by Alison Lurie
Ceci looked over her naked shoulder, grinned provokingly, and shook her head. “Uh-uh.”
Paul set his jaw, took two steps into the kitchen, seized her by both arms, and pulled. She resisted strongly at first. Then suddenly she relaxed, so that he stumbled backwards. They both fell on to the living-room rug, Ceci roaring with laughter.
“You idiot!” he exclaimed. Ceci lay beside him and laughed; he could feel her bare flesh shake. In a flood of exasperation and desire he put one hand over her mouth, the other arm across the warm landscape of her breasts.
“Mmm,” she murmured, and bit the side of his hand. In a moment they were thrashing about on the carpet in a forest of chair and table legs.
“Ceci, Ceci, you crazy fool,” Paul whispered.
“Let’s, let’s,” she replied. “Let’s do it again”; and she wrapped her arms, legs, and long hair round him; and this time he managed to forget almost everything.
14
“WHY IS DR. EINSAM ALWAYS LATE TO OUR MEETINGS?” said Bert Smith to Charlie Haraki, leaning back in the chair and setting his feet upon the edge of Katherine’s desk. “What’s your interpretation of this?” Dr. Haraki held out his hands, palms up, and shook his round head with comic rapidity, meaning: I don’t know. “Does it express a rejection of us as individuals, perhaps?”
Dr. Einsam, who had just come in forty-five minutes late, went on hanging up his coat in the corner and affected not to hear.
“But he’s also late to departmental meetings, we’ve got to remember,” Dr. Haraki remarked. “And often to dinner parties.” He played with his pencil, drawing small circles on the pad.
“Maybe we have to deal here with a more global pattern,” Dr. Smith suggested. “A diffuse unwillingness to meet all his responsibilities. For instance.”
Iz took off his glasses and polished them.
“Still, I happen to know he’s always on time for his patients,” Dr. Haraki said.
“That’s true. He is always on time for his patients. What do we make of that?”
Iz took a group of papers out of his briefcase. He pulled up a chair and sat down to read them, still paying absolutely no attention to his colleagues’ baiting. He looked tense, though, Katherine thought, and nervous. Or perhaps she only thought so, because she was tense and nervous herself, and sick: in the grip of the worst sinus attack she had had since the day she arrived in Los Angeles. Her nasal passages were completely stopped up, her head ached fearfully, her throat was sore, and her left ear reverberated with a whuffling, buzzing noise as if an insect had flown into it and got stuck there. She should have stayed home today, really. But the truth was that since last night she couldn’t abide her own house, after what she had discovered there, or thought she had discovered there.
Soon, perhaps tonight, there would have to be a painful scene in that house. But she wasn’t going to think about it now; she had a job to do. She propped one inflamed cheek on her hand, and tried to attend to the conversation. Dr. Smith and Dr. Haraki, with some assistance from Dr. Einsam, were talking now about the trouble a colleague called Dr. Jekyll was having with his dictaphone—a cheap, new model which he had purchased out of foolish economy and against their advice. This soon led into a continuation of last meeting’s argument about which tape recorder they should buy for field interviewing. Charlie Haraki favored the Moscowitz, which was sturdy, long-playing, and reliable. Bert Smith thought the Moscowitz was too bulky for field work. He wanted to try a new Japanese-made machine, the Kitano, which weighed only half as much and could be concealed in a coat pocket or handbag. However, it cost more, and had a recording capacity of only forty minutes. (This cultural reversal was not a freak, but typical. Dr. Smith’s cliffside apartment in Pacific Palisades was full of Japanese screens, silk pillows, and Oriental crockery; while Dr. Haraki lived in a split-level ranch house in Culver City with modern walnut furniture and a barbecue pit.) Katherine’s head hurt; her throat hurt.
“What do you think, Katherine?” Dr. Haraki asked suddenly. “Which would be easier for you to transcribe from?”
She blinked. “What? I’m sorry, I’m afraid I wasn’t listening.”
