The War Between the Tates: A Novel (12 page)

“Okay ... What a relief Lennie’s gone back to New York,” she adds after Roo has clumped upstairs. “I should be over it by now, but every time he comes I get uptight about having the house picked up and the kids clean. ‘Civilized people bathe themselves every day,’ he says.” Danielle imitates her husband’s precise, cool diction.

“Mm,” Erica assents, not adding that she shares this view. Danielle too, in her opinion, could have used a bath and clean clothes. Her red Mexican cotton dress is badly wrinkled; her brown feet stained with dirt.

Danielle’s slovenliness is a recent development. Like her house, she has altered since Leonard left, and in some of the same ways. There is less of her—nearly ten pounds less—and what remains is more untidy. The elaborate, almost European elegance she had gone in for during her marriage—the silk blouses and lace-patterned stockings, the smoothly shining constructions of hair, as carefully braided and rolled as French pastry—is gone. Danielle still looks European, but no longer in the style of the aristocracy. Now she wears bright, heavy, embroidered peasant dresses; her legs are bare and often unshaven; her hair is roughly held back by a leather thong. It is as if, lacking a man’s love, her sense of her own value has decreased. But this is an uncomfortable thought; Erica puts it aside and tries to attend to what her best friend is saying.

“—in his new place on West Fourth Street he’s got a built-in kitchen and everything organized. His ideal environment.” Danielle laughs briefly and pours herself more sherry.

“Brian says there’s only one room, not much larger than this,” Erica reminds her comfortingly. “And no view. Just a brick wall.”

“Yeh, he complains about that. He always looks on the down side, especially around here of course; he doesn’t want me to get envious. I’m supposed to feel sorry for him and think how hard his life is.” She laughs again harshly. “But he’s pretty well suited. He never could take being responsible for a whole house. And you know the yard drove him nuts. As soon as he got it in order something would start growing and fuck it up again.”

“I remember how cross he was about Matilda and Roo playing with the gravel, getting it into the grass.”

“Yeh. He never liked living with children. I think that’s the real reason he left.”

“Mm.” Over the past, fifteen months Danielle has put forward many possible real reasons for Leonard’s departure. When she does so her voice becomes rough, her language coarsens; but her eyes—wide, brown, damp—give her away; In spite of everything she is still, as Jeffrey or Matilda would put it, hung up on him. Erica imagines Leonard as a free-standing metal coatrack of the type placed by Corinth University in the corners of offices. She visualizes Danielle, hung up on one of its raised metal arms by the back of the neck of her red dress, the yoke of which is embroidered with yellow birds and flowers; Danielle has hung there, swearing and sweating, kicking and struggling to get down, for a year and a half. Erica feels thankful that she has never been in that position.

“—and of course he loves living in Manhattan, but he complains all the time how expensive it is and how much better off we are here. He’d like to cut down on what he’s sending us. Or stop it entirely.”

“He wouldn’t do that,” Erica says.

“Don’t kid yourself.” Danielle leans forward, putting her empty glass down on Leonard’s teak coffee table, now marked with overlapping rings. “Men will do anything they can get away with. And in this society they can get away with a hell of a lot. Look at my husband.” Though their divorce is over a year old, Danielle still speaks of Leonard as her husband. “Nobody thinks the worse of him for taking his family to the middle of nowhere and then deserting them. If I’d left the girls and Lennie here in Corinth and gone back to New York by myself, everyone would say I was very irresponsible, immature and selfish—if not sick.” Danielle laughs. “Oh, well.” She leans back into the soft, dusty pillows of the sofa, resting her head on one raised brown arm and putting her dirty brown feet up on the coffee table. “So how’s everything at your house?”

“All right, I guess,” Erica lies.

“Did you go back and see about the job yet?”

“No. I called and told them I couldn’t take it. Brian’s so set against the idea, it didn’t seem worth arguing about it any more. And it’s not as if I were absolutely dying to do library research.”

“No.” Danielle frowns. “But you did want a job. After all, it’s the principle of the thing.”

“Oh, don’t say that.” Erica giggles sadly. “That’s what Brian says. He thinks it was very underhanded and thoughtless of me to go looking for work without consulting him first. It makes him feel he can’t trust me.”

“It makes
him
feel he can’t trust
you,
” Danielle mutters with emotion. “That’s really—” She swallows and is silent.

