderly beauty who is a famous local gourmet cook and has always been fond of Erica) will probably not invite them to dinner at all. Chuck Markowitz and his wife will perhaps still invite them; but since Lily is a militant vegetarian, her dinners will consist, as usual, mostly of steamed wheat and raisins and fried eggplant, a type of nourishment he already gets too much of from Wendy and her friends.

  Essentially, all Brian’s colleagues will think less of him if he leaves his wife and children for Wendy—including those who might condone a discreet affair. A few may envy him sexually, but not very much, and not for very long. As soon as Wendy’s pregnancy becomes public knowledge even they will look down “upon him, and laugh silently, as he would do in their place.

  And if Wendy remains pregnant and he does not marry her, he will also be censured, especially by members of her generation. When his students and graduate students find out (and some of them will inevitably find out, or at least hear rumors) they will think him selfish, untrustworthy, uptight and square. In other words, whatever he does, he will be condemned and ridiculed by at least half the world.

  By the time Brian is a hundred miles out of New York the repetition of these ideas and recollections has become intolerable to him. It is for this reason that, somewhere near Liberty, he stops for two bedraggled young people holding up a damp, stained cardboard sign reading CORINTH U. As a rule he declines to pick up hitchhikers—not as a precaution against robbery, but because he prefers his thoughts to their conversation.

  In the rear-view mirror, as he slows down, he can see the two students jogging toward him along the dirty shoulder of the road through the rain. They are about the same size and wear the same anonymous, androgynous jeans and boots and parka, making it difficult to tell of what sex they are, even when they reach the car.

  “Hey, thanks.” They pile in behind with their knapsacks, breathless. “We thought nobody was ever going to stop. How far you going? ...Corinth? Wow, beautiful.” Brian identifies one by its rudimentary pale mustache as male; the other by its voice—a warm, dominant contralto—as female.

  “You still pissed at me, Sara?” the mustache asks as Brian swings back onto the highway.

  “I never was pissed at you,” Sara replies with dignity. “I just think you were being chicken-assed ... We had this bad experience just now, dig,” she adds, sitting forward behind Brian so that he can see her in the rear-view mirror; she is very young, slim, boyish and intense, with a lot of-dark red-brown hair and matching red-brown eyes under heavy straight brows. “We got a ride outside the city with these two greaser-type guys in a truck. They were into a six-pack, and pretty soon they began giving us a hard time because we wouldn’t drink. Especially Stanley. They were picking on his hair and saying how they’d thought he was a cute chick.” Brian moves his head to get another view of Stanley, who indeed would have been good-looking if he were female, but makes only a soft, nondescript young man. “Then they started saying how they were going to pull off the road and give him a-haircut; and me—well you know the kind of shit.” Sara clears her throat.

  “So when they had to slow down for the construction back there, we opened the door and jumped out,” Stanley explains.

  “That was lucky,” Brian says.

  “Yeh, except then we had to stand in the fucking rain for about an hour, not getting any rides,” Sara complains, “because Stan said no more trucks. He had like suddenly got this stereotype, see. Every time we saw a truck a mile off we had to put our thumbs down ...I don’t see why you were so unglued,” she says to him. “All you would have lost is hair. I could have got the clap from those guys.”

  “Yeh, maybe,” Stanley growls faintly.

  “Anyhow”—Sara turns back to Brian—“you like saved our lives, or at least our relationship. If you hadn’t come along when you did, I would have stopped anything on wheels.”

  “You wouldn’t have got into a truck alone,” Stanley states.

  “The hell I wouldn’t. Well, maybe I wouldn’t now,” she admits crossly. “But after we finish karate I’m going to go anywhere I fucking feel like.”

  “You’re learning karate?” Brian shifts his head so he can address both of them.

  “I’m thinking of it,” Stanley says, smiling nervously. “I don’t want her to beat me up.”

  “I could beat you up now, Stanley,” Sara says. “I could break your arm with the side of my hand, if I wanted to. Lesson Four.”

  Brian laughs, partly to ease the tension between his passengers.

  “You think that’s a joke,” Sara says, leaning forward again. “You think it’s pretty funny for a woman to want to learn karate.”

  “I think it’s not absolutely necessary for you to know how to break a man’s arm.” Brian smiles at Sara in the rear-view mirror, but her expression only becomes more belligerent. The premonition comes to him that he is about to hear a speech on the New Feminism. “Though I suppose in certain situations it might come in useful,” he adds, hoping to head the subject off. “If you were living in Manhattan, now—”

  But it is too late. “You think that, because you’re a man,” Sara informs him. “You’re used to the idea that women are the weaker sex, and you want to keep it that way.”

  “No, I—”

  “You don’t want us to learn karate, it really scares both you and Stan shitless, because for thousands of years you’ve kept women down basically by the threat of physical force and violence.”

