Nowhere City

by Alison Lurie

“Christ almighty!” Ceci shouted, brushing aside the tears and strands of hair with which her face was streaked. Her small hands were clenched into fists: Paul thought she was going to hit him again, and took a step backwards. But she only glared, and drew her breath in like a cat hissing. “You think that’s an excuse, that you don’t like doing it with her? Man, what a hypocritical, fucked-up square you really are, underneath!”

  “I don’t get it,” Paul said. He felt shell-shocked. “What do you want me to do? Hell, what do you want me to say?”

  “Ah, shit.” Ceci’s voice was thick with tears. She controlled herself, and went on, “If you really liked it—say if you really dug making it with your wife, whenever she felt well enough to want to, I could pick up on that. I wouldn’t like it, but I’d have to relate. ... You thought you had to make up a cheap story for me.” She focused on Paul’s face, his expression of blank confusion. “Man, you really are dumb,” she said. “Walter was right. You’re just nowhere.”

  “Listen,” she added. “I’ve got to get to the restaurant. Stella will be flipping trying to cover for me. I oughta be there now.” She turned and began to pick her way back across the field.

  The mention of Walter Wong reminded Paul that he, too, had a grudge. Maybe if he named it they could compromise and this could still turn into an ordinary fight. “Ah come on,” he said to the back of her jersey, her disordered streaky gold hair, her bare scratched arms. “You’ve been involved with other people too, a lot of people. Wong, and that guy you went to San Francisco with that you told me about, and Tomaso, and maybe even John and Steve.” To extend his list, Paul included what he had only sometimes suspected, and even an improbable guess.

  “I have not!” Ceci turned to face him on the bank above the road, crying again. “I mean, hell, so what if I have, that’s all the past. I didn’t even know you then.”

  At these revelations, a feeling like a paring-knife turned in Paul’s intestines. But he tried to pay no attention to it. It was more important not to lose Ceci. Making an effort, he saw it from her point of view; admitted that he had, at least, let her deceive herself. But if he had known how seriously she took it—

  “Ceci! Listen.” He spoke with emphasis; held out his arms to embrace her, and bounded forward. But at the same moment Ceci jumped off the edge of the bank on to the road.

  Paul clasped empty space; he lost his balance, shouted “Ahh! Help!” and waved his arms wildly to avoid falling head first. His feet slid out from under him and he skidded down the bank on his back in a landslide of stones and dust.

  “Oof!” He came to rest on his rear in the ditch, considerably shaken and bruised. He looked up. Ceci stood on the crest of the road watching him. For the first time that day she was laughing.

  “Wow, uh, oh God!” she laughed. “Ha ha ha ha!” Her mouth was stretched wide, and the small white teeth showed in a kitten’s grin. “Wow, do you look dumb. ... Well, get up,” she added. “Don’t just lie there. Climb into your Jag and drive me to the restaurant.”

  16

  ju lu

  lu mu

  nu tu

  Katherine typed, with an I.B.M. electric typewriter, onto a white index card. She rolled the card out of the carriage, inserted another, and typed:

  mu fu

  lu fu

  pu wu

  She was copying a set of 1,800 flash cards of an experiment on the psychology of learning. Each card consisted of six out of a possible ten nonsense syllables selected and arranged at random.

  It was now ten-thirty; Katherine had been working on this project for an hour and a half, and had completed 185 cards. And it wasn’t even her job. She was supposed to be working for Iz that day, but he had lent her to Professor Jekyll. So she was sitting in Dr. Jekyll’s office, and Iz was probably still asleep in bed, unless he was lying on the beach somewhere. It was a pleasant warm day, outside.

  fu mu

  su pu

  nu fu

  This job was not only an insult to Katherine’s intelligence and education, but a waste of university funds, because she earned $2.71 an hour, much more than an ordinary typist. Since there was no meeting, and Iz was not coming in, she would be doing it from now until five o’clock.

  Usually, the days that she worked for Iz were the best ones: partly because his projects were apt to be more interesting, but mostly because of the conversations that went with them.

