by Alison Lurie
“Golly Christ, am I glad to get away from there,” Susy said as she sat waiting for a break in the traffic. “What an adventure!” She laughed. “Gee, Katherine, you know you were wonderful! You really saved us. You know, children, if it hadn’t been for Katherine we just probably wouldn’t have got out of there at all. Honestly, you were so cool and collected.”
She turned on to the highway, back towards home. “Oh, my goodness,” she added. “You’ve ripped your skirt.”
Katherine looked down. Her narrow cotton dress was torn roughly up the side to the thigh.
“Gee, I’m sorry,” Susy said. “That’s the trouble with wearing skirts: something like this always happens. I hope you can fix it.”
“I can’t fix it,” Katherine said. “It’s just ruined.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll get you another one. It’s all my fault. I’ll tell you what, I’ll get you some Capris. You ought to wear Capris on trips like this, anyway.”
“It’s not important,” Katherine said in an odd voice.
Susy looked at her. “Why, Katherine, what’s the matter?” she asked. “Why are you shaking all over like that now?”
PART TWO
Venice
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—Los Angeles Mirror News
7
PAUL LAY ON HIS BACK, looking up into a fantastic jungle. Strange trees spread their marbled, many-colored leaves; exotic flowers and vines twined round them, and creatures never seen on land or sea sat on the branches. There was a man with a bird’s head, some winged lizards, and a dog that had an electric toaster for a body. Irregular white patches showed among the foliage, where the plaster had fallen from Ceci’s bedroom ceiling.
Most of the painting was on the ceiling, though the trees rose from trunks sketched on the walls and gnarled roots descending into the molding. One, perhaps the inspiration of the whole composition, began as a peeling hot-water pipe. The illusion was increased by the absence of any furniture in the room except for the mattress on which they lay.
Ceci was asleep, sprawled beside Paul where she had fallen after a last long climax, her legs still spread wide, her hair damp over her face. Her arms were flung out, the hands relaxed now next to the marks they had made in cloth and flesh: the sheet crumpled into folds; white scars, fast fading, on his arm.
He was very happy. With Ceci everything was so simple, so easy. She asked no questions about his life or his feelings; she said nothing about her own. She had no psychic or somatic complaints that had to be got through first; she did not make any declarations or demand any promises, only pulled off her clothes and gave herself to him. Was it always like this for her? He wanted her to wake up and answer this question; he wanted to hear that for her, too, it had been a unique experience.
“Ceci.”
No answer. It was strange to watch her lying there so close, naked, sleeping. Her head was tilted back, her mouth a little open, loose. Most of the girls he had known preferred to do it in the dark, or at least in the dusk. And they always pulled their skirt down or the sheet up afterwards, however boldly they might have shown themselves earlier. As if they were ashamed, or didn’t trust him.
“Ceci.” He said it louder this time, impatient to establish communication. “Hey, Ceci.” He turned on to his side, shifting her warm body with his.
“Mmm.” She moved her legs towards him, her mouth against his shoulder. “Wha?”
“Hey. You were out cold, weren’t you?”
Ceci opened her eyes, light brown today, almost yellow; she did not speak. They stared at each other for about four seconds.
“You,” Paul said, pulling her towards him. They kissed long and deeply. “Is it always like this with you?”
Ceci had shut her eyes; now she opened them again: wide, golden. “No,” she said. “Sometimes.” She raised her head slowly, sleepily, supporting it on one hand, yawned, smiled. “But I knew it was going to be like this for us.”
“How could you know that?”
“Easy. Because I wanted you the first time I looked at you.”
“Did you. Well, so did I.” Paul laughed. “Love at first sight?” He felt embarrassed at having used the word “love,” so he laughed again, less easily. “Do you really believe in that?”
Ceci lay back, pushing her hair out of her face. It fell on the sheet, streaked light and dark like frayed hemp. It wasn’t dyed, though; there was a great tangle of the same colors between her legs. “You know what I mean,” she said. “Somebody you want right away; they’re the only ones you can ever really make it with. ... I mean you can try, with the others, but it won’t swing. Like somebody you don’t dig much at first, but maybe later on you get to talking to them and they turn out to be pretty intelligent and hip. So you get to know them, and finally you think, oh well, he’s kind of attractive, I guess. When you try to make it with somebody like that, it’s always a bust. It’s just pretty sad, because probably by that time you’re friends, so you keep telling each other that it’s all right; sure, it’s great. Uh-uh. If you don’t want somebody right off, they’ve got nothing for you. I mean physically.”