Since she has never told Danielle of Brian’s untrustworthiness, Erica looks at her friend with surprise. Apparently, news of Brian’s behavior last spring has somehow reached her. She hesitates, doubting whether she should admit it now. After all, the affair with Wendee is in the past; she is trying to forget it, and has partly forgotten it. Danielle too says nothing; she folds her arms and looks out the window, visibly setting her jaw. Presumably she thinks Erica is ignorant of what Brian has done; that she remains a pitiable dupe. But Erica has no wish to support this character in addition to that of betrayed wife.

“I didn’t know you knew about all that,” she therefore says finally.

“I didn’t know you knew. Oh, shit I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right.” Erica smiles weakly.

“Here, have another drink.” Danielle slops sherry into Erica’s glass. “I only just heard this week,” she apologizes. “I thought about calling you, but then I thought, Well, hell, how do I know it’s true, I didn’t see it.” Her usually strong voice wavers.

“Of course, I understand,” Erica says, touched—and rather proud to realize that her friend is more upset now than she.

“How did you hear about it?” Danielle asks.

“I found the letter the girl wrote to him.”

“Then it is true.”

“Yes.” Erica smiles again, conscious of doing so bravely. “He admitted it.”

“You know I really didn’t believe it.” Danielle sighs. “I mean, it just didn’t sound like the sort of thing Brian would do. He’s always been so moral, so righteous.”

“I know.” Erica sees that she has been wrong. Danielle is too loyal to blame her or think less of her for Brian’s unfaithfulness. She could have told her story sooner. “And I didn’t figure he would ever take up with a girl like that, either. Do you know her?”

“No.” Erica shakes her head. “I never saw her.” She does not add that she had looked for Wendee all last spring whenever she was on campus—or rather, that she had looked for a beautiful young blonde. Several times she thought she had located the right person, and managed to ask her name; but she had always been wrong. (Actually Erica had seen Wendy often on campus, and once sat at the next table to hers in the coffee shop, without noticing her, for she was not anywhere near pretty enough to be the Wendee she imagined. And Wendy, who did not expect to see Erica on campus and was not looking for her, had not noticed Erica. ) Since June, when Brian told her that Wendy had left town, she had ceased to look.

“She’s nothing special. One of those moon-faced girls with sad blue eyes and stringy bleached hair. Honestly, I was surprised.”

“It is surprising,” Erica says, frowning so hard her head begins to hurt. Obviously something is wrong, either with Danielle’s information or with Brian’s description of Wendee. Love is supposed to be myopic, but not that myopic; and anyhow Brian has always denied being in, love, this means, what?

“When I saw her having coffee Thursday I thought, What a dumb-looking girl.”

“You saw her Thursday,” Erica says, choosing the words as if out of a barrel of live wet crabs which her best friend had just proffered to her.

“Yeh. In the Blue Cow.”

Erica’s head begins to hurt more, especially toward the back; to vibrate like the electronic music on Jeffrey’s records. Among the vibrations is one which announces to her that Brian has begun another scummy affair, this time with an ugly girl. It is the new affair of which Danielle has heard.

“Who told you about it?” she asks through the electronic static.

“Oh, it was one of our TAs; Gail Farber her name is. She’s kind of a chatterer. We were having coffee, and this girl came in. Gail waved to her—she knows her from the Krishna Bookshop—and then she told us who she was.” Danielle’s voice is apologetic, warm with sympathy.

“What else did she say?”

“Nothing else. Of course she didn’t know I’m a friend of yours.”

“Did she tell you the girl’s name?”

“I don’t think so. She said she was a graduate student in psychology. Hey!” Danielle bounces forward. “You know what I think? I think the actual reason Brian doesn’t want you to work for Barclay is that he’s in the psych department. He’s afraid you’ll meet this girl, or hear something about her. Hell, I’m positive that’s it.” The temperature of her voice has risen to a rolling boil.

“I never thought of that,” Erica says falteringly, staring around the living room. “But I guess you might be right.”

“What a lousy trick. Hey, I’m really sorry.” Danielle puts her hand on Erica’s arm, a comforting gesture.

