Nowhere City (35 page)

He was, luckily, an excellent diver, and his jackknife was as good as or better than Glory’s. Bubbles blew past him as he plunged down into an element much warmer than he had expected, clear and soft. He surfaced, feeling better, and shook the water out of his face.

“Great!” he exclaimed, and struck out for the other end of the pool in a fast splashing crawl. After nearly a year of struggling with the steep, treacherously churning ocean surf, he had forgotten what it was like to swim in a block of tamed fresh water, in which all the movement was one’s own—where one could float, dive, skim on one’s back under the sun or shoot down through blue-green depths as clear as Jell-O. He did all these things; he played with the passive water, sweeping it aside as he swam into shallow waves and kicking it up in fans of white spray; so delighted with the game that for a few moments he forgot where he was and in what company. Then, rising after a surface dive, he noticed Glory watching him from where she floated at the pool’s edge.

“Great,” he said again, but less spontaneously. “It’s just fine.” Glory smiled faintly.

It was certainly funny, he thought, that he should find himself alone in a pool in Beverly Hills with a movie starlet. From what Katherine had said, he had assumed there would be a crowd, or at least a large group, present. “Hey,” he said, swimming over. “Listen. Where is everybody?”

“They’re out of town. Baby, I mean Mr. Petersen, he’s the fellow that owns this joint, uh—home. He and his wife flew to Europe; he’s looking for some Scandinavian types for a new film.”

“Oh.” Paul hung on to the edge of the pool near Glory. The warm, soft water lapped between them like a live element.

“Yeah, he’s in Finland now, testing the Finland girls.”

“That must be hard work.”

Glory smiled, but only briefly, saying nothing. She rested her elbows behind her on the white-tiled gutter, throwing her breasts into even greater prominence. Her lovely white, bare legs floated up through the chlorine-green water, only a few feet from Paul’s. He swallowed, and sought a topic of conversation.

“Katherine’s been telling me about this crazy kid that’s been giving you so much trouble. ... This teenager that’s been persecuting you,” he elaborated.

“Yeah.” A dark look came over Glory’s face. “Persecuting is right.”

“That’s too bad.” So angry was her expression that he wondered if she were angry with him for mentioning the topic.

“You want to hear the latest? Now I’ve got the kid’s
mother
after me.”

“Her mother? What does she want?”

“I d’know, the same thing I guess: wants me to get the kid a movie contract. What an asshole idea! I couldn’t get my best friend a movie contract, but that’s what they all think.” As Glory spoke her voice altered: the hesitation and over-refined accent was wiped off its surface, leaving only an angry, throaty whisper. “I didn’t see her; she only got me on the phone this one time; she started screaming and carrying on crazy, so I hung up. ... I mean it was too damn much. Christ knows how she got my private number: some dumb bastard at the studio must of given it out. Anyhow, the way it is now, I don’t dare pick up my own goddam phone when it rings.”

“Hell, that’s tough.”

“You’re telling me.”

“Being practically driven out of your own house that way.” Paul appreciated Glory’s misfortunes; they made her seem more human, more approachable. He swam slightly nearer.

“Aw well, if it had to happen, it could’ve happened at a worse time.” She shrugged and splashed water on her shoulders to prevent sunburn, though this part of the pool was mostly in shadow.

“How’s that?”

Glory explained that there wasn’t much percentage in her staying home weekends when she couldn’t use her pool. Though Katherine had already mentioned this, Paul listened with expressions of surprise and concern. That was very interesting, he said. It reminded him of a piece on the geology of Los Angeles he had read, which maintained that due to a fault in the rock structure, one section of the Santa Monica mountain range was gradually disintegrating. As he spoke, Glory’s deep brown eyes, ringed with water-proof lashes, widened in concern.

“Jee-zus,” she said. “Listen, what’s the name of that book? I want to get it.”

The article had appeared in a technical volume which had been pretty heavy going for Paul himself. Since Glory had left school at thirteen, she would probably find it quite unintelligible. But Harvard had taught him never to discourage anyone by suggesting that they would be unable to learn.

“Gosh, I don’t remember exactly. But I could look it up for you, if you like.” (He promised himself that he would find her something easier on the subject at the same time.)

