Crossroads

“I’m late to my class,” her mother said. “Can you make sure you’re home by six?”

Becky filled her mouth with a sugar cookie. “I’m not going to the Haefles’ party.”

“I’m afraid that’s not negotiable.”

“I’m not negotiating.”

“You can discuss it with your father, then.”

“There’s nothing to discuss.”

Her mother sighed. “You know, honey, it’s not the worst thing in the world to make a young man wait. I know it doesn’t feel that way to you, but there is always tomorrow.”

“Thank you for your input.”

“I take it he managed to find you last night?”

“I thought you were late for your exercise class.”

Her mother sighed more heavily and turned away. Becky was sorry to have to freeze her out. Her goodwill was boundless, but her mother was wrong. Tomorrow was too late for the work she had to do. Tanner wasn’t headlining the concert, he was co-headlining it with Laura Dobrinsky. Becky needed every minute she could get with him before it started.

The time had come to take action. A dull red gash had opened and closed below the clouds on the eastern horizon, over the fields of broken cornstalks distantly visible from the window of Clem’s room, while he typed the last sentences of his Roman history term paper. His desk, in the uneasy light, was stubbled over with red eraser morsels and cloud-colored ash. His clean-living roommate, Gus, had already decamped to Moline for the holidays, and Clem had seized on his absence to smoke heavily all night, powering himself forward with nicotine and with rage at his primary sources, Livy and Polybius, for contradicting each other, rage also at the dwindling of his hoped-for hours of sleep from six to three to zero, and rage, most of all, at himself for having spent Monday seeking pleasure in his girlfriend’s bed, allowing himself to believe that he could research and write a fifteen-page paper in two twelve-hour workdays. The pleasure he’d experienced on Monday now amounted to nothing. His eyes and his throat were on fire, his stomach on the verge of digesting itself. The paper he’d produced, on Scipio Africanus, was an ill-argued tangle of repetitive phrases for which he’d be lucky to get a B-minus. Its badness was the final confirmation of a thing he’d known for weeks.

Without giving himself time to think, without even standing up to stretch, he rolled a clean sheet of erasable onionskin into his typewriter.

December 23, 1971

Selective Service Local Board

U.S. Post Office Building

Berwyn, Illinois

Dear Sirs,

I write to inform you that as of today I will no longer be enrolled as a student at the University of Illinois, thus no longer eligible for the student deferment that I was granted on March 10, 1971. I am prepared to serve in the U.S. Armed Forces if I am called upon. My date of birth is December 12, 1951. My draft number is 29 4 13 88 403. Please advise if/when you would like me to report for induction.

Sincerely,

Clement R. Hildebrandt

215 Highland Street

New Prospect, Illinois

Unlike his paper, the letter had the clarity of extensive forethought. But did typing it constitute an action? The words were barely more substantial on paper than they’d been in his head. Not until they’d been received and replied to would they attain power over him. At which point, exactly, could he be said to have taken an action?

He gazed for a while at the ceiling of cloud above the distant cornfields, the ground-level haze that industrial agriculture seemed to generate in winter, a smog part dampness and part nitrates. Then he signed the letter, addressed an envelope, and applied one of the postage stamps he’d bought for writing to his parents.

“This is what your son is doing,” he said. “This is how it had to be.”

Feeling less alone for having heard a voice, if only his own, he ventured out to the bathroom. Its eternally burning lights seemed all the brighter now that everyone else had gone home. Some departed hall mate’s whiskers adhered to the sides of the sink at which he splashed water on his face. He considered taking a shower, but his core body temperature was at a low ebb and he thought he might convulse with shivers if he undressed.

As he left the bathroom, the hall telephone rang. Its loudness was extraordinary and jolted him with dread, because he knew that only Sharon could be calling; she’d already called at midnight for a progress report and a pep talk. With regard to Sharon, his typing of the letter most definitely constituted an action. He stood outside the bathroom, immobilized by the ringing, and waited for it to stop. After the debacle of his wasted Monday, he no longer had a shred of faith in his power to resist the pleasure he took from her. The only safe plan now was to pack up his things, catch the first available bus to Chicago, and inform her of his action from New Prospect, by letter.

To his surprise, a door at the end of the hall flew open. A hall mate in gym shorts stomped out and answered the phone. He saw Clem and shook the receiver at him.

“Sorry,” Clem said, hurrying to take it. “I didn’t think anyone else was here.”

The hall mate slammed his door behind him.

“Did you finish?” Sharon said eagerly.

