by Alison Lurie
This last time five days had passed. Wendy did not knock on his door; she was not waiting for him when he came in to work, or on the stairs when he went to lunch. Brian began to wonder why the siege had been lifted; what had happened to her. He began to feel worried; guilty; finally even frightened.
Then yesterday, the sixth day, as he was leaving the office he happened to glance outside and saw her standing in the quadrangle below, a yellow spot off-center on a triangle of green grass, looking up to his window. He felt relief, or something like it.
As he left the building, she approached.
“I have to see you.”
“Yes?” Brian stopped walking and stood holding his briefcase, looking at Wendy. She had apparently spent time outdoors since their last meeting, her bare round arms, her round face, were reddened and freckled. Large pale ovals around her eyes, where sunglasses must have been, gave her a pathetic, lemurlike appearance.
“I have something to tell you. Good news.” Wendy smiled wistfully. “Could we like sit down somewhere?”
Feeling both generous and curious, Brian suggested the student-union cafeteria. At this time of the afternoon and year, no one he knew was likely to be there.
“I won’t be coming around to hassle you any more,” Wendy announced, sitting down opposite him with her plastic glass of 7-Up.
“No?” Brian set down his plastic glass of iced tea, anticipating the news that Wendy was finally about to leave town. He felt relief and regret.
“You know I’ve been going down to the Krishna Bookshop.” Wendy leaned forward; her jumbled silver beads and spiral silver wires swung out over the table.
“Yes, you told me.” Brian ceased smiling. In any university town there are many forces operating against education: forces social, political and moral (to be more accurate, immoral). Brian, like other professors, has had for years to contend for his students’ time and interest against beer parties, political meetings, film series, theater rehearsals, poetry readings, athletic practice and games, good swimming or skiing weather, and sex. He is tolerant of all these activities in moderation, recognizing that they are part of a liberal education. Recently, however, a new counterforce has sprung up, one which he cannot tolerate, since it refuses to present itself as an addition to, or relaxation from, the business of getting a college degree, but sets itself up instead as a rival.
The appearance in town earlier this year of the Krishna Bookshop—an outlet for texts on Eastern religion, a center for lectures on astrology and yoga—was at first a matter for academic curiosity and amusement. The thing could hardly be expected to last long, to survive financially, even in its obscure downtown location. But it did survive; it prospered. It expanded its shelves to include works on organic gardening and primitive music; it gave courses on a variety of dubious subjects from astral projection to Zen Buddhism—assigning homework and papers in competition with the university. Too many students began spending too much time there; sitting about for hours drinking herbal tea and wasting their limited funds on intellectual trash; encouraging each other in escapism and fuzzy thinking; absorbing bogus ideas and bringing them back to clutter up Brian’s and other professors’ seminars. By now, the Krishna Bookshop has become a matter for serious annoyance.
“I know you don’t groove very much on it, Wendy added.
“Mrm.” Brian dislikes the idea of Wendy’s hanging around the bookshop, and had often said so. But it was summer, and most of her friends were away. Having denied her his companionship, he had no right to deny her that of others. He therefore made a neutral noise, the auditory equivalent of a shrug.
“I went to a lecture there last night, on meditation. Did you ever try meditation?”
“Not in the sense you mean,” Brian said.
“I don’t dig the theory much; maybe it’s just over my head. But the exercises are really fine. Especially if you’re hung up on some intellectual problem, or obsessive emotion—well, like I am.” Wendy grinned ruefully, and leaned her face on her hand, pushing aside her long, limp hair. “For instance there’s this one exercise. You sit on the floor, cross your legs—yoga position if you can, only I can’t manage that yet—and put your hands on your knees so you’re in perfect physical balance. Then you close your eyes and visualize a white circle against a dark background. You don’t think of anything else, just concentrate on that one spot.” Wendy had shut her eyes in demonstration; now she opened them and looked at Brian. “Yeah, well, I was skeptical too. But it really works. I forgot everything that was ripping me: I forgot you, and me, and where I was—I felt very calm, very together ...You know, I figure if I do it regularly, I might get over wanting you.”
