Alison Lurie - The Nowhere City

“Yeah. Somebody next door watering their garden, or kids playing with the hose. ... I guess I better go tell them to quit it.” She pulled her body up out of the water on strong, round, dancer’s arms, scrambled onto the tiled edge of the pool, and stood up.

“You want me to come with you?” Paul asked. Glory ought not to go out on the street alone, he felt, with those big holes in her bathing suit.

“No thanks.”

But the truth was that her nakedness was not vulnerable, he thought, as the gate swung shut behind her; on the contrary, it was a kind of armor. It also had nothing to do with intimacy. This situation, which was charged for him, meant nothing to her.

“Hey, I couldn’t find anything. Nobody’s got their water running now, anyhow. What d’you think?”

“I don’t know.” Paul left off looking at Glory’s legs, and climbed out. “If it was from some hose that was on earlier, it would be stopping now. ... Do you think it’s stopping?”

“It looks to me like it’s getting worse.”

In fact, the descent of water had increased from a scattered dripping to a more or less continual drizzle, splashing into silver puddles on the tiles.

“It must be coming from inside the house,” he said.

“Yeah. Something must be leaking in there.”

“We’d better go in and look.”

“We can’t,” Glory objected. “I don’t have the key.”

“Let’s try, anyhow.” Paul crossed the patio and tried the back door. Then, ducking under the water, he rattled the handles of French doors that opened onto the porch, while Glory tried to look inside, but unsuccessfully, since all the curtains were drawn.

“So what do we do now?”

The sun, striking through the falling drops, dappled Glory with gold light and shade as if she were standing under a waterfall. Dazzled by her appearance, and flattered by the way in which she referred the problem to him, he volunteered:

“I’ll climb up on to the porch roof. Maybe I can get into one of those windows.”

Luckily, the supports of the roof were made of iron wrought to resemble leaves and flowers, offering Paul some foothold. There was a bad moment while he negotiated the gutter, thinking not so much of the pain of a possible fall, as of the ensuing inconvenience and humiliation.

“It’s all wet up here,” he called, as he reached the sundeck, which was slippery with flowing water. “Wait a sec, I’ll see where it’s coming from ... Christ!”

Through a glazed door, Paul looked into what appeared to be a small dressing-room in ruffled Colonial style, now awash in three or four inches of water, which was seeping out over the door-sill and on to the deck—although the door itself, he discovered, was locked.

“We have to get in there,” Glory said when he had got down, with some difficulty, and described the scene. “They must’ve left the water on: that’d be just like Marianne, she’s so dim anyhow. ... We can try around the front, but if nothing’s open we’ll have to break a window.”

“Okay.” Now that he had managed the porch, Paul was ready for anything. As they circled the house, unsuccessfully shoving at the doors and windows, he began to recognize this as the kind of comic and surprising adventure he most enjoyed, one which would make an excellent story later; he felt partly repaid for Glory’s evident disinterest in him.

From boyhood reading of detective stories he recalled that glass could be broken neatly and safely if it were first covered with a piece of cloth and then hit with a blunt instrument. The back door was conveniently divided into small panes, and his towel would do; but there was nothing to strike it with, so carefully pruned and raked was the yard. Feeling impatient, and recklessly heroic in a minor way, he struck the glass with his fist, at first tentatively, and then harder. There was a loud, sharp crack—and at the next blow, a satisfying crash. Still shielding his arm with the towel, Paul reached in and unlatched the door. He got scratched, but not badly.

“Wow! ... Aw, that’s great.” For the first time, Glory gave him a smile of straightforward warmth. “Come on.”

Following her into the house, Paul passed rapidly through a large Early American kitchen, all hanging copperware and pine paneling, through a pantry, and into a dark dining-room hung with candelabra.

“Jesus. Look at that!”

Glory stood on the edge of a long, luxurious sunken living-room, done in Beverly Hills Chinese Chippendale. It was now sunken indeed, under two feet of water, which lapped softly at the green plush carpeting of the steps as at a mossy shore. The skirts of the brocade slipcovers stirred in the current, and brightly colored silk pillows floated here and there. The wallpaper, a Chinesey design on a gold background, was bulging and peeling away from the walls. A small rain mixed with flakes of plaster dripped steadily from the ceiling in several places.

“It must be coming from upstairs,” Paul said, he felt rather inanely.

“Yeah.”

“How do we get up there?”

She shrugged. “I guess we have to wade.”

With a sense of unreality, Paul followed Glory Green, in her pink Swiss-cheese bathing suit and fringed rubber hair, across the flooded living-room. The water was quite lukewarm. In a drowned magazine rack, copies of Variety, sodden with damp, had begun to disintegrate; all this must have been going on for quite a long time. They climbed the mossy steps into the front hall, where the carpeting was also wet; more water, he saw, was running quietly down the carpeted stairs.

“Geez.” Glory giggled suddenly; her voice was strangely loud, as in an underground cave. “C’mon.”

They splashed upstairs. Here too the rugs and floors were wet. Glory hurried from room to room, flinging doors open and shut so fast that Paul had only an impression of expanses of tinted mirror, polished maple and mahogany, and immense silk-shaded lamps held aloft by the glazed figures of Chinamen. Then, in the largest bedroom, she pulled open a bathroom door which seemed to stick more than the others. A tidal wave of water rushed out at them, with such force that it knocked Glory down. Paul, a few feet behind, had to grasp at a chair to keep upright.

“Hey! Are you all right?” Wading across the rug to Glory, he helped her up, damp, dripping, and half-stunned. The warm wet flesh of her body pressed against his arm.

“I guess so,” she said, blinking and still leaning on him. Her bathing suit had been pulled round somehow so that the wet pink tip of one full breast pointed out through a small neat hole, as if it had been designed that way. Without stopping to think, Paul put his free hand over it, whether out of modesty or lust he could not have said. Instead of jerking away, Glory swayed towards him. He pulled her nearer; for an instant she looked into his eyes from a distance of about four inches; then they were involved in a sudden, dripping kiss. The circular samples of Glory were pressed against him in a juxtaposition so openly sensual that he was giddy for a moment; she spoke, but he had to ask her to repeat it.

“I said, better turn off the water.”

“Oh yeah, okay.” Through the bathroom door Paul could see a gilt faucet running into the marbled basin in a thin, steady trickle—much too small, it seemed, to have caused all this.

He shut it off and turned round; Glory was sitting on the bed, a huge vulgar expanse of shiny pale-blue satin, now streaked dark with water.

“I—You’re really—” he began as he moved towards her, not knowing what he was going to say, but determined to say, and do, something.

“C’mere.” If Glory’s ordinary speaking voice had a taste of sexuality, that she now used was like dark jam. Paul felt as if he had got into a dream, or more likely one of those surrealist movies that imitate dreams, but he was too aroused now to care. In a moment, with Glory’s help, he was peeling off her wet, very tight bathing suit, which left faint red circles on pale skin. He released first breasts of a size and pneumatic roundness that he had seen only in Playboy magazine, then a sculptured, almost concave stomach, and finally a patch of curly hair colored a vivid silver pink, which completed the unreal perfection of the whole. He knelt back from it, dazed.