Alison Lurie - The War Between the Tates - A Novel

“You mean—”

“Yeh.” Danielle looks away, then back, smiling with something almost like embarrassment. Erica does not smile. It is bad enough that her best friend should have been raped once by a stupid, coarse, red-faced veterinarian. That she should passively let it happen a second time worries Erica even more. She decides to speak out.

“You know, you don’t owe that creep anything just because he looks at sick turtles and once took care of your dog. After all, that was his job. I think you should tell him to stay out of your house. If he has to sleep with somebody, why doesn’t he go and sleep with one of those women who are always feeding him out in Brookdale?”

Danielle shrugs. She puts the cut-up chicken away in the fridge and moves onto a stool opposite Erica. “He can’t, unless he plans to marry them,” she says. “And even then probably not until after the ceremony. He explained it all to me last night. Those people operate on a different system. They’re all good churchgoing widows and spinsters who were friends of his dear departed wife. They play by the old rules and don’t commit fornication.”

“But that’s not your fault! You don’t have to let him use you sexually just because nobody else he knows will.”

“He doesn’t use me, really.” Danielle looks down into her coffee and then up again, almost defiantly. “I mean, it wasn’t so bad this time. In fact”—her face reddens—“it was sort of fantastic. I was surprised.”

“I should think so.”

“He was pretty surprised too. But appreciative. He wants to take me out to dinner tonight at the Gables.” Danielle half laughs.

“Are you going?”

“Hell, sure. Who would turn down a meal at the Gables?”

“I don’t know,” Erica replies, thinking that she would, but trying not to let any note of disapproval into the tune of her voice. She reminds herself that the men with whom Danielle was briefly involved after Leonard left also had faults. Some were opportunistic, others neurotic. But at least they were all presentable, intelligent men: lawyers, artists, professors—not Polish veterinarians.

“Of course I can’t really talk to him,” Danielle adds, as if she had heard Erica’s thoughts. “If I mention anything I’m teaching, he just looks dumb. And politically he’s hopeless: a grass-roots agrarian populist. But hell, I’m sick of talking to men. Once you start talking to them the next thing is you begin to get emotionally involved, and I’m not interested in getting involved with any man. I don’t have to worry about that with Bernie, because he doesn’t want it either. Basically he’s a pretty domestic type, even kind of romantic. He’ll probably end up with one of those nice women out in Brookdale. But right now he’s not ready for that; his wife has only been dead about a year. It’s just a physical thing between us: I need it and he needs it, and that’s all.

“Mm,” Erica comments, thinking in spite of herself that Brian last spring had used almost these same phrases to describe his feelings toward Wendy.

“And I really don’t like masturbation,” Danielle confides in a lower voice. “I tried it a few times, but I could never get much out of it. I couldn’t come or anything; I just always felt nervous and silly, you know?”

“Mm,” repeats Erica, who has had the opposite experience.

“Bernie and I talked it over,” Danielle continues. “I told him, no sentimental lies, no commitments, no promises.” She pushes her heavy dark hair back and her jaw forward.

“I see.” Erica knows that Danielle wants her to accept, if not approve, this plan of finding temporary sexual gratification with Bernie Kotelchuk. But how can she? It is so flat, so grossly practical—as if Danielle were to announce: “I want a piece of meat, so I’m going to the grocery.” Better, surely, to make out with what is already in the cupboard, or to become a vegetarian.

But she is anxious not to hurt her friend’s feelings, so she says something vague, and then, inventing a dentist’s appointment, declares that she must leave, in order to prevent herself from saying anything more—or worse, having to meet Bernie Kotelchuk. In a flurry of false haste, she scrambles on her coat and boots and scarf and gloves and literally runs from the house. She starts the car fast and, in case Danielle is looking, heads it downtown.

It is a heavy, cold, unattractive afternoon; the clouds hang close over the bare trees, like a huge sodden canvas tent; the wind, still blowing hard, beats and slaps the empty branches about. Erica feels like weeping for Danielle, who has been so beaten about and exploited by men—and by her own dependence on them. Gripping the cold wheel with her driving gloves, she promises herself that she will never, never let herself be so exploited. In spite of herself her eyes begin to fill with tears. Never, never—

She stops for a red light, blinking. She is downtown now, but what is she doing there? There must be something useful, some errands, or Christmas shopping. In the past Erica had always finished this task by the first week of December, but this year she is far behind, partly because she can’t decide what to get for anyone, especially the children. Brian told her yesterday that he is thinking of buying them each an expensive AM/FM radio, something she considers quite unnecessary, indeed an ill concealed bribe. Not to mention the additional noise these radios will cause in the house, where of course Brian is not living at the moment.

Brian feels guilty toward Jeffrey and Matilda, but not any longer toward Erica. He thinks he has done her a favor by arranging the murder of Wendy’s child, and he proposes to do her another soon by moving back into her house and bedroom. For surely that is what he had in mind last night when he said they must have a serious discussion soon. Like her unwanted suitors, he would be first incredulous and then abusive if she said she didn’t want him; that she doesn’t want to live in the modern world with a modern man.

But she cannot sit crying in traffic. Perhaps if she were to park and walk past the stores ... and there is a space across from the post office. She backs into it, gets out, walks away—then returns and feeds a series of pennies into the metallic head of the parking meter. Jeffo and Muffy used to love to do this for her when they were little; they loved the story she had invented for them about how all the meters in town belonged to a big family of underground aluminum giraffes, and late at night when nobody was looking they would pull their heads back down through the pavement and play together under the city. But the last time she had referred to this fancy, about a year ago, she had been badly snubbed: “Oh, Mother, must you be so stupid?”

The giraffe smacks its cold metal lips on each coin, pst, pst, pst, and sticks its round metal tongue farther out. Erica walks away from it toward Main Street, looking into shop windows. But instead of useful purchases, everything reminds her of what she wants to forget: a real estate office “Photo Gallery of Desirable Homes”; in the window of the savings bank, fourth-grade clay artifacts from the school Muffy and Jeffo once attended, where they had made the same loving lopsided bowls and glazed blue animals for her; the gift-shop display of Great Artists’ Puzzles, featuring a Renaissance nativity in sawed-up wooden fragments.

Across the street it gets worse. The department-store windows are vindictively symbolic: on one side an imitation ideal family—hers of five years ago—in matching ski outfits sprinkled with soap flakes; on the other, four grinning young people in party clothes. The display case flanking the front entrance is full of men’s shoes and boots drawn up in rows at different levels, decorated with argyle socks and plastic holly. They are glossy, heavy-soled, brutally new, ready to stamp and kick and tread on women—