Nowhere City (25 page)

“No.”

“Sure you did, too. Right at the beginning.”

“You must have misunderstood me. I never said anything like that.” Ceci’s eyes began to dilate, her mouth opened, and she took half a step back. “Maybe you assumed it,” he said more gently.

Paul started to stand up, but before he could rise very far Ceci hit him in the head with her handbag. “Ow!” he exclaimed, and toppled over sideways into a coarse, prickly bush. She hit him again, less accurately now because there were branches in the way. “For Christ’s sake!”

“You shit!” Ceci shouted. “You cheap, lying, two-timing shit!” She burst into angry tears.

Paul picked himself out of the bush. The sharp twigs clung to his clothes; he stood up, trailing shreds of Dacron suiting. He moved cautiously towards Ceci, one arm advanced to put round her shoulders, the other to ward off further blows.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Ceci did not raise her bag again; it hung limply to the ground. But she jerked aside from his touch.

“All this time!” she gasped. “Mother of God, all this time you’ve been shucking me. What a bring-down!”

“You don’t understand.” Paul did not attempt to hold Ceci again, but sort of swayed towards her. “What’s between me and Katherine has nothing to do with us. It’s a completely different kind of thing; it’s not really physical. We don’t really make love very often. And anyhow, that side of it isn’t very important. I mean, well. I don’t enjoy it very intensely physically.”

If it were possible to make the situation worse, he had done so.

“Christ almighty!” Ceci shouted, brushing aside the tears and strands of hair with which her face was streaked. Her small hands were clenched into fists: Paul thought she was going to hit him again, and took a step backwards. But she only glared, and drew her breath in like a cat hissing. “You think that’s an
excuse,
that you don’t like doing it with her? Man, what a hypocritical, fucked-up square you really are, underneath!”

“I don’t get it,” Paul said. He felt shell-shocked. “What do you want me to do? Hell, what do you want me to say?”

“Ah, shit.” Ceci’s voice was thick with tears. She controlled herself, and went on, “If you really liked it—say if you really dug making it with your wife, whenever she felt well enough to want to, I could pick up on that. I wouldn’t like it, but I’d have to relate. ... You thought you had to make up a cheap story for me.” She focused on Paul’s face, his expression of blank confusion. “Man, you really are dumb,” she said. “Walter was right. You’re just nowhere.”

“Listen,” she added. “I’ve got to get to the restaurant. Stella will be flipping trying to cover for me. I oughta be there now.” She turned and began to pick her way back across the field.

The mention of Walter Wong reminded Paul that he, too, had a grudge. Maybe if he named it they could compromise and this could still turn into an ordinary fight. “Ah come on,” he said to the back of her jersey, her disordered streaky gold hair, her bare scratched arms. “You’ve been involved with other people too, a lot of people. Wong, and that guy you went to San Francisco with that you told me about, and Tomaso, and maybe even John and Steve.” To extend his list, Paul included what he had only sometimes suspected, and even an improbable guess.

“I have not!” Ceci turned to face him on the bank above the road, crying again. “I mean, hell, so what if I have, that’s all the past. I didn’t even know you then.”

At these revelations, a feeling like a paring-knife turned in Paul’s intestines. But he tried to pay no attention to it. It was more important not to lose Ceci. Making an effort, he saw it from her point of view; admitted that he had, at least, let her deceive herself. But if he had known how seriously she took it—

“Ceci! Listen.” He spoke with emphasis; held out his arms to embrace her, and bounded forward. But at the same moment Ceci jumped off the edge of the bank on to the road.

Paul clasped empty space; he lost his balance, shouted “Ahh! Help!” and waved his arms wildly to avoid falling head first. His feet slid out from under him and he skidded down the bank on his back in a landslide of stones and dust.

“Oof!” He came to rest on his rear in the ditch, considerably shaken and bruised. He looked up. Ceci stood on the crest of the road watching him. For the first time that day she was laughing.

