Nowhere City (11 page)

Ceci put down her coffee cup. “I didn’t paint that,” she said. “My husband made it.”

“Oh.” Paul had forgotten about the husband. “It’s good, anyhow,” he said. “Is he a painter too?”

“He could be. He’s everything. Only he’s nothing. He’s a shit. Let’s not talk about him.” Ceci became visibly disturbed as she spoke. Unconsciously, she pulled her shirt together in front; the breast disappeared.

Paul made an effort, and began to talk about something else: Ceci’s painting. He told Ceci that painting was very important and that she was very important. Meanwhile he kept thinking about the husband. Who was he; where was he? She ought to paint more and take it more seriously, he said. Then maybe she could have a show.

“What for?” Ceci sat back. “So they can take my pictures away and put them in somebody’s store, and then in somebody’s house, like some rich square? Uh-uh.” She grinned, and put her elbows on the table. “I feel like keeping my pictures.”

Paul grinned back. A good moment. She was a beautiful, a really original girl. But he kept thinking about her husband.

“What’s his name?”

Ceci did not pretend to be puzzled. “Walter.” She put her cup onto her plate, beginning to clear the table.

“Walter O’Connor.”

“Christ, no. O’Connor’s my name. Walter Wong.”

“Wong?”

“Yes. He’s half Chinese.” Ceci was standing up now, gathering plates. She looked at Paul hard, to see how he took this. He did not know how he took it himself, but he felt uneasy. What was he supposed to say?—Some of my best friends are Chinese—?

“My wife’s called Katherine,” he volunteered, thinking he might at least reciprocate. “She’s really a nice girl, but she’s very unhappy in Los Angeles.” These remarks sounded stupid. “She misses the East.” Ceci, continuing to stare at him, gave no help. “And she’s sick, most of the time.”

“That’s tough. I’m sorry. What’s the matter with her?”

“Sinus trouble. She gets terrible headaches.”

“For Christ’s sake.” Ceci put a pile of plates down loudly in the sink. “Headaches! I thought you meant like she had cancer or something.” She wrung out a dish-rag. “So you could still be making it with her, only you don’t feel like it,” she said indistinctly, wiping the wooden table. Paul heard concern in her voice, and insecurity. She really cared. Maybe it was this that made him lie by implication.

“She doesn’t feel like it either.”

“Only you still live with her. Like in the same house.”

“Well, yes. Only—” Paul paused.

His marriage had, up to now, kept him safe through the stormiest encounters: it was like an invisible aluminum armor against which the most passionate blows, either from within or from without, would always beat in vain. He had never deceived anyone—he always made it plain at the start that he was deeply committed to his marriage. As it happened, no woman had ever turned him down for this reason. Some of them broke out at once in a gale of sobs and protestations, subsiding eventually to sad looks and sighs. Others replied that that was just fine with them: they, too, did not wish to “get involved”—but sooner or later there would be sulks and arguments, an odor as of something smoldering, rising sometimes to a sudden blaze in which fists beat on cushions and objects of apparel or household use were thrown. Paul was always strongly moved when he saw women in tears or in a rage. It roused both his affections and his passions; his warm heart leapt to meet theirs—but it, too, fell back, checked by the invisible armor.

He should have explained himself to Ceci already, but this time everything had happened too fast. Still, the sooner the better; he told her now. He said that he loved his wife and that she loved him, in her own way; he announced—what he knew to be true—that she needed him very much and that he could not leave her.

Ceci made no comment whatsoever. She shook detergent over the dishes in the sink, and turned the tap. A thin twist of brownish water came out of the tap. “Damn it.” She turned both taps back and forth. “Shit.”

“What’s the matter?”

“The water pressure’s gone off again. It’s always doing that; sometimes we have practically no water in the building for days. I might as well leave the dishes and get dressed.”

Paul followed her into the bedroom. Why hadn’t he left it alone? “You didn’t say anything,” he finally burst out.

“Say anything?”

“About what I told you just now.”

“What’s there to say? I heard you.” Ceci pulled up the sheet and blanket, her back to him. Then, as if relenting, she turned to Paul and smiled, a half smile. He felt immeasurably relieved, reprieved.

Ceci took off her shirt and put on a black cotton jersey and a striped skirt. “Don’t you ever wear any underwear?” he asked.

