Alison Lurie - The War Between the Tates - A Novel

And Brian told her, ill-advisedly. For after she hugged and soothed him she asked, “How come you always dream about Erica? Maybe you’re still in love with her.”

“I’m not in love with her,” Brian insisted. “I wish she’d get the hell out of my dreams.” Wendy remained silent, unconvinced. “She had wings like a harpy,” he added, and went on to relate this to Clara Dickson’s impossible demands.

But Wendy was not persuaded. “I d’know. Maybe she’s asking for so much bread on purpose, to zap the proceedings. On account of she wants you back, account of she’s still in love with you.”

“Erica is not in love with me,” Brian insisted with still greater conviction. “As a matter of fact, I don’t think she’s ever been in love with me.” In the dark, Wendy murmured doubtfully. “Look, let’s go back to sleep. I have two classes tomorrow.”

“Okay. I’m sorry. It’s just—I mean, shit, you never dream about me.”

“I don’t have to dream about you,” Brian said in his fondest tone, and with an appropriate gesture. He could feel her relax then; she returned the gesture, laughed warmly, and flopped back onto her stomach. She always slept that way, often with one fist in her mouth, like a child; and now, like a child, she was asleep again in a few moments. But Brian lay awake for over, an hour, while the wailing noise of his dream came and went in his mind.

The joint comes around to Brian again: a thin, wrinkled cigarette, pinched and wet at one end. Again he passes it on. He has no moral objection to marijuana, but he dislikes its effects. When he smokes grass he enters into a dull, stupid, sensual state in which the world is brightly colored and flattened out like the sort of abstract painting he finds most boring. He has the sense of being slowed down and speeded up alternately: a minute passes infinitely slowly, and quarter-hours disappear between two sentences. Wendy and her friends, with their childish sense of an infinite future, may think this amusing; but Brian finds it disagreeable: he does not wish to have big bites of time taken out of his life. Still worse than these sensual distortions is the intellectual effect of the drug. Meaning and order are blurred, and rational argument and comparison become impossible.

Besides, it makes social life boring. When drinks are served, people become more lively and communicative; they talk and move around more. Grass has the opposite effect: look at Linda and her guests, lying about for the last half-hour almost silent, like cows on actual grass.

Brian is seriously concerned about Wendy’s constant use of marijuana. She and her friends cannot seem to get together socially without lighting up a joint, and hardly a day goes by that she doesn’t smoke at least part of one, often (as now) mixed with hash to make it stronger. Possibly the stuff is harmless in small amounts, but what is a small amount? Without federal controls, how can anyone know how much they are getting? Also, he has read that the effect may be cumulative over months or years. Besides, it is a drug, and leads to stronger drugs: to LSD, speed and heroin; to addiction, weird delusions, mental and moral collapse, overdose and death. Nobody has proved that marijuana itself is not addictive, at least psychologically. And apart from everything else, it is illegal. It is distributed by criminal organizations part of whose profits go to bribery, corruption and possibly murder, and the use of it makes one a criminal. Right now Wendy and her friends are breaking a federal law. They could be arrested and tried and sent to jail; and so could he, as an accessory. Probably the judge would be especially hard on him because of his age and position.

Brian sighs and reaches past Wendy for another can of beer, and as he does so her peaceful bovine smile is replaced by a look of anxiety. He knows what this means: she is worried about his constant drinking. She has discovered that he and his friends cannot seem to get together socially without opening a bottle; that hardly a day goes by when he doesn’t have at least a glass of vermouth before supper, often mixed with gin to make it stronger.

In fact Wendy thinks of alcohol much as he thinks of drugs. In her view, grass makes you relaxed, happy and at peace with the world; it refines and heightens perceptions. Alcohol blurs the senses and causes you to become noisy and violent. Besides, everyone knows the stuff is addictive. A small amount—a can of beer or a glass or two of wine—might be harmless, but it is apt to lead to the use of stronger and more dangerous drinks: to loss of physical control, shouting, fighting, vomiting and fatal auto accidents; eventually to impotence and visions of snakes and cirrhosis of the liver. And apart from everything else, it is a gross commercial rip-off. A bottle of whiskey costs six to eight dollars, and a lot of that is taxes, which means it goes to supporting corrupt government and killing people in Vietnam.

The doors bangs open, admitting two more of Linda’s friends: a pretty, sturdy girl with a Jewish Afro hairdo, and a bearded young man. Both are already known to Brian: the young man is the graduate student in physics named Mark who used to live downstairs. He now lives in a commune with the girl, Jenny, a Corinth undergraduate with whom he is having a relationship, but not a really meaningful one. As Wendy has explained to Brian, “In a relationship you’re just screwing the guy. In a meaningful relationship you’re screwing him and also he’s your best friend.”

“Hiya, everybody.” Jenny pulls a poncho over her bushy head. Beneath it she is dressed in a style Brian recognizes but still finds odd. Unlike Wendy, with her mixed East-West Indian costume, Jenny and most of her undergraduate friends get themselves up as poor cowboys and dirt farmers. They wear heavy boots and faded, patched jeans, with a man’s shirt or sweater. For parties the sweater is replaced by a fancy low-necked blouse trimmed with lace or bright embroidery; necklaces and long earrings are added. But the jeans and the boots remain, making these girls look mismatched at the waist, like the cardboard figures in a game Brian had as a small child.

“How’s everything?” Linda raises a limp bony arm and hand from the floor, where she is lying prone.

“Lousy.” Jenny waves away the joint one of the other-guests has offered her and sits down next to Brian, reaching for a can of beer. “I’m really disgusted at this university.”

“Oh, yeh?” Brian shifts position, relieving the weight on his leg, and turns toward Jenny with pleasure—not only because she is very pretty, but because he may now hear something of interest. Also, he may be able to help. In the last few months he has counseled Wendy’s friends on a variety of problems: academic foul-ups, hassles with landlords, job applications, draft resistance. His advice is valuable to them, partly because of his greater knowledge of university procedures, partly because of his greater experience of the world. “What’s happening?”

Jenny frowns as she pulls open her beer can, but is silent.

“It’s that man in your department, that Professor Dibble,” Mark explains. “He sort of keeps insulting women in his lectures.”

“Not sort of,” Jenny says. “He does it blatantly.”

“Ah.” Brian is familiar with this problem; more, he is in a sense responsible for it. It was he after all, who last Thanksgiving suggested to a hitchhiker that she enroll in Dibble’s course. Sara had not only acted on the recommendation, she had passed it on to friends and members of her commune. As a result, at least three militantly feminist students are taking Poly Sci 202. They have not found Dibble sympathetic, nor he them; Brian has already heard complaints from both sides.

“I figured he was going to be bad when we got to the Nineteenth Amendment, but I didn’t think he’d be this bad. I mean, he’s really a fascist chauvinist pig. Some of the things he’s said, I didn’t think I’d ever hear them in an American university; they sound like Mein Kampf. And you can’t reason with him.”