Nowhere City

by Alison Lurie

  “I hate to end this pleasant experience,” he said; “but I’ve got a patient coming at four, and it’s quarter of now.” Automatically, Katherine checked her own watch. It had stopped. “Ah,” Iz added. “If you don’t mind, let’s write that letter after all, since you’re here? It won’t take long. Get your book, hm? ... This goes to Dr. Philip Lambert, Department of Educational Psychology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin,” he said rapidly. “Hm. Dear Phil, work on the social adjustment learning project is progressing well. ... He walked away and then back across the carpet, in a naked parody of a boss dictating to his secretary, while Katherine, after a scramble in her bag for pencil and notebook, sat on the edge of a chair, also naked, taking notes.

  “... yours ever. You can type that up for me when you get back to the campus? Okay, that’s it. Thank you, Katherine.”

  Iz picked up off the floor and put on his white cotton under-shorts. The serious nudist turned into the comic butt of a silent film comedy, one of those respectable bearded gentlemen whose clothes are always being stolen by Chaplin or Keaton.

  “Umm, about your current problem,” he said. “I have to give it more thought, but I have an interim suggestion right now.”

  “Oh?” Katherine was putting her arms into her dress. “Tell me.”

  “Very well.” Almost dressed now, he had again become Dr. Isidore Einsam, Beverly Hills. “I thought, if you really feel you’re getting too involved here, why don’t you consider testing your newly discovered abilities on some other man?”

  Within her tight, hot dress, Katherine felt a moment of panic. “And you mean you think this should stop,” she said in a thin voice.

  “Shit, no,” Iz exclaimed. “I’m not going to give you up yet.”

  Katherine pulled her dress down; she saw that he was smiling.

  “But I don’t know any other men in Los Angeles,” she said. “I certainly don’t know any that I’m attracted to at all.”

  Iz pulled up the knot in his striped tie. “Ah no?” he said. “How about Paul?”

  19

  A SWATH OF DESOLATE JUNGLE two blocks wide curved across Los Angeles towards the sea, and Paul wandered in it, among torn streets, overgrown gardens, broken walls, derelict houses, and shallow holes full of white rubble where buildings had once stood. The lawns and most of the gardens had withered from lack of water, but some deep-rooted rank bushes and weeds still grew greedily; devil-grass cracked the sidewalks, and vines, some flowering profusely, poured over the ruins. Overhead the avocado, lemon, and olive trees rustled their hard leaves in the hot breeze.

  It was late in the day, but still very warm. Katherine was in the kitchen doing the supper dishes, and Paul had gone out to think, or brood, in this waste land across the street, where the freeway was to be built. Plaster cracked under his feet as he walked, and far above a jet plane hummed in the fading sky; otherwise it was unnaturally quiet. Only fifty feet away from his front door, but completely out of sight of civilization, Paul sat down on a crumbling block of cement, and thought how much his surroundings resembled his state of mind.

  The fact was that he could not forget Ceci O’Connor. This affair had started so simply and passionately, like a sudden plunge into a clear, bubbling spring. Now the waters were turgid and muddy; everything had gone wrong. It was really all over, but still he could not stop thinking about it. He could consider Ceci rationally, dispassionately, historically even, and realize that she was a confused, half-educated, stubborn social rebel with no background or traditions (a victim of social change and disorganization, not her own fault, of course); but physically he was still, to use her term, very hung up.

  Movements she had made, things she had said, kept repeating themselves inside his head, taking on different, darker significances. Like the time once he had suggested that when summer came he would arrange to get off from work for a few days so that they could go together to Catalina Island where, he had heard, there was white sand and wild peacocks. But Ceci wouldn’t agree to make plans. Parting the long streaky hair over her face so that she looked out at him as through a bead curtain, she said, “Sure, that’d be great. But I don’t believe in figuring out things that far ahead. You start fixing all these plans and rules for something, it gets wrecked. I mean like as long as you want to do this and I want to do it, it’ll happen; and when one of us or both of us don’t want it any more—it’ll stop. That’s the way it really is anyhow, huh?” Bemused by her great eyes looking into his, her freedom from the laws of time, her trust in a continuing impulse, he had enthusiastically agreed.

