Alison Lurie - The Nowhere City

Ceci lay back, pushing her hair out of her face. It fell on the sheet, streaked light and dark like frayed hemp. It wasn’t dyed, though; there was a great tangle of the same colors between her legs. “You know what I mean,” she said. “Somebody you want right away; they’re the only ones you can ever really make it with. ... I mean you can try, with the others, but it won’t swing. Like somebody you don’t dig much at first, but maybe later on you get to talking to them and they turn out to be pretty intelligent and hip. So you get to know them, and finally you think, oh well, he’s kind of attractive, I guess. When you try to make it with somebody like that, it’s always a bust. It’s just pretty sad, because probably by that time you’re friends, so you keep telling each other that it’s all right; sure, it’s great. Uh-uh. If you don’t want somebody right off, they’ve got nothing for you. I mean physically.”

“You’re right,” Paul said. “Yeah, I think you’re right.” He sat up and kissed one of Ceci’s breasts lightly, pulling up the large brown-pink nipple. Then he kissed the other one. But something bothered him. “The trouble is,” he said, “sometimes you want somebody very much and it still doesn’t work out too well when you get them.” He realized that he was talking about Katherine. Whom had Ceci been talking about?

“Sure, that’s true. Like with us, last time wasn’t so great. I’m never much good the first time; I’m too charged up. Anyhow, your body’s got to get used to somebody else’s body. The better they know each other the better it gets.”

That wasn’t true of him and Katherine, Paul thought. The longer they knew each other, the worse it seemed to get, at least for her. But he didn’t want to discuss Katherine, or even think about her now. Instead he bent over and kissed Ceci again, this time under the breast where her tan ended. The line was so clear that she looked like a brown girl wearing a pink two-piece bathing suit.

“I like it the way you have the mattress right on the floor,” he said presently. “It makes me feel safe.”

“Mm?” Ceci spoke indistinctly against his arm, which she was licking dreamily.

“When I was a little kid, I used to be frightened all the time that there was a wolf under my bed at night. It was a story I read, the Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing. I mean the Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing. I used to hate to go to bed. I had to turn out the light by the door, and then I would take a running jump into my bed, so the wolf couldn’t grab hold of my feet. Sometimes he stayed there under the bed all night long.”

“Bad.” She moved up towards his shoulder. “Is he still there?”

“Oh no. Anyway, he’s certainly not here.”

“Maybe he’s squashed flat under the mattress,” Ceci suggested. She lifted her head. “Hey. How about some lunch?”

“Lunch?” With surprise, Paul realized that it was daytime, probably still morning, of some definite day. “Is it time for lunch?”

“Lunch for you, breakfast for me. I have to be at the gig at two.” Ceci stood up. “How about if I blow us some eggs, and you can call it an omelette?”

Saturday. It was Saturday morning. “Fine,” Paul said. He continued to lie on the bed, gazing at the ceiling. How fine everything was here, how easy. First you make love, then you eat. Everything you wanted and no strings attached. No regrets, no voices wailing about involvement and guilt and jealousy. It was so simple, so restful.

Cooking sounds came from the kitchen, mixed with jazz. Paul felt hungry. He sat up, gathered his clothes from where they had fallen, and began to dress. Saturday morning. Katherine was at home cleaning the house again, or maybe she had finished that by now and was out shopping. She would never schedule love before lunch. It was all right for him when the light was on, she had once said: he only saw her or the bedclothes usually; but she couldn’t help seeing the furniture and the curtains and whether there were any cobwebs on the ceiling, and it distracted her. What would she think of Ceci’s ceiling?

Katherine would dislike Ceci even if she never saw the painting on the ceiling and had no idea that Paul knew her. She thought beatniks affected; nobody would act that way, she thought, unless they were acting.

If she knew—But he didn’t want to imagine that, and she didn’t know. She wouldn’t suspect; she had other things to think about. She had started working at U.C.L.A., and she was fixing up the house, if you could call it that. When he came home yesterday afternoon, he found her trying to move the sofa outside. It was a hell of a job, because the front door was so narrow. They finally managed to get it out, and into the garage, where Katherine covered it with a sheet. She said that Los Angeles was too dirty and gritty; if she didn’t put her good things away they would simply be ruined.

Though she disliked their house, Katherine was also worried about their being thrown out of it. She had discovered that some of their neighbors across the street had got notices from the Highway Department to vacate by March first. Everyone on that block had received eviction notices, it turned out; the city was clearing the land for a new freeway. Katherine became hysterical then, and made Paul call up their landlady.

Oh, there was nothing to get excited about, the landlady told him. She had inside information from her brother in the real estate business that construction wasn’t going to start over there for a long time—two or three years, at least.

“You see, there’s nothing to get excited about,” Paul had explained after he hung up. “She’s lying,” Katherine said, holding on to a chair in the middle distance. “Wait and see. I suppose she’s known about it all along, but she didn’t say anything so she could get you to rent her house. Probably nobody else would have taken it. Probably everyone knew they were going to build a freeway here, right across the street, except us. You should have asked somebody before you signed the lease.”

And since then, Paul thought, Katherine had looked in the mailbox daily as if she wanted to find an eviction notice there, whatever inconvenience it might cause her; it would prove the landlady a liar and her husband a fool. She hadn’t said anything more about it, but he knew her well. Too well: maybe that was the trouble.

And Ceci? Not well enough: nearly all she said or did was like a collection of road signs in a strange language. He could remember coming upon such incomprehensible signs when they were driving through Europe. Screams of warning, perhaps—or directions to the heavenly city?

Massi caduti!

Gravillons Roulants 30

(“Let’s go back,” Katherine had kept asking, even then.)

Even more puzzling than Ceci’s statements were her silences. She was the only girl he had known who did not say anything in bed. She asked no questions, made no requests, expressed no pain or pleasure; even when the room seemed to shake around them she did not cry out, only held him harder. At the end she gave a long, breathy laugh, the laugh of a creature that does not know any words. What did it mean? Was she happy, or was she amused? Was she laughing at him?

Fully clothed, Paul walked into the next room. It was roughly whitewashed and littered with junk—crates and plaster and broken furniture and cans of paint and heaps of newspapers. And a lot of drawings and canvases: crated, stacked against the walls, even piled on the floor. There was no easel, but propped up on an old trunk was a work in progress, a large painting in which black shapes of flames and rocks and tangled string were starting to rush across an empty white canvas. He stood and looked at this for some time. A lot of time and expensive oil paint had been used here. Ceci was an artist; that was what she really was. Not for the first time, he wished he knew more about contemporary art.