“You’re right,” Paul said. “Yeah, I think you’re right.” He sat up and kissed one of Ceci’s breasts lightly, pulling up the large brown-pink nipple. Then he kissed the other one. But something bothered him. “The trouble is,” he said, “sometimes you want somebody very much and it still doesn’t work out too well when you get them.” He realized that he was talking about Katherine. Whom had Ceci been talking about?
“Sure, that’s true. Like with us, last time wasn’t so great. I’m never much good the first time; I’m too charged up. Anyhow, your body’s got to get used to somebody else’s body. The better they know each other the better it gets.”
That wasn’t true of him and Katherine, Paul thought. The longer they knew each other, the worse it seemed to get, at least for her. But he didn’t want to discuss Katherine, or even think about her now. Instead he bent over and kissed Ceci again, this time under the breast where her tan ended. The line was so clear that she looked like a brown girl wearing a pink two-piece bathing suit.
“I like it the way you have the mattress right on the floor,” he said presently. “It makes me feel safe.”
“Mm?” Ceci spoke indistinctly against his arm, which she was licking dreamily.
“When I was a little kid, I used to be frightened all the time that there was a wolf under my bed at night. It was a story I read, the Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing. I mean the Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing. I used to hate to go to bed. I had to turn out the light by the door, and then I would take a running jump into my bed, so the wolf couldn’t grab hold of my feet. Sometimes he stayed there under the bed all night long.”
“Bad.” She moved up towards his shoulder. “Is he still there?”
“Oh no. Anyway, he’s certainly not here.”
“Maybe he’s squashed flat under the mattress,” Ceci suggested. She lifted her head. “Hey. How about some lunch?”
“Lunch?” With surprise, Paul realized that it was daytime, probably still morning, of some definite day. “Is it time for lunch?”
“Lunch for you, breakfast for me. I have to be at the gig at two.” Ceci stood up. “How about if I blow us some eggs, and you can call it an omelette?”
Saturday. It was Saturday morning. “Fine,” Paul said. He continued to lie on the bed, gazing at the ceiling. How fine everything was here, how easy. First you make love, then you eat. Everything you wanted and no strings attached. No regrets, no voices wailing about involvement and guilt and jealousy. It was so simple, so restful.
Cooking sounds came from the kitchen, mixed with jazz. Paul felt
hungry. He sat up, gathered his clothes from where they had fallen, and began to dress. Saturday morning. Katherine was at home cleaning the house again, or maybe she had finished that by now and was out shopping. She would never schedule love before lunch. It was all right for him when the light was on, she had once said: he only saw her or the bedclothes usually; but she couldn’t help seeing the furniture and the curtains and whether there were any cobwebs on the ceiling, and it distracted her. What would she think of Ceci’s ceiling?
Katherine would dislike Ceci even if she never saw the painting on the ceiling and had no idea that Paul knew her. She thought beatniks affected; nobody would act that way, she thought, unless they were acting.
If she knew—But he didn’t want to imagine that, and she didn’t know. She wouldn’t suspect; she had other things to think about. She had started working at U.C.L.A., and she was fixing up the house, if you could call it that. When he came home yesterday afternoon, he found her trying to move the sofa outside. It was a hell of a job, because the front door was so narrow. They finally managed to get it out, and into the garage, where Katherine covered it with a sheet. She said that Los Angeles was too dirty and gritty; if she didn’t put her good things away they would simply be ruined.
Though she disliked their house, Katherine was also worried about their being thrown out of it. She had discovered that some of their neighbors across the street had got notices from the Highway Department to vacate by March first. Everyone on that block had received eviction notices, it turned out; the city was clearing the land for a new freeway. Katherine became hysterical then, and made Paul call up their landlady.
Oh, there was nothing to get excited about, the landlady told him. She had inside information from her brother in the real estate business that construction wasn’t going to start over there for a long time—two or three years, at least.
