Nowhere City (30 page)

“But Paul’s not the scholarly type at all,” Katherine objected rather stupidly. The truth was, no matter how angry she felt at her husband, and discouraged about her marriage, it annoyed her obscurely that Iz should sum him up this way.

“Not externally.” Iz did not press his point; he moved his fingers along Katherine, thinking.

“I brought my shorthand notebook,” she said, smiling as she noticed it sticking out of her bag across the room. “I thought you really wanted to dictate something.”

“Ya, I ought to. But let’s forget it.” Iz continued the outline.

“Mm. ... You know, I never do any work for you any more. It’s really awful, considering I’m being paid so much an hour by the grant. We’re exploiting them dreadfully.”

“Foundations exist to be exploited.” Gently, Iz drew a series of fine parallel lines across Katherine with his nails.

“And it’s not only you. I’m not really working very much for Charlie or Bert either. Even when you’re not there now, I just sit up in the office sometimes in a kind of daze. I guess—-” She stopped; Iz said nothing. “I guess maybe I’m getting too involved to work,” she concluded, almost in a whisper.

“You’re not as involved as you think you are,” Iz replied after a short pause. “Or let’s put it this way; you’re deeply involved in the experience, that’s true; but your commitment to me as an individual is not so very great. Do you really want to know what I think?” He raised his head to look at her. “Are you comfortable?”

“Yes. Go on.”

“All right. I think it’s easier for you to let yourself go with me because I’m not a man of your own class and background. I’m a foreigner ... a—what shall I say?—Wandering Jew, with a beard and an accent. In one sense, what you have with me is the kind of thing well-to-do women look for, perhaps not quite consciously, when they go abroad on a tour. Under those circumstances they can have what they call a “romantic interlude,” even a very intense one, without feeling they’re really deceiving their husbands. ... I don’t mean to imply this is only a phenomenon of the middle class. It’s the same thing with the little housewife who figures it doesn’t really count when she lets the plumber push her up against the basement wall some afternoon.”

“No. That’s just not true!” Katherine exclaimed. “I don’t think of you as a foreigner or a plumber. I know you’re a very intelligent, highly educated professional man.”

Iz laughed. “The way you say that proves it. Don’t be simple-minded, Katherine. You know what I’m talking about. You were saying almost the same thing yourself earlier.”

In silence, Katherine admitted to herself that she did, although of course Iz had put it much, much too crudely. “All right,” she said. “And you know what I was talking about too. About working for you and that. Because it does worry me, really. You know.” She looked at him. He smiled; slightly nodded.

“All right. I will give my serious consideration to your problem,” he replied in his professional manner. “Ahh.” He yawned and, raising himself, leaned across Katherine’s body and felt about on the floor with wide, half-blind gestures. Then he found his glasses, sat up, and put them on—changing at once from a naked and bearded satyr to a small, middle-European man at a nudist camp. This man looked at his watch.

“I hate to end this pleasant experience,” he said; “but I’ve got a patient coming at four, and it’s quarter of now.” Automatically, Katherine checked her own watch. It had stopped. “Ah,” Iz added. “If you don’t mind, let’s write that letter after all, since you’re here? It won’t take long. Get your book, hm? ... This goes to Dr. Philip Lambert, Department of Educational Psychology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin,” he said rapidly. “Hm. Dear Phil, work on the social adjustment learning project is progressing well. ... He walked away and then back across the carpet, in a naked parody of a boss dictating to his secretary, while Katherine, after a scramble in her bag for pencil and notebook, sat on the edge of a chair, also naked, taking notes.

“... yours ever. You can type that up for me when you get back to the campus? Okay, that’s it. Thank you, Katherine.”

Iz picked up off the floor and put on his white cotton under-shorts. The serious nudist turned into the comic butt of a silent film comedy, one of those respectable bearded gentlemen whose clothes are always being stolen by Chaplin or Keaton.

“Umm, about your current problem,” he said. “I have to give it more thought, but I have an interim suggestion right now.”

“Oh?” Katherine was putting her arms into her dress. “Tell me.”

