Alison Lurie - The Nowhere City

Letting the jersey down over the skirt, Ceci stepped aside. “Does it show?” Paul shook his head. “Great.” She put her hand on the shopping cart again. “Anybody looks at me, they’ll think I’m pregnant. With a real square baby.” She grinned, and Paul could not help smiling.

“You’re crazy,” he said.

He was pleased with this explanation, and repeated it to himself several times as he and Ceci passed slowly through the checkout stand, left the Joy Superdupermarket, and loaded her groceries into his car. She was crazy. It formed an important part of the legal defense he was composing in his head in the expectation of being picked up at any moment for shoplifting. When they turned out of the parking lot onto National Boulevard, he let out a sigh.

Ceci turned in the seat to look at him. “That really bugged you, didn’t it?” she asked.

“You’re goddamned right it did.” Half-consciously he was trying to use her language. “I was waiting for them to grab us the whole time. Listen, you’d better not try anything like that again.”

“Oh? Will you stop me?” Ceci smiled at him, but rather coolly. Paul did not answer. “Will you turn me in if I do?” Aware that he was being mocked, Paul looked away and continued driving. He began to feel that he had not been on an exciting assignation with a beautiful, crazy beatnik girl, but instead that he had been coldly used as a taxi by a married kleptomaniac waitress.

Following Ceci’s directions, Paul pulled up in front of a two-story shack on an alley in the beach slum of Venice. He got out of the car and began unloading her bags of groceries onto the sidewalk. One. Two. Three.

“There you are,” he said flatly.

“It’s upstairs.” Hardly glancing at Paul, Ceci picked up a carton of beer and began climbing a rickety stairway at the side of the building. Paul stood and looked at the three bags sitting on the dirty, cracked sidewalk, each printed in large letters with the name of the Superdupermarket: JOY, JOY, JOY. Then, furious, but a gentleman to the last, he picked them up and followed her.

The door at the top of the stairs opened directly onto a kitchen, shabby and dim. There was a big bowl of fruit and vegetables on the table, dishes stacked in the sink; the walls were covered with paintings and drawings and photographs. There was no sign of her husband. He set the bags on a table.

“Hey, you brought them all. Great. Thank you.” In Paul’s suspicious mood, it sounded like a dismissal.

“You’re welcome,” he said. “Well; see you next week, probably.”

“What d’you mean?”

“Oh, you know. At the restaurant.”

“Aren’t you staying for dinner?”

“Was I supposed to stay for dinner?”

Ceci released the groceries she was holding, two cans of soup and a head of lettuce. They fell on to the table. “Don’t put me down, man,” she said. “Don’t do that. I know you’re bugged because I scammed off with that rice. All right, but you don’t have to walk out on me.”

“I’m not walking out on you,” Paul protested, confused again. “I didn’t know you expected me to come to dinner. Honestly. Anyhow, I can’t come to dinner. I have to go home.”

“For Christ’s sake. What’d you think I got all this stuff for?”

“I don’t know. For you and your husband to eat, I suppose.”

“Christ. I wouldn’t buy crab meat and stuff like that for him. We’re separated. I mean he doesn’t live here any more.” She laughed shortly, then widened her eyes and looked at Paul warmly. “So come on. Stay.”

“I’d love to. But I can’t, really. I have to go home.”

Now Ceci narrowed her eyes: sexy kitten into watchful cat. “I get it,” she said finally. “You have to go back and have dinner with your wife. Great.”

“I’m sorry,” Paul said.

“So we blew the whole afternoon dragging around in that market, and now you have to go home. Or maybe you want to go home?” She spoke steadily, but Paul saw the slope of her shoulders, the way her mouth remained open at the end of the question, and knew that she was as tense and disappointed as he.

“God, no.” He extended his arms; immediately, or so it seemed, Ceci was pressed up against him, kissing him lightly all over the face; he was kissing her.

“Wow,” she said. “Ow. Wait a minute.” She stepped back, lifted her jersey, and pulled the box of wild rice out of her skirt. She laughed: “I forgot about this; I thought for a second it was some crazy thing you had on.” She leaned against Paul and began kissing him again, rubbing up against him very gently with her arms, breasts, legs, and belly. The blood ran into Paul’s head and private parts. He clutched at Ceci and bit her on the shoulder, getting a mouthful of cotton jersey. She put her feet on his feet, stood on tiptoe, and looked into his eyes.

“Hey.”

“Hey yourself,” Paul remarked inanely.

“Listen.” Very gently, Ceci brushed her breasts across his shirt. She had no bra on; he could feel the nipples lifted to hard points. “Do you have to go home to dinner now or not?”

“I have to go home to dinner eventually,” Paul murmured, stroking her bottom, “but now—”

“Okay. Cut out, then.” She stepped back, and put her hands behind her head, where the hair was beginning to come loose.

“No, I was going to say I could be half an hour late.” Automatically, Paul looked at his watch: he was half an hour late already.

“Uh-uh. I don’t go for that, man. I need a lot of time the first time. Or like it won’t really swing. You know.”

“But I want you.” Paul grasped Ceci again; she pulled back, half-resisting.

“Okay, okay. When do you want me?” She smiled.

“Now. I can stay about an hour.” What would he tell Katherine? It was after five already, he saw.

Ceci shook her head. “Yeah, with your eye on the clock,” she said. “Make it some other time, huh?”

“Whenever you say. Tomorrow?” With the remaining fraction of his brain, Paul began to think how he might possibly explain being absent on Thanksgiving.

“No good. I’m on all day. How about Friday? I don’t have to be at the place till four. You dig lunch on Friday?”

The image came to Paul of himself digging lunch, in the form of a great hole in Venice Beach, in which Ceci was half-buried, naked. “Yes,” he said. “About when?”

“Let’s make it noon.”

“Good.” He began to construct his excuses for Friday.

“Okay.” Disengaging herself from Paul, Ceci walked over and opened the door for him, with a succinctness that he found disconcerting. Surely there should be more conversation, more hesitation over a thing like this.

“You’re right near the beach here, aren’t you?” he said, moving slowly in the direction of the door. “Maybe if it’s still warm we could go for a swim; what do you think? Shall I bring my suit?”

“We won’t have the time, man.” Ceci gave him a cat’s half-smile.

Paul paused in the doorway. “Well,” he said. He bent to kiss her good-bye; the door was between them, and only their mouths met; warm, wet. Now, he thought, and started to go round the door; but Ceci leaned against it and pushed, hard. Thrown off balance, he staggered back and outside, on to the porch.

“Ceci—”

“Later,” she said, and shut the door on him.

In a state of mild shock, Paul went down the stairs, got into his car, and began to drive home. It was because things were happening too fast, he thought, too soon, that he felt this way. He was used to having to force his way through a lengthy routine of flirtation and discussion, first base and second base; used to beating down a series of defenses with all the sensual, emotional, and intellectual energy he had. This lack of resistance threw him off balance. From an ugly, desperate girl he might have expected such directness, but not from Ceci O’Connor. Maybe she was a nymphomaniac.