The War Between the Tates: A Novel

by Alison Lurie

  It doesn’t matter. Because the lights—the colors—the strawberry electric current—She lets herself slide away, into it—Yes—Yes—

  But then, from far off in her head, in a different, sharper voltage, something buzzes. An unpleasant flat doorbell vibration, dirty red. Danger—anxiety.

  “Hey, wait! I didn’t—We can’t—” she cries. In very slow motion, slipping back into the current again and again, she begins to struggle, to kick and paddle. Finally, gasping, shuddering, she sits up, disengaged from Zed.

  “No!” he calls out. There is an explosion, a fountain effect in the air, wet, silver. Erica watches it with blurred fear and regret from a safe distance. “Oh—Erica—God—” He falls back shaking and sobbing.

  Dizzy still, she bends over him. “I’m sorry,” she says, patting his shoulder, averting her eyes from his face, which is squeezed into a knot: red, awful, “I was afraid—I didn’t expect you to—”

  “No,” Zed replies finally, in a voice which seems to come from several miles off. He does not move.

  “I’m sorry.” Avoiding the place on the day bed where the fountain overflowed and the fountain itself, she puts her arms around him; at last even looks him in the face. It is unknotted, human again, though the pale eyes are still damp, red-edged.

  “Are you all right?” she asks anxiously, several times.

  “All right,” he answers eventually. “How are you?”

  “All right, I guess. I’m not so high any more. The rug is slower.”

  “Yes.”

  Erica drops her arms. Silence.

  “I see it now,” he says finally.

  Erica sits back, following his stare into the far corner of the room, noting that the sliding shadows are quieter now, their colors fading. “What do you see?”

  “It was a kind of voice, actually. Out of the waste-basket.” He smiles. “But it was right. It told me not to start the meditation center.”

  “Oh? Your students will be disappointed.”

  “They can go ahead on their own. If they want to. It’ll be better for them that way, in the end.”

  “And much easier on you.” She smiles. “And they can still come to you and get advice.”

  He shakes his head. “No. I’ve got to give up the bookshop, too.”

  “Give it up? Really? Why?”

  “It’s no good. It was all right at first; but now there’s too many camp followers—kids who don’t want to study seriously, just hang around and drink tea and gossip about each other’s charts, and have me play the Great Guru ...They’re not all like that. But those that aren’t, the serious ones, I’ve already taught them what I know. If I go on, I’ll start telling them lies.” He sighs, reaches over, and pulls his clothes toward him.

  “It was the same in California,” he continues. “For a while everything was fine; then people started taking me too seriously. Some of them wanted me to put my lectures onto tape. I let them persuade me, and pretty soon I was involved with recording studios and sound experts and publicity hacks, really bad karma. And then this TV Star, Mona Moon, tried to give me a house in Laurel Canyon. Her idea was I would live up there and do astrology and send out spiritual vibrations, and she and her friends would come and absorb them.

  “I tried to tell her I was a spiritual fraud, but she thought that was just holy humility. We had this stupid scene where she flung herself on the floor and tried to kiss my sneakers.” Zed laughs tiredly. “So I cut out. I decided then it was my own fault for picking a town like L.A. But it’s the same everywhere. Eventually, every place goes bad. It only takes a little longer in a cold climate.” He begins to drag his pants on.

  “You’re going to close the store,” Erica says, trying to sort it out. She too has begun to dress, but slowly and cautiously, for her head still swims with light.

  “I’m not sure. Maybe I’ll leave it to Tim He’s got a good business sense; and he’s a pretty fair astrologer.”

  “But what will you do, then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You could go back to teaching,” she says, rather eagerly.’

  “I’m not so sure. I haven’t taught in six years, not since I quit LA State in the middle of the term. I’m probably blackballed by the APA.”

  “I’m sure you could get a job somewhere. After all, you have a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard.”

