Nowhere City

by Alison Lurie

  A cup of coffee? There was no reason why she should. On the other hand, there was no reason why she should not. There was no reason now why she should do, or not do, anything. “All right.” Even in her present state, that sounded ungracious. “Yes; that would be nice.”

  They left the bookstore. “This way,” Mr. McKay said, and took her bare arm above the elbow, pressing it. At the same time he gave her a quick glance of sensual interest and pleasure which, as she turned her head, he altered into a friendly smile. He doesn’t know how miserable I am; he thinks I’m just an ordinary girl he’s succeeded in picking up, Katherine realized. He thinks I might like him. Well, if anyone saw her now, that was what they would think too. Katherine gave a slight jerk, or twitch, as if to get away.

  “Come on.” Jim McKay took a better grip on Katherine’s arm; she felt through his fingers the firm intention to have at least a cup of coffee with her. And after all, what difference did it make if she went with him? Nobody she knew would see her, and it was a better idea than going home to her empty house with a book on meteorology, south-western humor, or intelligence testing—or the biography of some romantic, exciting, successful dead person.

  “This way.” They had crossed Hollywood Boulevard; now they turned down a side street. Suddenly, between the low, shabby buildings and the stunted palms a great view opened out downhill in the distance—all of Los Angeles, or so it seemed: an immense white city sparkling in the smoggy sunlight.

  “Awright awright, let’s take it again from ‘maybe it’ll rain.’”

  The pianist broke off playing, and on the bare stage of the rehearsal studio the four other girls and Glory stopped their routine, dropping their arms awkwardly. One pulled up her blouse; another scratched her thigh.

  “Roxy, baby, you’re crowding Glory too close; you gotta keep farther back on the turn. Okay, Eddie.” The pianist resumed.

  Maybe it’ll rain tomorrow,

  But it’s not tomorrow to day-ay-ay,

  Let’s play!

  “Okay, okay, that was better, but you still don’t all get the gesture. ‘Rain ...’ Ginevra, you got to wiggle your fingers on that, when you bring them down, darling—like so. Let’s see it now. ... Terrific! No, not you, Roxy, you got to wiggle yours less, much less. Now this time let’s take it back to ‘If you wanna know the way’ Okay, Eddie.”

  In the rear of the bare hall, Paul tilted his folding chair back and sighed deeply with boredom. For Christ’s sake, when were they going to “break for lunch”? At twelve, Glory had said, but it was already nearer to one. He had heard the fragmented lyrics of Let’s Play sung about a thousand times; these trivial, hedonistic lines, he felt, would be incised on his mind as long as he lived, scars of the trivial, hedonistic relationship he had got himself into.

  Not that he held it against Glory. It wasn’t her fault; it was part of her nature and training to grab what you wanted when you wanted it. He was grateful for Glory’s sensuality, and deeply delighted with it; he was also pleased with himself because he had been able to respond to this in her, and to satisfy it. On the other hand, he definitely missed something in this affair (if it was an affair—he had only seen her twice), something that he had always taken for granted before.

  That sudden embrace in the flooded house had deprived him, Paul thought, of almost as much as it had given. He had missed the intellectual pleasure of the chase—all the suspense and excitement from the first sighting of the quarry through dodge and feint and flight and pursuit, until that climactic moment when he held the warm body, and also its soul, down quivering in his arms.

  In his worst moments, he said to himself that this was a relationship merely of two warm bodies, not of two people. He and Glory didn’t really know each other, and as far as he could tell they never would.

  But Paul had another, more definite, reason for concern, and that was Glory’s proposed trip to New England and to Convers College, in the fall. (He had heard from Convers now, asking him to come East for an interview next month, and offering to pay his way—which looked like a good sign.) Was Glory serious? He didn’t know, but the more she described her plans, the more clearly he saw that she mustn’t come, at least not then. Driving from Mar Vista to Hollywood that morning he had spent much of his time trying to invent persuasive arguments to this effect.

  She wasn’t going to be allowed to visit his life, though he was, at that moment, visiting hers. Did that seem unfair? But in Hollywood anyone passed; he wasn’t obvious and incongruous the way she would be in New England.