  A few weeks, even a few days ago, houses had still stood on this block of Mar Vista, deserted, with wooden signs nailed to them: “This House For Sale. To Be Moved.” Though vacant only a short time, the little stucco villas and castles had already begun to come apart. Long cracks had appeared in the flimsy pink and green plaster walls, tiles had fallen from the roofs, and panes in the variegated windows had been broken by children or tramps.

  Then, one by one, the houses had been taken away. Gangs of workmen came to cut the electric, gas, water, and telephone connections; then they would slowly jack the house up, forcing heavy beams under the floor. By evening it would sit several feet above its foundations, looking more than ever like a great awkward toy.

  The actual moving was always done just before dawn, when traffic on the streets was lightest; the noise of truck motors and heavy machinery first woke Paul one morning at about four A.M. He thought it was, first, a nightmare; then, an atomic war. Climbing out of bed groggily he went into the living room, pushed aside the slats of the blind, and looked out. By the light of flares and headlamps, men and machines were working around an undermined house, easing it slowly onto the bed of a huge tractor-trailer.

  After this, the process was repeated almost every few days, or rather nights. Katherine managed to sleep through the racket more or less, but it always kept him up. He would lie awake in bed, drowsily listening to the coughing of the bulldozer engines, the shouts and silences, and the straining of wood against metal.

  The one that had taken the longest to move was the little French château. They got it out into the street, and then it turned out that the turrets in front were too tall to pass under the telephone lines at the end of the block. Heavy engines churned and sputtered in front of Paul’s house while they consulted about what to do (wondering what had happened to break the sequence of sounds, he had got out of bed to look). Lights swung and flashed in the dark; presently a workman armed with bristling tools climbed the roof of the house, apparently to test the possibility of knocking off the pointed, pistachio ice cream towers. Standing at the window, Paul held his breath.

  The man climbed down. There was a long delay now, but Paul could not bring himself to go back to bed. He wouldn’t sleep anyhow, and he wanted to see what happened. Finally a telephone company truck pulled up; two men got out, shinnied up the pole, and tied back the wires. The colorless unsteady light of dawn was spreading across Mar Vista by the time the château slowly turned the corner onto Sepulveda Boulevard—propped up with boards and chained onto the bed of the truck, but listing a little to the left—and disappeared forever.

  By an ironic, destructive coincidence, it was later that same morning that he saw Ceci at the Aloha Coffee Shop, for the first time in several days after their outdoor quarrel. She asked him immediately, “Are you still living in Mar Vista? Or have you moved out?” No, he couldn’t resist saying, he was still there, but everything else was moving out. It had been the wrong answer, because Ceci had thought he meant that Katherine was going. A big lovely smile appeared on her face, but by the time the joke had been explained to her she was furious with him and refusing to listen to anything he said.

  An oleander shrub next to the broken steps where Paul sat was thick with fleshy purple flowers. They were poisonous, he had heard somewhere. Beside it scarlet weeds covered the ground; the flowers were gay and profuse, but the two colors clashed badly. Paul pointed out
to himself that Ceci too was only crudely pretty; her hands were too broad and stubby, her teeth were uneven, she dressed badly, and did not wash her streaky gold hair enough—often it smelt and tasted of the beach. She was morally loose, too. Everything he had ever jealously suspected was true: his Ceci had lain not only under the scrawny body of her weird Chinese husband, but under all those other men, and rubbed herself against them, and cried out with pleasure. Half Venice West had probably been into her, so why should he give a damn?

  Paul picked up a chunk of broken cement from the ground and threw it at an avocado tree across what had been somebody’s back yard. Crunch.

  Obviously Ceci didn’t give a damn herself. She didn’t care if she ever saw him again. With the girls he had known in the East, Paul had always remained more or less good friends. Even when they had married someone, or made up with their husbands, or had a baby or a new lover, there was still a special warmth in the way they looked at him across a room. They still belonged to the “underground” in spirit, even if they had retired. Often there would be a discreet lunch now and then at which Paul and his friend would reminisce, discuss topics of mutual interest, and confide in one another, over imported beer or iced coffee. The Oxford Grill was pleasant for such lunches.