Brian hesitated. He was acutely aware that all his efforts over the past two months had failed to cure Wendy of her attachment; they had only caused pain. If she could cure herself by sitting cross-legged and visualizing a white spot, or indeed by standing on her head and visualizing white elephants, he ought to be delighted. “Yes,” he said judiciously. “I think you might get over it anyhow, in time.”
Wendy shook her head. “That’s not how I am,” she said. “I never get over anything. I had this cat when I was a kid, maybe I told you, a big white tom named Crisco. He used to sleep on my bed. But when we moved into the apartment in Queens my folks had to give him away to the SPCA. I cried for that cat at night for years. Sometimes I cry for him even now.” Her pale-blue eyes brimmed with shiny tears—for Brian, for Crisco, or possibly both.
Hastily, he changed the subject. “Are there many people there, at those lectures on meditation?”
“Not too many now, in the summer. Maybe ten, twelve. I’ve only been this once. And I’ve been talking to Zed some more. You know, he’s amazing. He’s read like everything. Philosophy, psychology, history, poetry, metaphysics—”
“Is that so.” Brian had never seen the proprietor of, the Krishna, Bookshop, who (according to Wendy) chose to be known only by this syllable. He apparently declined to reveal his actual name, origins, education or history; he had renounced them all for religious reasons, along with his former job, friends, family if any, home and possessions. He lived in his bookstore, sleeping on a cot in the back room and cooking his vegetarian meals on a hot plate.
“He’s really a beautiful person,” Wendy said, leaning forward even further. “You ought to meet him, honestly.”
“Mrm.” Brian leaned back. According to reports, Zed was not in either sense a beautiful person. Students, even admiring students, described him as tall, skinny, and sort of funny-looking. His clothes, acquired at charity sales, seldom fit well, they said, and he was going bald. His age was uncertain. (“Man, he could be anything; he could be maybe thirty, or he could be really old, like even sixty.”) Whatever the truth, Zed was obviously old enough to have known better, and Brian had no desire to meet him.
“He acts sort of vague sometimes,” Wendy admitted. (Brian translated this as “He’s stoned out of his mind sometimes.”) “If he doesn’t feel like speaking, he just doesn’t answer you. Or maybe he’ll hand you a book and go into the back room. That’s how he was with me at first.” Giving up the attempt to speak confidentially across the table, Wendy now began a flanking movement, shifting her chair around toward Brian. “But this week he talked to me. It was weird. I didn’t tell him what was on my mind, he just seemed to know.”
“He knew, eh? What did he know?”
“Well, that I was hopelessly and desperately in love. I didn’t tell him who with,” Wendy added, responding to the expression which had appeared on Brian’s face. “Zed doesn’t want to know things like that; he says, ‘All names are lies.’”
“‘All names are lies’?” Brian repeated, refraining with difficulty from adding that the name “Zed” certainly was a lie.
“Uh-huh.” Wendy shifted her chair again. “You know, I think he’s the first person who’s said anything about it that wasn’t just bullshit, or laying their own trip on me.” She leaned toward Brian; the fan behind the
m blew shreds of her lank hair out sideways. “Like I’ve been trying all this time to distract myself, to do different things and make it with other people to take my mind off you, you know?”
“Yes.” This was in fact the advice Brian had given her, now presumably redefined, with the help of the Krishna Bookshop, as bullshit.
“Well, what Zed said convinced me I was going at it all wrong. I’ve been trying to replace one selfish personal desire with another just like it. Even if I could do that, I wouldn’t be getting anywhere; I’d still be caught in the whirlwind. What I’ve got to do is reach the end of desire.” Wendy edged her chair around further.
“Teach me to care and not to care.
Teach me to sit still”
Brian quoted ironically, looking at Wendy’s chair, which she had now shifted so far around the table that it was touching his. Her plump, sun-reddened left thigh, bare to the hip below the brief yellow dress, was half an inch from his own.
“Yeh. That’s it.” Wendy’s leg moved or sagged, as if of its own weight, against his leg.
