Nowhere City (26 page)

Was she acting crazily? She had never done anything like this at her other jobs. But there had been no need to: back in Massachusetts there was a tradition of administrative calm—changes came so slowly, in such an orderly way, that they were hardly felt. Whereas here everything was always in flux, growing, shifting.

Westwood Boulevard, at the bottom of the hill, was crowded with shiny cars. The eucalyptus trees raised long bare arms like white wooden snakes above the traffic. Katherine crossed over, and started down the path by the tennis courts. Balls flew at her through the air as she went, and rebounded from the wire netting a few feet away—involuntarily she flinched and ducked, and hurried on faster. On the other side of the path, enclosed by an even denser grid offence topped with barbed wire, the university’s experimental citrus trees were in flower and fruit; the air was sticky with orange blossom scent.

She came out on Gayley Street, and ran across between the cars. Dr. Einsam’s apartment building was almost immediately opposite—a large white object, poured over the hillside like a plaster of Paris pueblo. An outside stairway followed it uphill through purple bougainvillea and palms, with open galleries at each landing.

Katherine stopped at the top of the steps, panting and hot. Her pulse was loud, and her knees weak from climbing so fast. She leaned against the wall and looked at her watch. Fifteen minutes were already gone; there was no more time to lose. She pulled the plans out of her bag, turned to the first door along the gallery, and knocked next to the nameplate:
I. Einsam.

There was a pause. Katherine didn’t want to stand staring at Iz’s door, so she turned and looked down at the descending steps, the palms and creepers, the glitter of the sun on the cars below. Suppose he weren’t home, what then?

“Well,” Iz said. “You surprise me.” She turned; Dr. Einsam stood on the threshold wearing a red plaid bathrobe.

“I didn’t mean to disturb—I mean, I’m sorry I had to disturb you,” she began, still breathing hard. “But it’s really important: I found the floor plans—here—for the new building. They were on Dr. Jekyll’s desk, and the Project isn’t on them
anywhere!’
Iz continued to watch Katherine without changing his small smile of curious interest; she felt that she must be explaining herself badly. “You see, this is the deadline,
today,
for any changes. The letter says. So I didn’t know what to do—I thought, if you could talk to Dr. Jekyll in time—he’ll be back from class at one—and so I just rushed over to find you. Here.” She held the plans further out towards Iz, but he still did not take them.

“I’m glad you came,” he said. “Come on in.” He pulled the door open, and Katherine followed him into a long low room, with trees and sky spread across one wall. Large exotic plants grew out of containers on the floor. “I was just having my breakfast,” Iz said. “Would you like to join me?”

“No, no thank you.” Katherine was really hungry, or should have been, as it was lunch time, but she was starting to feel uncomfortable. Iz’s very unconcerned manner gave her a sense of having done something serious and possibly wrong—as if soon he would turn on her and rebuke her for having stolen papers off Dr. Jekyll’s desk, or something worse. She looked at the floor and saw dark red carpeting and Iz’s bare feet. His legs, below the bathrobe, were bare too, and covered with dark hairs.

“Well, Katherine, if you don’t mind, I’ll finish my coffee. Here, sit down.” He gathered some newspapers off a low couch.

Katherine sat on the edge of the couch, about six inches from the floor, bending her knees sideways awkwardly. Through an open door at the other side of the room she could see Iz’s bedroom, with an unmade bed and a chest of drawers. On top of the chest, leaning up against the wall, was a racing bicycle. She held out the floor plans again, as if they were her passport. This time Iz took them. He turned the pages quickly while he stood above Katherine, drinking his coffee.

“Uh huh,” he said finally. He looked down at her, and then glanced out of the long window at the view of palms and roofs and distant hills.

“The deadline is today,” Katherine told him again. “It’s right there in the covering letter. It says—” she jumped up and pointed it out on the page he was holding—“Any objections or proposed changes must be sent to the Chairman of the Space Committee on or before March 30,’ you see, that’s
today.”

“Ya,” Iz said. “I see. Katherine. Look at the city out there. How do you like it?”

Katherine stood up, and went over to the window. Something was very, very wrong; but what? “Oh yes, it’s beautiful,” she said nervously. “You really do have a wonderful view. The university looks so pretty from here, with the sun on it. Or is that Bullock’s over there?”