“Yeah. Ten minutes ago.”

“Hurrah! I bet you could use some breakfast.”

“What I really need is sleep.”

“Come have breakfast. I want to take care of you.”

A wave of light-headedness washed over him. The mere sound of her voice was rushing blood to his groin. Change of plan.

“All right,” he said. “But there’s something I need to tell you.”

“What is it?”

“I’ll tell you when I come over.”

His room, when he returned to it, was like a lidded charcoal fire. He opened the window and put on the peacoat that Sharon had chosen for him. The tissue-swelling elevation of his blood pressure was surely related to sex, but also perhaps to what he had to tell her. The letter he’d written had elements of aggression, and aggression was known to induce erections in men. The letter could lead to his going to Vietnam, where, although there was nothing arousing about being killed, he might be called upon to defend himself with a weapon. In his rational mind, he knew that killing was morally wrong and psychologically devastating, but he suspected that his animal self took a different view.

Letter and term paper in hand, he left his building through the rear stairwell, which had never lost its smell of fresh concrete. The damp morning air penetrated straight through his coat to his core, but it was a relief to be free of the smoke-filled tunnel that sex and all-nighters had made of his existence since regular classes ended. In the hush of the emptied campus, he could faintly hear the mightiness of Illinois, the rumble of a freight train, the moan of eighteen-wheelers, coal transported from the south, car parts from the north, fattened livestock and staggering corn yields from the middle, all roads leading to the broad-shouldered city on the lake. It did him good to find the larger world still extant; it made him feel less crazy.

Down the lane from the Foreign Languages Building, after he’d slipped his paper under the door of the classics department office, he came upon a mailbox. The next collection time was eleven a.m., and today was not a holiday. He faced the mailbox and considered his existential freedom to act or not to act. The strong thing to do was to drop his letter in the box. He might curse himself in the future—however wretched he felt now, army life was bound to bring worse—but if an action was morally right, a strong man was obliged to take it in the present. If he didn’t mail the letter now, he would arrive at Sharon’s with only the intention of mailing it, and he’d been down the intention-paved road before.

He closed his eyes and fell asleep in a heartbeat, reawakening in time to catch himself from falling over. In his hand he found a letter to his draft board. The throat of the mailbox made a rusty-jointed gulp as the letter went down it. He turned away and broke into a sprint, as if he might outrun what he’d done.

In the philosophy course he’d taken the previous spring, there was a curly-haired little mouse who sat in the same row he did, often wearing a pleated velvet French-style cap, and kept looking at him. One afternoon, when the bearded and beaded professor was holding forth on Sartre’s Nausea, extolling the idea that what we make of existence has nothing to do with what existence rawly is, Clem raised his hand to disagree. Reality, he said, operated according to laws discoverable and testable by scientific method. The professor seemed to think this proved his larger point—we impose our laws of science on a stubbornly unknowable reality. “But what about math?” Clem said. “One plus one will always equal two. We didn’t invent the truth of that equation. We discovered a truth that was always there.” The professor joked that they had a Platonist in their midst, and the hippies in the lecture hall turned to look at the square who’d challenged him, and the little mouse moved over to sit by Clem. After class, she praised his independence of mind. She adored Camus but couldn’t forgive Sartre for his communism.

Sharon was an Honors student, the first person in her immediate family to attend college. She’d grown up on a farm outside the downstate town of Eltonville, where communists were held in very low esteem. For the rest of the semester, she and Clem had sat together in class, and when she asked him for his home address he was happy to provide it. He’d never had a female friend besides Becky. In the letter Sharon then sent him, while he was at home in New Prospect, doing shovel work for the local nursery, she wrote about the heat and desolation of her family’s farmhouse in the summer. Her mother had died when she was twelve, her brother Mike was in Vietnam, her father and her younger brother made the farm run, and a hired Croatian woman did the cooking and housework. Her father had always excused Sharon from chores, and in her boredom as a child and her sorrow as a teenager she’d found refuge in reading. Her ambition was to be a writer or, as a fallback, to teach English in Europe. She’d already vowed never to spend another summer in Eltonville.

