Nowhere City

by Alison Lurie

  “You,” Ceci said. “You’re funny. How come you’re all hung up on the past like that?”

  “Well, hell,” Paul said. “After all, I’m an historian.”

  A diversion was created now by the entrance of a group of extremely beat-looking people: men in turtleneck sweaters and dark glasses, girls tightly wrapped in black, high-heeled, and dangling with colored beads. “Who’re they?” he asked eagerly.

  “Never saw them before.” Ceci studied the newcomers as they took their places at a table by the door, then turned her head away. “Tourists,” she pronounced scornfully. “Yeah. They’re all tourists. Ever since that piece came out in the paper some of them always make it down here on week-ends to see the beatniks. Maybe try to buy some pot or pick up a free lay. ... Look at their clothes. That’s supposed to be like beatnik costume. You could tell them a block off.” Again Ceci spoke in a normally loud voice. But the tourists were talking among themselves, and did not hear her.

  But I am disguised in beatnik costume, Paul thought. Does she mean I am a tourist? No, of course not. I come down here all the time, this is where my real life is. If I could, I’d live here. He began to run over a vague fantasy; suppose Katherine should be hit by a car, or let’s just say she can’t bear L.A., like she keeps saying, so she leaves him, goes back East. He stays at N.R.D.C.; next year he gets a raise to let’s say twelve K. He could move to Westwood or Brentwood or Pacific Palisades on that; but instead he goes to Venice. He lives just like all his friends, a simple pad, maybe with a view of the ocean. He uses the extra dough to build up a really fantastic book and record collection, with which he is extremely generous. Maybe he buys some pictures from local artists. He gives some money to the Tylers so Steve can stop driving the cab and finish his novel. After a while, he leaves Nutting to work on his thesis. He also writes articles, perhaps a book. He establishes a reputation as an historian and essayist. Ceci has already quit her job, of course. Now he marries her. And they have kids, like the Tylers; only maybe not so many.

  “Ceci!” he said, but in a joking tone, putting his arm around her. “Hey, let’s get married.”

  Ceci turned and looked at him, holding her expresso cup halfway to her mouth. “Sorry,” she said through the steam. “Can’t do it. I’m never going to be married again.”

  “Really?” Paul asked. “Why not?” He forgot that he was joking; his voice became serious.

  “Because it’s a shuck. When you get married, pretty soon you’re doing it with somebody you don’t love, because the law says you have to. Or just because they’re around, maybe. Anyhow, that’s how it is with me.” She drank, and put the cup down. “Besides, I couldn’t marry you. You have too much bread.” She spoke as if of a simple but insuperable fact; as if Paul were living in a room piled to the ceiling with pound loaves wrapped in waxed paper.

  Before he could answer, they were interrupted. Many more people were coming in now out of the fog: some neighbors of the Tylers named Tony and Jeanne took the table next to theirs, and then Steve turned up himself; with him was John, the fellow who had been at the beach on New Year’s Day. John had brought a guitar. Suddenly all the tables seemed to be full. The room was thick with smoke and noise, people calling for Dinny, who rushed back and forth through the crowd carrying cups of expresso, looking strained. Seeing this, Ceci excused herself and got up to help wait on the customers.

  Watching, Paul was reminded of how he had admired Ceci before he knew her, back when he first used to go to the Aloha Coffee Shop for lunch. But now, with her hair streaming down and dressed in a black jersey and pants, Ceci looked more like a dancer than a waitress. She moved with speed and grace, working the taps of the big expresso machine or swinging her way among the crowded tables, sending him a quick, special smile as she passed. God, she was so great. What fantastic luck that he had met her. Thank Christ he had decided to come to Los Angeles, where people were really alive and things happened right now as well as in the past.

  And maybe she was right. They couldn’t love each other more than they did, so why get married? It was only a convention. He felt good again. What a hip place, and here he was in the thick of it. He hoped that a lot would happen tonight—that people would play the piano, fight, recite poems. ...

  “You going to buy Kelly’s car?” Steve Tyler asked him.