“There’s no difference,” Iz said. “It’s like a friend of mine says, ‘I work in the big store at the bottom of the hill.’ Well.” He put his coffee cup down carefully on a table, dropped the plans to the floor, walked up behind Katherine, and ran both hands down her arms.

“Eh!” she cried out, and jumped as if she had touched an uninsulated wire.

Iz paid no attention, he took a step forward, pushing Katherine up against the cold glass of the window, air and trees, and kissed the back of her neck; she felt his body forced against hers, the coarse hair of his beard, his mouth.

“Oh no; I don’t want—” Katherine twisted round, and tried to pull away. “No!”

Iz stepped back, releasing her from the weight of his body, but he kept one hand against the window on each side, so that she could not move away. “What’s the matter with you today?” she said shakily.

“I want to sleep with you,” Iz said. “That’s what you came here for, isn’t it?”

“No. Of course not!”

“Ah, come on. I told you what my rules are. You knew I wasn’t joking.” Though he was not touching her, Iz was standing so close that Katherine could feel his breath and see the hairs growing out of his face into his beard. His arms, too, were covered with wiry black hair; it was on the backs of his hands, and on his legs, and matted on his chest. She felt she had been cornered by a dangerous, irrational animal.

“I didn’t even think about that!” she said, terrified. “I found the plans; and I knew they were important, and I had to get them to you; that’s all.”

“Ah, don’t kid me. You didn’t have to bring them all the way over here. You could have called me on the phone.” It was true; why hadn’t she thought of that? “Now couldn’t you have?” Iz smiled. Katherine recalled how she had run across Westwood, and wanted to run right back.

“I didn’t think of the telephone,” she said in an embarrassed voice. “I just rushed over. I’m sorry. Of course you’re right. That wasn’t necessary.”

“Depends what you need.” Iz leaned back, and let his arms fall. Though he continued to look at Katherine, she felt that the threat had diminished. “And why did it have to be me?” he went on. “How was it you didn’t try to get in touch with Charlie or Bert up at school?”

This idea, too, had simply not occurred to Katherine. “Well, but it’s you I usually ... she began feebly, but could not think how to end the sentence, and let her voice trail away.

“Another thing,” Iz continued, really grinning now. “Why did you jump at the conclusion that the plans you found are going into effect? How are you sure that our project hasn’t already been taken care of?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Has it already been taken care of?”

Iz nodded. “Uh-huh. Charlie and I saw Jekyll Saturday. He’s talked to Dr. Braun and it’s all set: we’re going to have two lab rooms and an office on the third floor.”

“Oh, that’s good.” But Katherine’s pleasure was extremely dim compared to her nervous embarrassment. “I’m sorry,” she repeated. “I was stupid. I don’t know why I didn’t think of all that.”

“You really wanted to come over here,” Iz told her. “You don’t have to feel sorry about it. I’m flattered. It’s a great thing, the unconscious mind.” He smiled, and stepped back.

“But I didn’t think—” Katherine began, and stopped. “I mean, it never occurred to me that you—I suppose I thought I was safe,” (she attempted a joke) “because I know psychiatrists don’t sleep with their patients.”

“Yah, they don’t,” Iz said. “They sleep with their secretaries.” He laughed. “But I’ll let you off this time,” he conceded. “You can go—” He broke off, looked at her, and said in an offhand way, “No; I don’t want to be rude. I’ll give you five—no, ten minutes. You can stay ten minutes and talk to me, before you have to leave. ... I think I’ll have another cup of coffee.” He walked across the room towards a wall kitchen. “Would you like some coffee?”

Should she go now? But everything had become so casual and ordinary that Katherine could hardly believe what had just taken place. Maybe it had all been a joke. “That’s very kind of you,” she said.

“Cream? Sugar?”

“Just cream, please.”

Iz handed Katherine her cup and sat down at a round table not unlike the tables at the ice-cream shop.

“Thank you,” Katherine said, and sat down opposite. He must have been kidding her. Still, she felt something had to be said to make sure, and fit the scene together; it couldn’t just disappear; that would be too weird, and really rather awful.

“Well, at least I did get to see your apartment,” she remarked. “It
is
pleasant. That long window, and all the plants, like a jungle.” Iz smiled, but made no other contribution. “Wouldn’t you really ever have invited me here? Even if I brought my husband? Wouldn’t that have been safe?”

