Crossroads Page 19

  Although she’d spent an inordinate amount of time alone in Los Angeles, she didn’t consider herself shy. The way her new condition felt to her was that every person who spoke to her was somehow Bradley Grant; every exchange of words, no matter how trivial, a rehearsal of the dire conversation she feared she would be having with him. A year later, in the hospital, one of the psychiatrists asked her if she wouldn’t rather be like other girls, not always so deathly serious—there was nothing wrong with small talk—gaiety was attractive in a girl—wouldn’t it be nice to escape from her thoughts in the flow of a light conversation? Marion wanted to file a criminal complaint about the psychiatrist. She happened to know that not all men required gaiety. She wondered how many other women on the ward had encountered the kind of man excited by morbid taciturnity: the literary kind of man, for whom craziness was romantic, or the sensualist kind, to whom still waters betokened sexually churning depths, or the chivalrous kind, who dreamed of saving someone broken.

  Bradley was all of those kinds of man. At least two other unmarried girls at Lerner were prettier than Marion, and Anne was as much a book reader as she was, so something else must have attracted Bradley. He’d detected craziness in her before she’d sensed it herself. Without her knowing it, her new condition made her more interesting to him, not less. On January 31, another fateful date, she returned from a protracted afternoon bathroom break and found, on her desk, an envelope with her name typed on it. Bradley was outside on the lot with a customer while the lesser salesmen stood at the windows, watching their lives go down the drain. It seemed likely to her that she’d been pink-slipped, and she opened the envelope to make sure. Seeing a typewritten poem, she ought to have thrown it in her wastebasket or at least waited until evening to read it. Instead, she took it back to the bathroom and locked herself in a stall.

  SONNET FOR MARION

  I dream I’m at the wheel and I’ve forgotten how

  To drive or never learned. I’m dreaming I’m

  Nineteen again. The car is young and powerful,

  It seems to drive itself, and by the time

  I find the brakes I’ve gone into a spin,

  A blur of storm-tossed palms and traffic lights.

  And you are at the wheel, not I. Within

  You a calm capability, as on that night—

  Oh, that night, when I was spinning and you

  Were speed and safety both. Did I only dream

  That, too? In your sustaining arms I knew

  What I had doubted: I’m younger than I seem.

  To dream of happiness, wake up, and walk on air

  Is to know the chance of happiness awake is there.

  Sitting in the stall, she tried to read past the sheer fact of the poem and understand what he was saying. The word that made no sense to her was capability. She was hardly even capable of speaking! It didn’t occur to her that Bradley might simply have used a faulty noun. She wondered if he’d meant that she was capable of saving him: if somehow, in the showroom of a car dealership, she’d been discovered after all, by a man of sufficient talent to fulfill his dream of writing for Hollywood, a dream his marriage had smothered but Marion might be capable of reviving and might yet join her own dream with. Wasn’t that what the poem was saying? That some dreams were so vivid that they became reality?

  She returned to the floor feeling elated, incipiently capable, and was disappointed when she could barely decipher her manager’s words to her. Now it was elation, not shame, that scrambled her mind, while the more general and important fact—that there was something diseased about a mind so easily scrambled—continued to elude her. When Bradley came back into the showroom with his customer, he was like a powerful magnetic field and she a charged needle. The field repelled her when she turned in his direction and attracted her when she turned away.

  In the evening, as closing time approached, the field approached her desk. “I’m such an ass,” he said.

  The manager, Mr. Peters, was standing within earshot. Bradley sat down sideways on a desk. “I promised you a T-bone steak last week,” he said. “You’ve probably been thinking, yeah, another salesman’s promise.”

  “I don’t need a steak,” Marion managed to say.

  “Sorry, doll, I’m a man of my word. Unless there’s somewhere else you need to be?” It was clever of him to approach her in the presence of Mr. Peters, who was older and sexually blind to her. It made the invitation seem innocent. “I thought we’d go to Dino’s, if that’s okay with you.” Bradley turned to Mr. Peters. “What do you think, George? Dino’s for a steak?”

