Nowhere City

by Alison Lurie

  None of them was Katherine. After he had looked into all the rooms at least twice, and walked round the pool, he had to admit, with considerable irritation, that he couldn’t find her. Nor, for that matter, could he find Glory or Glory’s husband. He knew absolutely no one here; it was as if he had got into the wrong house.

  Probably what had happened, he concluded, was that Katherine hadn’t arrived yet, but (having thoughtfully left the car for him) was still on her way to Glory’s by some slower means of transport. He must simply wait for her. Holding a drink, he wandered out towards the pool. It must have been fixed recently, for it was full, spotlighted both above and below the water, and slowly filling with the debris of the party. Paper napkins, cigarette butts, and a few potato chips floated on the surface; their shadows skimmed over the white tiles below like pale fish.

  Without making much effort, Paul fell into several curiously meaningless conversations. At one point, for example, he found himself talking to Glory’s press agent about airplane fares, at another to an odd pair of women: a pretty plump little Japanese in a cotton shirtwaist named Mrs. Haraki, and a handsome bony American named Mrs. Smith who wore a silk kimono and had chopsticks skewered through her hair. They were trying to identify the movie stars present, most of whom Paul had never heard of.

  It was now after ten o’clock; Katherine should have come. Unless, of course, she had already left, feeling too nervous and shy to bear a party like this any longer alone. But in that case, surely she would have left a message?

  Paul went back into the house, where he got another drink and spoke to a couple named Dodge who said they were college teachers, though Paul had taken them both for actors. He asked Mr. and Mrs. Dodge if they had seen his wife.

  “Your wife? Have you lost your wife?” Mr. Dodge held out his glass to the bar for more whisky.

  “No,” Paul explained. “I was supposed to meet her here, and now I can’t find her.”

  “Gee, that’s too bad,” Mrs. Dodge said, eating salted nuts. “I don’t know, maybe we saw her. What does she look like?”

  “Well, she has long kind of light brown hair, done in a knot at the back. She’s very pretty. Beautiful, but not, you know, striking. Quite pale. She’s rather shy.”

  “No,” said Mrs. Dodge, shaking her head. “I’m sorry.”

  “No,” said Mr. Dodge. “Marge and I haven’t seen anyone like that. But there’s lots of pretty girls here,” he added helpfully.

  What was he supposed to do now, Paul wondered. It was getting on for eleven, two A.M. by Boston time. Maybe he should go home, or at least call.

  The party was growing louder and louder. He drifted into the hall, looking for a telephone, where a dark, striking girl came up to him. “Hey, I know you,” she said woozily. “You’re the college-boy type was talking to Glory at the rehearsal last week.” She told him, giggling, that Glory and Iz Einsam were celebrating their party in bed. “Come on in an’ say hello to them,” she urged Paul, pulling his arm. “They won’t mind. Ev’body’s going in. Wait, first we gotta get you ’nother drink. ... There. C’mon now.”

  Against his better judgment, Paul allowed himself to be pulled down the hall and into a huge white room. There were two walls of mirrors, a lot of tropical plants, and a large white bed covered with fur and pillows. The man he had recognized before as Dr. Einsam was lying in bed, smoking.

  “Brought you ’nother friend,” said the dark girl. “This is whatsis-name.”

  “Paul Cattleman.”

  “Well! How do you do.” Iz sat up, naked at least to the waist, and held out his hand. He gave Paul a penetrating look, but not a hostile one; so Glory hasn’t told him anything, thank Christ, Paul thought. He crossed the room and shook hands. “We’re going to get up pretty soon,” Iz said. “You’re having a good time?”

  “Yes, thanks.” Embarrassed to be shaking hands with the man he had so recently cuckolded, Paul turned to go, and then turned back halfway across the room. “Only I want to ask you something. What’s happened to my wife?”

  “Ya.” Iz paused, and narrowed his eyes. “Let’s talk about it later,” he said finally. “I would like to answer you, but I don’t think this is the time and place for a metaphysical discussion.”

  Paul stared, then laughed nervously. “I didn’t mean it that way,” he said. “I mean I don’t know where my wife is. She left me a note to come here and meet her, but now I can’t find her.”

  “Ah, I see. Well, I know she was here earlier. I’ll ask Glory. Hey, baby.” Instead of raising his voice, Iz lowered it, and laid his hand on the pillow beside him. “Do you know where Katherine went?”

