The War Between the Tates: A Novel (46 page)

It was not enough that Brian should dissociate himself from the cause of antifeminism (refusing, for example, in spite of the generous fee offered, to contribute to an
Esquire
symposium on “Are Women Necessary?”). He must begin as soon as possible to attract public attention for other reasons; to associate himself with other, more appropriate—and more popular—causes.

But though he threw himself into the task with conscious energy, organizing the Peace March was much harder than Brian had anticipated. In part this was due to his success. Unexpectedly many groups responded to the initial canvas; his original plan had to be expanded, and expanded again, as pledges of support came in.

Beyond this, however, the job was complicated by the end-of-term press of work, and, most of all, by unexpected events in his own life: a series of awful revelations from which he is not yet recovered. Indeed, Brian thinks wearily, he may never fully recover.

The crisis began without warning a few days after he had agreed to work on the Peace March—at bedtime one evening when he mildly chided Wendy about her increasing weight. He was relating, as they undressed, a conversation he and Father Dave had had that afternoon with the editor of the local paper. The man was interested in their plans, and had promised to send a reporter and photographer to cover the story. If all went well, a photograph of the front-line marchers would appear on page one of the
Courier.
Since Wendy would presumably be in this picture, Brian suggested, she might try to take off a few pounds around her middle before May seventh.

He had spoken lightly; he was surprised therefore when she replied, in a voice full of choked feeling, that she couldn’t take off any pounds. “Why not?” Brian asked, perhaps a little sharply, but still smiling. “It’s only a matter of eating less—cutting out some of those late-night snacks, so you’ll get a little smaller.”

“I can’t get smaller,” Wendy insisted, laughing oddly. “All I can ever do now is get larger, and larger and larger and larger.” With a hysterical sob, she collapsed upon the bed in her underwear.

Brian was used by now to Wendy’s tears; he knew that the fastest way to dry them was to step forward and take her in his arms. But instead he stepped back. He looked at Wendy hard, and saw that she was thick in the waist, not from overeating, but because she was at least four months pregnant.

It was the first of a catastrophic series of mental detonations. As if the smooth white plaster walls and plush tan carpeting of his apartment were being strafed by an invisible fighter plane and exploding in a line of ugly holes, Brian realized: first, his own obtuseness—why hadn’t he noticed sooner?—and second, Wendy’s falsity. This simple, ingenuous girl, whom he had believed so candid, so devoted, had been systematically and sordidly deceiving him.

Questioning her, he dragged out the facts. Wendy had known that Brian did not trust her to remember to take her birth-control pills (quite naturally, after what had happened last fall); she had known that he occasionally counted them. Therefore, twenty-five days a month for the last four months she had flushed one pill down the toilet; and on the remaining five days she had inserted a series of unnecessary tampax into herself, removed them unused, wrapped them in paper, and placed them in the kitchen garbage can. Her only excuse was that she had been afraid to tell him the truth. Perhaps, Brian said furiously, she had imagined that if she did not tell him, it would go away?

Wendy, sobbing, admitted that she had had this thought; that she had hoped for a miscarriage. “But I don’t now, you know,” she added, half sitting up. “Not since last week, it was Thursday. On Thursday I felt Life.” She capitalized it with her voice as if speaking of the periodical, and laid her hand reverently on her thickened waist. A rapt, stubborn, stupid look came over her tear-streaked face; a look he had last seen in the Frick Museum on many painted female faces. “It zapped me like a bomb: there’s a person growing in there. I mean, that’s really outasight.” She giggled weakly at her own pun.

Brian did not speak. The bomb had exploded; depression, thick and dirty and full of stones, rained down on him. A vision of his vain and foolish vigilance in the past made him laugh gratingly, then break off as he thought of what was to come in the future. Only two weeks ago a liberal abortion bill had been passed in the state, but by the time it took effect it would be too late for Wendy; it was too late even now.

He would have to marry Wendy. Also, he would have to do this right away, as soon as it became legally possible—before her pregnancy became so obvious as to make them a public joke. But if she had been as free with her confidences as last time, it was already a public joke. He would have to stand up with her in the county courthouse, while the witnesses sniggered behind their smiles. Then he would have to take her home, and live with her for the rest of his life. The depression rained on steadily; Brian could feel himself bruised, knocked down, choking in the heavy, muddy future.

Meanwhile Wendy, perhaps encouraged by his silence, went on chattering with increasing confidence. “It’s a real freaky trip, you know, having somebody growing inside you—carrying them around everywhere you go. And knowing that everything you do affects them. Like if I smoke a joint or have a couple of beers, the baby gets high, did you know that? I mean, that’s a big responsibility.”

The responsibility was large not only generically but specifically, Wendy explained, because this child was destined for greatness. “It’ll have the Sun conjunct Uranus, a powerful magnetic personality, very original; maybe a genius, Zed says,” she confided, conveying to Brian the unwelcome news that her pregnancy was already known to that fool at the Krishna Bookshop. Indeed, as he soon discovered, it was an old story to most of her friends—who, in keeping the secret, had all also been deceiving him.

