Alison Lurie - The War Between the Tates - A Novel

“He acts sort of vague sometimes,” Wendy admitted. (Brian translated this as “He’s stoned out of his mind sometimes.”) “If he doesn’t feel like speaking, he just doesn’t answer you. Or maybe he’ll hand you a book and go into the back room. That’s how he was with me at first.” Giving up the attempt to speak confidentially across the table, Wendy now began a flanking movement, shifting her chair around toward Brian. “But this week he talked to me. It was weird. I didn’t tell him what was on my mind, he just seemed to know. ”

“He knew, eh? What did he know?”

“Well, that I was hopelessly and desperately in love. I didn’t tell him who with,” Wendy added, responding to the expression which had appeared on Brian’s face. “Zed doesn’t want to know things like that; he says, ‘All names are lies.’”

“‘All names are lies’?” Brian repeated, refraining with difficulty from adding that the name “Zed” certainly was a lie.

“Uh-huh.” Wendy shifted her chair again. “You know, I think he’s the first person who’s said anything about it that wasn’t just bullshit, or laying their own trip on me.” She leaned toward Brian; the fan behind them blew shreds of her lank hair out sideways. “Like I’ve been trying all this time to distract myself, to do different things and make it with other people to take my mind off you, you know?”

“Yes.” This was in fact the advice Brian had given her, now presumably redefined, with the help of the Krishna Bookshop, as bullshit.

“Well, what Zed said convinced me I was going at it all wrong. I’ve been trying to replace one selfish personal desire with another just like it. Even if I could do that, I wouldn’t be getting anywhere; I’d still be caught in the whirlwind. What I’ve got to do is reach the end of desire.” Wendy edged her chair around further.

“Teach me to care and not to care.

Teach me to sit still”

Brian quoted ironically, looking at Wendy’s chair, which she had now shifted so far around the table that it was touching his. Her plump, sun-reddened left thigh, bare to the hip below the brief yellow dress, was half an inch from his own.

“Yeh. That’s it.” Wendy’s leg moved or sagged, as if of its own weight, against his leg.

“And Zed is going to teach you this.” Brian tried to keep the sarcasm out of his voice; but the knowledge that she had confided in that occultist crank, fraud and drug addict irritated him profoundly. The idea that she planned to follow his idiotic advice made him furious. He moved his leg away.

“He can’t teach me. He said so. Nobody can teach the Way; you have to find it yourself, through prayer and meditation.”

“You mean you’ve really fallen for that mystical crap? I thought you were too intelligent for that.”

“It’s not crap. You don’t understand.” Wendy’s voice started to quaver. “It’s the same thing you’re doing yourself already, with your book—putting your energy into something outside yourself that’s greater than you.” Wendy gulped down a sob. “I told Zed about it, and he agreed with me. He’s very interested in you. He wants to know what hour of the day you were born.”

“What the hell does he want to know that for?”

“So he can cast your horoscope. I already gave him the day and year.”

“I don’t know what hour I was born,” Brian said with great disagreeableness. “And if I did, I wouldn’t tell him.” Wendy began sobbing aloud. “Oh hell. Please don’t do that. People are watching us.” Brian glanced quickly around the coffee shop to see which people these were. Fortunately, at that hour the place was nearly empty; he recognized no one.

Blam!

Standing in the dark at the far end of the vegetable garden, Brian starts, and looks up. The fireworks have begun. He can see them quite well from here—though, since the stadium is nearly two miles away, there is a considerable lag between light and sound. The rockets appear to burst silently, and it is only as the shower of sparks extinguishes itself in the trees that he can hear the detonation and the accompanying muffled A’hh! of the watching crowd. His children’s voices are part of this roar; and Wendy’s. She really grooves on fireworks, she told him yesterday, especially when she is high; she was planning to attend in that condition tonight, along with some of the Bookshop people.

The show, designed by professionals, is artistically varied in a primitive way, Brian notices. First a single rocket will sketch on the sky a huge imaginary umbrella; next two or three will open together, each a different primary color. There are comets that climb in crazy spurts, hissing comically and spitting random bursts of light; then what look like handfuls of giant flashbulbs begin to pop and smoke, brightest and noisiest of all.

On many earlier July Fourths, Brian has been there in the stadium with his children; he knows how the crowd looks at such a moment, photographed in stark black and white. He can see the smoke drifting up and smell the gunpowder. And he can see Wendy there, sitting on one of the worn slat benches, the pale circle of her face raised among three thousand raised faces. Suddenly he wants badly to be there too, sitting next to her in the smoky gloom, feeling the weight of her head against his shoulder as she tilts it back and gazes up open-mouthed, the warmth of her bare leg against his leg. He thinks of getting into his car, now—telling Erica he intends to look for the children—Stupid, of course: there will be no place to park within half a mile of the stadium; no way of finding her in the monstrous noisy crowd.

Wendy enjoys crowds, and likes the feeling of being part of one. Though intelligent, she is not of independent mind. She is a born follower, a true believer; and if he, Brian, forbids her to follow and believe in him, she will find other and less scrupulous teachers, other and false gods.

Some of the fireworks explode quickly above the trees; others seem to last a long time. Brian watches the spark of a Roman candle shoot upward, diving into black gravity as if into water and meeting a similar resistance. From it, as it finally unfolds high in the air, long trails of white stars fall almost lazily. After each burst of light comes the appropriate explosion, which varies from a single rifle crack to a complex grumbling roar. Occasionally there is a set piece on the ground; then he sees nothing, and can hear only a distant prolonged crackling volley. At intervals there is silence, accompanied by the sound of crickets and of leaves blowing.

At the finale every kind of color and rocket is sent up together, a long barrage of stars and scrawls and dotted lines. It is like watching a lesson being written on a huge blackboard in some unknown script which disappears as Brian tries to read it, followed and overlapped by explosions of sound in some thunderous unknown language. The sky and hills echo, and the air is heavily streaked with smoke and spotted with after-images in strange hues of purple and green. Lower down a dusky red glow shows through the trees, as if the stadium were burning.

In the smoky gunpowder light Brian can see written clearly what is going to happen next if he continues to reject Wendy. Lonely and sore, she will spend more and more time at the Krishna Bookshop. She will forget the truths she has learned from Brian and remember instead lies and nonsense pronounced in an impressive false manner by Zed. Eventually, without desire, out of gratitude and admiration, she will offer herself to him. And there is no doubt in Brian’s mind that the offer will be accepted. Zed is supposed to have given up sex along with other kinds of flesh, but a dish like Wendy obviously doesn’t come his way very often. Brian imagines how the dragged eyes of the proprietor of the bookstore will light up with carnal greed; how he will reach out his thin, dirty hands ...No. It does not bear thinking about. Groping in the dark along the line of fallen stones which was once a pasture wall, Brian selects a suitably large, flat rock. He lifts it and starts back downhill toward the house as the light in the sky fades. He avoids the row of beanpoles, but steps heavily on a tomato plant which has not yet been staked.