  Now that they were friends, when Iz came in he would sit down on the edge of Katherine’s desk and say, “Well, Katherine. What’s new?” And she would tell him, or he would tell her, before they started work. Later, in the middle of dictating a report or a case history, he would exclaim, “Hey. I haven’t eaten anything since last night. I’m starving. Come on.” And they would climb into Iz’s car and skid downhill to the Village Delicatessen for thick pastrami sandwiches, or to the English teashop on Westwood Boulevard which had scones with eight kinds of marmalade and jam. Once they went all the way out to Santa Monica because it was the only place for real strawberry cheesecake outside of Hollywood. At first Katherine wouldn’t order anything, but her refusals made so much trouble (“You have some problem about accepting food, don’t you? What is it?”) that presently she gave in. She had to resign herself to letting him pay, too. (“I’m rich, comparatively; you’re poor. When you make twenty dollars an hour, I’ll let you take me; okay?”)

  Katherine had learned, in these last two weeks, a good deal about Iz. She knew something about his childhood, which had been spent in ten different cities in six different countries; she knew something about his marriage, and something about his politics. “Do you know what Jackie in the office told me the other day?” she had asked him. “She told me to watch out for you, you were a Communist.” Iz groaned. “Oh no, no,” he said. “Here we go again. Listen, I’m less of a Communist than you are. Or Jackie is. I’m an anarchist. An anarchist is the opposite of a Communist.” Katherine’s face did not show immediate comprehension. “Of course some of the early anarchists were also Communists, they thought, but that was their mistake. See, a Communist believes always in more order. An anarchist believes in less order: less government, less rules, less system.”

  “But—” Katherine began; he continued. “Now you admit all organizations are terrible, inhuman; the larger they are the more they are terrible, okay?”

  Did she admit this? Katherine was not sure; she had never thought about it. She smiled uncertainly. Iz took this for agreement, and went on to talk about placing random messages on the telegraph wires, confusing policemen by disobedience of unwritten laws, and giving deliberately absurd answers to questionnaires. “Every day you should create a little disorganization somewhere, that’s the idea.”

  “Like Boy Scouts,” Katherine could not help saying; but Iz did not get irritated. “That’s right,” he said, smiling. “A good deed every day. You’re starting to understand. Only the anarchist is unkind, unthrifty, irreverent, disloyal, etcetera.”

  “All I ever heard about anarchists was that they threw bombs at things,” Katherine remarked, half giggling. “What’s that song? ‘In an anarchistic garret so meager and so mean, You can smell the pungent odor of nitroglycerine. They’re busy making fuses and filling cans with nails—’”

  “Ah, not any more,” Iz had said, laughing so that it was impossible to know whether he were serious. “That was in the early days, when our methods were more crude.”

  And as she found out about Iz, she told him about herself. It was true, for instance, that she really thought makeup was vulgar and nasty—she daubed on lipstick and powder every morning simply because, after all, it was the rule. “Whose rule?” Iz had inquired. “If you don’t like grease on your face, so leave it off. Who cares?” And after all nobody seemed to; at least they didn’t say anything about it. Of course out here everyone was so weird, it didn’t matter what you did. It would have been different back East.

  They had a joke between them about Katherine’s being one of Dr. Einsam’
s patients. If I were your patient, she would ask sometimes, what would you advise me about this? And he would give sometimes an outlandish, sometimes a reasonable answer. “Basically,” he had said last time, seriously, “you can’t do anything until you decide what you actually want from your husband. Why don’t you think about that?”

  So Katherine was thinking about it. Meanwhile, following the advice Iz had given her that first day in the ice-cream shop, she had begun what he called “Paul-watching.” It was amazing how, with Iz’s assistance and interest, what in the past had hurt so much had become almost a game. As he had predicted, signs of Paul’s infidelity continued to appear, increasing in obviousness. Finally last week he had come home to supper looking as if he’d been in a fight, all bruised and scratched and covered with dust. How puzzled he had seemed when she didn’t ask any questions! Katherine had to smile when she recalled it—and the way he had taken off his filthy suit and laid it out on a chair for her to see, instead of putting it into the laundry hamper as usual. “He’s trying to tell you something,” Iz had said. “I had a German Shepherd like that once.”

  nu tu

  pu mu

  wu pu

  Dr. Jekyll’s office, like most in the Department of Social Sciences, was dark, airless, and hot; it looked upon a yellow brick wall, with three aluminum ventilator hoods approaching along the top. No wonder everyone wanted to move. Katherine had come to the end of the pack of index cards; she swiveled her chair round and reached for more in the bottom drawer. As she did so, she noticed part of a floor plan sticking out from some papers on Dr. Jekyll’s desk. Taking care not to displace anything else, she eased it out.