  Only Ceci didn’t believe in Paul’s underground. “You mean like there’s a club of people who cheat on the cats and chicks they’re supposed to be making it with?” she asked. But she had her own underground, cruder and sloppier than his, not discreet and careful of other people’s feelings, but rebelliously noisy.

  She wouldn’t meet for lunch; she wouldn’t meet anywhere. “Don’t you know when something is over?” she had said that afternoon, when Paul, swallowing his pride again, telephoned her at the place in Santa Monica where she was now working. (He knew or suspected, but did not want to ask, that she had quit the Aloha Coffee Shop last week in order not to have to see him any more.) There was a long wait while Ceci was called to the phone. In the background he could hear restaurant noises, the ring of the cash register, the rattle of plates. “Listen, don’t call me at the gig any more, okay?” she said almost as soon as she got on the line. “They don’t like that here.”

  “But I have to,” Paul objected. “You haven’t got a telephone. ... Listen, if today is out, how about tomorrow? Shall I come down to your place tomorrow morning? I want to talk to you.” Glasses clinking. “No,” Ceci said. Her voice was faint among the clatter of plastic dishware, as if she were standing some feet from the receiver. “Well, how about—” he began again. “Aw, Paul,” she interrupted. “I mean, what’s the point, huh? What could we talk about? ... Don’t you know when something is over?”

  All right, the hell with it; he knew when something was over. He would change gigs himself. Already he had written back East asking about teaching and fellowship prospects for the fall. He should have done it sooner; the trouble was, out here it was so easy to lose track of time, especially around Ceci and her friends. So far, there had been no replies.

  The sun above the trees was turning into a flat vermilion circle as it sank into the layer of smog over Mar Vista. He’d better get home, or Katherine would ask: where had he been; what had he been doing? She would probably ask anyhow; it was nearly eight o’clock.

  But Katherine made no such remark when he walked back into the house. The dishes were done, and she sat in her usual corner of the new wicker sofa, sewing something under the lamp. On evenings when Paul didn’t go out, which meant every evening now, the convention was that he worked on his thesis. He had done so when he first arrived in Los Angeles, and in the last few days he had tried to do so again. It gave him the feeling that he was struggling uphill with a tremendous gray rock. Who the hell gave a damn about early Elizabethan trade policy and its social influences? It was so much easier to throw some records on the phonograph or look at a magazine, and a much better distraction from the thought of Ceci. Nevertheless he had written in letters to New England recently that he was finishing his thesis.

  The metal desk-lamp hummed fluorescently as it shed its cold light on the stacks of index cards. Each one of them had been covered with scratches of ink by his own hand: words and numbers and bibliographical abbreviations. He stared at them through a mist of obsession.

  “Paul,” Katherine’s voice said. “Paul. Paul?”

  “Hm?”

  “I’d like to ask you something, if you have a minute.”

  “Hm.”

  “I—I wondered if you wanted to go swimming this Sunday afternoon. The Skinners are organizing a beach party. Everyone’s going to bring supper and beer. Susy says it’ll be mobbed in Santa Monica, so they’re going down to Venice.”

  “Sunday?” Paul stalled. “I d’know.” He didn’t want to go anywhere with the Skinners. Once he had found out that the Nutting Research and Development Company had hired him to do practically nothing while looking like a Harvard historian, he had also realized that Fred Skinner had suspected this from the beginning, but had refrained from putting him wise. And Susy Skinner bored him. But above all, he did not want to go to Venice Beach with these people. Besides, he had to work on his thesis. “Let’s not make it this weekend,” he said. “I have to work on my thesis.”

  Katherine did not protest; she opened and shut her mouth, but said nothing.

  “You don’t really mind,” Paul told her. “You hate the beach anyhow.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Katherine pulled her thread through something yellow. “I’m really getting to like it rather, now that the water’s warmer. I’m even getting a tan; have you noticed? And I think my hair’s lighter.”

