Росс Макдональд - The Three Roads

Of course it hadn’t been a dream. Lorraine had been a real girl sitting not in some cavern of the unconscious, but in an actual bar drinking genuine whisky. For a girl of her age she seemed to have a remarkable capacity. If the truth were known she probably had no right to be drinking in a bar at all. They were strict with minors in California, and she didn’t look twenty-one. Her face was extraordinarily innocent, he thought, and extraordinarily sweet. The whiteness of her low, broad forehead was marbled with delicate blue veins and framed in black hair. Her long brows, which had not been plucked artificially thin like Paula’s, gave her blue eyes a pure and steadfast look. Yet there was nothing heavy about her face. Her short upper lip, repeating the upward tilt of her nose, gave it an impish gaiety accentuated by her full, impulsive mouth. She looked like an innocent kid from out of town who had blundered into a dive by mistake and was quite untouched by her surroundings.

He felt a certain responsibility for her, as he felt responsible for all weak or innocent or helpless people. It was only natural that he offered to buy her a drink.

“I don’t mind if I do,” she said. “Two stripes mean a full lieutenant, don’t they?”

“Yes,” he said. “I like your face. You have a lovely, pure face.”

She wriggled and giggled. “You Navy boys are fast workers. Been out a long time?”

“Nearly a year this last time.” He leaned toward the fragrance of her hair, which was sleek and heavy on her shoulders. When he inclined his head, his mind descended in a dizzy spiral round and round her body like a wreath. He said in a choked whisper: “I like the way your hair smells.”

She laughed with pleasure and turned her head quickly back and forth so that her hair flew out against his face. “You ought to. That’s expensive scent. What’s your name, sailor?”

“Bret.”

“That’s a nice name, so unusual. Mine’s Lorraine.”

“I think Lorraine is a beautiful name,” he said.

“You flatter me.”

He seized her hand and kissed its moist palm. The bartender gave him a brief, cynical glance.

“Be careful, Bret. You’ll spill our drinks.”

“To hell with them! I’ve got a quart of Harwood’s in my room. This stuff makes my throat dry anyway.”

“I like Harwood’s,” she said with girlish candor.

“Let’s go then.”

“If you want to, Bret dear.”

She slid off the stool and buttoned her coat. She was surprisingly small, but her figure had the dignity of perfection. As she moved ahead of him to the door he saw how the hips under the tight coat bloomed out from the narrow waist, swaying with every tap of her quick heels. His mind swayed with her body, and his eyes undressed her.

Twenty minutes later he undressed her with his hands. The taxi ride to his hotel had been a continuous kiss, and he was breathless and dizzy. She let out her breath to help him with a last difficult hook and eye and lay back smiling. He was amazed by her body’s economy and richness. Beneath the luxury of her breasts he could feel the fragile ribs. He could span her waist with his hands. But the sweep of her hips was terrifying, and the blandness of her belly and thighs, and the panther blackness of her hair.

When he turned out the light the whole night became panther-black and terrifying and sweet. Her kisses were the fulfillment of a promise too sweet to be believed, like a springtime in midwinter. Somewhere inside him the ice went out with a rush. The black night flowed like a river toward the delectable mountains, through a narrow, desperate gorge, into a warm valley where eventually he went to sleep.

This time Commander Wright was in his office and called to him through the open door to come in.

“Do you mind waiting a minute, Taylor? I should have got this stuff out yesterday.” He was working at his desk on a typewritten report, emending it with a red pencil that threatened to snap under the pressure of his thick fingers.

Bret sat down in a hard chair to wait. His body was tense with anxiety. Unless he was having delusions again he had done the one thing that fouled up his life completely. He remembered waking up in the morning with the girl in bed beside him. His head rang like a cracked bell, but a drink from the dwindling bottle of Harwood’s softened its tone. He went back to the sleeping girl and was fascinated again by her half-covered body shining in the dingy room. He had wakened her with his hands, and she turned toward him as soft and sensuous as a kitten. All this had been bad enough for a man of his moral pretensions (and the day after Paula had flown five hundred miles to be with him), but it wasn’t the chief thing that was worrying him now. He seemed to recall that when they ran out of whisky and went out to buy more, he also bought a marriage license.

“Bloody Navy red-tape,” Wright grumbled. He looked up from his papers and retrieved his dead pipe from the ashtray. “I suppose you came to get the word on Dr. Klifter? Well, he’s here. He drove down with me this morning.”

“I don’t understand, sir.”

“Didn’t Miss West tell you he was coming?”

“No, sir.”

“He’s a friend of hers, a well-known psychoanalyst. He was one of the original members of the Viennese Society until he broke with Freud. Then he ran his own clinic in Prague before the war. He’s been practicing in L.A. the last few years.”

“Very interesting,” Bret said. “But how do I come into all this?”

“He came here to interview you, I thought you knew. He’s going over the files with Weising now. If he thinks your case is susceptible to psychoanalytic treatment, we’ll arrange for it–”

“Who’s going to pay for it? I can’t afford the luxury of a psychoanalyst from Middle Europe.”

“Miss West is handling that.”

“I see.”

“You don’t seem very pleased. If he takes the case you’ll get a leave out of it. Don’t count on it, but that’s what’s in the book.”

“I’ve given up counting on anything.” Under different circumstances the prospect of a leave would have delighted him. But all he could think of right now was the stranger he had slept with, or married. If he had married her it meant the end of the one thing he cared about. When Paula found out, if she didn’t already know.… But she must know. Why hadn’t she told him?

Wright gave him a narrow look. “Is there something bothering you, Taylor?”

“Yes. Am I married? I know how irresponsible that sounds.”

Wright’s nostrils emitted twin streams of smoke like a benevolent dragon’s. “Close the door, will you? Thanks. Now sit down.”

“Do you have a record of a girl called Lorraine? It’s important to me to know–”

“Yes. You plan to marry Miss West, don’t you?”

“Answer my question,” Bret said sharply. “I don’t see any reason for making a mystery of it.”

“I’m not making a mystery out of it, Taylor. Your own mind did that.”

“All right, all right. Am I married?”

Wright knocked out his pipe as if extinguishing an impulse to ease his patient’s tension. “You can’t go on using my memory indefinitely. You’re getting to be quite a big boy now.”

“Yes, sir,” Bret said in flat hostility.

“Let’s see, you met this Lorraine Berker in San Francisco in the fall of ’44. Can you tell me about her? What she looked like?”

“She was a blue-eyed brunette, a very pretty girl.” He adopted the doctor’s past tense with a half-unconscious recognition of its aptness. “She had a remarkably white skin for a brunette.”

“Is that the way she looked the last time you saw her?”

“I don’t know. I’m trying to think.” He caught a glimpse of Lorraine’s face stained with sleep and tears as it had been the morning he left her. The ship was due to weigh anchor at eight, and he had to leave the hotel at five to allow time for the long ride to Alameda. He had kissed her for the last time, on mouth and eyes and breast, and left her in what must have been their marriage bed. “I married her, didn’t I? Before I sailed? Is it in the record?”