Clem wrote back to her and received a second letter so long she’d put three stamps on the envelope. It began with questions, devolved into stream of consciousness, short on punctuation, devoid of capital letters, and ended with a passage from Camus she’d copied out in French. He kept intending to take an evening and reply, but he never found the evening. He hung out with his friend Lester or watched TV with Becky, who’d cut back on her social life. Only when he returned to school and saw Sharon, walking by herself on the Main Quad, did the wrongness of his inaction come home to him. She threw him a hurt look, and this wasn’t right, he wasn’t a hurter, and so he pursued her. She greeted his apology with a shrug. She said, “I think I had a wrong idea about you.” Whether it was the challenge implicit in this, or the thing that people called guilt but was actually just a self-interested wish not to be thought ill of, he was moved to ask her out for pizza.

What had started their fight was the olive-drab jacket he wore to the pizzeria. For an antiwar protest the previous spring, he’d fashioned an electrical-tape peace sign for the back of it, and Sharon didn’t like it. She couldn’t stand the college peaceniks. Every morning, she said, she woke up afraid of hearing that her brother had been killed or maimed in Vietnam. Mike wasn’t a reader, he enjoyed hunting and fishing and had no ambition beyond inheriting the farm, but he was the kindest and most honorable person she’d ever known, and the peaceniks had only contempt for him. Who were they to spit on a person like her brother? They all had their student deferments, they got to smoke pot and have sex while people like her brother were dying, and they weren’t even grateful. They thought they were morally superior. Lucky white kids from the suburbs flashing their peace signs while other kids fought a war for them: it made her sick.

Clem’s first response to her tirade had been condescension. Being female, and sentimental, Sharon didn’t seem to realize how grotesquely immoral the war was, or that her brother had been free to refuse to serve in it. He, Clem, in her brother’s place, would have refused to serve. But Sharon wouldn’t budge. Her brother loved his country and was a real man; when duty called, he reported. And what about all the boys from Black slums and Indian reservations her brother was serving with? They didn’t even know that not serving was an option. The result was that people like Clem got to be both safe and self-righteous.

“What was your lottery number?” she asked him.

“Terrible. Nineteen.”

“So somebody right now is in the jungle because your parents sent you to college.”

“But I wouldn’t have gone anyway.”

“It’s the same thing. Somebody is there because you’re not. Somebody like Mike. You’re all about the ‘grotesque immorality’ of the war. What about the grotesque immorality of making poor people and uneducated people and Black people be the ones to fight it? Why isn’t that equally grotesque? Why aren’t you protesting that?”

“It’s kind of implied, don’t you think?”

“No. I never hear anyone here talk about it. All I hear is contempt for the military.”

She was little, and female, but her thoughts were original. In Arizona, on his church group’s spring trip, he’d worked for a Navajo man, Keith Durochie, who’d lost a son in Vietnam. Only seventeen, uncomfortable in the presence of a parent’s loss, Clem had tried to sympathize with Durochie by lamenting how unjust it was to die in such a war, and Durochie had gone morose and silent. Clem had said the wrong thing, but he hadn’t known why. Listening to Sharon, he understood that, far from consoling Durochie, he’d dishonored his son’s death. What an ass he’d been.

“I’m really sorry I didn’t write back to you,” he said.

Her dark brown eyes were on him. “Walk me home?”

Already, that first night, he’d had the heart-fluttering sense that he would have to take action; that he’d glimpsed a moral truth which there was no going back and unglimpsing. He might have been spared if he’d had a higher draft number, but lottery ball 19 had followed an incalculable (“random”) trajectory to pairing with his birthday, and his heart went out to the uneducated kid who was serving in his rightful place. He didn’t want to be like his father, who merely professed to have sympathy for the underprivileged. Giving up his student deferment was an insanely steep price to pay for being more consistent than his father, but by the time he and Sharon reached her house, on one of the shabbier side streets of Urbana, his moral intuition was telling him to pay it.

At the top of the stairs to her front porch, she turned around and kissed him. He was one step below her, the stairs compensating for their rather extreme height difference. The kiss was the beginning of a long reprieve from the judgment he’d passed on himself. When he finally tore himself away from her, with a promise to call her the next day, the thought of Vietnam had been banished by the sweetness of her mouth, the welcoming scent of her skin, the parting of his lips by her bold little tongue, the great surprise of it all.

