The War Between the Tates: A Novel (17 page)

After class Erica occasionally had coffee with him on Mass. Avenue; and once Sandy, who was rather pathetically stuck on her for a while, took her to hear
The Magic Flute.
At the end of that year he left Cambridge, but he came back now and then for a visit. He had been at her wedding on one of those trips; not that she’d invited him, but somebody had brought him along. He was rather sweet, really, Sandy—amusing to talk to, and intelligent—but sort of a lost soul even then. It wasn’t so surprising that he should end up out of a job, involved in Eastern mystical nonsense. But it was a little sad.

Erica turns north at the edge of campus onto the main road. A hard, high wind is blowing across it, shifting banks of cold-looking clouds. The last she’d heard of Sandy was a picture postcard of some Japanese temple; a shiny color photograph—on the reverse no address, no message, only his name and a haiku he’d copied out, something about crickets. That was several years ago ... three, four? She tries to recall whether the card was mailed directly here, or forwarded from Cambridge. In other words, does Sandy know the Tates are in Corinth? Were it anyone else she would have assumed not, otherwise they would have called. But with Sandy you couldn’t be sure—especially if he has turned into some kind of superstitious eccentric.

If she goes to the bookstore with Danielle, and it really is Sandy, then she will have to invite him to the house, to dinner, whatever he has turned into. But there is no need to do it instantly. Next week would be soon enough, or next month. If he has joined one of those vegetarian religions, it means a special meal, too. Well, that egg curry from the United Nations cookbook is quite good, with walnuts and chutney. Danielle can come, though Brian will not like that; nor will he like the vegetarian curry. He always demands meat for dinner. And Sandy himself will probably annoy Brian, or at least bore him. But perhaps it would not be unpleasant to bore and annoy Brian a little. And when you learn that an old friend is in town, the right thing to do is invite him to dinner, for instance next weekend.

Out on Jones Creek Road the wind is blowing even harder, scraping down the grass in the fields, pulling the few remaining wrinkled leaves from the oaks. As Erica comes up the hill past the latest Glenview Homes, which always look particularly exposed and vulgar from now until the first snowfall, she sees that there is someone, a young girl, sitting on the top step of her front porch next to two suitcases. From her attitude—body huddled against the wind beside a post, head down, eyes shut—it appears that she has been sitting there a long time; or is very cold, or very tired, or both. As Erica’s car enters the driveway, however, the girl hears it, and sits upright.

Erica turns off the ignition and sets the brake. Her thought is that this person is at the wrong house; that she has come to visit someone in a Glenview Home. Her suitcases, which are of molded plastic, pinkish tan, suggest this. She has yellow hair, most of which is pulled into braids that hang limply on either side of a round, ordinary Glenview Homes sort of face, while escaped shreds blow across it.

Erica gets out of the car with her books, and walks around it. “Can I help you?” she asks in a neutral, pleasant voice.

Slowly, the girl stands up. She is short—hardly taller than Erica though she stands a step higher—and not quite as young as she first looked. Her eyes are red-rimmed, worn, as though she had a bad cold, or had been weeping.

“Are you Mrs. Tate?”

“Yes.” Erica smiles encouragingly, not puzzled, since the name is within view, painted by her in script on their mailbox.

“Mrs. Brian Tate?” she repeats, with a sort of tired eagerness.

“That’s right.”

“I’ve come to apologize to you, before I leave town. I’m Wendy Gahaghan.”

“Wendy Gahaghan?” Erica shields her chest with the facsimile edition of the
Book of Kells.
Wendee? But she’s not beautiful; not even terribly pretty. She’s just ordinary.

“Uh huh ...You know who I am?”

“Yes.” Erica has a sense of speaking with difficulty, through her teeth. “I know all about it.” She grips the books tighter. It is for this limp, snuffly, ordinary girl that Brian has behaved so atrociously, caused so much pain, so much rage! Wendy looks at her blankly, waiting; it is not clear for what. If she is to be scolded, insulted, even struck, her stance suggests she will not have the energy to defend herself. Her head hangs sideways. You miserable, cheap, nondescript—But Erica has not been brought up to insult strangers; she cannot voice the words. Besides, if she does insult Wendy, she will be jumping back into the wrong-hole. Wendy came here at last to apologize, and I—

“You’d better come inside,” she says.

