The War Between the Tates: A Novel

by Alison Lurie

  Erica sloshes the mop up and down in the sudsy water and begins mopping the floor in shiny overlapping strips. For the hundredth time in six years she thinks what an expensive mistake it was to buy these red vinyl tiles, which looked so good in the store but faded to a dirty pink within the first year and showed every spill and speck of dust from the start. Then, for the hundredth time in six weeks, she thinks of something Danielle said about Sandy: that he is not only nice but “too nice to be a man.”

  Recently Erica has had proof of the truth of this statement, though perhaps not yet conclusive proof. But she might have suspected sooner—even on that first snowy evening in the bookshop, when Sandy did not press his advantage as most men would have. Or she might have guessed in the following weeks, when he seemed quite content with gently enthusiastic kisses and hugs of the sort an affectionate child might lavish on a new pet.

  Erica noticed this hesitancy, this childish diffidence—but it pleased rather than troubled her. She thought that Sandy was too much in awe of her to hope or expect that she would sleep with him; that he wanted to spare them both the embarrassment and pain of a refusal. No doubt he had suffered refusals before; had, perhaps often, been laughed at and rejected. Certainly something like that must have happened to make him hesitate, even turn away from life. But knowing what men are like, Erica knew that instinctively Sandy must want more. It was her duty to give it to him—to convince him that her friendship and charity were real. Nor would hers be a shallow, soup-kitchen kind of charity: she did not mean merely to fill a temporary need, but to deconvert Sandy, to bring him back into the world in every way and show him that it was real and good, so that he would give up his pathetic empty asceticism.

  With all this in mind, Erica chose her time and place carefully. She had given Sandy his unexpected birthday present impulsively and under poor conditions. Now that he was, in both senses, going to receive the present of his life, it should be under the best possible circumstances and in the most attractive gift wrapping. It must happen in her own house, for motels were sordid and the Krishna Bookshop grungy and cold—and when there was no chance of interruption. Therefore she waited until the children had gone to Connecticut with Brian for spring vacation, and the place was empty.

  Erica, like the rest of the nonacademic help at Corinth, had no spring vacation to speak of, but she did have Good Friday off. She made a light but elegant lunch (avocado salad, shrimp bisque, white wine) and cleansed the relevant parts of the house. She changed the bed in the spare room, putting on fresh sheets with a pattern of wild roses, and drew down the blinds three fourths of the way, so that parallelograms of sun fell on the carpet and a warm, watery light suffused the rest. She did not dress up—it seemed too obvious, and she had nothing really nice to wear anyhow—but she took a shower and put on a clean garnet-colored sweater and black wool slacks, and under them her best lavender-lace bra and panties. Then she got out her diaphragm, which had become quite stiff and dry with neglect under its coating of talcum powder, but seemed on inspection to be intact—at least it didn’t leak under the faucet—and put it in with an extra large helping of jelly, bought with some awkwardness the day before at a drug store where she was unknown.

  Everything was ready. And for the first hour, everything went as she had planned. She kissed Sandy even more affectionately than usual when he arrived, though his face was unpleasantly blotched with cold from the time he had spent trying to hitch a ride out to Jones Creek Road. She served lunch, turning the talk lightly toward love, teasing, reminiscing. There was a significant moment when she made some generalization about men, and Sandy, smiling, protested, “You can’t say that.”

  “I can too,”

  “Speaking from wide experience, I suppose.”

  “I’ve never had any experience, except Brian,” Erica replied. “But a woman just knows.” And she laughed gaily, glad to have told Sandy what would make the gift he was about to receive more valuable.

  It was not difficult after that to make clear what she intended; to move from the kitchen to the sitting room and then upstairs to the study. In the warm confusion of that move, and the chill of what followed, she forgets details. One exchange remains, when after gently helping her out of her clothes, Sandy pulled off his own shabby garments. In spite of their last, close embrace, she was startled, almost frightened by what she saw: the long white narrow torso; the burning bush of wiry hair—not faded with time like that on Sandy’s head, but still bright vermilion—and what rose from it.