  “I don’t want a job,” Zed says, pulling his gray sweater down, then reaching up to free his fringe of untidy, faded red hair from the turtleneck collar. “I don’t believe in philosophy any more ...All I know is, I’m going away.”

  “Going away?” As Erica echoes these words she sees an image: a man with a bundle and a stick going along a path, perhaps the Path Sandy speaks of. It is a painting somewhere, in a museum, or a book—Yes.

  “You know, I just had a flash,” she tells him. “A sort of vision, really, inside my head. You were in a painting. I mean, the painting was of you, all along, only I never realized it. It’s by Bosch: a man in ragged clothes starting on a journey, and he looks like you.”

  “I think I know the picture you mean. Is there a dog in it, and a ruined house in the background?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “It’s his version of the last card of the Tarot. The Fool, it’s called. The man in Bosch’s painting has the same pose, and the dog at his heels, and the stick.”

  “Really? That’s interesting. I didn’t, know that.” She turns back to him. “I’m sorry you’re going away.”

  “Are you.”

  “Of course I am. Very sorry. Without you, this town will be impossible.”

  “Come with me, then.”

  “I’d love to.” Erica laughs. “I wish I really could.”

  “Why can’t you?” Zed does not laugh.

  “Well, because of the house—Because of Jeffrey and Matilda.”

  “I thought you were tired of Jeffrey and Matilda.”

  “I am,” Erica says with feeling. “But that’s why I have to stay with them. I mean, nobody else would do it. But it’s my job to take care of my children, however tiresome they are, because I’m their mother.”

  “And Brian’s their father. Why not give him a turn?” There is no doubt this time; he is at least partly serious.

  Inside Erica’s head, there is a sensation of expanding light. The word “yes” forms in her mouth, but as she begins to voice it she looks at Zed, into his pale eyes with their enlarged dark pupils, and there she has a final, objective vision. It is double and achromatic, like a stereopticon slide. Reflected in the center of each eye she can see the tiny figure of Sandy going away on the Path; and she herself, just behind him, also dressed in dirty colorless rags. They are walking slightly uphill to the right, away from the house and the people, toward a dim cold misty blankness beyond the edge of the frame. In a moment they will both pass out of the picture into this void. She thinks that the picture is symbolically right; that it is the act of a Fool to set out for no known destination.

  Zed blinks, and the vision disappears. Again Erica laughs briefly, but this time it is the laugh of fear, thin and hysterical, of someone who sees that she has almost stepped off the edge of a cliff.

  “Oh, I couldn’t possibly do that,” she says. “Brian could never manage them.” She laughs again. “Besides, it wouldn’t be the right thing.”

  17

  AN ILL-ASSORTED COMPANY IS mobilizing on the Corinth campus this May morning, in Norton Hall—at other times the scene of ROTC exercises, basketball games, religious services, indoor track meets, rock concerts and fall registration. On the broad glossy varnished floor and in the surrounding tiers of stands diverse groups are gathering, like fugitives from all the other crowds that have assembled there in the past, or might do so in the future.

  Many are students; there is a large gang of long-haired, noisy undergraduates squatting and lounging on the floor in the center of the hall, and several smaller bands, each distinctive in appearance. Here is a bunch of pretty g
irls in flowered and pastel jeans, from Home Ec; there a group of solemn and rather formally dressed law students. There is a small contingent from the Africana Center, all dashikis and Afros, and another of Asians in turbans and saris. A flock of secretaries has taken over one of the tables set up along the south wall, and are unpacking sandwiches and cartons of coffee. Nearby, a squad of antiwar veterans, in complete or partial uniform, is milling about one of their number who is confined to a wheelchair.

  Here and there, you can see representatives of the United Campus Ministry, in motley, dress ranging from the loose white embroidered Indian shirt and dangling cross of Father Dave, the local radical priest, to the three piece gray flannel of the Methodist chaplain; there are also several nun’s habits, both traditional with starched white coif, and reformed. Over by the main entrance a party of graduate-student wives are pushing their giggling or complaining babies back and forth in strollers, or dashing away from their friends to chase toddlers down off the nearest grandstand, where a troupe of art students is encamped with paper streamers and gas balloons.