  “I think so.” Paul had finally called Walter Wong up at Universal Insect and Rodent Control (he had no home phone number—Ceci said he was probably sleeping with some girl or in his car), and offered him $725 for the dragster, $75 less than Kelly was supposed to be asking.

  Tony, who had been observing Paul casually for some time, now asked: “You a painter?”

  “Uh-uh.” Paul shook his head. “Just kind of a house painter. Not like John, an amateur. I was painting the kitchen over in my place,” he explained. This was true, but of two weeks ago.

  “Yeah.” Tony and his wife smiled, and Paul felt he liked them.

  “He works for Nutting Research and Development,” Steve Tyler informed them. Paul imagined that the expressions of Tony and his wife changed subtly, as if they were thinking: Oh, an outsider, a square. Maybe they weren’t; but there was no mistaking the look of cool dislike on Steve’s face.

  “What’s so bad about that?” Paul said, in as open a tone as he could manage. You drive a cab, he thought, John’s a part-time painter and carpenter, Tony (he had just learned this) is an actor who supports himself by working for a bookie joint, and your friend Walter Wong is an exterminator, for Christ’s sake—what’s so bad about N.R.D.C.? But Steve leaned forward smiling, as if he had been waiting for this question a long time.

  “Like it’s shit, man,” he said. “What do you think that place is making over there in Mar Vista? It’s just making death. You got to have some bread, all right, there’s other ways to get it.”

  Everyone nodded. Paul felt out of breath, as if he had received a blow under his ribs. He knew what Fred Skinner would have said: that Nutting was not making death, but laboring desperately to stave it off—that only through a relentless effort to produce the means of destruction could we deter the enemy from destroying us. Therefore we must keep on, keep on, etc.

  But Paul did not say this; for one thing, he was not sure he believed it. Also, he knew that the argument would irrevocably mark him as an outsider.

  “You’ve got it wrong,” he objected lightly. “Nutting’s just a research outfit. The only stuff they’re really producing in quantity, right now anyway, is television components.” Unsympathetic looks greeted this; Paul remembered that in Ceci’s opinion TV was not a low-brow nuisance, but a carnivorous brain-washing monster.

  An uneasy sensation had started in his stomach, too—probably it came from eating cream cake at midnight. He felt in his pocket for the envelope of digestive tablets that he sometimes carried.

  “You mean you don’t have any government contracts?” Steve said.

  “Hell, yes, of course we—they have contracts.” Paul worked one of the tablets out of the envelope. “But you’re over-simplifying.” He swallowed it unobtrusively, with a bitter chaser of tepid expresso. “We’re just working on—well, I can’t tell you what they’re working on, it’s against regulations, but it’s not really military. Anyhow,” (he laughed, trying to get them back on his side) “from what I’ve seen, you don’t have to worry about Nutting developing anything dangerous. They’re spending enough money and time to build a mountain, but all they’ve made out of it lately is some pretty sick-looking mole-hills.” He laughed a bit more; Tony, Jeanne, and John joined him, but Steve did not.

  Paul tried to ignore Steve; he went on. “Like I’ll give you an example. This isn’t breaking security—it happened years ago. They got a contract at Nutting to do a job on the repair and servicing of radar stations. You know there’s radar equipment set up all along the coasts to look out for enemy aircraft, and they have to revolve constantly to cover the whole sky. But they had to be checked and oiled from time to time, and
sometimes a part would have to be replaced. So the problem Nutting had was, how much would the radar have to be slowed down for a mechanic to repair it without getting too dizzy, and still lose as little sky coverage as possible. They had mathematicians working on the problem, of course, and physicists, and engineers, and communications specialists, and electronics men, and even psychologists. There were all kinds of angles, like, for instance, maybe the equipment could be redesigned a little, or different kinds of repair work could be done at different speeds, and maybe the physical make-up and personality type of the mechanic would be significant. They built a mock-up of a radar station in the plant and had a lot of volunteers revolving on it. Anyhow, so this went on for a whole goddamned year, and at the end of the year they got out a report in several volumes presenting all the data and tables and drawings and formulae they’d worked out, and making a whole lot of very complex recommendations.