  “You,” she half whispered, extending her hand, but not to touch. “That ... I mean, isn’t it awfully large?”

  “Just average, as far as I know.”

  There was a silence while both thought the same thing, about Brian.

  But Erica’s confusion and distress at that moment were nothing to what came after. First misunderstanding and misguided reassurance—for, thinking that Sandy hesitated out of consideration, she kept murmuring that it was all right—until at length she moved her hand and discovered that it was not all right She can hear her own squeak of exclamation now: “Oh! What’s the matter?” and Sandy’s reply, muffled and bleak: “I don’t know.”

  Next the clumsy straining, the bleats of distress and failure. Renewed effort; renewed failure. Then Sandy pulling away, sitting back between her legs, his face reddened, saying, “It’s no good.”

  And finally she recalls the excuses and explanations, overlapping and contradicting each other. “I didn’t expect ... “You know, I was afraid of this.” “We waited too long.” Erica, out of hope and faith and charity, accepted these excuses; offered some of her own. She soothed and comforted Sandy, assuring him that she understood, that she wasn’t angry, or upset, that it would be better next time.

  But it was not better next time. It was worse. At the mere sight of Erica naked at night in a university office (her children were back from vacation, but she had a key to the building where she worked), Sandy sagged and shrank in every part. He sat down on the extreme edge of the black plastic couch belonging to the editor of Current Organic Chemistry, next to Erica’s cold feet; his arms hung limp between his legs, and he spoke in a withered version of his normal voice. “Venus square Neptune again. I suppose it’s some kind of sign.”

  This time Erica did not reassure and comfort him. Instead, all the misery and self-doubt that had been churning below the surface of her mind for the past four days boiled up and over. Her laughter was sour, almost hysterical, as she told Sandy that he must have made a mistake. Obviously he did not want her, or love her.

  “No,” he whispered from the end of the couch. “I love you too much.”

  Erica did not believe him. She thought that Sandy had, as he had said before, waited too long. The Erica he loved was a beautiful young girl; at the sight of her creased face and middle-aged body in close-up, desire had left him. She sat up, reached for her clothes, and began to dress wearily, thinking that Sandy might have known, or at least guessed, that this would happen again—that he might have known the first time. She began to feel aggrieved at him for having allowed these two embarrassing and sordid scenes to occur, scenes in which she had offered herself and exposed herself and been rejected. It was too late now. This ugly, humiliating, ludicrous thing had happened staining this day and their friendship like the big splotch of strained-lamb-with-vegetables Jeffrey had once spat onto one of the illustrations for Sanford’s Busy Day, so that she had to draw the whole page over.

  But she could not draw this over; it would be in her life forever. And what made it worse was that she had brought it on herself, by trying to make love to somebody so ugly and peculiar and hopeless. A sort of fury came over her as she looked at Sandy, who was still sitting at the far end of the couch, his knobby white back bent as he pulled on his socks. She wanted to scream, to hit him, to beat his bald head and stooped shoulders with her fists. She was shocked by this impulse, however, and at once suppressed it, reminding herself that Sandy was not only her old friend, but a
pathetic, unhappy person who deserved pity. All the same, he might have known. At least the second time—

  “I should have known,” Sandy said suddenly, echoing Erica’s thoughts as he had a way of doing—in happier moments she had considered it a sign of their psychic sympathy. “I figured out a long while ago, anything I really wanted I couldn’t have. It’s my destiny.”

  “That’s stupid,” Erica exclaimed. A new idea had come to her; she paused with one bare leg up, dangling mauve tights. “You know what it is, you’re doing this to yourself. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s not your destiny or anybody’s destiny to fail. Everyone’s entitled to some success, some happiness.”

  “No.” Sandy, who had ceased dressing while she spoke, let out a long sigh and began dragging down his gray turtleneck sweater. “Not everyone. Not by a long shot. What you don’t realize yet, Erica, is that the devil is in charge of this world.