  The piano stopped, then started again. Only four girls were on stage now, and Glory was walking towards him. She wore a scoop-necked leotard, shabby dance slippers, hair shrouded in a scarf, and dark glasses. He jumped up with relief.

  “Hi! Can you come out to lunch now?”

  “Aw, no.” Glory sighed. “I got to stay. Jackie’s just running the girls through the new introduction. Come on back with me while I put on my make-up: there’s some big shots coming.”

  “All right, but I’m starving.”

  “Why don’t you go get yourself something? There’s a couple places round the corner.”

  “No, I’ll wait for you.”

  The dressing-room at one side of the stage was bare boards too, not very clean, and glaringly lit. Glory sat down in front of a mirror and took off her sunglasses. Paul was surprised at how young, and how undistinguished, even nondescript, she looked without makeup. Her skin in the electric light was freckled and flawed. He felt compassion, and was glad that he had thought of the kindest way to make his point.

  “Say. I’ve been thinking about your trip East,” he began, drawing a wooden chair towards him and sitting down on it backwards, the way the good guys do in “western films. “Seems to me the best time for you to come would be in the spring.” Always make positive suggestions, as a friend of Katherine’s, a nursery-school-teacher, had once said. He paused. Glory was not obviously listening to him, but opening her bag and beginning to lay out tubes, brushes, bottles, etc., on the dressing-table. “You said you’d never seen a real spring. You know, that’s pretty bad. The flowers. ... Why don’t you plan to come say about next April, maybe in spring vacation?” Paul ended awkwardly, but on an up note.

  “Yeah,” Glory said, not in assent, rubbing brownish-pink paint over her face and neck. “Maybe.”

  “You’d like it then. It’s really beautiful. All the leaves coming out on the trees, the spring flowers. ... He realized he had mentioned the flowers before. Glory said nothing; she was applying glue from a small bottle to something that looked like a dead, hairy centipede. She screwed the top back on the bottle, lifted the centipede carefully, and stuck it on to her left eyelid, where it turned into a strip of curly artificial lashes an inch long.

  “And by that time,” Paul went on, “I’d be settled in and know some people you could meet.” Among any faculty, he reasoned, there would be a proportion that would not only not disapprove of Glory, but would admire him for knowing her.

  “Aw, Paul. I d’know.” Glory held one eyelid down while she filled in above it with purple eye-shadow, then with silver. “I mean, sure, I’d like to see the flowers and all. But all those old professors.” Dipping a brush in dark brown liquid, she drew a wide curve above the lashes and out towards the temple. “Y’know, I could never really make that scene.” Glory powdered her lid to set the colors, opened both eyes, and glanced over the shoulder of her reflection at Paul, smiling apologetically. With one eye unpainted, the other metallic purple, she looked grotesque. “Aw, baby,” she added. “You know it was a kooky idea anyhow, ’cause by that time Kay’ll have found out and she won’t want me in the same state with her, forget the same town.”

  She means Katherine, Paul thought. “Found out? How’s she going to find out? I’m not going to tell her.”

  “You’re not? How come?”

  “Huh?”

  “I mean, you never tell her we made it together” (Glory began on the other eyelid), “h
ow the hell’s she going to know we paid them back?”

  “Paid them back?”

  “Yeah. Like we said, your turn my turn; fun for mama; fun for daddy. Boy, are you slow today!” As Glory looked at Paul’s puzzled expression in the mirror, hers also grew puzzled.

  “You mean you think your husband has been—” Paul broke off.

  “Aw, I know he’s been making out for a long time, ever since he walked out on me. I was all broken up for a while, then I said to myself: He thinks I’m just going to sit around on my ass bawling about it; well, I’ve got better things to do with that piece of equipment.” Glory laughed.

  “But you mean you think he’s been making out with—”

  “With your wife,” Glory finished. “Yeah.” She began penciling in an eyebrow, then stopped and turned round so as to look at Paul directly. “You mean you didn’t know that? Shit.”

  “It’s not true. Who told you?”

  “Nobody. I just know, that’s all.”

