Nowhere City (39 page)

The car lurched forward again, tripping the switch of the first rinse. A torrent of water poured down over them, streaking the glass and blurring the faces and bodies outside. Within the car the light of a wet dusk softened Glory’s face. Iz reached over and stroked the line of her neck, and then down towards her breast. Glory stiffened. The bastard, he thinks he can just walk right back in without saying a goddamn word, she thought. She tried to give Iz a cold stare, but lisped with emotion as she said:

“Tho what’s that for?”

The automobile jerked forward again, out of the water, and two men, one on each side, began to wipe it with soapy rags. They swept the pink metal in wide, mockingly sensual gestures, grinning at Glory through the dripping windows, as if it were her own body. As before, she paid absolutely no attention, as unconscious of her audience as an actress on a movie screen; Iz frowned nervously.

“Because I wanted to,” he said. “You’re very attractive, even with all that greasy stuff on your face. I want to touch you. I want to sleep with you.”

It was a tactical error. The tremor went out of Glory’s voice. “I’m a very beautiful girl,” she said flatly. “Lots of men want to sleep with me.” She turned and gazed out of the window through whorls of soap.

“Aw, babydoll!” the man on that side called to her. “Don’t give me that dirty look.” There was a burst of appreciation around him, followed by more shouted remarks.

Another jerk. The car moved forward under the second rinse, which fell with a blinding crash, drowning the faces and voices outside.

“Listen, pie-face,” Iz began again, putting his hand on hers where it lay on the shiny upholstery. “It’s not only your physical attractiveness.” No response. Her hand lay limp under his. “I miss the whole relationship. I really like you. And you like me.”

No response. Her head was still twisted away; floods of water passed behind it. “Ah, shit,” Iz said. “I love you.”

Glory turned and looked at him. Under the sugar-candy hair her face was in ruins, the perfect mask streaked and wet with clotted powder, dripping mascara, and tears.

“Oh, go fuck yourthelf,” she said, and burst into sobs.

“So it’s all set up,” Maxie told Iz and Glory. They were standing together in the rehearsal hall after the lunch break, waiting for the show to get going again. “Judd says the kid can come over Tuesday
P.M.
about four-thirty: he’ll wait for her. Her mother can bring her over; she should just go to the main gate and ask for Judd Hubert, tell her that’s the cameraman, and he’ll fix it up. You want I should call the mother, I got her number.”

“No, I’ll do that. I told her I would.” Iz took out a notebook and pen.

“Aw, Maxie, that’s great,” Glory said. “That’s real quick work.”

“I shoulda had a glass milk,” Maxie complained. “I didn’t eat since breakfast; now my stomach is acting up again.”

“Send out for it.”

“Yeah.” Maxie sighed deeply, and looked round. At the piano a well-known popular composer and the dance director were quarreling over the second chorus of a song; the effeminate voice of the latter rising at intervals into a petulant shriek. Two beautiful girls were leaning against the stage nearby drinking soda out of cans and complaining in persistently whiny voices about their costumes; and a famous comic sat facing the wall, reading
Billboard,
sulking, and picking his nose. The floor of the rehearsal hall was gradually becoming covered with cigarette butts, coffee-cups, newspapers, candy wrappers, and chewed chewing-gum.

“Will somebody please tell me why I ever went into this business,” Maxie asked. “Why I didn’t just stay with my father. He had a fine movie house in Westchester, a good business. He wanted me to walk into his shoes, but I turned it down and broke his heart. How do you explain that?”

It was a rhetorical question, addressed to the ceiling, but Iz answered it.

“Possibly you wanted to defy him: it’s natural.” He shrugged. “Also you were probably attracted by the glamour of the entertainment world that, as a child, you saw second-hand. You wanted to meet stars, get to know them personally.”

“Yeah,” Maxie groaned. “Do I know them personally.”

Iz put his notebook and pen up. “Well, I’ve got a two o’clock kleptomania,” he said, “I’ve got to go. You’ll be home about seven?” Glory nodded. “Okay. I’ll call you.”

Alone with Maxie, Glory noticed his fat, sour face. “Aw, Maxie honey,” she said. “Don’t look so down. It’s going to swing all right. Everything’s okay now.” She gave him a warm, natural smile, one of those that had made her famous, full of sensual love for the whole world.

