Nowhere City (5 page)

“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.”

V
ISTA 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.”

Katherine’s head ached terribly now with the smoke and the noise; she said nothing, but focused on Susy Skinner and nodded vaguely.

“Of course, it’s too bad, the courses all started last month, in September, and they don’t begin again until February; but maybe you could get into a discussion group. They have some awfully good discussion groups. They don’t get the very best-known lecturers, but they usually have some very nice young instructor for the discussion leader. They meet in one of the member’s homes once a week, and they serve coffee and refreshments afterwards. For instance, there’s a New Book Discussion Group, with Mr. Evert, that discusses all the new books. I mean if you’re interested in keeping up with the new books.”

As sometimes happened during her sinus attacks, Katherine found it very difficult, even painful, to refocus her eyes; she continued staring at the side of Mrs. Skinner’s face with a meaningless fixity which Susy no doubt took for deep interest. “Well, I’d like to, but it’s really a question of time for me—” she began slowly to say.

“Oh, I know it is. I mean moving and getting settled into a new house, it honestly is the complete end: you don’t have to tell me. But when you have time you ought to look into it. Some of the discussion groups meet in lovely homes up in Bel Air and Brentwood. Fred used to lead a group on Major Trends in something, I forget what, Major Trends in—Anyway, it met at this absolutely gorgeous home in Laurel Canyon right above where Glory Green lives. You could see her swimming in her swimming pool from their dining room. It was at night, of course, but she has these spotlights built in underneath the water, so you could see her real well. American Realism. That was it. Major Trends in American Realism. Anyway, I’ll lend you the catalogue, and Fred can tell you which are the best professors.”

Katherine returned Susy’s hundred-watt smile with a weaker one. Her head was throbbing loudly. She was also confused by the innocent enthusiasm of this creature in what she would have unhesitatingly classified as the costume of a hard, successful chorus girl or, since this was Los Angeles, movie starlet. She rested her head on her hand, pressing the flesh along her cheekbones as if this might loosen the congestion. “Thank you, it sounds very interesting,” she said. “But I’m afraid I won’t have much time for anything like that. I’m planning to find a job as soon as I can.”

“Oh, I see.”

Katherine put the other hand on the other side of her face. She felt dizzy and in considerable pain. Peering out at Susy above pale distorted cheeks and a mouth compressed into a grotesque pout, she said: “I’m terribly sorry, but I’m afraid I’m not feeling very well. Do you suppose I could lie down somewhere for a little while?”

“Oh, gee. I’m awfully sorry. Would you like to lie down in the bedroom?”

“Yes, thank you.”

They went into a tiny room almost entirely filled by king-size furniture. Katherine lay down on the bed beside the coats of the guests and let Susy cover her with a green satin puff. She lay on her back because that seemed more normal, but as soon as Susy had shut the door she rolled over on to her face, crept across the chenille, and hung her head over the end of the bed at a forty-five-degree angle.

She lay there a long time, feeling neither happy nor well, listening to the blur of voices in the other room. How hot it was here, and dry; terribly dry. It was the dehydrated air of Los Angeles that she and her sinuses could not get used to; she imagined it full of minute grains of soot and sand. It wasn’t her fault: she had never wanted to come to Los Angeles. Why was she here, then? Well, because Paul had expected it of her, and so had everyone else. If she had refused to come, there would have been questions, and talk, and opinions, and life cracked open in an ugly way. And besides, she had really not liked it very much in Cambridge either, or in Boston where she had gone to school. She had not liked it very much in Worcester where she had been brought up, the only child of a second-rate professor in a second-rate college; or anywhere in the East, or anywhere that she had ever lived or been, for that matter.

But Los Angeles was worst. She hung down farther off the bed; her long, silky hair fell over her face and brushed the straw matting, and her head throbbed as the blood ran into it. Paul must have noticed by now that she had left the party, and no doubt he was annoyed. Probably he too wished that she had never come to Los Angeles. Probably he wished she were dead.

No, that was unfair. Katherine knew that her husband’s attitude of tolerant impatience concealed only impatient tolerance. He took life so easily, swimming through it as through a warm, shallow stream; he could not imagine what it meant to be rubbed raw by every ugly sight and sound. He had no idea of what it had cost her to come out here; of how nearly she hadn’t come at all, of the weeks of anxiety while she had tried to make up her mind. In the end perhaps she had decided to follow Paul just because he didn’t know and never would know what she went through—in the same blind hope that had encouraged her to love and marry him, the hope that somehow his good spirits and good luck would rub off on her.

Staring at the floor, Katherine thought these familiar thoughts. Meanwhile her position began to have its effect: drainage began on one side of her face. Being careful not to raise her head, she burrowed into her bag and took out a wad of Kleenex. She blew her nose.

“How are you feeling; are you feeling any better?” Susy said, coming into the bedroom suddenly. “Oh, please don’t get up.” Katherine subsided to a renewed view of matting flowered all about her head with used pink Kleenex like damp, crushed paper roses. “Look, I brought you another drink. Or would you rather have some coffee or tea or something?”

“No, thank you, nothing. I’m draining my sinuses,” Katherine added, to explain the position in which she had been caught, as if she were either looking for dust under the bed, or planning to throw up. “I have to lie this way to get drainage.”

“Gee, that’s too bad.” Susy sat down on the far end of the bed. “I know what it’s like; my sister had sinus for years and years. Only hers went away after she moved to California.”

“Well, mine hasn’t,” Katherine said. “Ever since I moved to California it’s been much, much worse.” She tried to gather up some of the Kleenex. “Most of the time my passages are completely blocked.”

“But you’ve only been in L.A. a little while,” Susy objected. “Just a few weeks. You have to get used to it. Why, I had a terrible skin condition when I came out here, and even though I went and lay on the beach practically every day it didn’t get better for months. That’s what you ought to do, go and—”

“When you came out here? I thought you were natives.”

“Oh, lordy no. Nobody’s a native in L.A. The whole city has practically been built from the ground up since the war. I’m from Muncie, Indiana, and Fred’s from Tennessee. But of course we’ve been here, lemme see, eight and a half years. It was awful coming out here for the first time and feeling sick and sort of terribly lost; and I didn’t know anybody and I hadn’t a glimmer how I was going to live here. I mean I know just how you feel and I’d like to help.” Susy clasped her hands, red-nailed and loaded with gold and glass, around her knees. “I mean it may seem funny, me thinking I could help anybody,” she said in her soft squeak of a voice. “Fred says I’m a bigger baby than my Markie is. But anyhow I could show you where to go to the beach, and which are the best places to shop, and you know, things like that.”

“Thank you,” Katherine said. She rolled over and sat up. Mrs. Skinner looked a most unlikely friend for her, but beggars cannot be choosers. “That’s very nice of you.” She drank from the glass Susy had brought, because it was the only liquid in sight.

“And maybe I could even help about finding a job. What kind of work do you do?”

“Well, usually secretarial.” Katherine had learned from experience that the phrase “research assistant” conveyed nothing to most people. “Back in Cambridge I used to work for some of the professors.”