  Paul began to feel better. “Oh, that’s impossible,” he said. In Glory’s world, no doubt such promiscuity was the rule, but not in Katherine’s. “I know Katherine,” he asserted. “She wouldn’t do anything like that. She’s just not the kind of girl that—” He stopped; he had been about to draw a definition insulting to Glory. “How do you just know?”

  “From watching her.” Glory began on her eyebrows again, thickening them and extending them up and out like antennae. “The way she says his name, kind of tense, or the way she turns on when somebody else mentions it. Hell, everything.”

  “It couldn’t be,” Paul said. He felt much better now. “I mean, she might have a kind of intellectual crush on him, sure. Kind of a hero-worship.”

  “Hmh.” Picking up a brush, Glory began to outline her lips, which expressed scepticism. She did not believe him. The cool charm, the modesty of Katherine’s temperament, love without sensual passion, was probably something she had never come across in her life, or even conceived of.

  “See, Katherine does get that way sometimes when she’s working for somebody. She really gets to think they’re the greatest living expert in whatever it is they do,” he explained, trying to put it into terms that Glory would understand. “I guess that’s one reason she’s such a good secretary.”

  Stretching her lips, Glory filled in the outlines of a sensuous mauve-pink mouth, blotted it on a tissue, threw the tissue onto the floor, and dipped into a box of pink powder.

  “Baby,” she said. “You’re living in a little dream world.” For a few seconds she disappeared from Paul in a smog-thick cloud of powder. Then, turning her head, she unknotted the kerchief, pulled it off, and shook out her hair. When she turned back, Paul almost gasped; the nondescript freckled face had turned into a hard mask of unearthly, if vulgar, beauty.

  “Yeah,” she said, smiling not so much at him as into the mirror, testing her reflexes. “So listen, I got to get back on stage now; but just hang on, we hafta eat some time.” She stood up and smiled again, more genuinely. Paul understood that she was sorry for having, as she thought, undeceived him. But it was really she who was deceived, living in a dream world—but a vulgar, empty one.

  Opening the door to backstage, Glory waved to him; he raised his hand in a half-hearted return. A jangle of trivial dream-music poured in, dimming as the door shut. He looked at the mess of theatrical paint spread out on the dressing-table along with soiled tissues, smudges of powder, and a bottle of tablets—tranquillizers, he realized, picking it up—marked “for nervousness, restlessness, nervous irritability and excitability.” He thought that he ought not to be angry at Glory for her opinion of his wife’s chastity. He should be sorry for her instead, because she was sunk so deep in her shoddy, neurotic world. Paul walked back and forth in the dressing-room. It wasn’t her fault if she figured everyone else was the same—if she thought that every man was on the make, every girl a cheap whore like her—Paul realized that he was angry, very angry. He was suffering from nervousness, restlessness, nervous irritability and excitability.

  He went out into the rehearsal hall. Again, the girls were grinning and rotating and high-kicking on stage, their breasts bouncing in unison.

  If you want to know the way—

  How had he got into this place? He turned, and began to walk towards the exit.

  Outside in the hall, an altercation was going on. A middle-aged woman in an unattractive hat was arguing with the doorman.

  “Hey, listen,” the man said, stopping Paul. “Maybe you can help this lady; she wants to see Miss Green. I told her already a hundred times she can’t go in.”

  “But it’s very important.” The woman turned the screwed-up intensity of her expression on Paul. “I have to speak to Miss Green about my daughter’s screen test. My daughter, Dawn Nefflinger, only she calls herself Bobi Brentwood.” She gave a nervous laugh; her voice trembled with maternal hysteria and anxiety. Paul realized that this must be the mother of the teenager who was bothering Glory.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t help you.” He pushed through the swinging doors on to the sidewalk.

  The rehearsal hall was at the end of a blind alley. As Paul got to the corner, a sports car drove in: a black Jaguar. He watched it park with a loud squeak of brakes. A bearded man in dark glasses got out. Paul wondered if he hadn’t seen him somewhere; he frowned, trying to remember. No, he hadn’t seen him, he thought, as the man entered the building. He knew him instead from the blurred picture that Glory carried, and from Katherine’s description: it was Dr. Isidore Einsam.

