by Alison Lurie
“I’m not criticizing you,” Iz said. “Don’t get hostile.” Katherine took a few steps away, feeling irritated. “Listen, Katherine,” he went on, following her. “Do you know what you said that struck me a while back? About your parents. You said: ‘They aren’t living now.’ What comes to mind is the idea that they have chosen to be in a state of suspended animation. But they might be back at any time, so they could see what you’d done with their furniture and whether you were stealing flowers from other people’s gardens.” Both of them glanced at the roses, which glowed white and velvety dark in the twilight. “Only your parents aren’t living now; and they weren’t living yesterday, and they won’t be living tomorrow. Do you understand what I mean?”
Katherine looked at Iz without speaking, stunned at this intrusion into the privacy of her feelings: she was actually trembling. She ought to snub him directly, but she doubted that she could do so calmly, and she was determined not to lose her temper again. Besides, wouldn’t that be stooping to his own level?
“I don’t know where Paul can have got to,” she said in a high rapid voice, turning aside towards the street. “But I really ought to start supper. It’s—” She looked at her watch, but it had become too dark to read the tiny gold dial. “It must be getting late,” she concluded, and began to cross the street.
Iz ignored this. “Don’t repress what I’ve just said,” he ordered, coming after Katherine and blocking her way, so that they faced each other in the middle of the street. “Even if you think I’m wrong, say something.”
“I don’t have to say anything.” For the second time that day—how awful—Katherine found herself losing control. “Don’t tell me what to think,” she said. “I’m not one of your patients: I’m your secretary! I didn’t ask you to explain my childhood.” She clenched her fists and got hold of herself, and walked around Iz towards the curb in front of her house.
“Oh, hell,” Iz exclaimed, following her. “All right. I’m sorry.” He did not sound very sorry. “That’s what my wife kept telling me,” he added to Katherine’s averted profile. “She said I always tell people more than they want to hear, and I ask them too many questions.” This was the first time Katherine had ever heard him mention his wife; she turned her head slightly back. “I’m going,” Iz went on, moving towards his car. “I know it’s late. ... So what else can I say?” He turned and held out both hands in a gesture of charming European helplessness. Katherine did not advise him. She frowned, and put her fingers to her head; the small nagging sinus headache that she had had all day was growing worse, as it usually did in the evening. “Aren’t you going to speak to me at all?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just my sinusitis.”
“That’s too bad.” Iz’s immediate sympathy had a professionally warm resonance. “Do you have it often?”
“Most of the time, since we moved out here. I think it must be the smog, or something in the atmosphere, because I never got it this much back East.” She shouldn’t have said that; now, of course, he would tell her that it was psychosomatic, due to repression or something.
“It could be,” Iz said. “That’s a shame. Have you seen a doctor about it?”
“Not yet.”
“You ought to. Maybe a doctor could clear it up for you very easily, who knows? Take a day off next week and go to a specialist.”
“Thank you,” Katherine said. “Maybe I will.”
“You sound surprised. Did you think I was the kind of boss that never gives anyone time off?”
“No,” Katherine said, though she had thought this. “I suppose I expected you to say my sinus was all a delusion, and explain it away by some psychological reason.”
“No one can ‘explain away’ a physical symptom,” Iz said. “What a stupid idea. Pain is a real event, and real events have real causes.”
“Mm,” Katherine murmured, committing these words to memory as well as she could for use against Paul later. Iz walked round his car and stepped into the driver’s seat over the side.
“So long,” he said. “Tell your husband I’m sorry I didn’t get to meet him.”
“I will. But listen, don’t you think emotions have anything to do with it at all?” she added, wanting to make sure. “Is that the new view?
“How do you mean?” Iz paused with his hands on the wheel.
“Well, bad emotions. Anger or unhappiness or something; you don’t think they might make someone sick, just by themselves?”
“Possibly,” Iz said. “If they weren’t properly expressed.” He turned the ignition key, and started the engine, making a loud uneven noise in the quiet street. “But there would still have to be some physical basis.” He looked at her through the growing twilight. “I like the way you get angry,” he went on, almost shouting over the roar. “Don’t try to suppress it. It’s promising. So; see you next week.” Gunning the motor, he sped off.
