by Alison Lurie
“Jee-zus,” she said. “Listen, what’s the name of that book? I want to get it.”
The article had appeared in a technical volume which had been pretty heavy going for Paul himself. Since Glory had left school at thirteen, she would probably find it quite unintelligible. But Harvard had taught him never to discourage anyone by suggesting that they would be unable to learn.
“Gosh, I don’t remember exactly. But I could look it up for you, if you like.” (He promised himself that he would find her something easier on the subject at the same time.)
“Yeah; that’d be really swell, if you would.” Glory’s serious, breathless enthusiasm could not be wholly put on, Paul thought. She really wanted to know, to learn. It was an overtone that Paul enjoyed in his relations with women—one reason, perhaps, that he was often drawn to students.
“I’ll bring you some other books too. I came across a pretty good one on the structure of this whole region. With pictures.”
“Yeah? That’s swell. But what I really want to see is the thing you told me about first.” Glory splashed her face. “I mean if that whole part of town is going to fall apart, I better put my house on the market pretty quick, huh? before everybody finds out.”
“It’s not going to fall apart now,” Paul said, smiling. “Even if this guy’s right, the whole process will take a long time.”
Glory’s expression remained troubled. In his mind he saw what she probably imagined: a great slow semicomic landslide and explosion above Sunset Boulevard, scattering trees and cars and houses and fragments of earth. Of course such landslides did take place in Los Angeles, he recalled, on a smaller scale. He became more definite. “Thousands of years, maybe more.”
“You mean it’s not going to happen for thousands of years?”
“Well, probably not.” Paul noticed the scornful way in which Glory turned from him, as from a self-confessed false prophet. “Of course we can’t be sure.” She turned partially back. “That range of mountains is relatively unstable geologically.”
“You’ve really read up a lot on this place.”
“Well, I’ve had to. It’s part of my job. You see, I was writing a kind of history of the company I work for, back to when there was nothing around here but the dinosaurs.” Glory frowned, as if puzzled or bored. “You know, right where we are now there used to be a prehistoric jungle, full of ferns twenty feet tall and giant carnivorous reptiles.”
“Oh, yeah? Really?”
“Really,” Paul assured her. He watched a circle of white, wet flesh rise and fall with Glory’s breathing, and contrasted her interest in history favorably with that of Katherine, Ceci, and N.R.D.C. “You can see their bones down in the Los Angeles County Museum. ... The climate was very different from what it is now. It was terribly hot, and it probably rained most of the time.”
“Jesus. What a scene, huh?”
“Of course there weren’t any men around then. There were no animals, not any of the ones we know anyhow. There weren’t even any birds, except for a kind of flying dinosaur, sort of a cross between a lizard and a bat.”
“Ugh.” Glory shuddered. “Yeah; you know I saw one like that in a film once, but I thought it was something they made up.”
“No; they’ve found fossils of it, prints in the rocks. It was called a pterodactyl.”
“This crazy thing was about ten feet long, though.”
“They were that big. Some of the ones that couldn’t fly were about sixty feet long and thirty feet high, as high as, well, about as high as the house there.” Both of them looked at Baby Petersen’s house, an expanse of white shingles and glass glittering in the sun. Glory frowned, and shaded her eyes with her hand, as if she saw a procession of dinosaurs, or Colonial houses, passing.
“That’s funny,” she said.
“What’s funny?”
“Lookit that water coming off of the roof. I don’t get it. I mean where’s it coming from?”
Now that she had pointed it out, Paul observed a thin trickle of water falling from the gutter above the back porch. “It looks like it was raining,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“But it’s not raining.” Paul tilted his head back and gazed into a flat blue sky, blurred with sun.
“Nah, it hasn’t rained here in months.”
The dripping off the porch continued.
“It could be from somebody’s sprinkler system,” Paul suggested.
“Yeah. Somebody next door watering their garden, or kids playing with the hose. ... I guess I better go tell them to quit it.” She pulled her body up out of the water on strong, round, dancer’s arms, scrambled onto the tiled edge of the pool, and stood up.
