Nowhere City (13 page)

Ceci smiled; her eyes grew warm. “You don’t act like that all the time,” she said, moving over and rubbing against him a little, like a cat. “Just sometimes.” She laughed; he turned and kissed her closely, wrapping his arms so far round that each hand held the curve of a breast. He still felt a little ashamed, so he kissed her harder, biting the inner curve of her lip. God, how warm she was, how great it was here; he would be crazy to ruin it.

“Y’ know what I want?” Ceci whispered.

“No. What?”

“Breakfast.”

It was cool but bright outside. A white sun glared down out of a white sky on the slums of Venice. All the scars and stains of the one- and two-story frame buildings were exposed in miserable detail: the broken steps, the split shingles, the scabs of rust and paint on the bent iron railings. The narrow, deserted streets were pockmarked with holes and congealed lumps of tar and asphalt.

Paul and Ceci walked along cracked sidewalks with rough pebbly bites taken out of the curbs; they passed abandoned storefronts, with windows painted over black, or soaped white. Some of these stores were deserted, but in others people seemed to be living. It was garbage collection day, and trash cans loaded with empty bottles, sticky smudged papers, rags, and half-eaten hot dog rolls stood at intervals along the sidewalk, lit as if on a great stage.

In this decay, only one thing was whole: the automobiles. Not all of them—there were many rusted old machines. But among them, and even more gorgeous by contrast, were cars of equal or greater age that gleamed with polished chrome and glass and chalk-white tires—hot rods. Most were models of the early 1930s that had been more or less radically altered: their running-boards cut down, their metalwork rolled under at the bottom; one or two sported superchargers. They were freshly painted in all the colors of the TV screen: red, electric blue, neon green. Many were decorated with symbolic designs—lightning or red flames spurted out of the radiator and across the hood, or the whole front end of the car became a grinning monster with headlamps for eyes. They were impressive even asleep in the full light of day; roaring down the thruways at night they must be magnificent. Paul was glad he had left his car parked over by Ceci’s place. It was no fun driving around in that old heap, but if he had one of those hot rods—

Well, and why shouldn’t he have one? They couldn’t cost too much. He wouldn’t want to drive around in a car like that back in Cambridge, but nobody would care out here. He turned to Ceci and asked her.

“You want to buy one of these crazy shorts?” She began to laugh, pleased. Sure, she said, he could probably pick one up. There was always somebody around trying to unload a car. Steve Tyler might know of something.

They had come out of the maze of back streets now, into the main square of Venice. The ruins of its earlier glory—for at the turn of the century it had been a fashionable seaside resort—still stood: the long arcades, the graceful balconies, arches, and pilasters of colored stucco. But it was all in the last stages of desecration. The cobbled streets were crusted with dried mud and trash, and dirty paper blinds sagged in the dirty windows. The open shops under the arcades sold gimcrack souvenirs, overripe fruit, and girlie magazines.

There were more people about here, but all of them, like the buildings, seemed damaged and soiled. Bums leaned and spat in the arcade in front of a dark, smelly bar; shapeless women in shabby clothes were out marketing, every wrinkle and scar on their faces revealed by the glaring sun. A beggar with no legs sat on the sidewalk; the newsdealer had dark glasses and only one arm. Bums and cripples and criminals, the dregs of the city (even of the continent) washed up on Venice Beach as if by a landlocked tide. This was a dangerous place, too; Ceci ought not to be living here in these back streets, alone at night in that rickety old building. Why, anything could happen to her. As they crossed the square, Paul tightened his arm round Ceci; she looked at him, and smiled.

“Like it? Crazy, huh?”

Paul was not sure what she meant; he compromised. “I like you. Where’s this place we’re going?”

“Right over there.” She pointed up an alley to a one-story building of dirty cream-colored brick. It must once have been a grocery store: faded red letters across the top spelled out
GOODMAN’S PRODUCE MARKET.
The shop windows had been painted over in irregular rectangles of red, blue, green, and white up to about a foot from the top. Ceci knocked at the door, which had a hole in it where the handle should have been, and called, “Josie?”

There was no answer. Instead of knocking again, she went over to a garbage can that stood against the building, lifted the lid, rummaged about inside, and took out an old doorknob. She fitted it into the hole in the door, and turned it.

