Alison Lurie - The War Between the Tates - A Novel

Somehow she must make amends. She comes out from behind the chair, toward him.

“I’m sorry, Sandy,” she says, putting her hand on his arm. To her distress, it is actually trembling under the shirt. “I didn’t mean—”

“That’s all right.” He smiles painfully, indicating that it is not all right. Erica feels terrible. What can she do? Like Brian in a similar situation, it occurs to her that if she were to kiss Sandy affectionately, he might feel better. She approaches the gesture awkwardly, for she is unused to taking the initiative and has not kissed anyone in months. Another difficulty, one which has not occurred in twenty years, is Zed’s height; she has to stand on tiptoe to reach his cheek.

His reaction to the kiss is odd: as she comes near he almost flinches, then he looks surprised; finally he smiles, but stiffly.

“You’re not angry?” she asks.

Zed shakes his head unconvincingly. Obviously he does not believe either in her apology or her affection. He believes that she finds him and his feelings “absurd” and “silly.”

How could she have said those words, been so thoughtless, so unkind? How can she take them back and heal the injury she has given?

But even as she asks this, the only possible answer occurs to Erica. That it will require greater self-sacrifice than anything she has done yet first frightens and then-begins to convince her. If you know of someone who wants your old clothes, your day-old bread, it is wrong to keep them selfishly in the cupboard; she has always believed this. For years she used to save all their stale bread, and once a week she and Jeffo and Muffy would go down to Reed Park and scatter it in the bird sanctuary.

Zed has still not moved. He stands there against the shelves of books with his wings hunched, not even looking at her, simply waiting for her to go away. Instead she takes a step in the other direction, toward him.

“Sandy, my dear. What’s the matter?”

He turns his head, looks down, hesitates. Perhaps, now he sees her so close, so creased, even he doesn’t want—Then slowly he straightens up and moves nearer; she sees in close-up his ill-shaven, freckled, tired scarecrow features; his pale eyes with their reddish rims and orange lashes. Nearer still—She closes her eyes, improving the view.

At first it is hardly like being kissed at all; then Zed, with a clumsy, half-blind gesture, pulls her closer and shifts his mouth so that it meets hers more accurately. Erica remembers the look in his eyes a few moments ago; she remembers the birds in the park, how impatient and greedy they always were, how they would press close to her and her bag of bread, flapping and squawking; she remembers Brian, and waits for Sandy too to crowd, to grab.

But he only holds her, stroking her face and hair, kissing her gently and intermittently. Gradually she relaxes, rests against him. She sighs—not in protest, but Zed releases her, blinking and putting out one hand to feel for the shelf behind him.

“Sandy? Are you all right?”

“Yes. No. I feel dizzy.” He laughs. “I feel—As if I’d got a birthday present I’d given up expecting.”

“Did you have a birthday recently?”

“What? My birthday—It was last week.”

“I’m glad.” Erica looks up at him in a way which would have informed Brian, or any other man, that he should kiss her again. But Zed doesn’t move. He has no idea how large a present she intends to give him. She will have to tell him—to show him—But now she is embarrassed; she steps back, looks around the room. “Is it still snowing, do you think?” she asks.

“Let’s see.” Zed lifts the curtain to the front of the shop. “No. It looks as if it’s stopped.” He walks between dim bookshelves to the door and peers out. “And the street’s been plowed. You can go now. I’ll get your coat.”

15

IT IS A COLD, shiny April morning. In his apartment at the top of Alpine Towers, Brian Tate is having a leisurely breakfast: English muffins with marmalade, scrambled eggs, and coffee made in a filter pot the way he has finally managed to teach Wendy to make it. It is one of the few things he has managed to teach her—for on close acquaintance, Wendy’s malleability has proved just as intractable as Erica’s stubbornness. She will agree to anything, accept his opinion on any matter; but a few hours later she will meet Linda or some other friend, hear a lecture, read a magazine article, and change her mind. To keep her on the right track, he would have to stay with her twenty-four hours a day.

Brian has no desire to do this; in his view they are together too much as it is. Three weeks ago Wendy’s roommate Linda took up with, and into her apartment, an intense, homeless, bearded young man named Avery. Since then Wendy has been living full-time in Alpine Towers, an arrangement which Brian finds less than satisfactory. He can remember Leonard Zimmern saying cynically that there were only two infallible ways to get over a woman: one was to cut the relationship off completely, cold turkey, never to see her, telephone her or write to her again; the other, equally effective, was to see her all the time.

The idea that one should preserve some modesty, some privacy, even under the most intimate conditions, had been Erica’s native creed. It is foreign to Wendy. Every day now Brian can observe her sitting up in bed to blow her nose; brushing her teeth over the sink, her mouth full of foamy pink spit; washing out her dirty panties at night. If he had allowed it she would have used the toilet while he was shaving, also she is letting her appearance go, putting on weight; in the last month or so she must have gained five pounds. Her breasts are larger, which is all right; but her waist is also thicker, giving her figure a coarseness not at all to his taste.

But even if Wendy were more modest and as slim as before, Brian might still be sick of her. His theory had been right, after all: the way to cure a passion was by satiating it. Mere consummation was not enough; as long as the affair remained secret, the necessary stimuli to desire were there: absence, anxiety, delay, solitary longing.

Now the lovers are in full possession. They can see each other all day long. They can have breakfast together, and lunch, and dinner, and breakfast ...

In the house on Jones Creek Road the children were always around when Brian got home; he could seldom speak privately to Erica until late at, night. But he and Wendy are alone constantly, and always in each other’s presence, for the apartment has only one usable room. She doesn’t seem to mind this; probably she finds it comfortably familiar, having grown up under equally crowded conditions. She also, as far as he can tell, feels no slackening of romantic love; indeed she claims to adore him more than ever. When he suggests that she might look for another place to live she becomes weepy and helpless, insisting that there are no apartments at this time of year and that she will try even harder not to disturb him in his Work.

Meanwhile, she continues to disturb him—especially when she is trying not to: when she is tiptoeing around the apartment, opening and shutting the refrigerator with elaborate precaution, crawling under his desk to unplug the radio so she can drag it over the rug into the bedroom with her—for like his children, Wendy seems unable to study unless she is simultaneously eating and listening to bad music. In order to get any work done, even to grade papers, Brian has to retreat to his office on campus. Like Jeffrey and Matilda, Wendy is driving him out of his own house.

Brian sighs heavily. He has come to realize belatedly that in love, as in war, whatever is the greatest difference between the principals becomes the central issue. When they are alike except that one is male, the other female, the relationship takes its ideal form. But if there are other important differences—class, race, color, religion, nationality, education, etc.—then the lovers will find themselves polarized around these differences rather than engaged in the natural sexual contest.