“Yeah; that’d be really swell, if you would.” Glory’s serious, breathless enthusiasm could not be wholly put on, Paul thought. She really wanted to know, to learn. It was an overtone that Paul enjoyed in his relations with women—one reason, perhaps, that he was often drawn to students.

“I’ll bring you some other books too. I came across a pretty good one on the structure of this whole region. With pictures.”

“Yeah? That’s swell. But what I really want to see is the thing you told me about first.” Glory splashed her face. “I mean if that whole part of town is going to fall apart, I better put my house on the market pretty quick, huh? before everybody finds out.”

“It’s not going to fall apart
now,”
Paul said, smiling. “Even if this guy’s right, the whole process will take a long time.”

Glory’s expression remained troubled. In his mind he saw what she probably imagined: a great slow semicomic landslide and explosion above Sunset Boulevard, scattering trees and cars and houses and fragments of earth. Of course such landslides did take place in Los Angeles, he recalled, on a smaller scale. He became more definite. “Thousands of years, maybe more.”

“You mean it’s not going to happen for thousands of
years?”

“Well, probably not.” Paul noticed the scornful way in which Glory turned from him, as from a self-confessed false prophet. “Of course we can’t be sure.” She turned partially back. “That range of mountains is relatively unstable geologically.”

“You’ve really read up a lot on this place.”

“Well, I’ve had to. It’s part of my job. You see, I was writing a kind of history of the company I work for, back to when there was nothing around here but the dinosaurs.” Glory frowned, as if puzzled or bored. “You know, right where we are now there used to be a prehistoric jungle, full of ferns twenty feet tall and giant carnivorous reptiles.”

“Oh, yeah? Really?”

“Really,” Paul assured her. He watched a circle of white, wet flesh rise and fall with Glory’s breathing, and contrasted her interest in history favorably with that of Katherine, Ceci, and N.R.D.C. “You can see their bones down in the Los Angeles County Museum. ... The climate was very different from what it is now. It was terribly hot, and it probably rained most of the time.”

“Jesus. What a scene, huh?”

“Of course there weren’t any men around then. There were no animals, not any of the ones we know anyhow. There weren’t even any birds, except for a kind of flying dinosaur, sort of a cross between a lizard and a bat.”

“Ugh.” Glory shuddered. “Yeah; you know I saw one like that in a film once, but I thought it was something they made up.”

“No; they’ve found fossils of it, prints in the rocks. It was called a pterodactyl.”

“This crazy thing was about ten feet long, though.”

“They were that big. Some of the ones that couldn’t fly were about sixty feet long and thirty feet high, as high as, well, about as high as the house there.” Both of them looked at Baby Petersen’s house, an expanse of white shingles and glass glittering in the sun. Glory frowned, and shaded her eyes with her hand, as if she saw a procession of dinosaurs, or Colonial houses, passing.

“That’s funny,” she said.

“What’s funny?”

“Lookit that water coming off of the roof. I don’t get it. I mean where’s it coming from?”

Now that she had pointed it out, Paul observed a thin trickle of water falling from the gutter above the back porch. “It looks like it was raining,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“But it’s not raining.” Paul tilted his head back and gazed into a flat blue sky, blurred with sun.

“Nah, it hasn’t rained here in months.”

The dripping off the porch continued.

“It could be from somebody’s sprinkler system,” Paul suggested.

“Yeah. Somebody next door watering their garden, or kids playing with the hose. ... I guess I better go tell them to quit it.” She pulled her body up out of the water on strong, round, dancer’s arms, scrambled onto the tiled edge of the pool, and stood up.

“You want me to come with you?” Paul asked. Glory ought not to go out on the street alone, he felt, with those big holes in her bathing suit.

“No thanks.”

But the truth was that her nakedness was not vulnerable, he thought, as the gate swung shut behind her; on the contrary, it was a kind of armor. It also had nothing to do with intimacy. This situation, which was charged for him, meant nothing to her.

“Hey, I couldn’t find anything. Nobody’s got their water running now, anyhow. What d’you think?”

“I don’t know.” Paul left off looking at Glory’s legs, and climbed out. “If it was from some hose that was on earlier, it would be stopping now. ... Do you think it’s stopping?”

“It looks to me like it’s getting worse.”

In fact, the descent of water had increased from a scattered dripping to a more or less continual drizzle, splashing into silver puddles on the tiles.

“It must be coming from inside the house,” he said.

“Yeah. Something must be leaking in there.”

