Alison Lurie - The Nowhere City

Still, Paul thought now, with Los Angeles spread out before him in the sun, that was no reason to condemn a whole city. Maybe it had been his own mistake, starting at the wrong end down in the shabby seaside towns and industrial waste areas—as if one were to go to Boston and visit only Revere Beach and Somerville.

“Well, he was making up for that now. He was on his way, this Saturday afternoon, to swim in a movie executive’s private pool in the plushest part of Beverly Hills. He wouldn’t see the owner, who was away, but (even better) he was going to meet the movie actress to whom he had lent the pool—and for whom Katherine, of all people, was now working. That was Los Angeles for you—a place where you find a shy New England girl like his wife and a Hollywood starlet in the same pool.

Paul had turned off the freeway now, and as he drew nearer to his goal the houses grew larger, the lawns wider and greener, and the underground sprinklers rose into higher fountains, as if heralding his coming. In Los Angeles, water equalled money. He had noticed this before, driving past the dry, barren yards of the slums near the Nutting Corporation—and down in Venice Beach, where the taps in Ceci’s kitchen often gave only a brownish, brackish trickle, and no one could afford to water anything larger than a potted plant.

Across Wilshire Boulevard, and through the Beverly Hills shopping district. Now Paul drove along wide streets lined with palms and flowers, richly bathed in artificial rain, and the houses had swelled to castles—but castles reminiscent of the cottages on his street, in that each one was built in a different style. Here the grounds, too, had been made to conform to the owners’ whims, so that the Louisiana plantation house was hung with limp wisteria and climbing roses, while the Oriental temple next door had a Japanese garden and a monkey-puzzle tree.

The movie executive’s castle, when he located it, was glaringly Colonial—white, with gables, shutters, wrought iron, and a comic weathervane, behind an expanse of lush green lawn. A pink Thunderbird convertible stood in the driveway. Paul parked around the next corner, ashamed to leave his soiled, shabby Ford next to that vulgar beauty. It was the color that made it vulgar, mainly, he thought as he walked back; the lines were good, and everyone said the engineering was superb. With a car like that, you could count on getting service anywhere, too, not like with one of these foreign jobs. The idea occurred to Paul that he might buy a T-Bird. He would have to look into that.

Following Katherine’s directions, he went down a path at one side of the house, and pushed open a gate in the wall. He saw an expanse of sunlit white tile, a profusion of tropical flowers: purple bougainvillea, camellias, orange trees, tall lilies. The pool was all he could have wished: immense, oyster-shaped, deeply blue, and surrounded by white iron-and-glass furniture.

“Hello?” he called.

A girl in a pink fringed rubber bathing-cap, swimming at the far end of the pool, waved, swam towards him, and climbed out by the ladder.

“Hi ... Paul? I’m Glory. Happy to meet you. Your wife isn’t here: she asked me to tell you she had to go up to the university. She said she has a lot of scientific work to do for my husband.” Glory smiled, and spoke, sourly. Paul, taking this as an expression of scorn for science on Saturday afternoon, smiled back. “Yeah,” she went on. “So she said she’ll be here around five, if you could wait for her, okay?”

“Sure, okay,” Paul said, somewhat bemused. He had expected Glory to be good-looking, for Katherine had shown him some publicity photos, but had not expected to be much stirred by her. He did not like the chorus-girl type, as a rule. But Glory’s low, breathy voice, and the intense, melting way she had of looking up into his eyes as she spoke (automatic for her with all men, but he did not know this) took him by surprise. Then there was her incredible figure, and above all, the fantastic bathing suit she was wearing. Made of tight pink jersey, with a high neck and long sleeves, it was full of coin-shaped holes, ranging in size from ten to fifty cents. Not only were parts of her arms and back exposed, but random samples of her stomach, and a good deal of one breast. Particularly disturbing were some holes in the lower rear section of the bathing suit, through which that area of Glory gently bulged.

“You want to go in?”

“Oh yeah, sure.” Paul jerked himself into intellectual alertness, and became aware that Glory was smiling at him almost ironically, if chorus girls were capable of irony.

“Okay, you can change in the pool house; it’s open. Over here. ... The, uh, washroom’s in there.” Glory led Paul around the far end of the pool and opened a screen door. Then, turning her attention off as completely as if she had flicked a light switch (the silent kind), she walked away to the diving-board and did a neat jackknife dive into the water.

Paul looked after her, blinked, and went in. The interior of the pool house was expensively disguised as the deck of a yacht. A wooden railing trimmed with brass and life-preservers ran round the room, and above it the walls were painted in a lush Technicolor style to imitate ocean views, with fluffy white clouds, soaring gulls, and tropical islands on the horizon.

It was to be expected, he thought, beginning to change his clothes. Among the thousands of pretty girls in California who wanted to be in the movies, one would have to have something pretty special to succeed. But even if Glory were, as was likely, completely insensitive, stupid, and vulgar-minded, he now felt he had to make an impression on her, make her notice him. After all, he was more than just Katherine’s husband, another New England mouse.

The bathroom, in the cabin of the imaginary yacht, was nautically decorated. A glance at himself in one of the mirrors trimmed with rope and flags was somewhat reassuring: he didn’t look so bad, though pale for southern California. The blue plaid cotton bathing suit was pretty depressing, though. On an impulse, he took down one of two fancy yachting caps that hung on the pegs of a steering wheel, and placed it jauntily on his head. Then, carrying his towel, and whistling to show unconcern, he went out.

Glory was floating on her back at the far end of the pool; her eyes seemed to be shut.

“Is it cold?” Paul called. She did not reply. Perhaps she had not heard him; he repeated the question.

“Huh?” Glory opened her eyes, rolled over, and swam a few strokes nearer.

“I said, is it cold,” he repeated, now feeling stupid.

“So-so.” Glory raised her eyes to the hat, but made no comment.

Paul’s impulse was to test the water with his foot, but that would seem sissy. Trying to regain ground, he threw his towel towards a deck-chair and leapt on to the diving-board, testing its spring. But the hat. He snatched it off and sailed it towards the chair; what a fool he would really have looked, diving in with it on.

He was, luckily, an excellent diver, and his jackknife was as good as or better than Glory’s. Bubbles blew past him as he plunged down into an element much warmer than he had expected, clear and soft. He surfaced, feeling better, and shook the water out of his face.

“Great!” he exclaimed, and struck out for the other end of the pool in a fast splashing crawl. After nearly a year of struggling with the steep, treacherously churning ocean surf, he had forgotten what it was like to swim in a block of tamed fresh water, in which all the movement was one’s own—where one could float, dive, skim on one’s back under the sun or shoot down through blue-green depths as clear as Jell-O. He did all these things; he played with the passive water, sweeping it aside as he swam into shallow waves and kicking it up in fans of white spray; so delighted with the game that for a few moments he forgot where he was and in what company. Then, rising after a surface dive, he noticed Glory watching him from where she floated at the pool’s edge.