The War Between the Tates: A Novel (45 page)

“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—

“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.

Zed blinks, and the vision disappears. Again Erica laughs briefly, but this time it is the laugh of fear, thin and hysterical, of someone who sees that she has almost stepped off the edge of a cliff.

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly do that,” she says. “Brian could never manage them.” She laughs again. “Besides, it wouldn’t be the right thing.”

A
N ILL-ASSORTED COMPANY IS
mobilizing on the Corinth campus this May morning, in Norton Hall—at other times the scene of ROTC exercises, basketball games, religious services, indoor track meets, rock concerts and fall registration. On the broad glossy varnished floor and in the surrounding tiers of stands diverse groups are gathering, like fugitives from all the other crowds that have assembled there in the past, or might do so in the future.

Many are students; there is a large gang of long-haired, noisy undergraduates squatting and lounging on the floor in the center of the hall, and several smaller bands, each distinctive in appearance. Here is a bunch of pretty girls in flowered and pastel jeans, from Home Ec; there a group of solemn and rather formally dressed law students. There is a small contingent from the Africana Center, all dashikis and Afros, and another of Asians in turbans and saris. A flock of secretaries has taken over one of the tables set up along the south wall, and are unpacking sandwiches and cartons of coffee. Nearby, a squad of antiwar veterans, in complete or partial uniform, is milling about one of their number who is confined to a wheelchair.

Here and there, you can see representatives of the United Campus Ministry, in motley, dress ranging from the loose white embroidered Indian shirt and dangling cross of Father Dave, the local radical priest, to the three piece gray flannel of the Methodist chaplain; there are also several nun’s habits, both traditional with starched white coif, and reformed. Over by the main entrance a party of graduate-student wives are pushing their giggling or complaining babies back and forth in strollers, or dashing away from their friends to chase toddlers down off the nearest grandstand, where a troupe of art students is encamped with paper streamers and gas balloons.

There is an air of determined holidaymaking; a clamor of talk punctured by shouts as people try to attract the attention of newcomers; continual motion among the groups and between each group and the headquarters of the Peace March, which is located on a low platform (sometimes used for boxing matches) at one side of the hall. The crowd is thicker there, and persons with an important, occupied air are sitting behind a table piled with papers. These are mainly men, and mainly professors; Brian Tate is among them.

“Fine turnout,” one of his colleagues remarks, coming up to help himself to two paper arm bands printed with blue peace symbols, and a bunch of handbills. “I’ll take a couple more of these for Walt and Jimmie, if I may.”

“Of course. No, it’s not bad. Considering everything,” Brian agrees modestly. He rises slightly in his chair to survey the hall. The march isn’t due to start for twenty minutes, yet already there must be nearly a thousand people here. The handbills and arm bands have been printed on time and without serious typographical errors; the weather is good—mild and overcast, but not raining; and all academic business has been officially canceled for the afternoon.

Sitting down again, he congratulates himself—not only on the probable success of the event, but on his decision, two weeks ago, to help direct it. He knew from the start that most of the organizational work would fall upon him, for the other leaders—Archibald Matlock of the English department, and Father Dave—are strong on commitment, but weak in practical knowhow. But he knew also that this was the opportunity he needed. If his reputation were ever to recover, it would have to be through something like this. Continued explanations of his real role in the Dibble affair would not suffice; like corrections to the newspaper story, they followed the original false account only limpingly and at a distance, in smaller type.