Alison Lurie - The Nowhere City

“I’m afraid I can’t help you,” Katherine said, as Bobi paused for breath. She tried to disengage her arm. “Miss ... Green ... isn’t ... here,” she repeated, speaking each work slowly and distinctly. “She probably won’t be back until quite late. I’m sure she won’t be able to see you today.”

“She hasta see me today.” Bobi Brentwood’s face, under the chalk-pink make-up, trembled between tears and determination. “She owes it to me. This is my big chance.”

“But it’s already late,” Katherine said, getting her arm free. “Nearly supper time. Miss Green may not be home for a long while. You might be waiting here all night. Now why don’t you go on home?” She would catch cold, too, Katherine thought, in those flimsy clothes, as soon as it got dark.

“Why don’t you mind your own business?” Bobi retorted, clumsily sarcastic. Turning her back on Katherine, she sat down deliberately on the top step and rested her chin on her fists, as if prepared to wait forever.

Katherine wondered if she ought to go back in and tell Glory that her house was still besieged. But that would look awfully suspicious to Bobi, and it would only upset Glory—if she answered the door at all, now. She would do better to hurry home and call from there.

So she made her way around the potential star, who sat gazing out in front of her—as oblivious now of Katherine as if she had dropped into a hole in the hillside—and down the steps to her car. She put the box of fan mail on the front seat (what if all these people, too, were suddenly to appear at Glory’s gate?) and turned to get in. As she did so, she noticed the star’s feet and legs, now on a level with her head. Bobi Brentwood wore cheap white patent-leather sandals smudged with dirt, and her feet (the toe-nails thickly painted violet) were badly soiled and bruised; one knee was scraped raw as if she had fallen. Katherine realized that in this huge diffuse city where no one went anywhere on foot, Bobi must have walked at least three steep miles uphill from Sunset Strip, possibly all the way from wherever she lived, to Glory’s house. And that would have been a long way, for Los Angeles is stratified socially as well as geographically, from the slums in the center of the valley where the smog is thickest to the pools and palaces on the hill-tops.

“Say, let me give you a lift home,” she called up. “Where do you live?”

No response. Then draggingly: “Huh?”

“I said, I’ll give you a ride home, if you like.”

“No, thanks.” Bobi gave her a cold, miserable look, completely void of trust. “I’m staying here.”

“Well, all right.” Katherine started to get into the car, then stopped. Though surprised at the way in which she was becoming involved in Glory’s world, she tried once more. “Oh, come on,” she said. “You can see Miss Green some other time.”

Bobi looked down from the top step, and tossed back her bird’s-nest of hair with a movie heroine’s gesture of scorn.

“Ah, why don’t you beat it?” she said. “I wouldn’t ride in a cheap heap like that if it was the last car in California.”

21

PAUL DROVE ACROSS LOS ANGELES under a sky for once swept clear of smog by the desert winds that occasionally, at this time of the year, blow over the mountains towards the sea. The city shimmered in the dry, warm air, every detail sharp, but all colors bleached out by the intensity of the light, like a mirage.

But if it were a mirage, he thought, it wasn’t the harmless decorative sort, but one of those false visions that hover just above the horizon of the desert, luring travelers on to exhaustion and despair. Only now he knew what was behind the mirage. Yesterday at Nutting he had made a final effort to get back one of the copies of his history of the company. Even if it were never published, the MS. would be something to show when he got back East; besides, he had written the book, and he wanted it. At the end of the afternoon, greatly exasperated, he went into Fred Skinner’s office to complain that whenever he asked for a copy of his own work, everyone in the place became vague and obstructive.

“Yeah,” Skinner replied. “I heard something about it. You sure did some goddamn fancy research for that book, didn’t you? You got everything into it.”

The implication was false. In fact, as Paul told Skinner, he had handled the classified material with extreme care, taking precautions not to give away any trade or government secrets. Most of what he had found out with such difficulty had to do with the early history of the company, anyhow, not with current military research.

“Boy, you found out too much.” Skinner gave his sardonic ape’s grin. “I heard you even got the name Pike from somewhere.”

“Pike? Oh, Nelson Pike. He was in on the first incorporation. I think he was the assistant treasurer.”

“Yeah, well, he was also one of the defense witnesses for Dave Hume, along with his glamourpuss wife. The papers were talking about a perjury charge before he left the state. They don’t mention that name around here now. And I heard that’s not the only thing. All that stuff about financing, union problems, what happened to the Kinsman Corporation back in ’56 when it tried to muscle in—I mean, shit, you should of known better, expecting them to print that.”

Stunned, Paul had only been able to say that Nutting itself had done nothing illegal, and that, after all, everything in the history had in fact happened. Skinner sighed, then frowned. He stood up, leaned against his desk, and spoke slowly, as if explaining something to a dull child.

“Look at it this way; what good can it do them to put out that kind of info? And it can sure do a hell of a lot of harm, to publicize the fact one of the guys started this company had those kind of associations, for example. They’d be out of their mind to publish a thing like that. Hell, anyhow, what does it matter? It’s all in the past.”

Olympic Boulevard, along which Paul was now driving, rose up between the two sections of the Twentieth Century Fox lot, where oil derricks and the plaster-and-lath towers of disused movie sets showed fleetingly above the trees. Ahead, Los Angeles was visible from Beverly Hills all the way to the pale violet mountains, looking like a set itself, or even a painted backdrop, in the flat light.

It was a beautiful landscape, in its way, but inhuman, like some artist’s vision of the future for the cover of Galaxy Science Fiction. People looked out of place here: they seemed much too small for the roads and buildings, and by contrast rather scrappily constructed, all small awkward limbs and shreds of cloth. However, very few people were visible. The automobiles outnumbered them ten to one. Paul imagined a tale in which it would be gradually revealed that these automobiles were the real inhabitants of the city, a secret master race, which only kept human beings for its own greater convenience, or as pets. ... Of course, if one of the humans were to realize the true state of things, it would give him limitless freedom and opportunity.

Freedom and opportunity; he smiled ironically. It was his old dream about Los Angeles, which he had given up, but still half believed. It wasn’t even his own; it had come to him straight out of American history: “Go West, Young Man.” Some time after he got here he had lost sight of his original stated intention, of visiting southern California as a detached historian. He had begun to play childishly with the fantasy of becoming a corporation executive here, or an intellectual beatnik, or—most naive and stupid of all—both at the same time.

So Mar Vista (that is, N.R.D.C.) had let him down; and Venice had let him down—though of course, from their points of view, he had let them down. Anyhow, he was disgusted with both places.