Alison Lurie - The Nowhere City

During this speech Glory’s mouth fell open wider and wider; then it shut as firm as a plastic flower.

“You’ve got a big explanation for everything, haven’t you?” she said when he had stopped speaking. “Oh yeth; you’ve got an interpretation. You know what’s your problem? If you want to know, your head is swelled up with all those poor slobs lying on the couch in your office all day long, telling you how great you are, taking every word you say like the Bible. All those poor old bitches and hard-up homos throwing themselves around on the couch and bawling and telling you how hot in the pants they are for you, you really go for that. You think you can push everybody around like you push them around.”

“Oh, screw.” Iz swallowed, and got control of his temper and vocabulary. “Your jealousy of my patients is understandable, sweetie,” he went on, “but completely misplaced. And you really know that.”

Glory gave no sign of knowing it, but continued to stare stubbornly at him.

“Listen, sweetie. I’ve explained the transference relationship to you enough times. I told you already, the emotions my patients think they feel for me are only projections of emotions they feel, or used to feel, for somebody else. They’re not really in love with me; they’re in love with somebody they think I am, maybe their father or their mother. Their demonstrations of this emotion don’t give me any personal satisfaction.”

“Pigshit,” Glory suggested.

Iz shrugged as if giving the whole thing up, and sat back. They looked at each other in an unfriendly way.

“Hey,” Glory said presently. “If you don’t mind, let’s split. I’m sick of this scene.”

“But it’s so interesting.” He smiled.

“Interesting?” Glory wrinkled her pug nose with disgust at Mar Vista, over which a smoggy pink sunset was now settling. “That?”

“No. You. What you’re really saying now, for instance, is that you want to split with me. You’re sick of me.”

For a moment Glory said nothing. She turned to Iz and gave him a slow take, head to foot. “Yeth,” she said. “You’re so goddamned right.” And, with the appropriate gesture, of cutting her own throat, “I’m fed up to here.”

4

VISTA GARDENS: A LONG row of two-story plaster apartment buildings backing on to the San Diego Freeway. There was no vista of course, and no gardens, Katherine thought. This whole city was plastered with lies: lies erected in letters five feet tall on the roofs; lies pasted to the walls, or burning all night in neon. Her head ached; her sinusitis was worse again.

She followed Paul down the cement walk, past dwarf palms illumined by a red spotlight, into a stucco building. She stood in a hallway while he rang the bell; she smiled nervously and without joy when the door was opened on a confused scene of strange people and cheap furniture. An unattractive man in a striped sport shirt put his arm around her, drew her into the room, saying something loud and facetious. She could not change her features into another expression; the little nervous smile was glued there, like a lie. “Well, and how do you like Los Angeles?” “Oh, very well, thank you.” Because she mustn’t let Paul down. She was given a glass with faces painted outside, ice inside. People speaking, moving. Her head ached, ached.

“Katherine! Come on,” Paul was saying now. He had taken her by the arm, and was pulling her towards the door. Everyone was laughing and talking. “All these buildings look alike to me, you know!” Paul exclaimed to them, laughing.

“Yes, they do look pretty much the same,” others agreed, smiling as if this were a delightful circumstance.

“What?” Katherine said. A grinning man took her glass out of her hand. Paul was still laughing as he pushed her outside and shut the door of the party behind them. He leaned back against the wall, in order to laugh better.

“What a joke!” he said. “That wasn’t the Skinners’ place. We were at the wrong party!”

“Oh.” Katherine did not look up.

“Hey, what’s the matter?” Katherine did not respond; she was leaning her forehead against the wall, her eyes were closed, her fists pressed against her anterior sinuses. “Do you have a headache again?”

“Yes. It hurts terribly.”

“Isn’t there anything you can do for it?”

“I already took all my medicines,” Katherine said through her fists; even talking hurt. “The only thing else I could do is lie down and try to drain it. Maybe I’d just better go home; then you can come back and try to find the party.”

“Oh, I know where it is now. It’s right in the next building. Would you really like me to take you home?”

“I don’t care,” Katherine said through pains which were realer than the present scene; blurred wall crossed by blurred shadows, Paul’s voice, the smell of cleaning-fluid. “If you want to.”

Paul sighed. “Of course I don’t want to, silly,” he said. “I want you to go to the party with me, if you can manage it.”

Katherine stood up, which made her head spin. “I guess I can manage it,” she said.

“Come on, then. You’ll feel better once you have a drink.”

Katherine followed Paul, her head bent. Steps, grass, steps, a door, another door, a room. It might have been the same apartment; there was the same tacky Danish modern furniture, brass bowls and blue denim; the same kind of people. Everyone seemed to be so large in Los Angeles, so tanned and athletic-looking. Though Katherine was only a little below average size, here she felt small, pale, and weak.

A brown, balding man crossed the room towards them, pushing before him a tall, blonde girl who looked like an illustration from a magazine. Her hair, bleached nearly white and with the texture of frayed silk, was bandaged round her head into a large structure resembling an Indian turban, and she had a tan so deep that her features were almost invisible. She wore sea-green velvet pants, a low-cut ruffled blouse, ropes of beads, and high-heeled satin pumps.

“Hiya, Cattleman! Meet the wife. Susy, honey, this is Paul and Katherine. What’re you drinking?” He moved off to the bar with Paul.

“Oh, gee. How do you do! I’m so glad you could come,” Susy squeaked, or whispered—it was hard to say which. “Gee, I’ve been wanting to meet you so much, Katherine. Won’t you sit down?”

Katherine sat down on a simple, ugly sofa. Susy sat beside her, and asked whether she had any children. A moment later she was claiming that she had two herself. Where could they be, in this tiny apartment, and what on earth could they be like?

“Viola’s in school all day now,” Susy confided, leaning towards Katherine, her eyes and teeth fluorescently sincere. “And Mark has his Swim-and-Fun School in the mornings; and I know it’s crazy, but honestly I miss them just terribly. We used to have such a real fun time together when they were little. The apartment seems so stupid and empty, with me all alone just pushing a dust-mop around. ... Oh, I know it, I’ve got to get on the ball and do something. I ought to get out and take some courses and develop some of my potential. They have some wonderful courses, you know, up at the university.”

Susy bounced forward on the sofa. Under her blouse she had extremely high, full breasts, cone-shaped. But then so did all the other women in the room. For the first time in her life Katherine began to feel flat-chested, as well as undersized and pale.

“Oh, really,” she said, to say something.

“Oh yes, wonderful. Terribly stimulating. They have a marvelous course I want to take called World Tensions in the Space Era—Professor Bone’s course—with audiovisual and everything, and he even has very well-known people come and explain the significance of the different world tensions to his class.”