“Very well.” Almost dressed now, he had again become Dr. Isidore Einsam, Beverly Hills. “I thought, if you really feel you’re getting too involved here, why don’t you consider testing your newly discovered abilities on some other man?”

Within her tight, hot dress, Katherine felt a moment of panic. “And you mean you think this should stop,” she said in a thin voice.

“Shit, no,” Iz exclaimed. “I’m not going to give you up yet.”

Katherine pulled her dress down; she saw that he was smiling.

“But I don’t know any other men in Los Angeles,” she said. “I certainly don’t know any that I’m attracted to at all.”

Iz pulled up the knot in his striped tie. “Ah no?” he said. “How about Paul?”

A
SWATH OF DESOLATE JUNGLE
two blocks wide curved across Los Angeles towards the sea, and Paul wandered in it, among torn streets, overgrown gardens, broken walls, derelict houses, and shallow holes full of white rubble where buildings had once stood. The lawns and most of the gardens had withered from lack of water, but some deep-rooted rank bushes and weeds still grew greedily; devil-grass cracked the sidewalks, and vines, some flowering profusely, poured over the ruins. Overhead the avocado, lemon, and olive trees rustled their hard leaves in the hot breeze.

It was late in the day, but still very warm. Katherine was in the kitchen doing the supper dishes, and Paul had gone out to think, or brood, in this waste land across the street, where the freeway was to be built. Plaster cracked under his feet as he walked, and far above a jet plane hummed in the fading sky; otherwise it was unnaturally quiet. Only fifty feet away from his front door, but completely out of sight of civilization, Paul sat down on a crumbling block of cement, and thought how much his surroundings resembled his state of mind.

The fact was that he could not forget Ceci O’Connor. This affair had started so simply and passionately, like a sudden plunge into a clear, bubbling spring. Now the waters were turgid and muddy; everything had gone wrong. It was really all over, but still he could not stop thinking about it. He could consider Ceci rationally, dispassionately, historically even, and realize that she was a confused, half-educated, stubborn social rebel with no background or traditions (a victim of social change and disorganization, not her own fault, of course); but physically he was still, to use her term, very hung up.

Movements she had made, things she had said, kept repeating themselves inside his head, taking on different, darker significances. Like the time once he had suggested that when summer came he would arrange to get off from work for a few days so that they could go together to Catalina Island where, he had heard, there was white sand and wild peacocks. But Ceci wouldn’t agree to make plans. Parting the long streaky hair over her face so that she looked out at him as through a bead curtain, she said, “Sure, that’d be great. But I don’t believe in figuring out things that far ahead. You start fixing all these plans and rules for something, it gets wrecked. I mean like as long as you want to do this and I want to do it, it’ll happen; and when one of us or both of us don’t want it any more—it’ll stop. That’s the way it really is anyhow, huh?” Bemused by her great eyes looking into his, her freedom from the laws of time, her trust in a continuing impulse, he had enthusiastically agreed.

A few weeks, even a few days ago, houses had still stood on this block of Mar Vista, deserted, with wooden signs nailed to them: “This House For Sale. To Be Moved.” Though vacant only a short time, the little stucco villas and castles had already begun to come apart. Long cracks had appeared in the flimsy pink and green plaster walls, tiles had fallen from the roofs, and panes in the variegated windows had been broken by children or tramps.

Then, one by one, the houses had been taken away. Gangs of workmen came to cut the electric, gas, water, and telephone connections; then they would slowly jack the house up, forcing heavy beams under the floor. By evening it would sit several feet above its foundations, looking more than ever like a great awkward toy.

The actual moving was always done just before dawn, when traffic on the streets was lightest; the noise of truck motors and heavy machinery first woke Paul one morning at about four
A.M.
He thought it was, first, a nightmare; then, an atomic war. Climbing out of bed groggily he went into the living room, pushed aside the slats of the blind, and looked out. By the light of flares and headlamps, men and machines were working around an undermined house, easing it slowly onto the bed of a huge tractor-trailer.

After this, the process was repeated almost every few days, or rather nights. Katherine managed to sleep through the racket more or less, but it always kept him up. He would lie awake in bed, drowsily listening to the coughing of the bulldozer engines, the shouts and silences, and the straining of wood against metal.

