Alison Lurie - The Nowhere City

She had known all along, too well, that Iz was still “emotionally involved” with Glory. He admitted it himself, though as a psychological fault. If she were to tell him that Glory was in the same state, she had realized, that Rory was nothing but a publicity stunt, it might send him back to her. At any rate, he should have the choice. But Katherine had kept putting it off, saying to herself: not yet, just a little later. She had repeated to herself, in excuse, Iz’s own statement that his relationship to his wife was “a neurotic attachment to a highly original but basically immature personality.”

Until the day last week when, arriving at Glory’s house, she found her hunched over a portable FM set, screwing the knobs round and bending the aerial this way and that so as to catch the weak signal of the U.C.L.A. student radio station and hear a symposium in which Dr. Einsam was taking part. “Ssh, just a sec.” She twisted the dial back and forth, and fragments of Iz’s professional voice leaked out into the room, roughened with static. When the program was over, Glory sat up, patted her hair into place, and said to Katherine, “I thought it’d be kind of a gas to hear him shooting his mouth off again, telling the whole world what to think, but you can’t get a thing on this asshole set.” Katherine was not fooled. Throughout the program some analogy had kept eluding her, but now she had it: Glory was Iz’s fan. She treasured these half-audible, irrelevant phrases (“... ya, I would say that ... in this case the existence of a control sample ... essential”) as a fan might the scribbled autograph of her chosen star, or the bent paper cup from which he had drunk.

Katherine thought that she would not have gone to such lengths to hear Iz’s voice, no matter how long they had been separated; she just did not care for him that much. She didn’t, she realized, want any more of Iz than she had, however much she wanted that. Certainly she didn’t wish she were married to him. Not only that there was (perhaps) something in his suggestion that this affair was a vacation trip for her, something outside of real life. It was also that he was too much the guide of the tour. There was something too preceptorial, even too analytic, in his manner towards her, for what he would have called “a permanent relationship.” After all, to stay with your doctor too long is to confess your illness chronic. If cured, you paid the bill and went away.

So there had been nothing to look forward to. Iz would never like her any better than he did, while she was in danger every day that passed of becoming more and more—well, the word he would have used was “dependent.” And meanwhile, there was the persistent consciousness that she knew something Iz ought to know, and was keeping it from him.

It was hard bringing up the subject, since after her first visit to Glory’s house Katherine had stopped telling him what she saw and heard there. She had trained herself, long ago, to be secretive about her employers’ lives. But beyond this, she had wanted to avoid mentioning or thinking about Glory when she was with Iz, because it felt too awful and uncomfortable. The truth was, probably, she should never have got into the situation of working for Glory, and Iz should never have put her there.

Yesterday at the office she had told him. Iz listened silently, attentively, while she spoke, asking only one question: “Gunn is definitely a fag? Ya, I heard that rumor, but I thought he could be AC-DC.” When she had finished, Iz looked at her. Then, breaking a rigid rule of his about behavior on campus, he put his hand over hers, and said, “Thank you for telling me this.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” Katherine replied in a thin, formal voice. “I should have done it sooner.”

“No.” Iz still gripped the back of her hand. “Don’t feel that; there was no need. Unless you wanted to.” She did not answer, or return his look. We can’t say anything more, she had thought, because maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Glory doesn’t want him, but what does that matter, if he wants her? Students passed in the hall; Iz took his hand away, and work continued. Only at the end of the afternoon he had remarked, throwing it off with painful casualness, “So they’re rehearsing for the benefit tomorrow. Hm. They’ll be there all day?” That was all; except that for the first time in many weeks he left the office without making arrangements for her to come to the apartment. All the same, Katherine knew that Iz was at Glory’s rehearsal now. Or more probably, because he seldom got up before noon, on his way there.

She had miscalculated, she thought; she hadn’t known she would feel like this. If she had known that, she still should have told Iz, but would she have done so? He might have found out anyhow, eventually. But not right now, not today.

“It’s over. I did it to myself,” she said aloud. “It’s finished.” Talking to herself right out on the street, like a crazy person. She must be in a state to act like that. She was in a state. She must get hold of herself, and do something constructive. She didn’t want to go home: somehow she felt that in the empty house (Paul had gone to work, though it was Saturday) it would all be even worse.

Ahead of Katherine on the street corner was a news stand, displaying “Home-Town Papers from 50 States” and glossy magazines dealing with every possible hobby and interest, from auto-racing to Zoroastrianism, from birth (Your New Baby) to death (Casket and Sunnyside) . The Boston Globe and Herald were there, of course, but she felt no impulse towards them either. They were irrelevant to the people she knew here, the things she had done with them, the vacant pain inside her. Still, the news stand gave her an idea: she would look for some interesting book to read over the weekend, to take her mind off everything.

There was a large bookstore, the Pickwick Bookshop, almost directly across the street. Katherine stopped briefly at the bargain tables outside, where for fifty-nine or seventy-nine cents you could buy books whose glossy paper jackets were beginning to be rubbed dull and torn around the edges. Inside, the latest successes were piled into bright pyramids. What did she want to read: biography, sociology, history, travel? Katherine disliked most current fiction, but she had a wide range of general interests, and the various jobs she had held had left her with some special ones. But nothing seemed what she wanted. What was it Iz had said, when she complained that she couldn’t find any good new biographies at the library? “Once you’ve tried reality, imaginary lives seem flat.”

Still, there must be something—She wandered about the crowded store, turning covers over listlessly to read blurbs, lifting books and setting them back, and then simply standing, frowning at the flat colored faces, pictures, and letters.

“Hello, there.”

Katherine looked up. Across a table of books, a strange man was smiling at her. Automatically, she began to make her face stiff and blank.

“I know you. Don’t you work in the H-building?” he continued. “Over at U.C.L.A.?”

“Oh; yes.” Tentatively, Katherine relaxed her face.

“You’re working for Smith and Haraki—isn’t that right?”

“Yes, that’s right.” And Einsam and Einsam, she thought dully.

“I thought so. I’m Jim McKay.” He came around the counter towards her; a small, pale Irishman with sharp features and black cropped hair. “I’m in Anthropology,” he said, and held out his hand. After a fractional hesitation, due to her preoccupied depression, Katherine took it. The firm, warm touch of another five being acted like a slight electric shock. She focused more clearly on Mr. McKay, who seemed to be about thirty-five and was wearing a blue work shirt, a striped tie, chino pants, and sneakers. She moved the features of her face into a smile.