Alison Lurie - The War Between the Tates - A Novel

“Yes. No.” She laughs shudderingly.

“Lean on me: Breathe slowly ...That’s better. You shouldn’t get up so fast. Not good when you’re high.”

Erica breathes several times more. She looks around the room, but it has ceased to be alive or nice. Instead everything is flat and dead; the curtains, the pictures, the rug, the windows seem to have been badly painted onto the walls and floor, like cheap scenery.

“What I saw in the bathroom,” she says abruptly. “In the mirror picture. It’s not just the drug. I keep seeing her anyhow-where, this awful old woman. Only it’s me. I’m turning into her. I’m forty already, isn’t that horrible?”

“No,” Zed says after a considerable pause. “You’ve lived forty years. If you didn’t age, that would be horrible. Like those old film stars you see in L.A., made into plastic mummies of themselves.”

“Yes—But—” Erica hears her voice; a thin disembodied wailing sound. “I’m not used to it,” this voice continues. “You know I used to be very pretty, and wherever I went I looked well. A man came up to me once when I was sitting in front of Emerson Hall and he said I added to the beauty of the scene, the yellow leaves. Like the sun, and the yellow leaves. And wherever. But now I don’t any more. Pretty soon I’ll be like that disgusting jelly glass, spoiling the landscape everywhere. I hate getting old and ugly, I hate it. I hate It!” The wailing turns to sobbing. “Somebody’s crying,” she remarks. “I think it’s me.”

“Right. All right.” Zed is holding her, her face against his shirt, stroking her. The crying fades.

“That’s weird,” Erica says, swallowing a last sob. “I was crying, but not exactly.”

“It’s all right.”

“Thank you.” She hugs him and sits back. “But do you feel that too? Do you hate getting ugly and old?”

A pause. “It’s different for me,” Zed says finally. “I’ve always been ugly. Age doesn’t change that much. What I don’t like is the way time runs out. Knowing there are things I won’t do in this life, places I won’t see. People dying.”

Erica looks around the room, which is no longer flat like scenery but insubstantially three-dimensional, full of colored shadows. “Dying, I’m not afraid of that,” she says finally. “It’s behaving badly at the end. Wearing out weak and whiny and disgusting. I’d like to escape in a car accident, so I won’t have to go through the bad last part of my life. Sometimes I drive fast to help it along, especially when the icy roads last winter. But I might just be crippled for life, so I drive slower.

“I thought it would be nice for it to happen right after Christmas when I was going to fly to Boston,” she adds, watching the shadows slide. “The plane could fall down, so quick and easy. But it snowed too hard, all the flights were folded.” She laughs. “I was very disappointed. Not so much now ...Did you ever feel that?”

A long silence. Erica watches the shadows ducking and sliding.

“Did you ask me something?” Zed says finally.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“No. I want to answer you. I was thinking about it, but then I forgot ...What was the question?”

This time it is Erica who does not reply. She is absorbed in watching the shadows advance and retreat as the ceiling fixture sways on invisible streams of air. In the circle of brighter light beneath the bird lampshade, skeins of dust swirl like pale silk and then slowly settle through air which is a thin lukewarm blue substance, with levels and currents. Behind it the figure of Zed seems to wobble and fluctuate.

“All the air is full of water,” she says. “You’re very far away ...Why are you so far away in the water?”

“It’s because I’m a double Pisces.” Zed smiles. From a great distance he puts out his long arms to Erica, and around her, pulling her toward him. Oceans of air flow out between them. “Is that better?”

“Yes.” She leans against him, sighing. “I guess I’m really high now ...How long will this last?”

“Not long. It’s a short trip. The housewife’s special. We should start coming down fairly soon.”

“I like it. I feel all floaty, as if I were swimming. Diving, da you?”

Zed replies, or does not reply; she is not sure. She is watching the walls of the swimming pool standing up around them tall and white like three angels spreading out their wide white wings to one another. The fourth is sloping in to meet them, alighting his face, the dormer window, is streaked with tears of rain from all the sorrow he has seen outside. Yet she isn’t hallucinating in the conventional sense. She sees only walls; but she knows them to be angels. “The walls are white angels,” she informs Zed.

“That’s’ nice. What are they doing?”

“I don’t know. I think they’re protecting us, as long as we stay here.” She relaxes against him, laughing gently. “I like it here. Let’s stay forever.”

“All right.” Zed is absently stroking her left forearm with one finger. The fine hairs quiver like the antennae of a hundred moths, sending out tiny sparks.

“That’s strange,” she says. “It’s pins and needles, but warmer. How does it feel to you?”

“Nice.”

Erica raises her free hand and strokes his wrist, where the freckles are shaded by red moth hairs. More sparks appear, explode outward; the room is no longer a swimming pool but an electrical field with concentric circles of tiny, bright plus signs pulsing out from, the points where she and Sandy are in direct contact. “We’re manufacturing electricity,” she tells him. “The minus signs are in the corners of the room.”

“Is that so.” Zed looks sideways down. The pupils of his pale eyes are large and black. After a long time, or quite soon, he kisses her lightly. The effect is of a blurred electric shock.

“It’s very hot in here,” she murmurs presently. “All this moth electricity makes it very very too hot. Should we open the window?”

“No.” Zed’s mouth is beside her ear; his voice comes from inside her head. “Let’s take off our clothes.”

“All right,” Erica agrees, while a part of her mind which seems to be shut up in a small cage remarks in a weak whispering voice that this is something she had decided not to do.

“Careful, though. Don’t sit up or move too fast, or you’ll get dizzy. Pretty high now.”

“I am dizzy.” Erica begins to pull her sweater over her head in slow motion. “It’s, all right though ...Only it takes so long, is all,” she adds after several minutes inside the sweater, a hot mauve cave hung with moss. “I don’t like it in here. Too much moss.” She waves her arms.

“Wait. Let me help ...There. Is that better?”

“Much better.” She stretches. “That Was a brilliant idea. You’re really brilliant, do you know that, Sandy? You are, actually. That’s funny.” Naked, pleasantly dizzy, Erica flops back onto the cushions, laughing with delight at Zed, whose arms and torso shine with a watery Day-Glo light. “I never saw anything like that. How come I’m not brilliant like you? she adds, holding up one leg. “My legs are extra long, but they’re not shining.”

“Sure they are.” Zed drops his pants into the green tweed sea, where they float gently, and moves toward her, “You’re shining all over, like the morning star.”

She laughs, sways forward. Experimentally, she rubs his phosphorescent cheek with pursed lips. The effect is—Magnetic? Radioactive? “Or it’s something to do with time,” she adds. “Do you think it’s time?”

“Yes,” Zed says; or perhaps “No.”

Erica looks down. Something amazing is happening: an exotic, pale, silky thing is growing, rising, reddening—