The War Between the Tates: A Novel (7 page)

Sometimes, if he waits until Erica is warmed up, he can introduce desirable novelties without her objecting, or even noticing. But on New Year’s Eve, after a boring party at which Brian had drunk more than he wanted without feeling any better, he went too fast.

“Wait, what are you doing?” Erica exclaimed as he lifted her off the bed onto the floor. “Ow, too cold!”

“Come on. Let’s lie down here.”

“Well, at least get the quilt,” Erica said, her pelvis and voice tensing. “Put it under me ... Wait ... No, on the rug, that way. All right, go ahead.”

What followed, for both of them, was not more satisfactory than usual, but less so. It was further marred for Brian by the persistent image of Wendy Gahaghan lying on his office linoleum—exposed, silent, willing. He knew from hints she had dropped, anecdotes she had told, that she was not similarly wary of innovation. He knew that he could without a word have fallen on her there on the floor and possessed her in any way he liked, and earned only her passionate gratitude in that moment, early in the morning of New Year’s Day, the tide of Brian’s resolve had changed. Slowly at first, it began to flow in toward the shore, covering the stern moral rocks with foamy waves of self-justification. He did not, however, give up the idea of himself as a serious and responsible person, concerned to obey the categorical imperative and seek humanistic goals.

What he did was to turn the problem inside out. Wendy was suffering (he told himself), and had been suffering for perhaps a year, from unconsummated love. It was the worse for her because, in her world, such feeling was so rare as to be almost unknown. Among her friends even the most transitory physical attraction was consummated as a matter of course, and at once. But romantic passion, as De Rougemont has pointed out, is a plant which thrives best in stony soil. Like the geraniums in Erica’s kitchen, the less it was watered, the better it flowered. That was why Wendy loved him; while for the boys she casually slept with she felt little.

Therefore, Brian argued with himself as the soapy waves of false logic sloshed toward the shore, what he really ought to do was to sleep with Wendy himself, as soon as possible. She would see then that he was only a man like other men; her disease would be cured. He owed it to her to provide this cure, even at the cost of deflating his value in her eyes and ruining his moral record. He didn’t
want
to commit adultery, he told himself, but it was his duty. It was a choice between his vanity, his selfish wish for moral consistency, and Wendy’s release from a painful obsession.

Looking back now, Brian finds it hard to understand how he had entertained such self-righteous nonsense; how he, a serious political scientist, had been able to fool himself with the old means-end argument. For he had applied this argument to himself as well as to Wendy; he had hoped to cure his obsession as well as her passion by sating it. He had been intermittently aware, he recalls now, that outsiders might not appreciate the extent of his altruism in screwing Wendy Gahaghan, if they heard of it—but he had counted that almost one more thorn in his martyr’s crown.

He did not realize then that he was already becoming addicted to Wendy, and that he was planning to increase the dose partly because he needed to quiet the anxiety that he was in every sense, including the most private, a small man. In a shady part of his mind which he did not usually visit he wished to learn her opinion on this matter. Erica could not judge it, any more than she could judge his professional competence, since, having known no other men, she had no means of comparison. It was true that earlier in his life several women had assured Brian that he was of average size. But what if they had been politely lying? Or what if he had shrunk, in fifteen years? Brian recognized the childish, neurotic stupidity of these ideas, but he could not suppress them entirely. “Just once; just one shot, that’s all, to cure you both,” his addiction whispered; and at last he promised it what it wanted.

When Wendy appeared in Brian’s office after Christmas vacation he was momentarily embarrassed. He had denied her for so long that changing direction was awkward. Fortunately, almost miraculously, she provided him with an opening.

“How are you?” he, asked, falling into the traditional starting gambit.

“Just the same.” Wendy grinned. “Or worse, maybe.”

“I’m sorry.” Uncharacteristically, Brian had risen when she knocked, ostensibly to shelve some books, but in fact to get out from behind his desk—that old defensive fortification which had now become a military, impediment.