  “It’s obvious, once you look at it.” he continued, smiling briefly and sourly. “Suppose you were the devil, and you wanted to make mankind as miserable as possible. At first you might think of afflicting them all with everything you could lay on: war and unemployment and heroin addiction and cancer and political torture and starvation and blindness and deformity and radiation poisoning. Have everyone in the world suffer, all the time.

  “But that’s too easy. If the human condition is miserable everywhere, mankind will expect that, and be resigned to it. What you’d really want to do is make almost everyone sick and ugly and frightened and hungry. Then you’d have a few who didn’t suffer at all—whom everything always went right for—who were young, rich, beautiful, healthy and happy. And you’d scatter them around the world to discourage the others; to remind them every day, every hour, of “what they were missing.” Sandy’s voice was harsh. “That’s what people like you and Brian are for.”

  “But things don’t go right for us.” Erica laughed uneasily, telling herself that Sandy was joking. “Not lately, anyhow.”

  “No. Your turn is over. You’re being sent to join the majority.” He did not laugh.

  “You don’t really believe all that.”

  “I don’t know.” He spoke more slowly now, in a fainter voice. “I believe it sometimes.”

  “I thought you believed in God, that God created the world, not the devil.”

  “I didn’t say he created it. The devil can’t create anything. You only have to go out into the country and look around to know who made it—look at the fields, the sky, the birds. But of course that was quite a while ago. You can tell by what’s happening to the world that God doesn’t care about it any more.”

  “And you think He doesn’t care about us any more either, whether we’re happy or not.”

  “Or that it’s irrelevant to Him. A man I met at the monastery over in Elmira once said to me, “God isn’t interested in whether we’re happy, only in whether we’re good.”

  “And do you agree with that?”

  “I don’t know.” Sandy shrugged and bent down to tie his boots. “Sometimes I think wanting to be good is just another form of vanity.”

  Of that whole sad scene, it is this last exchange which continues to press on Erica’s mind; everything else she can dismiss as Sandy’s fantasy, Sandy’s superstitious self-doubt and self-induced failure.

  She can sympathize with the fantasy, though, for she too—especially when reading the newspaper—has seen the world as a place of misery; she has often thought that if God existed, He would be the devil. But fortunately Erica has not believed in God for years. Her scorn of all religious faith is profound and long-standing. It dates from the age of ten, when her mother, in an uncharacteristic impulse of neighborly gregariousness and social piety after the departure of Erica’s father, decided that it would be nice if her daughters attended Sunday school at the local Presbyterian church.

  Erica was quite willing to go. Though raised almost as a heathen, she had observed the advantages of religious belief in her paternal grandmother. For Gran, life was orderly, serious and significant. Though she lived alone in a three-room apartment in Worcester, Massachusetts, she never complained of being bored like her daughter-in-law. Every day for her was important, presenting a constant series of problems in moral arithmetic. Every detail of behavior, down to setting a mousetrap or taking another slice of cake, was good or bad; every night there were complicated moral sums to add and subtract—even to multiply—in private dramatic consultation with God. Moreover, she explained, God does not make distinctions between persons. He was just as interested in the state of ten-year-old Erica’s conscience as in Gran’s own.

  So they entered Sunday school. Little Marian went into the kindergarten, where she learned to sing simple hymns and make Easter decorations from pipe cleaners and lavender and yellow construction paper. But Erica was placed in the class of a fat elderly lady called Mrs. Winch, who wore a lace-bordered handkerchief pinned to her chest, with a gold watch dangling from it upside down so that only she knew what time it was. Mrs. Winch believed in old-fashioned discipline; she informed her class that they must always be clean and polite and good so that God would love them, and so that if they should die suddenly, He would wish to take them up to heaven to be with Him forever and ever Amen. If they were dirty and rude and disobedient—well Mrs. Winch was not old-fashioned enough to go into what would happen then; but she hinted, and the other children filled Erica in.

