Alison Lurie - The Nowhere City

An oleander shrub next to the broken steps where Paul sat was thick with fleshy purple flowers. They were poisonous, he had heard somewhere. Beside it scarlet weeds covered the ground; the flowers were gay and profuse, but the two colors clashed badly. Paul pointed out to himself that Ceci too was only crudely pretty; her hands were too broad and stubby, her teeth were uneven, she dressed badly, and did not wash her streaky gold hair enough—often it smelt and tasted of the beach. She was morally loose, too. Everything he had ever jealously suspected was true: his Ceci had lain not only under the scrawny body of her weird Chinese husband, but under all those other men, and rubbed herself against them, and cried out with pleasure. Half Venice West had probably been into her, so why should he give a damn?

Paul picked up a chunk of broken cement from the ground and threw it at an avocado tree across what had been somebody’s back yard. Crunch.

Obviously Ceci didn’t give a damn herself. She didn’t care if she ever saw him again. With the girls he had known in the East, Paul had always remained more or less good friends. Even when they had married someone, or made up with their husbands, or had a baby or a new lover, there was still a special warmth in the way they looked at him across a room. They still belonged to the “underground” in spirit, even if they had retired. Often there would be a discreet lunch now and then at which Paul and his friend would reminisce, discuss topics of mutual interest, and confide in one another, over imported beer or iced coffee. The Oxford Grill was pleasant for such lunches.

Only Ceci didn’t believe in Paul’s underground. “You mean like there’s a club of people who cheat on the cats and chicks they’re supposed to be making it with?” she asked. But she had her own underground, cruder and sloppier than his, not discreet and careful of other people’s feelings, but rebelliously noisy.

She wouldn’t meet for lunch; she wouldn’t meet anywhere. “Don’t you know when something is over?” she had said that afternoon, when Paul, swallowing his pride again, telephoned her at the place in Santa Monica where she was now working. (He knew or suspected, but did not want to ask, that she had quit the Aloha Coffee Shop last week in order not to have to see him any more.) There was a long wait while Ceci was called to the phone. In the background he could hear restaurant noises, the ring of the cash register, the rattle of plates. “Listen, don’t call me at the gig any more, okay?” she said almost as soon as she got on the line. “They don’t like that here.”

“But I have to,” Paul objected. “You haven’t got a telephone. ... Listen, if today is out, how about tomorrow? Shall I come down to your place tomorrow morning? I want to talk to you.” Glasses clinking. “No,” Ceci said. Her voice was faint among the clatter of plastic dishware, as if she were standing some feet from the receiver. “Well, how about—” he began again. “Aw, Paul,” she interrupted. “I mean, what’s the point, huh? What could we talk about? ... Don’t you know when something is over?”

All right, the hell with it; he knew when something was over. He would change gigs himself. Already he had written back East asking about teaching and fellowship prospects for the fall. He should have done it sooner; the trouble was, out here it was so easy to lose track of time, especially around Ceci and her friends. So far, there had been no replies.

The sun above the trees was turning into a flat vermilion circle as it sank into the layer of smog over Mar Vista. He’d better get home, or Katherine would ask: where had he been; what had he been doing? She would probably ask anyhow; it was nearly eight o’clock.

But Katherine made no such remark when he walked back into the house. The dishes were done, and she sat in her usual corner of the new wicker sofa, sewing something under the lamp. On evenings when Paul didn’t go out, which meant every evening now, the convention was that he worked on his thesis. He had done so when he first arrived in Los Angeles, and in the last few days he had tried to do so again. It gave him the feeling that he was struggling uphill with a tremendous gray rock. Who the hell gave a damn about early Elizabethan trade policy and its social influences? It was so much easier to throw some records on the phonograph or look at a magazine, and a much better distraction from the thought of Ceci. Nevertheless he had written in letters to New England recently that he was finishing his thesis.

The metal desk-lamp hummed fluorescently as it shed its cold light on the stacks of index cards. Each one of them had been covered with scratches of ink by his own hand: words and numbers and bibliographical abbreviations. He stared at them through a mist of obsession.

“Paul,” Katherine’s voice said. “Paul. Paul?”

“Hm?”

“I’d like to ask you something, if you have a minute.”

“Hm.”

“I—I wondered if you wanted to go swimming this Sunday afternoon. The Skinners are organizing a beach party. Everyone’s going to bring supper and beer. Susy says it’ll be mobbed in Santa Monica, so they’re going down to Venice.”

“Sunday?” Paul stalled. “I d’know.” He didn’t want to go anywhere with the Skinners. Once he had found out that the Nutting Research and Development Company had hired him to do practically nothing while looking like a Harvard historian, he had also realized that Fred Skinner had suspected this from the beginning, but had refrained from putting him wise. And Susy Skinner bored him. But above all, he did not want to go to Venice Beach with these people. Besides, he had to work on his thesis. “Let’s not make it this weekend,” he said. “I have to work on my thesis.”

Katherine did not protest; she opened and shut her mouth, but said nothing.

“You don’t really mind,” Paul told her. “You hate the beach anyhow.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Katherine pulled her thread through something yellow. “I’m really getting to like it rather, now that the water’s warmer. I’m even getting a tan; have you noticed? And I think my hair’s lighter.”

Paul had not noticed; he did not notice now. He was thinking of Venice Beach, with illustrations. One foggy night Ceci and he had gone down with a blanket to lie on the damp, salty sand, and listen to the waves licking the shore; and Ceci’s breasts tasted of salt. Goddamn it, he wasn’t going to let her get away like that; he would go down there, tomorrow afternoon—

Katherine was still speaking. “... you see, what it is about Los Angeles; what happens here doesn’t count. That’s how you have to think about it. I remember you said something like that when we first got here, but I didn’t understand then. I think the way you put it, you said it was all an amusing joke.”

“An amusing joke?” Paul repeated. He felt a peculiar impulse to laugh wildly, as if he were in a Frankenstein movie. No, he would go there tomorrow morning.

“Yes. But you see I wanted to take it all seriously, or at least I didn’t want to, but I thought I had to. I couldn’t think of how else to take it, because I’d been so serious all my life. That’s what Dr. Einsam says; he says—”

Katherine paused. Paul recognized that it was his turn to say something, so he said, “Oh. Who’s Dr. Einsam?”

“Dr. Isidore Einsam. You know, he’s one of the people I work for. I’ve told you about him.”

“Oh, mm.” No doubt she had, Paul thought. “One of those psychology professors.”

“No. He’s sort of an international Jewish capitalist anarchist,” Katherine said, smiling; it was a joke she and Iz had recently made up. Paul looked at her suspiciously, or bemusedly. “He’s a psychiatrist. Anyhow,” (she got a grip on herself and shifted the subject) “he says people with an academic background like mine often think the whole world is a small classroom they can’t ever get out of.”