“You want me to come with you?” Paul asked. Glory ought not to go out on the street alone, he felt, with those big holes in her bathing suit.
“No thanks.”
But the truth was that her nakedness was not vulnerable, he thought, as the gate swung shut behind her; on the contrary, it was a kind of armor. It also had nothing to do with intimacy. This situation, which was charged for him, meant nothing to her.
“Hey, I couldn’t find anything. Nobody’s got their water running now, anyhow. What d’you think?”
“I don’t know.” Paul left off looking at Glory’s legs, and climbed out. “If it was from some hose that was on earlier, it would be stopping now. ... Do you think it’s stopping?”
“It looks to me like it’s getting worse.”
In fact, the descent of water had increased from a scattered dripping to a more or less continual drizzle, splashing into silver puddles on the tiles.
“It must be coming from inside the house,” he said.
“Yeah. Something must be leaking in there.”
“We’d better go in and look.”
“We can’t,” Glory objected. “I don’t have the key.”
“Let’s try, anyhow.” Paul crossed the patio and tried the back door. Then, ducking under the water, he rattled the handles of French doors that opened onto the porch, while Glory tried to look inside, but unsuccessfully, since all the curtains were drawn.
“So what do we do now?”
The sun, striking through the falling drops, dappled Glory with gold light and shade as if she were standing under a waterfall. Dazzled by her appearance, and flattered by the way in which she referred the problem to him, he volunteered:
“I’ll climb up on to the porch roof. Maybe I can get into one of those windows.”
Luckily, the supports of the roof were made of iron wrought to resemble leaves and flowers, offering Paul some foothold. There was a bad moment while he negotiated the gutter, thinking not so much of the pain of a possible fall, as of the ensuing inconvenience and humiliation.
“It’s all wet up here,” he called, as he reached the sundeck, which was slippery with flowing water. “Wait a sec, I’ll see where it’s coming from ... Christ!”
Through a glazed door, Paul looked into what appeared to be a small dressing-room in ruffled Colonial style, now awash in three or four inches of water, which was seeping out over the door-sill and on to the deck—although the door itself, he discovered, was locked.
“We have to get in there,” Glory said when he had got down, with some difficulty, and described the scene. “They must’ve left the water on: that’d be just like Marianne, she’s so dim anyhow. ... We can try around the front, but if nothing’s open we’ll have to break a window.”
“Okay.” Now that he had managed the porch, Paul was ready for anything. As they circled the house, unsuccessfully shoving at the doors and windows, he began to recognize this as the kind of comic and surprising adventure he most enjoyed, one which would make an excellent story later; he felt partly repaid for Glory’s evident disinterest in him.
From boyhood reading of detective stories he recalled that glass could be broken neatly and safely if it were first covered with a piece of cloth and then hit with a blunt instrument. The back door was conveniently divided into small pa
nes, and his towel would do; but there was nothing to strike it with, so carefully pruned and raked was the yard. Feeling impatient, and recklessly heroic in a minor way, he struck the glass with his fist, at first tentatively, and then harder. There was a loud, sharp crack—and at the next blow, a satisfying crash. Still shielding his arm with the towel, Paul reached in and unlatched the door. He got scratched, but not badly.
“Wow! ... Aw, that’s great.” For the first time, Glory gave him a smile of straightforward warmth. “Come on.”
Following her into the house, Paul passed rapidly through a large Early American kitchen, all hanging copperware and pine paneling, through a pantry, and into a dark dining-room hung with candelabra.
“Jesus. Look at that!”
Glory stood on the edge of a long, luxurious sunken living-room, done in Beverly Hills Chinese Chippendale. It was now sunken indeed, under two feet of water, which lapped softly at the green plush carpeting of the steps as at a mossy shore. The skirts of the brocade slipcovers stirred in the current, and brightly colored silk pillows floated here and there. The wallpaper, a Chinesey design on a gold background, was bulging and peeling away from the walls. A small rain mixed with flakes of plaster dripped steadily from the ceiling in several places.
