Nowhere City (22 page)

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 now.” 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.”

“I’m sorry. Where does it hurt exactly?” he added, with a note, though a rather forced one, of professional sympathy.

“It hurts everywhere today. Here and here and here and here. All around my eyes. The worst pain is right here under my eyebrows—it’s as if my forehead was being hammered in a vise.” Katherine laughed a little, uncomfortably. “In my lower sinuses, under the eyes, it’s mostly only a tingling, burning sort of feeling.”

“All around your eyes,” Iz repeated, smoothing his sherbet gently with the back of his spoon. “That’s really too bad. It sounds to me as if you wanted to cry.”

“I don’t,” Katherine contradicted. “I never cry. Why, I haven’t now since I can’t remember how long, years and years. No matter how terrible the pain is, I just,” she shrugged, “can’t cry.”

“You can’t cry.” Iz repeated her words softly. “That’s very interesting. Why not?”

“I don’t know,” Katherine said; she was aware of being handled, but it was so agreeable to find someone who was interested in her complaint, and Dr. Einsam himself had just spoken about much more personal matters. “Maybe it all goes into my sinus.”

“You mean that when something occurs that would naturally produce tears, the reaction is turned inwards, and creates instead a sinus condition. You
are
crying all the time, only inside.”

This was not quite what Katherine had meant, or rather, she had meant it only facetiously. What Iz said struck her like a sudden, glancing blow, or the flash of a light on a cloudy day. Maybe she had meant that. Certainly, today—She caught her breath, and parried the attack (if it was an attack: Iz was sitting eating ice-cream so casually, not even looking up) with another joke. “Well, maybe,” she said. “Anyhow, if that’s so, I ought to be grateful. At least it keeps me from making a public fool of myself.” She laughed slightly, or rather simultaneously hummed and blew air through her stopped-up nose so as to create the impression.

“That’s an unusual attitude,” Iz said, slowly stirring the remains of his orange sherbet round with his spoon. “It’s also non-utilitarian.”

“Non-utilitarian?”

“Yah. Because weeping doesn’t cause you as much pain, or last as long as a sinus attack, does it? It is after all the natural reaction, under many circumstances.” Now Iz raised his head and looked at her. He had bright gray eyes behind his glasses. “Why shouldn’t you cry sometimes?” he asked. “Maybe you have a good reason.”

At these words, all Katherine’s despair and mortification, pent-up for nearly twenty-four hours now, seemed to flow throbbing into her eyes and nose. Suddenly she felt as if she were going to burst out sobbing right there.

“You’ve got to let it out,” Iz went on. “It’s important. I know this from my own experience. The danger is, if you inhibit yourself completely from expressing one kind of emotion, eventually you get so you can’t express any kind of emotion. You feel depressed, so go ahead, cry.”

“I—” Katherine began, and swallowed. “Of course, I—” This time the word rose from her throat in the form of a wail. “As a matter of fact, I am rather depressed today,” she managed to say, but then she was caught up in a series of dry, creaking shudders.

“Come on,” Iz said. “You can let go now.”

Katherine recognized the professional phrases, the standard sympathetic tone, but could not stop herself from being affected by them. Covering her face awkwardly with spread hands, she began to sob: a loud, uneven, tearing noise.

Iz watched her; his face showed sympathy. He reached out to touch or hold her arm, which, in a pale violet sweater, was not far from him. But a half-inch away he hesitated, as if remembering some precept, and finally withdrew his hand.

“What is it?” he asked quietly, after allowing a minute’s interval. “Tell me.”

“It’s. Uhh. It’s Paul, I suppose,” Katherine sobbed. The realization came over her that she was about to tell Dr. Einsam everything. She wanted to get up and run away; but she was so sick, so cold, so confused, she simply didn’t have the energy. “It’s just that he’s deceiving me. And I found out last night. I’ll get over it.”

“Ahh. How did you find out?”

“Well, when I came home from work.” Katherine swallowed. “When I walked into the house I knew, really. I mean I knew he must have been there with somebody, because everything was all wrong. The towels for instance: they were hung up the wrong way in the bathroom.” Her voice trembled. “I always fold them into thirds, and Paul just kind of throws them over the pole; but last night they were folded in half, and the wash-cloth was next to them, instead of over the tub. And the bed was made up all wrong, with the quilt—” She groaned, despairing of explaining what was wrong with the quilt; she thought how hysterical and silly she must sound to Iz. But he did not smile; he continued to look at her with serious concern. “And on the carpet in the living-room,” she went on. “You know that fluffy pale nylon carpeting we have? Well, there was this big kind of bruise where it was all flattened down. As if animals had been rolling on it. And hair.” Katherine choked down a final sob. Iz had not changed his expression, did not look shocked. Perhaps he didn’t believe her. She looked at this floor, gray stained cement marked into tiles. “It really was.”

“Ya,” Iz murmured. He pulled at his beard, thinking. “And what did your husband say about this?”

“He didn’t say anything; he had a late meeting, so—Maybe it wasn’t a meeting. I don’t know. Anyhow, I was asleep when he got in, and he was asleep when I left this morning. So nobody said anything.”

“Ah.” Iz took off his glasses, and began to polish them with the paper napkin, which had a scalloped border. Was he going to have no reaction?

“In my own house,” she said in a tight voice. “I suppose that’s the worst thing. Right in my own house.”