  Almost at once she realized that this must be the final plan for the allocation of space in the new Social Sciences building; and that the Project on Perception and Delinquency was allotted nothing. From the attached memorandum she learned that this plan was being sent to all the full professors as a last step before it was put into effect. “Any objections or proposed changes must be sent to the Chairman of the Space Committee on or before March 30,” it ended ominously.

  March 30. That was today. What was going to happen, then? The shack in which the Project was now located would be torn down in June, and Perception and Delinquency would have no place to go. Dr. Jekyll must have forgotten that he had promised to take care of them. Or they had forgotten to remind him, or they didn’t know that today was the deadline in the “space race.” What ought she to do? Oh, why wasn’t Iz here? She couldn’t speak to Dr. Jekyll herself, but someone ought to speak to him, right away. A feeling of anxious excitement began to expand inside Katherine.

  This was a crisis. She must get in touch with Iz, as soon as possible. It was past eleven—Dr. Jekyll had classes, he had said he wouldn’t be back until one. There was time, if she went now, if she hurried, to get to Iz, show him the plan, and bring it, and him, back. Then he could speak to Dr. Jekyll, and Dr. Jekyll could speak to the Committee, and the space race could be won after all; all due to a fortunate accident, and to Katherine Cattleman.

  Without stopping to think any more, Katherine stood up, shoved the floor plan into her bag, and left the office, locking the door behind her. As fast as she could go without actually running, she went along the hall, down two flights of stairs, and out of the building.

  As usual, it was glaringly bright outside. The sun on the cement walls and brick walls hurt her eyes. To Katherine’s right was an orange steel skeleton for the plans she had in her bag, the rooms marked out as cubes of empty space. In imagination, she saw herself and the rest of the Project sitting triumphant up there, suspended in the air around an invisible desk. In the distance, across Westwood Boulevard, she could see the trees and pale roofs of apartment houses; somewhere among them was Dr. Einsam’s apartment.

  She started towards it, at first along the path. But soon, becoming impatient, she veered off straight downhill past another excavation, picking her way around construction equipment and piles of cinder-blocks. Another immense modernistic building, six floors of poured concrete and steel, was rising here. According to a sign, it was to be called Parking Structure F. Dust covered her shoes, the ones Iz approved of.

  Was she acting crazily? She had never done anything like this at her other jobs. But there had been no need to: back in Massachusetts there was a tradition of administrative calm—changes came so slowly, in such an orderly way, that they were hardly felt. Whereas here everything was always in flux, growing, shifting.

  Westwood Boulevard, at the bottom of the hill, was crowded with shiny cars. The eucalyptus trees raised long bare arms like white wooden snakes above the traffic. Katherine crossed over, and started down the path by the tennis courts. Balls flew at her through the air as she went, and rebounded from the wire netting a few feet away—involuntarily she flinched and ducked, and hurried on faster. On the other side of the path, enclosed by an even denser grid offence topped with barbed wire, the university’s experimental citrus trees were in flower and fruit; the air was sticky with orange blossom scent.

  She came out on Gayley Street, and ran across between the cars. Dr. Einsam’s apartment building was almost immediately opposite—a large white object, poured over the hillside like a plaster of Paris pueblo. An outside stairway followed it uphill through purple bougainvillea and palms, with open galleries at each landing.

  Katherine stopped at the top of the steps, panting and hot. Her pulse was loud, and her knees weak from climbing so fast. She leaned against the wall and looked at her watch. Fifteen minutes were already gone; there was no more time to lose. She pulled the plans out of her bag, turned to the first door along the gallery, and knocked next to the nameplate: I. Einsam.