Though enthusiastic about the baby, Wendy received Brian’s proposal of marriage with a composure which verged on lassitude. She also accepted his other proposals for their future (legal, economic, medical) without any great vivacity or gratitude. Brian assumed it was because all her attention was turned inward, upon her womb and its contents, that she took so little interest in planning when and how they would marry, or where they would live (Alpine Towers being forbidden to infants). Yet when he recalled the nest-building fervor that had overtaken Erica under similar circumstances, he felt puzzled.

He was furious, too, that additional responsibilities should be forced upon him now, when term papers were coming in and his phone, both at home and at the university, rang constantly about the Peace March. He had no time to call doctors or inspect apartments. Wendy, who did, apparently could not summon the energy. But when he complained of this one evening at supper, he received another severe, almost fatal shock.

“You don’t hafta call up that real estate dude if you don’t want to,” Wendy told him, setting her elbows one on each side of a plate of overcooked chili (expectant motherhood had blurred her sense of time, never very acute). “You don’t hafta do anything you don’t want. I mean, shit.” Her voice trembled. “You don’t hafta marry me.”

Controlling his own voice, Brian replied that she did not mean that.

“I do too,” Wendy asserted. “I don’t care if I’m an unwed mother. I mean, so what? I mean if people don’t like it, screw them.”

Brian gave a sigh of exasperation at these counterculture histrionics. Wendy had managed to conceal her condition so far by wearing loose clothing, notably the garment she had on then: a huge, heavy, tentlike Indian poncho made out of an old red blanket with orange and black zigzag designs. But she was growing larger, and the weather warmer, every week. Soon she would have to take off her wigwam, and the coming papoose would be visible to everyone. And when it came to that, he explained to Wendy, she would care. She would suffer from embarrassment and from social censure, including that of her own family of origin.

Wendy denied this. “I can hack it,” she insisted. “I may be a little uptight about what Ma will say, but I can hack it with her too, and the whole family if I hafta. I’m not freaked out over what your neighbors and the department will think.”

“You say that now.” Brian smiled, trying to lower the temperature of the discussion. “But even if it were true, it’s not the only consideration. We can’t be concerned only with you. Or me.” He smiled even harder. “We have to think of the baby, of what it will mean for him or her to be illegitimate.”

“Lots of kids in this country are bastards, and they don’t always—I read this article—”

“No doubt,” he said impatiently. “Lots of kids are also undernourished, and neglected, and un-educated. I wish them all well. But I have no intention of placing that sort of handicap on any child of mine.”

“Yeh, but—” Wendy had given up all pretense of eating; she shoved her plate aside and leaned over the table. “I mean, isn’t that just going along with everything that’s fucked up in this society? If you just do it because you’re afraid of prejudice,” isn’t that sort of helping to perpetuate it?”

Brian groaned silently, and rebuked himself for having provoked a theoretical argument with someone who was constitutionally (in both senses, now) incapable of logical thought.

“Anyhow,” she went on, “why should it be so important that it’s your child? I mean, like Zed says: it’s a karmic hangup to think of kids as
mine
or
yours,
as if they were private property. All children belong to God, really, and we’re just appointed their guardians, the way it’s written in
The Prophet.

“Lo, your children are not your children, but the sons and daughters of God”

she recited in a trembly, emotional voice. “That’s a really beautiful saying. And it’s true, too.”

Third-rate poetry, Brian thought to himself; mystical crap. Then another interpretation of Wendy’s babbling, far-fetched but even less agreeable, occurred to him. “It is mine, though, I assume, this baby?” he said in a tone he tried to make pleasant. “Technically speaking, that is.”

Wendy’s reaction to this question—the mug-shot slump of her shoulders, the red, slapped expression on her face—should have been answer enough. But Brian, determined to know the worst, forced first an admission and then the sordid details out of her.

She wasn’t really, absolutely sure, Wendy finally admitted. Because, you see, at the end of last year, when Brian was at those meetings in New York, and she came back to college early to finish a paper, “there was this guy Ahmed that Linda knows, this grad student in Engineering. He’s really a nice dude, sort of shy and sensitive, you know? He writes prose poems.” Ahmed was spending the holidays alone in his dormitory. “He couldn’t go home for vacation because he’s from Pakistan, and he had all this dumb work to make up, these crappy engineering problems. He was feeling really lonely and down, thinking how he was stupid and had no friends and would be a disgrace to his country and he might as well jump down the gorge ...So I like gave myself to him for Christmas.”

The night that followed this revelation was the worst Brian has ever had. Hour after hour he tossed and twitched, while Wendy, worn out by sobbing and self-justification, lay sleeping heavily beside him.

He could see no way out: it was like a multiple-choice test in which none of the answers were right. Marry Wendy? Abandon her? The odds were in favor of the child’s being his, and certainly the moral responsibility, for he had lain with her a hundred times to the Pakistani’s one. There was no chance of that character’s assuming the burden, according to Wendy. (“Oh, Ahmed can’t marry me; he’s been betrothed to a girl back home since he was fourteen. He hasta marry a virgin anyhow, because of his religion.”)

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: