Alison Lurie - The War Between the Tates - A Novel

Learning recently (from the complaints of younger professors) of the appearance in town of the Krishna Bookshop, Shade took the academically unprecedented but for him perfectly logical step of paying it a visit. He had inspected the premises, talked to several customers and finally, triumphantly, identified its proprietor as “one of our alumni—indeed, as it turns out, a former student in my introductory course.” Shade’s satisfaction at this discovery, and at the spirit of local patriotism shown by Zed’s return to Corinth; quite overshadowed any doubts he might feel about the manner of this return.

For Danielle too the significant fact about Zed’s name is that she has heard it before. It is, she believes, the name of a graduate student in philosophy nearly twenty years ago.

“I wondered if it was the same guy we knew at Harvard,” she remarks to Erica, holding a Styrofoam cup under the coffee urn. “That tall, funny-looking man with the red hair that Ann Hershey used to, go out with. Wasn’t he from Corinth?”

“Ann didn’t go out with Sandy Finkelstein,” Erica says, filling her cup in turn. “She went out with his roommate. But he did go to Corinth; it could be the same one.”

“He was studying philosophy.” Danielle moves along the counter toward the cashier, searching in her memory, and also in the side pocket of her briefcase for a dime. “And he played the piano, didn’t he?”

“Yes; quite well.” Erica shifts two heavy books on medieval Irish art and reaches into her shoulder bag. “Here, I have change. Let me pay.”

“That’s all right, I’ve found it. Yeh; I remember him at some party at Lowell House. Everybody was dancing and he was playing.”

The cashier rings up their money; Danielle and Erica move on toward a counter where individual portions of cream and sugar are heaped in plastic bins.

“Sanford Finkelstein,” Danielle repeats. “Listen, isn’t he the one that ostrich is based on, in your books?”

“Well, I suppose in a way.” Erica smiles. “It was the name mostly. Sanford seemed like a good name for an ostrich.”

“He looked sort of like an ostrich. Those long skinny legs and neck. And the way his red hair stuck up on top of his head.” Both women laugh. “If it’s really him, it’s funny he should come back here and run a crank bookshop. I thought he was teaching philosophy out in California somewhere.”

“The last I heard, he was in Japan.”

The coffee shop is crowded; Erica and Danielle end up sitting on a window ledge. Danielle would have been content to share a table, but Erica prefers this, both because it provides more privacy and because it gives a better view of the room, thus furthering the real purpose which has brought her onto campus.

“We ought to go down to that bookstore sometime and see if it’s really Sandy Finkelstein,” Danielle says, pouring a paper trapezoid of cream into her coffee.

“Mm.” Erica stirs sugar into hers with a plastic stick. “Speaking of identifying people,” she adds. “Do you happen to notice that girl here?”

“What girl? Oh.” Lowering her cup, Danielle scans the room. “No, I don’t see her. She was here the other day, though,” she adds unhelpfully.

Erica controls a sigh of impatience. This is the third time in as many weeks that she has had coffee with Danielle in order to identify Brian’s nameless new mistress. Once she has seen her (ideally, in Brian’s company) she can confront him, and she is eager to confront him. The pleasure of being secretly in the right has worn thin for Erica over the past weeks. She is in the right, and Brian in the wrong, but he doesn’t know it, or rather he doesn’t know she knows. He goes on smugly believing he is getting away with something. And, in fact, as long as she doesn’t speak, he is getting away with something.

Besides, concealing what she knows from Brian is a kind of lying, and Erica hates lies. She has sometimes told polite fibs, but she disapproves even of this, and avoids it when she can, She has not lied seriously since junior high.

Therefore she has sought the girl, both in Danielle’s company and alone, even more conscientiously than she had hunted for Wendee last spring. Again her search has been vain, but this time for the opposite reason. The moon-faced graduate student she is seeking now, with her “stringy bleached hair” is as much uglier than the real Wendy Gahaghan as last spring’s quarry was more beautiful.

But though she hasn’t been able to identify Brian’s mistress, Erica has plenty of circumstantial evidence of her existence. There is Brian’s continued air of uneasy, preoccupied self-righteousness; his phony concern for his wife’s mental and moral health—intended, she believes, simultaneously to disarm her suspicions, keep her on the defensive, and cover his own guilt. There is his disinterest in making either love or serious conversation. Above all, there is the evidence of his new sideburns.

To Erica’s knowledge, Brian has had hair on his face only once in his life before: in the summer of 1952, when he grew a mustache while they were on Martha’s Vineyard. After a rather slow start it came in well: glossy, full, seal-brown. He took it back with him to Cambridge for the fall term, where his friends agreed with Erica that it made him look much older, and more serious. But three months later a student organization published a guide to freshman courses illustrated with caricatures of faculty members. In this guide, Brian appeared as a very small man attached to a very large mustache. Over the Christmas vacation he shaved it off.

The mustache had been a deliberate effort; the sideburns appeared deviously. Brian did not at any time declare an intention to grow them; they merely began—as if on their own momentum—edging down the sides of his face a fraction of an inch at a time, like some geological formation. When they reached the level of his mouth they began to put out a sort of horizontal extension or spur on each cheek. They are an announcement to the whole world that Professor Tate wishes to appear younger, and less serious—to be seen as a “swinger.” To Erica, their message is as plain as if her husband had been branded across the face: ADULTERER.

“The vet was over again last night,” Danielle says, breaking into these thoughts.

“Oh?”

“He turned up about nine-thirty, said he wanted to take another look at Roo’s sick turtle. But I don’t think that was what he really wanted.”

“What did he want?” Erica turns from contemplation of the entrance to the coffee shop, where Brian’s mistress might at any moment appear.

“Sex, I think.” Danielle laughs briefly. “Not that he made any move, or said anything. He just sat there drinking beer and telling me animal stories for a couple of hours. But he kept looking at me. You know how it is—you can usually tell.”

“Mm.”

“Of course I suppose he’s lonely too. His wife died last year; or passed away as he puts it. He practically never talks about her. I guess it still hurts him a lot. And both his sons have left home, and all his friends are respectably married. I feel sorry for him in a way. I mean, he’s a nice guy, and not bad-looking, if he weren’t so dumb and slow. I feel like I ought to tell him he’s wasting his time at my house—barking up the wrong tree, to use his phrase. He ought to go after one of these hot little bitches who are just asking for it, like my husband always did.” Danielle smiles sourly and gestures around the coffee shop.

“Mm.” Reminded, Erica looks again toward the door, in case a pudding-faced bleached blonde of the sort who is just asking for it should enter. Then she looks back at her friend, frowning slightly. Ever since the separation she has followed Danielle’s emotional life with anxious concern. First, directly after Leonard moved out, there was a period of stunned despair. This was followed by several months of flagrant and indiscriminate misbehavior with an overlapping series of unsuitable men. (Erica and Brian had divided them into two types: Scavengers and Weaklings. The former were like those gulls which follow in the wake of large departing ships, where it is traditionally easy to pick up leavings; the latter of the doglike variety, drawn to any woman who recently belonged to a successful man by the magical belief that if they rub against her some of his power, his mana, will rub off on them.) This period was especially hard on Erica, who found it difficult to hide her disapproval when she dropped in on her friend and found some man she hardly knew—or worse, knew quite well—in a position of temporary intimacy.