13
THOUGH IT WAS MID-MORNING, all the blinds in Paul and Katherine Cattleman’s house were drawn. The sun poured against the walls and then flowed back, leaving a cube of pale shadow inside. In the bedroom the sheets and blankets had been pulled off on to the floor at the foot of the bed, a heap of darker shadows. Ceci O’Connor Wong lay on the striped mattress, naked, while Paul stroked her breasts.
“So good.” She gave a murmur of pleasure.
“What’s so good?”
“I like the way you still like me afterwards. You know some men are great beforehand: they love to lie around and kiss and make out; but as soon as it’s over they don’t even want to touch you. They get up right away and wipe themselves off like they’d been to the bathroom. I figure they really hate women.”
Paul made an indistinct noise in reply. He felt uneasy here, though he was almost certain that Katherine would not come home. (But suppose she suddenly got sick at work?) Maybe they should have gone to a motel and asked for a room (at nine A.M.?). But he didn’t like the idea of love in a motel; and here was a whole house standing empty, after all.
Things had been in this state for a week, ever since Ceci’s friend Tomaso and Tomaso’s girlfriend Carmen had arrived. Under other circumstances Paul might have liked Tomaso, a short, powerfully built young man with black hair and an intelligent, good-natured manner. He would have had nothing against Carmen, a plump, pretty Mexican girl who spoke hardly any English. But what the hell were they doing in Ceci’s apartment? Tomaso was supposed to be looking for a place to live and a job teaching Spanish, but he wasn’t looking very hard. He lay around on the floor reading Spanish and French poetry and playing Mariachi records at top volume. The bathroom was full of Carmen’s intimate black lace laundry and the kitchen of stacks of tortillas and strings of hot sausage. How long were they going to stay, for Christ’s sake?
As far as Ceci was concerned, there was no reason for Paul to stop coming over and climbing into her bed just because Tomaso and Carmen were there. After all, she argued, Tomaso knew that they were making out; he didn’t mind. Which implied that Tomaso had a prior claim—that was what Walter Wong had implied, wasn’t it? Tomaso had lived there before; his name was painted on the door. But maybe Wong had still been there then.
Paul moved his hand down a few inches on to Ceci’s softly rounded belly, shield-shaped within the pelvic hills, and divided heraldically into brown above and pink below by the sun. He wanted to settle, once and for all, whether it had ever belonged to Tomaso, and now, while she lay yawning with gentle pleasure under his hand, would be a good time to ask. How should he put it? He thought back to her last remark, and said:
“Have you known many men like that?”
“Like what?” Ceci asked drowsily. “Oh. No. One or two, maybe.”
“How many men have you been with?” he asked in an assumed sleepy tone, lying back.
“Gee. I d’know.”
“You mean you don’t want to tell me.” Paul imitated playfulness.
“No; I don’t know. I never counted them.” Paul heaved hi
mself up on his elbow again and looked into Ceci’s face to see if she were lying; she returned his gaze directly. “Why should I?”
“I should think you’d want to know.”
“What for?” Now Ceci was quite awake; she opened her eyes fully and put her hand on Paul’s to stop a caress that had become somewhat automatic. “Do you keep score? Do you add them up, so you can go around counting to yourself, like ‘twelve, thirteen, fourteen, and little Ceci in Venice makes fifteen’?”
“Hell, no,” Paul said. But he could not help thinking, first that Ceci had over-estimated his score, and second that her own total must be among the figures she had just named.
“This place makes me uncomfortable,” he said. “I keep thinking somebody’ll walk in. Let’s get up, huh?”
“Okay.” Ceci stretched and sat. “Hey, we can have a shower! Let’s have a shower.”
“You take one.” Paul smiled. “It’s not such a big treat for me.”
While Ceci splashed and sang in the bathroom, Paul pulled on his clothes and hurriedly made up the bed again. Katherine’s bed—Katherine’s parents’ bed, really, with its tall headboard and suspended wooden garlands—no wonder he felt constraint here, he thought, even with Ceci. And no wonder Katherine lay so still, or moved so mechanically, under that frieze of dark, petrified fruit.