  Paul had not noticed; he did not notice now. He was thinking of Venice Beach, with illustrations. One foggy night Ceci and he had gone down with a blanket to lie on the damp, salty sand, and listen to the waves licking the shore; and Ceci’s breasts tasted of salt. Goddamn it, he wasn’t going to let her get away like that; he would go down there, tomorrow afternoon—

  Katherine was still speaking. “... you see, what it is about Los Angeles; what happens here doesn’t count. That’s how you have to think about it. I remember you said something like that when we first got here, but I didn’t understand then. I think the way you put it, you said it was all an amusing joke.”

  “An amusing joke?” Paul repeated. He felt a peculiar impulse to laugh wildly, as if he were in a Frankenstein movie. No, he would go there tomorrow morning.

  “Yes. But you see I wanted to take it all seriously, or at least I didn’t want to, but I thought I had to. I couldn’t think of how else to take it, because I’d been so serious all my life. That’s what Dr. Einsam says; he says—”

  Katherine paused. Paul recognized that it was his turn to say something, so he said, “Oh. Who’s Dr. Einsam?”

  “Dr. Isidore Einsam. You know, he’s one of the people I work for. I’ve told you about him.”

  “Oh, mm.” No doubt she had, Paul thought. “One of those psychology professors.”

  “No. He’s sort of an international Jewish capitalist anarchist,” Katherine said, smiling; it was a joke she and Iz had recently made up. Paul looked at her suspiciously, or bemusedly. “He’s a psychiatrist. Anyhow,” (she got a grip on herself and shifted the subject) “he says people with an academic background like mine often think the whole world is a small classroom they can’t ever get out of.”

  “Hnh.” Had he had more energy to spare, Paul might have registered a stronger reaction, protested against the flip diagnosis of academic life made by this crank psychiatrist his wife was working for. Not that he thought psychiatrists were cranks in general, but in southern California they well might be. This city was full of amateur wisemen, self-made experts on everything. If only Ceci had some education and sense of proportion; if she could only realize—He hadn’t meant to deceive her; he had simply assumed that she assumed—“Ceci, I need to see you,” he had said, laughing somewhat to take the edge off the statement, that last time they met, at the Aloha Coffee Shop
. “I get so bored without you.”

  “Yeah,” she had replied, balancing her plastic tray against the hip of the cheap green uniform. “You get bored easy. You know what Steve Tyler said about you? He said, ‘Paul’s not going to change an inch, and when nothing and nobody you meet can change you, pretty soon everything seems like a drag. ... And the next thing is you get to be a great big drag yourself.’” Ceci’s voice had grown very rough; she turned her face away. Paul almost thought she was crying, but when she looked back her eyes were hard and dry. She pushed back some ends of streaky gold hair under the coarse hairnet all the Aloha waitresses wore, and put Paul’s check down on the table beside his empty glass.

  “Well,” she said in a flat voice, as she took off for the kitchen. “See you.” Which had meant, he thought, the opposite, because since then she had not seen him, and would not see him.

  Crawling in the mists of these memories, Paul was aroused by a touch on his shoulder. Katherine had come over and was sitting on the arm of his chair, speaking to him; he realized that she must have been speaking to him all along.

  “... and I know I’ve been difficult,” she was saying. “When I first got out here, when I had nothing to do and I was sick with sinus all the time, I was really dreadful.”

  Some answer was called for. “Oh, that’s all right,” he replied with about one-third of his conscious mind. “I know it was hard on you to come out here where you don’t know anybody.”

  “Yes, but all the same; I was awful.” Katherine smiled. “But I’m going to make it up to you now.” She leaned against Paul; then she put her arms around his neck and kissed his forehead in an unusual way. It was not unprecedented for Katherine to kiss him affectionately, and when she did so she usually favored the upper parts of his head—his eyes, his ears, his forehead (as now), the section of hair under which he had been told that the superego was located—-as if, he had sometimes thought, these were the only parts of him she really approved of or felt comfortable with. But in this embrace now there was a kind of deliberate physicality which was completely uncharacteristic of his wife; which she must, therefore, be straining at in order to gratify him. A sad mistake. Quite automatically, Paul turned and put his arms loosely around Katherine, patting her back in a calming way.