Росс Макдональд: The Three Roads

She forced blankness on her mind, smiled as an act of faith, and watched the belt of orange trees that had appeared between the railroad and the sea. A sailor passing in the aisle, willing and eager to accept her blind smile as a personal tribute, paused beside her chair.

“Good afternoon,” he said with the assurance of extreme youth and a double row of ribbons. “A lovely afternoon, isn’t it?”

As if he were appraising an object on which he intended to enter a bid, he stood and frankly examined her polished-copper hair, her smooth skin, the promise of the figure revealed by her blue wool dress. She couldn’t bring herself to feel angry. She was on the brink of thirty, and she’d never been quite beautiful enough to be smug about her looks. On the other hand she wasn’t going to listen to wolfish chatter all the way to Los Angeles.

“Blow, swabbie,” she whispered hoarsely. “My husband’s an officer.”

“Certainly, certainly.” He tipped his white hat forward onto the bridge of his nose, and said before he strolled away: “No hard feelings.”

She turned back to the orange groves rushing by like a dark green river on which thousands of tiny oranges floated dizzily away. She was worried about the lie she had told, not because it was a lie, but because she had claimed Bret Taylor as her husband. He wasn’t, and she was afraid he never would be. He’d turned her down in San Francisco in no uncertain terms, and if she’d had any pride she’d have given up when he married the other girl. Yet here she was, nearly two years later, still camping on his trail and beginning to tell strangers on trains that she was his wife. She’d have to watch herself or she’d be going around making all sorts of extravagant claims, like the old woman in Monterey who said she was Mary the Mother of God.

Her real embarrassment came from a deeper source. In the two and a half years since she had met Bret Taylor there had been stirrings in the heart of her body as heavy and ultimate as seismic movements. She had to admit that she was beginning to feel as female as hell, as female and irrational as any D. H. Lawrence Fraülein . She wanted a man and she wanted a child. Yet she felt that it was faintly ridiculous to be an old-maid Rachel weeping over her unborn children. After all, she had been married and knew the answers, most of which were discouraging. But perhaps a marriage like that one didn’t count. She hadn’t really begun to feel like a woman until years after Pangborn floated out of her life, paddling blithely with a swizzle stick down a golden river of highballs. Jack Pangborn, the King of the Golden River, had never been for her. No, that marriage didn’t count.

You certainly are a tremendous shrewd picker, she told herself derisively. Your first choice, way back in high school, was a youthful Adonis with an I.Q. of 85 and a dazzling future as a clerk in a chain grocery store. Then there were all those crushes on older men, the men you were going to reform. Finally you followed the dictates of common sense and got yourself romantically involved with an amiable dipsomaniac who half the time couldn’t remember your name, and called you Mabel, Gertie, or Flo, as the spirit moved him. When the spirit moved Pangborn beyond your reach and you couldn’t go on supporting him for the rest of your life, much as you would have liked to, you nursed a broken heart for years and years. Or was that only a mother complex that got fractured? Whatever it was, you laid off men for a good long time, on account of you had a great sorrow in your life. And meanwhile your salary went up from a hundred to seven fifty a week, because there’s nothing like a fractured mother complex, or heart, to fit a girl for making money.

One day you, the shrewd picker, shut both your eyes tight, mumbled a brief invocation to Aphrodite and reached into the grab-bag again. What came out was Lieutenant Taylor. He looked pretty good for while, so good that you began to doubt the faultless ineptitude of your own judgment. But all came right in the end when he stood you up in San Francisco and broke your heart, or whatever it was, for good and all. But that wasn’t enough. You needed something more to maintain you in the condition of unhappiness to which you had become accustomed. So he married another girl, just to make it permanent. Then he went away into the Pacific and had his ship bombed out from under him and came back and lost his mind. Even that wasn’t enough. But the additional things were a little too terrible to think about just now when she was still depressed by the encounter in the hospital. There would be time enough to think about those additional things when she went to see Dr. Klifter.

How on earth did a girl get that way? She’d made a couple of bum choices, but she was no spiritual masochist, in love with a system of diminishing returns kissing the fists that gave her the old one-two. It was true she’d been tossed out on her ear and had come back asking for more, but that was because he needed her. He needed someone at least, and she had nominated herself. But it wasn’t true that she loved him because he needed her. When she’d fallen in love with him for the first and last time, he hadn’t needed her at all. She had never met a man more self-contained and independent, and she’d gone ahead and fallen for him just the same. That was back in the fall of ’43, when the tide of war was beginning to turn and the only thing that people worried about was winning it. It was really rather pathetic how simple the big things like love and war seemed until you started to go into detail.

She had driven down to La Jolla for the week end – San Diego County seemed to have become the Ithaca of their affair – and had met him at a party there. It wasn’t much of a party. Bill and Bella Levy were too careless and informal, and too much in love with each other, to run a really good one. They were content to corral a heterogeneous mob of human beings and turn them loose in the big studio with a radio-phonograph and a case of liquor. Sam Slovell was there that night, and drunk enough to play boogie-woogie on the electric organ.

At one moment she was moving about the room by herself, with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, looking at Bill’s abstractionist paintings and Bella’s primitives. Male and female created they them, she thought, not much caring which was which. The next moment a young man in Navy blues was moving beside her. He was the only serviceman present, and she’d noticed him earlier in the evening. Without feeling called upon to do anything about it, she’d registered the observation that he looked lonely and out of place. Now he was asking her to dance, and she raised her arms to let him take hold of her. He danced quite well, though he had the look of a man who wouldn’t, and she felt pleased with herself because after several hours of moderate drinking she could still dance with a glass in her hand and not spill a drop of her drink.

“You’ve got a steady hand,” he said when the music paused.

She drained her glass and set it down on a table. “Confidentially, I’m controlled by invisible wires.”

He laughed dutifully and somewhat unnecessarily. “Let me get you another drink.”

“No, thank you. Like half the souses in the world I’m merely a social drinker. But go and get one for yourself.”

“I don’t drink.”

She thought she detected in his tone a trace of provincial self-righteousness which made her want to embarrass him. “But how unusual! I thought all naval personnel simply poured it down.”

Instead of blushing he smiled, and she saw with some surprise that he wasn’t a dull man at all. “Drinking brings out my paranoiac streak, so I gave it up. My name’s Taylor, by the way.”

“West is mine.” She removed a dried old palette from a bench, and they sat down together. “I take it that when you’re inducted into the Navy they take away your first name and give you a number instead?”