Alison Lurie - The Nowhere City

Her first impression was one of behinds. Rose-pink behinds by Boucher; white behinds by Ingres; misty Impressionist behinds and full, fleshy Rubens behinds. Nearly all the paintings in the room were of nudes. They lay spread out on sofas—they lolled half-erect, embracing people or urns; they cast their eyes down provocatively, or looked boldly over their rounded shoulders out of thick, sticky gold frames. At intervals along the walls below them stood antique sofas with the legs of beasts, covered in rose and gold brocades, as if awaiting the convenience of this crowd of whores. Even the few landscapes and still-lifes seemed to ooze a vulgar sensuality: the baskets of ripe, dewy fruit and the sunlit hills repeated the same forms.

Katherine stood in the center of the room and clenched her hands. Meanwhile Susy circumambulated the gallery as if she were in any museum, standing for an equal interval in front of each canvas, seeing nothing, making polite comments, watching the children as they ran about.

“I want to go now. I want to see the animals,” Mark said.

“What’s that lady doing, Mommy?” Viola asked loudly. “Why is she holding that big bird in her lap?” She pointed at a large, darkly varnished Baroque canvas. Varnish-colored female arms and legs were confused with brown clouds and the wings, neck, head, and beak of a whitish bird.

“Well, I don’t know, darling,” Susy replied. “I guess she’s petting him.” She cast Katherine a look of adult conspiracy and suppressed laughter; Katherine did not cast it back.

“I want to go. I want to see the animals!”

“All right, Markie. I’ll take them outside and let them run around for a while, Katherine. Don’t hurry.”

Katherine walked down the gallery. It occurred to her what a very typical Los Angeles phenomenon it was, one which could be described in letters to acquaintances back East. They would hardly believe her, though; they would think that she was exaggerating. Also, just now there was no acquaintance to whom Katherine owed a letter; they all owed her letters. When she and Paul had been in Europe two summers ago they had got lots of mail, but not now, even in the same country with the same postal system.

“Quite a collection, isn’t it?” a voice said immediately behind Katherine. She jumped. No one was there except the museum guard, the usual gray man in a gray uniform. He was looking at her, so he must have spoken.

“Oh, yes,” she replied.

“You should see the upstairs, too.” The guard swayed towards her like a pendulum, from the feet. “Take a look at the bedrooms; see the Amours of the Gods tapestry.”

“Oh yes, well, some other time,” Katherine said. She began walking away backwards, smiling nervously, and did not stop until she had left the building.

Susy was watching the children in the courtyard. They returned to the car and drove on up the canyon to where the animals were kept. Here a more respectable aspect of Mr. Putty was displayed, insofar as it is respectable to keep wild animals in one’s back yard. The bear, the deer, the Rocky Mountain goats, the bobcat; all were housed in large outdoor pens; they did not appear especially unhealthy or ill cared-for, but they seemed discouraged and bored. They stood under the eucalyptus trees or lay about on the ground with the air of creatures who have been forcibly torn from their natural habitat, and wish and hope only to return to it. They did not have the hysterical stared-at gaze of animals in public zoos, but they looked at Katherine, she felt, as if they blamed her, along with all humans, for their being there—not realizing that she was their fellow.

“That’s everything,” Susy said. “Except the buffaloes. Do you want to see the buffaloes before we go?” Viola and Mark shouted that they did. “All right. But it’s a long walk. Let’s go in the car.”

She turned up a dirt road marked TO THE BUFFALO. “It won’t take long,” she told Katherine. “There’s not much to see, they keep them in a big field and last time they were way over at the other side of it.”

The eucalyptus ended; they were now in an orchard of young citrus trees, five to six feet high, set out in rows. The road grew dustier and more irregular, and then came to a dead end in front of a high cyclone fence. “Caution,” read a metal sign. “Do Not Feed or Annoy the Buffalo.”

As Susy had said, there was nothing much to see: a few large dark-brown shapes could be made out, motionless in the dry grass, about a hundred feet farther up the hill. Mark was disappointed, and banged on the fence, while Viola shouted: “Buffaloes! Nice buffaloes! Come here!”

The sun was falling, and it seemed pointless to stay. They all got back into the car. Susy started the engine and began to back down the narrow road, scraping the fenders against first one and then the other of its banks.

“Ouch! I’ll scratch the car all up this way; Fred’ll kill me.”

She drove forward again to the fence. “I’m going to turn round here in the orchard. Hold tight.” Susy pulled the wheel to the left. The station wagon leaped up off the road on to the soft dirt. “There. Now.” She put it into reverse, and stepped on the gas.

The engine roared, but nothing else happened; the station wagon remained stationary. “Oh, golly,” Susy said. She pumped the gas harder, and manipulated the wheel.

“Oh, golly,” she repeated finally, and got out to look.

“What’s the matter, Mommy?”

“Stay in the car, children.” Viola and Mark did not obey her.

“Are we stuck, Mommy? Mommy, are we stuck?”

“No, darling. Get back in the car.”

They did not, so Katherine got out too. She walked back and joined the Skinners in the contemplation of a rear wheel half-buried in loose, sandy earth.

“Stand back, kids. Mommy’s going to start the car now. Stay with Mrs. Cattleman. Maybe it’ll go now, without all of you in it.”

Susy got back behind the wheel and started the engine. Nothing happened, except that the rear wheels spun violently.

“I want to go home,” Mark cried.

“Why don’t you try to rock it out?” Katherine called from where she stood with the children. “Put it into forward, and then right back into reverse.” Susy nodded. “And give it plenty of gas.”

“Okay.” With a shudder, the car leapt forward, but only a couple of feet, and stopped with a crunch, its nose buried in one of the young orange trees, which now stuck out ahead of the hood at an angle.

“We hit the tree,” Susy said, in a voice that was beginning to show hysteria. “Do you think we killed it?”

“Mommy, let’s go back!”

“It’s only bent,” Katherine said. “It’ll be all right. All you have to do is back up a little.”

“I want to go home, Mommy.”

“I’ll try that. Shush up, children, for heaven’s sake. We are going home, as fast as we can. Stay with Katherine.”

Pulling the shift lever back into reverse, Susy gunned the car: the hood shook, and the engine roared; it also gave out strange pounding and snorting noises. No. That wasn’t coming from the engine; it was something alive—

“Aooh! Aooh!” Mark saw it first, and began to scream; something rushing towards them down the hill, a charging mass of something dark and horrible. It was the buffalo: heads down, feet beating on the ground, like a huge mass of hairy carpet pads charging towards them.

Mark and Viola, screaming, flung themselves into the car; Katherine stood paralyzed. The buffalo rushed towards her and towards the fence—but of course, there was a fence, Katherine remembered with a gasp, seeing it—then they wheeled round without even touching it and stood, pawing the ground.

“You see, it’s all right. They can’t get through the fence!” Katherine shouted, catching her breath. Mark and Viola continued screaming.