The War Between the Tates: A Novel

by Alison Lurie

  Zed has still not moved. He stands there against the shelves of books with his wings hunched, not even looking at her, simply waiting for her to go away. Instead she takes a step in the other direction, toward him.

  “Sandy, my dear. What’s the matter?”

  He turns his head, looks down, hesitates. Perhaps, now he sees her so close, so creased, even he doesn’t want—Then slowly he straightens up and moves nearer; she sees in close-up his ill-shaven, freckled, tired scarecrow features; his pale eyes with their reddish rims and orange lashes. Nearer still—She closes her eyes, improving the view.

  At first it is hardly like being kissed at all; then Zed, with a clumsy, half-blind gesture, pulls her closer and shifts his mouth so that it meets hers more accurately. Erica remembers the look in his eyes a few moments ago; she remembers the birds in the park, how impatient and greedy they always were, how they would press close to her and her bag of bread, flapping and squawking; she remembers Brian, and waits for Sandy too to crowd, to grab.

  But he only holds her, stroking her face and hair, kissing her gently and intermittently. Gradually she relaxes, rests against him. She sighs—not in protest, but Zed releases her, blinking and putting out one hand to feel for the shelf behind him.

  “Sandy? Are you all right?”

  “Yes. No. I feel dizzy.” He laughs. “I feel—As if I’d got a birthday present I’d given up expecting.”

  “Did you have a birthday recently?”

  “What? My birthday—It was last week.”

  “I’m glad.” Erica looks up at him in a way which would have informed Brian, or any other man, that he should kiss her again. But Zed doesn’t move. He has no idea how large a present she intends to give him. She will have to tell him—to show him—But now she is embarrassed; she steps back, looks around the room. “Is it still snowing, do you think?” she asks.

  “Let’s see.” Zed lifts the curtain to the front of the shop. “No. It looks as if it’s stopped.” He walks between dim bookshelves to the door and peers out. “And the street’s been plowed. You can go now. I’ll get your coat.”

  15

  IT IS A COLD, shiny April morning. In his apartment at the top of Alpine Towers, Brian Tate is having a leisurely breakfast: English muffins with marmalade, scrambled eggs, and coffee made in a filter pot the way he has finally managed to teach Wendy to make it. It is one of the few things he has managed to teach her—for on close acquaintance, Wendy’s malleability has proved just as intractable as Erica’s stubbornness. She will agree to anything, accept his opinion on any matter; but a few hours later she will meet Linda or some other friend, hear a lecture, read a magazine article, and change her mind. To keep her on the right track, he would have to stay with her twenty-four hours a day.

  Brian has no desire to do this; in his view they are together too much as it is. Three weeks ago Wendy’s roommate Linda took up with, and into her apartment, an intense, homeless, bearded young man named Avery. Since then Wendy has been living full-time in Alpine Towers, an arrangement which Brian finds less than satisfactory. He can remember Leonard Zimmern saying cynically that there were only two infallible ways to get over a woman: one was to cut the relationship off completely, cold turkey, never to see her, telephone her or write to her again; the other, equally effective, was to see her all the time.

  The idea that one should preserve some modesty, some privacy, even under the most intimate conditions, had been Erica’s native creed. It is foreign to Wendy. Every day now Brian can observe her sitting up in bed to blow her nose; brushing her teeth over the sink, her mouth full of foamy pink spit; washing out her dirty panties at night. If he had allowed it she would have used the toilet while he was shaving, also she is letting her appearance go, putting on weight; in the last month or so she must have gained five pounds. Her breasts are larger, which is all right; but her waist is also thicker, giving her figure a coarseness not at all to his taste.

  But even if Wendy were more modest and as slim as before, Brian might still be sick of her. His theory had been right, after all: the way to cure a passion was by satiating it. Mere consummation was not enough; as long as the affair remained secret, the necessary stimuli to desire were there: absence, anxiety, delay, solitary longing.