“Wow, uh, oh God!” she laughed. “Ha ha ha ha!” Her mouth was stretched wide, and the small white teeth showed in a kitten’s grin. “Wow, do you look dumb. ... Well, get up,” she added. “Don’t just lie there. Climb into your Jag and drive me to the restaurant.”

Katherine typed, with an I.B.M. electric typewriter, onto a white index card. She rolled the card out of the carriage, inserted another, and typed:

She was copying a set of 1,800 flash cards of an experiment on the psychology of learning. Each card consisted of six out of a possible ten nonsense syllables selected and arranged at random.

It was now ten-thirty; Katherine had been working on this project for an hour and a half, and had completed 185 cards. And it wasn’t even her job. She was supposed to be working for Iz that day, but he had lent her to Professor Jekyll. So she was sitting in Dr. Jekyll’s office, and Iz was probably still asleep in bed, unless he was lying on the beach somewhere. It was a pleasant warm day, outside.

This job was not only an insult to Katherine’s intelligence and education, but a waste of university funds, because she earned $2.71 an hour, much more than an ordinary typist. Since there was no meeting, and Iz was not coming in, she would be doing it from now until five o’clock.

Usually, the days that she worked for Iz were the best ones: partly because his projects were apt to be more interesting, but mostly because of the conversations that went with them.

Now that they were friends, when Iz came in he would sit down on the edge of Katherine’s desk and say, “Well, Katherine. What’s new?” And she would tell him, or he would tell her, before they started work. Later, in the middle of dictating a report or a case history, he would exclaim, “Hey. I haven’t eaten anything since last night. I’m starving. Come on.” And they would climb into Iz’s car and skid downhill to the Village Delicatessen for thick pastrami sandwiches, or to the English teashop on Westwood Boulevard which had scones with eight kinds of marmalade and jam. Once they went all the way out to Santa Monica because it was the only place for real strawberry cheesecake outside of Hollywood. At first Katherine wouldn’t order anything, but her refusals made so much trouble (“You have some problem about accepting food, don’t you? What is it?”) that presently she gave in. She had to resign herself to letting him pay, too. (“I’m rich, comparatively; you’re poor. When you make twenty dollars an hour, I’ll let you take me; okay?”)

Katherine had learned, in these last two weeks, a good deal about Iz. She knew something about his childhood, which had been spent in ten different cities in six different countries; she knew something about his marriage, and something about his politics. “Do you know what Jackie in the office told me the other day?” she had asked him. “She told me to watch out for you, you were a Communist.” Iz groaned. “Oh no, no,” he said. “Here we go again. Listen, I’m less of a Communist than you are. Or Jackie is. I’m an
anarchist.
An anarchist is the
opposite
of a Communist.” Katherine’s face did not show immediate comprehension. “Of course some of the early anarchists were also Communists, they thought, but that was their mistake. See, a Communist believes always in more order. An anarchist believes in
less
order: less government, less rules, less system.”

“But—” Katherine began; he continued. “Now you admit all organizations are terrible, inhuman; the larger they are the more they are terrible, okay?”

Did she admit this? Katherine was not sure; she had never thought about it. She smiled uncertainly. Iz took this for agreement, and went on to talk about placing random messages on the telegraph wires, confusing policemen by disobedience of unwritten laws, and giving deliberately absurd answers to questionnaires. “Every day you should create a little disorganization somewhere, that’s the idea.”

“Like Boy Scouts,” Katherine could not help saying; but Iz did not get irritated. “That’s right,” he said, smiling. “A good deed every day. You’re starting to understand. Only the anarchist is unkind, unthrifty, irreverent, disloyal, etcetera.”

“All I ever heard about anarchists was that they threw bombs at things,” Katherine remarked, half giggling. “What’s that song? ‘In an anarchistic garret so meager and so mean, You can smell the pungent odor of nitroglycerine. They’re busy making fuses and filling cans with nails—’”

“Ah, not any more,” Iz had said, laughing so that it was impossible to know whether he were serious. “That was in the early days, when our methods were more crude.”