  “Huh?” From under the sheet, Glory lifted a tumble of pink curls, a blurred face. “Uh-uh. Somewhere round.” Her head fell again.

  “Aw, I know where Kay is,” the girl who had brought him in said suddenly. “You wanna find Kay? She’s in the living-room. C’mon.”

  Closing the bedroom door behind him, Paul followed her into the hall. “Hey, you’re Kay’s husband,” she said. “I wasn’t so loaded I woulda caught on sooner. I’m Ramona Moon, pleased to meetcha.”

  “How do you do.” Paul and Mona shook hands. He realized that he had finished his third drink. Probably that was why everything seemed so odd.

  “C’mon. ... This way. See, there she is, over by the piano.” Mona pointed across the living-room to where a girl sat on the piano bench, talking to two men: a pretty girl in tight yellow pants, with a smooth California tan and ash-blonde hair piled up onto her head like a mound of whipped cream; an obvious Los Angeles type; he remembered vaguely seeing her over there earlier in the evening.

  “Oh, that’s not her,” Paul started to say, when the girl, laughing at some joke that had been made, turned her face full in his direction. He realized that it was Katherine.

  He should have known then, of course. But the untangling of any long-standing illusion is a difficult matter, and over three weeks of miserable scenes, baffling explanations, and inconclusive arguments had intervened between Glory’s party and the smoggy morning when Paul climbed into the plane for Boston again.

  Of it all he remembered now only a few things: for instance, the moment when Katherine, sorting clothes for the cleaners, had finally said that she didn’t want to go back to New England. Once the words were out, she repeated them many times, each time more clearly. Even her voice had changed: it was louder, with almost a California twang—not Katherine’s voice at all. Somehow his wife had disappeared; still, if he could only get her away from Los Angeles, if she would only come back East with him, he was sure, he said, that she would turn into herself again. “Yes, I know” Katherine replied. “That’s what I’m afraid of. ...”

  Eating, dressing, undressing, carrying the groceries in and the cans and trash out, through all the small routines of domesticity, their argument discontinuously continued. “But you know you can’t stay here,” Paul remembered saying as he wiped a plate with a damp towel (not since the first months of marriage had they washed up so conjugally). “Why, the house is going to come down in a couple of months. You won’t have anywhere to live.” Katherine, her hands moving beneath the suds, sourly smiled. “You think I can’t even find an apartment by myself,” she stated. “No,” Paul replied, inaccurately. “I didn’t mean that. But for instance, suppose you did get an apartment; what’d you do with all your parents’ furniture, out in the garage?” Briefly, Katherine’s face altered: a shadow of her old, pale, complex inward look crossed it. Her wrists were still under the trickle of rinse water. “After all,” (Paul pushed his advantage), “those are pretty valuable antiques. You can’t just leave them in a garage.”

  “Well, if you feel that way,” Katherine said slowly. Sweeping her arm across the sink, she pulled out of the soapy water a handful of knives, forks, and spoons; she splashed them under the faucet and set them bristling on end in the rack. “If you want them, I could ship them back East to you,” she offered. And he—who of course had nothing to put in
the new apartment at Convers, and hoped that Katherine’s ancestral furniture would, eventually, draw her back across the country—agreed.

  At night, in bed, they had long, vaguely intense conversations—lying far apart, in pajamas; Paul knew Katherine better than to try and change her mind by appealing to her body—he appealed instead to her emotions. At times, he thought, with some success; at others not. Once, across the chilly landscape of sheet, he asked what she thought would become of her, if she stayed in Los Angeles. Instead of answering, Katherine said to him calmly, pushing back her ash-blonde hair (it wasn’t dyed, she had insisted, only bleached by the sun), “You know what’s the matter with you, Paul. You’re always thinking of what happened before now or what might possibly happen some time later. You’re squeezed up between the past and the future; you’re not living.”

  Finally, there was the time, perhaps worst of all, and late at night, when he had come out of the bathroom in a towel and exclaimed to Katherine, “I suppose what this all means is that you hate me; you can’t forgive me. Well,” he added bitterly, thinking of Ceci, of Glory, of all the others whose existence, it had turned out, she had suspected all along, so that finally she had—but he didn’t want to think of that—“Well, I guess maybe you have a good reason.”