  “If you don’t mind the noise,” Mr. Peters said.

  The rain outside was hurling itself down vertically, the car lot a shallow lake with currents rippling in the showroom lights and cresting at the storm drains. Marion sat in Bradley’s dark LaSalle with him, facing a fence in an unlighted corner of the lot, while the rain made a warlike sound on the roof. In her head, she rehearsed a short sentence, I’m actually not hungry. Even in her head, she stumbled over the words.

  Bradley asked her if she’d read his poem. She nodded.

  “It’s a tricky form, the sonnet,” he said, “if you’re strict about the rhyme and meter. In the old days, the word order was more flexible, you know, In me thou seest, where late the sweet birds sang, but who talks like that anymore? I wonder if anyone ever really said In me thou seest.”

  “Your poem is good,” she said.

  “You liked it?”

  She nodded again.

  “Will you let me buy you dinner?”

  “I’m not actually … actually not I’m—not hungry.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Maybe just take me home?”

  The rain came down harder and then abruptly let up, as if the car had gone under a bridge. When Bradley leaned toward Marion, she shied from the magnetism.

  “This is wrong,” she said, finding the voice she used to have. “This isn’t fair.”

  “You don’t like me.”

  She didn’t know if she liked him. The question somehow wasn’t pertinent.

  “I think you have talent as a writer,” she said.

  “On the basis of two little poems?”

  “You do. I could never write a sonnet.”

  “Sure you could. You could make one up right now. Da-duh, da-duh, da-duh, da-duh, rhyme A. Da-duh, da-duh, da-duh, da-duh, rhyme B.”

  “Don’t ruin it,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Don’t ruin what you wrote for me. It’s so beautiful.”

  He tried again to kiss her, and this time she had to push him away.

  “Marion,” he said.

  “I don’t want to be that kind of girl.”

  “Which kind is that?”

  “You know which kind.” Her face cramped up with tears. “I don’t want to be a slut.”

  “You could never in a million years be that kind of girl.”

  She pressed on her face to stop the cramp. “You hardly know anything about me.”

  “I can see into your soul. You’re the opposite of that kind of girl.”

  “But you said your marriage is not negotiable.”

  “I did say that.”

  “Do you write poems for your wife?”

  “Not since a very long time ago.”

  “I don’t mind if you write poems for me. I like it. In fact, I love it. I wish—” She shook her head.

  “Wish what?”

  “I wish you’d write a play, or a movie, and I could star in it.”

  Bradley seemed astonished. “That’s what you want?”

  “It’s just a dream,” she hastened to say. “It isn’t real.”

  He put his hands on the wheel and bowed his head. He could so easily have opened the door a crack and said he wasn’t sure about his marriage. He must have sensed that she wasn’t well. Perhaps he felt that lying to a nutty girl wasn’t sporting.

  “What if I did,” he said. “What if I wrote a part for you. Maybe
the daughter of the German ambassador—I almost think I could do it, as long as I could picture you in the role. That’s what I’m missing, something beautiful to picture instead of all the ugliness I bring home. I don’t get any support at all from Isabelle. She doesn’t even like it when I read a book. She’s jealous of a book! And boy does she get angry when I try to tell her about a new idea. It’s like she’s Dr. Freud and I’m the patient, just because I have ideas for a screenplay. ‘Oh dear, the patient is displaying symptoms again. We thought we’d cured him of ambition, and now he’s had a relapse.’ She’s so bitter about her own dreams, she can’t stand the fact that I still have my own.”

  “Do you love her?” Marion said. Hearing herself ask this question made her feel older and wiser: capable.

  “She’s good with the boys,” Bradley said. “She’s a good mother. Maybe a little too anxious—every little sniffle is a sure sign of whooping cough. But you wouldn’t believe how quickly the most interesting person in the world can turn into the most boring person you’ll ever meet.”

  “She used to be interesting.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. She sure as hell isn’t now.”

