Росс Макдональд - The Three Roads

“In keeping back these facts? I realize Bret will have to know eventually. But not now. His hold on reality is still so precarious. I don’t know what the shock would do to him.”

“Nor do I. I hope to understand him better when I have talked to him tomorrow. It may be that the truth of these things, the ugly and naked truth, is exactly what his mind requires. You see, the fact that he is innocent of his wife’s death does not exclude the possibility of subjective guilt. It merely removes the most obvious objective reason for his guilt.”

“You’ll have to take it slower. My brain isn’t functioning tonight.”

“I shall illustrate my meaning. Suppose that he desired his wife’s death. Though he was innocent in all but wish, her death, satisfying as it did his unconscious or partially unconscious desires, might very well leave him with an overpowering sense of guilt. Do you understand me now?”

“Yes,” she said in a low voice. “I felt guilty of her death, for that reason.”

Her eyes, black with fear, were fixedly watching the dark window again.

He did his best thinking in the night watches, when darkness and silence swathed his room. Long after midnight he lay awake charging the wilderness of memory that stretched backward from the advancing edge of the present. The motives that explained his life were as difficult to trace as a river that ran underground for more than half its length. But night after night he renewed his groping search. In this dim subterranean place, the hidden life of violence and hatred, tenderness and desire, he might find the self that he had lost, and the key to the door of the room where he lay.

The landmarks of his external life – his boxing championship in college, his graduation summa cum laude , his Washington appointment, the publication of his book on the Age of Reason – these things lost all their significance when he looked at them from below, from the vantage point of darkness. The bald ceremony at which he was sworn in as an officer in the Naval Reserve had moved him deeply at the time, but now it was meaningless except as one remote link in the chain of events that had brought him to this hospital bed. His mental crisis, like a crisis in the economy of a nation, had changed the value of his currency.

But there were scenes in his hidden life that seemed to be lit by a pulsating lightning, a throbbing anguish as secret and intimate as his blood. On his tenth birthday he shot a sparrow with the new air rifle that was his father’s birthday present to him. The sparrow flopped crazily around the garden for a long time and refused to die. He had not been able to shoot it again or to touch it with his hands. He stood paralyzed by guilt and repulsion and pity, and watched it beat away its life among the flowers.

Standing by his father’s coffin ten years later, he had not been able to grieve. The flower-choked funeral parlor in the little Indiana town bored and irritated him. He was anxious to get back to Chicago and his work. And in the heavy atmosphere of the cut roses and carnations he remembered his tenth birthday. His father had found him with the dying sparrow, and they saw it die together, change in a spasm from a frantic bird to a handful of dusty feathers. They had buried the dead sparrow beside the rosebush, and his father had taken away his air rifle, and he had never seen it again.

He looked down into the rouged and sunken face of Professor Emeritus George Taylor who had sired and fed him, taken away his air rifle, and died unloved in his sleep in his sixty-sixth year. But two days after the funeral he awoke in his Pullman berth on his way back to Chicago and wept for the poor old man and the dead bird. Another ten years had passed since then, but he could still remember the fading eyes of the sparrow as its life went out, and the terrible loneliness of the body in the coffin.

A loneliness as deathly as the dead man’s had enclosed him for most of those ten years. He had never been able to take love or give it until he met Paula in La Jolla and she decided to stay with him. Even the day he told her he loved her had been flawed by an impulse of rejection. Though nothing had actually happened and the evil impulse had been rejected in turn, the remembered scene, the moving sky and the gray sea, the dark, sharp cormorants skimming low over the water, were lit by the guilty lightning in his mind.

It was the first cloudy day in their week together, too cold and dark for sun-bathing or swimming in the cove. A rough wind from offshore reinforced the tide, and the waves rolled in like hills of glass that shattered on the deserted beaches. The wind brought color into her cheeks and made her eyes shine. With a brightly figured scarf over her hair she was young, absurd, and lovely, laughing at the white explosions of the waves bursting on the rocks. They linked hands and climbed the sea wall as they had on the first night. Threading their way among the pools and fissures of the water meadows, they scrambled up on a high rock and stood there out of reach of the surf.

While they watched the terrific horseplay of the sea, the seals came in. Usually they stayed a mile or so out, their raised snouts tiny disappearing cones of darkness against the shifting colors of the ocean. But sometimes when their mood was right and the waves were high, they caught them and rode them in to shore. They could swim up and out of the crest of a wave, leap clear, turn in the air, and slide back into their element. Back and forth they swam inside the breaking rollers, the continuous grace of their movements as clear to the watchers as if they were swimming under glass. Just before the waves swept them to destruction on the rocks, they ducked and released themselves, swam out and rode in again. The sleek bodies gliding and twisting in the glass walls were like the bodies of women. He felt exultant, with an undercurrent of fear and shame. He had never possessed the body of a woman.

“How I’d love to be a dancer!” Paula said. “To say things directly with my body, instead of through a typewriter and actors’ faces and camera angles. It must be the most satisfying art there is.”

He didn’t answer until the seals had tired, or thought of another game, and went away. When he turned to her a tender warmth was trembling through him.

She faced him gladly, with soft and shining eyes. Her glowing body was hidden like a beast in ambush under her fur coat. He was painfully aware of the warmth of her hand, the whiteness of her chin and throat, the redness of the mouth that was raised to him. His heartbeat was quickened, and his knees loosened by desire. She opened her coat to let him in, and they embraced on the rock above the sea, in full view of two hotels.

It was then that he told her he loved her. But in the dizzy instant of passion the revulsion had taken hold of him. He moved to free himself, but she misinterpreted his movement and held him closer. He felt trapped. She was a divorcée, her kisses were hot and syrupy, her body was cheaply had. She was a woman like the rest. There was no virtue in any of them, as his father had warned him long ago.

He had mastered the impulse, of course, but it had almost overpowered him for a moment: to fling her backward into the boiling surf, let her appetent body be purified and broken. He might so easily have killed her, with a single violent motion have rejected love and lost her forever. Actually he had done nothing to hurt even her feelings. His love for her had drained back into him by way of his head, and he had kept his secret.

It occurred to him now for the first time that perhaps she had not been wholly unaware. They were together for nearly two weeks after that, but they had not become lovers. He had blamed his inexperience and desperate shyness, but it may have been Paula after all who had subtly withdrawn herself. When he asked her to marry him she had preferred to wait. She had seen too many hasty wartime marriages, she said. Of course she wanted to be his wife, but it was better to wait and be sure. When his ship got its sailing orders and headed west again, they weren’t even formally engaged.