The Nowhere City by Alison Lurie

Author:Alison Lurie
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781453271179
Publisher: Open Road
Published: 2012-10-13T00:05:00+00:00

14

“WHY IS DR. EINSAM ALWAYS LATE TO OUR MEETINGS?” said Bert Smith to Charlie Haraki, leaning back in the chair and setting his feet upon the edge of Katherine’s desk. “What’s your interpretation of this?” Dr. Haraki held out his hands, palms up, and shook his round head with comic rapidity, meaning: I don’t know. “Does it express a rejection of us as individuals, perhaps?”

Dr. Einsam, who had just come in forty-five minutes late, went on hanging up his coat in the corner and affected not to hear.

“But he’s also late to departmental meetings, we’ve got to remember,” Dr. Haraki remarked. “And often to dinner parties.” He played with his pencil, drawing small circles on the pad.

“Maybe we have to deal here with a more global pattern,” Dr. Smith suggested. “A diffuse unwillingness to meet all his responsibilities. For instance.”

Iz took off his glasses and polished them.

“Still, I happen to know he’s always on time for his patients,” Dr. Haraki said.

“That’s true. He is always on time for his patients. What do we make of that?”

Iz took a group of papers out of his briefcase. He pulled up a chair and sat down to read them, still paying absolutely no attention to his colleagues’ baiting. He looked tense, though, Katherine thought, and nervous. Or perhaps she only thought so, because she was tense and nervous herself, and sick: in the grip of the worst sinus attack she had had since the day she arrived in Los Angeles. Her nasal passages were completely stopped up, her head ached fearfully, her throat was sore, and her left ear reverberated with a whuffling, buzzing noise as if an insect had flown into it and got stuck there. She should have stayed home today, really. But the truth was that since last night she couldn’t abide her own house, after what she had discovered there, or thought she had discovered there.

Soon, perhaps tonight, there would have to be a painful scene in that house. But she wasn’t going to think about it now; she had a job to do. She propped one inflamed cheek on her hand, and tried to attend to the conversation. Dr. Smith and Dr. Haraki, with some assistance from Dr. Einsam, were talking now about the trouble a colleague called Dr. Jekyll was having with his dictaphone—a cheap, new model which he had purchased out of foolish economy and against their advice. This soon led into a continuation of last meeting’s argument about which tape recorder they should buy for field interviewing. Charlie Haraki favored the Moscowitz, which was sturdy, long-playing, and reliable. Bert Smith thought the Moscowitz was too bulky for field work. He wanted to try a new Japanese-made machine, the Kitano, which weighed only half as much and could be concealed in a coat pocket or handbag. However, it cost more, and had a recording capacity of only forty minutes. (This cultural reversal was not a freak, but typical. Dr. Smith’s cliffside apartment in Pacific Palisades was full of Japanese screens, silk pillows, and Oriental crockery; while Dr.

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