Nowhere City

by Alison Lurie

  I do not do so, Paul thought now, and he looked away from Skinner down the aisle between the booths, observing the back of their waitress as she walked away from them, balancing a loaded tray with professional skill. At the end of the room she pushed the swing door open with her hand, deftly catching it against her round arm and shoulder as she turned to steady the tray. Then she gave the door a neat shove with her foot and vanished into the kitchen, under an arch of crudely painted tropical fruits and flowers.

  Paul enjoyed watching this waitress. She was young, and even pretty, with a chunky but good figure under her coarse starched green and white uniform. Moreover, there was a kind of charming proficiency and directed energy in everything she did which was lacking at Nutting. Some of the secretaries in the Publications Department were pretty and some were competent, but not both. Apparently girls who were both pretty and competent were not sent to Publications, but were routed instead to Systems or Administration. The secretary who Paul and Skinner shared was neither pretty nor competent.

  Paul kept his eyes on the kitchen door, and in a few moments his waitress reappeared. Again she flipped expertly round the door under the painted garlands, with a half-smile of concentration on her tanned, snub features. Not a drop spilled from the brimming glasses on the tray.

  “Off in a hot dream world,” Skinner said loudly. Apparently Paul had failed to answer some question; he had not really been listening for some minutes. “Well, I’m going to get on back and get started on that report. Have fun.” He put a dollar down on the table, and went out.

  Paul looked at his watch. Hardly half an hour had passed since he left the plant, so he sat on, finishing his sandwich.

  “More coffee?”

  “Oh yes, please.” One of the better things about Los Angeles, Paul thought, is that when you buy a cup of coffee you always get as many free refills as you want. He smiled gratefully at the waitress as she poured it. She smiled back, showing white but crooked teeth, and remarked:

  “Hey, you forgot your book today.”

  “That’s right,” Paul agreed.

  Until last week, he had found his lunch hours at Nutting embarrassing. Though he was always welcomed in a friendly way by the other Publications Department people in the cafeteria, as soon as he sat down with them their conversation faded into inanities, for they were afraid of inadvertently mentioning some Nutting secret in front of someone who was merely Confidential, and who might (they knew about Reds in Eastern universities, after all) turn out to be a bad security risk. All except Skinner were so obviously uncomfortable with him that Paul often chose to eat alone in the Aloha Coffee Shop with a book.

  “Aw, too bad,” the waitress said, resting her coffeepot on the table.

  Paul made a conventional gesture of rueful resignation.

  “Listen, I’ll tell you what; I’ll get you a book, soon as I finish with the coffee. I’ve got one out back ... Nah, that’s all right. No trouble.”

  She was away before Paul could stop her; he was left to wonder what she would bring him, and then to speculate amusedly on a culture in which any book was the equivalent of any other. The incident was typically Los Angeles, he thought: in Boston or New York even a very stupid waitress would not imagine that he read the same books she read; nor would she step outside of her role to bring him anything not on the menu.

  He must not and did not smile. In a way it was a challenge; an individual was trying to treat him as an individual, not as a mechanical task. He must rise to the occasion and behave in such a way as not to discourage such acts. There had been other hints of this attitude; for instance, the direct, curious gaze and speech of garage mechanics as he drove across the West. (“Where you from in Massachusetts? I got an uncle back there.”) They seemed not to have classified him, other than as a person. How unlike New York, where every stranger is an object to observe or dodge on the street; or Cambridge, where one does sometimes speak to strangers, but only if they are obviously of one’s own caste.

  Well, he must behave like a native too. He had already resolved that while he was in Los Angeles he would do his best to follow the local mores; he wanted to create as little as possible of what sociologists call “noise” or “static.” Not only for the sake of better reception, but in order to preserve something which he was beginning to find agreeably unique.