  Marion could simply have offered him friendship and inspiration. She wasn’t yet nutty enough to believe she could star in a movie he’d written. His stroke of genius salesmanship was to describe a person she felt like murdering. He didn’t know that his wife had the same name as Marion’s mother and her faithless school friend, but as soon as he gave her a more detailed Isabelle to hate, the door was open for nuttier thoughts to rush in. The thought that she, Marion, really was more capable than he. The thought that he was too kindhearted to face the obvious truth. The thought that only she could save him from unhappiness, only she could rescue him as a writer, by believing in him and helping him face the truth about his loveless marriage. What kind of vengeful witch got jealous of a book? Isabelle needed murdering for that, and the way for Marion to do it was to move over on the seat. She was short enough to kneel on it, slender enough to fit between him and the steering wheel, and once she was in his arms the dimension of moral significance disappeared.

  Bradley Grant took her virginity on the seat of a 1937 LaSalle Series 50 with fogged-up windows, on the lot of Lerner Motors. The act hurt less than certain girls in Santa Rosa had led her to suppose it would, but later, in the bathroom at her rooming house, she discovered more blood than she expected. The white porcelain ran red as she rinsed her underlinens. Only in the morning did she realize that her monthly period had started.

  There wasn’t much room for her condition to worsen, but in February it worsened. She felt trapped in a metal cube that was filling up with water, leaving only a tiny pocket of air at the top to breathe. The air was sanity. At every turn, she encountered constriction, most cruelly in how little time she had alone with Bradley. All day, she worked within a hundred paces of him, but he said they had to be very careful. At lunchtime she pressed him into a corner of her old sanctuary in the parts department, but the room had a window through which their corner was obliquely visible. Harry Lerner had forbidden further selling of cars after closing time, and Bradley kept finding reasons he had to go home in the evening. They finally resorted, again, to the seat of his LaSalle. Although it seemed a lot riskier on a moonlit night, without fog on the windows, she kept him there until 10:45. The following week, on his day off, he took her to a motel in Culver City, but even there she felt constricted, because it wasn’t enough to make love. They needed to discuss the future, because surely Bradley now understood that he couldn’t stay married to Isabelle, and their lovemaking left no time for talk. Not until they were back in his car did she ask him if he’d started writing again.

  “Not yet,” he said.

  It was a reasonable and honest answer, but it greatly upset her. The distance to her house was diminishing as he drove, their time for talking dwindling, the cube filling up with water.

  “I don’t know if I can do it,” he said.

  “Have you tried?”

  “All I can think about is you.”

  “That’s all I can think about, too. I mean—you.”

  “I just don’t know if I can do it.”

  “I know you can.”

  “Not writing,” he said. “This. I don’t know if I’m cut out for loving two women at the same time.”

  Less than a mouthful of air was left in the cube. All Marion was able to say with it was “Oh.”

  “It’s tearing me in two,” he said. “I’ve never met anyone I’ve wanted like you. Everything about you is exactly right. It’s like I was born with your face imprinted on my brain.”

  She didn’t have the same feeling about him. If she’d passed him on the street a year ago, she wouldn’t have looked twice. For a moment, as if from outside herself, she could glimpse the outlines of the thing inside her, the obsession that was growing in her, and recognize it as an object foreign to a normal person’s desires. But then, in a blink, she was inside it again.

  “Let’s go back to the motel,” she said.

  “We can’t.”

  “It wasn’t enough. I need more time with you.”

  “I want more, too, but we can’t. I’m already late.”

  Late meant Isabelle. The prospect of relinquishing Bradley felt so life-threatening to Marion that if she murdered Isabelle it would be an act of self-defense. She began to hyperventilate.

  “Marion,” he said. “I know it’s hard for you, but it’s even harder for me. It’s tearing me in two.”

  He said more, but her breathing drowned it out. Black cars and white buildings, winos with paper bags and women in sheer stockings, loving two people and tearing me in two. Either she breathed so hard she passed out or another slippage was occurring. The hand that Bradley put on hers, in front of her rooming house, was burning cold. She still couldn’t hear what he was saying, she only knew she had to get away.