  Erica was not convinced by this doctrine, however, but morally shocked. She had been brought up to do the right thing for its own sake. Her father, who at that very moment was fighting for Freedom in a Canadian Army training camp, had taught her that she would be rewarded simply by a sense of self-respect, by the knowledge that she had done right and was a superior person. She was fastidiously revolted by the idea of a virtue which depended on bribes and threats—of a God whose opinion of people was so low that He only expected them to behave decently under the threat of being burned alive for ever. It was worse than the Christmas business, where little girls and boys were told that they’d better not pout and better not cry, because Santa Claus was coming. It was like her Aunt Ida saying “Give me a kiss, and I’ll give you a candy”—what Gran referred to scornfully as “cupboard love.”

  Mrs. Winch’s cosmology therefore struck Erica as greedy, cowardly, cruel and false. If God was really operating on that system, He was somebody Erica didn’t want to know. She went home and told her mother that Mrs. Winch smelled of laundry soap and she didn’t want to go to Sunday school any more. And Lena, whose enthusiasm for the social opportunities of the Presbyterian church was waning, acquiesced.

  But Sandy’s idea of a non-Santa Claus God who had no toys in his bag, but was watching Erica all the time to see whether she was still doing the right thing without thought of reward—that bothered her. Because if she were God, that is probably how she would have behaved.

  And if there were this God, He might not like what she is about to do today. It is wrong by conventional standards, and also against the law. But that isn’t what really troubles Erica, though she would dislike it to become known to most of her acquaintances or the police. What she is concerned about is the private purity of her motives. Has she agreed to go on this trip with Sandy for the sake of art and love—that is, to enlarge her creative vision and prove that she really cares about him and has forgiven his recent ineptness? Or is she just trying to escape from reality for a few hours?

  But it is too late to back out now. Dumping the last pail of rinse water into the sink, she leaves the kitchen and goes upstairs to remove her damp jeans and sweater, and change into—what does one wear on a drug trip?

  “I don’t feel anything,” Erica complains. She is sitting upright on the day bed in the room of one of Sandy’s students who is away for the week. Half an hour ago she swallowed a white powder mixed with ginger ale; and ever since she has been watching the furniture and the rain-streaked dormer window and the sloppily-whitewashed walls hung with strips of batik
and a poster of a many-armed dancing god, to see if they will begin to wriggle or change colors.

  “It’s pretty early yet. And we didn’t take all that much,” Zed replies for the third time.

  “I think your friend cheated you. Nothing’s going to happen, unless some policeman comes to arrest us for taking this stuff.”

  “They can’t arrest you for having taken drugs; only for possession. It’s the reverse of the laws on alcohol. We could walk into the police station stoned out of our minds and they couldn’t touch us.”

  “I don’t even feel drunk. A little sleepy, maybe. But everything looks just the same. I wanted the world to be transformed.”

  “Transformed?” Zed raises his pale eyebrows.

  “Yes, so I could put it into my drawings, make them more interesting. Different, because I’m bored by them really. Or maybe I could have a vision, a religious experience.”

  “A religious experience,” he repeats slowly, separating the words.

  “I’ve heard that people have them. Of course I’m not religious, but you know how it is when your life goes wrong: there’s a feeling you’re probably being punished; But for what? That’s what I’d like to find out.”

  “You mean God should appear to you now, in a long white bathrobe and a Canadian accent, and say ‘Bad, naughty Erica.’” Zed grins. “That’s not religion. If you do have a vision, it won’t be like that.”

  “What will it be like, then?” Erica asks, laughing rather sharply. “Tell me, since you’re so far advanced on the Path.”

  “I’m not very advanced.”

  “Oh, come on.” She is as annoyed by Sandy’s perpetual, almost automatic self-denigration as she was by his joke about her father.

  “It’s true. I’m more like Brian and the rest of his friends up on the hill than you think. Those who can’t, teach.”