  There was a pause. Katherine didn’t want to stand staring at Iz’s door, so she turned and looked down at the descending steps, the palms and creepers, the glitter of the sun on the cars below. Suppose he weren’t home, what then?

  “Well,” Iz said. “You surprise me.” She turned; Dr. Einsam stood on the threshold wearing a red plaid bathrobe.

  “I didn’t mean to disturb—I mean, I’m sorry I had to disturb you,” she began, still breathing hard. “But it’s really important: I found the floor plans—here—for the new building. They were on Dr. Jekyll’s desk, and the Project isn’t on them anywhere!’ Iz continued to watch Katherine without changing his small smile of curious interest; she felt that she must be explaining herself badly. “You see, this is the deadline, today, for any changes. The letter says. So I didn’t know what to do—I thought, if you could talk to Dr. Jekyll in time—he’ll be back from class at one—and so I just rushed over to find you. Here.” She held the plans further out towards Iz, but he still did not take them.

  “I’m glad you came,” he said. “Come on in.” He pulled the door open, and Katherine followed him into a long low room, with trees and sky spread across one wall. Large exotic plants grew out of containers on the floor. “I was just having my breakfast,” Iz said. “Would you like to join me?”

  “No, no thank you.” Katherine was really hungry, or should have been, as it was lunch time, but she was starting to feel uncomfortable. Iz’s very unconcerned manner gave her a sense of having done something serious and possibly wrong—as if soon he would turn on her and rebuke her for having stolen papers off Dr. Jekyll’s desk, or something worse. She looked at the floor and saw dark red carpeting and Iz’s bare feet. His legs, below the bathrobe, were bare too, and covered with dark hairs.

  “Well, Katherine, if you don’t mind, I’ll finish my coffee. Here, sit down.” He gathered some newspapers off a low couch.

  Katherine sat on the edge of the couch, about six inches from the floor, bending her knees sideways awkwardly. Through an open door at the other side of the room she could see Iz’s bedroom, with an unmade bed and a chest of drawers. On top of the chest, leaning up against the wall, was a racing bicycle. She held out the floor plans again, as if they were her passport. This time Iz took them. He turned the pages quickly wh
ile he stood above Katherine, drinking his coffee.

  “Uh huh,” he said finally. He looked down at her, and then glanced out of the long window at the view of palms and roofs and distant hills.

  “The deadline is today,” Katherine told him again. “It’s right there in the covering letter. It says—” she jumped up and pointed it out on the page he was holding—“Any objections or proposed changes must be sent to the Chairman of the Space Committee on or before March 30,’ you see, that’s today.”

  “Ya,” Iz said. “I see. Katherine. Look at the city out there. How do you like it?”

  Katherine stood up, and went over to the window. Something was very, very wrong; but what? “Oh yes, it’s beautiful,” she said nervously. “You really do have a wonderful view. The university looks so pretty from here, with the sun on it. Or is that Bullock’s over there?”

  “There’s no difference,” Iz said. “It’s like a friend of mine says, ‘I work in the big store at the bottom of the hill.’ Well.” He put his coffee cup down carefully on a table, dropped the plans to the floor, walked up behind Katherine, and ran both hands down her arms.

  “Eh!” she cried out, and jumped as if she had touched an uninsulated wire.

  Iz paid no attention, he took a step forward, pushing Katherine up against the cold glass of the window, air and trees, and kissed the back of her neck; she felt his body forced against hers, the coarse hair of his beard, his mouth.

  “Oh no; I don’t want—” Katherine twisted round, and tried to pull away. “No!”

  Iz stepped back, releasing her from the weight of his body, but he kept one hand against the window on each side, so that she could not move away. “What’s the matter with you today?” she said shakily.

  “I want to sleep with you,” Iz said. “That’s what you came here for, isn’t it?”

  “No. Of course not!”

  “Ah, come on. I told you what my rules are. You knew I wasn’t joking.” Though he was not touching her, Iz was standing so close that Katherine could feel his breath and see the hairs growing out of his face into his beard. His arms, too, were covered with wiry black hair; it was on the backs of his hands, and on his legs, and matted on his chest. She felt she had been cornered by a dangerous, irrational animal.