“Katherine doesn’t look well today,” Dr. Einsam said, observing her for the first time.
“That’s true,” Dr. Haraki agreed. “She looks pale. How do you feel, Katherine?”
“I’m all right. I have a sinus headache, that’s all.” Dr. Haraki had heard of Katherine’s sinus; he made a sympathetic face. “A rather bad one.” She smiled deprecatingly.
“For God’s sake,” Dr. Einsam said impatiently. “We don’t want you to come in when you’re sick. Go home and go to bed. What do you think we are here, white slavers?”
“I don’t want to go home,” Katherine said. “I’m not really sick. I mean I don’t have a fever or anything. I know I’m not contagious.”
Dr. Einsam looked as if he were going to object, but then seemed to change his mind. “Okay,” he said, and re-arranged the papers in his hand.
“You shouldn’t have sinus infections now,” Dr. Haraki suggested mildly. “It’s spring.” He gestured out the window, where some green-leaved shrubs that had been there all along were speckled by the same smoggy sunlight.
“No it isn’t,” she said. “Not really.”
“Oh? Why not?”
“Well, it’s just not the same. You can’t have spring when you haven’t had winter. It’s—well, you’d understand if you’d ever lived in the East.”
“You don’t like Los Angeles, do you?” Dr. Einsam said.
“No,” she admitted, cornered.
“Really? What don’t you like about it?” Dr. Haraki asked. Katherine looked at him defensively—she hated being the center of group attention. But he smiled back with such polite, friendly interest, so different from Dr. Smith’s formality or Dr. Einsam’s ironic overfamiliarity, that she tried to answer him.
“I think it’s partly that kind of thing. There being no seasons. Because everything runs together out here; you never know where you are, when there isn’t any winter or any bad weather, ever.”
“Most people would consider that an advantage,” Dr. Smith said.
“Well, I don’t,” Katherine replied. “This way the months don’t mean anything.” She addressed herself to Dr. Smith; he came from the Middle West and ought to understand. “And the days of the week don’t mean anything: the stores stay open on Sundays and people keep coming to work here. I know it’s mostly because of the rats and the other animal experiments that are going on, but all the same. It’s so confusing. Then there’s not really any day or night here either. You go to a restaurant for dinner and you see people sitting at the next table eating breakfast. Everything’s all mixed up and wrong.”
Dr. Smith regarded her with a professional stare. “Lack of expected cues,” he announced to the group. “It’s like those experiments of Skinner’s, where he had the dogs on a very elaborate schedule for food and sleep, and then when he took the apparatus away the ones who’d been on the schedule longest went into a kind of neurotic daze. They began rushing back and forth in the cage, and showing diffuse anxiety and really highly unstructured behavior. But there was some emotional exhilaration too.”
“I heard about that,” Dr. Haraki said. “One of my students was telling me. It was that pretty girl, Mrs. Dodge; do you know her?”
What Katherine wanted to know was, what had happened to the dogs after the experiment? Did they ever get right again? But already the conversation had turned to other subjects.
The meeting was brief that day: Dr. Haraki had a special seminar on delinquency with some social workers, and Dr. Smith went off to the animal labs to look at the twenty rats in whom he was trying to induce alcoholism by manipulation of their liquid intake. Dr. Einsam remained; he told Katherine that he wanted to dictate a letter. She opened her notebook again and poised her pencil.
“Hm.” Iz tilted his chair back and looked at the ceiling. Katherine waited. Two minutes passed
.
“What time is it?” he said suddenly.
Katherine consulted her little gold watch. “Five past three.”
“Would you like some ice cream? I’ll drive you down to the Village.”
Nothing, Katherine had promised herself, would ever make her get into a car with Dr. Einsam again.
“No thank you,” she said. “I don’t really feel like it.”
“Sure you do. It’ll be good for you.”
“But I’m not hungry.” Katherine’s voice, ringing through the aching and buzz inside her head, sounded shrill, even to her.
“Okay; you can take notes while I eat.”