“Don’t have any.” Ceci smiled. “It saves money.”

Paul laughed. But it also disturbed him. He thought of Ceci walking around Los Angeles, her secret parts exposed to the air and smog beneath her loose skirt. “Don’t you get cold in the winter?”

“What winter?”

“I keep forgetting.” Paul smiled. “This
is
winter, here.”

Or waiting on tables in the Aloha Coffee Shop, he thought, with her full pink naked breasts rubbing against the sleazy starched uniform. It made him feel nervous, almost jealous. If he were married to her he wouldn’t like it at all.

“What if you were caught in an accident?”

“Big bang for the cops.” Ceci grinned, looking up from fastening her sandals.

Paul saw a car smashed and smoking by the side of a freeway. Ceci was lying beside it, her eyes closed, her striped skirt wrenched up, her streaky gold hair loose at both ends, surrounded by gaping, leering policemen.

“Let’s see,” she went on. “Today is Saturday, tomorrow must be Sunday. Next week I’m on from eight to two every day. What’re you doing Monday afternoon? Can you get off early?”

“Sure, I can get away for an hour or so. But I have to be back by four; there’s a meeting. Why don’t we meet for coffee, about two-thirty?”

“Uh-uh. That’s no good. You know we can’t make it here and back in an hour and a half.” She stood up. “Two-thirty Tuesday?”

“All right.” Paul was bothered by her tone of passionate practicality. If they weren’t going to make love, didn’t she even want to see him?

Ceci opened the door. On the outside was printed in black crayon:

O’CONNOR

WONG

TOMASO

Paul looked at this as he went past. “Who’s Tomaso?” he asked. Ceci did not seem to hear him. They began going downstairs. Paul decided that he really wanted to know. “Who’s Tomaso?” he said again.

“This used to be his pad.” Ceci did not look at Paul. “Damn, I forgot the garbage.”

She ran back up the steps; Paul continued to descend them slowly. O’Connor, Wong, Tomaso. What had he got himself into?

An odd aching feeling had begun in his stomach, and his hands felt tense and nervous. What was the matter with him? He was both excited and worried. What the hell was it? The feeling wasn’t exactly physical; he remembered it from before, years before. But it had something to do with Ceci.

He stood still on the second step from the bottom. Yes. Now he recognized it: it was intense physical jealousy.

“Okay!” Ceci called out, hurrying down the stairs.

“Okay,” Paul called back, in an even more casual tone. After all, the whole thing was casual, uncomplicated. What he had always wanted. He stepped out on to the sidewalk and waited, smiling. As Ceci reached him, she looked up briefly out of her round, deeply fringed brown eyes.

No. It was no use pretending. Somehow, when and where he had least expected it, he had been caught.

O
NE A.M. ON AMBROSIA DRIVE,
high in the dry hills above the Strip. Glory Green went through her house turning out the lights. She should have been in bed hours ago—she had to be at the studio at eight—but she was too restless and depressed to sleep.

She stood in the archway of the long sunken living-room, her hand on the switch. The ten-foot artificial Christmas tree, pale pinkish blonde (it just matched her hair) had been put up and trimmed that morning by a professional interior decorator. Maxie had conned him into doing it gratis, for the plug. The tree was loaded with pink and silver balls and trinkets and candy. Three dozen little pink electric candles kept bubbling and winking off and on, and a music-box concealed in the stand tinkled “Silent Night,” over and over again.

Glory didn’t go for it. In the first place, it was three weeks to Christmas, and by that time the whole set-up would be dirty and everyone would be sick of it. Besides, the silver angels’-hair that Maxie’s gay-boy had spread all over everything in a last burst of inspiration, leaping from ladder to chair in his suede shoes, was too spooky. It reminded her of the scene in that old English movie—what was its name?—where the crazy old lady burns up in her room. Because long ago her boyfriend stood her up on her wedding day, and she flipped, so ever since she’s been holed up in this same room waiting for him to come back to her, in her ratty old-fashioned wedding dress, and spiders’ webs over everything, especially this great big wedding cake. It was with Jean Simmons.

Glory had been photographed under the tree that afternoon, in a silver
négligé.
If Maxie was lucky, she would come out in one of the Sunday papers the day before Christmas: “Miss Glory Green, opening some of the hundreds of gifts she has received this year from friends and fans around the world.” (The fag had brought the prop presents too, all done up in pink and silver.) “The two lovable puppies, Castor and Pollux, are a special gift to Glory from the Suharaja of Banipur. They are Manx Spaniels, one of the rarest and most expensive breeds of dogs in the world.”

