Alison Lurie - The Nowhere City

“Awful. It’s just full of crap. Like, you know. Painted wall plaques and plastic flower arrangements and magazine racks and smocked satin pillows. There’s all these things that you’re supposed to do something with them, open coke bottles or light cigarettes or hang up your coat, only they’re made to look like something else; puppy dogs maybe, or babies or funny Indians. For instance, on top of the TV she’s got this cute ceramic rabbit about three feet high with an aerial growing out of his ears. After you’ve been there ten, fifteen minutes, you feel like you’re being smothered.” Ceci unwound the towel from herself and began to rub her hair dry. Though the blinds were closed, it made Paul uneasy to see her sitting completely naked in Katherine’s chair. It was something Katherine had never done and would never do: she didn’t like to go around without clothes on.

He shouldn’t have brought Ceci here; it was a messy thing, mixing up one part of his life with another. He had never made that mistake before; he had always been careful to keep his affairs separate from the very different kind of relationship that he had with Katherine.

“And it’s the same outside,” Ceci went on. “All those houses down there are the same. Their yards are all crapped up with stuff, rock gardens and birdbaths and iron flamingoes plugged into the grass. Uh-uh. I can’t take it more than once or twice a year.”

“Is that all you see your mother, a couple of times a year?” Ceci nodded. “Doesn’t she mind?”

“Nah. She never dug me much, anyhow. I moved out of the house when I was fourteen; I didn’t like the man she was married to then and he didn’t like me, so I went to live with a girlfriend, and I just never went back. And of course now she thinks I’m completely flippy. I only go down there when it gets to be Christmas or something and she wants to put on an act like she’s got a family.”

Paul looked at Ceci, naked and vulnerable under her long damp parti-colored hair, and felt a surge of pity. He would have liked to make it all up to her: to give her, say, a house in Pacific Palisades with a view of the ocean, all the showers she wanted, clothes, furniture, a studio. And perhaps he would, one day.

“Well, maybe you’re lucky,” he said meanwhile. “If my parents lived in Long Beach I’d have to go there for dinner every week.”

“Oh yeah?” Ceci said, rubbing her hair. “Why?”

“Well, because they’d expect it. I mean, they’d want to see me, and I’d really want to see them, sort of. You know how it is.” But of course she didn’t.

Making the towel into a white turban, Ceci got up and began to survey the room again. She flipped through the magazines so neatly laid out on the polished coffee table, and leaned across the sofa to look at the facsimile of a page from a medieval manuscript which hung above it. Paul could see the wicker pattern of the chair imprinted in red and white on her behind.

“All boxed in,” she remarked, not turning her head. “There’s a wall around the garden, and a wall around the castle, and a border of thorns around the whole picture, and another border outside of that; and then the frame. Say, that girl is really in a bad way.”

Paul frowned, but said nothing. As far as possible, he had always avoided discussing Katherine with anyone he got involved with, or with anyone at all. Such matters were private; he despised the kind of man who explains to girls exactly how his wife does not understand him.

“The Dream of Success; The Maturity of Dickens —” Now Ceci was reading the backs of the books aloud. Paul refused to react; he stared at the carpeting, which was pinkish gray, with a thick nap. They should never have come here today; it was as if Katherine, and not Ceci, stood exposed in the center of the house.

They ought to leave. He looked up; where was Ceci, anyhow? He turned round, and saw her in the kitchen, standing full in the sunlight by the sink reading Katherine’s Phillips Brooks engagement calendar.

“Hey,” he exclaimed. “Come out of there! Somebody’ll see you.”

“In a sec. Listen, it’s so sad. Nothing ever happens to her. ‘Tuesday, 10 A.M., Dr. Dituri, get prescription. Wednesday—’”

“Come on out of there.” Paul gesticulated from the shadow of the doorway; he was unwilling to join Ceci in the natural picture frame provided by the uncurtained kitchen window.

“What for? ‘Wednesday, 5:15, haircut and set, Lotta. Thursday P.M., change shoes, Bullocks.’ Only on Friday and Saturday, there’s nothing to do. See, she never goes anywhere. She gets her hair done and buys new shoes and then she never goes out. It’s just so bad. Don’t you ever take her any place?”

“You stand there, somebody’ll see you.”

“Aw, nobody’s looking.” She turned the page. “Next week—”

Paul glanced past her through the kitchen window. Across the street all the houses were empty, and looked it now: dust and trash had blown on to the porches, soot streaked the windows, flowering plants hung withered on their stalks. The long grass, unwatered, had mostly turned a pale dirty brown. But on this side of the street he could see two children riding tricycles next door and a woman clipping green grass further down the block. “Ceci! Will you please come out of there?”

Ceci looked over her naked shoulder, grinned provokingly, and shook her head. “Uh-uh.”

Paul set his jaw, took two steps into the kitchen, seized her by both arms, and pulled. She resisted strongly at first. Then suddenly she relaxed, so that he stumbled backwards. They both fell on to the living-room rug, Ceci roaring with laughter.

“You idiot!” he exclaimed. Ceci lay beside him and laughed; he could feel her bare flesh shake. In a flood of exasperation and desire he put one hand over her mouth, the other arm across the warm landscape of her breasts.

“Mmm,” she murmured, and bit the side of his hand. In a moment they were thrashing about on the carpet in a forest of chair and table legs.

“Ceci, Ceci, you crazy fool,” Paul whispered.

“Let’s, let’s,” she replied. “Let’s do it again”; and she wrapped her arms, legs, and long hair round him; and this time he managed to forget almost everything.

14

“WHY IS DR. EINSAM ALWAYS LATE TO OUR MEETINGS?” said Bert Smith to Charlie Haraki, leaning back in the chair and setting his feet upon the edge of Katherine’s desk. “What’s your interpretation of this?” Dr. Haraki held out his hands, palms up, and shook his round head with comic rapidity, meaning: I don’t know. “Does it express a rejection of us as individuals, perhaps?”

Dr. Einsam, who had just come in forty-five minutes late, went on hanging up his coat in the corner and affected not to hear.

“But he’s also late to departmental meetings, we’ve got to remember,” Dr. Haraki remarked. “And often to dinner parties.” He played with his pencil, drawing small circles on the pad.

“Maybe we have to deal here with a more global pattern,” Dr. Smith suggested. “A diffuse unwillingness to meet all his responsibilities. For instance.”

Iz took off his glasses and polished them.

“Still, I happen to know he’s always on time for his patients,” Dr. Haraki said.

“That’s true. He is always on time for his patients. What do we make of that?”

Iz took a group of papers out of his briefcase. He pulled up a chair and sat down to read them, still paying absolutely no attention to his colleagues’ baiting. He looked tense, though, Katherine thought, and nervous. Or perhaps she only thought so, because she was tense and nervous herself, and sick: in the grip of the worst sinus attack she had had since the day she arrived in Los Angeles. Her nasal passages were completely stopped up, her head ached fearfully, her throat was sore, and her left ear reverberated with a whuffling, buzzing noise as if an insect had flown into it and got stuck there. She should have stayed home today, really. But the truth was that since last night she couldn’t abide her own house, after what she had discovered there, or thought she had discovered there.