  The waitress had finished pouring coffee and gone back into the kitchen, and now Paul remembered reading in some sociological text that for the working classes the word “book” means anything printed which is not a newspaper; every magazine is a “book.” Maybe she would bring him a copy of Look or the Post rather than some popular love story.

  Here she came. He composed his features into the beginnings of a friendly and grateful smile.

  The waitress walked up to Paul’s table, and laid down in front of him a new copy of Samuel Beckett’s latest play.

  With great difficulty, Paul prevented an expression of astonishment from appearing on his face. “Well, thank you,” he uttered.

  “Maybe you’ve already read this.”

  “No, but I’ve been wanting to.” This was true. “I—” But she had already whisked away to take an order at another table.

  Paul opened the book, but could not concentrate; he kept looking up. Twice the waitress was simply waiting on a table, her back to him, and it passed through his mind that maybe the book had been left behind by some other literate customer. The third time he caught her standing by the kitchen door, balancing her tray and half smiling to herself in his direction. He realized that she probably knew what he had been thinking, and also what he was thinking now. He looked away; he tried to read, and could not; he tried to finish his sandwich. Finally, caught staring again, he signaled for the check.

  “Like that book?” she said, scribbling on her pad.

  “Very much. I wish I had more time to read it.”

  She seemed to consider, adding the check—she added like any illiterate waitress, slowly, frowning and chewing on her pink tongue—then said: “I can lend it to you, overnight, like, if you want.”

  “Yes, I would. Thank you.”

  “Only you get it back here tomorrow.” This was said in a tone of friendly threat; both smiled.

  “All right. Do you read this kind of thing often?”

  The waitress looked at him a moment, like Justice deciding whether the scale should rise or fall; she had large brown eyes, set wide. “No,” she said finally. “Mostly I read True Screen Stories and the Saturday Evening Post.” Paul laughed; she laughed too, softly. What a pretty girl she was.

  “You’re not really a waitress,” he said, and for the first time he spoke in the tone he would have used to an attractive girl at a party. But her reaction to this was unfavorable: her face became cold and blank, and she said in a voice like that of a waitress:

  “I don’t get you.”

  “Well, really—” Paul smiled; no reaction. He laughed self-consciously. Then, determined not to give up, he said: “Hey. What’s your name?”

  “Ceci. Can’t you read?” CECI was embroidered in green on the pocket of her uniform. She shifted her hips and looked round the room, about to go. But Paul was stubborn; besides, her very rudeness, quite outside the conventional limits of rudeness for waitresses, gave him confidence.

  “Just Ceci?”

  “Cecile, then. If you must know, Cecile O’Connor.”

  Paul had gone on staring at her, and when she finally glanced back to say this, they exchanged a look which unsettled him. It did not last long; Cecile O’Connor dropped his check on the table and walked off quickly towards the kitchen.

  But who is she? Paul thought. As he left (late now), paying the check at the cashier’s desk, he recalled that she hadn’t bothered to ask his name. A wave of ridiculous depression passed over him because of this small incident, that a waitress had not wanted to know his name. Then he recalled that exactly who he was, and what he was (at least for the moment), was printed in capital letters on his
chest: SECRET PAUL CATTLEMAN, NUTTING RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION.

  3

  A BLACK JAGUAR SPORTS car was stopped on the west shoulder of the San Diego Freeway between Pico and National Boulevards, in full view of the southbound afternoon traffic, and two people sat in it quarreling. They were Glory Green, a successful Hollywood starlet, and her husband Dr. Isidore Einsam, a successful Beverly Hills psychiatrist.

  “Okay, I get the idea. You’re pissed off at me,” said Glory in her amazing voice, and she turned her amazing face away. She wore the conventional costume of a kooky starlet on vacation: high-heeled sandals; tight pink silk pants from Jax; long, baggy, bulky, dirt-colored sweater; and a tall conical straw hat tied under the chin with a pink scarf. Her face, including the mouth, was painted chalky brown all over, as if with Kemtone; her heavy eye makeup was hidden by heavy dark glasses. She had the soft, throaty, resonant speech of the mature actress, but with a childish half-lisp which grew more pronounced in moments of stress, so that she actually described her husband now as “pithed off.” But it did not really matter what Glory said, for first practice and then habit had brought her to the point where she could not even telephone for a plumber without sounding sexy.