And as she found out about Iz, she told him about herself. It was true, for instance, that she really thought makeup was vulgar and nasty—she daubed on lipstick and powder every morning simply because, after all, it was the rule. “Whose rule?” Iz had inquired. “If you don’t like grease on your face, so leave it off. Who cares?” And after all nobody seemed to; at least they didn’t say anything about it. Of course out here everyone was so weird, it didn’t matter what you did. It would have been different back East.

They had a joke between them about Katherine’s being one of Dr. Einsam’s patients. If I were your patient, she would ask sometimes, what would you advise me about this? And he would give sometimes an outlandish, sometimes a reasonable answer. “Basically,” he had said last time, seriously, “you can’t do anything until you decide what you actually want from your husband. Why don’t you think about that?”

So Katherine was thinking about it. Meanwhile, following the advice Iz had given her that first day in the ice-cream shop, she had begun what he called “Paul-watching.” It was amazing how, with Iz’s assistance and interest, what in the past had hurt so much had become almost a game. As he had predicted, signs of Paul’s infidelity continued to appear, increasing in obviousness. Finally last week he had come home to supper looking as if he’d been in a fight, all bruised and scratched and covered with dust. How puzzled he had seemed when she didn’t ask any questions! Katherine had to smile when she recalled it—and the way he had taken off his filthy suit and laid it out on a chair for her to see, instead of putting it into the laundry hamper as usual. “He’s trying to tell you something,” Iz had said. “I had a German Shepherd like that once.”

Dr. Jekyll’s office, like most in the Department of Social Sciences, was dark, airless, and hot; it looked upon a yellow brick wall, with three aluminum ventilator hoods approaching along the top. No wonder everyone wanted to move. Katherine had come to the end of the pack of index cards; she swiveled her chair round and reached for more in the bottom drawer. As she did so, she noticed part of a floor plan sticking out from some papers on Dr. Jekyll’s desk. Taking care not to displace anything else, she eased it out.

Almost at once she realized that this must be the final plan for the allocation of space in the new Social Sciences building; and that the Project on Perception and Delinquency was allotted nothing. From the attached memorandum she learned that this plan was being sent to all the full professors as a last step before it was put into effect. “Any objections or proposed changes must be sent to the Chairman of the Space Committee
on or before March 30,”
it ended ominously.

March 30. That was today. What was going to happen, then? The shack in which the Project was now located would be torn down in June, and Perception and Delinquency would have no place to go. Dr. Jekyll must have forgotten that he had promised to take care of them. Or they had forgotten to remind him, or they didn’t know that today was the deadline in the “space race.” What ought she to do? Oh, why wasn’t Iz here? She couldn’t speak to Dr. Jekyll herself, but someone ought to speak to him, right away. A feeling of anxious excitement began to expand inside Katherine.

This was a crisis. She must get in touch with Iz, as soon as possible. It was past eleven—Dr. Jekyll had classes, he had said he wouldn’t be back until one. There was time, if she went now, if she hurried, to get to Iz, show him the plan, and bring it, and him, back. Then he could speak to Dr. Jekyll, and Dr. Jekyll could speak to the Committee, and the space race could be won after all; all due to a fortunate accident, and to Katherine Cattleman.

Without stopping to think any more, Katherine stood up, shoved the floor plan into her bag, and left the office, locking the door behind her. As fast as she could go without actually running, she went along the hall, down two flights of stairs, and out of the building.

As usual, it was glaringly bright outside. The sun on the cement walls and brick walls hurt her eyes. To Katherine’s right was an orange steel skeleton for the plans she had in her bag, the rooms marked out as cubes of empty space. In imagination, she saw herself and the rest of the Project sitting triumphant up there, suspended in the air around an invisible desk. In the distance, across Westwood Boulevard, she could see the trees and pale roofs of apartment houses; somewhere among them was Dr. Einsam’s apartment.

She started towards it, at first along the path. But soon, becoming impatient, she veered off straight downhill past another excavation, picking her way around construction equipment and piles of cinder-blocks. Another immense modernistic building, six floors of poured concrete and steel, was rising here. According to a sign, it was to be called Parking Structure F. Dust covered her shoes, the ones Iz approved of.