They went up two steps into a long, dim cave of a room. Here, as at Ceci’s, practically everything was on the floor: plants, shelves of books, lamps, dusty pillows, and several mattresses with faded spreads. No wonder they called these places “pads.” The only chairs were a couple of wicker and iron contraptions like the ones Katherine had bought to replace her own furniture, which she was gradually moving into the garage.

The upper three-quarters of the room were completely empty, with bare whitewashed walls against which drawings, newspaper clippings, poems, and photographs had been nailed or pasted. Painted directly on the wall, right up by the ceiling, surrounded by strange leaves and flowers like those in Ceci’s bedroom, was the slogan
DONALD DUCK IS A COMMUNIST.

In the center of the room was a playpen, mostly occupied by a large inflated rubber beach toy in the shape of a green sea monster with red spots. It also contained a plump blonde baby about a year and a half old.

“Hello, Psyche,” Ceci said. “Where’d you get your friend?” Psyche did not reply. “Josie? Steve?” She pulled aside a curtain. “Hi!”

“Hi,” replied a man’s voice from beyond the curtain. “Come on in.”

Paul approached and looked over Ceci’s shoulder into a bedroom. Clothes hung from pegs on the walls, and there was a mattress raised about a foot off the floor on blocks. The blankets had been pushed into a heap on one side, and a man about Paul’s age was lying under the sheet, with his head propped on one hand. He had a round, pleasantly ordinary face, and long, thinning fair hair.

“Hey, this is Paul. Steve. I mean, like, Paul Cattleman, meet Steve Tyler.”

“How do you do,” Paul said, helping to continue the joke, if it was a joke.

“Hi,” Steve said lazily. He looked Paul over, lowering his eyelids and smiling just slightly. His blunt features took on a look of peasant irony and cunning, like Clever Hans in the folk tales. Paul felt that Ceci’s friend might be waiting for him to do something which he could later ridicule or disparage.

“Hey, Josie.” Steve addressed the heap of blankets. There was no response. “We had a big night last night,” he said. “Didn’t break up till about three, four o’clock. You should have been here. Where were you, anyhow? Wow, am I beat.” He blinked his eyes.

“You want us to cut out?”

“No, stick around. I’ve got to get up anyhow. Hey, Josie. Company.”

A sound came from the heap of bedclothes. “Tell ’em t’go away.”

“It’s Ceci.”

“Ceci.” The blankets moved. A thin, pretty blonde girl with nothing on sat up in bed, rubbing her eyes. On seeing Paul, she pulled the end of the sheet up over herself, but without haste or any exclamation of surprise. “Hi.”

“Hey, Josie, this is Paul.”

“Oh, hi!” Josie did not inspect Paul as her husband had done. Her face opened; she smiled warmly. Paul felt that he would like her.

“I’m sorry we disturbed you,” he said.

“Aw, no. That’s all right. Got to get up sometime and feed the kids. You want some coffee, or lunch or something?”

“Anything you’ve got,” Ceci said, smiling. “We haven’t had breakfast.” Paul wondered if she was telling Josie that they had just been in bed together. But Josie didn’t seem to react. Maybe it was just her way; but more likely the Tylers already knew that Ceci was having an affair with him and all about him, whereas he hadn’t even heard of the Tylers’ existence before this morning.

“I’ll make the coffee,” Steve offered. He swung his legs over the far side of the mattress and sat up. Paul realized that he too was naked. Turning his long, brown back to them, Steve pulled on a pair of blue jeans. Josie continued to sit in bed holding the edge of the sheet loosely against her breasts. Paul felt that if she knew him just a little better she would have got out of bed to dress. It was all innocent and natural. But he wasn’t used to so much nature yet. He turned back into the other room; Ceci and Steve followed him.

“Where’s all the kids?” Ceci asked.

“Oh, they’re around somewhere.” Steve began to clean out a huge coffee-pot. “I guess maybe Starry took them down to the beach.”

“How old are your kids?” Paul asked.

Steve smiled, as if this question pleased him. “Let me see. Well, Psyche, that’s her there, she’s about nineteen months. Nathaniel’s four, and Ezra’s six. So Freya must be seven, no, eight now; and Astarte’s ten and a half.” He held the coffee-pot under the water tap of the sink. As at Ceci’s pad, a mere trickle of brown liquid came out. “Hey, siddown, why don’t you?”

Ceci sat, and so did Paul, on one of the long wooden benches at the kitchen table. He began to feel easier; he decided he liked this place.

