Alison Lurie - The Nowhere City

Besides, he dictated too fast.

Oh well, it was only for six more months. Katherine put on her bathing suit, and packed a canvas bag with towels, sunglasses, suntan lotion, a white rubber bathing cap, and a white sweater. Over her bathing suit she put on a pair of brown slacks and a brown and white flowered shirt which Susy Skinner had persuaded her to buy last week at the More Store. Then she tucked under her arm those parts of the Sunday edition of the New York Times which she had not yet read. (It takes four days for the Times to reach Los Angeles, so this was last Sunday’s Times. Paul and Katherine bought it when it arrived on Thursday and saved it to read on Sunday morning.) She went outdoors into the glaring sunlight, and got into the car, where Paul was already waiting.

Paul was careful to take the most scenic route to Venice Beach, along Centinela Boulevard and then up and down over the hills of Ocean Park. But Katherine watched the streets wheel by without interest. Los Angeles all looked the same to her—flat, crowded, vulgar. When she rode up to U.C.L.A. on the bus the houses grew a little larger and cleaner, and the grass greener. Now they became smaller and dirtier, and the yards grew brown. That was all.

“Look!” Paul said, as they came to the top of the last hill. Ahead, at the bottom of the sky and extending as far as she could see in either direction, was a band of bright gray material, glittering so that it hurt her eyes. “There’s the ocean!” Paul cried. Katherine said nothing; they plunged downhill again among the dirty houses.

Deliberately (he had scouted the area beforehand) Paul stopped the car on one of the better streets in Venice. His effort was futile. Standing on the sidewalk, Katherine glanced round with distaste at the unpainted houses, the dusty gardens planted with pots of cactus and bird-of-paradise (the coarse blue and orange plastic-looking exotic flower that is Los Angeles’ official emblem), and the designs in shells and colored gravel. Nothing else was in bloom here now: the rose bushes that Paul had seen a week ago had been pruned back almost to the ground and now looked like large insects half-buried in the sandy soil.

At the end of the street, nearer now, was a glittering gray rectangle, which grew longer and brighter as they approached and finally opened out into a great blank panorama of air and water. Now they were on the Promenade, a long, paved walk open to the beach on one side, on the other lined with tawdry shops and houses, many boarded up for the winter season. Wood and concrete benches had been placed along the edge of the sand at regular intervals, facing the ocean. On these benches, which stretched as far as Katherine could see, old people were sitting, waiting to die. They were dressed in their good clothes: the men in worn, shiny suits, the women in print dresses and coats and stockings and dark shoes. Almost all of them wore hats. A few were reading newspapers, or talking to themselves or a neighbor; but most simply sat, staring ahead, the hot noon sun shining down upon their clothes and their shoes and their dry, knobby hands. The wind blew into their faces across four thousand miles of empty ocean.

Katherine turned her head away, feeling self-conscious, as she and Paul walked along the beach past bench after bench. Paul apparently had some particular spot in mind, lord knows why—as far as she could see it was all the same. For miles in each direction the thick, bright gray sea sloshed against the pale brown sand. The beach was relatively empty—a few swimmers sat on mats; here and there drunks lay against the low wall by the walk, sleeping off last night’s debauch in the sun. Farther down towards the water, where the slope of the beach changed, seaweed was drying in disordered heaps, investigated by gulls and sand-flies.

Now Paul stopped, in the middle of nowhere near a trash can, and dropped his towel on to the sand. “I’m going in,” he announced. “Coming?”

“Maybe later,” Katherine temporized. “I want to sit down first.” She knelt, and began unpacking the beach bag.

“Okay.” Paul started across the beach towards the Pacific Ocean, first walking and then breaking into a half-run. He looked silly, Katherine thought, bouncing over the sand that way and waving his arms around. She watched as he jogged across the wet shingle and into the water, which sent up a heavy gray-green wave, edged with suds, to stop him; then she turned away. She spread the towels out side by side, weighing down the corners with shoes. Then she took off her new slacks and shirt. “Those’ll make your husband sit up and take notice!” Susy had predicted; but they hadn’t. Paul noticed nothing about her any more. They hardly had any real talks lately at all, except a few times about history or sociology. He was always busy. It was probably all the fault of this horrible place and the horrible job he had.

Opening the bottle of suntan lotion, she greased her white arms, legs, shoulders, and back; she put on her sunglasses; then she lay down on her stomach, facing away from the water, and began the New York Times Magazine Section.

It wasn’t unpleasant here, she thought, as she turned the pages. And her sinuses hardly hurt at all today. But it was scarcely worth going to all this trouble just to lie in the sun and read the paper. To do that, she need only go out into their own back yard, where there was no sand to get into her clothes or wind to blow the pages around. Of course she never did go out into the back yard; it was simpler to look at the paper indoors, sitting up. Lying down to read, like this, always made her feel sleepy. Katherine yawned, and slowly lowered her forehead onto the first page of an article titled “Education in a Changing World.” In the intense sunlight the type shimmered, blurred into illegibility. She shut her eyes.

She was aroused by the sounds of voices and a portable radio playing jazz. Squinting out from under her arm, she observed the approach of a group of young natives, all extremely tanned and freakishly dressed. She assumed and hoped that they would pass on. But they did not. Although there was plenty of room on the beach, they spread out a straw mat and sat down not fifteen feet from Katherine.

Katherine turned her head, and observed the natives with displeasure over her shoulder. There were three of them. They must be some sort of actors or beatniks, because both the men had beards. One, who was large and blond, had a blond beard, tightly curled; the other, who was small and wiry, had a straggly brown one. They wore the barest pretense at bathing suits, brightly colored briefs that clung indecently tight, while the girl was spilling out of her bikini in every direction. Really it was pretty disgusting, on a public beach.

Katherine started again on the Times. But the wind, blowing off the ocean, blew the music towards her, a frantic, insistent hum. She sat up and looked round again, crossly. And now she became aware that the natives were staring at her, all three of them quite shamelessly, out of their dark glasses. Since they were lying farther down the beach towards the water, they could look without turning their heads.

Katherine’s bathing suit, which covered her more than adequately, began to feel too small, especially in back. She recalled that she had not shaved her legs for several days. But she certainly wasn’t going to be forced to move. After all, she was here first. She lay down again, on her back, and put her white sweater over her face, completely covering it. For some reason this reminded her of the classic college anecdote, about the girl who was on her way to her room from the showers, with nothing on but a small towel, when suddenly she saw the janitor coming down the hall. Quick as a flash, she whipped the towel off her body and wrapped it round her head, preserving her anonymity forever.