Alison Lurie - The Nowhere City

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She was copying a set of 1,800 flash cards of an experiment on the psychology of learning. Each card consisted of six out of a possible ten nonsense syllables selected and arranged at random.

It was now ten-thirty; Katherine had been working on this project for an hour and a half, and had completed 185 cards. And it wasn’t even her job. She was supposed to be working for Iz that day, but he had lent her to Professor Jekyll. So she was sitting in Dr. Jekyll’s office, and Iz was probably still asleep in bed, unless he was lying on the beach somewhere. It was a pleasant warm day, outside.

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This job was not only an insult to Katherine’s intelligence and education, but a waste of university funds, because she earned $2.71 an hour, much more than an ordinary typist. Since there was no meeting, and Iz was not coming in, she would be doing it from now until five o’clock.

Usually, the days that she worked for Iz were the best ones: partly because his projects were apt to be more interesting, but mostly because of the conversations that went with them.

Now that they were friends, when Iz came in he would sit down on the edge of Katherine’s desk and say, “Well, Katherine. What’s new?” And she would tell him, or he would tell her, before they started work. Later, in the middle of dictating a report or a case history, he would exclaim, “Hey. I haven’t eaten anything since last night. I’m starving. Come on.” And they would climb into Iz’s car and skid downhill to the Village Delicatessen for thick pastrami sandwiches, or to the English teashop on Westwood Boulevard which had scones with eight kinds of marmalade and jam. Once they went all the way out to Santa Monica because it was the only place for real strawberry cheesecake outside of Hollywood. At first Katherine wouldn’t order anything, but her refusals made so much trouble (“You have some problem about accepting food, don’t you? What is it?”) that presently she gave in. She had to resign herself to letting him pay, too. (“I’m rich, comparatively; you’re poor. When you make twenty dollars an hour, I’ll let you take me; okay?”)

Katherine had learned, in these last two weeks, a good deal about Iz. She knew something about his childhood, which had been spent in ten different cities in six different countries; she knew something about his marriage, and something about his politics. “Do you know what Jackie in the office told me the other day?” she had asked him. “She told me to watch out for you, you were a Communist.” Iz groaned. “Oh no, no,” he said. “Here we go again. Listen, I’m less of a Communist than you are. Or Jackie is. I’m an anarchist. An anarchist is the opposite of a Communist.” Katherine’s face did not show immediate comprehension. “Of course some of the early anarchists were also Communists, they thought, but that was their mistake. See, a Communist believes always in more order. An anarchist believes in less order: less government, less rules, less system.”

“But—” Katherine began; he continued. “Now you admit all organizations are terrible, inhuman; the larger they are the more they are terrible, okay?”

Did she admit this? Katherine was not sure; she had never thought about it. She smiled uncertainly. Iz took this for agreement, and went on to talk about placing random messages on the telegraph wires, confusing policemen by disobedience of unwritten laws, and giving deliberately absurd answers to questionnaires. “Every day you should create a little disorganization somewhere, that’s the idea.”

“Like Boy Scouts,” Katherine could not help saying; but Iz did not get irritated. “That’s right,” he said, smiling. “A good deed every day. You’re starting to understand. Only the anarchist is unkind, unthrifty, irreverent, disloyal, etcetera.”

“All I ever heard about anarchists was that they threw bombs at things,” Katherine remarked, half giggling. “What’s that song? ‘In an anarchistic garret so meager and so mean, You can smell the pungent odor of nitroglycerine. They’re busy making fuses and filling cans with nails—’”

“Ah, not any more,” Iz had said, laughing so that it was impossible to know whether he were serious. “That was in the early days, when our methods were more crude.”

And as she found out about Iz, she told him about herself. It was true, for instance, that she really thought makeup was vulgar and nasty—she daubed on lipstick and powder every morning simply because, after all, it was the rule. “Whose rule?” Iz had inquired. “If you don’t like grease on your face, so leave it off. Who cares?” And after all nobody seemed to; at least they didn’t say anything about it. Of course out here everyone was so weird, it didn’t matter what you did. It would have been different back East.

They had a joke between them about Katherine’s being one of Dr. Einsam’s patients. If I were your patient, she would ask sometimes, what would you advise me about this? And he would give sometimes an outlandish, sometimes a reasonable answer. “Basically,” he had said last time, seriously, “you can’t do anything until you decide what you actually want from your husband. Why don’t you think about that?”

So Katherine was thinking about it. Meanwhile, following the advice Iz had given her that first day in the ice-cream shop, she had begun what he called “Paul-watching.” It was amazing how, with Iz’s assistance and interest, what in the past had hurt so much had become almost a game. As he had predicted, signs of Paul’s infidelity continued to appear, increasing in obviousness. Finally last week he had come home to supper looking as if he’d been in a fight, all bruised and scratched and covered with dust. How puzzled he had seemed when she didn’t ask any questions! Katherine had to smile when she recalled it—and the way he had taken off his filthy suit and laid it out on a chair for her to see, instead of putting it into the laundry hamper as usual. “He’s trying to tell you something,” Iz had said. “I had a German Shepherd like that once.”

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Dr. Jekyll’s office, like most in the Department of Social Sciences, was dark, airless, and hot; it looked upon a yellow brick wall, with three aluminum ventilator hoods approaching along the top. No wonder everyone wanted to move. Katherine had come to the end of the pack of index cards; she swiveled her chair round and reached for more in the bottom drawer. As she did so, she noticed part of a floor plan sticking out from some papers on Dr. Jekyll’s desk. Taking care not to displace anything else, she eased it out.

Almost at once she realized that this must be the final plan for the allocation of space in the new Social Sciences building; and that the Project on Perception and Delinquency was allotted nothing. From the attached memorandum she learned that this plan was being sent to all the full professors as a last step before it was put into effect. “Any objections or proposed changes must be sent to the Chairman of the Space Committee on or before March 30,” it ended ominously.

March 30. That was today. What was going to happen, then? The shack in which the Project was now located would be torn down in June, and Perception and Delinquency would have no place to go. Dr. Jekyll must have forgotten that he had promised to take care of them. Or they had forgotten to remind him, or they didn’t know that today was the deadline in the “space race.” What ought she to do? Oh, why wasn’t Iz here? She couldn’t speak to Dr. Jekyll herself, but someone ought to speak to him, right away. A feeling of anxious excitement began to expand inside Katherine.