Authors: Alison Lurie
She walked forward; her knees were wet now, and now her thighs; she felt spray on her face. Suddenly the sea came up and pulled at her. Katherine tried to step back, but the ground was uneven, and the undertow had already buried her feet in sand. With a great effort she freed herself and, almost falling, struggled back out of the ocean.
A
DAMP NIGHT. FOG
blew in from the sea steadily, smothering the beach towns; the neon lights along Venice and Washington Boulevards smoldered, sending out plumes of colored smoke. Ceci clung to Paul’s arm, but it was he who had to be guided as they made their way through the black alleys behind the beach.
“Here.”
She stopped before a shabby store-front, so dimly lit that Paul would have passed it by without a second look. The windows were heavily misted; here and there drops had gathered and run down, leaving a crack through which yellow light seeped.
They entered. A long, very dark room, a jumble of wooden tables and chairs, walls scrawled from floor to ceiling with drawings and writings, all obscure in the gloom. On every table a squat candle, the kind lit in churches, burned in a glass container—each soft flame flickering in a pool of colored wax.
“We’re early,” Ceci said, looking around at the empty tables, on some of which games of chess were set up ready for play.
“It’s ten-thirty.”
“Mm. This place doesn’t really heat up till around midnight. Well.” She slid onto a bench by the wall.
Paul sat beside her and looked about. In the rear corner two men in shirts and sweaters were playing chess. A small dark girl, with curly black hair that hung over her face like a poodle’s, sat with them. Otherwise the room was empty. Paul removed his raincoat. He had dressed for the occasion: the chino pants spattered with house paint were his own, but the oil-paint-stained sweatshirt had been borrowed from Ceci. She had even dug up a pair of sandals for him, a little too small, but not much. As a final gesture, he had decided not to shave that morning. It was wonderful how much difference it made to get out of the tight case of fabric he usually wore. In these old clothes he felt as if he could really move, swing his arms, jump, run.
“Hiya, Dinny,” Ceci greeted the girl with the poodle haircut, who had come over to them. “This is Paul.” Dinny smiled prettily at him, but said nothing. As nearly as you could tell in the gloom, she was wearing only a pair of orangish tights and a baggy gray sweater. “Who’s winning tonight?” Ceci asked. “Is Leo beating again?” Dinny shook her head. “Cool. Expresso, I guess. What d’you want, Paul? ... Two expressos. You want something to eat?”
“Sure, I’m starving. What’ve you got?”
Dinny, though addressed directly, still said nothing. “How about some of that pastry?” Ceci asked. “Dinny blows great pastry. Have you got any of that way out cake tonight, you know, with all the different-colored layers?” Dinny nodded. “Great. Bring us two of those.”
“Hey. Why doesn’t she ever say anything?” Paul asked in a whisper, as soon as Dinny had disappeared behind the curtain at the back. “Can’t she talk, or something?”
“Uhuh.” Ceci did not whisper. “She can if she wants to. Only Dinny just doesn’t dig words. Like she doesn’t relate verbally.”
The two men studying the chess-board gave no sign of having heard this, though they must have done so. Well, maybe we all talk too much. Paul fell silent himself, just looking around and enjoying being there. Then Dinny brought coffee and cake, the expresso steaming black and hot, the cake cold and thick with whipped cream. What a great place. Why hadn’t he been here before? Because he never saw Ceci at night, when Venice came alive; that was why.
“I like it here,” he said. “Look at those plaster flowers along the molding; I wonder what this place used to be. You know, Venice was once an elegant resort town about fifty or sixty years ago. Named after the real Venice. I’ve been looking up the records: lots of these streets were canals then. There were about fifteen miles of canals, all of them built out of concrete by a retired manufacturer from the Middle West named Kinney, who wanted to make this a big cultural center. He put up all those arcades and imitation palazzos in the square, and he got gondolas with singing Italian gondoliers to take the tourists from the railroad station to their hotels. I’ve seen pictures; the men in the straw hats and knickerbockers, and the women all got up in white, like Gibson girls, with parasols. He brought Sarah Bernhardt to play
Camille
in an auditorium he built on the end of the pier, over the waves.” Ceci did not seem to be listening very hard; she looked at the candle flickering on the table dreamily. “Right around here, right up the main street, only it was a canal then, there was an outdoor restaurant with hanging gardens called l’Esperanza. ... What are you smiling at?”
