by Alison Lurie
“Because I wanted to,” he said. “You’re very attractive, even with all that greasy stuff on your face. I want to touch you. I want to sleep with you.”
It was a tactical error. The tremor went out of Glory’s voice. “I’m a very beautiful girl,” she said flatly. “Lots of men want to sleep with me.” She turned and gazed out of the window through whorls of soap.
“Aw, babydoll!” the man on that side called to her. “Don’t give me that dirty look.” There was a burst of appreciation around him, followed by more shouted remarks.
Another jerk. The car moved forward under the second rinse, which fell with a blinding crash, drowning the faces and voices outside.
“Listen, pie-face,” Iz began again, putting his hand on hers where it lay on the shiny upholstery. “It’s not only your physical attractiveness.” No response. Her hand lay limp under his. “I miss the whole relationship. I really like you. And you like me.”
No response. Her head was still twisted away; floods of water passed behind it. “Ah, shit,” Iz said. “I love you.”
Glory turned and looked at him. Under the sugar-candy hair her face was in ruins, the perfect mask streaked and wet with clotted powder, dripping mascara, and tears.
“Oh, go fuck yourthelf,” she said, and burst into sobs.
“So it’s all set up,” Maxie told Iz and Glory. They were standing together in the rehearsal hall after the lunch break, waiting for the show to get going again. “Judd says the kid can come over Tuesday P.M. about four-thirty: he’ll wait for her. Her mother can bring her over; she should just go to the main gate and ask for Judd Hubert, tell her that’s the cameraman, and he’ll fix it up. You want I should call the mother, I got her number.”
“No, I’ll do that. I told her I would.” Iz took out a notebook and pen.
“Aw, Maxie, that’s great,” Glory said. “That’s real quick work.”
“I shoulda had a glass milk,” Maxie complained. “I didn’t eat since breakfast; now my stomach is acting up again.”
“Send out for it.”
“Yeah.” Maxie sighed deeply, and looked round. At the piano a well-known popular composer and the dance director were quarreling over the second chorus of a song; the effeminate voice of the latter rising at intervals into a petulant shriek. Two beautiful girls were leaning against the stage nearby drinking soda out of cans and complaining in persistently whiny voices about their costumes; and a famous comic sat facing the wall, reading Billboard, sulking, and picking his nose. The floor of the rehearsal hall was gradually becoming covered with cigarette butts, coffee-cups, newspapers, candy wrappers, and chewed chewing-gum.
“Will somebody please tell me why I ever went into this business,” Maxie asked. “Why I didn’t just stay with my father. He had a fine movie house in Westchester, a good business. He wanted me to walk into his shoes, but I turned it down and broke his heart. How do you explain that?”
It was a rhetorical question, addressed to the ceiling, but Iz answered it.
“Possibly you wanted to defy him: it’s natural.” He shrugged. “Also you were probably attracted by the glamour of the entertainment world that, as a child, you saw second-hand. You wanted to meet stars, get to know them personally.”
“Yeah,” Maxie groaned. “Do I know them personally.”
Iz put his notebook and pen up. “Well, I’ve got a two o’clock kleptomania,” he said, “I’ve got to go. You’ll be home about seven?” Glory nodded. “Okay. I’ll call you.”
Alone with Maxie, Glory noticed his fat, sour face. “Aw, Maxie honey,” she said. “Don’t look so down. It’s going to swing all right. Everything’s okay now.” She gave him a warm, natural smile, one of those that had made her famous, full of sensual love for the whole world.
Years of intimacy with actors and actresses had made Maxie impervious to every sort of smile. “You think everything is okay, baby, you’ve got a limited view of my situation,” he complained. “If I live through this, I’ve also got to get Paul Demeray out of his recording contract; on top of that his wife is expecting again in the middle of her picture, Smit doesn’t want to work with Foss this year, and a million more.”
“Phoebe Demeray’s having another kid? I didn’t hear that yet. That’s marvy.” Gloria smiled. “I wish I was having one.”
“She’s not telling it around yet, keep it—” Maxie broke off, looking at Glory. “Aw, no you don’t, honey.” Glory said nothing. A dreamy expression had appeared on her face. “Don’t be a kook. Think of your career: you know you got two big pictures lined up ahead of you. You don’t want to get yourself knocked up now.”
“Uh-uh.” Over the heads of everyone in the hall, Glory stared into the bright, smoggy distance out the window. “I think I’d really like to be knocked up.”
PART FIVE
International Airport
FOREVERNESS.
—Billboard poster for Forest Lawn
23
HIGH IN THE AIR, the jet hummed across the country, carrying Paul back towards California. Mountains and rivers and western cities rolled beneath it, dimmed to a uniform bluish-tan blur, though when he had left New England everything had glowed with the intense green of early summer.
The greenness of New England! He couldn’t get over it. The hills and meadows of new grass near Convers College, with mist white on them in the evening and dew shining in the morning. The air was clear, its distances softened by a blue haze of moisture, instead of the dirty yellowish mixture of gasoline fumes, soot particles, and irritants he had been used to. The rain falling seemed miraculous too; he exclaimed over it naively to his friends, explaining that in Los Angeles it had not rained for a year and a half.
