Alison Lurie - The Nowhere City

“Jesus—You’re—”

“Don’t tell me, huh.” Glory pulled Paul hard towards her; her breath warmed him. As they kissed and clung, he began to notice little imperfections, visible only close up, that reassured him with their proof of her humanity: a freckled roughness in her skin, a smudge of mascara by one eye, the pucker of an appendicitis scar on her belly.

“Come on.” With strong, pink-nailed fingers, Glory dragged Paul’s wet bathing suit down off his hips, down his legs, and flung it, like a damp rag, into a corner.

“Ah,” she began to murmur. “Aw, that’s it. ... Come on. ... Do it do it do it. Do it to me.” In the flooded room, like an actor in a surrealist—no, a pornographic—film, he dug his toes into the satin bedspread and drove into her again and again.

“Aw.” Glory sighed, and pulled one of the satin pillows towards her, propping it under her head—which, as she had never taken off her bathing cap, was still covered with fringed rubber hair. “Don’t get up. ... Hey, that was good.”

“You liked it?” Paul felt as if he had received some film award. “So did I.”

“Yeah. That’ll show them, huh?” She laughed.

“Mm.” Show whom? Paul wondered; probably the whole world.

“Hey, y’know, this room.” She laughed again.

“It’s pretty weird, isn’t it?” he agreed, surprised however that Glory’s taste would condemn this luxurious set.

“Weird? Yeah: all that water.” She gestured towards the soaked carpet. Somewhere below, Paul could still hear a residual dripping. “No, what I meant was, I was thinking, how many times Baby Petersen’s tried to get me onto this bed, and he never made it.”

“Poor guy,” Paul said, smiling, so pleased at this evidence of his competitive success that he could be magnanimous. He had gone to bed with a movie starlet; he, Paul Cattleman, had actually done and was doing this.

“Ah, don’t feel sorry for him. Baby’s a shit from the word go. His whole life is dedicated to the proposition the way to get ahead at Superb is by putting out for Baby Petersen. Which is a big lie because he just doesn’t pull that much weight around the studio. He’s a nothing, but by the time you find that out, it’s too late.” Glory noticed Paul looking at her. “Not me. I’m too old to fall for that kind of line.”

“How old are you?” Paul realized he did not know the first thing about this beautiful girl with whom he had just been intimate: not even her real name or the true color of her hair, though she lay there naked beside him, one leg thrown over his.

Glory was silent. Paul thought she was angry at the question. But the truth was that she had trouble herself remembering her age, so many lies had been told about it. Before Glory was out of diapers her mother, who had been divorced rather too long before the birth, had begun to add months to Glory’s age to forestall suspicions of illegitimacy. She had never officially corrected this error; but a little later, when Glory became a child actor, she had subtracted a year or two, or three—nobody really knew how many. Later, professional exigencies had dictated a change in the opposite direction, for you had to be sixteen to get a working permit for a job as a night-club dancer. As time went on, Glory took matters into her own hands, and often became older or younger in order to flatter a man or sign a contract; she had come to feel that her age, like the color of her hair, was a matter of choice.

“I’m twenty-six,” she said now, adding two years to her studio age.

“I’m thirty-one.” This produced no comment. To re-establish communication, Paul went back to the last topic. “You said this guy who lives here is married, though. What’s his wife like?”

“Oh, she’s okay. Only she’s been kicked around so much she’s kind of slap-happy, you know. She cries all the time. Well, she’s actually kind of a lush, but you can’t hold it against her, what she has to live with.”

“Why doesn’t she divorce him?”

“I d’know; I guess she doesn’t want to. She’s still kind of sweet on him. I think she keeps hoping he’ll stop screwing around and come back to her. And he plays up to it, see. He uses her as a front with his other girls, if they get too serious or they start wanting to marry him, then he always has an out: he tells them how basically he really loves his wife, only she has serious problems. I think in a way he believes his own line, cause he’s just as screwed up as everybody else in the business.”

An uncomfortable feeling, which he did not analyze, passed through Paul. “Are they all screwed up in your business?”

“Christ, yeah. They really are, you know.” Glory turned on her side towards Paul. “Maybe it’s the dumb climate. A friend of mine says that once you get out here, and get into the sun, you kind of gradually go soft, if you’re not used to it. ... I don’t like the sun. I always try to stay out of it myself. ... How long since you moved to California?”

“About nine months. But we haven’t come for good. We’re just here temporarily.”

“Oh yeah, really?” Her voice was intimate, as usual, but somehow casual. Paul realized that no words of love or even liking had been spoken between him and Glory; there had been no explanation of what had happened. Physical desire had simply been turned on and flooded them, like the house. Was this going to be an affair, or was it only an incident? He didn’t know what she thought, and that was perhaps one reason the whole thing seemed so unreal.

“When’re you leaving?” Glory asked.

“I don’t know exactly. Probably sometime this year.” A week ago Paul had had a very promising letter from his thesis director telling him about a job at Convers College; he was waiting now to hear from them directly. “I’m kind of sorry, now.” He accompanied this avowal with a warm but gentle kiss, intended to convey gratitude and affection. Glory met it at a higher temperature.

“Mmm. And where’re you going to?” she stroked his leg with her knee.

“Well, probably to Convers. It’s sort of north of Boston.”

“That’s in New England. Y’know, I’ve never been in New England.” Glory rubbed his leg higher up, expertly.

“I wish I could take you with me.”

“Yeah? I’d like to go. I’ve always had a kind of kooky dream to see that part of the country. All those old-fashioned towns and historical places: I really think I would go for them. There’s a New England set out on the back lot at the studio, with these neat little white wooden houses and big barns and fences and tall trees, y’know. When I was first working at Superb I used to walk through it on the way to where we were shooting Mexican Mamba —what a bomb that turned out to be—and I d’know, it sort of picked me up.”

“You ought to see the real thing.” The educational impulse stirred in Paul again, along with other impulses. The idea of Glory walking alone through an imaginary village had something pathetic about it, too. “Seriously. Why don’t you take a trip and visit New England?”

“Maybe I will. I’m so goddamned fed up with all the creeps and phonies in this town. ... Hey! You know what I’ll do?” Taken with her idea, Glory left off rubbing against Paul. “Soon’s we finish making this picture, that’s probably only a couple months, I’ll go East. ... I’d love to walk out on this screwy dump right now, only I couldn’t let Rory and the kids down.”

“New England is good in the summer,” Paul said. “Not too hot. Cape Cod—”

“Yeah. That’s what I’ll really do. I’ll take a couple weeks off, Maxie can fix it—”

“That’s a fine idea.”

“—and I’ll come and stay with you. Maybe in September, huh? What did you say that place was called?”