Росс Макдональд - The Three Roads

“A touch of the feline is natural enough under the circumstances.”

“Anyway I suffered for my little moment of false triumph. She showed me the bundle of letters Bret has sent her, and even insisted that I read one of them. Bret had told her about me, you see, and she was perfectly willing to see me suffer. She was quite sweet to me, but in a deadly way. I didn’t want to read the letter, but I’m afraid I did. I felt compelled to.

“It was the sort of thing you write to a child, still and reassuring. He was at sea again; he couldn’t tell her where, but it was exciting; he loved her and looked forward to seeing her. It was painful to read but it gave me a certain consolation. He had nothing really to say to her, and she didn’t have brains or feeling enough to know the difference.”

“I gather she was pretty young.” There was in his voice an elegiac undertone that Paula resented in spite of herself.

“Nineteen or twenty, I’d say. She had nearly ten years on me, and that didn’t help. But she was no child bride. She went out of her way to let me know she’d been around. Frankly I had the feeling that Bret had been seduced.”

“It’s fairly evident that someone had to,” Wright said quietly.

“I know. I tried to, our last night together, but it didn’t take. He was a virgin, and I’d been married before. Yet I’m sure he loved me.”

“That may have been precisely the trouble. He’s a bit of an idealist, isn’t he?”

“You know him.”

“He’s an idealist all right. And that’s all very well, but when idealists break down, and they nearly always do, they tend to go to the opposite extreme. This girl, for instance. I presume his interest in her was primarily sexual. How did she feel about him?”

“I don’t believe she had any strong feeling one way or the other, but then I’m not an unbiased witness. She seemed to be proud of being married to a full lieutenant in the Navy, and having a little house of her own, though she wasn’t doing much to keep it up. She was a little tight when I got there, quite early in the afternoon. She offered me a bottle of beer, and I tried to get her to talk, but it was heavy going. I’m no giant intellect, but she was a featherbrain. Our only common ground was the movies.”

“And Lieutenant Taylor?”

“No, not even Bret. Our conceptions of him were so different I found I couldn’t talk with her about him. Not without getting angry, at least, and I certainly wasn’t going to do that. To her he was an acquisition, a meal ticket garnished with gold braid. She mentioned twice that he had bought her the house and was sending her an allotment of two hundred dollars a month. In spite of those things I invited her to return my visit, but she never did. I guess I didn’t do a very good job of covering my feelings, and she resented me quite as much as I resented her. I called on her about two months before she was murdered, and I didn’t see her alive after that.”

Wright hammered his pipe on his heel with flagellant intensity. “You didn’t see her alive?” he said with his face averted.

“I saw her dead. I was with Bret when he found her body.”

He glanced up into her face and was embarrassed by the pain he saw there. “Oh, yes. Of course.”

“I told you about it when you took charge of Bret’s case. I hope I don’t have to go through it again.”

“There’s no need to,” he answered quickly. “We have a complete record.”

“As a matter of fact I do have to go through it again,” she said. “I’ve got an appointment with Dr. Klifter tonight.”

“Klifter?”

“The psychoanalyst. I assumed that Captain Kelvie had told you about him. He’s agreed to interview Bret tomorrow. With your permission,” she added coldly.

“Of course the captain talked to me about it. The name slipped my mind for a moment.”

“A Freudian error, Commander?”

“Not at all. I’ve read Klifter’s monographs, and I think they’re fine. But it’s hard to get used to the idea that he’s in California. He’s always been a sort of European myth to me.”

“He’s a very charming and unpretentious man,” Paula said. “He acted as technical adviser on a script I rewrote – that’s how I happen to know him. I’ll be very glad if he consents to take the case. I take it you have no objections to his interviewing Bret?”

“None at all. Since you have the captain’s permission, mine’s only a formality anyway. Actually I’ll be glad of the chance to discuss the case with Klifter. I do want to warn you though not to expect too much.”

“I expect very little.”

“I don’t mean that Taylor won’t recover, and I don’t mean that psychoanalysis mightn’t be useful. Our pentothal interview is a variation of psychoanalytic technique, as a matter of fact.”

“I know that.” She rose to go, holding her purse before her body like a shield. She had worn, for Bret’s eyes, a woolen dress that clung to the outlines of her shoulders and breasts. “I’ll miss my train.”

“Let me take you down in the station wagon.”

“Thank you, I have a cab waiting.”

“All I meant,” he repeated as she offered him her hand, “was that you mustn’t look for a sudden miracle. These things take time. Nothing can take the place of time.”

She heard his final sentence two ways. The meaning that echoed in her mind all the way to the station was the one he had not intended. Time was running away like a river, and she and Bret were lodged on opposite banks. Nothing could take the place of the time that had already run out or the time that was yet to run.

Although she had passed between them uncounted times, Paula was always struck by the contrast between the Santa Fe station and the San Diego gas company building. The latter was an ugly huge cube of a building, surrounded by towering steel chimneys like candles on a birthday cake. Across the streetcar tracks was the archaic and sentimental incongruity of the station tower. It seemed to her that the two buildings were symbols of historic forces. On the one hand was the giant mass of the power and utility companies that actually dominated the life of the state; on the other, the Spanish past that California plutocracy used to stucco its façade.

The shining metal streamliner waiting beside the station added the final touch to her allegory. It was the impossible future superimposed upon the ugly present in the presence of the regretted past. There was no continuity between the tenses, she thought. You passed from one to the other as a ghost passed through a wall, at the risk of your own reality. The spotless interior of this streamlined future was crowded with unreal passengers waiting to be transported, appropriately enough, to Los Angeles.

She moved like a sleepwalker along the platform and found the chair she had reserved in the parlor car. Even the train’s starting, one of her oldest excitements, and the blue glimpses of the sea as they passed outside the city, failed to lift her out of her mood of vague resignation. After her five years in California there was still something false and garish about summer weather in February. She’d have preferred an unsmiling sky and a gray sea to that steady yellow sun and those glittering waves. She wondered if there was anything in the idea she’d heard somewhere that too much fair weather could make people hard-hearted and self-indulgent.

On an afternoon like this, and with a parlor car to observe it from, it was hard to believe in sin and madness and death. That cotton-batting surf didn’t look much like cruel, crawling foam. But of course it was, and people suffered in California just as they did in other places – suffered a little more, perhaps, because they didn’t get much sympathy from the weather.