Awkwardly, she holds open both the screen door and the front door, while Wendy, weighed down lopsidedly with suitcases, plods past her, and stands dumbly in the hall.

“In here.” Erica leads Wendy toward the sitting room, where last night’s paper still lies on the sofa, and the curtains are due to be cleaned. The kitchen, where she usually sits with Danielle and other friends, is tidier; but Wendy is not a friend, and probably will not notice anyhow.

Abandoning her suitcases in the middle of the rug, Wendy takes the nearest chair, which happens to be Brian’s—something she could not have known, but which makes Erica shiver nevertheless. I must not be mean or hysterical, I must behave well and do the right thing, Erica tells herself, sitting down formally opposite Wendy on a straight chair which she has not sat in for three years. A pause; but she is not obliged to break it.

“I’m not going to take up that much of your time,” Wendy finally begins, moving forward to the extreme edge of Brian’s chair as if to demonstrate this. “All I wanted to tell you is, I’m sorry for the hassle I’ve caused around here.” She takes a breath.

“Yes,” Erica says neutrally. Since she will probably never see her again, she is cataloging Wendy’s appearance for future reference: pale round face, conventional childish features, bitten nails.

“I mean, it’s racked me up all along what I was laying on you, somebody I never even met, you know?” Wendy’s hands are clutched together in her lap; her voice is high, uncertain. A faint New York accent—lower-middle-class. “I used to think how you were living right here in town and you knew all about it. And if you wanted you could probably report me to the grad committee and get me thrown out of school. Or you could come over someday and shoot me. Only you never did, you know?” Wendy’s voice catches again. Erica realizes she is not merely guilty and nervous, as she ought to be, but actually frightened.

“No,” she agrees, trying to ease the tension a little. “It never occurred to me.”

“I mean, what I did to you, it was shitty. Some of the professors around here, their wives probably wouldn’t give a damn. But BRIAN.” She pronounces his name with a special exhalation of air, of awe. “I mean, if you did shoot me, everybody who knew him would say, ‘Well, okay,’ you know?”

The idea that Brian is of such unique importance and value that infringement of rights in him would justify murder annoys Erica profoundly, although (or even because) she might have subscribed to it in the past. Naturally, she does not show this annoyance. “I wouldn’t know how to shoot anyone,” she merely says, smiling briefly.

Wendy smiles back; her smile is timid, grateful. She has small uneven white teeth, like a child.

“The other thing I wanted to say, it’s that you shouldn’t blame Brian.” She takes another breath. “I mean the, uh, you know, relationship wasn’t his idea. I like persecuted him into it. If it wasn’t for that, I bet he wouldn’t have ever got off with any chick.”

“Perhaps,” Erica says, thinking that Wendy is deceived, for Brian is off with another chick even now, and one reportedly much inferior to her. Her defense does not persuade Erica of Brian’s relative innocence, but rather the reverse. It demonstrates that Brian had not only seduced this girl last spring, but had somehow managed to convince her that it was all her fault. Just as he has so often tried to convince Erica that everything was hers. She’d like to tell him—

And she will tell him. I had a visitor today, she will remark calmly after supper tonight, when the children are out of the way, when Brian is fed, relaxed and expecting no unpleasantness. Who do you think it was? she will ask. A visitor to lunch. And then bring up the other one, because it is time for that. Yes.

“Look,” she says aloud, speaking for the first time in a normal conversational voice. “Would you like a cup of coffee? Or something to eat, perhaps. Have you had lunch?”

“Oh no, no thank you.” Wendy looks frightened again; can she suspect that Erica, having neglected to shoot her, now intends to poison her?

“I haven’t eaten lunch yet myself,” Erica continues reassuringly, standing up. “I’m going to make myself a tuna-fish sandwich, and you could have one too if you like.”

“No thanks, really. I better not.” Wendy also rises. “Hey,” she adds, trailing Erica toward the kitchen. “You hafta believe me, you know. I mean about Brian. That he’s not responsible.”

“Brian is a grown man,” Erica says, opening the refrigerator to remove milk, lettuce and a bowl of tunafish-salad mix; and shutting it again with the emphasis her tone lacks.

“But it was my fault really. For months I kept coming around to his office, and he always wasn’t having any. He tried to help me get over it, he was beautiful about it, and so patient and intelligent, well you know how he is, but I couldn’t. I just cried all the time and kept saying how I was going to have a nervous breakdown if he didn’t love me.”