“You,” Ceci said. “You’re funny. How come you’re all hung up on the past like that?”
“Well, hell,” Paul said. “After all, I’m an historian.”
A diversion was created now by the entrance of a group of extremely beat-looking people: men in turtleneck sweaters and dark glasses, girls tightly wrapped in black, high-heeled, and dangling with colored beads. “Who’re they?” he asked eagerly.
“Never saw them before.” Ceci studied the newcomers as they took their places at a table by the door, then turned her head away. “Tourists,” she pronounced scornfully. “Yeah. They’re all tourists. Ever since that piece came out in the paper some of them always make it down here on week-ends to see the beatniks. Maybe try to buy some pot or pick up a free lay. ... Look at their clothes. That’s supposed to be like beatnik costume. You could tell them a block off.” Again Ceci spoke in a normally loud voice. But the tourists were talking among themselves, and did not hear her.
But I am disguised in beatnik costume, Paul thought. Does she mean I am a tourist? No, of course not. I come down here all the time, this is where my real life is. If I could, I’d live here. He began to run over a vague fantasy; suppose Katherine should be hit by a car, or let’s just say she can’t bear L.A., like she keeps saying, so she leaves him, goes back East. He stays at N.R.D.C.; next year he gets a raise to let’s say twelve K. He could move to Westwood or Brentwood or Pacific Palisades on that; but instead he goes to Venice. He lives just like all his friends, a simple pad, maybe with a view of the ocean. He uses the extra dough to build up a really fantastic book and record collection, with which he is extremely generous. Maybe he buys some pictures from local artists. He gives some money to the Tylers so Steve can stop driving the cab and finish his novel. After a while, he leaves Nutting to work on his thesis. He also writes articles, perhaps a book. He establishes a reputation as an historian and essayist. Ceci has already quit her job, of course. Now he marries her. And they have kids, like the Tylers; only maybe not so many.
“Ceci!” he said, but in a joking tone, putting his arm around her. “Hey, let’s get married.”
Ceci turned and looked at him, holding her expresso cup halfway to her mouth. “Sorry,” she said through the steam. “Can’t do it. I’m never going to be married again.”
“Really?” Paul asked. “Why not?” He forgot that he was joking; his voice became serious.
“Because it’s a shuck. When you get married, pretty soon you’re doing it with somebody you don’t love, because the law says you have to. Or just because they’re around, maybe. Anyhow, that’s how it is with me.” She drank, and put the cup down. “Besides, I couldn’t marry you. You have too much bread.” She spoke as if of a simple but insuperable fact; as if Paul were living in a room piled to the ceiling with pound loaves wrapped in waxed paper.
Before he could answer, they were interrupted. Many more people were coming in now out of the fog: some neighbors of the Tylers named Tony and Jeanne took the table next to theirs, and then Steve turned up himself; with him was John, the fellow who had been at the beach on New Year’s Day. John had brought a guitar. Suddenly all the tables seemed to be full. The room was thick with smoke and noise, people calling for Dinny, who rushed back and forth through the crowd carrying cups of expresso, looking strained. Seeing this, Ceci excused herself and got up to help wait on the customers.
Watching, Paul was reminded of how he had admired Ceci before he knew her, back when he first used to go to the Aloha Coffee Shop for lunch. But now, with her hair streaming down and dressed in a black jersey and pants, Ceci looked more like a dancer than a waitress. She moved with speed and grace, working the taps of the big expresso machine or swinging her way among the crowded tables, sending him a quick, special smile as she passed. God, she was so great. What fantastic luck that he had met her. Thank Christ he had decided to come to Los Angeles, where people were really alive and things happened right now as well as in the past.
And maybe she was right. They couldn’t love each other more than they did, so why get married? It was only a convention. He felt good again. What a hip place, and here he was in the thick of it. He hoped that a lot would happen tonight—that people would play the piano, fight, recite poems. ...
“You going to buy Kelly’s car?” Steve Tyler asked him.
“I think so.” Paul had finally called Walter Wong up at Universal Insect and Rodent Control (he had no home phone number—Ceci said he was probably sleeping with some girl or in his car), and offered him $725 for the dragster, $75 less than Kelly was supposed to be asking.
