Alison Lurie - The War Between the Tates - A Novel

“Come on. Let’s lie down here.”

“Well, at least get the quilt,” Erica said, her pelvis and voice tensing. “Put it under me ... Wait ... No, on the rug, that way. All right, go ahead.”

What followed, for both of them, was not more satisfactory than usual, but less so. It was further marred for Brian by the persistent image of Wendy Gahaghan lying on his office linoleum—exposed, silent, willing. He knew from hints she had dropped, anecdotes she had told, that she was not similarly wary of innovation. He knew that he could without a word have fallen on her there on the floor and possessed her in any way he liked, and earned only her passionate gratitude in that moment, early in the morning of New Year’s Day, the tide of Brian’s resolve had changed. Slowly at first, it began to flow in toward the shore, covering the stern moral rocks with foamy waves of self-justification. He did not, however, give up the idea of himself as a serious and responsible person, concerned to obey the categorical imperative and seek humanistic goals.

What he did was to turn the problem inside out. Wendy was suffering (he told himself), and had been suffering for perhaps a year, from unconsummated love. It was the worse for her because, in her world, such feeling was so rare as to be almost unknown. Among her friends even the most transitory physical attraction was consummated as a matter of course, and at once. But romantic passion, as De Rougemont has pointed out, is a plant which thrives best in stony soil. Like the geraniums in Erica’s kitchen, the less it was watered, the better it flowered. That was why Wendy loved him; while for the boys she casually slept with she felt little.

Therefore, Brian argued with himself as the soapy waves of false logic sloshed toward the shore, what he really ought to do was to sleep with Wendy himself, as soon as possible. She would see then that he was only a man like other men; her disease would be cured. He owed it to her to provide this cure, even at the cost of deflating his value in her eyes and ruining his moral record. He didn’t want to commit adultery, he told himself, but it was his duty. It was a choice between his vanity, his selfish wish for moral consistency, and Wendy’s release from a painful obsession.

Looking back now, Brian finds it hard to understand how he had entertained such self-righteous nonsense; how he, a serious political scientist, had been able to fool himself with the old means-end argument. For he had applied this argument to himself as well as to Wendy; he had hoped to cure his obsession as well as her passion by sating it. He had been intermittently aware, he recalls now, that outsiders might not appreciate the extent of his altruism in screwing Wendy Gahaghan, if they heard of it—but he had counted that almost one more thorn in his martyr’s crown.

He did not realize then that he was already becoming addicted to Wendy, and that he was planning to increase the dose partly because he needed to quiet the anxiety that he was in every sense, including the most private, a small man. In a shady part of his mind which he did not usually visit he wished to learn her opinion on this matter. Erica could not judge it, any more than she could judge his professional competence, since, having known no other men, she had no means of comparison. It was true that earlier in his life several women had assured Brian that he was of average size. But what if they had been politely lying? Or what if he had shrunk, in fifteen years? Brian recognized the childish, neurotic stupidity of these ideas, but he could not suppress them entirely. “Just once; just one shot, that’s all, to cure you both,” his addiction whispered; and at last he promised it what it wanted.

When Wendy appeared in Brian’s office after Christmas vacation he was momentarily embarrassed. He had denied her for so long that changing direction was awkward. Fortunately, almost miraculously, she provided him with an opening.

“How are you?” he, asked, falling into the traditional starting gambit.

“Just the same.” Wendy grinned. “Or worse, maybe.”

“I’m sorry.” Uncharacteristically, Brian had risen when she knocked, ostensibly to shelve some books, but in fact to get out from behind his desk—that old defensive fortification which had now become a military, impediment.

“Nothing helps any more. Being away from you hurts. And being here hurts worse, some ways.”

“I don’t like to see you unhappy.” Having replaced his books, Brian was now standing next to Wendy. He thought that he hadn’t realized before how small she was, how childlike. He towered over her not only intellectually and chronologically, but physically. A pleasant sensation.

“I know.” She gave a little apologetic smile and shrug. “If you would kiss me, just once, I’d feel better.”

“You know, I’ve been thinking about that,” Brian said, smiling down. “I think just possibly you might be right.” He had imagined that he would explain his analysis of Wendy’s problem and outline the solution he proposed, before putting it into practice. But events moved too fast for him. It was not until the next day that he was able to present his theory—which, by then, was already being proved incorrect.

Waiting in his office now, Brian vows to himself that the end of his affair will be better governed than the beginning. His two previous attempts to break it off had not worked because they were based on a faulty political analysis of the situation—possibly due to unconscious resistance on his part. Wendy does not care if his wife knows of the affair; among her friends such matters immediately become public anyhow. She knows also that her work has not fallen off since January; and even if it had fallen off, she wouldn’t have cared.

But there is one thing which will convince her that the affair must end; one sentence Brian can speak which will make her almost as eager to end it as she had been to begin. When she comes in today, Brian can tell her that his own work is suffering; that he has been unable to write his new book, a project she regards with awe.

“Too much of my energy is going into our relationship,” he will say, in a few minutes now. “There’s not enough left for my work.”

And what is more, this will be the literal truth. It is not only that his affair with Wendy consumes certain hours; more profoundly, it consumes the emotional and physical energy which at other times has been sublimated into the writing of political history. As his roommate had put it once back at Harvard, when Brian made a similar choice before an important exam: “Brian thinks it all comes out of the same faucet.”

“I know it does,” he had replied.

“You’re nuts,” said his roommate cheerfully. “The way I look at it, the more I screw the better I work.” But time proved him wrong: he received a grade of only B-plus on the important exam, while Brian was rewarded for his abstinence with a straight A.

3

JULY FOURTH. IT IS summer now, the time of year Erica Tate once liked best. The climbing roses are in bloom over the screen porch; the students have gone home; the town is green, sunny, silent. Her husband’s affair with that girl is over. Erica wants to forget it, and she is trying to forget it. She knows this is the only way. It is not enough for her to forgive Brian; what she must do is get the whole thing out of her mind entirely. Then and only then, can life go back to normal.

And if not now, when? It is a warm, soft evening, unusually quiet Jeffrey and Matilda are not playing the phonograph or the radio or quarreling or talking on the telephone; they are away, at the fireworks show in the stadium. The sun has just set, and the sky beyond the porch, behind the apple trees, is layered with white and rose chiffon clouds, like a nightgown Erica had when she got married. She sighs.