Her house was a clapboard wreck with a hippie-run bicycle store on the ground floor, hippie common rooms on the second floor, hippie bedrooms on the third, and Sharon, who detested hippies, in the only habitable room on the fourth. She looked to the world like a harmless small creature, but she had a way of getting what she wanted. The year before, after her sorority had expelled her for violating its rules, the hippies had given her the best room in their house. Among other things, it was the perfect room for uninterrupted sex. Clem would later come to see the wisdom of parietal regulations, which, outmoded norms of behavior aside, served to keep undergraduates from falling into a pit of pleasure and neglecting their studies, but on his second visit he’d gone up to her room in all innocence. After some hours of necking on her bed, in their clothes, Sharon went to the bathroom and returned wearing only a terrycloth robe. It transpired that she’d got impatient with the necking, also sore of chin and nose. She pushed Clem onto his back and undid his belt buckle. He said, “Wait, though.” She said it was okay, she was on the Pill. She’d lost her own virginity when she was seventeen, an exchange student in Lyon, France. The family she’d boarded with had an older son who went to the university but lived at home and was her lover for two and a half months, until they were detected. The ensuing shitstorm had resulted in her being sent home to Eltonville. A monumental embarrassment, she said, but worth it. After exchanging letters for a year, her lover had found someone else and she’d had further adventures on which she didn’t care to elaborate. Clem, supine, his belt unbuckled, was still trying to slow things down, to extend a discussion that seemed mandatory, when she took off the robe and lay down on him. “It’s easy,” she said. “I’ll show you.” In short order, he found himself looking up at the naked entirety of a girl he might have expected to uncover part by part, with much asking of permission, over a span of weeks or months. Seeing her altogether was such a visual overload he had to shut his eyes against it. She moved up and down on his erection until there was a cracking rip in the fabric of the universe. She fell forward and kissed him with her indeed very abraded mouth. He needed to know if she’d liked what had just happened. She said she had, very much. But, he persisted, had she…? “All in good time,” she said. “I’ll show you.”

For a twenty-year-old farm girl from southern Illinois, Sharon knew a lot about sex. Some of it she’d learned in France, the rest she knew from reading books. To Clem the most shocking thing she knew was that she really, really liked to have her vulva licked. Licking a vulva hadn’t been on his most distant radar; the Latin word for it, although he’d seen it in a dictionary, had only been a word. If pressed, he might have guessed that it was a technique for seasoned lovers, a sort of hard drug to which ordinary intercourse was a gateway. He certainly couldn’t have imagined doing it with a girl who was still confusing the names of his two brothers. Still less could he have imagined loving it. The only thing better than seeing and smelling and tasting her vulva was the moment when he got to put his penis in it; and therein lay the problem.

He now saw that his supposed self-discipline, the outstanding study habits his parents and his teachers had always praised, had not been discipline at all. He’d excelled at school because he’d enjoyed learning things, not because he had superior willpower. As soon as Sharon introduced him to more intense forms of pleasure, he discovered how hopelessly undeveloped the muscles of his will really were. He found himself skipping organic chem lab for hardly any reason, just to take a long walk with her, not even to have sex, just to be near her. He had his first experience of fellatio on a morning when he should have been in Roman history. He failed to prepare for his cellular biology midterm because putting his penis in Sharon’s vulva had offered more pleasure, in the moment, than studying did. What this said about his self-control was bad enough. Worse yet was how it undermined his best moral argument for keeping his deferment—the idea that he could better serve humanity by working diligently at school, becoming a leader in the field of science, than by serving as a grunt in Vietnam. If he couldn’t keep his grade point average above 3.5, he truly had no right to a deferment.

Sharon, for her part, was wonderfully untroubled. She couldn’t be drafted, and she only took the kind of courses where a gifted writer got an automatic A. She could outline a paper just by talking it through with Clem, whereas he needed to study hard, by himself, to memorize organic radicals. She was a true reader, accustomed to solitude, and preferred having no friends to having friends less remarkable than she was. Clem didn’t have good friends at U of I yet himself, but one of his science study mates, Gus, had asked him to room with him, clearly hoping to deepen their friendship, and now Gus was barely speaking to him, because Clem had hurt his feelings by spending all his time with Sharon. She was every bit as hungry for pleasure as he was, but it didn’t seem to derail her life the way it did his. She was never in a hurry to be somewhere, and he’d come to crave what she did to his sense of time, her serene indifference to the clock, nearly as much as he craved her body. As long as he could stay curled up inside her neatly ordered life, as if it were his own life, and never leave her room, he felt all right. Only when he left her room was he engulfed by anxiety, and only by returning could he relieve it.