“It must be coming from upstairs,” Paul said, he felt rather inanely.
“Yeah.”
“How do we get up there?”
She shrugged. “I guess we have to wade.”
With a sense of unreality, Paul followed Glory Green, in her pink Swiss-cheese bathing suit and fringed rubber hair, across the flooded living-room. The water was quite lukewarm. In a drowned magazine rack, copies of Variety, sodden with damp, had begun to disintegrate; all this must have been going on for quite a long time. They climbed the mossy steps into the front hall, where the carpeting was also wet; more water, he saw, was running quietly down the carpeted stairs.
“Geez.” Glory giggled suddenly; her voice was strangely loud, as in an underground cave. “C’mon.”
They splashed upstairs. Here too the rugs and floors were wet. Glory hurried from room to room, flinging doors open and shut so fast that Paul had only an impression of expanses of tinted mirror, polished maple and mahogany, and immense silk-shaded lamps held aloft by the glazed figures of Chinamen. Then, in the largest bedroom, she pulled open a bathroom door which seemed to stick more than the others. A tidal wave of water rushed out at them, with such force that it knocked Glory down. Paul, a few feet behind, had to grasp at a chair to keep upright.
“Hey! Are you all right?” Wading across the rug to Glory, he helped her up, damp, dripping, and half-stunned. The warm wet flesh of her body pressed against his arm.
“I guess so,” she said, blinking and still leaning on him. Her bathing suit had been pulled round somehow so that the wet pink tip of one full breast pointed out through a small neat hole, as if it had been designed that way. Without stopping to think, Paul put his free hand over it, whether out of modesty or lust he could not have said. Instead of jerking away, Glory swayed towards him. He pulled her nearer; for an instant she looked into his eyes from a distance of about four inches; then they were involved in a sudden, dripping kiss. The circular samples of Glory were pressed against him in a juxtaposition so openly sensual that he was giddy for a moment; she spoke, but he had to ask her to repeat it.
“I said, better turn off the water.”
“Oh yeah, okay.” Through the bathroom door Paul could see a gilt faucet running into the marbled basin in a thin, steady trickle—much too small, it seemed, to have caused all this.
He shut it off and turned round; Glory was sitting on the bed, a huge vulgar expanse of shiny pale-blue satin, now streaked dark with water.
“I—You’re really—” he began as he moved towards her, not knowing what he was going to say, but determined to say, and do, something.
“C’mere.” If Glory’s ordinary speaking voice had a taste of sexuality, that she now used was like dark jam. Paul felt as if he had got into a dream, or more likely one of those surrealist movies that imitate dreams, but he was too aroused now to care. In a moment, with Glory’s help, he was peeling off her wet, very tight bathing suit, which left faint red circles on pale skin. He released first breasts of a size and pneumatic roundness that he had seen only in Playboy magazine, then a sculptured, almost concave stomach, and finally a patch of curly hair colored a vivid silver pink, which completed the unreal perfection of the whole. He knelt back from it, dazed.
“Jesus—You’re—”
“Don’t tell me, huh.” Glory pulled Paul hard towards her; her breath warmed him. As they kissed and clung, he began to notice little imperfections, visible only close up, that reassured him with their proof of her humanity: a freckled roughness in her skin, a smudge of mascara by one eye, the pucker of an appendicitis scar on her belly.
“Come on.” With strong, pink-nailed fingers, Glory dragged Paul’s wet bathing suit down off his hips, down his legs, and flung it, like a damp rag, into a corner.
“Ah,” she began to murmur. “Aw, that’s it. ... Come on. ... Do it do it do it. Do it to me.” In the flooded room, like an actor in a surrealist—no, a pornographic—film, he dug his toes into the satin bedspread and drove into her again and again.