  “But meanwhile, all this time, another company somewhere else was working on perfecting radar equipment. Naturally. And so, just about the time the N.R.D.C. report was finished, these other guys came up with a new type of radar that didn’t ever need to be oiled or repaired.”

  This time even Steve laughed. “Jesus, that must have finished them!” Tony said.

  “That’s what I thought too,” Paul agreed. “But it wasn’t true. Nobody gave a damn, apparently; they just filed the report away and started on the next project. I was talking about it to a mathematician who was here from Boston; he has a theory about the whole thing. His idea is, it’s supposed to turn out like that. He calls it Watson’s Law; that’s his name. Watson’s Law says that the purpose of this whole economy is to expend as much time, money, and material as possible without creating anything useful. Otherwise, see, the productive capacity of the country would get out of hand. You notice it most in organizations like Nutting. When they’re working on a government contract, they can’t afford to produce anything that might compete with private enterprise. But the process is going on everywhere.”

  “Only not here,” Jeanne put in. “We’re all out of it. I mean, it’s like Steve once said—what was it?—we don’t any of us here hustle for death or deception.” She looked at Steve; he nodded.

  “All right,” Paul said. “I mean, no. You can’t opt out of your society like that.” He was facing Steve, not Jeanne. “The same people I work for at the plant, you’re driving them around town in your cab, and John’s painting their houses and your friend Walter’s killing their bugs. If you want to keep your hands really clean, you can’t stay here, you’ve got to go be a hermit in the mountains somewhere. And even then you wouldn’t be clear, you’d be depending on the government to keep the area safe from gangs of bandits and forest fires. And what’d happen if everybody started acting like you?” Paul became aware that he had finally been forced into the position of The Other, but went on, still trying to speak casually. “There’d be terrible unemployment, depression, maybe a war. What’re you going to do about that?”

  “Christ, I don’t know,” Steve said. “That’s not my business. You got us into this mess; you get us out.”

  Paul glared at Steve, infuriated by his cool tone and his use of the second person singular; he was about to accuse him of being solipsistic and irresponsible. But now John, who had been listening silently, took his guitar out of its case and played two chords; then two more, in a loose blues rhythm, humming under his breath. Someone across the room began beating softly on the table in accompaniment.

  Gradually the place grew quieter; some of the people at the tables stopped to listen; some went on talking, but in lower voices. Ceci slid back into her seat beside Paul and took his hand under the table. He clasped hers hard.

  As John continued to play, Paul’s anger and the pain in his stomach moderated. He thought that he was right, but that whether or not he was right, he would never convince Steve, who for some reason was permanently down on him—maybe out of loyalty to his pal Walter Wong. Still, you couldn’t expect to please everybody—the rest of Ceci’s friends liked him. He began to feel better, to be ready for the next thing to happen, whatever it might be. Maybe someone would sing now or recite beat poetry.

  In fact, a man with a bunch of papers in his hand had just come up to the table, and was speaking to John, when something did happen. The front door was shoved open with a loud crash, and two large policemen entered the coffee house. John broke off in the middle of a phrase. Within thirty seconds everyone in the room had stopped talking.

  There was a scuffle in back by the expresso machine. Two more cops appeared through the burlap curtain, pushing ahead of them a customer who had been in the washroom. Paul had noticed before how the Los Angeles police, because of their uniforms (tight gaiters, leather windbreaker, ammunition belt, black leather gloves) resemble stormtroopers or juvenile delinquents more than they do the cops back East. These four were no exception. He was not frightened of them, but he found it necessary to remind himself that he had not done anything illegal lately, had he?

  “Okay, who owns the joint?” one of the cops said loudly.

  One of the men who had been playing chess in the corner stood up. Thin and slight in his gray sweater, at least a foot shorter than any of the policemen, he looked like a member of another species. Apparently in response to some command, he began to take things out of his pockets and place them on the table.

  “What’s going on?” Paul whispered to Ceci.

