Alison Lurie - The War Between the Tates - A Novel

Brian apologizes, thanks the young man, leaves the building. A suitcase, he repeats to himself half aloud. Certainly if you intend to kill yourself you don’t take a suitcase. He draws breath. Inside his head he can still see Wendy’s kitchen and two stove racks leaning against the yellow wall, but Wendy has vanished. He can therefore look right into the oven and see what he must have known all along, that it is an electric oven. This evidence of mental confusion, warped memory, appalls Brian. He realizes by what a narrow margin he has been saved from smashing in the door of an empty student apartment; from being discovered in this act, or just afterward, by the bearded young man.

A suitcase. What Wendy intends, just as he had deduced at first from her letter, is to leave town. To do what most girls would do in her situation—that is, go home, to her parents in Queens.

Brian gets into his car; his pulse is returning to normal. All right. To reach New York, Wendy will probably have to take a bus, and to take a bus she will have to go to the bus station. He starts the car and drives across town, fighting an impulse to exceed the speed limit considerably.

The Greyhound station is deserted except for one bored clerk who tells Brian grudgingly that the last bus for New York departed at noon—too early for Wendy, who must have left her letter in his mailbox about that time. The next one leaves after three, nearly two hours from now. He has plenty of time.

Standing in line at the bank, waiting to draw out six hundred dollars (a sum suggested to him by recent articles in the Village Voice ) , Brian congratulates himself on the decision to keep his royalties and lecture fees in a separate account with which Erica has nothing to do. As he moves forward he notices a sign urging customers to Place Your Valuables in Our Vaults. Vaults; Tombs; Wombs. Wendy lying broken on wet rocks; his name printed near hers in the newspaper. But he stamps these irrational fears down into the brown-patterned carpet, repeating to himself “Suitcase ... Bus.”

But if Wendy is still in town, where is she? As he watches Mrs. Morrison telephoning some higher authority to learn if it is all right to give Brian Tate his own six hundred dollars, the hunch comes to him that she is at that occult bookstore, talking to the phony who runs it, telling him everything.

Mrs. Morrison is still on the phone, listening, nodding. The figure, six hundred dollars in cash, has aroused suspicion. She too, or her superior at the other end of the line, has read the Village Voice; they know.

The phone is replaced. Is he sure he doesn’t want travelers checks? They’re so much safer. No? Tightening her lips, Mrs. Morrison begins counting out the money, in tens and twenties—unmarked bills, he hopes. She slides them through the gap in the bars, and Brian folds them into his wallet under her gaze.

The Krishna Bookshop is located at the shabbier end of Main Street, between a Chinese restaurant and an office-supply store. From outside its appearance is drably exotic. The narrow dusty window, like Wendy’s day bed, is draped with a fading India-print spread, on which a large Oriental stone idol sits smiling faintly and smoothly. All around him books on occult subjects are haphazardly placed; some standing, some lying, some leaning on one another, as in a partially ruined temple, a miniature Asian Stonehenge.

Inside, the first impression is of dull fight, crowded tall shelves, a dirty-sweetish smell of incense. Wendy is not in the room. At a high wooden counter on Brian’s right a boy with a skimpy beard is reading, in disregard of the sign on the wall behind him which proclaims in heavy black-script capitals on faded gold:

IF THE WAY CAN BE EXPRESSED IN WORDS, IT IS NOT THE TRUE WAY

In the corner to Brian’s left a girl in overalls is sitting crosslegged on the floor; at the far back of the store two men are bent over some papers at a table. One is young and husky, with bushy black hair; the other older and thinner—possibly the proprietor.

Brian feels scorn rising toward disgust—an intensification of the political and strategic advantage he is aware of when entering any store. He is at a political advantage in these situations, like most customers, because he is socially anonymous, while the people in the store are defined, and defined as low-status clerks; and at a special advantage here since he knows who Zed is, while Zed does not know him. He is at a strategic advantage because he can choose whether to buy or not, while they cannot choose whether or not to sell; and strategically invulnerable here, since there is nothing in this dingy place he wants. Except of course information. He selects the girl on the floor as the most normal-looking of the lot, and moves toward her.

“Excuse me,” he says. “I’m looking for Wendy Gahaghan. Has she been here today?”

No answer. Brian raises his voice and repeats the question.

Still no answer. The girl does not even look at Brian, though he is standing directly in front of her; she looks through him. A thin, dizzy unease comes over him, a sensation of not being in the Krishna Bookshop, or anywhere.

“Gail can’t talk now, she’s doing her yoga,” remarks the boy at the counter.

“Oh, sorry.” Brian moves off, reminding himself that he is still in a state of tension.

“You looking for Wendy?”

Brian admits this.

“I haven’t seen her.” He lowers The Zodiac and the soul and calls, “Hey, Zed. Has Wendy been in today?”

At the rear of the shop the older man turns and looks for a second at Brian, with an odd, startling effect like the switching on and off of a strong light. Then he shakes his head, turns back.

“She might be in, if you want to hang around awhile,” the boy offers. “She usually comes in the afternoons.”

Hanging around, Brian moves along one wall, reading the backs of books. Demonology Today. The Tarot revealed. The very titles proclaim them full of lies, superstition, fear—all that should have been destroyed or good by the philosophical and political enlightenment of the eighteenth century, the scientific and social enlightenment of the nineteenth, but is now crawling back into very corner. The sleep of reason produces monsters, and they are here, invisibly thick in this ill-lit room. That skinny drug addict has brought them here, and with their help he is living off Wendy and other innocent students, poisoning their minds, subverting everything Brian and his colleagues have taught them.

Wisdom of the Sufi. Psychic Self-Defense. The Book of the Dead. The information that Wendy usually comes here in the afternoons, something she has concealed from him, is to Brian another proof that the demons of irrationality and self-destruction have their claws into her deeper than he knew. If she does destroy herself, this place must bear the guilt. Some of the guilt. He grimaces, moving along the wall of books. From time to time he glances with distaste at Zed’s back, or pats his jacket pocket, where the wallet stuffed full of bills still bulges and glows fluorescently.

Presently there is movement at the back of the room. The heavy young man is getting up from the table, collecting papers covered with figures and diagrams, expressing gratitude.

“Yeh, well, I’d like to go along with you on that; but you know those Mercury and Venus progressions never act much on me,” he remarks as he and Zed walk past Brian toward the door. “They don’t energize me like the Mars-Uranus aspects do. I guess violence is just my karma.” He laughs childishly. “Ready, Gail? Well, see you later.”

“Go in peace, Danny.”

Zed shuts the door and slouches slowly back down the long, narrow book-lined room toward Brian. There is something uneasy, even threatening in the approach of this gangling figure, its face obscure against the back-light from the window. Brian’s hand goes protectively to his jacket pocket. But as Zed draws nearer and the musty glow from the ceiling fixture strikes him, the threat dissolves. He is revealed to-be a weedy, nondescript middle-aged man; tall, pale, balding, with blurry worn features.