“Nothing helps any more. Being away from you hurts. And being here hurts worse, some ways.”

“I don’t like to see you unhappy.” Having replaced his books, Brian was now standing next to Wendy. He thought that he hadn’t realized before how small she was, how childlike. He towered over her not only intellectually and chronologically, but physically. A pleasant sensation.

“I know.” She gave a little apologetic smile and shrug. “If you would kiss me, just once, I’d feel better.”

“You know, I’ve been thinking about that,” Brian said, smiling down. “I think just possibly you might be right.” He had imagined that he would explain his analysis of Wendy’s problem and outline the solution he proposed, before putting it into practice. But events moved too fast for him. It was not until the next day that he was able to present his theory—which, by then, was already being proved incorrect.

Waiting in his office now, Brian vows to himself that the end of his affair will be better governed than the beginning. His two previous attempts to break it off had not worked because they were based on a faulty political analysis of the situation—possibly due to unconscious resistance on his part. Wendy does not care if his wife knows of the affair; among her friends such matters immediately become public anyhow. She knows also that her work has not fallen off since January; and even if it had fallen off, she wouldn’t have cared.

But there is one thing which will convince her that the affair must end; one sentence Brian can speak which will make her almost as eager to end it as she had been to begin. When she comes in today, Brian can tell her that his own work is suffering; that he has been unable to write his new book, a project she regards with awe.

“Too much of my energy is going into our relationship,” he will say, in a few minutes now. “There’s not enough left for my work.”

And what is more, this will be the literal truth. It is not only that his affair with Wendy consumes certain hours; more profoundly, it consumes the emotional and physical energy which at other times has been sublimated into the writing of political history. As his roommate had put it once back at Harvard, when Brian made a similar choice before an important exam: “Brian thinks it all comes out of the same faucet.”

“I know it does,” he had replied.

“You’re nuts,” said his roommate cheerfully. “The way I look at it, the more I screw the better I work.” But time proved him wrong: he received a grade of only B-plus on the important exam, while Brian was rewarded for his abstinence with a straight A.

J
ULY FOURTH. IT IS
summer now, the time of year Erica Tate once liked best. The climbing roses are in bloom over the screen porch; the students have gone home; the town is green, sunny, silent. Her husband’s affair with that girl is over. Erica wants to forget it, and she is trying to forget it. She knows this is the only way. It is not enough for her to forgive Brian; what she must do is get the whole thing out of her mind entirely. Then and only then, can life go back to normal.

And if not now, when? It is a warm, soft evening, unusually quiet Jeffrey and Matilda are not playing the phonograph or the radio or quarreling or talking on the telephone; they are away, at the fireworks show in the stadium. The sun has just set, and the sky beyond the porch, behind the apple trees, is layered with white and rose chiffon clouds, like a nightgown Erica had when she got married. She sighs.

“What?” Brian says, looking up from his coffee and the
Village Voice.

“I was thinking about the children,” says Erica, who is not aware of having sighed aloud. “I’m not sure we should have let them go alone.” She uses the word “we” with an effort, for it is Brian who gave permission for the excursion.

“They’re not alone,” he says impatiently. “They’re with three thousand other people.”

“That’s what bothers me. Among three thousand people there’s sure to be some bad characters.”

“Don’t worry about it. Most of them are kids. Or students.”

“What difference does that make?”

No reply. Erica opens her workbox and selects a spool of thread. Lately she has been much troubled by fantasies of awful things that might happen to Jeffrey and Matilda, fantasies which she fears from her reading may also be wishes. But adolescence is a precarious time, and crowds at night are dangerous. Somewhere in the huge, dark stadium there are teenage hoods looking for boys like Jeffrey to rob and bully; there are depraved older men looking for silly, reckless young girls like Matilda. But it is no use saying this to Brian. He doesn’t care what happens to the children—No, worse than that; he himself is one of the bad characters. He has already seduced a girl half his age.