The one that had taken the longest to move was the little French château. They got it out into the street, and then it turned out that the turrets in front were too tall to pass under the telephone lines at the end of the block. Heavy engines churned and sputtered in front of Paul’s house while they consulted about what to do (wondering what had happened to break the sequence of sounds, he had got out of bed to look). Lights swung and flashed in the dark; presently a workman armed with bristling tools climbed the roof of the house, apparently to test the possibility of knocking off the pointed, pistachio ice cream towers. Standing at the window, Paul held his breath.

The man climbed down. There was a long delay now, but Paul could not bring himself to go back to bed. He wouldn’t sleep anyhow, and he wanted to see what happened. Finally a telephone company truck pulled up; two men got out, shinnied up the pole, and tied back the wires. The colorless unsteady light of dawn was spreading across Mar Vista by the time the château slowly turned the corner onto Sepulveda Boulevard—propped up with boards and chained onto the bed of the truck, but listing a little to the left—and disappeared forever.

By an ironic, destructive coincidence, it was later that same morning that he saw Ceci at the Aloha Coffee Shop, for the first time in several days after their outdoor quarrel. She asked him immediately, “Are you still living in Mar Vista? Or have you moved out?” No, he couldn’t resist saying,
he
was still there, but everything else was moving out. It had been the wrong answer, because Ceci had thought he meant that Katherine was going. A big lovely smile appeared on her face, but by the time the joke had been explained to her she was furious with him and refusing to listen to anything he said.

An oleander shrub next to the broken steps where Paul sat was thick with fleshy purple flowers. They were poisonous, he had heard somewhere. Beside it scarlet weeds covered the ground; the flowers were gay and profuse, but the two colors clashed badly. Paul pointed out to himself that Ceci too was only crudely pretty; her hands were too broad and stubby, her teeth were uneven, she dressed badly, and did not wash her streaky gold hair enough—often it smelt and tasted of the beach. She was morally loose, too. Everything he had ever jealously suspected was true: his Ceci had lain not only under the scrawny body of her weird Chinese husband, but under all those other men, and rubbed herself against them, and cried out with pleasure. Half Venice West had probably been into her, so why should he give a damn?

Paul picked up a chunk of broken cement from the ground and threw it at an avocado tree across what had been somebody’s back yard. Crunch.

Obviously Ceci didn’t give a damn herself. She didn’t care if she ever saw him again. With the girls he had known in the East, Paul had always remained more or less good friends. Even when they had married someone, or made up with their husbands, or had a baby or a new lover, there was still a special warmth in the way they looked at him across a room. They still belonged to the “underground” in spirit, even if they had retired. Often there would be a discreet lunch now and then at which Paul and his friend would reminisce, discuss topics of mutual interest, and confide in one another, over imported beer or iced coffee. The Oxford Grill was pleasant for such lunches.

Only Ceci didn’t believe in Paul’s underground. “You mean like there’s a club of people who cheat on the cats and chicks they’re supposed to be making it with?” she asked. But she had her own underground, cruder and sloppier than his, not discreet and careful of other people’s feelings, but rebelliously noisy.

She wouldn’t meet for lunch; she wouldn’t meet anywhere. “Don’t you know when something is over?” she had said that afternoon, when Paul, swallowing his pride again, telephoned her at the place in Santa Monica where she was now working. (He knew or suspected, but did not want to ask, that she had quit the Aloha Coffee Shop last week in order not to have to see him any more.) There was a long wait while Ceci was called to the phone. In the background he could hear restaurant noises, the ring of the cash register, the rattle of plates. “Listen, don’t call me at the gig any more, okay?” she said almost as soon as she got on the line. “They don’t like that here.”

“But I have to,” Paul objected. “You haven’t got a telephone. ... Listen, if today is out, how about tomorrow? Shall I come down to your place tomorrow morning? I want to talk to you.” Glasses clinking. “No,” Ceci said. Her voice was faint among the clatter of plastic dishware, as if she were standing some feet from the receiver. “Well, how about—” he began again. “Aw, Paul,” she interrupted. “I mean, what’s the point, huh? What could we talk about? ... Don’t you know when something is over?”