Alison Lurie - The War Between the Tates - A Novel

Lifting the receiver, he dials Wendy’s number, planning what he will say (Why didn’t you tell me—How could you have thought I—). The phone begins to ring. (But there’s no need to break off your education, to drop out of school—A short medical leave of absence—Mononucleosis is the usual cover story—) The dead, even burr of a telephone sounding in an empty apartment; three times, four, five. Has she left town already?

He sets the receiver back and begins to read Wendy’s letter for the third time. “Zed says we all live many different lives and this one is over for me that’s all” he reads; “... disappear silently ...The end of everything ...

Brian half starts up from his desk, making the noise “Awff.” He controls himself, sits down again. He warns himself aloud not to leap to conclusions, while a voice located somewhere behind his left ear shouts silently into it that time is of the essence if a frightful disaster is to be averted. He dials Wendy’s number again, while another voice at the top of his head remarks how in crisis even sophisticated, educated men employ the rhetoric of cheap political melodrama; this fact has interesting historical applications, it remarks.

Brr, brr, brr. But perhaps that wasn’t Wendy’s number. Brian replaces the receiver and consults a student directory. Though the figures appear to be the same, he dials them again, slowly, with fingers which feel swollen. Brr, brr, brr, brr, etc.

All right, this is an emergency. He must think clearly, logically. If Wendy is not home, she might be somewhere on campus. Leaving a note on his door, he hastens out and spends the next half-hour in a rapid tour of the university, becoming, in spite of Wendy’s declared intention, progressively more and more uncalm and unproductive and apart. He looks for her in the reading room and in the library stacks, in three cafeterias and two coffee shops and the campus store. He looks also for Linda, whom he has so often in the past tried to overlook. But he cannot perceive them, though people in all these locations perceive him. Some of them stare at him, probably wondering what he is doing there. And what is he doing there? If Wendy plans to kill herself, or even if she only plans to leave town, she isn’t going to be reading in the reserve book room or eating one of her cream-cheese-on-raisin-bread sandwiches in the Blue Cow.

This evidence of his mental confusion makes Brian stumble on the steps of the library. He stops, tries to catch his breath. He must clarify his mind, review the situation as a whole, make a structural analysis, reject extraneous data.

Here in Corinth, because of its unique geological history, the means of suicide are always at hand. Wherever claustrophobia for life strikes, you are seldom far from the easy way, the traditional Corinth University way, out. Two of the bridges over the north ravine, and one over the south, are most popular. But the cliffs are everywhere, and at this time of day more private. Every year a few unhappy students, in the local phrase, “gorge out.”

If Wendy has already leaped into one of these deep, fatal cracks in the landscape, there is nothing to be done, Brian thinks as he stands on the library steps panting and sweating, though it is a cool, cloudy day. Nothing to be done even if she is now on her way; there are too many possible spots, he could never find her. But she will be found, soon enough—Found, identified, examined; found to be with child, his child. The tragic event will be reported as usual in two discreet paragraphs on an inner page of the Corinth Courier, read with supper tomorrow by everyone in town, by Erica. His denials. “I haven’t seen her, spoken to her—hardly seen her, spoken to her” (more believable) “since last spring. Of course, I’m afraid, she was always somewhat unbalanced—” Unbalanced, fell easily. The event recorded at greater length, with a recent photograph in the student paper, read with breakfast next day by everyone; by Linda Sliski. Linda’s sorrow, her rage, her consciousness, the expansion of her consciousness into that of others, many others, expanding circles of others.

“Good afternoon,” remarks a colleague, one George Chambers, passing Brian on his way into the library.

“Mrm,” Brian replies, recalled to public awareness. He holds out his hand, palm up like a beggar, to give the impression that he has paused outside the library only for a moment, to test for rain. It is not raining, but looks threatening. A strong wind is blowing across the quad under dark, smoky, dirty-looking clouds. Rain is promised, lightning, thunder, hail. Automatically Brian begins to walk away from the library toward his office. Publicity, scandal, ruin. George Chambers, a family man of exemplary sensitivity, will no longer wish him a good afternoon, or any afternoon.

Back at his office, panting and slightly giddy, as if he had just climbed a mountain instead of two flights of stairs, Brian again lifts the phone. He dials Wendy’s number and lets it ring, eleven times. As it rings he visualizes the apartment. He imagines the bathroom, which has pink walls, white tiles. The sink and tub are antique, rust-stained under the faucets. A razor blade rests on the rim of the tub, which is beginning to fill with blood, and with Wendy’s long pale hair. She has just cut her wrists, though inexpertly and perhaps not fatally; but, leaning over the rim, she has already lost consciousness. Slamming his office door behind him, Brian half walks, half runs through the building toward the faculty parking lot.

Wendy’s apartment is on the second floor of an old frame house in Collegetown. It is approached by way of a steep flight of stairs, a sort of narrow chute-lined in red cabbage-rose wallpaper leading to a glassed door curtained inside with green burlap. Brian alternately knocks upon this door and shakes it by the cut-glass handle, calling out Wendy’s name and demanding that she let him in.

No answer. He descends the stairs and goes outside, walking around the building and looking up at the windows of the apartment. It is hard to see anything, for the backyard is on a downward slope and littered with trees and drifts of leaves and rusted play equipment.

Brian begins to climb the fire escape. Breathing hard after three flights, he draws level with Wendy’s bathroom. Between pink curtains he can see a corner of the mirror; then as he climbs further some toothbrushes of varied colors. The sink. The empty tub. Of course, he thinks on the way down, Wendy would never cut her wrists; she is afraid of blood.

Standing in the yard, frowning up at the second floor, Brian suddenly sees in his mind right through the brown shingles into Wendy’s kitchenette. Wendy is there; she is kneeling on the spatter-pattern linoleum, with her head inside the stove. The vision is so clear that he can even see the two metal racks which normally occupy the oven, and upon which Wendy has in the past broiled Swiss-cheese-and-tomato sandwiches for his lunch. To make room for her head, she has removed these racks and placed them against the wall. Brian hurries into the building again and up the cabbage-lined chute. Again he rattles the door handle, and shakes it.

“Wendy?’” he shouts, several times. He tries to think of ways of breaking the door in—difficult because there is no landing—ways of breaking the glass panel. “Wendy!”

“What the hell’s going on up there?”

Glancing down, Brian sees in foreshortened perspective a bearded young man—the physics graduate student who lives in the downstairs apartment.

“I’m looking for Miss Gahaghan.”

“She’s not there, she went out about an hour ago. Nobody’s home.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure I’m sure. She had a suitcase with her. What’s the matter, you stoned or something? I’m trying to study.”