“That’s all right.” Erica shifts nervously, causing her friend’s hand to fall off; she dislikes being touched, and hates to be pitied; which always implies to her that she is pitiable. “I suppose everybody in that department knows by now,” she says. “I suppose even Barclay knows.”

“Oh, I don’t think so, he—”

“Probably he knew when he interviewed me.” In contrast to Danielle’s, her tone is cool, even cold. The words seem to fall onto the Oriental rug like invisible lumps of ice.

“I’m sure he didn’t. He’s not the type to hear gossip. He’s never been friendly with students, as far as I know.”

“Mm.” Erica does not want to enter into a discussion of Mr. Barclay’s social contacts. Her vehement wish is to get out of Danielle’s living room and be alone to think. “Listen,” she says. “What time is it? ...I’d better get home, B—” (she suppresses the name, unvoiced) “—the children will be wondering what’s happened to me.”

And what has happened to me? Erica thinks as she walks with her headache along the uneven sidewalk in the direction of her car, a block away. Danielle’s street is near the university, and dominated by two large fraternity houses; there is always a parking problem. The curb is lined with dented metal and stained plastic bins, overflowing with the week’s offal. There are also paper bags full of bottles and beer cans, and bundles of rainsodden newspapers tied with string. In front of one fraternity a maroon overstuffed chair, badly spotted, lies on its side vomiting kapok—apparently a casualty of last night’s brawl. Garbage, Erica thinks. Litter, pollution, filth.

Walking through the muggy afternoon, she thinks that she had believed the filth was gone, that she had begun to forget it; and now it has appeared again, and worse; much worse. She had thought that by casually and lovelessly screwing a pretty girl Brian had polluted and dishonored their marriage as much as he possibly could. But she was wrong. Now he has gone further in dishonor—he is screwing an ugly girl. He has become unclean, revolting—like that can there, tipped over and spewing out beer bottles and old bones.

Litter and lies. Danielle was right: Brian has concealed his real reasons for not wanting Erica to work in the psychology department He has invented false arguments and spoken of The Children, pretending a false concern for their welfare, blaming her for lacking concern. And even that evening last week, when she agreed not to take the job, and he put his arms gently around her, and stroked her back smoothly the way she likes, and called her “princess,” he was lying, lying. Erica feels dizzy with rage and grief; she stumbles on the broken sidewalk and puts one hand on the nearest object—a telephone pole, stained dark-brown and with a numbered aluminum label nailed to it—to steady herself. He had pulled off her shoes gently, one at a time, and said—But this is too much to bear thinking of; Erica takes a breath, lets go of the telephone pole, and walks on.

To protect his ugly, trashy affair, Brian has lied and manipulated her into giving up something she really wanted to do, and needed to do. Then, instead of thanking her for her generosity, he has blamed her for having even thought of it. He has shamed and bullied her; he has managed to make it appear that wanting to hire a housekeeper and take an ordinary part-time job, something thousands of women in America do, is selfish and reprehensible. Again, just as last spring, she has been maneuvered into the wrong; into a deep moral hole.

Turning the corner, Erica sights her car next to another heap of rubbish. It is a shiny bulging tan station wagon which Brian bought last spring, and which she has not yet been able to get used to. It is slow to start, clumsy to drive—and impossible to parallel-park; after trying on one memorable occasion, Leonard Zimmern had named it The Jar of Peanut Butter. Erica, who does most of the daily driving, recently suggested that they might trade it in for a smaller car, like Danielle’s Peugeot. This had infuriated Brian, who is suspicious of all foreign goods, and opposed to their purchase on economic grounds. If she didn’t like the car, why hadn’t she said so before he bought it?—i.e., before she knew. Then Brian had delivered a lecture on responsibility for one’s choices and the balance of trade, which ended as usual lately with Erica dug farther down into her moral hole. It is very disagreeable and unattractive there, and Erica knows that she herself is becoming rapidly more disagreeable and unattractive, like most prisoners.

But now, this afternoon, a ladder has been lowered into the hole, and she can climb out. Yes. It is Brian who is guilty now; it is Brian who can be exposed. Erica stands with her hand on the door of the station wagon, thinking hard through her headache. She must climb carefully; she must remember what happened last time, how Brian had eventually turned his guilt into hers. She must be armed against every possible counterattack. She must stay cool and not expose her own weakness—no sobbing this time, no passionate jealousy; no accusations without evidence.