  “Now, really, I—”

  “I know what you’re going to say, you’re going to tell me you never hit a woman in your life, but that’s because you never had to, you got your way without it. You don’t have to physically hassle them, all our social institutions do it for you. Like for instance—”

  For the next hour and a half Sara lectures Brian and Stanley on the subject of women: their natural physical, psychological and moral superiority to men; the manifold injustices they have suffered in the past; and their right in the present to equal pay, equal educational and vocational opportunities, free day-care centers, and abortion on demand. (Brian finds this part of the lecture esp
ecially annoying). At intervals she takes various paperback and magazines and newspaper cuttings out of her knapsack and reads aloud to them from Simone de Beauvoir and other lady authors. Occasionally Brian tries to change the subject; or to declare that he is already in favor of equality between the sexes, but Sara will have none of that. “Sure, you say so, but you don’t really mean it. It’s the same with Stanley. He thinks he wants to get rid of all that chauvinist shit, but he can’t—it’s in too deep, from his conditioning. Like that stupid crack he made about karate.”

  In the rear-view mirror Stanley’s face twitches, but he does not protest. Really, Brian thinks, he is a pretty miserable, low-spirited imitation of a young man. Somebody ought to tell him so, to shame him out of his passivity and knock some guts into him. Brian is beginning to understand why the drunken truckdrivers baited Stanley, and threatened to cut off his long limp curls. If he, Brian, were two big greaser-type guys instead of one small professor, he too might—And Sara? Yes, why not? A good hard fuck, to shut her mouth for a while.

  Picturing this scene in his mind, Brian continues to drive as fast as prudent in the direction of Corinth, and to give the impression of listening to Sara. He does this last so successfully that, having concluded her sermon, she becomes quite affable, even confiding. She and Stanley tell Brian of their difficulties with some members of their commune who are heavily into nudity (“Okay, so that’s their trip, except then they want the heat up to seventy-five all the time, and the rest of us swelter; besides, it really kites the gas bill”) and others who shirk KP. As they approach Corinth, Sara, who is a science major, asks Brian’s advice: is there some course in his department he could recommend to fill her distribution requirement? (an impulse of malice comes over him, and he recommends Donald Dibble’s Constitutional Law course, smiling to himself as he imagines the inevitable collision of views.)

  Leaving his grateful passengers at the bottom of a muddy farm road, Brian drives on into town, to the apartment building where he has been living for the past month. Alpine Towers (more literally Tower, for there is only one as yet, though others are threatened) is brand-new, blatantly modern. Most of the apartments are rented furnished, in the bland indestructible style of airport motels. After four weeks, Brian still often feels that he is in a motel. At other times he feels he is living in one of a rank of post-office boxes—which, from the outside, the tall, flat building with its squares of glass and pressed-metal plating closely resembles. Some of the boxes are empty, some crammed full, and they are constantly emptied and refilled; because of its unusually small rooms and large rents, there is a rapid turnover of incoming Corinth faculty and outgoing husbands. It is the only building in town which always has a vacancy.

  Brian lives alone in the Towers. He has not allowed Wendy to move in with him, though she spends most of her time there. At this stage, he has explained to her, it would not look well. Besides, the apartment is not large enough for two people—or even for one: the closets are inadequate, and apart from the Living Area there is only a tiny ill-lit bedchamber. But Alpine Towers is just a few blocks uphill from Wendy’s room in Collegetown, so it is easy for her to go back and forth.

  As Brian had expected, his apartment on the sixth floor is dark; Wendy is afraid to face him. Presently he must try to locate her, but not yet; not tonight. It is nearly nine o’clock; he has driven for over eight hours today and eaten nothing since breakfast. His body demands a hot shower, a hot dinner and at least eight hours sleep.

  Throwing his coat on the Danish-anonymous couch, Brian makes himself a strong Scotch and water. He takes one gulp, sighs loudly, and carries the drink with him into his bedroom, switching on the light and tossing his suitcase onto the bed, where it falls heavily against a big heap of blankets which was not there when he left, for Brian always makes up his bed tightly every morning as he was taught in the Navy.

  “Uhhh.”

  “Hey! Wendy?”

  The blankets churn and shift; she raises her face, which is puffy and streaked with dirty tears.

  “Well?” he says in an exhausted, exasperated Navy voice.

  “I’m sorry.” Wendy struggles to a sitting position. “I didn’t think you’d be back this soon, and Linda’s having a blast.”

  “I see,” he remarks, in the tone of one who does not see.

  “I blew it, Brian.”

  “So I gather.” He comes further into the room, causing Wendy to draw back across the bed with a frightened expression.

  “I couldn’t hack it, that’s all,” she mews. “I couldn’t.”