Though he would have denied it, vehemently, if she’d asked him, another reason he preferred to be in her room was that he felt awkward with her in public. The difficulty, such as it was, lay not in what she was in herself. He was proud of her intelligence, proud of her pretty face and prettier figure, proud of her limpidly unaffected manner. The difficulty lay in what she was in relation to him, namely, fourteen inches shorter. She had never, not once, made reference to their height difference, and he hated himself for even being aware of it. The way the world judged people by their physical appearance, which they had no control over, and which had nothing to do with their mind or their personality, was totally unjust. In theory, he was happy to be so much taller than Sharon, because it demonstrated his commitment to equality and to the marriage of true minds, irrespective of physical impediment. In practice, too, when they were alone in bed, the almost illicit littleness of her naked body was an added turn-on. But in public, try as he might, he couldn’t help feeling that people were staring at them and drawing conclusions about him.

At Thanksgiving, when he went home to New Prospect and saw Becky, who was now a fully grown woman, his discomfort had become acute. Becky and her friends, especially Jeannie Cross, were so resplendent that they might have been a different species, and Becky had made an uncharacteristically cutting remark about the height difference of Tanner Evans and Laura Dobrinsky. Although Clem had looked forward to telling his sister that he had a girlfriend, he sensed right away that Becky had no interest in Sharon—didn’t want to meet her, didn’t want to hear about her, wouldn’t approve of her. When he proceeded to gush about the beauty of Sharon’s mind, and to describe the extremity of her allure, the depth of the sensual pit he’d fallen into, his words sounded hollow and abstract. The whole conversation was deeply embarrassing. He came away from it ashamed of his sexuality, ashamed by extension of Sharon herself, and more painfully aware of their dimensional incongruity. Their relationship, which until then had seemed open-ended, now felt temporary, as if Sharon were merely his “first girlfriend,” the sweet but dimensionally unsuitable person with whom he’d lost his virginity. Intentionally or not, Becky had caused him to scrutinize his feelings for Sharon, and he found them lacking. They weren’t rugged enough for him to declare to his sister, “I don’t care about your superficial judgment, she’s the person I love,” and they weren’t powerful enough—didn’t strongly enough suggest an enduring future of togetherness—to serve as an argument against giving up his student deferment. They were more like an escape, a reprieve, from his moral duty.

He’d returned to school with a strict plan for himself. He would see Sharon only two evenings a week, and not stay over at her house at all, and he would study ten hours every day and try to ace every one of his finals and term papers. If he ran the table with A-pluses, he could still keep his GPA above 3.5—the figure which, though basically arbitrary, was his last plausible defense against the action he would otherwise be called upon to take.

His plan was sensible but not, it turned out, achievable. When he stopped by Sharon’s house, it was as if they’d been apart for five months, not five days. He had a thousand things to tell her, and as soon as he took down her corduroys it seemed mean and silly to have worried about their height difference. Not until he returned to his room, the following afternoon, did he lament his lack of willpower. He recalibrated his plan, assigning himself eleven hours of daily study, and stuck to this schedule until Friday, when he treated himself to another evening with Sharon. By the time he left her, on Sunday afternoon, he would have had to study fifteen hours a day to make the numbers work. He told himself that he was living in the moment, like an existentialist, and savoring their togetherness while it lasted, but he sensed something darker going on. Something almost spiteful—as if, by surrendering to Sharon’s elastic sense of time, and thereby ensuring that his grades would suffer, which would leave him no moral choice but to drop out of school, he were secretly preparing to punish her. She had no inkling of what the figure 3.5 signified to him, but she would understand it soon enough, and rue that she hadn’t insisted that he study.

What had made the coming punishment crueler was that Sharon was giving signs of loving him in an old-fashioned, romantic, totalizing way. Despite having presented herself as a free spirit, a Colette-reading sexual adventurer, and despite being too sophisticated to use mushy language, she seemed to have a longer-range vision for the two of them. No sooner had he told her about his conversation with his sister at Thanksgiving, the bequest from their aunt, than she’d become fixated on going to Europe with him. She respected him for refusing the money Becky had offered, but why not at least accept a free vacation? Wouldn’t it be amazing to be together in France? The two of them visiting the same places as his sister and his mother, but doing their own thing? Whenever she returned to the idea, to add or subtract some stop on their mythical itinerary, Clem simply closed his eyes and smiled. In his secret heart, he already knew that he would write to the draft board. The overriding reason to do it was that it was morally correct. He had further important reasons relating to his father and to Sharon, to whom he wanted to prove how seriously he’d taken her ideas, and who he hoped would admire the rightness of his action and compare him favorably with her brother Mike. And yet, ridiculously, in the waning days of the semester, as the reality of his academic failures had sunk in, the most salient attraction of forfeiting his deferment had been to avoid going to France with his girlfriend and his sister.

