Alison Lurie - The War Between the Tates - A Novel

When Brian called that night she said nothing. She waited until he was home again and then brought out the letter, explaining in what sounded to her like an unnaturally flat, bleak tone how she had come to read it. Giving it to him felt strange: she had so often in the last eighteen years handed over other letters and watched Brian read them, waiting for his comments, his judgment—often for his solution. It was as if she now hoped that he would explain Wendee’s letter away. He would tell her calmly, convincingly, that it was all a joke; a preposterous fantasy that had nothing to do with them.

Because it was unlikely, wasn’t it, that such a letter should have anything serious to do with people like Erica and Brian?

But Brian had admitted that it did, merely offering, over and over, the wrong excuse: It was nothing, it had meant nothing, it was not important, and anyhow it was finished. He was only sorry she had ever had to hear of it. (Were there, then, other things of which she had not had to hear? Brian declared there were not, but how could she trust him now?) He expressed regret, pain at having troubled her—but all as if he were apologizing for having come home with dirty clothes. He had walked into a bog by mistake, and got mud on his shoes and socks, even on his pants—a nuisance, but they could be sent to the cleaners; Brian himself was not muddy, in his opinion. He did not realize that he had betrayed not only Erica, but himself; that he had become permanently smaller and more ordinary.

And he had made her smaller. The wife who is betrayed for a grand passion retains some of her dignity. Pale-faced and silent, or even storming and wailing as in classical drama, she has a tragic authority. She too has been the victim of a natural disaster, an act of the gods. But if she was set aside merely for some trivial, carnal impulse, her value also must be trivial.

What is so awful, so unfair, is that identity is at the mercy of circumstances, of other people’s actions. Brian, by committing casual adultery, had turned Erica into the typical wife of a casually unfaithful husband: jealous and shrewish and unforgiving—and also, since she had been so easily deceived, dumb and insensitive. Her children, by becoming ill-mannered adolescents, had turned her into an incompetent and unsympathetic mother. And the bulldozers grinding toward them over the hill surrounding them, had turned Jones Creek Road into Glenview Heights, without her lifting a finger.

It was like being on stage. The lights change from amber to blue; the scenery alters behind the actors: the drop curtain showing cottages and gardens is raised. The villagers have not moved, but now they appear awkward, small and overdressed against the new backdrop of mountains and ruins. And nothing can be done about it. That is the worst thing about being a middle-aged woman. You have already made your choices, taken the significant moral actions of your life long ago when you were inexperienced. Now you have more knowledge of yourself and the world; you are equipped to make choices, but there are none left to make.

What Danielle said is true, Erica thinks: it is better for men. Brian has an important job, he makes decisions, he uses his knowledge, he gives lectures and writes books and votes at meetings for or against and lies on his floor on top of graduate students and gets up again. But for her there are no decisions, only routines. All she can do is endure.

It is darker out now. The sky still holds some light, but its color is leaching away; the layered clouds have become gray and mauve. Brian folds his paper. “I’m going to put those stones on the trash cans,” he announces.

“What? Oh, good,” Erica says dully.

Often recently the Tates’ garbage has been disturbed at night by dogs or some wild animal. In the morning they find the cans overturned and bones, crusts, vegetable peelings, and shreds and chunks of wet newspaper scattered about.

Brian crosses the yard. In the shadows by the trash bins he feels around for the three large rocks he has brought down earlier from the old stone wall behind the vegetable garden. He finds two, and lifts them heavily into place on top of the garbage cans. But he cannot locate the third rock—his hands, groping, meet only thready long grassland the slightly greasy rounded flanks of the plastic cans.

As he starts around the house to get another rock, swearing quietly to himself, Brian passes the screen porch, which appears to him as a cube of artificially lit yellow space blurred by wire screening. It contains porch furniture, two lamps, and a beautiful woman who is sitting in a white wicket armchair, intermittently sewing. Though she does not know he is looking at her, she wears an expression he has seen often lately—one of melancholy and injured feelings.

How long is she going to keep this up, for God’s sake? What more does she want from him? He had been unfaithful, which was not a good thing. All right. He has apologized; he has done his best to minimize the duration and importance of his affair. He has made considerable efforts to behave just as before or better: to go places with the children and inquire about their activities with a show of interest; to converse with and make love to Erica with a show of enthusiasm. He is careful never to make any remark which might even remotely recall Wendy. Officially, he has forgotten her.

It would be reasonable, certainly, for Erica to forget her also, Brian thinks, crossing the loose uneven earth of the garden in the thickening dusk, since she knows that Wendy has left for Southern California, and for ever. He had told her about this as soon as Wendy announced her plans, assuming that she would be as relieved as he was, and that she might as well be relieved a fortnight sooner.

And he was relieved. Wendy’s reaction to the end of the affair—her animal wails, her stunned-silences—had frightened him. He had tried to tell himself that it was a healthy abreaction: that she was just getting rid of all her feelings at once. When she was across the continent she would forget him, probably long before he had forgotten her.

None of what he had predicted and hoped for happened. Wendy’s departure did little for his wife’s morale—and nothing for his own, since it never actually took place. At this very moment Wendy is still in Corinth, hanging about the campus and suffering.

Brian had foolishly hoped and imagined that they would remain friendly: that Wendy would continue to come to his office, though perhaps less often, and talk to him. This had proved impossible. As soon as she got inside the door she began weeping; sometimes quietly, sometimes so loudly that he feared Steve Cushing next door would hear. Presently he had to ask her not to come any more, for her own good. The sentence of banishment was difficult to enforce. At first she continued to appear anyhow, though apologetically and always with an excuse—some academic question only he could answer, the promise of being perfectly good and just bothering him for a second. But almost at once she would begin to gasp for breath, to sob. Brian had to give up his habit of calling “Come in.” When he recognized Wendy’s knock, or, thought he did, he had to get up from his desk and go to open the door, not too far. “I’m sorry, but I can’t see you,” he would have to say in a forced calm tone, if it was she, or, “You know we agreed you wouldn’t come here this week,” and shut the door again. Even then Wendy did not always go away. She would wait for him to come out, shuffling up and down the Jar end of the corridor, or sitting in the chair outside Dorothy McCall’s office across the way, like the pile of unclaimed student papers that sometimes occupied it. Brian removed this chair, hiding it in the men’s washroom. Wendy was not discouraged, but sat on the floor, her small plump feet, in tan fringed moccasins—or, as the weather grew hotter, bare and gray-soled with dust—sticking out in front of her so that people had to step over them. If he objected to this (“What will it look like to, for example, Mr. Cushing, Mrs. McCall, Mr. Lewis, your sitting here all afternoon?”) she would wait farther off: on the stairs, or below in the hall—sometimes pretending to read a book, sometimes staring at the notices of past concerts and lectures and roommates wanted on the bulletin board. She did not care who saw her there or what they would think. And this lack of social shame, like her lack of emotional and physical shame, gave her a tremendous advantage in the wars of love. She knew what she wanted, and wanted it wholly. She was not divided against herself as Brian was; one voice crying Halt, another Forward, a third railing about responsibility.