Alison Lurie - The War Between the Tates - A Novel

Well, there is no use being angry about that now. Lena has been dead for seven years. Erica takes the cookie dough out of the refrigerator, arranges it on a baking sheet, and puts it into the oven. She is going into the other room to start the ironing when her glance falls on Brian’s letter from the university. Probably what she should do is open it now and see what they want so that when he calls tonight she won’t have to waste any time.

Inside the long official-looking envelope, marked URGENT—PERSONAL in mercuròchrome red, are several awkwardly folded sheets of typing paper covered edge to edge with large round manuscript, written with the same vermilion marking pen.

Saturday

Dear Mr. Professor Tate!

I came round to see you this a.m. before I left town but no answer too bad. I mean bad. I left yr. J. S. Mill with Mr. Cushing next door, sorry not to return it sooner.

I keep thinking of you, how are you doing up there? I am not doing that well here; this scene is really bringing me down. It was juicy the first couple days with me and Ma, the Good Relationship, but neither of us could keep it up. Friday night Linda & Ralph came by with a couple of friends and kind of took over the place. Ma went upstairs which I thought showed real understanding but next morning we had the whole generation drama again. Of course she wouldn’t admit she was pissed at being turned out of Her Own Living Room, and how grungy we left the kitchen, we had to talk about Larger Issues. You know Wendee Ma says to me smiling anxiously I am worried about the kind of boys you are seeing so much of these days, and Linda too, I wonder what her parents think of them. Their long hair no I don’t mind that she says smiling tolerantly as long as they keep it washed. It is the rudeness the loudness the total lack of consideration for Others and well their unkempt dirty appearance that too. I sometimes try to imagine how it must be for your professors having to face a class full of students looking like that, I really feel sorry for them she says, smiling pityingly.

By now Erica has determined that the red letter is neither official nor urgent—merely the chatter of some eager, confiding student, such as Brian frequently receives. She reads on only out of inertia, plus mild curiosity and some sympathy with Ma.

I guess you would like it better if I was seeing a professor, I said. Well maybe Ma said smiling ruefully. I am a mother after all and naturally I want to feel that my child is safe and well taken care of. You may laugh now but you just wait until you are a mother and you will see. Okay, I said, I can wait. Mother! I thought, what if I told her. Don’t worry Ma I have already taken your advice and I am seeing a professor. Oh good Wendee are you seeing a lot of him. Oh yeh I am Ma I am seeing his face and his arms and his legs and his ass and his cock. But not right now, which is a big drag. Dear Brian, I just hope it is for you too. I want to lie down on your floor again. I need very bad to be with you and talk and argue with you and think and learn and grow and fuck.

yours yours yours yours you

Erica returns to page one and reads this letter over again. She begins to feel hot and cold as she reads, as if she were running a fever; she holds the contagious paper farther from her, by its extreme-edges, not touching the writing. The last blood-red word has been written over the margin so that part of it is missing. Erica supplies the rest: rs yours yours yours” ... an endless train of this word, streaming off the page into her kitchen and out the window across space and time; over the wet snow-crusted front lawn, the ice-pocked road, the cold fields and hills beyond.

Slowly, methodically, she refolds the letter and replaces it in its envelope. There is a peculiar burning odor in the room; like explosives. For a moment Erica thinks she is having a hallucination. Then she opens the oven door: at once the kitchen fills with smoke and the hot, sweet, ashy smell of scorched cookies. The war has begun.

2

MAY 11. BRIAN IS sitting in his office at the university waiting for Wendy Gahaghan to come in so he can tell her that their affair is over. The script for this scene has been worked out in advance in his mind, the significant speeches written and rewritten. Twice already he has spoken the opening lines—but without success. Wendy had not responded as she should have responded; she is in another play, or film.

For instance, the statement “My wife has found out” did not, to Wendy, constitute a sufficient reason for ending the affair. That was a heavy scene, she admitted, but it was not her scene. And his suggestion that the relationship was bad for her education had been met with eager denials. Her interest in learning and her grades had both risen, she insisted, since they started making it together—didn’t he know that? And in fact, Brian did know it.

And yet the thing has to be done. He realizes now that letting Wendy into his office had been like trying marijuana (not that he has ever tried marijuana). From the mild, pleasant stimulant of her conversation he had gone on to stronger drugs: her admiration and finally her passion. Before he becomes addicted, he has to give her up. Just thinking and worrying about it has begun to exhaust his energy to the point where he is functioning only in second gear as a teacher and is completely stalled on his current project, a study of American foreign policy in the Cold War period.

Moreover, Erica believes the thing has been done. Indeed, without actually lying, Brian has implied that the affair was almost over when she read that unfortunate letter. Actually lying, he has said it was as brief and unimportant as such an affair could be.

He would much prefer to wait until the end of the term, but the danger that Erica may make another such discovery is too great. He might lecture Wendy for hours on discretion, she might fervently promise to be careful; but she is impulsive, given to sudden romantic gestures. Only last week, seeing him unexpectedly in the hall, she ran toward him and embraced him. Since it was late afternoon, the hall was empty; but the door to one of the other offices was open, and a colleague of Brian’s was sitting in this office, observing them. “I just raised the grade on her exam,” Brian had lied afterward to this man, with a phony grin. And this was a double lie: Brian has never raised the grade on a student’s exam—he is against that sort of thing on principle.

How has he, Brian Tate, got into this tangle of phony grins and lies? How has he, who for years was a just, honorable, and responsible person, become involved with someone like Wendy Gahaghan?

Or let’s look at it from the other end for a change. Why hasn’t he become involved with some girl like Wendy long before this? Not through lack of opportunity: he can remember many occasions over the last twenty years when students—some of them much more his type than she is, a few almost as attractive as his wife Erica—had made it apparent that they would welcome a more personal relationship with him. Among his colleagues he knows many who have admittedly, or by repute, taken advantage of such welcomes. But for sixteen years he had privately scorned these colleagues. He had even rather looked down on his friend Leonard Zimmern, who had the excuse of an angry, impossible, unfaithful wife. He, Brian Tate, had no time for such hole-and-corner games. He loved Erica, and he had serious work to do.

But during the last year or two this work has changed. The wrong way of putting it: his work has not changed, and he has recognized that it never will. He is forty-six, and according to local criteria a success. His students think him interesting and well informed. His colleagues think him competent and fortunate; many of them envy him. He holds an endowed chair in the department and is the author of two scholarly studies in his field and a widely used and profitable text; he has a beautiful intelligent wife, two attractive and intelligent children, and a desirable house in Glenview Heights. They are not aware that internally, secretly, he is a dissatisfied and disappointed man. He bears the signs openly: a sharp W-shaped frown between his neat dark eyebrows, a pinched look round the mouth. But those who see these signs assume Brian is disappointed not by his own condition, but by the condition of the world.