Alison Lurie - The War Between the Tates - A Novel

“I don’t like automobiles.” Zed glances toward the street, where automobiles are parked, with a grimace she remembers well. “No. That’s not the whole truth. I thought of calling, or getting somebody to give me a ride out to your house. But then I thought, If it was meant to happen, it would happen. God’s will.” He smiles oddly, and looks at Erica. “Would you like some tea?”

“Yes, that would be nice.”

“It’ll take a few minutes.” Zed goes to the back of the shop and passes behind a curtain made of faded orange-striped madras bedspread. There is the sound of water running unevenly. She waits, looking at the shelves which line the room, the books with odd titles and obscure publishers, a notice announcing classes: MONDAY—ASTROLOGY. WEDNESDAY—BEGINNING MEDITATION.

“You give lectures here, as well as selling books?” she says when Zed reappears.

“Not really. Seminars. I don’t perform like Levin or Jaeger. I couldn’t if I wanted to; and I don’t want to. Though that’s what they’d like, most of the people who come.” Zed grins.

“Because they’re lazy, you mean?”

“Not so much lazy as intellectually passive. A lot of kids get interested in mysticism because it looks like a way out of all the pressure that’s on them. A way out of the system.”

“And they’re wrong?”

“No, they’re right. But that doesn’t mean there’s no work involved. Not just study—they don’t usually object to that; they’re used to it. They’ll do anything you tell them, really. Except think.” Zed smiles. “They have this idea that the Path is a sort of conveyor belt that’ll carry them along to enlightenment without any serious effort on their part. If they have questions, they think all they have to do is ask me.”

“But if you know the answers—” Erica tries to keep irony out of her voice. She doesn’t want to mock Sandy; she is sorry for him, and mildly curious.

“I don’t know the answers,” Zed says impatiently. He sighs and leans back against a shelf, where his elbows make two indentations in a row of works on alchemy. She can see the nearer one, white and knobby, through a raveled hole in his gray sweater. “I tell the kids who come in here, ‘Don’t lay that guru trip on me. I’m not qualified.’ I know something about meditation, and I can tell them what books to read, and what not to do if they want to get onto the Path, and that’s about all. If they want a real teacher they’ve got to go somewhere else: to the Zen-Center in Rochester, or to New York. Or the Far East. There’s the kettle.” He straightens up.

This time Erica follows him down the dingy narrow room and past the bedspread to another even narrower and dingier room. Shelves and cartons of books take up most of the space, along with a narrow studio couch. In one corner there is a paint-streaked sink with dishes and pans stacked on the ledge beside it, and a row of canned goods, tomato soup and peas and applesauce, above. Hanging from nails are what must be Sandy’s clothes: a long overcoat, two long-armed wool shirts and some crumpled striped pajamas.

“Do you live here, too?” she asks.

“It’s convenient.” Zed shrugs. “And cheap.” The kettle is wheezing and spitting; he lifts it from the hot plate and tries to pour into a teapot on the shelf above. “Oh, blast.”

As the hot water slops over, and he grabs for something to mop up with, Erica remembers another afternoon tea nearly twenty years ago. Sandy is sitting opposite her at one of the small square tables in Schrafft’s on Brattle Street. In front of each of them is a glazed paper doily with spiderweb designs punched out in opposite corners, and a cup and saucer with a green S monogram in Gothic script. Sandy raises the dark-green teapot and tilts it over her cup, and its oval top falls off, slopping hot water on the varnished wood. She can hear him cry “Oh, blast,” just as he did now, and see him lifting aside the cups and the silvery aluminum sugar bowl with its two handles like arms akimbo, and the plate of cinnamon toast cut into four parallel strips; mopping up awkwardly with his own and then her paper napkin; finally bending under the table to retrieve the top of the pot, because no one in rural Waterford, New York, ever taught him that you don’t pick things up off the floor in restaurants.

It is not, however, an instance of Proustian recall, the discovery of a lost memory. Erica has thought of this scene many times, because it took place during the most important conversation of her and Sandy’s acquaintance. The subject of this conversation was, Whether it is worth doing anything after you realize you will never be first-rate at it. Or, as he puts it—referring to a philosophy essay on which he had labored for three weeks—“if you know it will always be an A-minus, never an A. Once you’re sure of this, shouldn’t you just quit the field?”

But Erica, who had the same problem, found herself taking the other side. As Sandy rose into view above the table again with his red hair awry and the top of the teapot in one hand, she heard her own voice maintaining a position she had not, up to that moment, known she held. You didn’t leave the field, she insisted; you only moved to another part of it, where the ground wasn’t so hard. Take her cousin at MIT. He couldn’t do theoretical physics as well as some people, but he would still be a good engineer. Or suppose, like her, you knew you probably weren’t going to become a first-rate painter, she went on with conviction, gazing across the damp table at Sandy. You didn’t give up art. Instead you concentrated on what you could do, didn’t he see? Which in her case was small amusing line drawings.

“Yes; I see,” Sandy had replied; and for once he seemed to be considering Erica’s argument seriously, as possibly true and not just an expression of her own opinions. This was rare; in spite of his chronic shyness and naïveté, it was difficult for anyone to make an intellectual impression on Sandy. Perhaps, as a rural smalltown boy, he had picked up the automatic agrarian suspicion of all theorizing.

Subsequent events seemed to prove that this time, though, he had been convinced. Not only did Erica follow her new rule from that day on—Sandy also seemed to be following it. The trouble was, he didn’t seem to know where to stop. Leaving behind the heights of logic and metaphysics, he moved down to the less difficult slopes of ethics and aesthetics; then, the next year, still lower, to the history of philosophy, with special emphasis on the Oriental tradition. After finishing his degree, he associated himself with less and less reputable institutions, finally ending up with a part-time appointment in a California city college.

But no matter how far he descended, Sandy never seemed to reach his level of competence. Probably this was mostly due to self-doubt rather than lack of ability, Erica thinks sadly, watching him now as he spoons sugar clumsily from a cardboard box into a stained cup with no handle—why doesn’t he just pour it? Sandy had a good mind, and he always worked hard. But even now, on the lowest and muddiest slopes of philosophy (if it can still be called that), even here, in this dingy shop surrounded by half-literate tracts and astrology posters, he doesn’t feel competent. It is really pathetic. For over a year he has been living in this dismal back room on Iona canned peas and Heinz vegetarian baked beans, too shy to presume on their past acquaintance, thinking perhaps she wouldn’t want to see him now he has sunk so low. Something must be done about this.

“You must come to supper sometime soon,” she therefore says, following Zed back into the shop and watching as he sets his improvised tea tray (a length of unpainted shelving) on the counter by the door.