“And Zed is going to teach you this.” Brian tried to keep the sarcasm out of his voice; but the knowledge that she had confided in that occultist crank, fraud and drug addict irritated him profoundly. The idea that she planned to follow his idiotic advice made him furious. He moved his leg away.
“He can’t teach me. He said so. Nobody can teach the Way; you have to find it yourself, through prayer and meditation.”
“You mean you’ve really fallen for that mystical crap? I thought you were too intelligent for that.”
“It’s not crap. You don’t understand.” Wendy’s voice started to quaver. “It’s the same thing you’re doing yourself already, with your book—putting your energy into something outside yourself that’s greater than you.” Wendy gulped down a sob. “I told Zed about it, and he agreed with me. He’s very interested in you. He wants to know what hour of the day you were born.”
“What the hell does he want to know that for?”
“So he can cast your horoscope. I already gave him the day and year.”
“I don’t know what hour I was born,” Brian said with great disagreeableness. “And if I did, I wouldn’t tell him.” Wendy began sobbing aloud. “Oh hell. Please don’t do that. People are watching us.” Brian glanced quickly around the coffee shop to see which people these were. Fortunately, at that hour the place was nearly empty; he recognized no one.
Blam!
Standing in the dark at the far end of the vegetable garden, Brian starts, and looks up. The fireworks have begun. He can see them quite well from here—though, since the stadium is nearly two miles away, there is a considerable lag between light and sound. The rockets appear to burst silently, and it is only as the shower of sparks extinguishes itself in the trees that he can hear the detonation and the accompanying muffled A’hh! of the watching crowd. His children’s voices are part of this roar; and Wendy’s. She really grooves on fireworks, she told him yesterday, especially when she is high; she was planning to attend in that condition tonight, along with some of the Bookshop people.
The show, designed by professionals, is artistically varied in a primitive way, Brian notices. First a single rocket will sketch on the sky a huge imaginary umbrella; next two or three will open together, each a different primary color. There are comets that climb in crazy spurts, hissing comically and spitting random bursts of light; then what look like handfuls of giant flashbulbs begin to pop and smoke, brightest and noisiest of all.
On many earlier July Fourths, Brian has been there in the stadium with his children; he knows how the crowd looks at such a moment, photographed in stark black and white. He can see the smoke drifting up and smell the gunpowder. And he can see Wendy there, sitting on one of the worn slat benches, the pale circle of her face raised among three thousand raised faces. Suddenly he wants badly to be there too, sitting next to her in the smoky gloom, feeling the weight of her head against his shoulder as she tilts it back and gazes up open-mouthed, the warmth of her bare leg against his leg. He thinks of getting into his car, now—telling Erica he intends to look for the children—Stupid, of course: there will be no place to park within half a mile of the stadium; no way of finding her in the monstrous noisy crowd.
Wendy enjoys crowds, and likes the feeling of being part of one. Though intelligent, she is not of independent mind. She is a born follower, a true believer; and if he, Brian, forbids her to follow and believe in him, she will find other and less scrupulous teachers, other and false gods.
Some of the fireworks explode quickly above the trees; others seem to last a long time. Brian watches the spark of a Roman candle shoot upward, diving into black gravity as if into water and meeting a similar resistance. From it, as it finally unfolds high in the air, long trails of white stars fall almost lazily. After each burst of light comes the appropriate explosion, which varies from a single rifle crack to a complex grumbling roar. Occasionally there is a set piece on the ground; then he sees nothing, and can hear only a distant prolonged crackling volley. At intervals there is silence, accompanied by the sound of crickets and of leaves blowing.
At the finale every kind of color and rocket is sent up together, a long barrage of stars and scrawls and dotted lines. It is like watching a lesson being written on a huge blackboard in some unknown script which disappears as Brian tries to read it, followed and overlapped by explosions of sound in some thunderous unknown language. The sky and hills echo, and the air is heavily streaked with smoke and spotted with after-images in strange hues of purple and green. Lower down a dusky red glow shows through the trees, as if the stadium were burning.