“I see,” Erica remarks, rinsing two pieces of lettuce in the sink under an unnecessarily hard flow of water.

“But that was straight, you know,” Wendy insists. “I figure I would have flipped out pretty soon.” She makes the gesture of someone exhausted or insane flipping a pancake, in demonstration. “I was really flaky.” Erica takes a loaf of whole-grain rye bread out of the bread drawer. “I’m not getting across to you,” Wendy says anxiously. “You’re not listening to me; you’re just angry.”

“I’m not angry, at
you,
” Erica corrects, opening the mayonnaise jar. “I think it’s very honest and decent of you to come and see me like this.” In her head, she contrasts the natural whole-grain honesty and decency of Wendy’s conduct, her willingness to accept blame, with the slippery opaque homogenized mayonnaise behavior of Brian.

“I had to, because I probably won’t be back here for a long while.” Wendy shrugs wearily, and leans against a cupboard. Her raincoat has fallen open; under it she is wearing a leather vest and skirt trimmed with long untidy leather fringe.

“You’re leaving Corinth for good?” Erica asks, thinking that according to Brian, Wendy had already left town in June. Either he has neglected to mention that she has returned for a visit (by the look of the suitcases, a lengthy visit) or he does not know it.

“Yeh. I hope it’s for good.” Wendy grins, sighs. “I’m taking the bus to New York this afternoon.”

“Ah.” In all their years here Erica and Brian have never used the bus, which takes six uncomfortable hours to reach New York, but always a car or the more rapid and expensive plane. “Have you seen Brian?”

“No; not since last Friday. He doesn’t want to see me again.”

“But he knows you’re going to New York?”

“He knows I’m splitting.” Wendy’s voice rises and wobbles as if she were going to cry. “It’s what he wants.”

Splitting = leaving town, Erica translates. But Wendy also appears to be splitting in another sense, of which her fringed and shredded clothes are the visible sign. Though Brian has long since lost interest in this miserable girl, she still has a crush on him—is even now being cut into shreds and torn apart by this crush.

“And do you want to leave town?” she asks, trying to speak gently.

“I hafta leave town.” Wendy gasps, swallows. “Not just on account of what’s happened, but if I stay I know I’ll hassle Brian and keep him from working on The Book. That’s the really heavy thing.”

“How do you mean, heavy?” Erica arranges her sandwich on a willow-patterned plate.

“You know—serious. Important: I mean, compared to The Book, none of us are important, you know? Not even Brian, maybe.”

“I don’t think I follow you,” Erica says, turning up the flame under the coffee pot.

“You know his book, on American foreign policy?”

“I know about it, naturally. I haven’t read any of it yet.”

“But you know what it’s about, and that he’s going to show how this really beautiful plan Kennan had after World War II was shucked because of selfish establishment politics and intrigues. He’s going to explain the whole thing, and if The Book is published in time, and the right people in Washington read it, it’s going to really zap them. And that could have a fantastic effect, you know? Like once they realize what happened before, they would reverse their strategy, and stop trashing the rest of the world.” She looks at Erica with absolute, almost hysterical sincerity. “There’s no way of predicting for sure, but it could happen, you know?”

“I suppose it possibly could,” Erica admitted, wishing that Wendy would stop asking her if she knows things.

“Well, then. Say The Book wasn’t finished, and so our policy wasn’t changed and the world was destroyed, all because I wanted so bad to see Brian and get fucked?” Erica flinches at the term; Wendy, not noticing, moves nearer, gazing at her with intensity. “I mean, what I believe is if you really love somebody you hafta want what’s right for them irrespective of if it hurts you personally. Like what my roommate Linda says about Madagascar. The way you know you really love a guy is, suppose he was to get a telegram saying he could have whatever he wants most in the world if he would move to Madagascar, and suppose you got this telegram first. Would you rip it up and destroy his future, or would you give it to him?”

“Mm,” Erica says, moving back from this outburst. “It’ll be easier for you both if you’re in New York,” she says, trying to speak in a calming voice.

“It’s like the only way. I mean, we both realize if I’m here I won’t be able to leave him alone, because I tried that already last summer. I swear to stay away but then I get racked up about something and telephone, you know? Or I freak out completely and go to the office. And even when I’m seeing him it’s no good: I want to see him more, all the time, and there’s bad scenes, like last month in the coffee shop. It’s a bummer, really.”