Росс Макдональд - The Three Roads

“You’d better get home and take a hot bath,” he said.

“I suppose I’d better.”

She hated him warmly all the way back to the hotel. But when, at the last possible minute before they said good night, he asked to see her again next day, she felt unreasonably grateful.

It was a warm day, cloudless and bright, and they went down to the cove in their bathing suits. In any other company Paula would have been the first into the water, but today she didn’t need to go in at all. She had a man to take up the challenge for her, a man who put her competitive instinct to sleep. She lay down in the hot sand like any soft little woman, and watched him catch the waves and ride them in. He swam well, and that pleased her. Brains in a man were all very well, indispensable in fact, but you liked a few other things to be added. Broad shoulders, for example, and the ability to swim under water.

The brown man in the waves looked much younger today, younger and freer in the water, as if that other element were his own. He played like a young animal until he was tired and a wave brought him up and stranded him on the beach. He staggered up the slope toward her, breathing hard.

“I bet it’s cold.”

“Not so cold if you keep moving.” He stood on one foot and kicked sideways with the other, shaking the water out of his ears.

“Don’t you ever get tired of the sea – after being on it for so long?”

“It depends what sea you’re talking about.” He sat down in the sand and stretched out beside her. “There are two kinds of sea, and they’re as different as day and night. The sea that meets the land, and the sea that’s all by itself. Where they come together they sort of kindle each other and make something better than either land or sea. I never get tired of seacoast.” He paused and took a long breath. “But when you’re in the middle of the ocean and haven’t seen anything else for weeks, it’s as dull as anything you can think of – a prairie farm, or a boys’ prep school in the middle of a desert.”

“ ‘ ’Twas midnight on the ocean,’ ” she quoted, “ ‘Not a streetcar was in sight.’ ”

“Exactly. I get a kick out of looking at the ocean and not being on it. Not that I see too much of it when I’m at sea.”

“I thought naval officers stood on the bridge in all weathers, scanning the darkened horizon for enemy craft.”

“The O.D.’s stand on the bridge all right, but we’ve never even seen an enemy craft. Our planes do the scanning for us.”

“I didn’t know you were on a carrier.”

“A jeep carrier. I’m an Air Intelligence Officer. My job is to keep track of the planes.”

“Is it hard?”

“It’s fairly easy most of the time. But in combat it’s not hard, it’s impossible. The instruments aren’t perfect yet, and training never is, so every now and then communications break down. The whole system gets locomotor ataxia just when we need it most. I won’t try to describe it.”

“You sort of have. It must be nice to get home for a change–” Then she remembered what he had told her about his disappointment, and quickly added: “Did you say you had three weeks?”

“Eighteen days now.”

“Are you going to stay here?”

“I guess so. I can’t think of a better place.”

“No folks to go home to?”

“No. Both my parents have been dead for a long time. Most of my friends are in Washington, but I don’t feel much like going to Washington just now.”

She had already, quite shamelessly, begun to plan. There was no important reason why she shouldn’t take her holiday now. Even if she went ahead and finished the revision she was working on, her producer was tied up with other things and wouldn’t be ready to go into production for months. She had been half intending to spend her holiday in La Jolla anyway. Here, more than anywhere she knew, land and sea kindled each other, as he said, and made a new element under the sun.

He had raised himself on his elbows to look down into her face. “Do you live here?”

“No, but I’m staying here this month.”

“I suppose you live in Hollywood?”

“For the last few years I have.”

“I wouldn’t have thought you were a Hollywood type.”

“Hollywood is full of outlandish characters.”

“That’s not what I mean. You’re not outlandish at all.”

She smiled up at him. “I’m doing all right.”

“I know. I can tell by your clothes. But there are other ways of doing all right.”

“What other ways? Kitchen and Kinder?”

“Perhaps.”

“I tried them.”

“Kinder?”

“No, no Kinder . But I was married for a while. That was a considerable time ago. It didn’t work out.”

“Oh,” he said.

She pressed her advantage. “I did my stint of plain living and high thinking too. I worked for the Detroit Free Press for my bread and butter, and wrote for the little magazines for art’s sake. Then I met an agent who offered to sell me down the river to Hollywood, and I let him sell me. I was sick of living in a one-room apartment and mending stockings after midnight. Now I just throw them away. Or did before the war.”

“Stockings, or dollar bills?”

“ Five -dollar bills.”

That silenced him for a while. “I guess you resent my high moral tone,” he said finally.

“I guess I do. I can’t help wondering where you got it. You didn’t study for the ministry, did you?”

“No.” But he added surprisingly: “My father did. He never finished his seminary course though. He lost his faith and turned into a philosophy professor instead of a minister. His religious emotions were transformed into a passion for morality. Morality was an obsession with him, at least after my mother died.”

“How old were you when she died?” Already she was becoming infected with a lover’s typical symptom and most impossible desire, the desire to share all of his memories, to have known him from the beginning. “Very young?”

“I think I was four. Four or five.”

“That’s dreadful. What did she die of?”

His face went blank. After a silence he answered: “I don’t know.”

“But didn’t your father tell you?”

“No,” he said curtly. “He was a strange man, terribly shy and secretive. I think he should have been a monk.”

“What did he look like?” Paula said. “I don’t think I would have liked him.”

“No. He wouldn’t have liked you either. Did you ever see a picture of Matthew Arnold? He looked like him. A long solemn face, intelligent-looking but too heavy, and sort of miserable. He wasn’t a happy man.”

“You must have been glad to get away from him.”

“It wasn’t easy. Even after he died I still felt under his thumb. I was at the University of Chicago then, and I tried kicking over the traces, but my heart wasn’t in it. That was when I found out I couldn’t drink.”

“What happened?” She made her question as perfunctory as she could, but she was breathlessly eager to know.

“I got drunk a few times, but I invariably wanted to fight. I had been storing up aggressiveness for fifteen years, and it all came out in the bars. I suppose that’s as good a place for aggressiveness as any.”

“Aggressiveness against him, you mean? Did you hate your father?”

“I never admitted it to myself, but I suppose I did. For a long time I was afraid even to think anything that he would disapprove of. He never laid a finger on me, but he put the fear of God into me. Of course I loved him, too. Does that sound complicated?”

“Yes, but no more complicated than the way things happen.” She thought of her own father, who had been the antithesis of Bret’s, an easy-living hard-drinking salesman whose visits home became less and less frequent and finally ceased altogether. She had started out by despising him, but all she felt for his memory now was affectionate tolerance. Tolerance was the most she had felt for anyone for a long time, until now.