Years of intimacy with actors and actresses had made Maxie impervious to every sort of smile. “You think everything is okay, baby, you’ve got a limited view of my situation,” he complained. “If I live through this, I’ve also got to get Paul Demeray out of his recording contract; on top of that his wife is expecting again in the middle of her picture, Smit doesn’t want to work with Foss this year, and a million more.”

“Phoebe Demeray’s having another kid? I didn’t hear that yet. That’s marvy.” Gloria smiled. “I wish I was having one.”

“She’s not telling it around yet, keep it—” Maxie broke off, looking at Glory. “Aw, no you don’t, honey.” Glory said nothing. A dreamy expression had appeared on her face. “Don’t be a kook. Think of your career: you know you got two big pictures lined up ahead of you. You don’t want to get yourself knocked up now.”

“Uh-uh.” Over the heads of everyone in the hall, Glory stared into the bright, smoggy distance out the window. “I think I’d really like to be knocked up.”

FOREVERNESS.

—Billboard poster for Forest Lawn

H
IGH IN THE AIR,
the jet hummed across the country, carrying Paul back towards California. Mountains and rivers and western cities rolled beneath it, dimmed to a uniform bluish-tan blur, though when he had left New England everything had glowed with the intense green of early summer.

The greenness of New England! He couldn’t get over it. The hills and meadows of new grass near Convers College, with mist white on them in the evening and dew shining in the morning. The air was clear, its distances softened by a blue haze of moisture, instead of the dirty yellowish mixture of gasoline fumes, soot particles, and irritants he had been used to. The rain falling seemed miraculous too; he exclaimed over it naively to his friends, explaining that in Los Angeles it had not rained for a year and a half.

Paul’s friends had smiled when he told them this, thinking he exaggerated. They were glad to see him, though: they greeted him almost as if he had come back from the dead. The truth is that when you go West you do vanish as far as most Easterners are concerned; he could remember feeling this about others. It was worse than death really—there wasn’t even any mourning.

Paul was also delighted to see his friends. He had forgotten how many people he knew in Cambridge, most of whom also knew each other. That was another thing about the East: the interlocking nature of society there, wrapped about itself like a grapevine. Whereas life in Los Angeles had the infinitely branching pattern of exploding fireworks—lines moving on a dark field, which never crossed, or crossed only by accident. In the East you had to go three thousand miles to disappear, but in L.A. you could do it by changing jobs and moving a few blocks. The way people treated each other there seemed to imply this: there was something anonymous, after all, about it.

Seeing the people he knew in Cambridge again, Paul realized that most of his relationships in Los Angeles, for instance with Fred Skinner, were comparatively shallow, acquaintances of convenience. These were his real friends: they spoke his language, shared his past; they wished him well. He remembered how Skinner had reacted when he heard that Paul was going East for the interview. “Letting the side down, huh?” he had said, his mock anger covering real anger. “Selling yourself back to those academic bastards for pennies.” On the other hand, Howard Leon, the head of the Publications Department, had surprised Paul by congratulating him. “I’ve always felt this wasn’t the place for you,” he had remarked. “After all, this isn’t a serious operation from an historian’s point of view.”

“An historian’s point of view.” Recollected on his way East, the words had made Paul uneasy. He wondered whether, after so many months in Los Angeles, he were still an historian. He thought of the heaps of index cards spread out on the desk in Mar Vista, with dust particles collecting on them. In imagination he saw the smog gathering inside his mind, too, month after month, until—

But thank God, that had turned out to be an illusion. Even the first evening, sitting in a friend’s apartment in Cambridge, he could feel the internal smog lifting, and something like an historical sense waking; he heard himself beginning to think again in terms of political, cultural, economic movements and meanings. The next day in Convers, as he talked to the history staff about his thesis, their interest lit his, which had perhaps only been covered with ashes and not put out. He remembered, as it were, that he had (from an historian’s point of view) an exciting subject. He began to borrow books and write down titles of articles.

