Alison Lurie - The War Between the Tates - A Novel

“Don’t you mind that thing around your head?” he had once asked her. “It looks uncomfortable. Doesn’t it hurt?”

“Uh uh,” Wendy replied, smiling eagerly—for at this point Brian almost never made any comment on her appearance. “It feels good. It’s like—It kind of, you know, keeps my brains together.”

“I see.” Brian could not help smiling back, for it was true that Wendy tended to be, not so much scatterbrained (which suggests a restless movement of ideas) as mentally diffuse. Simple facts she knew very well—like the names of books she had studied and courses she had taken—became hidden in fog from time to time, causing her to stamp her foot and exclaim that she was “too stupid.” Sometimes whole areas of information seemed to drift toward the misty periphery of her consciousness and fall off the edge.

Publicly Brian held this to be the result of too much marijuana and not enough sleep, and scolded her for it; but privately he suspected it was also due to lack of interest in graduate study. Wendy was intelligent enough, but her mind was not scholarly. Until very recently, girls like her, whatever their SAT scores, didn’t usually go to graduate school. But nowadays, if they hadn’t found someone to marry as undergraduates, they continued their education and their search, often in fields like psychology or sociology which seemed relevant to the situation.

With the slightest encouragement, Wendy would have transferred into Political Science, but Brian had no intention of giving this encouragement. He had already disregarded several hints, so he was ready when she mentioned the matter openly, on November 11—but he was not prepared for what followed.

When Brian told her that no, he definitely did not think she should enter his department and do a thesis on Utopian communities under his direction, Wendy’s pale-blue eyes watered; she blinked her flaxen eyelashes. “You think I couldn’t do the work,” she asked or stated, her pink-smudged lower lip wobbling with the effort not to cry. “You think I’m not smart enough.”

No, that wasn’t it at all, Brian replied. It just seemed to him that at this stage in her graduate career ...He went on repeating his arguments while Wendy, in a trembling voice, repeated hers. As he spoke it occurred to Brian that if Wendy wanted to, she could probably transfer into the department without his help. She was a hard-working, conscientious girl; her record in general was good. He was not on the graduate admissions committee this year; to stop her, he would have to make a written statement casting doubts upon either her sanity or her honesty. That he should even think of doing so cast doubts upon his own.

But, glancing at her again as she spoke, at her lank lemonade-blond hair parted in the middle Indian style and descending smoothly over her cheeks like the flaps of a wigwam, he realized that Wendy, like the squaw or Hindu maiden she affected to be, would never do anything he did not advise—because his approval was more important to her than her education. And at that moment, as if she had read his thoughts, Wendy said hesitantly, looking first up at him and then down at the notebooks in her lap,

“It’s not so much that I can’t stand my psych seminars—It’s just that I want to do something you really respect—It’s because, you know, I’m emotionally fixated on you, I guess you dig that.” She raised her round blue eyes, but not her face, to his.

Reviewing history now, Brian realizes it was at this moment that he should have been frank. He should have met Wendy’s offensive head-on; made it clear at once that he wasn’t the sort of professor who encouraged, or even allowed, the emotional fixations of students. He should have recommended that Wendy either unfix her feelings or stop coming to see him. Instead he chose to pretend that nothing had happened, to treat what she had said as unimportant. He assured Wendy in a light, humorous tone that it would pass; that she was confusing appreciation of his ideas with something else. He waffled—the word was accurate, suggesting something cooked up, full of little square holes.

In effect, on November 11 of last year he had given Wendy Gahaghan permission to be in love with him, and to add this to the list of problems she came to discuss with him, two or three times a week now. The convention was maintained, on his part at least, that the attachment was a sort of mild delusion from which she would eventually recover, and which was therefore to be treated with humorous tolerance. Wendy accepted this convention to some extent. She refused to admit that she was deluded in loving Brian, or that a cure was likely; but she preserved a certain detachment from her infatuation. In his presence, at least, she took the sort of ironic, stoical attitude toward it that he had known older people to maintain toward a chronic disease.

In the weeks that followed it came to be assumed that when Brian asked, quite routinely, how she was, he was inquiring about the state of her disease, her hopeless passion for him. “Well, I thought I was a little better, until I heard you talk at the Department Colloquium last night. What you said about Cordell Hull was so beautiful, I couldn’t stand it,” she would report. Or, “I’ve really been trying to get over it. I was rapping with Mike Saturday night; he said what I needed was a good fuck, that was all. So we tried it ...Uh-uh. It didn’t work. I mean, it was okay: Mike’s a nice guy, and he’s very physical—But this morning it was like it never happened, sort of.” Wendy would have gone on; but Brian, with a sense of moral scrupulousness, always changed the subject—whereas the truth was that he should never have allowed it to come up at all.

This state of things continued for about three weeks. Then two events of little apparent importance, but far-reaching effect, occurred. First, on December 3, Wendy contracted the Asian flu. For over a week she did not come to Brian’s office. His first reaction was slight relief, followed in a day or so by concern. He thought back to their last meeting, and remembered her complaint that every single time she saw him she adored him more. “Well,” he had replied jokingly, “in that case perhaps you’d better see less of me.” Unaware that Wendy was in the infirmary with a fever of 103 degrees, he told himself that she must have taken his advice; that this would be hard for her, but that it was probably the right decision. In the days that followed, he found these thoughts repeating themselves in his head with irritatingly increasing frequency.

The second event of slight apparent importance involved the Sayle Chair of American Diplomacy—not in the symbolic, but in the physical sense. Six years ago, when Brian inherited the Sayle Chair, he had also inherited an actual piece of furniture: an ancient, battered Windsor armchair with a high round back and a cracked leg, which had been presented to the first incumbent by some waggish students about 1928, and bore a worn label in imitation nineteenth-century penmanship: “Wm. M. Sayle Chair of American Diplomacy.” This object now occupied a corner of Brian’s office, which was already too small in his opinion, without serving any useful purpose. Nobody could sit on it safely; you could not even put many books on it.

Gradually, Brian had begun to feel that the Sayle Chair did not like him; doubtless it thought he was not of the stature of its previous occupants. For a while he tried hanging his raincoat over it, but this only made it even more obtrusive. It looked like someone tall and thin and round-shouldered, probably Wm. M. Sayle, crouching in the corner with his head down. Brian would have liked to throw the chair out, but that was not feasible, for it had become a Tradition in a university which valued Tradition.