Alison Lurie - The Nowhere City

A new image appeared in Paul’s head: a New England college town. Mr. Cattleman, the junior instructor in history, has scarcely arrived, when he is visited by his mistress, a Hollywood starlet with pink hair.

“Uh—Convers. But it’s a fairly small town, you know. There wouldn’t be much for you to see there.”

“Aw, I don’t care about that. As long as there’s a lot of nature and scenery. Y’know I really go for the country. I love to get out in the open spaces and run around and look at all the trees growing and grass and flowers. That’s one reason this town makes me so sick.”

“Yeah, but what I meant was, I’m afraid the people won’t interest you much. Convers is pretty much a college town, mostly students and professors.”

“But that’s what I’d like most.” In her enthusiasm, Glory sat up. “Shit, you don’t know how much I want to meet some real, serious, intellectual people, professors and thinkers, that you can learn something from. People that don’t spend all their time getting loaded or screwing somebody or pulling a deal over the next guy. I want to go to the kind of parties where everybody is talking about serious things, like art and philosophy and history and those kind of things.” Visions of some academic gatherings he had attended passed across Paul’s mind. In imagination, he added Glory to them, dressed in her pink bathing suit.

“Uh, well,” he said.

“Maybe you think I wouldn’t know how to act right with people like that. Listen, I wouldn’t say anything or do anything funny; I wouldn’t want to. All I’d want to do is just sit quietly in a corner and listen to their conversations, and nobody would even notice me.”

“That’s what you think,” Paul said. Glory turned her face towards his, frowning.

“I get it,” she said. “You mean you don’t want me to come. You think I would embarrass you or something, because I’m so uneducated and dumb.” Glory’s voice was hostile and hurt; she turned her face away.

“No; I mean you’re a very beautiful girl, and people are going to notice you wherever you go.” No response. Paul sat up and put his arms round Glory, like a child with an expensive new toy, which he suddenly fears will be taken away from him again. He stroked her neck, her shoulders. “You’re really incredibly beautiful.” No response. “I think it’d be just great to have you visit me in New England.”

“Is that straight?” Sulkily, Glory turned towards him.

“Yes.” Calling up the resources of his experience, he pulled her nipples towards him, twisting and squeezing them gently.

“Ah. ... Yeah, do that. ... Really?”

“Really.”

“Listen though,” Paul said a moment later. “I mean, what time is it? Shouldn’t we do something about the house, telephone somebody or something?” He raised his head from her lap; Glory pushed it down again.

“Sure,” she agreed. “Later.”

22

SATURDAY NOON. AN ANONYMOUS crowd of sightseers loitered and drifted along Hollywood Boulevard west of Vine Street. They stopped to gawk at the photos in front of second-story night clubs and dance halls, at the windows of discount dress and hat and shoe stores, at stand-up lunch counters where red, rubbery hot dogs fried and orange drink bubbled perpetually. They entered souvenir shops and bought accordion strings of colored postcards, dummy books titled Los Angeles Confidential (which opened to reveal a toy privy or a naughty plastic doll), pink china vases, and rayon panties with “Hollywood, California” printed on them.

They were of every age, or no age. The little girls had permanents and nailpolish, sometimes even lipstick and high-heeled sandals, while the mothers or grandmothers who dragged them whining along the sidewalk wore ruffled baby dresses and curled, tinted hair—as if they had changed into each other’s clothes for a joke. Elderly men and women, some at the far edge of their lives, shuffled by, muttering to themselves and fingering their handbags or the parcels they carried. There were plenty of young people too: watchful delinquent boys slouching by in leather jackets, and clusters of teenage girls giggling stupidly and clinging to each other as they swept up the sidewalk. There were family groups of tourists, noisily crude, or silent, because they had known one another too long; and pickup couples blinking as they emerged from five-dollar hotels, noisily crude or silent.

All these people had something in common: a look of being cheaply made—put together, like the clothes they wore, out of shoddy materials, and colored with harsh chemical dyes. Their faces wore a common expression—that of people anxiously searching for something: for success, for adventure, for love. Or if they had given up these ends, they were at least searching for some excitement; for a scene, a spectacle, a hero to watch. Above all, they were looking, with the intensity of castaways on a desert island, for the beautiful and the famous—looking for stars. Whom, of course, they never found—except for their footsteps in cement in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater.

So they wandered under the merciless sun, and Katherine wandered with them.

What was she doing there? She had come to Hollywood that morning to pick up a new lot of fan letters at the rehearsal studio where Glory was practicing for a charity show (another of Maxie’s gimmicks). Once she had the letters, Katherine could have stayed to watch rehearsal, or she could have gone home on the bus. There was no reason to hang around Hollywood Boulevard, except that it seemed a good place to be miserable in.

And it was all her own stupid fault; she had done it to herself. She had told Iz that Glory was still in love with him.

It had taken a while, first to know it and then to tell it. Originally she had believed what Iz said: that Glory had no interest in him any more, that she was glad to be rid of him so that she could go out with Rory Gunn, the handsome song-and-dance star, and get her picture into the papers. After Katherine had met Glory, she realized that that could not be completely true, for Glory grew upset over even the mention of Dr. Einsam’s name. But she said to herself that that was simply something Glory would have to get over. The truth was, they just weren’t suited to each other; it was an impossible marriage. As the Social Sciences professors said, it was unhealthy, unbalanced of Iz to have chosen such a wife. And the same thing could be (and was) said on the other side: Mona had confided to Katherine that a lot of Glory’s real friends were glad she had got rid of that intellectual creep, who had no appreciation for her career.

Katherine herself felt sympathy for Glory. Women, she thought, always have something in common. However different their backgrounds or occupations; they can always meet upon the basic general topics: food, clothes, houses, people. When she, Glory, and Mona discussed men, for instance, it did not seem to matter any more that they were speaking respectively of a Harvard graduate student in history, a European-born psychiatrist, and a small-time Italian gangster. Katherine felt a purely altruistic regret when she first learned that Rory Gunn, the handsome star who had been taking Glory out twice a week in the most public and expensive way, was the same person as the sad homosexual who telephoned her almost every day to report the crises of his hopeless affairs.

Aimlessly, stopping and starting slowly, Katherine drifted along the sidewalk from one ugly window display to another, her eyes fixed on, but not seeing, trays of glazed chocolate doughnuts, or painted and varnished plaster images of flowers and fruit. Occasionally other tourists bumped into her, but she was usually too late to apologize or acknowledge their apologies, for depression had slowed her reaction time.