  Now the lovers are in full possession. They can see each other all day long. They can have breakfast together, and lunch, and dinner, and breakfast ...

  In the house on Jones Creek Road the children were always around when Brian got home; he could seldom speak privately to Erica until late at, night. But he and Wendy are alone constantly, and always in each other’s presence, for the apartment has only one usable room. She doesn’t seem to mind this; probably she finds it comfortably familiar, having grown up under equally crowded conditions. She also, as far as he can tell, feels no slackening of romantic love; indeed she claims to adore him more than ever. When he suggests that she might look for another place to live she becomes weepy and helpless, insisting that there are no apartments at this time of year and that she will try even harder not to disturb him in his Work.

  Meanwhile, she continues to disturb him—especially when she is trying not to: when she is tiptoeing around the apartment, opening and shutting the refrigerator with elaborate precaution, crawling under his desk to unplug the radio so she can drag it over the rug into the bedroom with her—for like his children, Wendy seems unable to study unless she is simultaneously eating and listening to bad music. In order to get any work done, even to grade papers, Brian has to retreat to his office on campus. Like Jeffrey and Matilda, Wendy is driving him out of his own house.

  Brian sighs heavily. He has come to realize belatedly that in love, as in war, whatever is the greatest difference between the principals becomes the central issue. When they are alike except that one is male, the other female, the relationship takes its ideal form. But if there are other important differences—class, race, color, religion, nationality, education, etc.—then the lovers will find themselves polarized around these differences rather than engaged in the natural sexual contest.

  There are many differences between him and Wendy, but the greatest is that of generation. He had been born twenty years sooner and had certain interests, habits and attitudes; he found the interests, habits and attitudes of Wendy and her friends tiresome. Last week, at a particularly disorganized and frantic graduate student party, when he refused to try to dance in the current disorganized and frantic style, even Wendy turned on him, crying plaintively, “Why can’t you swing a little?” “Because I don’t want to swing,” Brian replied. “I’m not a child. I don’t want to swing, or slide, or go on the teeter-totter.”

  He sighs and unfolds this morning’s student paper. Beyond the usual depressing international news, which he has already heard on the radio last night, nothing catches his notice except for another letter complaining about Donald Dibble’s course. It is the fourth or fifth such letter to appear in the Star, and not very original or well written; but Brian reads it carefully, for he has a personal interest in the controversy.

  Since Linda Sliski’s party there have been several developments in the war between Dibble and the local feminists, in which Brian has played an important advisory role. His original suggestion that more women should be brought into Dibble’s class was adopted enthusiastically. Over that first weekend Jenny was able to enlist five or six sympathizers, including Linda and Wendy. They crowded into the room on Monday and sat in a clump at the back. If Dibble had had the slightest political sense he would have avoided saying anything to provoke them; he would simply have waited them out. But he made an antifeminist remark, or what could pass for one, and the girls at the back began to whisper and groan half audibly. On Monday night Jenny and Sara went to a WHEN meeting and asked for recruits; and at Wednesday’s lecture there were a dozen superfluous women who did not wait for offensive statements but started groaning and booing when Dibble spoke favorably of the Republican party, causing him to slam down his text and notes and, in a
trembling voice, request all auditors to leave. When they did not move he stuffed his books and papers into a briefcase and walked out of the room.

  But Dibble was by no means defeated. When Jenny and Sara arrived at next Monday’s lecture, followed this time by nearly twenty extra women, they found a monitor at the door with an official class list and orders to admit only students legally enrolled in the course. Baffled, the leaders of the protest returned to Brian for counsel. They were confused and angry; a few wanted to take some drastic action against Dibble, to arouse public opinion on a wide scale.

  In fact public opinion was already being aroused; the dispute had become a matter first of departmental and then of university gossip, and was now even known to people outside Corinth. Leonard had called Brian from New York for details. “We’ve had the same thing,” he reported. “The local Hens objected because Jane Austen, the Brontes, et cetera, were taught by men, who couldn’t possibly understand, bla bla bla. But as I said to Irv here, you have to get tough and hold the line, or you’ll be in for it. Next you’ll have the Gay Power boys picketing Comp Lit because Proust and Gide aren’t taught by faggots.”