The Suharaja had wanted very much to be in the picture too, but Maxie wouldn’t let him. It wasn’t only because she was married now; the straight dope was that the Suharaja sounded a lot better than he looked. He was a dim little brown man with gold neckties who didn’t speak English too good. It was just like the Suharaja of Banipur to give a girl something stupid for Christmas like two rare expensive dogs that weren’t even house-broken.

He didn’t have all that fabulously much loot either, ever since Banipur didn’t need him any more. He wasn’t really Suharaja of anything now. The way Glory understood it, he went and let his country have an election, and they didn’t pick up his option, and now Banipur belonged to some people called the Christian Marxists. So he was out of a job. He was always hanging around Hollywood; Glory had dated him a couple of times before she met Iz, and now he was back again. Probably eventually some girl who wasn’t making out too well professionally would marry him. If he was lucky it would be some decent kid that would really like him and give him a good time. But you couldn’t count on the Suharaja’s being lucky. More likely he would pick up a real little bitch.

Glory looked round the room, and sighed. She turned off the tree; “Silent Night” and the candles stopped. Then she turned off the other lights. The room became a long cave of dark, soft shapes—spooky really. It was kind of scary living up here in the hills all alone.

She walked down the hall and through to her bathroom, turning out lights as she went. She had already taken off her make-up and put five different kinds of skin conditioner on different parts of her face and body. Roger, the make-up man at the studio, would have been proud of her. He was always yakking at her about something she ought to use regularly every night, and mostly she never paid any attention. All that stuff interfered with a girl’s private life.

She took a roll of toilet paper out of the cupboard and began wrapping it round and round her head to protect the pink-blonde bouffant hair-do that had taken three hours in Mr. Gene’s place that morning. Round and round, until she had used up half the roll and constructed a bulging paper turban. She pasted the edges of it to her face and neck with Scotch tape. Now, if she slept carefully, it would keep till tomorrow.

She glanced at herself briefly in the bathroom mirror, quite without vanity. For Glory, beauty was a dress she could put on whenever she wished to, and after twenty years she was tired of it. Since kindergarten she had worn it, walking through the city like a child wearing a golden coat, and people had grabbed at her as she passed, greedily, but only because she was stuck inside the coat. Now it was her working clothes, her uniform, and when she was at home she took it off, quite deliberately. In the mirror shiny patches of pink, greased face alternated with dry patches of white and blue medicated lotion, so that she looked like a freakish clown.

Iz should have been in the photo. Maxie had wanted her to call him up and ask him over, if you can imagine, but she wouldn’t. So Maxie phoned Iz himself. He couldn’t reach Iz at the apartment he’d taken over in Westwood, or at the University, where he was working on some research thing, so he called the office in Beverly Hills.—Did Glory tell you to call me? Iz asked. (She was listening in on the extension.)—Uh-uh, Maxie said, it was my idea.—I thought so, Iz said. It’s the kind of thing I would expect from you. You really believe that I would come back just to pose for a picture so you can prove to everybody, the newspapers, that Glory and I are still living together.—There’s been a lot of unfavorable comment, Maxie said. It’s been now a month; people are speculating.—Well, screw them, Iz said. Tell them to hedge their bets.—You want to ruin this girl’s career? Maxie asked. Is that what you want to do? All right, don’t answer me now; think it over. Only why don’t you have some consideration for her? It’s a little thing, it’s a nothing to you, a few minutes of your time. So why be a louse?—I have a patient waiting, Iz said. I can’t discuss it with you now. Is Glory there? I’d like to speak to her. Glory shook her head violently.—Glory’s not here, Maxie answered.—All right. Let me give you some professional advice, Maxie, Iz said. I’ll give you this advice gratis, absolutely free. Go fuck yourself. He hung up.

Glory extinguished the bathroom light and went on into her all-white bedroom. Her bare feet sank into thick white carpeting and white fur rugs; the opaque glass lamps threw soft fans of light along the white walls. She had always gone for this room. Iz dug it too; he had helped her shop for all the kooky white or near-white plants that stood along the sliding glass doors to the patio.