Tony, who had been observing Paul casually for some time, now asked: “You a painter?”
“Uh-uh.” Paul shook his head. “Just kind of a house painter. Not like John, an amateur. I was painting the kitchen over in my place,” he explained. This was true, but of two weeks ago.
“Yeah.” Tony and his wife smiled, and Paul felt he liked them.
“He works for Nutting Research and Development,” Steve Tyler informed them. Paul imagined that the expressions of Tony and his wife changed subtly, as if they were thinking: Oh, an outsider, a square. Maybe they weren’t; but there was no mistaking the look of cool dislike on Steve’s face.
“What’s so bad about that?” Paul said, in as open a tone as he could manage. You drive a cab, he thought, John’s a part-time painter and carpenter, Tony (he had just learned this) is an actor who supports himself by working for a bookie joint, and your friend Walter Wong is an exterminator, for Christ’s sake—what’s so bad about N.R.D.C.? But Steve leaned forward smiling, as if he had been waiting for this question a long time.
“Like it’s shit, man,” he said. “What do you think that place is making over there in Mar Vista? It’s just making death. You got to have some bread, all right, there’s other ways to get it.”
Everyone nodded. Paul felt out of breath, as if he had received a blow under his ribs. He knew what Fred Skinner would have said: that Nutting was not making death, but laboring desperately to stave it off—that only through a relentless effort to produce the means of destruction could we deter the enemy from destroying us. Therefore we must keep on, keep on, etc.
But Paul did not say this; for one thing, he was not sure he believed it. Also, he knew that the argument would irrevocably mark him as an outsider.
“You’ve got it wrong,” he objected lightly. “Nutting’s just a research outfit. The only stuff they’re really producing in quantity, right now anyway, is television components.” Unsympathetic looks greeted this; Paul remembered that in Ceci’s opinion TV was not a low-brow nuisance, but a carnivorous brain-washing monster.
An uneasy sensation had started in his stomach, too—probably it came from eating cream cake at midnight. He felt in his pocket for the envelope of digestive tablets that he sometimes carried.
“You mean you don’t have any government contracts?” Steve said.
“Hell, yes, of course we—they have contracts.” Paul worked one of the tablets out of the envelope. “But you’re over-simplifying.” He swallowed it unobtrusively, with a bitter chaser of tepid expresso. “We’re just working on—well, I can’t tell you what they’re working on, it’s against regulations, but it’s not really military. Anyhow,” (he laughed, trying to get them back on his side) “from what I’ve seen, you don’t have to worry about Nutting developing anything dangerous. They’re spending enough money and time to build a mountain, but all they’ve made out of it lately is some pretty sick-looking mole-hills.” He laughed a bit more; Tony, Jeanne, and John joined him, but Steve did not.
Paul tried to ignore Steve; he went on. “Like I’ll give you an example. This isn’t breaking security—it happened years ago. They got a contract at Nutting to do a job on the repair and servicing of radar stations. You know there’s radar equipment set up all along the coasts to look out for enemy aircraft, and they have to revolve constantly to cover the whole sky. But they had to be checked and oiled from time to time, and sometimes a part would have to be replaced. So the problem Nutting had was, how much would the radar have to be slowed down for a mechanic to repair it without getting too dizzy, and still lose as little sky coverage as possible. They had mathematicians working on the problem, of course, and physicists, and engineers, and communications specialists, and electronics men, and even psychologists. There were all kinds of angles, like, for instance, maybe the equipment could be redesigned a little, or different kinds of repair work could be done at different speeds, and maybe the physical make-up and personality type of the mechanic would be significant. They built a mock-up of a radar station in the plant and had a lot of volunteers revolving on it. Anyhow, so this went on for a whole goddamned year, and at the end of the year they got out a report in several volumes presenting all the data and tables and drawings and formulae they’d worked out, and making a whole lot of very complex recommendations.
“But meanwhile, all this time, another company somewhere else was working on perfecting radar equipment. Naturally. And so, just about the time the N.R.D.C. report was finished, these other guys came up with a new type of radar that didn’t ever need to be oiled or repaired.”
This time even Steve laughed. “Jesus, that must have finished them!” Tony said.