Alison Lurie - The War Between the Tates - A Novel

“What’s that? Is that you?” She laughs. “It’s like a big strawberry cone. Golly, fantastic.” She bends over to lick the cone, which tastes faintly of strawberry ice cream. “It’s good, you should have some,” she says presently.

“No thanks. But help yourself.”

“I never did this before,” she adds a little later. “Something frowned me not to but she’s got very small now in the cage and her hat is stupid so I don’t hear her ...Anyhow”—she raises her head again—“Brian is black raspberry, and I don’t like black raspberry. It tastes too brownish purple.” She begins giggling softly and falls back away on the-day bed; she shuts her eyes again and watches the lights flowing behind her eyelids, mixed with colored ice cream. Zed lies down too, above her, around her—or is he inside her?

It doesn’t matter. Because the lights—the colors—the strawberry electric current—She lets herself slide away, into it—Yes—Yes—

But then, from far off in her head, in a different, sharper voltage, something buzzes. An unpleasant flat doorbell vibration, dirty red. Danger—anxiety.

“Hey, wait! I didn’t—We can’t—” she cries. In very slow motion, slipping back into the current again and again, she begins to struggle, to kick and paddle. Finally, gasping, shuddering, she sits up, disengaged from Zed.

“No!” he calls out. There is an explosion, a fountain effect in the air, wet, silver. Erica watches it with blurred fear and regret from a safe distance. “Oh—Erica—God—” He falls back shaking and sobbing.

Dizzy still, she bends over him. “I’m sorry,” she says, patting his shoulder, averting her eyes from his face, which is squeezed into a knot: red, awful, “I was afraid—I didn’t expect you to—”

“No,” Zed replies finally, in a voice which seems to come from several miles off. He does not move.

“I’m sorry.” Avoiding the place on the day bed where the fountain overflowed and the fountain itself, she puts her arms around him; at last even looks him in the face. It is unknotted, human again, though the pale eyes are still damp, red-edged.

“Are you all right?” she asks anxiously, several times.

“All right,” he answers eventually. “How are you?”

“All right, I guess. I’m not so high any more. The rug is slower.”

“Yes.”

Erica drops her arms. Silence.

“I see it now,” he says finally.

Erica sits back, following his stare into the far corner of the room, noting that the sliding shadows are quieter now, their colors fading. “What do you see?”

“It was a kind of voice, actually. Out of the waste-basket.” He smiles. “But it was right. It told me not to start the meditation center.”

“Oh? Your students will be disappointed.”

“They can go ahead on their own. If they want to. It’ll be better for them that way, in the end.”

“And much easier on you.” She smiles. “And they can still come to you and get advice.”

He shakes his head. “No. I’ve got to give up the bookshop, too.”

“Give it up? Really? Why?”

“It’s no good. It was all right at first; but now there’s too many camp followers—kids who don’t want to study seriously, just hang around and drink tea and gossip about each other’s charts, and have me play the Great Guru ...They’re not all like that. But those that aren’t, the serious ones, I’ve already taught them what I know. If I go on, I’ll start telling them lies.” He sighs, reaches over, and pulls his clothes toward him.

“It was the same in California,” he continues. “For a while everything was fine; then people started taking me too seriously. Some of them wanted me to put my lectures onto tape. I let them persuade me, and pretty soon I was involved with recording studios and sound experts and publicity hacks, really bad karma. And then this TV Star, Mona Moon, tried to give me a house in Laurel Canyon. Her idea was I would live up there and do astrology and send out spiritual vibrations, and she and her friends would come and absorb them.

“I tried to tell her I was a spiritual fraud, but she thought that was just holy humility. We had this stupid scene where she flung herself on the floor and tried to kiss my sneakers.” Zed laughs tiredly. “So I cut out. I decided then it was my own fault for picking a town like L.A. But it’s the same everywhere. Eventually, every place goes bad. It only takes a little longer in a cold climate.” He begins to drag his pants on.

“You’re going to close the store,” Erica says, trying to sort it out. She too has begun to dress, but slowly and cautiously, for her head still swims with light.

“I’m not sure. Maybe I’ll leave it to Tim He’s got a good business sense; and he’s a pretty fair astrologer.”

“But what will you do, then?”

“I don’t know.”

“You could go back to teaching,” she says, rather eagerly.’

“I’m not so sure. I haven’t taught in six years, not since I quit LA State in the middle of the term. I’m probably blackballed by the APA.”

“I’m sure you could get a job somewhere. After all, you have a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard.”

“I don’t want a job,” Zed says, pulling his gray sweater down, then reaching up to free his fringe of untidy, faded red hair from the turtleneck collar. “I don’t believe in philosophy any more ...All I know is, I’m going away.”

“Going away?” As Erica echoes these words she sees an image: a man with a bundle and a stick going along a path, perhaps the Path Sandy speaks of. It is a painting somewhere, in a museum, or a book—Yes.

“You know, I just had a flash,” she tells him. “A sort of vision, really, inside my head. You were in a painting. I mean, the painting was of you, all along, only I never realized it. It’s by Bosch: a man in ragged clothes starting on a journey, and he looks like you.”

“I think I know the picture you mean. Is there a dog in it, and a ruined house in the background?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“It’s his version of the last card of the Tarot. The Fool, it’s called. The man in Bosch’s painting has the same pose, and the dog at his heels, and the stick.”

“Really? That’s interesting. I didn’t, know that.” She turns back to him. “I’m sorry you’re going away.”

“Are you.”

“Of course I am. Very sorry. Without you, this town will be impossible.”

“Come with me, then.”

“I’d love to.” Erica laughs. “I wish I really could.”

“Why can’t you?” Zed does not laugh.

“Well, because of the house—Because of Jeffrey and Matilda.”

“I thought you were tired of Jeffrey and Matilda.”

“I am,” Erica says with feeling. “But that’s why I have to stay with them. I mean, nobody else would do it. But it’s my job to take care of my children, however tiresome they are, because I’m their mother.”

“And Brian’s their father. Why not give him a turn?” There is no doubt this time; he is at least partly serious.

Inside Erica’s head, there is a sensation of expanding light. The word “yes” forms in her mouth, but as she begins to voice it she looks at Zed, into his pale eyes with their enlarged dark pupils, and there she has a final, objective vision. It is double and achromatic, like a stereopticon slide. Reflected in the center of each eye she can see the tiny figure of Sandy going away on the Path; and she herself, just behind him, also dressed in dirty colorless rags. They are walking slightly uphill to the right, away from the house and the people, toward a dim cold misty blankness beyond the edge of the frame. In a moment they will both pass out of the picture into this void. She thinks that the picture is symbolically right; that it is the act of a Fool to set out for no known destination.