His wife had been in Los Angeles six months now, Paul thought, and she still existed here as a sad, angry exile, whining for the past. The variety and excitement of the city, the warm, easy climate, hadn’t had the good effects he had once hoped for. Of course Katherine had never been a very happy or lively person. But now it was as if southern California, where poinsettias were six feet tall and roses grew to the size of cabbages, had increased both his elation and her depression. She seemed to bear a perpetual grudge. It discouraged him to think about it, so he did not think about it often.
He pulled the cord of the blind, and light poured in through a lattice of red and green leaves. Maybe he shouldn’t have brought Ceci here, but there was a lot to be said for getting her out of Venice. After all, there was a whole great city here—why should they limit their lives to a few run-down shacks and a strip of dirty sand?
The shabby decay and disorder of Venice no longer seemed attractive to Paul; he was surprised that he had ever found it so. There was nothing intrinsically great about taking your bath in a cracked laundry tub (listen to Ceci now). Or those rusty black secondhand clothes she always wore—what was the point of them? Los Angeles was an economy of abundance, for Christ’s sake.
And Ceci’s friends’ sloppy, pointless defiance of authority was beginning to get on his nerves. It wasn’t that they didn’t like him, now. For a while after the night of the police raid he had been a kind of culture hero in Venice; he was still included in the crazy schemes they talked of for getting back at the cops. Childish—but what were they all anyhow but a bunch of disobedient children: abusing the grown-ups, shouting “I won’t!” behind their backs, refusing to wash their faces or comb their hair or tidy their rooms, and smoking illegal cigarettes down in their club-house.
Take Ceci’s painting. She had some new canvases that were first-rate, really beautiful and original. She ought to have a show, and get some recognition, so she wouldn’t always have to work as a waitress. But according to her and her pals, that would be selling out. Maybe, but look at it from the other side: you could almost call it selfishness to hide these pictures away from the world in a shack in Venice. Of course, he would have been thought incredibly square if he were to say anything to Ceci and her friends about the artist’s responsibility to society. Right away they would start sounding off, with examples, on the shitty way society treats artists. It was one of their favorite subjects; part of their creed.
Everything was a war between Us and Them, who were imagined as all narrow, hostile Philistines. Which was another reason for Ceci to leave Venice, and meet some of the other intelligent people in the world.
Holding a towel around her, Ceci came out of the bathroom. “Hey,” she said, grinning. “That was big.” She walked past Paul into the center of the darkened living-room and turned slowly round, looking at everything. “Pretty nice place.”
“It’s too small.”
“Well, yeah, maybe. You couldn’t have much of a blow-out here. But it sure is neat. Everything’s so new and spiffy and clean. I bet you don’t even have bugs. It looks like nobody moved in yet; like one of those store window displays. ... Cool chair.” She sat down in a dish-shaped wicker chair, clasping her arms round her bare legs like a child. “Yeah, I really dig this chair.”
“You want one? I’ll buy you one like it,” Paul offered.
“Aw, no, don’t do that. I don’t need it. Hey, lookit, my hair got all wet.” Ceci began to take down her hair, which she had pinned up roughly for the shower.
“I’d like to buy you something.”
“Uh-uh. I don’t want it. I don’t like to have stuff around I don’t use. It bugs me. I guess I’m afraid my pad’ll get to look like my mother’s place.”
“Oh? What’s that like?” He knew of Ceci’s background only that her father, a pretty square advertising salesman, had deserted her mother, a completely square bookkeeper, when Ceci was in kindergarten in Long Beach.
“Awful. It’s just full of crap. Like, you know. Painted wall plaques and plastic flower arrangements and magazine racks and smocked satin pillows. There’s all these things that you’re supposed to do something with them, open coke bottles or light cigarettes or hang up your coat, only they’re made to look like something else; puppy dogs maybe, or babies or funny Indians. For instance, on top of the TV she’s got this cute ceramic rabbit about three feet high with an aerial growing out of his ears. After you’ve been there ten, fifteen minutes, you feel like you’re being smothered.” Ceci unwound the towel from herself and began to rub her hair dry. Though the blinds were closed, it made Paul uneasy to see her sitting completely naked in Katherine’s chair. It was something Katherine had never done and would never do: she didn’t like to go around without clothes on.
