Alison Lurie - The War Between the Tates - A Novel

No escape. The pursuing forces of blind female error and blind female nature had finally caught up with and defeated him. Because Of his own religion, duty, he would still have to wed Wendy, knowing that she had deceived him in every sense. There was also a good chance of his becoming the butt of a savage irony: that having paid over a thousand dollars to have his own child destroyed, he would have to bring up as his the child of a wog graduate student. Very likely it would be brownish in color and interested in machines.

But in that case, surely he would be justified in getting a divorce? A second divorce: more public scandal, more lawyers’ fees, more alimony payments and child support. For legally the child would be his; economically he would be responsible for it until its twenty-first birthday. At which time, if he hadn’t yet succumbed to these multiple pressures, Brian would be sixty-eight. How would he be able to afford it? Even if he were to teach summer school every year, move into an even smaller and nastier apartment, give up the idea of going abroad not only this summer but any summer, or on his next sabbatical, perhaps of even taking his sabbatical ...

All night these thoughts ran through Brian’s head. In the roar of trucks climbing the hill below Alpine Towers, the screech of planes overhead, the cackle of a radio next door, he heard the sound of laughter—the laughter of a monstrous regiment of women. He dozed briefly and was awakened by nightmares (mares, he noted with a crazy clarity, not stallions) in which the principal sound effect was a loud horselaugh.

When dawn, late and gray, bleached the window, he rose from beside Wendy and went to make himself a cup of tea, the solace of childhood illnesses and wakeful nights. In suppers and robe he stood before the stove waiting for the water to boil, feeling old for the first time in his life. He would be forty-eight at the end of this year, getting on for half a century. No age to play around with freaked-out college students, argue with abortionists, climb out of college buildings on a rope, wrestle with hysterical women, and become the father of a bastard.

Yet he had in a way chosen to do all these things, Brian thought as the electric coils reddened dully under the kettle. It was not only bad luck, but rash ambition, sensual greed and egotistic hubris which had led him onto these battlefields—finally into a labyrinth of trenches where he would wander for the rest of his life, mocked and harassed, clawed and bitten by female monsters. If only it were not too late to find a way out! He would ask nothing more; he was cured forever of wanting fame, power and the love of unbalanced schoolgirls:

Astonishingly, his prayer was heard. Two days later when he walked into his apartment at the end of a long day, Wendy stood up out of her chair by the window and announced that she was leaving him. It wasn’t anything personal, she insisted. She loved Brian, but she just couldn’t hack the idea of marriage, or of living in Corinth the rest of her life. Also, she didn’t want her baby to be brought up here. “You see,” she explained, “the stars can’t do it all. I hafta figure out how the kid can have the best developmental experiences. If I stay here and get into this academic life style, he’s bound to pick up some of its hangups and shitty mental sets.” Therefore, Wendy continued, while Brian stood stupefied by the door holding his briefcase and that evening’s newspaper, she was planning to split after finals for a far-out commune she’d heard of in an unpopulated part of Northern California. Pressed, she admitted that she would be accompanied on this journey by an old friend named Ralph. And how did Ralph feel about her pregnancy? According to Wendy, he was tolerant, even enthusiastic. “Ralph wants to work out a total relationship. He really digs kids. He doesn’t care whose kid it is; he hasn’t got your thing about possessions. He lives completely in the Now.”

Brian’s reminiscences are interrupted by the sight of someone coming toward him, picking her way among groups of sitting and squatting peace marchers; someone he is, for the first time in over a year, very glad to see: Erica Tate.

“Oh, there you are,” Erica says. She is looking well, though too thin; her hair is brushed back from her face, accentuating this. She is wearing a green sleeveless dress, and her paper arm band with its blue peace symbol is fixed high on a slim bare arm. “I left the station wagon down on Tioga Street, across from the orthodontist’s. So I can drive you back here all right.”

“That’s fine,” Brian replies; like his wife he speaks in a careful, almost formal manner. “Thank you.” He smiles cordially, as if they were on opposite sides of a conference table, negotiating some important treaty. “I’ll meet you there after all this is over.”

“I’ll probably be later than you are, though,” Erica says. “I mean, if my group starts—”

“That’s all right. I’ll wait.” Brian smiles again in the same manner. “I don’t have anything to do this afternoon. Classes have been canceled, so I won’t have to meet my seminar.” He is conscious of deliberately elaborating his point, as if anticipating simultaneous translation. “If you’d like to walk with us, though, that would be fine.” The Peace March is to be led by prominent representatives of the University, the Church and the Army (the wheelchair veteran, plus two of his buddies who will carry a banner).

“No, thank you,” Erica says with careful good will. “I promised Danielle and the WHEN people I’d go with them.”

“Ah.” Attempting not to convey annoyance Brian smiles some more—but briefly, for he also doesn’t want to seem relieved at not having to march beside Erica. In fact, he feels neither relief nor annoyance—only a desire that she shouldn’t be hurt or offended in any way.

Yet some emotion, some tension at least, must have shown on his face, for Erica frowns slightly, then smiles slightly, and finally offers:

“If you’d like to—I mean, would you like to come back to the house afterward for some lunch?”

“Thank you; that would be a help. The Faculty Club’s sure to be jammed by then.”

“Yes.” She opens her mouth as if about to add something, then shuts it. “Well, I’ll see you later,” she says. “I’d better get back to the Hens.”

Erica sets off in the direction of Danielle’s party, but before she reaches it she consults her watch, and finding that the march will not start for fifteen minutes, turns toward the washroom—not because she needs to, but in order to think over what has just happened and organize her mind. In inviting her to walk with him, Brian was in effect proposing that they appear together in public for the first time in over six months. She had declined, not in order to reject all that this might imply, but merely out of surprise and confusion of feelings. Whenever something sudden happens, her first impulse is to withdraw, consider the situation, regroup her forces.

Of course in a way she isn’t surprised, Erica thinks, shoving open the door of a long bare crowded room painted battleship-gray and smelling of pine antiseptic. There were signs of what might be coming when she spoke to Brian two days ago—even last Sunday evening, when after returning the children he came into the house, and upstairs to the study where Erica was working on drawings for the Art Festival. He shut the door behind him and told her, in a tight, strained, self-mocking voice, that Wendy was probably pregnant; not by him, but by a Pakistani engineering student, and that she had just left him for an unemployed Chicago film maker.

Erica’s first reaction to this earth-shattering announcement was compassion for Wendy. The poor girl, she thought; the poor, silly, confused child. But during the next few days some of her sympathy began leaking out through the cracks. It was reasonable that Wendy should grow disillusioned with Brian. It was forgivable, though very careless of her to have got pregnant again, and understandable that she should try to conceal the fact for a while. But that she should have been so casually unfaithful; that she should have so calmly planned to present Brian with someone else’s baby—that was hard to understand. Had she been lying to herself, then, or only to Brian and Erica, when she said last fall that she would “always belong to him completely”?