  There is an air of determined holidaymaking; a clamor of talk punctured by shouts as people try to attract the attention of newcomers; continual motion among the groups and between each group and the headquarters of the Peace March, which is located on a low platform (sometimes used for boxing matches) at one side of the hall. The crowd is thicker there, and persons with an important, occupied air are sitting behind a table piled with papers. These are mainly men, and mainly professors; Brian Tate is among them.

  “Fine turnout,” one of his colleagues remarks, coming up to help himself to two paper arm bands printed with blue peace symbols, and a bunch of handbills. “I’ll take a couple more of these for Walt and Jimmie, if I may.”

  “Of course. No, it’s not bad. Considering everything,” Brian agrees modestly. He rises slightly in his chair to survey the hall. The march isn’t due to start for twenty minutes, yet already there must be nearly a thousand people here. The handbills and arm bands have been printed on time and without serious typographical errors; the weather is good—mild and overcast, but not raining; and all academic business has been officially canceled for the afternoon.

  Sitting down again, he congratulates himself—not only on the probable success of the event, but on his decision, two weeks ago, to help direct it. He knew from the start that most of the organizational work would fall upon him, for the other leaders—Archibald Matlock of the English department, and Father Dave—are strong on commitment, but weak in practical knowhow. But he knew also that this was the opportunity he needed. If his reputation were ever to recover, it would have to be through something like this. Continued explanations of his real role in the Dibble affair would not suffice; like corrections to the newspaper story, they followed the original false account only limpingly and at a distance, in smaller type.

  It was not enough that Brian should dissociate himself from the cause of antifeminism (refusing, for example, in spite of the generous fee offered, to contribute to an Esquire symposium on “Are Women Necessary?”). He must begin as soon as possible to attract public attention for other reasons; to associate himself with other, more appropriate—and more popular—causes.

  But though he threw himself into the task with conscious energy, organizing the Peace March was much harder than Brian had anticipated. In part this was due to his success. Unexpectedly many groups responded to the initial canvas; his original plan had to be expanded, and expanded again, as pledges of support came in.

  Beyond this, however, the job was complicated by the end-of-term press of work, and, most of all, by unexpected events in his own life: a series of awful revelations from which he is not yet recovered. Indeed, Brian thinks wearily, he may never fully recover.

  The crisis began without warning a few days after he had agreed to work on the Peace March—at bedtime one evening when he mildly chided Wendy about her increasing weight. He was relating, as they undressed, a conversation he and Father Dave had had that afternoon with the editor of the local paper. The man was interested in their plans, and had promised to send a reporter and photographer to cover the story. If all went well, a photograph of the front-line marchers would appear on page one of the Courier. Since Wendy would presumably be in this picture, Brian suggested, she might try to take off a few pounds around her middle before May seventh.

  He had spoken lightly; he was surprised therefore when she replied, in a voice full of choked feeling, that she couldn’t take off any pounds. “Why not?” Brian asked, perhaps a little sharply, but still smiling. “It’s only a matter of eating less—cutting out some of those late-night snacks, so you’ll get a little smaller.”

  “I can’t get smaller,” Wendy insisted, laughing oddly. “All I can ever do now is get larger, and larger and larger and larger.” With a hysterical sob, she collapsed upon the bed in her underwear.

  Brian was used by now to Wendy’s tears; he knew that the fastest way to dry them was to step forward and take her in his arms. But instead he stepped back. He looked at Wendy hard, and saw that she was thick in the waist, not from overeating, but because she was at least four months pregnant.

  It was the first of a catastrophic series of mental detonations. As if the smooth white plaster walls and plush tan carpeting of his apartment were being strafed by an invisible fighter plane and exploding in a line of ugly holes, Brian realized: first, his own obtuseness—why hadn’t he noticed sooner?—and second, Wendy’s falsity. This simple, ingenuous girl, whom he had believed so candid, so devoted, had been systematically and sordidly deceiving him.