He shouldn’t have brought Ceci here; it was a messy thing, mixing up one part of his life with another. He had never made that mistake before; he had always been careful to keep his affairs separate from the very different kind of relationship that he had with Katherine.
“And it’s the same outside,” Ceci went on. “All those houses down there are the same. Their yards are all crapped up with stuff, rock gardens and birdbaths and iron flamingoes plugged into the grass. Uh-uh. I can’t take it more than once or twice a year.”
“Is that all you see your mother, a couple of times a year?” Ceci nodded. “Doesn’t she mind?”
“Nah. She never dug me much, anyhow. I moved out of the house when I was fourteen; I didn’t like the man she was married to then and he didn’t like me, so I went to live with a girlfriend, and I just never went back. And of course now she thinks I’m completely flippy. I only go down there when it gets to be Christmas or something and she wants to put on an act like she’s got a family.”
Paul looked at Ceci, naked and vulnerable under her long damp parti-colored hair, and felt a surge of pity. He would have liked to make it all up to her: to give her, say, a house in Pacific Palisades with a view of the ocean, all the showers she wanted, clothes, furniture, a studio. And perhaps he would, one day.
“Well, maybe you’re lucky,” he said meanwhile. “If my parents lived in Long Beach I’d have to go there for dinner every week.”
“Oh yeah?” Ceci said, rubbing her hair. “Why?”
“Well, because they’d expect it. I mean, they’d want to see me, and I’d really want to see them, sort of. You know how it is.” But of course she didn’t.
Making the towel into a white turban, Ceci got up and began to survey the room again. She flipped through the magazines so neatly laid out on the polished coffee table, and leaned across the sofa to look at the facsimile of a page from a medieval manuscript which
hung above it. Paul could see the wicker pattern of the chair imprinted in red and white on her behind.
“All boxed in,” she remarked, not turning her head. “There’s a wall around the garden, and a wall around the castle, and a border of thorns around the whole picture, and another border outside of that; and then the frame. Say, that girl is really in a bad way.”
Paul frowned, but said nothing. As far as possible, he had always avoided discussing Katherine with anyone he got involved with, or with anyone at all. Such matters were private; he despised the kind of man who explains to girls exactly how his wife does not understand him.
“The Dream of Success; The Maturity of Dickens—” Now Ceci was reading the backs of the books aloud. Paul refused to react; he stared at the carpeting, which was pinkish gray, with a thick nap. They should never have come here today; it was as if Katherine, and not Ceci, stood exposed in the center of the house.
They ought to leave. He looked up; where was Ceci, anyhow? He turned round, and saw her in the kitchen, standing full in the sunlight by the sink reading Katherine’s Phillips Brooks engagement calendar.
“Hey,” he exclaimed. “Come out of there! Somebody’ll see you.”
“In a sec. Listen, it’s so sad. Nothing ever happens to her. ‘Tuesday, 10 A.M., Dr. Dituri, get prescription. Wednesday—’”
“Come on out of there.” Paul gesticulated from the shadow of the doorway; he was unwilling to join Ceci in the natural picture frame provided by the uncurtained kitchen window.
“What for? ‘Wednesday, 5:15, haircut and set, Lotta. Thursday P.M., change shoes, Bullocks.’ Only on Friday and Saturday, there’s nothing to do. See, she never goes anywhere. She gets her hair done and buys new shoes and then she never goes out. It’s just so bad. Don’t you ever take her any place?”
“You stand there, somebody’ll see you.”
“Aw, nobody’s looking.” She turned the page. “Next week—”
Paul glanced past her through the kitchen window. Across the street all the houses were empty, and looked it now: dust and trash had blown on to the porches, soot streaked the windows, flowering plants hung withered on their stalks. The long grass, unwatered, had mostly turned a pale dirty brown. But on this side of the street he could see two children riding tricycles next door and a woman clipping green grass further down the block. “Ceci! Will you please come out of there?”