  “I’m not pissed off at you, pie-face,” Iz said. “I just think it might be interesting to find out why you forgot your bathing suit. I’m interested in your reasons for wanting to forget it.” Iz often cited Glory to his professional friends as proof that a stable personality need not be a conventional one; she was completely off-beat, completely and wonderfully original, without being neurotic.

  “I didn’t want to forget it, stupid. I wanted to pack it.”

  “I don’t think so,” Iz said, smiling a psychiatrist’s knowing smile. Though he was only thirty-two, and had not been in private practice long, he did this smile most effectively. The psychiatrist’s beard he had recently grown (small, dark, pointed) helped a lot. Like his wife, Iz wore huge black-rimmed sunglasses; the rest of him was covered with inoffensively elegant sports clothes.

  “Okay.” Glory sighed theatrically. “Let’s have your interpretation.”

  Iz paused. For about a year after their marriage he had had a sort of superstitious dread of disturbing this unique psychological organization that was his wife by any sort of prying, but lately he had begun to let what he thought of as professional curiosity get the better of him.

  “Well,” he said; “there are a number of possibilities. Maybe you really don’t want to go to Mexico. Maybe you don’t want to expose your body to the Mexicans; or maybe that’s just what you do want. We know already that you prefer to swim nude. Or maybe simply you don’t like any of your bathing suits.” As every one of these explanations was correct, and no secret to her, Glory smiled and said nothing.

  “Or maybe more than one of these reasons applies. Most of our actions are after all multiply determined. I mean,” he translated, since Glory had left school in the eighth grade, “most people have more than one reason for whatever they decide to do.” Glory did not mind her husband’s using technical language; she liked it, even when she did not quite understand. The roar of long words breaking over her head made her feel as if she too swam in deep intellectual seas, washed about by great ideas. There was practically nothing she went for in a man as much as a really brilliant mind. She had therefore been gazing affectionately at Iz; but when he began explaining as if she were a feeble-minded kid, she pouted. Both of these expressions were hidden from Iz by the shadow of her hat and glasses; he continued. “I think it might be interesting if we were to ask sometime why you ‘forget’ so often.”

  This was not a new or original idea, though it was new that Iz should express it. Glory’s headlong rush through her life had left a trail of abandoned objects. She had forgotten handbags, suitcases, packages, contracts, and every imaginable and unimaginable piece of clothing, in every imaginable and unimaginable place. She had also, at one time or another, misplaced a pregnant police dog, a pink Edsel automobile, and two husbands. Some of these things later turned up in unexpected places; others were never recovered. Glory was already mildly famous for this, and Maxie, her press agent, was doing his best to make her more so.

  “Oh, I think you’re right,” Glory said. “We should do that some time. But right now, how about getting off your ass? I mean we aren’t going anywhere here.” She gestured at Mar Vista laid out below the freeway: a random grid of service stations, two-story apartment buildings, drive-ins, palms, and factories; and block after block of stucco cottages.

  “So what’re you going to do about your bathing suit?” Iz persisted. Glory shrugged, raising both her shoulders and her celebrated breasts, but did not answer. Silence was her best weapon and also her best defense; nothing she could say was half so eloquent as her beauty. “Goddammit. You try to go in without one somewhere along the coast, and we’ll both end up in the jug. No thanks. I can see the headlines.” He stopped smiling. “Or is that what you want? Maybe you’re planning a publicity stunt?”

  Here Iz did Glory an injustice; it had not occurred to her that she might be arrested for indecent exposure in Mexico. Maxie would shit poodles if she got herself into anything like that without clearing it with him first. For a couple of seconds she considered doing it just for that. But she decided not: after all, this was supposed to be a vacation.

