Crossroads

“I only brought twenty dollars.”

“Well.” Sophie smiled pleasantly. “You can think of it as a Christmas present, if you want.”

Marion shuddered.

“The holiday seems to have a particular association for you,” Sophie said. “Will you tell me what it is?”

Marion shut her eyes again. The Christmas she’d spent alone in Santa Monica later seemed like the last day that she and the outside world had been in balance. In the first weeks of 1940, storm after chaotic storm dumped rain on Southern California. The streets were black and oily with it on the evening she stayed late at Lerner Motors to type up papers on the preposterous sale that Bradley Grant had made. Sideways rain was slapping the window of her boardinghouse room long after midnight, when she wrote in her diary, Something awful has happened and I don’t know what to do. It must never, ever happen again.

Bradley Grant was the star salesman at Lerner. Although Marion was lonely, she’d taken to eating her lunchtime sandwich in an unused room in the parts department. There, she at least had the undivided companionship of a book, until Bradley Grant began intruding on her. Bradley was fifteen years older than she was, but he had the fatless body of a teenager and a face whose handsomeness was hard to judge; there was something cartoonlike about the stretchiness of his features, especially his wide mouth. When he saw Marion with a volume of Maupassant stories, he invaded her lunch-hour sanctuary to hold forth on Maupassant. He was an avid reader, a literary man by training. He struck her as being most interested in himself, so overflowing with words that he had to troll the parts department to find an outlet for them, but one day he brought her his own copy of Homage to Catalonia, by the English writer George Orwell. He was distressed about the rise of Fascism in Europe, about which she knew essentially nothing. She duly read the Orwell and began to pay attention to the front page of the newspaper, in order to seem less ignorant to Bradley. One day, he remarked that a girl as intelligent and pretty as Marion ought to be in the front office, and the very next day she was transferred to the front office. At Lerner, the lesser salesmen were rank perspirers, changing their undershirts at midday, afraid of the pink slip every Friday, but Bradley Grant was so valuable to the dealership that only the owner, Harry Lerner, could overrule him. After her transfer, Marion continued to eat her lunchtime sandwich in the back. Becoming a front-office typist and file fetcher was hardly her idea of being discovered.

On the day a person was born, only one date on the calendar, her birthday, was significant, but as she proceeded through life other dates became permanently exalted or befouled, the date her father killed himself, the date she married, the dates her children were born, until the calendar was densely checkered with significance. On the evening of January 24, a young man in a dripping fedora walked into the Lerner showroom shortly before closing time. A lesser salesman sidled up to him and got the brush-off. At Lerner, they called any man who came inside to flaunt his automotive knowledge, or to be fawned over for a couple of minutes, or just to get out of the weather, with no intention of buying, a Jake Barnes. Bradley Grant, who’d coined the name, and who’d already closed three sales that day, strolled up to Marion’s desk with an apple and ate it carefully while he studied the young Jake Barnes. “I like his shoes,” he said, dropping the apple core in her wastebasket. “Is there somewhere you need to be?” There was never anyplace Marion needed to be. Within a minute, on the floor, Bradley had a hand on the Jake Barnes’s shoulder and was helping him into a brand-new Buick Century. She watched Bradley’s features stretch into cartoons of astonishment, indifference, compassion, stern admonition. With a gliding tread that let him hurry without seeming to hurry, he returned to her and told her to keep the showroom open and a manager on duty. “Jake and I are making a little cash run,” he said, gliding away again. An hour later, he and the young buyer were back on the floor and Marion was typing up the paperwork.