“You see, there’s nothing to get excited about,” Paul had explained after he hung up. “She’s lying,” Katherine said, holding on to a chair in the middle distance. “Wait and see. I suppose she’s known about it all along, but she didn’t say anything so she could get you to rent her house. Probably nobody else would have taken it. Probably everyone knew they were going to build a freeway here, right across the street, except us. You should have asked somebody before you signed the lease.”
And since then, Paul thought, Katherine had looked in the mailbox daily as if she wanted to find an eviction notice there, whatever inconvenience it might cause her; it would prove the landlady a liar and her husband a fool. She hadn’t said anything more about it, but he knew her well. Too well: maybe that was the trouble.
And Ceci? Not well enough: nearly all she said or did was like a collection of road signs in a strange language. He could remember coming upon such incomprehensible signs when they were driving through Europe. Screams of warning, perhaps—or directions to the heavenly city?
Massi caduti!
Gravillons Roulants 30
(“Let’s go back,” Katherine had kept asking, even then.)
Even more puzzling than Ceci’s statements were her silences. She was the only girl he had known who did not say anything in bed. She asked no questions, made no requests, expressed no pain or pleasure; even when the room seemed to shake around them she did not cry out, only held him harder. At the end she gave a long, breathy laugh, the laugh of a creature that does not know any words. What did it mean? Was she happy, or was she amused? Was she laughing at him?
Fully clothed, Paul walked into the next room. It was roughly whitewashed and littered with junk—crates and plaster and broken furniture and cans of paint and heaps of newspapers. And a lot of drawings and canvases: crated, stacked against the walls, even piled on the floor. There was no easel, but propped up on an old trunk was a work in progress, a large painting in which black shapes of flames and rocks and tangled string were starting to rush across an empty white canvas. He stood and looked at this for some time. A lot of time and expensive oil paint had been used here. Ceci was an artist; that was what she really was. Not for the first time, he wished he knew more about contemporary art.
He went back through the bedroom into the kitchen. The record was still playing.
“Hi.” Ceci turned. She was wearing a man’s old work-shirt, with the sleeves rolled up, open all the way down the front. Otherwise she was wearing nothing.
“Hungry? It’s ready.” She pulled the pan off the stove, slid eggs onto a plate, added sliced tomatoes, green pepper, and onion, wiped her hands on her shirt-tail, pushed her hair back, and sat down. “You can sit there.”
Paul walked round the kitchen table, past the kitchen chair full of Ceci, and sat. Déjeuner sur l’herbe, he thought. He might at least have left off his jacket and tie.
“This is great,” he said, referring to everything.
“Thanks.” Ceci smiled. “You’re sort of great yourself,” she added
“So are you.”
They ate.
“What’s so great about me?” Paul asked.
“I d’know. I guess what I like is, you’ve got a lot of go but you’re not hung up on anything. And I think you’re kind of happy with yourself, so you don’t have to put anyone down.”
They smiled at each other. Ceci put her hand out across the table; Paul took it. He continued to eat with his left hand.
“You really trust me, don’t you?” he asked. “The way you went to sleep in my arms like that. You trust me like that and you hardly know me. How come?”
“You have to trust people. That’s the way it is.” She shrugged. “Sure, they might shuck you; but if you don’t trust anybody you shuck yourself worse.”
This answer pleased Paul, but not completely; he would have liked it to include some testimonial to himself. Whom else had she trusted? He relaxed his hold on Ceci’s hand; she took it back, and began to butter toast.
He tried another subject. “I really like the way you paint. That big picture you’re working on now. That’s really interesting.”
“Which one?”
He described it.
“Aw, that’s finished. I finished it last month; it’s only still up there because I haven’t done anything big since. I only blow a picture sometimes; you know, when I really feel like it. Here.” Ceci stretched across the table to put a piece of toast on Paul’s plate, skimming the butter with her right breast.
“Thanks.”
She sat down again, but the breast did not make it back under her shirt; it remained outside, the full lower curve shiny with butter, the nipple pointed towards him.
“But what I dig most,” (he used her idiom rather self-consciously) “is the painting in the bedroom. On the ceiling. That’s great.”
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.
“W
alter 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.