Alison Lurie - The Nowhere City

Paul made an indistinct noise in reply. He felt uneasy here, though he was almost certain that Katherine would not come home. (But suppose she suddenly got sick at work?) Maybe they should have gone to a motel and asked for a room (at nine A.M.?). But he didn’t like the idea of love in a motel; and here was a whole house standing empty, after all.

Things had been in this state for a week, ever since Ceci’s friend Tomaso and Tomaso’s girlfriend Carmen had arrived. Under other circumstances Paul might have liked Tomaso, a short, powerfully built young man with black hair and an intelligent, good-natured manner. He would have had nothing against Carmen, a plump, pretty Mexican girl who spoke hardly any English. But what the hell were they doing in Ceci’s apartment? Tomaso was supposed to be looking for a place to live and a job teaching Spanish, but he wasn’t looking very hard. He lay around on the floor reading Spanish and French poetry and playing Mariachi records at top volume. The bathroom was full of Carmen’s intimate black lace laundry and the kitchen of stacks of tortillas and strings of hot sausage. How long were they going to stay, for Christ’s sake?

As far as Ceci was concerned, there was no reason for Paul to stop coming over and climbing into her bed just because Tomaso and Carmen were there. After all, she argued, Tomaso knew that they were making out; he didn’t mind. Which implied that Tomaso had a prior claim—that was what Walter Wong had implied, wasn’t it? Tomaso had lived there before; his name was painted on the door. But maybe Wong had still been there then.

Paul moved his hand down a few inches on to Ceci’s softly rounded belly, shield-shaped within the pelvic hills, and divided heraldically into brown above and pink below by the sun. He wanted to settle, once and for all, whether it had ever belonged to Tomaso, and now, while she lay yawning with gentle pleasure under his hand, would be a good time to ask. How should he put it? He thought back to her last remark, and said:

“Have you known many men like that?”

“Like what?” Ceci asked drowsily. “Oh. No. One or two, maybe.”

“How many men have you been with?” he asked in an assumed sleepy tone, lying back.

“Gee. I d’know.”

“You mean you don’t want to tell me.” Paul imitated playfulness.

“No; I don’t know. I never counted them.” Paul heaved himself up on his elbow again and looked into Ceci’s face to see if she were lying; she returned his gaze directly. “Why should I?”

“I should think you’d want to know.”

“What for?” Now Ceci was quite awake; she opened her eyes fully and put her hand on Paul’s to stop a caress that had become somewhat automatic. “Do you keep score? Do you add them up, so you can go around counting to yourself, like ‘twelve, thirteen, fourteen, and little Ceci in Venice makes fifteen’?”

“Hell, no,” Paul said. But he could not help thinking, first that Ceci had over-estimated his score, and second that her own total must be among the figures she had just named.

“This place makes me uncomfortable,” he said. “I keep thinking somebody’ll walk in. Let’s get up, huh?”

“Okay.” Ceci stretched and sat. “Hey, we can have a shower! Let’s have a shower.”

“You take one.” Paul smiled. “It’s not such a big treat for me.”

While Ceci splashed and sang in the bathroom, Paul pulled on his clothes and hurriedly made up the bed again. Katherine’s bed—Katherine’s parents’ bed, really, with its tall headboard and suspended wooden garlands—no wonder he felt constraint here, he thought, even with Ceci. And no wonder Katherine lay so still, or moved so mechanically, under that frieze of dark, petrified fruit.

His wife had been in Los Angeles six months now, Paul thought, and she still existed here as a sad, angry exile, whining for the past. The variety and excitement of the city, the warm, easy climate, hadn’t had the good effects he had once hoped for. Of course Katherine had never been a very happy or lively person. But now it was as if southern California, where poinsettias were six feet tall and roses grew to the size of cabbages, had increased both his elation and her depression. She seemed to bear a perpetual grudge. It discouraged him to think about it, so he did not think about it often.

He pulled the cord of the blind, and light poured in through a lattice of red and green leaves. Maybe he shouldn’t have brought Ceci here, but there was a lot to be said for getting her out of Venice. After all, there was a whole great city here—why should they limit their lives to a few run-down shacks and a strip of dirty sand?

The shabby decay and disorder of Venice no longer seemed attractive to Paul; he was surprised that he had ever found it so. There was nothing intrinsically great about taking your bath in a cracked laundry tub (listen to Ceci now). Or those rusty black secondhand clothes she always wore—what was the point of them? Los Angeles was an economy of abundance, for Christ’s sake.

And Ceci’s friends’ sloppy, pointless defiance of authority was beginning to get on his nerves. It wasn’t that they didn’t like him, now. For a while after the night of the police raid he had been a kind of culture hero in Venice; he was still included in the crazy schemes they talked of for getting back at the cops. Childish—but what were they all anyhow but a bunch of disobedient children: abusing the grown-ups, shouting “I won’t!” behind their backs, refusing to wash their faces or comb their hair or tidy their rooms, and smoking illegal cigarettes down in their club-house.

Take Ceci’s painting. She had some new canvases that were first-rate, really beautiful and original. She ought to have a show, and get some recognition, so she wouldn’t always have to work as a waitress. But according to her and her pals, that would be selling out. Maybe, but look at it from the other side: you could almost call it selfishness to hide these pictures away from the world in a shack in Venice. Of course, he would have been thought incredibly square if he were to say anything to Ceci and her friends about the artist’s responsibility to society. Right away they would start sounding off, with examples, on the shitty way society treats artists. It was one of their favorite subjects; part of their creed.

Everything was a war between Us and Them, who were imagined as all narrow, hostile Philistines. Which was another reason for Ceci to leave Venice, and meet some of the other intelligent people in the world.

Holding a towel around her, Ceci came out of the bathroom. “Hey,” she said, grinning. “That was big.” She walked past Paul into the center of the darkened living-room and turned slowly round, looking at everything. “Pretty nice place.”

“It’s too small.”

“Well, yeah, maybe. You couldn’t have much of a blow-out here. But it sure is neat. Everything’s so new and spiffy and clean. I bet you don’t even have bugs. It looks like nobody moved in yet; like one of those store window displays. ... Cool chair.” She sat down in a dish-shaped wicker chair, clasping her arms round her bare legs like a child. “Yeah, I really dig this chair.”

“You want one? I’ll buy you one like it,” Paul offered.

“Aw, no, don’t do that. I don’t need it. Hey, lookit, my hair got all wet.” Ceci began to take down her hair, which she had pinned up roughly for the shower.

“I’d like to buy you something.”

“Uh-uh. I don’t want it. I don’t like to have stuff around I don’t use. It bugs me. I guess I’m afraid my pad’ll get to look like my mother’s place.”

“Oh? What’s that like?” He knew of Ceci’s background only that her father, a pretty square advertising salesman, had deserted her mother, a completely square bookkeeper, when Ceci was in kindergarten in Long Beach.