The morning sky was growing darker, not lighter, when he reached her house. He had a key he never used—despite a recent bicycle theft, the hippies refused to lock their back door. He let himself into the murk of their kitchen and hurried past the cheese-crusted crockery piled in and around the sink, which existed in a kind of hippie equilibrium, a steady state in which new dirty dishes were added at exactly the same rate that someone bothered to wash the older ones. Most of the hippies were too placidly self-absorbed to even know his name, but he’d received many a knowing smile in passing, and he was glad not to encounter anyone as he made his way upstairs. He sensed that the sum of his identity, in that house, consisted of being the dude who was boning the little chick on the fourth floor, which was uncomfortably close to a fair summation.

Sharon, in flannel pajamas, was mixing something at the plywood counter of the makeshift kitchenette outside her room. Clem stooped to kiss her curls and put his arms around her from behind. In his disordered mind, he was already halfway a soldier, arriving to do what soldiers did with a woman, but she shrugged him off playfully. “I’m making toast with sugar and cinnamon.”

“I’m not sure I can face food right now.”

“When was the last time you ate?”

“Sometime yesterday. I had a tuna-salad sub.”

“You definitely need food. But first—” She crouched to open her little refrigerator. “I bought champagne.”

“Champagne.”

“To celebrate.” She handed him the cold bottle. “You didn’t believe me, but I knew you could do it.”

Typing out fifteen pages of C-level work in sixty hours didn’t seem like such a feat to Clem. “Champagne, Urbana,” he said.

“Exactly.”

Drinking anything alcoholic, at nine in the morning, in his condition, was ill-advised, but Sharon had definite ideas about how things should be done, and he didn’t want to disappoint her. He peeled the foil off the bottle and popped the cork.

“To us,” she said when he’d filled two jelly glasses. “To Scipio Africanus!”

“Don’t even say that name. I spent all night typing Scipoi and having to erase it.”

“Just to us, then.”

She stood on tiptoe for a kiss that he bent down to give her. He caught an exciting, catfoody whiff of degraded semen from his several deposits of it in her on Monday. She took her glass and the bottle into her bedroom, and he followed her like a dog. She sat propped against the pillows on her bed while he pawed her feet, massaging her bare soles with his thumbs. The champagne was making her exceedingly lovely. Far from easing his announcement to her, it was inviting him to calculate when he would have to leave her house to intercept the postal worker emptying the mailbox and get his letter back. On the theory that his brain cells needed readily absorbable glucose to regain higher function, he drained his glass.

She immediately refilled it. “You said you had something to tell me?”

He fell back onto the bed and looked up at the canted ceiling, his vision spinning. The light coming in through her dormer seemed detached from any specific hour, by its grayness and by his body clock’s confusion, the feeling that today was still yesterday and morning had followed afternoon without an intervening night.

“I have something to tell you, too,” she said.

It occurred to him that he’d never kissed her feet. They were tiny and high-arched, their soles soft and cool, a balm to his fevered cheeks. She laughed and pulled them away.

“Sorry,” she said. “That tickles.”

He had no basis for comparison, but it was possible to worry that not all girls—perhaps very few girls—were as sweetly direct as Sharon about what they liked and didn’t like. Possible to worry that few girls could have been more generous, more forgiving of his blunders, more tolerant of his incessant wish for intercourse, more interested in having it herself, less given to tears or pouting, less emotionally demanding, than Sharon had been. Possible, indeed, to worry that the three months now ending had amounted to a little Eden, an earthly paradise that he’d been stupid-lucky to land in and was a fool to be destroying. He thought of the November morning when he’d watched her hobble to the bathroom, like an old woman, and had understood how miserably sore he’d made her in his pursuit of one last, negligible orgasm. He remembered how she’d hobbled back to bed, how he’d castigated himself and begged her forgiveness, and how she’d simply laughed it off, C’est l’amour. He’d been living in an inverse Eden, whose Eve had eaten the apple and shared her delicious knowledge with him. Why, oh why, did he have to destroy it?

He reckoned that he could leave her room as late as 10:45 and still be back at the mailbox before a postal worker got there. For that matter, he could spend the whole morning with her and write a second letter to say he’d changed his mind and was keeping his deferment.

“Are you falling asleep?” she said.

“Not at all.”

“Let me make you some toast.”

“No, I’m okay. Champagne is like a glucose bomb.”