  “Have lunch with me,” Iz told Glory, rather than asked her, as the groups of dancers, singers, producers, agents, musicians, and other people connected with the charity show began to break up and move towards the exit. Whether it was the lack of a question in his voice, or just the months of separation, Glory answered flatly.

  “I’m not eating lunch today; I hafta take the car to the car wash.” In the state of nervousness into which Iz’s appearance had thrown her, it was the first excuse she could think of. As for Paul, she had completely forgotten about him.

  “All right, I’ll come with you.”

  Iz took her arm; she let him do so stiffly. Why should I say a nice word to this conceited bastard? her whole attitude seemed to announce as they walked out into the blinding sunlight (goddamn it, she’d forgotten her glasses). What does he think? he turns up out of nowhere after all this time, I’m supposed to throw myself into his arms? She saw Iz’s Jag in the alley, practically underneath a No Parking—No Standing sign, and thought, Hope he gets a ticket.

  Glory’s own car was parked round the corner. She refused Iz’s offer to drive, and kept up her silence on the way, interspersed with short, discouraging answers to his questions and comments about the show. She was not going to get excited, she resolved; she was going to be very polite and distant. However, as they sat in the line of automobiles waiting to enter the automatic car wash, she remembered an obligation and said coolly to Iz:

  “Hey, I oughta thank you for talking to that crazy kid’s mother for me. It must’ve been a drag.”

  “Ah, it wasn’t so hard. All she wanted was for somebody to listen to her for a while.”

  Glory let her foot off the brake, moved up in line, and stopped again. “The last time I listened to her, she started right in screaming about money, and how she didn’t have much loot, but she was an American citizen. I figured she was trying to put the grab on me. I mean, how was I to know she wanted to keep the kid out of the studio? I thought they were playing it together.” Glory laughed shortly, then sighed. “You figure it’ll work out all right, that phony screen-test business?”

  “I think so.” Consulting hastily together in a corner of the rehearsal hall (while Bobi’s mother waited in the lobby), Iz and Maxie Weiss, Glory’s agent, had agreed that an imitation screen test was to be arranged for Bobi Brentwood on the Superb lot. She was to be informed afterwards that though she looked pretty good, she needed some professional trainin
g. She would then be encouraged to enroll in an acting class which was also a kind of group therapy. “The trouble is,” Iz said, “the mother definitely needs help too; but what can you do—you have to start somewhere.”

  “She’s not in such bad shape,” Glory said, moving up in line again. “She’s not near as flippy as my mother was.”

  “That’s a great recommendation,” Iz began. He was going to go on, but luckily for his marriage an employee of the automatic car wash opened the door of the T-Bird and began to vacuum the interior around them. “You want to get out?” Glory shook her head. “Okay.” Iz shrugged. The man finished, wound up the windows, shut the door, and motioned for Glory to drive forward.

  At the entrance, another employee hooked the car on to the rotary chain that would pull it through the building. Glory shifted into neutral and sat back. Up till now she had been unnoticed, but the man with the vacuum tank had recognized her and was alerting the others. The word passed round quickly, so that when her car was jerked forward into the tunnel it was met by eight or ten men of varying ages and races, all damp with soap and steam, and many stripped to the waist because of the heat. They stared avidly at Glory in her stage make-up and tight, low-cut dance costume. Undisconcerted, she sat coolly back in the far corner of the seat away from Iz, who self-consciously stroked his beard and frowned.

  The car lurched forward again, tripping the switch of the first rinse. A torrent of water poured down over them, streaking the glass and blurring the faces and bodies outside. Within the car the light of a wet dusk softened Glory’s face. Iz reached over and stroked the line of her neck, and then down towards her breast. Glory stiffened. The bastard, he thinks he can just walk right back in without saying a goddamn word, she thought. She tried to give Iz a cold stare, but lisped with emotion as she said:

  “Tho what’s that for?”

  The automobile jerked forward again, out of the water, and two men, one on each side, began to wipe it with soapy rags. They swept the pink metal in wide, mockingly sensual gestures, grinning at Glory through the dripping windows, as if it were her own body. As before, she paid absolutely no attention, as unconscious of her audience as an actress on a movie screen; Iz frowned nervously.