“Aw.” Glory sighed, and pulled one of the satin pillows towards her, propping it under her head—which, as she had never taken off her bathing cap, was still covered with fringed rubber hair. “Don’t get up. ... Hey, that was good.”
“You liked it?” Paul felt as if he had received some film award. “So did I.”
“Yeah. That’ll show them, huh?” She laughed.
“Mm.” Show whom? Paul wondered; probably the whole world.
“Hey, y’know, this room.” She laughed again.
“It’s pretty weird, isn’t it?” he agreed, surprised however that Glory’s taste would condemn this luxurious set.
“Weird? Yeah: all that water.” She gestured towards the soaked carpet. Somewhere below, Paul could still hear a residual dripping. “No, what I meant was, I was thinking, how many times Baby Petersen’s tried to get me onto this bed, and he never made it.”
“Poor guy,” Paul said, smiling, so pleased at this evidence of his competitive success that he could be magnanimous. He had gone to bed with a movie starlet; he, Paul Cattleman, had actually done and was doing this.
“Ah, don’t feel sorry for him. Baby’s a shit from the word go. His whole life is dedicated to the proposition the way to get ahead at Superb is by putting out for Baby Petersen. Which is a big lie because he just doesn’t pull that much weight around the studio. He’s a nothing, but by the time you find that out, it’s too late.” Glory noticed Paul looking at her. “Not me. I’m too old to fall for that kind of line.”
“How old are you?” Paul realized he did not know the first thing about this beautiful girl with whom he had just been intimate: not even her real name or the true color of her hair, though she lay there naked beside him, one leg thrown over his.
Glory was silent. Paul thought she was angry at the question. But the truth was that she had trouble herself remembering her age, so many lies had been told about it. Before Glory was out of diapers her mother, who had been divorced rather too long before the birth, had begun to add months to Glory’s age to forestall suspicions of illegitimacy. She had never officially corrected this error; but a little later, when Glory became a child actor, she had subtracted a year or two, or three—nobody really knew how many. Later, professional exigencies had dictated a change in the opposite direction, for you had to be sixteen to get a working permit for a job as a night-club dancer. As time went on, Glory took matters into her own hands, and often became older or younger in order to flatter a man or sign a contract; she had come to feel that her age, like the color of her hair, was a matter of choice.
“I’m twenty-six,” she said now, adding two years to her studio age.
“I’m thirty-one.” This produced no co
mment. To re-establish communication, Paul went back to the last topic. “You said this guy who lives here is married, though. What’s his wife like?”
“Oh, she’s okay. Only she’s been kicked around so much she’s kind of slap-happy, you know. She cries all the time. Well, she’s actually kind of a lush, but you can’t hold it against her, what she has to live with.”
“Why doesn’t she divorce him?”
“I d’know; I guess she doesn’t want to. She’s still kind of sweet on him. I think she keeps hoping he’ll stop screwing around and come back to her. And he plays up to it, see. He uses her as a front with his other girls, if they get too serious or they start wanting to marry him, then he always has an out: he tells them how basically he really loves his wife, only she has serious problems. I think in a way he believes his own line, cause he’s just as screwed up as everybody else in the business.”
An uncomfortable feeling, which he did not analyze, passed through Paul. “Are they all screwed up in your business?”
“Christ, yeah. They really are, you know.” Glory turned on her side towards Paul. “Maybe it’s the dumb climate. A friend of mine says that once you get out here, and get into the sun, you kind of gradually go soft, if you’re not used to it. ... I don’t like the sun. I always try to stay out of it myself. ... How long since you moved to California?”
“About nine months. But we haven’t come for good. We’re just here temporarily.”
“Oh yeah, really?” Her voice was intimate, as usual, but somehow casual. Paul realized that no words of love or even liking had been spoken between him and Glory; there had been no explanation of what had happened. Physical desire had simply been turned on and flooded them, like the house. Was this going to be an affair, or was it only an incident? He didn’t know what she thought, and that was perhaps one reason the whole thing seemed so unreal.