“We’d better go in and look.”

“We can’t,” Glory objected. “I don’t have the key.”

“Let’s try, anyhow.” Paul crossed the patio and tried the back door. Then, ducking under the water, he rattled the handles of French doors that opened onto the porch, while Glory tried to look inside, but unsuccessfully, since all the curtains were drawn.

“So what do we do now?”

The sun, striking through the falling drops, dappled Glory with gold light and shade as if she were standing under a waterfall. Dazzled by her appearance, and flattered by the way in which she referred the problem to him, he volunteered:

“I’ll climb up on to the porch roof. Maybe I can get into one of those windows.”

Luckily, the supports of the roof were made of iron wrought to resemble leaves and flowers, offering Paul some foothold. There was a bad moment while he negotiated the gutter, thinking not so much of the pain of a possible fall, as of the ensuing inconvenience and humiliation.

“It’s all wet up here,” he called, as he reached the sundeck, which was slippery with flowing water. “Wait a sec, I’ll see where it’s coming from ... Christ!”

Through a glazed door, Paul looked into what appeared to be a small dressing-room in ruffled Colonial style, now awash in three or four inches of water, which was seeping out over the door-sill and on to the deck—although the door itself, he discovered, was locked.

“We have to get in there,” Glory said when he had got down, with some difficulty, and described the scene. “They must’ve left the water on: that’d be just like Marianne, she’s so dim anyhow. ... We can try around the front, but if nothing’s open we’ll have to break a window.”

“Okay.” Now that he had managed the porch, Paul was ready for anything. As they circled the house, unsuccessfully shoving at the doors and windows, he began to recognize this as the kind of comic and surprising adventure he most enjoyed, one which would make an excellent story later; he felt partly repaid for Glory’s evident disinterest in him.

From boyhood reading of detective stories he recalled that glass could be broken neatly and safely if it were first covered with a piece of cloth and then hit with a blunt instrument. The back door was conveniently divided into small panes, and his towel would do; but there was nothing to strike it with, so carefully pruned and raked was the yard. Feeling impatient, and recklessly heroic in a minor way, he struck the glass with his fist, at first tentatively, and then harder. There was a loud, sharp crack—and at the next blow, a satisfying crash. Still shielding his arm with the towel, Paul reached in and unlatched the door. He got scratched, but not badly.

“Wow! ... Aw, that’s great.” For the first time, Glory gave him a smile of straightforward warmth. “Come on.”

Following her into the house, Paul passed rapidly through a large Early American kitchen, all hanging copperware and pine paneling, through a pantry, and into a dark dining-room hung with candelabra.

“Jesus. Look at that!”

Glory stood on the edge of a long, luxurious sunken living-room, done in Beverly Hills Chinese Chippendale. It was now sunken indeed, under two feet of water, which lapped softly at the green plush carpeting of the steps as at a mossy shore. The skirts of the brocade slipcovers stirred in the current, and brightly colored silk pillows floated here and there. The wallpaper, a Chinesey design on a gold background, was bulging and peeling away from the walls. A small rain mixed with flakes of plaster dripped steadily from the ceiling in several places.

“It must be coming from upstairs,” Paul said, he felt rather inanely.

“Yeah.”

“How do we get up there?”

She shrugged. “I guess we have to wade.”

With a sense of unreality, Paul followed Glory Green, in her pink Swiss-cheese bathing suit and fringed rubber hair, across the flooded living-room. The water was quite lukewarm. In a drowned magazine rack, copies of
Variety,
sodden with damp, had begun to disintegrate; all this must have been going on for quite a long time. They climbed the mossy steps into the front hall, where the carpeting was also wet; more water, he saw, was running quietly down the carpeted stairs.

“Geez.” Glory giggled suddenly; her voice was strangely loud, as in an underground cave. “C’mon.”

They splashed upstairs. Here too the rugs and floors were wet. Glory hurried from room to room, flinging doors open and shut so fast that Paul had only an impression of expanses of tinted mirror, polished maple and mahogany, and immense silk-shaded lamps held aloft by the glazed figures of Chinamen. Then, in the largest bedroom, she pulled open a bathroom door which seemed to stick more than the others. A tidal wave of water rushed out at them, with such force that it knocked Glory down. Paul, a few feet behind, had to grasp at a chair to keep upright.