Crossroads

It was strange to think that the man crouched at her feet had been having such thoughts about her. He was a fascinating person, but in the end, even if one discounted that he was married, he was just a car salesman. She’d weathered the upwelling of dread with her good sense intact. She made a move to stand up, but Bradley caught one of her hands and held her in place. “I wrote something about you,” he said. “Can I tell you what I wrote?”

Taking her silence as consent, he recited a poem.

A woman walks, her name is Marion

Her hair is dark but smells of bright

Sun piercing clouds with clarion splendor

Her eyes downcast but full of light

And darkness both, her mind a wide sky

Both serene and threatening: untouchable

“Who wrote that?” she said.

“I did.”

“You wrote that.”

“It’s the first thing I’ve written since I don’t know when.”

“You wrote that about me?”

“Yes.”

“Say it again.”

He recited it again, with a bashful sincerity that made him definitely handsome. She was having a delayed reaction to the whiskey, an opening of certain floodgates. The apparent tilting of the showroom floor seemed to prove that the cars had their parking brakes set. Despite having seen Bradley persuade a stranger, twice in three hours, that the stranger wanted something he shouldn’t have wanted, she wondered if he really might have talent as a writer. The subject of his poem was specific, not interchangeable. She herself had felt herself to be dark and light, sky-wide, and he’d made a rhyme with her name.

“One more time,” she said.

She thought a third hearing might tell her, for sure, if he had real talent. In fact, it told her nothing, because all she could hear was that he’d written a poem about her. She leaned back in the chair and let the whiskey shut her eyes. “Hoo-eee,” she admitted. The switch in her was in the Off position, which was another way of saying she didn’t care. Her father with a chain around his neck, dead on the bottom of the bay. Her sister uncatchable no matter how Marion might run. She didn’t care.

When Bradley drew her to her feet and kissed her, it was as if her body were picking up at exactly the oversexed point it had left off with Dick Stabler. It was horrifying how much a man wanting her was what it wanted. She felt she couldn’t press herself against Bradley hard enough, she needed harder pressing, and Bradley gave it to her. He backed her against the immovable weight of a gleaming Cadillac 75 and pressed her where Dick Stabler hadn’t dared to. There was a thing that her hips were capable of doing but hadn’t ever done. To let them do it, to fully relax them, even upright, even in a dress, with Bradley between her knees in his still-damp trousers, felt momentous. Roy Collins, on the eve of her departure from Santa Rosa, had predicted what would happen if she wasn’t careful in Los Angeles. Roy hadn’t used the word slut again, but he’d made it very clear that if Marion got in trouble she could expect no further help from him. And now here she was, opening her legs for a married man. Over Bradley’s head, when he happened to lower it to her neck, she saw the uneven steps the office wall clock was taking toward eleven o’clock, the hour at which she’d be locked out of her rooming house. She was feeling ill with hunger as the whiskey wore off.

As if putting a bookmark in a novel, she pushed him away and wordlessly moved to get a cigarette. He, too, said nothing while he turned off the bright lights, locked the front door, and led her to his ’37 LaSalle. By the time they reached her house, they had only ten minutes to talk before the night manageress threw the deadbolt.

She put out the third of the cigarettes she’d chain-smoked. “I don’t see how I’m going to go to work in the morning.”

“Same as you always do,” he said.

There was a problem that needed solving before it worsened, but she suspected that the problem had no solution—that she was no stronger than the man who came to Lerner and saw the only red car. Rather than waste her last minutes on pointless talk, she slid over and put her arms around Bradley. The car shook in the gusts of wind and she with it. Inside the house, as soon as she’d shut her door behind her, she touched herself the way she’d learned to in the frustrated aftermath of making out with Dick Stabler. But those had been more innocent days. Now she felt too lonely to concentrate on dispelling her sexual urge, too scared of her badness to surrender to it. She needed to cry instead; and this was the first time the slippage occurred.

It was one in the morning and she couldn’t account for two hours. Her sad little room, with its nicked and peeling furniture and its smoke-saturated fabrics, its lamp overbright but wrongly positioned for reading in bed, presented itself as a collection of random places that she thought she might have stared at, pushed her face into, banged her forehead against. Her bedspread lay in a heap in a corner. There was no fresh smoke, but her ashtray was upended on her bed, a dirty avalanche of old butts and ashes at the base of the pillow. Her impression was of a person who’d frantically defended herself against evil spirits beating on the window in the form of sideways rain. Now she was painfully hungry, but she appeared to be uninjured. No one in the world is more alone than I, she wrote in her diary.