Erica looks up at her husband, an important professor aged forty-six, well dressed, small and compact in build, with a handsome, steady face, reading the paper. What had happened between him and Wendee was three months past. He just didn’t think about it any more, he had told her last week, with such casual impatience that she at last believed him. He doesn’t think of Wendee; he doesn’t
think
of her, Erica; he doesn’t
think
of the children. What does he think of, for heaven’s sake? No doubt, of recent American political history; of the Cold War, about which he is writing a book.

It seems to Erica horribly unfair that she should continue to find herself brooding, almost obsessively, about a girl she has never seen, while Brian, who has lain naked on top of this girl and partly inside her on his office floor, is able to forget.

But why his office floor? Well, because there was a blizzard outside, Brian had explained stiffly, and they didn’t want to walk to Wendee’s apartment in College-town and back again; there wasn’t time. It was details like that which caused trouble. If Erica had known either more or less it would have been better, she thought. Instead she had just enough information to be able to visualize the scene. She involved herself emotionally by the imaginative effort of completion. As if she were watching television on a defective set, she created a whole reality out of speckled hints and blurry shadows. She created the naked arms and legs on Brian’s floor, which was of vinyl mottled green-gray and glossy with institutional wax, slightly chilly and dusty to the touch; the hissing of the radiator, like a coiled iron serpent; the sleet and snow beating and melting down the office window.

This vision and others like it come to Erica against her will and desire at the worst possible moments, blotting out will and desire. When Brian touches her, even casually, she stiffens. When they lie together she cannot free herself of the thought that every gesture he makes, every caress, has been sketched on Wendee’s body; that every whispered word has already been breathed into Wendee’s ears; every sigh of passion—

“What’s the matter?” Brian asks.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You made a noise. You were groaning.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

—That Brian should have forgotten only made it worse. If he had loved the girl passionately, seriously, that would have been more tolerable. Had they been carried away, snowed under by a blizzard of real feeling, they would have had some excuse. Instead Brian tried to excuse himself by assuring Erica that the affair had been minor, casual. “It just wasn’t that important,” he had said several times, as if unaware how much this devalues both of them.

Erica sighs again and rotates the skirt she is hemming. Of course some professors became involved with their students; she knew that. Girls got crushes on them—it was a recognized occupational hazard, which had existed when she was in college. It had never happened to Erica, but several of her friends had at one time or another thought themselves in love with some professor. Conventional morality being different then, they did not undress in offices so readily, but tended more to tears, declarations and gifts of homemade fudge and homemade verse.

But there is a new sort of student now: less romantic, much more matter-of-fact about sex—and Wendee apparently is one of them. Suppose you are a middle-aged professor, and such a girl comes into your office and boldly declares that she wants to. sleep with you—no strings attached, no emotional commitment. It is, after all, the stock situation of most men’s fantasies. Erica could see how many might jump at the chance.

But she would never have expected it of Brian. She had always thought of him—he had thought of himself, and apparently still does—as a serious, responsible person. He saw a reason and purpose to life; he disliked frivolous and meaningless pleasures. He therefore had little time for things like watching television and going to large parties. Occasionally, for instance when alone at large parties where TV programs were being discussed, Erica had regretted this. But simultaneously she had admired Brian for his position; valued his influence. Without it, she sometimes thought, who knew how shallow her life might have been, how much time she might have wasted? The world would be a superior place if most people in it were like Brian Tate, she often thought.

And all this virtue had been false. Brian had sat opposite her night after night, as he is sitting now, and delivered his moral opinions, blaming his friends who got involved with students, listening to her accuse herself of being a bad mother, while all the time—

“Amusing letter here on those women’s rights protesters,” he says, lowering the
Voice
and looking at her over the top margin. “Did you read it?”

“What?” Erica turns her head, pushing aside her hair, which needs to be cut, washed and set.