Alison Lurie - The Nowhere City

“I hate to end this pleasant experience,” he said; “but I’ve got a patient coming at four, and it’s quarter of now.” Automatically, Katherine checked her own watch. It had stopped. “Ah,” Iz added. “If you don’t mind, let’s write that letter after all, since you’re here? It won’t take long. Get your book, hm? ... This goes to Dr. Philip Lambert, Department of Educational Psychology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin,” he said rapidly. “Hm. Dear Phil, work on the social adjustment learning project is progressing well. ... He walked away and then back across the carpet, in a naked parody of a boss dictating to his secretary, while Katherine, after a scramble in her bag for pencil and notebook, sat on the edge of a chair, also naked, taking notes.

“... yours ever. You can type that up for me when you get back to the campus? Okay, that’s it. Thank you, Katherine.”

Iz picked up off the floor and put on his white cotton under-shorts. The serious nudist turned into the comic butt of a silent film comedy, one of those respectable bearded gentlemen whose clothes are always being stolen by Chaplin or Keaton.

“Umm, about your current problem,” he said. “I have to give it more thought, but I have an interim suggestion right now.”

“Oh?” Katherine was putting her arms into her dress. “Tell me.”

“Very well.” Almost dressed now, he had again become Dr. Isidore Einsam, Beverly Hills. “I thought, if you really feel you’re getting too involved here, why don’t you consider testing your newly discovered abilities on some other man?”

Within her tight, hot dress, Katherine felt a moment of panic. “And you mean you think this should stop,” she said in a thin voice.

“Shit, no,” Iz exclaimed. “I’m not going to give you up yet.”

Katherine pulled her dress down; she saw that he was smiling.

“But I don’t know any other men in Los Angeles,” she said. “I certainly don’t know any that I’m attracted to at all.”

Iz pulled up the knot in his striped tie. “Ah no?” he said. “How about Paul?”

19

A SWATH OF DESOLATE JUNGLE two blocks wide curved across Los Angeles towards the sea, and Paul wandered in it, among torn streets, overgrown gardens, broken walls, derelict houses, and shallow holes full of white rubble where buildings had once stood. The lawns and most of the gardens had withered from lack of water, but some deep-rooted rank bushes and weeds still grew greedily; devil-grass cracked the sidewalks, and vines, some flowering profusely, poured over the ruins. Overhead the avocado, lemon, and olive trees rustled their hard leaves in the hot breeze.

It was late in the day, but still very warm. Katherine was in the kitchen doing the supper dishes, and Paul had gone out to think, or brood, in this waste land across the street, where the freeway was to be built. Plaster cracked under his feet as he walked, and far above a jet plane hummed in the fading sky; otherwise it was unnaturally quiet. Only fifty feet away from his front door, but completely out of sight of civilization, Paul sat down on a crumbling block of cement, and thought how much his surroundings resembled his state of mind.

The fact was that he could not forget Ceci O’Connor. This affair had started so simply and passionately, like a sudden plunge into a clear, bubbling spring. Now the waters were turgid and muddy; everything had gone wrong. It was really all over, but still he could not stop thinking about it. He could consider Ceci rationally, dispassionately, historically even, and realize that she was a confused, half-educated, stubborn social rebel with no background or traditions (a victim of social change and disorganization, not her own fault, of course); but physically he was still, to use her term, very hung up.

Movements she had made, things she had said, kept repeating themselves inside his head, taking on different, darker significances. Like the time once he had suggested that when summer came he would arrange to get off from work for a few days so that they could go together to Catalina Island where, he had heard, there was white sand and wild peacocks. But Ceci wouldn’t agree to make plans. Parting the long streaky hair over her face so that she looked out at him as through a bead curtain, she said, “Sure, that’d be great. But I don’t believe in figuring out things that far ahead. You start fixing all these plans and rules for something, it gets wrecked. I mean like as long as you want to do this and I want to do it, it’ll happen; and when one of us or both of us don’t want it any more—it’ll stop. That’s the way it really is anyhow, huh?” Bemused by her great eyes looking into his, her freedom from the laws of time, her trust in a continuing impulse, he had enthusiastically agreed.

A few weeks, even a few days ago, houses had still stood on this block of Mar Vista, deserted, with wooden signs nailed to them: “This House For Sale. To Be Moved.” Though vacant only a short time, the little stucco villas and castles had already begun to come apart. Long cracks had appeared in the flimsy pink and green plaster walls, tiles had fallen from the roofs, and panes in the variegated windows had been broken by children or tramps.

Then, one by one, the houses had been taken away. Gangs of workmen came to cut the electric, gas, water, and telephone connections; then they would slowly jack the house up, forcing heavy beams under the floor. By evening it would sit several feet above its foundations, looking more than ever like a great awkward toy.

The actual moving was always done just before dawn, when traffic on the streets was lightest; the noise of truck motors and heavy machinery first woke Paul one morning at about four A.M. He thought it was, first, a nightmare; then, an atomic war. Climbing out of bed groggily he went into the living room, pushed aside the slats of the blind, and looked out. By the light of flares and headlamps, men and machines were working around an undermined house, easing it slowly onto the bed of a huge tractor-trailer.

After this, the process was repeated almost every few days, or rather nights. Katherine managed to sleep through the racket more or less, but it always kept him up. He would lie awake in bed, drowsily listening to the coughing of the bulldozer engines, the shouts and silences, and the straining of wood against metal.

The one that had taken the longest to move was the little French château. They got it out into the street, and then it turned out that the turrets in front were too tall to pass under the telephone lines at the end of the block. Heavy engines churned and sputtered in front of Paul’s house while they consulted about what to do (wondering what had happened to break the sequence of sounds, he had got out of bed to look). Lights swung and flashed in the dark; presently a workman armed with bristling tools climbed the roof of the house, apparently to test the possibility of knocking off the pointed, pistachio ice cream towers. Standing at the window, Paul held his breath.

The man climbed down. There was a long delay now, but Paul could not bring himself to go back to bed. He wouldn’t sleep anyhow, and he wanted to see what happened. Finally a telephone company truck pulled up; two men got out, shinnied up the pole, and tied back the wires. The colorless unsteady light of dawn was spreading across Mar Vista by the time the château slowly turned the corner onto Sepulveda Boulevard—propped up with boards and chained onto the bed of the truck, but listing a little to the left—and disappeared forever.

By an ironic, destructive coincidence, it was later that same morning that he saw Ceci at the Aloha Coffee Shop, for the first time in several days after their outdoor quarrel. She asked him immediately, “Are you still living in Mar Vista? Or have you moved out?” No, he couldn’t resist saying, he was still there, but everything else was moving out. It had been the wrong answer, because Ceci had thought he meant that Katherine was going. A big lovely smile appeared on her face, but by the time the joke had been explained to her she was furious with him and refusing to listen to anything he said.