  “No,” Katherine, or Kay, had said, sitting up in bed, brown now against the sheets except for the pattern of a bathing suit burned on to her body in negative. “I don’t hate you. It’s funny, but you just don’t seem real to me any more, somehow. I just don’t care.”

  The airplane taxied down the field to the end of the runway, wheeled round, and hesitated a moment, its engines blasting harder. Then it started forward, lifting heavily into the air. Out of the cabin window Paul saw Los Angeles tilt and sink away from him. As the plane made a circle he saw, in rapid panorama, the bleached green of the Pacific Ocean wrinkled with white waves against the beach; billboards, factories, and palms; block after block of houses; cars speeding like insects along the glittering freeways; the towers of oil wells on the barren hills.

  Straightening out of its turn, the jet began to climb. The outlines of the sun grew harder and brighter as they ascended, the sky more brilliant and blue. Looking down, though, Paul saw that the light, bright colors of the city had begun to blur. Layers of yellowish-gray haze thickened under them. Soon he could hardly make out the shapes of buildings and roads.

  The plane rose higher into the clear, hard air. Now everything below, between the mountains and the sea, was gone. Los Angeles had disappeared into a bowl of smog.

  A Biography of Alison Lurie

  Alison Lurie (b. 1926) is a Pulitzer Prize–winning author of fiction and nonfiction. Born in Chicago and raised in White Plains, New York, she grew up in a family of storytellers. Her father was a sociology professor and later the head of a social work agency; her mother was a former journalist. Lurie graduated from Radcliffe College, and in 1969 joined the English department at Cornell University, where she taught courses on children’s literature, among others.

  Lurie’s first novel, Love and Friendship (1962), is a story of romance and deception among the faculty of a snowbound New England college. It won favorable reviews and established her as a keen observer of love in academia. Her next novel, The Nowhere City (1965), records the confused adventures of a young New England couple in Los Angeles among Hollywood starlets and Venice Beach hippies. She followed this with Imaginary Friends (1967), which focuses on a group of small-town spiritualists who believe they are in touch with extraterrestrial beings.

  Her next novel, Real People (1969), led the New York Times to call her “one of our most talented and intelligent novelists.” The tale unfolds in a famous artists’ colony where much more than writing and painting occurs. Lurie then returned to an academic setting with her bestseller The War Between the Tates (1974), and drew on her own childhood in Only Children (1979). Four years later she published Foreign Affairs, her best-known novel, which traces the erotic entanglements of two American professors in England. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985.

  The Truth About Lorin Jones (1988) follows a biographer around the United States as she searches for the real, and sometimes shocking, story of a famous woman painter—a character who appears as an eight-year-old in Only Children. The Last Resort (1999) takes place in Key West, Florida, among a group of ill-assorted characters, some of who appear in earlier Lurie novels. Truth and Consequences (2005) returns to an academic setting and plumbs the troubles of a professor with back trouble, his exhausted wife, and two poets—one famous and one not.

  Lurie has also published a collection of semi-supernatural stories, Women and Ghosts (1994), and a memoir of the poet James Merrill, Familiar Spirits (2001). Her interest in children’s literature inspired three collections of folktales, including Clever Gretchen (1980), which features little-known stories with strong female heroines. She has published two nonfiction books on children’s literature, as well: Don’t Tell the Grown-ups (1990) and Boys and Girls Forever (2003). In the lavishly illustrated The Language of Clothes (1981), she offers a lighthearted study of the semiotics of dress.

  Lurie officially retired from Cornell in 1998, but continues to teach and write. In 2012 she was named to a two-year term as the official New York State Author. She lives in Ithaca, New York, and is married to the writer Edward Hower. She has three grown sons and three grandchildren.

  Lurie at age seven.

  Lurie at age fourteen, wearing her first long party dress in preparation for dancing school.

  Lurie and her dog, Sliver, in the backyard of her family’s home in White Plains, New York, in the summer of 1947. (Photo courtesy of Kroch Library.)

  Lurie on the porch of her parents’ home in White Plains, New York, in the early spring of 1947.

  Lurie with her husband, Edward Hower, in Key West, Florida, in 2008.

  Lurie and Hower.

  Lurie in 2009.

  Lurie’s three sons, from left to right, John, Jeremy, and Joshua, in October 2011.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  copyright © 1965 by Alison Lurie

  cover design by Elushika Werrakoon

  978-1-4532-7117-9

  This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media

  180 Varick Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com

  EBOOKS BY ALISON LURIE

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