  Questioning her, he dragged out the facts. Wendy had known that Brian did not trust her to remember to take her birth-control pills (quite naturally, after what had happened last fall); she had known that he occasionally counted them. Therefore, twenty-five days a month for the last four months she had flushed one pill down the toilet; and on the remaining five days she had inserted a series of unnecessary tampax into herself, removed them unused, wrapped them in paper, and placed them in the kitchen garbage can. Her only excuse was that she had been afraid to tell him the truth. Perhaps, Brian said furiously, she had imagined that if she did not tell him, it would go away?

  Wendy, sobbing, admitted that she had had this thought; that she had hoped for a miscarriage. “But I don’t now, you know,” she added, half sitting up. “Not since last week, it was Thursday. On Thursday I felt Life.” She capitalized it with her voice as if speaking of the periodical, and laid her hand reverently on her thickened waist. A rapt, stubborn, stupid look came over her tear-streaked face; a look he had last seen in the Frick Museum on many painted female faces. “It zapped me like a bomb: there’s a person growing in there. I mean, that’s really outasight.” She giggled weakly at her own pun.

  Brian did not speak. The bomb had exploded; depression, thick and dirty and full of stones, rained down on him. A vision of his vain and foolish vigilance in the past made him laugh gratingly, then break off as he thought of what was to come in the future. Only two weeks ago a liberal abortion bill had been passed in the state, but by the time it took effect it would be too late for Wendy; it was too late even now.

  He would have to marry Wendy. Also, he would have to do this right away, as soon as it became legally possible—before her pregnancy became so obvious as to make them a public joke. But if she had been as free with her confidences as last time, it was already a public joke. He would have to stand up with her in the county courthouse, while the witnesses sniggered behind their smiles. Then he would have to take her home, and live with her for the rest of his life. The depression rained on steadily; Brian could feel himself bruised, knocked down, choking in the heavy, muddy future.

  Meanwhile Wendy, perhaps encouraged by his silence, went on chattering with increasing confidence. “It’s a real freaky trip, you know, having somebody growing inside you—carrying them around everywhere you go. And knowing that everything you do affects them. Like if I smoke a joint
or have a couple of beers, the baby gets high, did you know that? I mean, that’s a big responsibility.”

  The responsibility was large not only generically but specifically, Wendy explained, because this child was destined for greatness. “It’ll have the Sun conjunct Uranus, a powerful magnetic personality, very original; maybe a genius, Zed says,” she confided, conveying to Brian the unwelcome news that her pregnancy was already known to that fool at the Krishna Bookshop. Indeed, as he soon discovered, it was an old story to most of her friends—who, in keeping the secret, had all also been deceiving him.

  Though enthusiastic about the baby, Wendy received Brian’s proposal of marriage with a composure which verged on lassitude. She also accepted his other proposals for their future (legal, economic, medical) without any great vivacity or gratitude. Brian assumed it was because all her attention was turned inward, upon her womb and its contents, that she took so little interest in planning when and how they would marry, or where they would live (Alpine Towers being forbidden to infants). Yet when he recalled the nest-building fervor that had overtaken Erica under similar circumstances, he felt puzzled.

  He was furious, too, that additional responsibilities should be forced upon him now, when term papers were coming in and his phone, both at home and at the university, rang constantly about the Peace March. He had no time to call doctors or inspect apartments. Wendy, who did, apparently could not summon the energy. But when he complained of this one evening at supper, he received another severe, almost fatal shock.

  “You don’t hafta call up that real estate dude if you don’t want to,” Wendy told him, setting her elbows one on each side of a plate of overcooked chili (expectant motherhood had blurred her sense of time, never very acute). “You don’t hafta do anything you don’t want. I mean, shit.” Her voice trembled. “You don’t hafta marry me.”