The distance from U.C.L.A. to Westwood Village is short, and though there was a close call with a green Buick coming out of Bullock’s parking lot, they arrived without incident. The ice-cream parlor was a small, awkwardly shaped room, dimly lit by imitation gas lights and furnished with red-and-white striped wallpaper, flimsy wire chairs and tables, and innumerable mirrors and fringes and flounces. There were jars of hard candy, coy signs in Victorian Gothic (“Our Own Scrumptious Strawberry Shake, 65 cents”), and stuffed animals.
Dr. Einsam made his way through this little cave of childish indulgence without appearing to notice how out-of-place he looked there, like a humorous collage in which the black-and-white photograph of a bearded European gentleman has been cut out and pasted on to a colored advertisement.
“Let’s go into the courtyard,” he suggested. “It’s warm today.”
It was not warm in the courtyard, which except for themselves was empty. A fresh, chilly breeze blew through the stucco arches, among deserted tables and chairs; it ruffled the foliage and flowers in the concrete pots. Katherine drew her thin raincoat around her shoulders. For the first time she was aware of wind and weather—of the city as more than a great stale room, walled with mountains and roofed with smog.
“You’re cold, aren’t you?” Dr. Einsam said. “We’d better go back inside.”
As always, his bossy dogmatism angered her. “No; I’m all right. Let’s stay here.” She took her shorthand pad out of her bag and put it on the table so that Dr. Einsam could see her staying here and ready to take dictation.
Dr. Einsam looked at the shorthand pad, and then into the air, and then at Katherine. “So. What’d you think of the meeting?” he said vaguely.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she answered, surprised. But as a matter of fact there was a question she wanted to ask. “Tell me something, though. What happened to the dogs in that experiment?”
“What happened to what dogs?”
“In that experiment, the one Dr. Smith was talking about that got the dogs so mixed up. What happened to them afterwards?”
“Don’t know.” Iz shrugged. “The same as happens to most experimental animals, I would guess.”
“And what’s that?”
“Send them over to the nearest med school labs.” He observed Katherine’s expression. “You see, once animals have been through one psychological experiment, you can’t use them in another, because they wouldn’t be normal subjects any longer.”
Katherine set her mouth. “I think that’s terrible,” she said. “Those poor dogs. First you put them through all that misery and confusion, for months and months, and then you send them off to be tortured by medical students. I’m not an anti-vivisectionist or anything,” she added. “I realize they have to use animals for research, I mean to test new medicines and so forth. But what does that experiment prove? Just that if all the order of life is taken away it’s depressing and terrible. Everybody already knows that.”
Iz looked at Katherine intently throughout this speech. When she finished he cleared his throat, as if he were about to speak, but apparently thought better of it.
“The professor that did that experiment, he must be a sadist or something,” she added, looking at him for confirmation.
“I don’t know him. Maybe he is, who knows? They have that motive, occasionally, these guys who go into experimental psych. But most likely, it was pure scientific curiosity. He really wanted to see what would happen. Or he had an idea what would happen, and he wanted to prove it.”
A waitress appeared in the courtyard, shivering in a teased hairdo and a pink uniform. “Did you want something?” she asked in an affected, unfriendly voice. “We aren’t serving out here yet.”
Katherine started to get up, but Iz motioned her back. “Please,” he said. “I’d like some ice cream. Tell me,” he went on, looking at her persuasively. “This flavor-of-the-month you have this month, this Ginger Fluff. Is it any good?”
The waitress looked down. “Well,” she said distantly. “You might like it. I don’t care for it myself.”
“Ah. Why not?” Iz gave her a direct, solemn glance, appropriate to the most weighty question or respondent—as if he were professionally engaged. Katherine had never been inside a psychiatrist’s office, and never intended to be, but she recognized it, perhaps from movies.
“Well, I d’know. I guess I don’t like ginger much. And then the Fluff part, that’s marshmallows.”
“And you don’t like marshmallows,” Iz interjected.