He pressed his palm between her legs, testing the spring of the curls beneath the flannel. He moved up for a closer view while he pulled down her pajama bottoms. Oh, the beauty of what he uncovered! The inexhaustibleness of its invitation! It was true that, if he’d been as forthright in his preferences as she was in hers, he might have asked her to leave her pajama top on. He was on friendly enough terms with her breasts, but he’d gained access to them so early on that he hadn’t had time to become properly fascinated with them, as a treasure to dream of uncovering, and they’d seemed a bit irrelevant ever since. He liked them better in a bra. Best of all would be to have her top-clad and bottomless, like a collegiate female faun, Honors student above the waist, creature of his wettest dreams below. But he’d never found a way to express this preference uninsultingly, and she seemed to prefer being fully naked.

She shed her pajama top and tugged on the shoulders of his shirt. She liked him naked, too—considered it especially bad form to leave one’s socks on—but this morning he didn’t feel like undressing. He’d had a taste of aggression and felt like doing what he wanted, even if he couldn’t tell her what to do. He had an image of a soldier fucking in his boots, defended by his clothes. When she tugged again on his shirt, he resisted.

“Are you cold?”

“No.”

He set about the only work for which he’d lately had ambition. Spread out before the horizon of her rib cage, sloping into the valley of her navel and up to a grove of wiry curls too close to be in focus, were the mobile white plains of her belly. Her hands, to either side, gripped the bed as she regulated contact with his tongue. He was amazed by his body’s reserves of energy; it spoke to the primacy of reproductive function to an organism. No matter how he’d lashed his brain cells with cigarettes, they’d been too spent to pull weight in his final pages on Scipio Africanus, and yet here were the muscles of his neck and tongue, indefatigable, soldiering forward on the promise of a reward accruing not even to them but to his penis. His neck postponed its aching, his temples their pounding with champagne, his eyes the resumption of their burning, until he could obey the deeper animal imperative and release its boiling madness.

She gave a sharp cry. For a moment, rocked by its own galvanism, her body seemed to dismember itself. He lingered to push his tongue as far into her as it would reach, to taste what his penis couldn’t, and then moved up to look into her eyes. They were beady, the darkest of browns; her smile was lopsided, as if he’d broken it. He put a pillow under her butt, the way she liked it, and pulled his pants halfway down. It bordered on miraculous how completely her little person accommodated him. He lowered his full weight onto her and lay still, trying to etch into his memory the feel of total penetration. He wondered how many months or years it would be before he next felt it with someone.

“Are you all right?” she said.

“Yeah. Just pausing.”

“You know what I was imagining? That we were together in Paris. That we got caught in a thunderstorm and went back to our hotel room soaking wet. I was imagining you making me come while the rain came down harder and harder on the boulevards.”

Even the word come could not overcome the turnoff of picturing them in Paris. The four of them standing in line to get inside the Louvre. Becky tall and clean and radiantly good-natured, his mother studying a guidebook and making some wry comment about it—he hated to imagine Sharon in that picture. He hated to imagine himself, condemned every morning to lie in a heavily fucked-upon French bed where everything was hot and red and sleep-depriving, with crusted semen on the sheets, condemned to wishing he could be wherever Becky was instead, maybe downstairs in a breakfast room with fresh napkins and baguettes, she and their mother having some lively conversation that he would have liked to be a part of. Becky he never regretted being near, because nearness was all he wanted from his sister. When he pictured himself and Sharon entering that Parisian breakfast room, stinking of après-sex cigarettes, their eyes red and puffy-lidded, the glowing image of Becky receded and faded like an angel’s. Even in the real world, he was losing her—had been losing her ever since the night in September when Sharon had taken off her bathrobe. The more Sharon was in the picture, the less Becky could be. His penis was deflating.

“Oh, baby,” Sharon said. “You must be so tired.”

He nodded, glad to let her think that.

“I have an idea, though,” she said. “I was thinking we could both come back here right after Christmas. Do you want to do that? We could spend all day reading ahead for classes and be together every night. I don’t want you to feel like you’re falling behind with your work because of me.”

He’d burned through all his glucose. The imperative had dwindled to nothing.

“But that’s not the thing I wanted to tell you.” She repositioned herself to look into his eyes. “Can I tell you something important? I’ve been wanting to say it for weeks now.”

He waited with dull dread.

“I’m in love with you,” she said. “Am I allowed to say that?”

It was exactly as he’d feared.

“I am so in love with you, baby.”