Another surprise was that, in talking to his friends and answering their questions about Los Angeles, he had begun to see it as an historian. Theories and connections that he had never worked out consciously flared up as he spoke. The basic thing about L.A., he explained, was that it lacked the dimension of time. As Katherine had first pointed out to him, there were no seasons there, no days of the week, no night and day; beyond that, there was (or was supposed to be) no youth and age. But worst, and most frightening, there was no past or future—only an eternal dizzying present. In effect, the city had banished historians as Plato had poets from his Republic. The Nutting Research and Development Corporation cared nothing for history, he said, and even feared their own. They had hired Paul to work in their office because they wished
to have him working in their office,
in the present tense, and to demonstrate him to visitors.

Paul’s friends smiled and laughed as he talked, astonished that such things should be. “Barbaric!” they exclaimed, and looked upon him with mild awe, as upon an anthropologist returned from a year with some native culture. They did not, of course, see the dark side of it: they didn’t know what it was like for someone to be born and brought up in a world where history does not exist. Ceci O’Connor, for instance. For Ceci (as for Nutting) life was not the sum of all she had ever been, seen, and done—but a small area illuminated in a vast landscape of dimness, as if by the moving beam of a flashlight in a darkened room.

That was why morality in the dimension of time meant so little to her, and morality in other dimensions so much. A black feeling came over Paul as, rushing through the stratosphere towards Los Angeles, he thought of Ceci. On her own terms he had treated her badly and selfishly; which was no excuse, because not to treat someone on their own terms was in itself selfish. In Ceci’s book he was, in fact, a cheap shit.

But he wasn’t really like that, Paul pleaded to the slowly darkening upper air outside the window. They were crossing the San Bernardino mountains now: bare rocks, glowing red in the setting sun, looking like the mountains of hell. At least, he hadn’t used to be like that. For the girls he knew in the East he was “honest,” “serious,” “so great,” and they had told him so, several within the last few days. Embracing him with whirlwind warmth, or pressing his hand in quiet significance, according to their natures, they exclaimed how much they had missed him, how glad they were he was coming back—suggesting long, long talks, perhaps more, to come. He had managed to have lunch with one of them, a girl named Amy, and after she had brought him up to date on the intimate side of her life (“Oh, Paul, you always understand everything so well, you make me feel much better”) he had tried to tell her about Ceci. “I had a love affair in Los Angeles with a waitress,” he began badly. “Really?” Amy smiled, and he heard a fake pastoral note in his voice, as if he were some eighteenth-century European bourgeois confessing his amours with a charming dairy-maid. He tried again. “She wasn’t a waitress really: she was a painter. She just worked as a waitress. She was a sort of beatnik actually.” Amy was still smiling fondly at the traveler’s tale. It was at this point, he thought, that he had begun to see how he had behaved to Ceci. “The thing was,” he said loudly, “I really loved her. I was in love with her.” This was more than he had ever told Amy, but she took no notice. “Oh, Paul,” she said, laying her hand on his arm. “It’s so wonderful to see you again. Nobody else I know has the same kind of—I don’t know—enthusiasm that you have. They don’t really
live,
none of them.”

Paul saw that it was no use. To the next old friend who asked what he had been doing with himself in southern California (this one a man) he replied, as if making a joke, that he had “got somewhat involved” with a pink-haired movie starlet and the wife of a Chinese exterminator.

He hadn’t been so great with Glory either, Paul thought. From her point of view they had been friendly conspirators, taking a well-deserved and enjoyable revenge together. If she had known her suspicious were false, she probably wouldn’t have gone to bed with him. Whereas for him the incident had been a matter of opportunism. He had no right really to complain that the relationship was shallow, because he had made it so himself out of incuriosity and greed. The truth was that, having come to Los Angeles in the spirit of an explorer, he had lost track of his own standards and finally almost gone native; doing so, like most anthropologists, with a conspicuous lack of decency and grace.

There was one more thing, worst of all: the way he had treated Katherine. He had insisted that they come to Los Angeles—well, that was all right: even now he didn’t regret going there, and once he got safely back he would probably come to appreciate what he had learned there more and more. He didn’t think he should have left Katherine alone in Cambridge, but once he had got her out there he should have been much more patient with her fears, her loneliness, even with her sinus trouble; he should have tried harder to make her life tolerable. (For instance, he should have tried to find some friends for them that she could have talked to, other transplanted New Englanders. There were people like that around, but he had avoided them deliberately, just as he avoided Americans abroad.)