Alison Lurie - The Nowhere City

“Hnh.” Had he had more energy to spare, Paul might have registered a stronger reaction, protested against the flip diagnosis of academic life made by this crank psychiatrist his wife was working for. Not that he thought psychiatrists were cranks in general, but in southern California they well might be. This city was full of amateur wisemen, self-made experts on everything. If only Ceci had some education and sense of proportion; if she could only realize—He hadn’t meant to deceive her; he had simply assumed that she assumed—“Ceci, I need to see you,” he had said, laughing somewhat to take the edge off the statement, that last time they met, at the Aloha Coffee Shop. “I get so bored without you.”

“Yeah,” she had replied, balancing her plastic tray against the hip of the cheap green uniform. “You get bored easy. You know what Steve Tyler said about you? He said, ‘Paul’s not going to change an inch, and when nothing and nobody you meet can change you, pretty soon everything seems like a drag. ... And the next thing is you get to be a great big drag yourself.’” Ceci’s voice had grown very rough; she turned her face away. Paul almost thought she was crying, but when she looked back her eyes were hard and dry. She pushed back some ends of streaky gold hair under the coarse hairnet all the Aloha waitresses wore, and put Paul’s check down on the table beside his empty glass.

“Well,” she said in a flat voice, as she took off for the kitchen. “See you.” Which had meant, he thought, the opposite, because since then she had not seen him, and would not see him.

Crawling in the mists of these memories, Paul was aroused by a touch on his shoulder. Katherine had come over and was sitting on the arm of his chair, speaking to him; he realized that she must have been speaking to him all along.

“... and I know I’ve been difficult,” she was saying. “When I first got out here, when I had nothing to do and I was sick with sinus all the time, I was really dreadful.”

Some answer was called for. “Oh, that’s all right,” he replied with about one-third of his conscious mind. “I know it was hard on you to come out here where you don’t know anybody.”

“Yes, but all the same; I was awful.” Katherine smiled. “But I’m going to make it up to you now.” She leaned against Paul; then she put her arms around his neck and kissed his forehead in an unusual way. It was not unprecedented for Katherine to kiss him affectionately, and when she did so she usually favored the upper parts of his head—his eyes, his ears, his forehead (as now), the section of hair under which he had been told that the superego was located—-as if, he had sometimes thought, these were the only parts of him she really approved of or felt comfortable with. But in this embrace now there was a kind of deliberate physicality which was completely uncharacteristic of his wife; which she must, therefore, be straining at in order to gratify him. A sad mistake. Quite automatically, Paul turned and put his arms loosely around Katherine, patting her back in a calming way.

“There, there,” he murmured.

“You know, you’ve got attractive eyebrows,” Katherine said. Placing one delicate hand on his thigh, almost in his groin, as if to steady herself, she bent over and licked his near eyebrow with her tongue. Paul’s eyes twitched. He found it very unsettling, in fact disagreeable, to have his wife suddenly start acting like a loose woman.

But there was more to it than that. He felt wrong about touching Katherine at all now, guilty, even—unfaithful. That was what Ceci had made him feel; for her, that was how it really was. While Katherine bent farther over him and started on his other eyebrow, the idea came to him that if he refused her now, he could tell Ceci that he had done so, that he had stopped making love to his wife (well, it had been, let’s see, nearly two weeks now). Then Ceci would see him again; he was sure of it.

“Hey, Katherine,” he mumbled, freeing his head. “You don’t have to make up to me like that, hon.”

“But I want to,” Katherine said. She lifted her face and looked at him, but rather at the surface of his features than into his eyes. “You’re really a very good-looking man,” she announced.

“Well, thanks,” Paul said, still more disconcerted. He was sure that Katherine had never spoken to anyone in her life in this tone. The whole situation felt profoundly false to him; his impulse was to start up and hurry away. Of course that would look awkward and terrible, and it would hurt Katherine’s feelings. It wasn’t her fault he was so preoccupied tonight that she, reversing their usual parts, took this awkward initiative, after two weeks. He should find it touching, really. Besides, there was a part of him that did not recognize tone, that only grew warm when a woman’s hand was pressed against it; and now it was very warm. What guaranteed that Ceci would see him tomorrow, anyhow? That she was not already shacked up, in some shack on Venice Beach, with somebody else? Right now, very likely, some “cat” was lying on her bed under the painted forest of flowers. Who was Ceci O’Connor that he should do for her what he had never done for anyone else, not even his wife? Katherine might be clumsy at imitating love, but she did love him, and only him.

“You’re pretty attractive yourself,” he told her, without looking to see whether this were true. Moving Katherine’s embarrassing hand off his leg, he pulled her down into a more comfortable, familiar position in his lap. But even now she would not settle down; she twisted round and rubbed her mouth across his, using her tongue as Ceci might have done, holding him like Ceci—

No: it was all wrong, disordered, Paul thought, as he half-reciprocated—as if his craving for Ceci was so great that now it had got out of his head and into Katherine, so that she was deliberately imitating, or rather was possessed by, Ceci. As if he were going crazy or something, even, because of course Katherine didn’t know Ceci, didn’t even know she existed.

With some effort, he pulled his head back. “Hey, listen,” he whispered, afraid to voice his hallucination aloud. “What’s happening?”

“Nothing,” she whispered back. If it were all in his mind, he thought, he must take a firm hold on himself now, behave normally. And Katherine had stopped moving about now. She seemed to melt in his arms; her eyes were almost shut.

“Do you want to go into the other room?”

“Mm, yes.”

Never in the course of their marriage, he thought, had they got into bed so quickly. (Or did it only seem so?) Katherine, who usually was so slow about taking off her clothes, methodically hanging each garment up or folding it on to a chair, lay spread out on the sheet before Paul even had his socks off. She was smiling up at him suggestively—or was it just affectionately? Was it all in his mind? What the hell was going on? Though physically excited, Paul frowned and hesitated, standing by the bed.

“Paul?” she said finally. He knelt over her, but still hesitated, stroking her arm absently. “Mm, Paul,” she added. “Maybe you’d like to try something different tonight? Would you like to do it this way?

Coming from Katherine, this suggestion, and the gesture that went with it, was as shocking as a physical blow; Paul flinched as if he had in fact been struck.

“Where did you hear about that?” he exclaimed; but simultaneously there was a flash of cognition. “I get it now,” he said, standing up. “You’ve been reading some book; some marriage manual or something like that, haven’t you?” For the first time that evening he looked directly at Katherine, but she avoided his eyes and did not answer him.

“Come on now,” he said, more gently, touching her shoulder. “It’s true, isn’t it? I know you couldn’t think of something like that yourself.”