Alison Lurie - The Nowhere City

“You saw him this Sunday?”

Ceci stopped laughing, and stared at him coolly. “Yeah,” she said. “He was here to supper.” With difficulty, Paul made no comment. “He makes it over here for supper every week, mostly, if you want to know.”

“I guess I want to know,” Paul said. He controlled his voice. “I don’t mean to get all excited about it,” he said. “I know you’re not involved with him any more or anything.” Did he really know this? “Hell, I mean I have supper with my wife all the time. We don’t communicate; we don’t even talk much, but anyway, we sit at the same table and eat.” Now he was beginning to lie; he did talk to Katherine at supper. He grew ashamed. Ceci continued to look at him, waiting. “Oh, hell!” he said, flinging out his arms in desperation. “What’s the matter with me? I don’t want to act like this all the time.”

Ceci smiled; her eyes grew warm. “You don’t act like that all the time,” she said, moving over and rubbing against him a little, like a cat. “Just sometimes.” She laughed; he turned and kissed her closely, wrapping his arms so far round that each hand held the curve of a breast. He still felt a little ashamed, so he kissed her harder, biting the inner curve of her lip. God, how warm she was, how great it was here; he would be crazy to ruin it.

“Y’ know what I want?” Ceci whispered.

“No. What?”

“Breakfast.”

It was cool but bright outside. A white sun glared down out of a white sky on the slums of Venice. All the scars and stains of the one- and two-story frame buildings were exposed in miserable detail: the broken steps, the split shingles, the scabs of rust and paint on the bent iron railings. The narrow, deserted streets were pockmarked with holes and congealed lumps of tar and asphalt.

Paul and Ceci walked along cracked sidewalks with rough pebbly bites taken out of the curbs; they passed abandoned storefronts, with windows painted over black, or soaped white. Some of these stores were deserted, but in others people seemed to be living. It was garbage collection day, and trash cans loaded with empty bottles, sticky smudged papers, rags, and half-eaten hot dog rolls stood at intervals along the sidewalk, lit as if on a great stage.

In this decay, only one thing was whole: the automobiles. Not all of them—there were many rusted old machines. But among them, and even more gorgeous by contrast, were cars of equal or greater age that gleamed with polished chrome and glass and chalk-white tires—hot rods. Most were models of the early 1930s that had been more or less radically altered: their running-boards cut down, their metalwork rolled under at the bottom; one or two sported superchargers. They were freshly painted in all the colors of the TV screen: red, electric blue, neon green. Many were decorated with symbolic designs—lightning or red flames spurted out of the radiator and across the hood, or the whole front end of the car became a grinning monster with headlamps for eyes. They were impressive even asleep in the full light of day; roaring down the thruways at night they must be magnificent. Paul was glad he had left his car parked over by Ceci’s place. It was no fun driving around in that old heap, but if he had one of those hot rods—

Well, and why shouldn’t he have one? They couldn’t cost too much. He wouldn’t want to drive around in a car like that back in Cambridge, but nobody would care out here. He turned to Ceci and asked her.

“You want to buy one of these crazy shorts?” She began to laugh, pleased. Sure, she said, he could probably pick one up. There was always somebody around trying to unload a car. Steve Tyler might know of something.

They had come out of the maze of back streets now, into the main square of Venice. The ruins of its earlier glory—for at the turn of the century it had been a fashionable seaside resort—still stood: the long arcades, the graceful balconies, arches, and pilasters of colored stucco. But it was all in the last stages of desecration. The cobbled streets were crusted with dried mud and trash, and dirty paper blinds sagged in the dirty windows. The open shops under the arcades sold gimcrack souvenirs, overripe fruit, and girlie magazines.

There were more people about here, but all of them, like the buildings, seemed damaged and soiled. Bums leaned and spat in the arcade in front of a dark, smelly bar; shapeless women in shabby clothes were out marketing, every wrinkle and scar on their faces revealed by the glaring sun. A beggar with no legs sat on the sidewalk; the newsdealer had dark glasses and only one arm. Bums and cripples and criminals, the dregs of the city (even of the continent) washed up on Venice Beach as if by a landlocked tide. This was a dangerous place, too; Ceci ought not to be living here in these back streets, alone at night in that rickety old building. Why, anything could happen to her. As they crossed the square, Paul tightened his arm round Ceci; she looked at him, and smiled.

“Like it? Crazy, huh?”

Paul was not sure what she meant; he compromised. “I like you. Where’s this place we’re going?”

“Right over there.” She pointed up an alley to a one-story building of dirty cream-colored brick. It must once have been a grocery store: faded red letters across the top spelled out GOODMAN’S PRODUCE MARKET. The shop windows had been painted over in irregular rectangles of red, blue, green, and white up to about a foot from the top. Ceci knocked at the door, which had a hole in it where the handle should have been, and called, “Josie?”

There was no answer. Instead of knocking again, she went over to a garbage can that stood against the building, lifted the lid, rummaged about inside, and took out an old doorknob. She fitted it into the hole in the door, and turned it.

They went up two steps into a long, dim cave of a room. Here, as at Ceci’s, practically everything was on the floor: plants, shelves of books, lamps, dusty pillows, and several mattresses with faded spreads. No wonder they called these places “pads.” The only chairs were a couple of wicker and iron contraptions like the ones Katherine had bought to replace her own furniture, which she was gradually moving into the garage.

The upper three-quarters of the room were completely empty, with bare whitewashed walls against which drawings, newspaper clippings, poems, and photographs had been nailed or pasted. Painted directly on the wall, right up by the ceiling, surrounded by strange leaves and flowers like those in Ceci’s bedroom, was the slogan DONALD DUCK IS A COMMUNIST.

In the center of the room was a playpen, mostly occupied by a large inflated rubber beach toy in the shape of a green sea monster with red spots. It also contained a plump blonde baby about a year and a half old.

“Hello, Psyche,” Ceci said. “Where’d you get your friend?” Psyche did not reply. “Josie? Steve?” She pulled aside a curtain. “Hi!”

“Hi,” replied a man’s voice from beyond the curtain. “Come on in.”

Paul approached and looked over Ceci’s shoulder into a bedroom. Clothes hung from pegs on the walls, and there was a mattress raised about a foot off the floor on blocks. The blankets had been pushed into a heap on one side, and a man about Paul’s age was lying under the sheet, with his head propped on one hand. He had a round, pleasantly ordinary face, and long, thinning fair hair.

“Hey, this is Paul. Steve. I mean, like, Paul Cattleman, meet Steve Tyler.”

“How do you do,” Paul said, helping to continue the joke, if it was a joke.

“Hi,” Steve said lazily. He looked Paul over, lowering his eyelids and smiling just slightly. His blunt features took on a look of peasant irony and cunning, like Clever Hans in the folk tales. Paul felt that Ceci’s friend might be waiting for him to do something which he could later ridicule or disparage.