Authors: Alison Lurie
“Gee; well then, that should be easy. I bet you could find something up at U.C.L.A. I’ll ask Fred. You’re lucky to have secretarial training.” Katherine did not have secretarial training—only an A.B. from Wellesley—but she did not contradict Susy. “I wish I had sometimes, it’s so easy to get typing to do when you want to make a little money for Christmas or something, but the only thing in the world I know how to do is teach nursery school.”
“Nursery school?” Katherine’s voice rose in surprise. “Gracious.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, that is—” But Katherine could not think of an evasion. “I’m surprised at your being a teacher. I suppose I thought you probably were an actress or a dancer or something like that,” she admitted with embarrassment.
“Golly, thanks. I’m awfully flattered: I adore the theater. But honestly, I never had any talent that way. I couldn’t even get into dramatic club in high school. Hey, you need another drink. Shall we go back in? I mean, how do you feel?”
Katherine felt better; there was a dim buzzing in her head, but it was painless. She looked at the tall glass in her hand, empty except for a cube of ice. I mustn’t drink any more, she thought.
In the other room, the party was still going on, only louder. Nobody seemed to notice her return. “Honey, Katherine needs another drink,” Susy said to her husband.
“Just plain water and ice, please. Lots of water: I’m very, very dehydrated.” Katherine giggled, and then bit her tongue. Oh dear, she thought. I must sit down and not say anything.
She sat on the sofa, stiffly upright, and pressed her knees together.
“Water and ice coming up, ma’am,” Fred Skinner announced, handing her the glass with a flourish which splattered her skirt. “Sor-ry!” Lurching a little, he sat down beside her. “Well, good to see you here.”
Katherine tried to think of a topic of conversation. “How is your report coming?” she asked.
“Report?” He frowned like a cross ape.
“Yes, you know, your report on the secret materials that blew over the fence.”
“Who told you about that?” Skinner exploded, in irritation rather than inquiry, for the answer was obvious. “I suppose your husband told you that story,” he answered himself, loud enough for Paul to hear him across the room and turn around. “Hey, Cattleman, whatsa big idea, breaking our security in bed! Doncha read the regulations?”
“It’s all right, Chief. I know I can count on her,” Paul replied. “I just thought it was a good story, the way it showed up Leon.”
“Yeah? Never trust a broad is my motto,” Skinner said. By this time, most of those present were listening and laughing. “Take it from me. And while we’re on the subject, Cattleman—” (he lapsed back for a moment from tough into academic style)—“I don’t wanna hear any more of this disloyal talk about Howard Leon. He’s a pretty committed guy.”
Paul smiled along with the rest, but Katherine could see that he was disconcerted. “Wow! Now hear that,” he exclaimed. “I get it. Gripe all you want in camp, but don’t let on to the civilians.”
Skinner gave Paul his monkey-like grin. “Yeah. Something like that.” The attention of the party remained fixed on him, and therefore on Katherine, but she refused to start another topic, or even to look at him. After a moment, he stood up and went away. Relieved, she lifted her glass and took two big swallows before she realized that he had deceived her—her “ice water” was full of some kind of strong, colorless alcohol.
Katherine glared across the room at Fred Skinner; but when she caught his eye, he winked. She had a strong impulse to get up, walk across the rug, and slap his face. That’ll make him wink, she thought, rising, dizzy, half out of her seat—and then subsiding in horror at the idea of the spectacle she had nearly created.
The party was in full swing now, with people laughing, shouting, and hugging each other. A few of them, like Fred Skinner, were dressed in conventional Eastern clothes; but most, like his wife, were disguised as Martians. A young woman with the face of a spinster school-teacher wore vivid purple velvet pants and sash and a yellow ruffled blouse printed with violets; a blond man about forty had on a Mexican shirt with blue embroidery and peculiar leather sandals—his behavior, however, indicated that he could not possibly be a homosexual. Most of the guests, unlike Susy, looked all right from the neck up (these two even had horn-rimmed glasses), but somehow that made it worse.
Katherine had hoped no one would speak to her until she felt clearer in the head, but now a girl sat down next to her on the sofa. “I’m Natalie Lenaghan,” she said pleasantly, “and you must be Mrs. Cattleman. How do you do?”
“How do you do,” Katherine said, since this was safe.