“Of course. But he isn’t here, is he?” In pantomime, Iz leaned down and peered under the table, and then behind a low bookcase by the wall. The implication was that Paul was an insignificant object, small enough to be overlooked. Actually, of course, he was five or six inches taller than Iz. But Iz was somehow more concentrated, denser.

“How is Paul, incidentally?” Iz felt his face to see whether he had shaved the outlines of his black beard properly.

“Oh, he’s all right.” Though she felt much easier, Katherine could not quite manage to continue her confidences to Dr. Einsam. “How’s Glory?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t spoken to her for almost two weeks. She’s keeping busy, I suppose.” Iz’s voice was so dry and sour that Katherine felt a wave of sympathy.

“I’m sorry.”

Iz looked up. “You really are, aren’t you?” he said without irony. “You’re about the only one. Do you want to know what Dr. Robinson said to me yesterday?” She nodded. “He had the stupidity to come up and congratulate me on my separation.”

“What, really? How could he do that?”

“For him it was easy. You don’t know that department, Katherine. You should have been around here two years ago, when Jekyll first put me up for a teaching appointment. It was quite incredible. Academically I looked great, but they had also to take into consideration my character. They are all of course self-appointed clinical diagnosticians. They concluded I was immature, and my personal life was unstable. Because I had been married and divorced, and now they heard the rumor I was going around with an undergraduate. I told Jekyll, ‘I am not “going around with an undergraduate.” I am living with a very attractive and intelligent girl who happens at the moment to be taking some courses in the Department of Social Sciences.’ Only from their point of view it was as if I had deliberately selected some abstraction called
an undergraduate
to sleep with, exactly because it was against their rules. ... Jekyll’s a good guy; he tried to see it my way, but he just wasn’t flexible enough. If she had only been a graduate student, he kept saying, even a first-year graduate student, that would have been better. But, I pointed out to him, none of the first-year graduate students were as good-looking as Nancy. They were really a sad lot that year.” Iz looked quietly at his watch.

“That’s awful,” Katherine said. She was fascinated, though really shocked by the behavior of both sides. “I mean trying to interfere with people’s personal lives like that.”

“That’s not the end of it. Jekyll and Charlie Haraki brought me up again last year. By that time I wasn’t living with Nancy any longer, but I was engaged to Glory; they liked that even less. Two unsuccessful relationships, they said to Jekyll, and now he wants to marry a movie star. Isn’t there something rather unhealthy about that? I was furious. Unhealthy, to want to marry Glory! I said to Jekyll, what about them? What about Mrs. Braun: don’t you think anyone who would stay married to her for twenty years is pretty unhealthy? What about Robinson? He’s never been married at all; I bet he couldn’t even get it up for Glory; isn’t that pretty unhealthy?”

Iz looked at his watch again. A smile slowly appeared on his face. He drained his coffee cup and put it down. “Well, Mrs. Cattleman,” he said. “Look what time it is.”

“Oh, that’s right.” Katherine checked her own watch. “I’ll go now.” She stood up and started towards the door.

“No,” Iz said, getting up. “You’ve missed your chance. You see, you wanted to stay.” He spoke casually, and began casually to walk towards her.

“I’m sorry; I forgot to look at my watch,” Katherine explained, a little nervously. “I was too interested in what you were saying, I guess.” She picked up her pocketbook, and turned towards the exit. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”

“Uh-uh.” Iz put his hand over Katherine’s on the doorknob, so that she could not turn it.

“Now come on, Iz,” she exclaimed. “I’m leaving now. Don’t be difficult.” She twisted and pulled to get her hand free, and open the door, but unsuccessfully—Iz only tightened his grip. The muscle of his arm pressed against hers. “Oh, really, don’t be so
silly
again,” she continued, putting on a primly humorous tone. “I only stayed a moment longer than you said I could. You’re not going to make anything of
that,
surely!”

“I’m sorry,” Iz said in a not-sorry voice. “But I’ve never let any woman make a fool of me twice.” With his free hand he took hold of Katherine’s hair at the back of her neck, and turned her face forcibly towards his. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do.” He spoke in a friendly, reasonable tone, almost as if he were dictating a report. “I’m going to give you what you came here for. Don’t play coy with me. If you won’t take your clothes off, I’ll tear them off. If you won’t lie down, I’ll knock you down. If you won’t make love with me, I’ll rape you.”