Paul’s friends had smiled when he told them this, thinking he exaggerated. They were glad to see him, though: they greeted him almost as if he had come back from the dead. The truth is that when you go West you do vanish as far as most Easterners are concerned; he could remember feeling this about others. It was worse than death really—there wasn’t even any mourning.
Paul was also delighted to see his friends. He had forgotten how many people he knew in Cambridge, most of whom also knew each other. That was another thing about the East: the interlocking nature of society there, wrapped about itself like a grapevine. Whereas life in Los Angeles had the infinitely branching pattern of exploding fireworks—lines moving on a dark field, which never crossed, or crossed only by accident. In the East you had to go three thousand miles to disappear, but in L.A. you could do it by changing jobs and moving a few blocks. The way people treated each other there seemed to imply this: there was something anonymous, after all, about it.
Seeing the people he knew in Cambridge again, Paul realized that most of his relationships in Los Angeles, for instance with Fred Skinner, were comparatively shallow, acquaintances of convenience. These were his real friends: they spoke his language, shared his past; they wished him well. He remembered how Skinner had reacted when he heard that Paul was going East for the interview. “Letting the side down, huh?” he had said, his mock anger covering real anger. “Selling yourself back to those academic bastards for pennies.” On the other hand, Howard Leon, the head of the Publications Department, had surprised Paul by congratulating him. “I’ve always felt this wasn’t the place for you,” he had remarked. “After all, this isn’t a serious operation from an historian’s point of view.”
“An historian’s point of view.” Recollected on his way East, the words had made Paul uneasy. He wondered whether, after so many months in Los Angeles, he were still an historian. He thought of the heaps of index cards spread out on the desk in Mar Vista, with dust particles collecting on them. In imagination he saw the smog gathering inside his mind, too, month after month, until—
But thank God, that had turned out to be an illusion. Even the first evening, sitting in a friend’s apartment in Cambridge, he could feel the internal smog lifting, and something like an historical sense waking; he heard himself beginning t
o think again in terms of political, cultural, economic movements and meanings. The next day in Convers, as he talked to the history staff about his thesis, their interest lit his, which had perhaps only been covered with ashes and not put out. He remembered, as it were, that he had (from an historian’s point of view) an exciting subject. He began to borrow books and write down titles of articles.
Another surprise was that, in talking to his friends and answering their questions about Los Angeles, he had begun to see it as an historian. Theories and connections that he had never worked out consciously flared up as he spoke. The basic thing about L.A., he explained, was that it lacked the dimension of time. As Katherine had first pointed out to him, there were no seasons there, no days of the week, no night and day; beyond that, there was (or was supposed to be) no youth and age. But worst, and most frightening, there was no past or future—only an eternal dizzying present. In effect, the city had banished historians as Plato had poets from his Republic. The Nutting Research and Development Corporation cared nothing for history, he said, and even feared their own. They had hired Paul to work in their office because they wished to have him working in their office, in the present tense, and to demonstrate him to visitors.
Paul’s friends smiled and laughed as he talked, astonished that such things should be. “Barbaric!” they exclaimed, and looked upon him with mild awe, as upon an anthropologist returned from a year with some native culture. They did not, of course, see the dark side of it: they didn’t know what it was like for someone to be born and brought up in a world where history does not exist. Ceci O’Connor, for instance. For Ceci (as for Nutting) life was not the sum of all she had ever been, seen, and done—but a small area illuminated in a vast landscape of dimness, as if by the moving beam of a flashlight in a darkened room.
That was why morality in the dimension of time meant so little to her, and morality in other dimensions so much. A black feeling came over Paul as, rushing through the stratosphere towards Los Angeles, he thought of Ceci. On her own terms he had treated her badly and selfishly; which was no excuse, because not to treat someone on their own terms was in itself selfish. In Ceci’s book he was, in fact, a cheap shit.
But he wasn’t really like that, Paul pleaded to the slowly darkening upper air outside the window. They were crossing the San Bernardino mountains now: bare rocks, glowing red in the setting sun, looking like the mountains of hell. At least, he hadn’t used to be like that. For the girls he knew in the East he was “honest,” “serious,” “so great,” and they had told him so, several within the last few days. Embracing him with whirlwind warmth, or pressing his hand in quiet significance, according to their natures, they exclaimed how much they had missed him, how glad they were he was coming back—suggesting long, long talks, perhaps more, to come. He had managed to have lunch with one of them, a girl named Amy, and after she had brought him up to date on the intimate side of her life (“Oh, Paul, you always understand everything so well, you make me feel much better”) he had tried to tell her about Ceci. “I had a love affair in Los Angeles with a waitress,” he began badly. “Really?” Amy smiled, and he heard a fake pastoral note in his voice, as if he were some eighteenth-century European bourgeois confessing his amours with a charming dairy-maid. He tried again. “She wasn’t a waitress really: she was a painter. She just worked as a waitress. She was a sort of beatnik actually.” Amy was still smiling fondly at the traveler’s tale. It was at this point, he thought, that he had begun to see how he had behaved to Ceci. “The thing was,” he said loudly, “I really loved her. I was in love with her.” This was more than he had ever told Amy, but she took no notice. “Oh, Paul,” she said, laying her hand on his arm. “It’s so wonderful to see you again. Nobody else I know has the same kind of—I don’t know—enthusiasm that you have. They don’t really live, none of them.”
