Alison Lurie - The War Between the Tates - A Novel

Next the clumsy straining, the bleats of distress and failure. Renewed effort; renewed failure. Then Sandy pulling away, sitting back between her legs, his face reddened, saying, “It’s no good.”

And finally she recalls the excuses and explanations, overlapping and contradicting each other. “I didn’t expect ... “You know, I was afraid of this.” “We waited too long.” Erica, out of hope and faith and charity, accepted these excuses; offered some of her own. She soothed and comforted Sandy, assuring him that she understood, that she wasn’t angry, or upset, that it would be better next time.

But it was not better next time. It was worse. At the mere sight of Erica naked at night in a university office (her children were back from vacation, but she had a key to the building where she worked), Sandy sagged and shrank in every part. He sat down on the extreme edge of the black plastic couch belonging to the editor of Current Organic Chemistry, next to Erica’s cold feet; his arms hung limp between his legs, and he spoke in a withered version of his normal voice. “Venus square Neptune again. I suppose it’s some kind of sign.”

This time Erica did not reassure and comfort him. Instead, all the misery and self-doubt that had been churning below the surface of her mind for the past four days boiled up and over. Her laughter was sour, almost hysterical, as she told Sandy that he must have made a mistake. Obviously he did not want her, or love her.

“No,” he whispered from the end of the couch. “I love you too much.”

Erica did not believe him. She thought that Sandy had, as he had said before, waited too long. The Erica he loved was a beautiful young girl; at the sight of her creased face and middle-aged body in close-up, desire had left him. She sat up, reached for her clothes, and began to dress wearily, thinking that Sandy might have known, or at least guessed, that this would happen again—that he might have known the first time. She began to feel aggrieved at him for having allowed these two embarrassing and sordid scenes to occur, scenes in which she had offered herself and exposed herself and been rejected. It was too late now. This ugly, humiliating, ludicrous thing had happened staining this day and their friendship like the big splotch of strained-lamb-with-vegetables Jeffrey had once spat onto one of the illustrations for Sanford’s Busy Day, so that she had to draw the whole page over.

But she could not draw this over; it would be in her life forever. And what made it worse was that she had brought it on herself, by trying to make love to somebody so ugly and peculiar and hopeless. A sort of fury came over her as she looked at Sandy, who was still sitting at the far end of the couch, his knobby white back bent as he pulled on his socks. She wanted to scream, to hit him, to beat his bald head and stooped shoulders with her fists. She was shocked by this impulse, however, and at once suppressed it, reminding herself that Sandy was not only her old friend, but a pathetic, unhappy person who deserved pity. All the same, he might have known. At least the second time—

“I should have known,” Sandy said suddenly, echoing Erica’s thoughts as he had a way of doing—in happier moments she had considered it a sign of their psychic sympathy. “I figured out a long while ago, anything I really wanted I couldn’t have. It’s my destiny.”

“That’s stupid,” Erica exclaimed. A new idea had come to her; she paused with one bare leg up, dangling mauve tights. “You know what it is, you’re doing this to yourself. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s not your destiny or anybody’s destiny to fail. Everyone’s entitled to some success, some happiness.”

“No.” Sandy, who had ceased dressing while she spoke, let out a long sigh and began dragging down his gray turtleneck sweater. “Not everyone. Not by a long shot. What you don’t realize yet, Erica, is that the devil is in charge of this world.

“It’s obvious, once you look at it.” he continued, smiling briefly and sourly. “Suppose you were the devil, and you wanted to make mankind as miserable as possible. At first you might think of afflicting them all with everything you could lay on: war and unemployment and heroin addiction and cancer and political torture and starvation and blindness and deformity and radiation poisoning. Have everyone in the world suffer, all the time.

“But that’s too easy. If the human condition is miserable everywhere, mankind will expect that, and be resigned to it. What you’d really want to do is make almost everyone sick and ugly and frightened and hungry. Then you’d have a few who didn’t suffer at all—whom everything always went right for—who were young, rich, beautiful, healthy and happy. And you’d scatter them around the world to discourage the others; to remind them every day, every hour, of “what they were missing.” Sandy’s voice was harsh. “That’s what people like you and Brian are for.”

“But things don’t go right for us.” Erica laughed uneasily, telling herself that Sandy was joking. “Not lately, anyhow.”

“No. Your turn is over. You’re being sent to join the majority.” He did not laugh.

“You don’t really believe all that.”

“I don’t know.” He spoke more slowly now, in a fainter voice. “I believe it sometimes.”

“I thought you believed in God, that God created the world, not the devil.”

“I didn’t say he created it. The devil can’t create anything. You only have to go out into the country and look around to know who made it—look at the fields, the sky, the birds. But of course that was quite a while ago. You can tell by what’s happening to the world that God doesn’t care about it any more.”

“And you think He doesn’t care about us any more either, whether we’re happy or not.”

“Or that it’s irrelevant to Him. A man I met at the monastery over in Elmira once said to me, “God isn’t interested in whether we’re happy, only in whether we’re good.”

“And do you agree with that?”

“I don’t know.” Sandy shrugged and bent down to tie his boots. “Sometimes I think wanting to be good is just another form of vanity.”

Of that whole sad scene, it is this last exchange which continues to press on Erica’s mind; everything else she can dismiss as Sandy’s fantasy, Sandy’s superstitious self-doubt and self-induced failure.

She can sympathize with the fantasy, though, for she too—especially when reading the newspaper—has seen the world as a place of misery; she has often thought that if God existed, He would be the devil. But fortunately Erica has not believed in God for years. Her scorn of all religious faith is profound and long-standing. It dates from the age of ten, when her mother, in an uncharacteristic impulse of neighborly gregariousness and social piety after the departure of Erica’s father, decided that it would be nice if her daughters attended Sunday school at the local Presbyterian church.

Erica was quite willing to go. Though raised almost as a heathen, she had observed the advantages of religious belief in her paternal grandmother. For Gran, life was orderly, serious and significant. Though she lived alone in a three-room apartment in Worcester, Massachusetts, she never complained of being bored like her daughter-in-law. Every day for her was important, presenting a constant series of problems in moral arithmetic. Every detail of behavior, down to setting a mousetrap or taking another slice of cake, was good or bad; every night there were complicated moral sums to add and subtract—even to multiply—in private dramatic consultation with God. Moreover, she explained, God does not make distinctions between persons. He was just as interested in the state of ten-year-old Erica’s conscience as in Gran’s own.