“We live in the next building but one,” Mrs. Lenaghan went on. “My husband’s at U.C.L.A.; that’s him over there.”
Katherine made no response. This was even safer. She observed Mr. Lenaghan: he was all right from the waist up, but below that he wore red plaid shorts. Mrs. Lenaghan, however, would have passed in Harvard Square.
“You’ve just come out here, haven’t you?” Mrs. Lenaghan said. “How do you like Los Angeles? ... Or don’t you really know yet?”
“Oh, I know,” Katherine replied. She realized dimly that this was a wrong answer.
“Susy says you’ve found a nice house quite near here,” Mrs. Lenaghan tried again after a pause. “That’s really wonderful luck. What’s it like?”
“It looks like a gas station,” Katherine said. “I mean, lots of these houses here look like gas stations, with those flat roofs, don’t you think so? ... They do, because they’re white and made out of cement, and they have flat roofs.”
Mrs. Lenaghan laughed. “Well, but that’s because it hardly ever rains in L.A. A sloping roof wouldn’t be any use here. Still, I see what you mean. When you come to think of it,” she added, “there are a lot of gas stations here that look like houses. There’s one up in Brentwood that’s exactly like a New England lighthouse.” She laughed again.
Katherine did not laugh. She wished that this agreeable and apparently intelligent woman would leave and come back some other time. I’m drunk, she thought of saying, so would you please go away now, before I make a fool of myself? But the utterance of this statement would be the action it was designed to prevent.
“Of course there are some ridiculous things here,” Mrs. Lenaghan went on. “But then think of the climate! That’s what I always say to myself.”
“I don’t like the climate,” Katherine said. “I don’t like the sun shining all the time in November, and the grass growing. It’s unnatural, it’s as if we were all shut up in some horrible big greenhouse away from the real world and the real seasons.” She raised her voice. “I hate the oranges here as big as grapefruits and the grapefruits as big as, I don’t know what, as big as advertisements for grapefruit, without any taste. Everything’s advertisements here. Everything has a wrong name. I mean the name of everything, you see, it’s always a lie, like an advertisement. For instance, this is Mar Vista, which is supposed to be Spanish for ‘view of the sea.’ But it has no view of the sea; it’s all flat, it has no view of anything. Mar Vista!” she repeated scornfully. “Spoil-the-View, I call it; Spoil-the-View, California.”
People were listening to Katherine again now, but she did not notice. “I despise it here,” she went on to Mrs. Lenaghan. “You know what I saw the first day I got to Los Angeles, when Paul was driving me back from the airport, the first afternoon I was here? We were driving back from the airport, and we passed a doughnut stand, and on top of it was this huge cement doughnut about twenty feet high, revolting around. I mean revolving. You know. It was going around and around.” Katherine waved her arm in demonstration. “That was the first thing I saw, before I saw the stand. From a long, long way off, that big empty hole going around and around up in the air, with some name painted on it. Well I thought, that’s what this city is! That’s what it is, a great big advertisement for
nothing.”
Katherine stopped speaking, or rather shouting. Silence fell over the Skinners’ party, every member of which had been listening to her.
I
T WAS THE DAY BEFORE
Thanksgiving, but in Mar Vista the perpetual summer continued. Babies rode barefoot in their strollers, front lawns were wet and green under the rotating sprinklers, or scorched brown by the heat, depending on the attentions of their owners, for water is expensive in Los Angeles. Only the angle of the sun through the palms, and the early dark, suggested that the winter equinox was approaching.
Paul still sat at his desk behind a growing heap of books and papers. He had finished the first section of his work on N.R.D.C., a brief historical description of Mar Vista from prehistoric times to the establishment of the Nutting plant in 1940. He had thrown in enough dinosaurs and
conquistadores
to keep the interest of the lay reader, while presenting sequentially the basic geographic and historical facts. Still, he was impatient to get on to the real subject. He tapped his foot on the synthetic floor, and his pencil on the desk top. Only now his impatience was more general; he just wanted to get through the next half-hour. Nutting was letting everyone off at three for the holiday, and he had an appointment.
He was going to have a cup of coffee with Ceci O’Connor. That was how he put it to himself; it sounded better than to say that he had an assignation with a waitress. Anyhow, she was not really a waitress: he was convinced of that. And it was not an assignation: they were going to have a cup of coffee, and talk about books, because there was no chance to talk at the Aloha Coffee Shop.