In the smoky gunpowder light Brian can see written clearly what is going to happen next if he continues to reject Wendy. Lonely and sore, she will spend more and more time at the Krishna Bookshop. She will forget the truths she has learned from Brian and remember instead lies and nonsense pronounced in an impressive false manner by Zed. Eventually, without desire, out of gratitude and admiration, she will offer herself to him. And there is no doubt in Brian’s mind that the offer will be accepted. Zed is supposed to have given up sex along with other kinds of flesh, but a dish like Wendy obviously doesn’t come his way very often. Brian imagines how the dragged eyes of the proprietor of the bookstore will light up with carnal greed; how he will reach out his thin, dirty hands ...No. It does not bear thinking about. Groping in the dark along the line of fallen stones which was once a pasture wall, Brian selects a suitably large, flat rock. He lifts it and starts back downhill toward the house as the light in the sky fades. He avoids the row of beanpoles, but steps heavily on a tomato plant which has not yet been staked.
At the end of the garden he stops for a moment among some lettuce which has gone to seed, steadying his rock, catching his breath. He contemplates the woman exhibited on the back porch as in a lighted display case, and compares her to a Radcliffe student he had met one evening some years ago after a public lecture at Harvard. A beautiful, fresh young girl—slim and delicate, with small, perfectly finished features and curly dark hair cut short behind and falling into her dark-lashed eyes in front—from which she would, with a graceful, impatient gesture, toss it back as she spoke. Her manner was gay, almost childlike, yet at the same time serious and even dignified. “A young princess,” Brian had thought.
He began to take her out, and was extremely pleased When he realized she preferred him to her many other admirers, though not extremely surprised. He was, after all, several years older than most of them, and people in the Government Department agreed that he had an important future ahead of him. But Brian was astounded, presently, to discover that Erica was still a virgin at twenty. He felt awe and gratitude to Fate for having, as it were, signaled his importance by saving this special treat for him.
Since she was an intelligent modern girl, and in love, Erica slept with Brian before their marriage—but not very often, nor with very great success. He had experience enough to know that in spite
of her sighs of pleasure she did not really enjoy the sexual act. He had not been too concerned about this, thinking that she would learn after the wedding. But instead she unlearned—or rather, gradually ceased to pretend.
For nearly three years all his natural skill and invention, all the warm-up techniques he had heard or read of, were unsuccessful. Or, more accurately, they were too successful. Erica much preferred them to that for which they were intended to prepare the way. She loved it when Brian blew into her ear, gently bit the base of her thumb, or stroked her breasts in circles. She sighed and smiled and stretched like a cat when he licked a slow line down the length of her spine, and further. “Oh love, love,” she murmured. “Oh bliss.” If only he had been satisfied to stop there, he could feel her thinking. But no, he always had to bring out, or up, what she called “that thing.” “Don’t put that thing in yet please; daring; I’m not ready.”
“My cock, my prick, my penis for God’s sake,” he had shouted at her once. “Can’t you call it by its right name?” No, she couldn’t. She didn’t like any of those words; she never thought them in her mind and she couldn’t say them. She knew words for the other difficult parts of the body: “behind” for ass and “stomach” for belly, but there was no word for That Thing. Or occasionally, when Erica was really hurt or annoyed with him, Your Thing. Ordinarily, out of good manners, she overlooked the fact of his connection with the Thing, and when possible its very existence. She avoided looking at it directly, and never touched it unless she was specifically requested to do so. It was as if Brian were a neighbor who owned a particularly ugly dog. “The dog is scratching at the door,” you might say to him politely, not wishing to underline their relationship—but, in anger, “Your dog bit me.”
Two years passed in this way. Then Erica became pregnant. Her obstetrician, a cautious, prissy man, advised that she “avoid intercourse” from the sixth month on, and for two months after the birth—in effect, a five-month abstinence. Abstinence, that is, from the sort of love-making Brian liked; the sort Erica liked was allowed to continue. Brian began to look at girls on the street; though a sense of his own moral dignity, and fear of social exposure, kept him from approaching any of them.