Alison Lurie - The Nowhere City

“Great,” he said again, but less spontaneously. “It’s just fine.” Glory smiled faintly.

It was certainly funny, he thought, that he should find himself alone in a pool in Beverly Hills with a movie starlet. From what Katherine had said, he had assumed there would be a crowd, or at least a large group, present. “Hey,” he said, swimming over. “Listen. Where is everybody?”

“They’re out of town. Baby, I mean Mr. Petersen, he’s the fellow that owns this joint, uh—home. He and his wife flew to Europe; he’s looking for some Scandinavian types for a new film.”

“Oh.” Paul hung on to the edge of the pool near Glory. The warm, soft water lapped between them like a live element.

“Yeah, he’s in Finland now, testing the Finland girls.”

“That must be hard work.”

Glory smiled, but only briefly, saying nothing. She rested her elbows behind her on the white-tiled gutter, throwing her breasts into even greater prominence. Her lovely white, bare legs floated up through the chlorine-green water, only a few feet from Paul’s. He swallowed, and sought a topic of conversation.

“Katherine’s been telling me about this crazy kid that’s been giving you so much trouble. ... This teenager that’s been persecuting you,” he elaborated.

“Yeah.” A dark look came over Glory’s face. “Persecuting is right.”

“That’s too bad.” So angry was her expression that he wondered if she were angry with him for mentioning the topic.

“You want to hear the latest? Now I’ve got the kid’s mother after me.”

“Her mother? What does she want?”

“I d’know, the same thing I guess: wants me to get the kid a movie contract. What an asshole idea! I couldn’t get my best friend a movie contract, but that’s what they all think.” As Glory spoke her voice altered: the hesitation and over-refined accent was wiped off its surface, leaving only an angry, throaty whisper. “I didn’t see her; she only got me on the phone this one time; she started screaming and carrying on crazy, so I hung up. ... I mean it was too damn much. Christ knows how she got my private number: some dumb bastard at the studio must of given it out. Anyhow, the way it is now, I don’t dare pick up my own goddam phone when it rings.”

“Hell, that’s tough.”

“You’re telling me.”

“Being practically driven out of your own house that way.” Paul appreciated Glory’s misfortunes; they made her seem more human, more approachable. He swam slightly nearer.

“Aw well, if it had to happen, it could’ve happened at a worse time.” She shrugged and splashed water on her shoulders to prevent sunburn, though this part of the pool was mostly in shadow.

“How’s that?”

Glory explained that there wasn’t much percentage in her staying home weekends when she couldn’t use her pool. Though Katherine had already mentioned this, Paul listened with expressions of surprise and concern. That was very interesting, he said. It reminded him of a piece on the geology of Los Angeles he had read, which maintained that due to a fault in the rock structure, one section of the Santa Monica mountain range was gradually disintegrating. As he spoke, Glory’s deep brown eyes, ringed with water-proof lashes, widened in concern.

“Jee-zus,” she said. “Listen, what’s the name of that book? I want to get it.”

The article had appeared in a technical volume which had been pretty heavy going for Paul himself. Since Glory had left school at thirteen, she would probably find it quite unintelligible. But Harvard had taught him never to discourage anyone by suggesting that they would be unable to learn.

“Gosh, I don’t remember exactly. But I could look it up for you, if you like.” (He promised himself that he would find her something easier on the subject at the same time.)

“Yeah; that’d be really swell, if you would.” Glory’s serious, breathless enthusiasm could not be wholly put on, Paul thought. She really wanted to know, to learn. It was an overtone that Paul enjoyed in his relations with women—one reason, perhaps, that he was often drawn to students.

“I’ll bring you some other books too. I came across a pretty good one on the structure of this whole region. With pictures.”

“Yeah? That’s swell. But what I really want to see is the thing you told me about first.” Glory splashed her face. “I mean if that whole part of town is going to fall apart, I better put my house on the market pretty quick, huh? before everybody finds out.”

“It’s not going to fall apart now,” Paul said, smiling. “Even if this guy’s right, the whole process will take a long time.”

Glory’s expression remained troubled. In his mind he saw what she probably imagined: a great slow semicomic landslide and explosion above Sunset Boulevard, scattering trees and cars and houses and fragments of earth. Of course such landslides did take place in Los Angeles, he recalled, on a smaller scale. He became more definite. “Thousands of years, maybe more.”

“You mean it’s not going to happen for thousands of years?”

“Well, probably not.” Paul noticed the scornful way in which Glory turned from him, as from a self-confessed false prophet. “Of course we can’t be sure.” She turned partially back. “That range of mountains is relatively unstable geologically.”

“You’ve really read up a lot on this place.”

“Well, I’ve had to. It’s part of my job. You see, I was writing a kind of history of the company I work for, back to when there was nothing around here but the dinosaurs.” Glory frowned, as if puzzled or bored. “You know, right where we are now there used to be a prehistoric jungle, full of ferns twenty feet tall and giant carnivorous reptiles.”

“Oh, yeah? Really?”

“Really,” Paul assured her. He watched a circle of white, wet flesh rise and fall with Glory’s breathing, and contrasted her interest in history favorably with that of Katherine, Ceci, and N.R.D.C. “You can see their bones down in the Los Angeles County Museum. ... The climate was very different from what it is now. It was terribly hot, and it probably rained most of the time.”

“Jesus. What a scene, huh?”

“Of course there weren’t any men around then. There were no animals, not any of the ones we know anyhow. There weren’t even any birds, except for a kind of flying dinosaur, sort of a cross between a lizard and a bat.”

“Ugh.” Glory shuddered. “Yeah; you know I saw one like that in a film once, but I thought it was something they made up.”

“No; they’ve found fossils of it, prints in the rocks. It was called a pterodactyl.”

“This crazy thing was about ten feet long, though.”

“They were that big. Some of the ones that couldn’t fly were about sixty feet long and thirty feet high, as high as, well, about as high as the house there.” Both of them looked at Baby Petersen’s house, an expanse of white shingles and glass glittering in the sun. Glory frowned, and shaded her eyes with her hand, as if she saw a procession of dinosaurs, or Colonial houses, passing.

“That’s funny,” she said.

“What’s funny?”

“Lookit that water coming off of the roof. I don’t get it. I mean where’s it coming from?”

Now that she had pointed it out, Paul observed a thin trickle of water falling from the gutter above the back porch. “It looks like it was raining,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“But it’s not raining.” Paul tilted his head back and gazed into a flat blue sky, blurred with sun.

“Nah, it hasn’t rained here in months.”

The dripping off the porch continued.

“It could be from somebody’s sprinkler system,” Paul suggested.