“Hey, Cattleman!” Fred Skinner put his chimpanzee’s face round the frosted-glass partition. “Wait till you hear this. All our problems are solved.” He sat on the corner of Paul’s desk, knocking over a pile of books. “Hell. Sorry. Look at this.” He spread out a glossy brochure.
UnDat
it read in multicolor, three-dimensional letters on a gold background.
The Universal Data Processor
Below, in the center of a gold aureole, was portrayed a streamlined green and silver machine, roughly the shape, and about twice the size (to judge by the pretty girl who stood with her arm about it, smiling erotically), of a large wringer washer.
“We’ve got it made,” Skinner said. “No more incinerators, no more sifting ashes, no watching the janitors all afternoon.”
“You mean this machine is going to get rid of the classified trash for you?” Paul asked.
“For us, pal. You’ve got to start identifying with the corporate image. Our problems are your problems, Cattleman.”
“Yeah. How’s it going to do that?”
“Well, like it says here.” Fred unfolded the brochure. “‘Materials placed in the hopper are first treated with a unique bleaching and dissolving agent which removes all traces of text, whether written—’ Wait a moment. ‘Five distinct tearing and shredding arms then rapidly reduce the—’ Here we are. ‘The UnDat is capable of completely processing all forms of paper, cardboard, and celluloid in a matter of minutes. For maximum efficiency of operation, large metal fasteners and rings should be removed before insertion.’ Great, isn’t it?”
“So you put all your, I mean we put all our classified trash into this machine; and what comes out?”
“It’s a kind of green sludge. Looks like damp shredded wheat, sort of. I had a sample of it, but I had to leave it with Howard Leon. He’s investigating the possibility that Bob Kinsman might be able to use some of it to pack components over in the plant.”
“We’re really going to get one of these things?”
“It looks pretty definite,” Skinner said with satisfaction.
“Goddamn.” Paul laughed. “Crazy.”
“What’s so crazy about it? Listen, most of the big companies on government contract have already put in something like this—Sylvania, Ramo-Woolbridge—everybody.” Paul continued laughing. “Whoever thought this up had real genius. It fills a fucking felt need. I only wish I was going to collect one percent of the net.”
“Is it expensive?”
“In the neighborhood of nine or ten K.” Fred took out a new pack of cigarettes, and broke the cellophane with his thumbnail. “And of course it costs another K or so a year to operate.”
“But you won’t be saving any money then,” Paul objected.
“Hell, no. Why should we save money?” Fred said, tapping his cigarette on the desk. “Butt?”
“No thanks. Well, hell, I suppose so as to apply it somewhere else, to buy something you need, or save the government some money, or raise our salaries—I mean, you read about how these automated machines are going to do all that.”
“Boy, have you got the wrong idea,” Fred said from between his hands as he crouched over the flame, for even in the windless air-conditioned climate of Nutting he behaved as if he were trying to light up on some stormy beach-head. “You’re all confused, boy,” he said. “You can’t apply your small-time civilian standards to this kind of operation. You’re talking as if N.R.D.C. was your family budget, a few dollars saved on rent, a few dollars more to blow on whisky. It just doesn’t work that way here. You don’t have to get all shook up about a little matter of nine K. There’s plenty more where that comes from.
“Think what we’re buying with it,” he went on. “Absolute security. Say, that’s a good line: I can work that in. Another thing you’ve got to keep in mind. The bigger the yearly cost figures for the department, the bigger the yearly increment. I know it takes some getting used to after you’ve been up in that scruffy ivory tower. You don’t have to tell me. Don’t tell me, just ask me.” Fred grinned, and drew on his cigarette. “Any time.”
“Thanks, Chief,” Paul said. “Thanks for that generous offer.” He wished Skinner would go away, though, so that he could clean up his desk and be ready to leave at three.
“You’ve got to learn to ride with it,” Fred went on. “Listen, when I was first here, soon as I began to see what the score was, I started requisitioning supplies. I put in for every fucking thing I could think of, every kind of paper and pencil and notebooks; even some furniture, a chair and a couple of lamps, everything. I was testing, you know. Testing. I couldn’t believe it. Well, it all came through. Not a bitch from anywhere. Jesus, when I think what us poor instructors used to go through trying to get a couple of red pencils out of Miss Rollins’s supply cupboard.” He sucked in, then blew out smoke.