  “They’re looking for drugs.”

  Paul took a breath. Safe. But anyhow he had not done anything. He began looking round the room, wondering which of the other customers would turn out to be addicts. Some of them did look pretty odd. Two of the cops were going along the tables, searching the crowd, while the others stood guard at the front and back exits. They looked through the handbags of the women and made the men turn out their pockets. Not a very thorough search, compared to those in detective movies; they probably wouldn’t find anything (and he felt a twinge of disappointment). Maybe they don’t expect to, just trying to make things hard for the beats again.

  At the table next to theirs a cop sniffed suspiciously at a pack of Camels, then emptied them out on to the table, and broke one apart to smell the tobacco. “Hey!” the owner protested. “Those are my last cigarettes.” The cop said nothing, but he began to tear up the rest of the pack, smelling the cigarettes only perfunctorily. Leaving the table covered with shredded paper and tobacco, he passed on to Paul and Ceci.

  “Lessee your bag,” he ordered. Ceci set the bag in front of her, and Paul watched with some indignation as the cop pawed through it: comb, wallet, keys, an orange, a paperback book (a play by Genet with a lurid cover, at which he squinted suspiciously).

  “Okay.” He passed on to Paul, who began to empty his pockets, first the right side: keys, wallet, change—he took his time, beginning to appreciate if not to enjoy the experience, and thinking that this deliberate delay was the least he could do to show how he felt. Then the left: handkerchief, nail file, comb—“That there! What’s that you got?”

  “Oh, that’s nothing,” Paul said, “just some pills for upset stomach.” He reached out, but the cop was ahead of him slamming his paw on to the table.

  “Oh, yeah.” Heavy irony; he held up the plain white envelope and peered into it.

  “Listen, that’s just medicine. They’re called Alkogel or something; you can get them anywhere, without a prescription.” The cop paid no attention to Paul, although everyone else in the room was listening to him; he spoke out of the side of his mouth to his partner.

  “Okay. You come with us,” he added in a tough voice. “Stand up,” he said, as Paul, astonished, did not move.

  Paul stood up. “Listen, officer. You’re making a mistake,” he said, and was aware that he had uttered a stock line from TV drama. “I mean this isn’t dope or anything.”

  “Move.” But before Paul had a chance to move, the policeman pushed him heavily, so that he staggered and nearly fell on to the
next table, where Steve and John were sitting.

  “Hey, why doncha leave him alone?” Steve said.

  The cop turned and glared at Steve. Then he glared at Paul. “This a friend of yours?”

  “Uh-uh,” Paul answered automatically, shaking his head. Why had he said that? Because Steve was not his friend. And besides he was in enough trouble already; he wasn’t going to admit knowing somebody who probably had a record around here for shoplifting or God knows what. C’mon.

  While the entire roomful of people watched, the four policemen escorted, or rather shoved Paul out of the coffee house.

  Twenty minutes later, Paul sat alone in a small room which, although it had no bars, he presumed to be a cell. It contained two chairs, a table, and a battered standing ashtray bolted to the floor. The walls were painted a disagreeable shade of green and there was no window, only a ceiling ventilator grille. High up on the door was a small glass panel, presumably so that the cop on duty could look at Paul if he felt like it.

  Paul had never seen the inside of a police station before. He felt angry, worried, nervous; even claustrophobic. His feet hurt, because these sandals (whose sandals? Probably Walter Wong’s, he realized) were too small. His stomach was still unsettled, very unsettled, but they had taken away his envelope of digestive tablets. Of course they would let him out as soon as they discovered that it wasn’t heroin or cocaine, or whatever they thought it was. He hoped. Everybody knew that the cops in Venice hated the beats. They wanted them to move out, and were following a policy of deliberate harassment and bullying to effect this purpose; and he had fallen into the jaws of that policy. He remembered tales and rumors now that he had heard from Ceci and her friends, about things the cops (or as they called them, “the fuzz”) had done. Scenes from TV plays, stories of police brutality. But of course they wouldn’t dare (why not?).