Free Nowhere City by Alison Lurie Page B

said finally.
    “That’s all right. I’ll find something in the icebox.”
    “There isn’t anything in the icebox, really. I meant to go to the store today, but I didn’t feel up to it. ... Why don’t you go out and get something, and I’ll try to sleep. I’ve been trying for hours, and I’d just dropped off when you woke me up. It really wasn’t very considerate of you.”
    “Well, it wasn’t very considerate of you not to get anything for supper,” Paul said, in what he intended for a humorous tone.
    “If you had any idea of how I feel,” Katherine said, not humorously, “you wouldn’t ask me to get up and cook. I’m so dizzy, and I have pains shooting through my head like long needles. All through my head. Or maybe you would ask me, I don’t know,” she concluded in a dull shrewish voice.
    “I’m sorry,” Paul said flatly. Katherine might have managed to buy him a pound of hamburger, considering that she had practically nothing to do all day. Which was probably part of her trouble.
    “Oh, by the way,” he said. “Did you call up U.C.L.A. yet? Skinner asked me about it, you know.”
    “I know.” Katherine raised her eyes briefly. She was suspicious of Fred Skinner: she would not believe that he had thought she had been “really great” at his party; she was convinced that he had deliberately tried to make her drunk out of boorish malice. Suspecting some similar trick, perhaps, she kept putting off investigating an apparently good job he had heard about at U.C.L.A. “Susy called today. She wants us to go to the beach with them and some friends on Friday. I said I didn’t know. I really don’t want to go, but I thought you might.”
    It occurred to Paul that going to the beach with the Skinners would prevent him from being crazy enough to see Ceci O’Connor again, so perhaps it was a good idea. Besides, he had been trying for weeks to show Katherine the sea, the sun—“We ought to go,” he said. “It’s insulting to keep turning down invitations all the time. Fred and Susy will think you don’t want to see them.”
    “I don’t want to see him, and I don’t want to go to the beach.” Katherine lay down again, pulling the sheet with her. She tugged it into position with weak gestures. “I don’t mind seeing her, but I can do that any time.”
    “You should go. Maybe you’ll be feeling all right by then. You haven’t been to the beach at all yet.”
    “If I feel all right, I’ll have better things to do than go and sit in the dirty sand with a crowd of vulgar people.” Katherine half sat up, twitched the blanket over herself, and fell back. “Would you mind putting the blind down again?” Paul looked at her; then he looked for the cord of the Venetian blind, and let it down. “Thank you. Why don’t you go by yourself if you want to?” she added.
    “I can’t,” Paul said. “I have to go back to the office on Friday. I have to finish a special project.”

6
    A LONG THE PACIFIC COAST Highway, in an unsteady stream of cars, moved the pink station wagon in which Katherine Cattleman, Susy Skinner, and Susy’s two children were going to visit the G.J. Putty mansion, art museum, garden, and private zoo. Katherine and Susy were in front; Mark, aged three, lay on his stomach in the cargo area, digging up the rubber matting with a toy bulldozer, and Viola, aged six, sat primly in front of him holding a plastic purse in white nylon gloves.
    The Putty estate is not open to the general public, but it may be visited on certain days by those who have made previous arrangements, and Fred Skinner had made such an arrangement through someone he knew in the U.C.L.A. Art Department. Katherine admitted to herself that it was thoughtful of him to have done so. She had no interest in the mansion, the garden, or the zoo, but the collection included paintings by Rubens, Renoir, Matisse, etc. which few people had ever seen, and she felt (or rather knew she ought to feel) gratitude to Fred for