  “What do you want; you want to stop somewhere on the way down?” Glory shrugged again. “Or do you want to try to buy a suit in Tijuana? So tell me.” Iz did not mention the possibility that he might turn around and drive back to their house in the hills above Hollywood, or else to the Beverly Hills shopping district, which was nearer. He abhorred all retrogressive movement. Also, he was determined to force Glory to ask him for what she wanted or, as he put it to himself, to assume responsibility for her own actions.

  “Like where? In the desert I could pick something up, but not in Tijuana.”

  “I see.” Iz smiled, and actually stroked his new beard. He contemplated her, and she eyed him, through their sunglasses; in the cars that sped past, drivers and passengers, mostly in sunglasses, continued to stare at them.

  “Okay,” Glory said finally. “I’ll feed you the line. ‘Whadayou see?’”

  “Let me ask you,” Iz said, holding his pose. “What do you see?” Glory did not answer. She continued to look at Iz almost inquiringly, as if she had not heard the question. Had Iz been in his office he would have accepted this as the sign of total resistance to interpretation—so wait patiently a few sessions, at fifteen to thirty dollars an hour, then offer the interpretation again. But he was patient only in his office.

  “You want to go to Palm Springs,” he said. “You always wanted to go to Palm Springs.”

  “That’s a lot of crap,” Glory said.

  “It should be,” Iz said. “Because you know what would happen if we went to Palm Springs. As soon as you showed your face there you’d be surrounded by a crowd of voyeurs and parasites, massaging your ego, trying to participate vicariously in—”

  “Talk talk talk talk,” Glory interrupted.

  “All right. Ass-kissers and creeps, to you; sucking up to you, so they can get in on a good thing, just the way they are on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. And I don’t think you need that any more. I don’t think that’s what you really want.”

  “You know what I want, ass-head,” Glory said. “I want to go away somewhere with you. I want to get out of this phony nowhere city and go somewhere where we can swim ... and lie in the sun ... and sleep.” Glory’s voice deepened and slowed into a vibrating whisper of the kind that comes out of theater amplifiers during close-ups.

  “Right. That’s what I thought you wanted,” Iz said in an appropriate voice. He leaned towards Glory, putting one hand under her pink silk thigh, another at her neck, pulling her up to him. Their large dark glasses stared into each other and the plastic rims grated together as they kissed passionately, much to the interest of the passing vehicles.
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  “I want to be warm,” Glory murmured, her mouth and tongue fluttering at the margin of his beard. “We could go like somewhere out in the desert where nobody goes. Just get out there and keep driving until we hit some way out place. Mm?”

  “Mm,” Iz replied.

  Unwisely, Glory pushed her advantage. “And then, well like tomorrow, I could just run into Palm Springs without anybody seeing me and pick up a bathing suit.”

  Iz drew his head back, and replaced Glory in her seat of the car.

  “You really are a spoiled child, beautiful, aren’t you?” he said. “A beautiful, spoiled child.” Glory did not agree with him. “You’ve got to have everything your way.” Glory opened her mouth, but he continued. “Oh, I know it’s not entirely your fault. Since you really were a child chronologically you’ve been flattered and indulged and taught to think that all Glory’s little whims were very, very important. Because you weren’t like other people. You were a child entertainer, a little third-rate goddess, so charming and so talented and so pretty. When you reached adolescence you got a big shock: nobody loved you any more. You had a tough time before you started making it again, and you should have learned something then. Maybe you did learn it, only I wonder if now you aren’t forgetting. Maybe you’re beginning to feel that all those years were just a bad dream. You know what I think is your problem now? You’re starting to believe all that crap that Maxie grinds out about Glory Green, the beautiful, crazy, way out starlet. Ya, I think so. You’re starting to believe your own publicity.”