Росс Макдональд - The Three Roads

Still she had been as faithful as a wife, though for nearly a year the only bond between them was the tenuous paper chain of letters. She had written him every day, turning her mind inside out on the pages to show that there was no part of her that didn’t love him. His interior life had fed on her letters like an unborn child drawing nourishment through its cords. A letter a day, thirty letters a month. Sometimes when they were on the high seas for weeks at a time, he would hear nothing for a month and reap a harvest of thirty letters at once. The serial number of her letters had mounted to over three hundred when his ship was ordered back to the West Coast to pick up a load of planes.

Security regulations forbade him to tell her in advance, and he had too strict a sense of duty to try to get around them, so that she didn’t guess he was coming until he phoned her studio from Alameda. She greeted his voice with incredulous laughter, as if it were a miracle that they should be together on the same continent again. He called her shortly before noon. She caught a plane from Burbank at two o’clock, and a little after four he met her at the San Francisco Airport.

When he saw her tall figure descending the ramp and crossing the apron toward him, he felt a glow of possessive pride that was quickly snuffed out by the fear that he couldn’t claim her. From her narrow feet to the tilted hat upon her shining hair she was poised and elegant, moving mysteriously and surely in a female land-world that glittered forever beyond his reach. He saw her through a glaze of time, locked away from him as if in amber.

Then she came through the gate in a little rush, a halting run. Distance and time were annihilated between their bodies. He forgot his doubts and fears, everything but the knowledge of his five senses that he was with her. “It’s good to be home,” was all he could think of to say against her cheek, and all she could answer was “Yes.”

They started out to celebrate in the usual way, drinking at the Top of the Mark, dining at Omar Khayyam’s. They talked about the life of ships, which was strange to her, the life of the studios, which was equally strange to him, the life of separated lovers, which they both knew well. But he gradually lost his ability to respond to her intimacy. He was acutely embarrassed by her obvious pride in the double lieutenant’s braid that he wore now.

As the hours went by, the hours that he had counted over one by one while he lay sleepless on the last five nights from Pearl, his inner tension increased and became unbearable. Paula sensed his trouble and tried hard to play it down. But after they quarreled at supper her good spirits seemed almost defiant in the face of something that was too much for her but that she’d fight to the last ditch. They both drank heavily, and the midnight taxi-ride to Oakland, which she suggested because she had never crossed the bridge, was a drunken flight from an inescapable reality. Before twelve of them had passed, they knew that their golden hours were being lost.

The final wastage, the jackpot of nothingness, came at the bitter end of the evening. She had managed to sublet a suite in one of the apartment hotels on Nob Hill for the three days they would be together, and she invited him up there for a final drink. From the window of her living-room he could look out over the lighted city like an airman, down the slanted neon streets to the dark harbor, where the ferries and water taxis crossed and recrossed, and the bold arch of the bridge slung across it like a chain of light. His vision was slightly blurred by alcohol, and the whole city stirred like a brilliant armada in a light breeze. A fleet laid out like that would be nice to bomb, he thought. Or a city. A little bombing in the right places would do Frisco a lot of good. Jesus, his head felt rotten! Liquor made him melancholy four times out of five, and the fifth time it made him wild. It seemed to affect Paula hardly at all except to heighten her reactions, and that was all she understood about it.

She came up quietly behind him and closed her arms around his waist. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she said. “Greater than Troy or Carthage. There are three cities in this country that give me the feeling of greatness, the feeling I had when I went to London and Paris. New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. That sounds like the name of a railway, doesn’t it? A super-railway with no changeover at Chicago.”

“There’s nothing left of Troy,” he answered somberly, “and they sowed salt on the ruins of Carthage.”

She laughed softly in his ear. “You and your tragic sense of history! I wasn’t thinking of anything like that. They have a romantic sound to me, is all. And they were big navy towns in their day.”

He resented her laughter, her easy rejection of his mood. To his whisky-sickened nostrils the perfume in her hair was overpoweringly sweet. He resented her material perfection, the long polished nails of the hands that held him, the fine clothes he could not have bought for her, the lofty rooms he could not have rented. They had quarreled at supper when she had tried to pick up the check. Though she had seen her error and given in immediately, his humiliation still rankled.

“You’re a very independent woman, aren’t you?” he said.

She was silent for a moment, then answered matter-of-factly: “I suppose I am. I’ve been on my own for a good many years.” But her embrace slackened, and she drew back from him a little as if in self-defense. “You wouldn’t want me to be a clinging vine, would you?”

He laughed harshly. “There’s not much danger of that.” He was still facing the window. The lights of the city outside were bright and heartless, like cruel eyes. San Francisco, the city he had dreamed of for a year, meant no more to him now than the empty camouflage cities built to mislead enemy bombers.

“I thought you liked me as I was, Bret. I’m sorry if I did the wrong thing at supper. I’ve simply gotten into the habit of paying my way. It’s a measure of self-protection in Hollywood.”

He stirred angrily, and her hands fell away from him entirely as he turned to face her. “I don’t know much about your Hollywood crowd, but that seems like a funny attitude to take to me. I thought we were going to be married–”

“We are.”

“What sort of place will I have in your life if I’m your husband?”

“What are you trying to do? You’re making a difficulty where none exists.”

“On the contrary. The difficulty may be insuperable.”

“Listen to me,” she said. “I don’t even know what we’re quarreling about. Those weeks in La Jolla I thought I learned to understand you. Whether I did or not, you took reality with you when you went away. All the time you were out my life here seemed unreal. Before I met you it was the war that was unreal, but since then it’s all I’ve cared about.”

He had hurt her once, and the resulting pain made him strike out blindly again. “No doubt I’ve given you some very authentic touches for your next war picture.”

She threw away her vanity and took hold of his unbending body. “Don’t be a bastard, darling. You can’t be jealous of my work.”

“That’s a laughable thought.”

“Then what’s the matter? I was crazy with happiness when you phoned this morning. I thought everything would be wonderful, and it hasn’t been. Don’t you love me?”

He answered with an effort: “I don’t know.”

“All your letters said you loved me. Have I done something to spoil it? Turn around and face me.”

He turned in the circle of her arms and looked down into her face. There was a spillage of tears from the corners of her eyes, which she tried to blink away. She closed her eyes and leaned toward him.