  But Brian felt some sympathy for Jenny’s cause. After all, Dibble probably had made some foolishly unprofessional remarks. He was a boor and a reactionary and Brian’s long-standing enemy, while Jenny was a beautiful young girl who admired him and would be grateful if he helped her to defeat their common adversary; Brian had already imagined some of the forms this gratitude might take.

  He did not get tough with Jenny, therefore, but tried to calm her down and persuade her that the protesters should make their next move through official channels, presenting their case in a letter to the acting chairman of the political science department, with carbon copies to Dibble and the dean. Vague complaints would not be enough, though; what they needed was evidence: direct quotations from Dibble’s lectures insulting women.

  As a result of this conversation Sara and Jenny, who were the only leaders of the protest now enrolled in the course, began attending it with tape recorders hidden in their bags. They sat in the front row, but at opposite ends; this was necessary because of Dibble’s habit of walking nervously back and forth the length of the podium as he spoke. Jenny concealed the microphone in her blouse; Sara, less generously endowed, in the bib pocket of her overalls. But results were disappointing. Dibble had finished discussing the Nineteenth Amendment, and almost all he did for two weeks was to refer once to Prohibitionists as “hysterical old-maid schoolteacher types” and to pronounce the name “Eleanor Roosevelt” in a sneering tone.

  Examination of the past lecture notes of sympathizers was more productive, however; and best (or worst) of all was a recording secretly made by Linda Sliski when calling on Dibble in his office under pretense of getting information for her Ph.D. thesis. “If you want my frank opinion, it’s a waste of time to teach girls political science,” Brian heard his colleague announce on Linda’s tape recorder—as he had heard him often in meetings. “Do you know what percentage of our female graduates go on to make any use whatever of their expensive education?” Dibble’s voice, converted by the machine to an unpleasant low quacking, continued quoting figures until it was interrupted by Linda’s equally unpleasant high bleat accusing him of specious logic and reactionary bias, and informing him that she, at least, had every intention of putting her education to use, and that she had no intention, Professor Dibble, of becoming a mere housewife and bringing more children into a world like this one, and that he might not have a very good opinion of her capabilities, but she would like him to know that she had an A average and had just been appointed to a position at Ohio State University. This information, or perhaps the realization that Linda was on the verge of tears, caused Dibble to laugh in a way Brian knew well, and to remark, “You got an assistant professorship at Ohio State? Well, you’d better hang on to it. There’s a fashion now in some schools for hiring women, but it won’t last.”

  Hearing this conversation replayed, Brian had a strange giddy sensation—an intoxicating sense of power. Almost without effort, he had set the two people in Corinth he most disliked upon each other. He had chosen their battleground and their weapons; now he could sit behind the scenes and hear them attack each other, saying things he would have liked to say himself.

  This feeling of power was increased three days ago when Brian was called in for consultation on the dispute by Bill Guildenstern, the acting chairman of the department. Like many acting chairmen, Bill was an ambitious, cautious, personable young man; an executive type, devoted to the smooth functioning and greater glory of the department, but without strong opinions of his own. His policy has been to consult the senior members of the staff individually on any problem which arises (he is too shrewd a politician to consult them en masse), and then present his decision as a consensus. Brian, as a former chairman, is often consulted.

  “I’d like to get your opinion of this,” Bill said, holding out to Brian a letter he had seen before, now signed by eleven members of Dibble’s course and eighteen non-members, all female.

  “Certainly,” Brian agreed. He pretended to read the letter, making appropriate noises. “Mm, hm. Well, it seems to be fairly temperate and straightforward, as these things go,” he remarked, not unnaturally, for he had seen the original draft and told Jenny to tone it down. “But I expect Don is somewhat heated about it.”

  “Boiling,” Bill replied.