The girl giggled. “Nah, I don’t mind marshmallows.” Her voice had completely changed; it was now cheerful, nasal, unrefined.
“You don’t mind marshmallows, but you don’t like them with ginger.”
“That’s right.” Now she gave him an open, confident smile, like a patient pleased and surprised by a diagnosis. “Yeah, that’s what it is.”
“Well,” Iz said. “I don’t mind ginger but I don’t like it with marshmallows. So I’ll have orange sherbet. Two dishes of orange sherbet?”
“I’m not hungry,” Katherine insisted.
“One dish of orange sherbet.”
Though the waitress had gone, Katherine said nothing. She glanced round at the empty tables and chairs, the stained cement, the lush plants in their containers. Looking more closely at the pot nearest them, she realized that the foliage was half real, half artificial: the living shrubs and vines, winter-faded, had been eked out with shiny plastic ones.
“This matter of the lack of cues,” Iz said. “It doesn’t have to create a panic. Look at it this way. Man is not a dog: he is a rational animal. If there is no schedule, then you are free to work out your own schedule. A place like this, Los Angeles, actually it’s a great opportunity. Consider me, for instance. When I first got here I was still beating out my brain trying to be at work every day at nine A.M. I don’t do that any more. I get up when I feel like it, at twelve or one, I don’t see any patients before two, so I’m still fresh for evening hours. So, I get home about eleven and have supper and I’m still completely awake at midnight. And between then and four A.M. is the best time in Los Angeles, Katherine. The city’s beautiful then: no heat, no smog, no crowds. Almost quiet.”
“I’d like to see that,” she said, a little sceptically.
“You should.” Iz pulled at his beard. “There’s only one thing wrong with my schedule: Glory wouldn’t play. She never wanted to stay up with me, because she always had to be at the goddamned studio at eight A.M. the next day.” He frowned above his heavy horn-rimmed glasses. “Sometimes I think that’s what really broke us up. Ah, good,” he added, as a tall dish of orange ice was placed in front of him.
“Can I get you anything else?” the waitress asked. “We just made some new coffee.”
“No thanks. This is fine.”
Katherine watched the girl hover a moment, and depart. “She wanted to talk to you some more,” she remarked. She wasn’t trying to change the subject—she was interested and flattered that Dr. Einsam should confide in her. For the first time she felt sorry for him: he was an employer and a psychiatrist, with a high-bracket income, yet something he wanted had been taken away from him. At the same time, why had he wanted to marry a person like that, a movie starlet? She simply could not think what comment to make.
Iz shrugged. “I’m talking to you n
ow.” He attacked the mound of sherbet. “For an example, last night,” he went on. “It wasn’t so late, only about one-thirty. I was up in Malibu at the Positano—we used to go there often. There was a new singer I wanted Glory to hear. I really thought she would be interested. So I got on the phone and called her. She wouldn’t come up. All she could talk about was how I had woken her up and how tired she was. She didn’t even listen to me.” He chopped at the cone of ice-cream with the side of his spoon. “Well, that’s the problem. Well, it’s one of the problems, at least. So what would you do in that situation?”
“Me?” Katherine jumped nervously. “I don’t know,” she said through her headache. How simple Dr. Einsam’s problems were, compared to hers, was what she thought. Imagine breaking up a marriage over something so trivial. It reminded her of those news items in the Los Angeles paper in which someone was suing for divorce because their husband snored, or their wife ate crackers in bed. “I don’t know; maybe your wife could take a nap in the evening, before you get home. You have to compromise. After all, you can’t really expect her to stay up until four A.M., when she has to go to work the next morning.”
“You think I should adjust my schedule to her needs,” Iz said, frowning aggressively.
Though Katherine realized that Dr. Einsam’s bitterness was directed through her rather than at her, she quailed before it. “Really,” she said. “I don’t know anything about it.” She pulled her coat closer, somewhat ineffectually, and rested her forehead on the back of one hand.
Iz looked at her. “You have a headache,” he recalled. “How is your headache?”
“It’s rather bad.”