  “You.could.have.let.me.know.” Brian is aware of controlling his anger, ejecting his words slowly like separate cold lumps of metal.”

  “I was scared to.” Wendy smiles rapidly and nervously; she is up on her knees now, and he can observe that she is wearing only an oversize faded white sweatshirt printed with pink peace symbols.

  “You.ran.away.because.you.were.afraid.of.a.minor.operation.” He fires another round.

  “It wasn’t just that. The whole thing freaked me out. Like you know how I was all last week. And yesterday was worse. I mean you know, Ma and Pa and Brendan and Jakie. And then my sister and her husband drove in from New Jersey with the baby for Thanksgiving dinner, and we had the whole family-of-origin scene. All of them smiling and passing me the gravy and asking how I enjoyed my courses on account of they didn’t know that I was about to commit a murder. Because that’s what they’d think it was. I realize it’s just my same old parochial-school hangup, the return of the repressed. I know that. Only it really racked me up.

  “But I was still convinced to do it. Then last night Linda came over, and I was rapping to her about it, and she said, why didn’t we consult the I Ching? So we found the book up in my old room; and the first time I threw the coins I got hexagram number forty-two: Increase. I mean, wow.”

  She looks up at Brian expectantly, but he makes no response. “The thing is, you know,” she continues, “with the I Ching, lots of times you get an answer that’s really hard to connect to your personal situation: it’s, all about the emperor and the great stream. But this was so right on. Increase! I mean, that’s what I’m doing, right? And the Judgement said, get this: ‘The satisfaction of the people in consequence of this increase is without limit.’ You understand? That means it’s going to work out really fine for everybody.”

  “I understand, yes,” Brian says, holding his tone steady. “You’re telling me that you decided to change all your plans, and screw up your life, and mine, because of the way three pennies fell on the floor of a bedroom in Queens.”

  “I didn’t decide—” Wendy’s voice trembles.

  “No, I don’t think you did. You don’t really believe that kind of superstitious crap. Linda might, her head’s so fucked up, but not you. The truth is you just hadn’t got the courage, or the integrity, to stand by your decision.” Wendy edges away from the machine-gun fire along the bed, her back against the wall. She has begun to sob intermittently, but Brian has seen too much of her tears over the past month to be impressed. “You hadn’t even got the decency to let me know. Instead you had to sneak out of town.” Wendy has reached the end of the bed; she stands up against the far wall, looking damaged.

  “But if,” she whimpers. “If it’s, you know, God’s will.”

  “God’s will!” he repeats grindingly. He feels rage burn up inside him, as if a match has been put to powder, fusing all the anger he has tamped down over the past twenty-four hours, anger at his mother, his aunts, Jeffrey, Martha, the guard at the Frick, Mrs. Gahaghan, Dr. Friendly, the parking-garage attendant, the clerks at the hotel and theater box office, Sara, and Stanley. He rounds the bed toward Wendy, who is weeping steadily now.

  “Stop that stupid noise.” He raises his hand; Wendy, anticipating the blow, crumples with it to the floor. Though he has barely touched her, she does not get up or move, but lies there in a heap, sobbing monotonously.

  The fire blazes on; Brian prepares to strike aga
in, more effectively, then pauses. It is partly the inhibition of which Sara spoke, a moral and social block against hitting a woman, especially a pregnant woman, a mother. But even more, it is a sense of futility. He sees himself and Wendy again as the sculpture in the Frick: Reason conquering Error. To an observer there would be no doubt which of them was victor, which vanquished. Brian stands upright, fully dressed, his arm raised, his square jaw set, and a righteous frown on his brow; while Error, half clothed, huddles under his feet, abject and trembling.

  But appearances can lie; art does lie habitually. Brian knows from twenty-five years of teaching that Reason often fights a losing battle, and it is proved again here. All his arguments, his month-long logical analysis of the situation, were not worth three cents to Wendy once his back was turned. She lies there now looking weak and disheveled and defeated; he can curse her, strike her again, throw her out of his apartment, and she will not resist. But such tactics will not save him. He is joined to Error through his own flesh, as the figures in the Frick are cast of the same bronze. To separate them will take craft, skilled force, patience.

  “Come on, get up,” he says therefore, nudging Wendy’s bare flank gently with his foot. “Don’t lie there crying. I’m not angry at you, everything’s going to be all right.”

  12

  THE ONE UGLY PART of the Tates’ pretty old farmhouse is the cellar. It is almost entirely below ground level, dark and usually damp, with mottled walls of a sour gray cement which will not hold paint, and a web of rusty pipes and hot-air ducts and wires hanging from the low ceiling. In the least damp corner, raised off the gritty cement floor on soggy two-by-fours, are the Maytag washer and dryer.