  For a moment Brian allowed himself to enjoy a vision of Dibble in his office, opening a copy of this letter, reading it, boiling. “Ye-es,” he said, frowning so as not to smile. He turned back to the second page, to the demand for a public apology from Dibble plus equal class time for a speaker of their choice. If he wished Brian could advise granting this demand, causing Dibble to boil even harder. But, like Bill, he had to consider the public reputation of the department, to avoid uproar and scandal. It was time to return to the policy of containment.

  He could of course, and perhaps should, recommend the usual delaying tactics: suggest that the matter be referred to a committee which would be unable to reach its decision until the term was over. But this would mean in effect a total victory for Dibble. It would be deeply discouraging to Wendy and pretty Jenny and all their friends. Moreover, they would see it as a failure not only of their cause but of Brian’s advice and political know-how.

  For all these reasons, he had decided on a compromise. It was clear that the demand for an apology must be forgotten. (“Apologize!?” Bill reported Dibble as shouting. “Those spoiled brats ought to apologize to me.”) There should be no interference with lectures, but Dibble should be asked to announce optional class meetings during reading period (now only two weeks off) in which the feminist viewpoint would be presented. And as Bill nodded, smiled, expressing approval of this solution, Brian felt again the intoxication of political power. He thought that now he understood why someone might wish to become a double agent.

  He was not surprised to discover that Bill Guildenstern had taken his advice. But he was rather startled yesterday when he heard that Dibble had refused even this favorable compromise. Wendy and her friends, quite naturally, were not only surprised but indignant. At about noon Sara and Jenny appeared in Brian’s office, one white with anger, the other almost weeping. He tried to calm them, to tell them that nothing much was lost—that they could still go ahead and hold meetings in reading period without Dibble’s permission. Jenny seemed partly convinced, but not Sara. “You know something?” she cried passionately, clinging to the back of a chair with her small white fists as if it were a podium, and looking more than ever like a young boy revolutionary. “If we were blacks, instead of women, they wouldn’t dare give us this kind of crap. Anyone, anyone has more status in this society than we do, more respect!”

  “Blacks do not have more status,” Brian corrected her. “The establishment is just more scared of them. If you were black, they’d be afraid you’d bomb Burnham Hall, or hold Dibble hostage in his of
fice.”

  “Yes! That’s what we should do,” Sara said stubbornly. “Only we’ve got no guts. We’ve let ourselves be brainwashed too long.” She gave Brian an accusing, discouraged look, such as another woman might give an incompetent repairman, and turned back to Jenny. “Come on, let’s split. We’ve got to get that meeting organized.”

  From the departmental point of view things have turned out for the best, but Brian regrets that the protest has ended in a rout. Sara had held her meeting last night, and Wendy dutifully attended the first two hours of it. (Brian, as usual, did not go; he would have been unwelcome, not as a professor, but as a man.) She reported that there was a lot of discussion still going on when she left, but no plan of action. Brian was not surprised; women alone can never really get a cause together. It is not only that they are too gentle, but also, as he has read recently, that they lack the male bonding instinct, the tradition of cooperation against a common enemy.

  Wendy has poured him another cup of coffee, and is cooking herself a brownish mess of health-food cereal and nuts and raisins when the telephone rings. It is Linda, breathlessly asking to speak to her.

  “For you.” Brian holds out the receiver.

  “Hi ...What? ...Oh, wow! ...Fantastic ...No, we didn’t hear the radio. Gee, I don’t know. Wait a sec.” She turns around. “Linda says they’ve taken over Dibble’s office! She’s going over there now, and she wants me to come with her. Oh, hey, isn’t that far out?”

  “Taken over his office?” Brian drops the Times, causing the Cosmopolitan Girl on the back page to become smeared with egg and marmalade, and stands up. He is torn between reluctance to speak with Linda and wish for information. But he recalls her habitual inaccuracy, and the first impulse wins. “Tell her you’ll call back. And turn on WCUR.”