Ten and a half. Either Steve and Josie were a lot older than they looked, or they must have been married pretty young. “Unusual names,” he said.

“Nathaniel’s for Hawthorne. Ezra’s Pound, of course. The girls are all called after goddesses. That was her idea,” he added, grinning at Josie, who had just come into the room. She was wearing old blue jeans like her husband’s, with the addition of a white T-shirt which clung to her small, pointed breasts.

“Hey, I hear you had a party last night,” Ceci said to her.

“Yeah.” Josie began to take food out of a dilapidated refrigerator with
COOL, MAN
painted in large letters across its door. “It was kind of a great scene. You should have been here. Angus came over with some new sides, and Becky; and John was here with his guitar; and we had some beer, and everybody was singing like crazy. And then later, must have been about two, Walter fell in. How’s about pancakes?”

“Walter,” Ceci said. It was not a question.

“Mm. Matter of fact, he might still be here. He passed out last night, and he wasn’t up yet when I blew the kids’ breakfast. Let’s see.” Josie walked towards the front part of the room. “Yeah! Here he is.”

Paul looked where she pointed. On the floor, in a dark corner behind the hi-fi speaker, was what he had dismissed as a heap of blankets and coats. Now he identified a man lying face down among them, with most of his head covered.

“Hey, Walter,” Josie said gently. “Do you dig some pancakes?” Paul tensed himself for the encounter.

But the man on the floor did not move. “Leave him sleep it off,” Steve advised. “Hey, I’ll play you the new Adderly side Angus brought over last night. Cool.”

He put the record on. A medley of jazz sounds in a lazy, complicated rhythm began to issue from the speaker. Ceci and Steve sat down on one of the mattresses to listen to it. Paul sat down too, in a position where he could see if Walter Wong was waking up, by turning his head just slightly. Every time he did this, he became more uncomfortable. He didn’t want Wong to catch him staring. On the other hand, he didn’t want Wong staring at him.

He tried to concentrate. His enthusiasm for and knowledge of jazz had stopped about 1952; he found it difficult to follow this music. Anyhow, the etiquette of listening to jazz was something he hadn’t caught on to yet. It was going all the time at Ceci’s; sometimes she would stop everything and listen, but sometimes she wouldn’t. Sure, it made a good background. There were a couple of records, for instance, that Ceci liked to make love to. One called “Walkin’” especially. Sometimes, if she were already up when Paul came, she would put it on the player before she got back into bed. It had a slow, uneven beat that she said really sent her physically. By now, it had the same effect on Paul.

He had lost track of what was playing again. Ceci and Steve were still following closely; now and then they would exchange a smile, or Steve would say to them, “Get this.” The baby sat in her playpen sucking her thumb and listening docilely. Back in the kitchen part of the room Josie was mixing up pancake batter and frying bacon. It was a pleasant domestic scene; except that there on the floor in the corner, not moving, out cold, lay Walter Wong.

They sat down to eat. Josie had made a big stack of hot pancakes, and there was syrup, jam, honey, and cheese. Another record was playing, or maybe it was the same one, but now nobody seemed to be paying much attention. They talked about music, about the different kinds of great pancakes they had ever had all over the United States and in Mexico and Europe, and about the poetry readings at the Gashouse. They discussed the troubles they were having with the local cops. The Gashouse might be closed down; one friend’s studio had been condemned as unsanitary; another friend had been picked up for questioning because he was walking on the beach at five
A.M.
He had been taken to the station house, shoved down half a flight of stairs as if by accident, and released covered with bruises.

Paul would have liked to join in, to ask questions; but the silent presence of Walter Wong made him uneasy. They spoke of cars; Ceci told the Tylers that Paul was thinking of maybe buying one. Yes, he said, he thought he would. The car he had now was a “drag,” he said, testing their language; what he wanted was something more alive. He was going to go on, but he looked over his shoulder as he reached for the syrup, and fell silent. Nobody pushed him; maybe they knew what was bothering him, he thought.

“Hey, where’d you get the sea serpent?” Ceci asked between mouthfuls.

“Walter brought it over last night for the kids’ Christmas present,” Josie said. “I guess he lifted it somewhere.”

“Aw, come on,” Steve objected. “You couldn’t lift a thing like that. It’s too big. Even Walter couldn’t get away with that.”