Alison Lurie - The Nowhere City

“I thought you were going to take over Kelly’s dragster from Walter,” Ceci remarked.

With difficulty, Paul came back to the conversation. “Oh,” he replied. “Oh, that. I guess not.” He wondered again whether he should tell Ceci what Steve Tyler had said to him—with reluctance, for after all Wong was his friend—“Hey, better stay away from Kelly’s car. Walter’s been cannibalizing it.” The term was unfamiliar; in the moment before he understood it, Paul saw Walter Wong sitting on the front fender of Kelly’s dragster, eating pieces of the engine.

Why shouldn’t he let Ceci know that her husband was trying to cheat him, taking out the vital parts of the Ford and, he supposed, exchanging them for broken-down parts of other automobiles? But he decided to let it pass. It might make her mood worse. Besides, now that he had given up the fantasy of living in Venice, all those dragsters looked like teen-age jokes. He was too old for such a car; he didn’t want Ceci to try to find him another one.

Around the next curve the houses stopped. The bare, steep banks of the road, unwatered, were suddenly dry instead of green. The waste ground was bright with real estate signs: Glen-View Estates to be Erected Here. Level Exclusive Homesites! For Information Regarding This Desirable Property Call ...

Now they were at the top of the range of hills. Ahead of them, blurred by smog, was the San Fernando Valley. Paul turned off onto Mulholland Drive; this was a narrow road along the crest of the mountains, badly paved, twisting and turning around heaps of earth and rock, skirting sheer cliffs of mud. The long dry grass and sparse grayish weeds which grew beside the road erupted at intervals into tufts of wild flowers: yellow, white, even brilliant red.

Paul’s spirits rose. “Well, how d’you like this?” he asked.

“Yeah, it’s nice.”

“Look at those flowers! We’re really getting into the country now.”

He began to drive more slowly, searching for an uninhabited side road. They passed houses that had been recently completed, houses under construction, and more real estate signs. Paul began to be aware that they were losing a lot of time.

Well, here; maybe this would do. He turned uphill to the right. The springs of the Ford squeaked angrily as it jolted over the dust and stones, around a sharp corner. Now there was a view: below, to their left, the mountain was being sliced into like a loaf cake, for “development.” The flowers and brush on the slopes had been bulldozed away, and flat rectangular lots, dirty brown, were aligned one above another along a curve of roadbed, marked out with sticks and string and red rags.

His first thought was that they should turn back and look for another place. But it was getting late. The construction site was empty, anyhow: the tractors and graders and dump trucks stood motionless down the hill; the workmen had gone home. And the other side of their road was undisturbed. The chaparral grew high there, and in the ditch by the car were star-shaped white flowers. He turned off the engine.

“Hey! Let’s get out and walk.”

“Okay.” Ceci’s reply, though not as enthusiastic as his suggestion, was fairly agreeable.

Together, they started uphill along the dirt road, now only a track. After all, this landscape had its own kind of beauty, Paul thought. The smoky green and indigo of the hill behind the construction site, the intense blue sky, were exotic and interesting. The barren ground and the grayed foliage made the flowers seem much more miraculous than those back East—it was as if a swarm of fragile, bright butterflies had suddenly settled on a dead bush.

But round the next bend, with the trucks and bulldozers still in sight, the road ended in a trash pile: a heap of smashed bottles, cans, and dead sticks and leaves.

“Goddamn it,” Paul said. “Well, I guess we’ll just have to strike out across county.” Digging his feet into the sides of the bank, he climbed up it, releasing a small landslide of dirt and stones.

“You’re crazy,” Ceci said. But rather fondly.

“Yep. Come on.” He held out his hand; she took it, and he pulled her up the bank and into his arms. For the first time that day they really kissed. Her lips and tongue fluttered against his face. He would have liked to lay her down right here, but it was too close to the road.

“Hey.”

“What?” Ceci mumbled, kissing him under the chin.

“Come on.”

Crossing the waste ground was not easy. The sage put out stalks of brittle, whitish leaves to scratch them; and the sumac held them back with its woolly, awkward stems, and slapped their faces with clusters of faded red leaves. The larger scrub trees had thorns. The ground was dry, uneven, and stony; and each plant, bush, or tree was surrounded by an area of barren earth.

“Hey,” Ceci said. “Where’re we going to?”

Paul stopped. “Nowhere.” He turned and caught hold of her by her brown, bare arms, now marked with white scratches.

They kissed. “Oh hell,” Ceci whispered, rubbing herself against him. “I’m still so hot for you. Ah, goddamn it.”

“Let’s sit down,” Paul gasped. Crouching, he tried to clear a patch of ground; he broke off twigs and threw stones to one side. “Ceci. Come on.” He ran his hand up her warm, scratched brown leg.

“You want to do it here?”

“Yes.”

Ceci was bending down towards him; her breasts were heavy under the tight cotton jersey. Paul took hold and pulled her over, onto him.

“Ow! Paul, you’re flippy. We can’t make it here, right out in the open. I mean, anybody came along, they could see us.” She giggled.

It was true that though the field seemed to be grown over with an almost impassable network of coarse bushes, the foliage was so sparse that there was hardly cover enough for a dog. But Paul’s body was quivering with excitement; even the prospect of having to overcome Ceci’s reluctance, so rare for her, excited him. And if not here out in the country, where?

“Who cares?” Holding Ceci down, Paul began deliberately to do all the things that he knew aroused her most: he bit her neck, and forced his leg between her legs, dragging up her skirt, and rubbing against her curly mound of hair with his knee, so that she began to pant and cry out.

“Ah. Oh! ... Ah! All right; all right.”

He lifted her aside and as rapidly as he could began to pull off most of his clothes, kneeling in the dust. Ceci did the same. Paul spread their things hurriedly over the dirt and stones to make a kind of patchwork bed. He could not help, meanwhile, glancing over his shoulder to see if anyone were coming up the road. Cars going to the dump, construction workers, hikers, or whoever owned this property. Because at the very least they were trespassing; there was probably a city ordinance against what they were about to do. Somehow they had got out of Walden into “The Waste Land,” from private pastoral to public lust.

“Come on, huh?” As usual, Ceci, who wore many fewer clothes, was ready first.

“Just a moment.” Paul took off his shorts, and then, rather self-consciously, pulled a piece of gold wire off one finger. It was his wedding ring, the result of an elaborate ceremony nearly four years ago. Sentimentally, or superstitiously, he always took it off before he did anything he had promised then not to do. He put the ring into a pocket of his jacket. Then, shutting his eyes, he fell upon Ceci.

“This bed’s pretty hard,” Ceci said presently, breaking the silence that follows climax. “Wow, my back.”

“My knees,” Paul replied, echoing her joking tone, and thus tacitly accepting this excuse for what had been as intense, but not exactly as protracted as it might have been. It was true that his knees were sore; one of them, he noticed, was even bleeding a little. This made him feel better, because it proved how much he had been able to forget himself in nature; but worse in that it proved how hostile this particular nature was.