  The second slippage was worse, the number of hours unaccounted for greater, and afterward she found scrapes on her knuckles, a red bump on her forehead. She was an hour late for work the next morning and wept disproportionately when Mr. Peters mildly chided her. At lunchtime, fearing suffocation if she stayed inside, fearing death if Bradley tried to speak to her, she fled the dealership and walked randomly on named and numbered streets. Snowfall from the storms extended down the spectral mountains, but the March sun was strong, spring already in the air. She was beginning to breathe more freely when she caught sight of a familiar face. Coming toward her, in the crosswalk at Grand Avenue and Ninth Street, was Isabelle Washburn. Marion lowered her head, but Isabelle stopped her by the arm.

  “Hey, kid. Aren’t you even gonna say hi?”

  Underneath a light coat with a sheen both lavender and green, Isabelle wore a green-on-white polka-dot dress, not cheap. She’d side-curled her hair and adopted a slack-jawed way of speaking that sounded copied from the movies. It transpired that she blamed her nincompoop cousin, rather than her utter lack of acting talent, for the failure of her plan for being discovered, but she was making okay money as a photography model and living with some other gals in a bungalow behind the Egyptian Theatre. It could have been Marion’s imagination, diseased by her own wantonness, but Isabelle’s repeated references to her landlord gave her the impression that he was more than just a landlord. Her artificial new way of speaking suggested a heart hardened by rough experience. “So anyways, that’s me,” she said. “Whatcha been up to yourself?”

  “I’m well,” Marion said, which was so funny to her she almost laughed.

  “Landed on your feet and all that?”

  “Fine, fine. Yes. I have a steady job. Which I should probably get back to.”

  Isabelle frowned. “Whadja do to your head?”

  “I couldn’t tell you.”

  Isabelle dug in her purse. “Lemme put some powder on that.”

  Right there on the street corner, Marion let her erstwhile friend apply makeup to the bump on her forehead. T
he casual sisterliness of the ministration choked her up. Isabelle raised her chin with her finger and inspected her with a professional eye. “That’s a little better,” she said, closing her compact. “You know, we really ought to get together sometime. You used to crack me up so much. Remember Hal Chalmers and Pokie Turner? Dick Thtabler? You ought to just drop in if you’re ever out my way. I’m literally right behind the Egyptian, on Selma, it’s a bright-red house, you can’t miss it.”

  Isabelle seemed to have forgotten that she’d dumped Marion nine months ago. Her life in the meantime had been so crowded with event that high school was already historical to her, and indeed it did now seem remarkable that Marion had ever imagined their remaining friends after graduation. But she no longer felt like murdering Isabelle. Instead, she felt sad about what life was doing to her. Nine months later, when life had done even worse to Marion and she had no one to turn to, she not only remembered Isabelle’s sloppy kindness at the corner of Ninth and Grand. She remembered that Isabelle lived in a bright-red bungalow behind the Egyptian Theatre.

  She’d become—had made herself—a problem Bradley had to manage. A few days after her second slippage, a blond customer in her thirties had come to the showroom. Nearly all the customers at Lerner were men, and Marion hadn’t seen Bradley work his magic on a woman since she’d become obsessed with him. Suddenly the cartoonish plasticity of his features seemed grotesque. After the woman left, without buying, Marion’s hatred of his wife came to a screaming boil and blew a gasket in her head. When he went to the men’s room, she followed him into it and threw her arms around his neck, tried to climb him. Her question was when they could make love again. She desperately needed to make love with him again, and in his fear of being caught in the men’s room he agreed. They went back to Culver City that very evening. The pleasure sex gave her was increasing exponentially with each encounter. Bradley avowed that, until that night, he’d never understood what passion was. He avowed that he was absolutely mad for her. When he drove her home, he told her she had to quit working at Lerner and find a better place to live.