Paul saw that it was no use. To the next old friend who asked what he had been doing with himself in southern California (this one a man) he replied, as if making a joke, that he had “got somewhat involved” with a pink-haired movie starlet and the wife of a Chinese exterminator.
He hadn’t been so great with Glory either, Paul thought. From her point of view they had been friendly conspirators, taking a well-deserved and enjoyable revenge together. If she had known her suspicious were false, she probably wouldn’t have gone to bed with him. Whereas for him the incident had been a matter of opportunism. He had no right really to complain that the relationship was shallow, because he had made it so himself out of incuriosity and greed. The truth was that, having come to Los Angeles in the spirit of an explorer, he had lost track of his own standards and finally almost gone native; doing so, like most anthropologists, with a conspicuous lack of decency and grace.
There was one more thing, worst of all: the way he had treated Katherine. He had insisted that they come to Los Angeles—well, that was all right: even now he didn’t regret going there, and once he got safely back he would probably come to appreciate what he had learned there more and more. He didn’t think he should have left Katherine alone in Cambridge, but once he had got her out there he should have been much more patient with her fears, her loneliness, even with her sinus trouble; he should have tried harder to make her life tolerable. (For instance, he should have tried to find some friends for them that she could have talked to, other transplanted New Englanders. There were people like that around, but he had avoided them deliberately, just as he avoided Americans abroad.)
Never mind; he would make it up to her. He was taking her back now, and she would never have to see southern California again. How happy she would be in Convers! The picturesque old houses, the green forests and fields that he had promised to Glory, who had no use for them, were all there for Katherine. The faculty apartment he had been shown backed onto a wide, mowed lawn ending in open woods; he saw Katherine running across the grass towards him there, smiling, her arms full of leaves and wild flowers.
It was Katherine that he really loved, Paul thought, and he felt in his wallet again for her picture, which he had, so to speak, rediscovered within the last few days. Hers was a real, a classic beauty, subtle, fine, and private—not blatant and public like the Hollywood sort: Glory, for instance, was most beautiful at a distance. When you got really close to her you could see that her bright hair was coarse and dyed; she had freckled, flawed skin. Katherine, on the other hand, was invisible at fifteen feet; but her skin and hair were fair and fine, and every detail delicately perfect.
It was almost dark out now. The whining of the jet’s engines had changed key; they were over Los Angeles. Paul looked down at the city, a black plain streaked with smoke and colored fights. He felt a faint anxiety at having left Katherine alone in such a place, even for a few days; he was glad to be getting back to her.
Paul had not asked his wife to meet him at the airport. It was a long way, and the telling of his news and her reaction to it would be more delightful staged in their own living-room. Too impatient after the delays of landing to wait for the bus, he got into a taxi, gave his address, and settled back to pleasant anticipation.
“Here y’are.” The taxi had stopped on the wrong street, next to a great ugly hill of bare earth. Then Paul looked out the other window, and saw his house. He got out of the cab, realizing what had happened. When he left Mar Vista four days ago, the bulldozers had been at work leveling the lots across the street, while trucks brought in fill dirt. This process had simply continued; the ground was being raised so that the new freeway, like all the others, would cross Los Angeles above the house-tops.
Still, there was something horrible about that long heap of dirt lying there in the street light with machines squatting on it. Even though he knew that the people and even the houses had been moved away, he had the fantasy that everything that had once been across the street was there still, buried beneath the dirt: the flowering bushes, the stucco walls and tiled roofs, the kitchen tables, the lemon trees, the children on their tricycles.
The lights were on in his house, and his car was in the driveway; the same old Ford that he had brought out from Boston. After all, he had never got round to trading it in for a Buick, a hot rod, a Jaguar, or a Thunderbird. But Katherine was out; she had left him a note on the mantelpiece:
Welcome home—
I’ve gone to Iz and Glory Einsam’s reunion party—
meet me there.
Irritated by the delay of the scene he had planned, and the change in the set against which it would have to be played, Paul washed perfunctorily, changed his shirt, found his car keys, and set out for Hollywood.
It was only about nine o’clock Los Angeles time, but in Cambridge it was midnight. No wonder he felt unsettled in his stomach and a little tired. As he drove along the freeway, though, Paul smiled and began to feel better. He was amused and pleased, he found, that Glory was reconciled with her husband; he was glad that she should be happy, and it relieved him of any obligation. Moreover, it was a final proof that there was nothing to Glory’s suspicions, for if Katherine really had been involved with Dr. Einsam, she would certainly not be going to this party. Not that he had ever thought she was, of course.
Paul located Glory’s house easily by the number of cars parked along the street and the noise and music coming over the fence. It was a very large party, he saw, as the maid showed him in (after checking his name against a list). The long pink living-room was full of people, mostly movie types, and they were standing in the hall and crowded around the bar in the dining-room. Opposite him doors stood open onto a terrace, and he could see more people out there.