It was exactly as he’d feared, but somehow the effect was the opposite of what he might have expected. A wave of masculine well-being was sweeping through his body. The knowledge that he fully possessed this person, the thrill of that conquest, and something more savage, the sudden enhancement of his capacity to inflict pain on her: it was hitting him like a full-bore shot of testosterone. The imperative stormed back to life, and he unthinkingly obeyed it, with a thrust. It was astonishing how different it felt to be inside a woman he’d caused to fall in love with him, how comprehensively his genital nerves now felt connected to her. It was almost as if, until this moment, he’d never had sex. He gave another thrust. The pleasure was outrageous.

“So, what do you think?” she said.

“I think you’re amazing,” he said, humping away.

“Okay.” She faintly nodded, as if to herself.

He paused and lowered his face to kiss the mouth that had spoken the magic words. She turned her face away from his.

“Why didn’t you want to take your clothes off today?”

“I don’t know. It seemed like it might be exciting, somehow.”

Again the dubious little nod.

“Sharon,” he pleaded. He knew that a conversation needed to be had, and that it would not be a good conversation, but his very strong preference was to have it just a little bit later. By way of expressing this preference, he shut his eyes and moved his hips again. The pleasure was undiminished, but she immediately spoke again.

“I want you to say you’re in love with me, too.”

He opened his eyes. As far back as September, when the needle of his mind had stuck in a groove playing Sharon, he’d had the impulse to say he was in love with her. He’d suppressed it because he was following her lead in everything and had gathered that romantic declarations weren’t comme il faut. It was true that, after his crisis at Thanksgiving, he’d been glad he’d kept his mouth shut earlier. But now he could feel, in his own nerves, how transformative it might be for Sharon to hear the magic words from him. It was so transformative, in fact, that he felt he could speak them with some honesty.

“You don’t even have to mean it,” she said. “I’m just curious how it feels to hear it.”

He nodded and said, “I’m not in love with you.”

It took him a moment to realize that his tongue had slipped. He truly hadn’t meant to say that. He was aghast.

“Say you are, though,” she said.

“I was trying to. It just came out wrong.”

“To put it mildly!”

He extended his arms, looked down at their furry point of contact, and shook his head against a bitter truth in him. “I … I don’t know what I am. I don’t think I can say it.”

Her face twisted up as if the truth had scalded it.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“It’s okay.” She managed a wry smile. “I tried.”

“God, Sharon, I am so sorry.”

“It’s really okay. You can go ahead and finish.”

She was generous to the last, but even in his supremely inflamed state he understood the wrongness of taking more pleasure from her now. He started to withdraw.

“No, do it,” she said, trying to pull him back in. “Just forget I said that thing.”

“I can’t.”

She was weeping. “Please do it. I want you to.”

He couldn’t. He remembered the sex talk, or what had passed for a sex talk, that his mother had given him before he left for college. Whatever else he might hear on campus, she’d said, sex without commitment was empty and ruinous. This was the ancient wisdom. As with the parietal rules, he was realizing too late that old people weren’t entirely stupid. Beneath him was a weeping girl to prove it.

Getting out of bed made him conscious of the obscenity of his erection. While Sharon lay and wept, he yanked up his jeans and put on his peacoat. In the hippie bedroom below them, a familiar bass line started up, the same Who album they’d been hearing for weeks. He shook Sharon’s pack of cigarettes, pulled one out with his lips, and struck a match. Back in September, he’d tried one of her Parliaments and liked it. By the time he’d realized that smoking, like sex, did not in itself confer manhood, he was wretchedly addicted.

“Can I make you some toast?” he said.

No answer. Sharon had pulled the bedspread onto herself and was facing the wall, her crying detectable only as a faint shaking of her curls. Her bed was a double mattress on a box spring, her desk a hollow-core door on sawhorses, her bookshelves pine one-by-tens with cinder-block supports. He remembered his first sight of her books, the great quantity of French-language paperbacks, the austere whiteness and uniformity of their spines. Back then, three months ago, he couldn’t have imagined anything sexier in a woman than high intelligence. Even now, if he and she had been all mind and genitals and nothing else, he might have imagined a future for them.

He wondered if he should simply leave now—whether this would be the kind thing to do or the cowardly thing. He’d planned to break up with her by letter because he wanted to speak to her mind-to-mind, rationally, well clear of the inviting pit. But now he’d hurt her, and she was crying. Maybe the situation spoke for itself? Maybe further talk would only be hurtful? He sat down on the edge of her bed, drew smoke into his abused lungs, and waited to see what he would do. Again the existential freedom, to speak or not to speak. Beneath the floor, the Who continued their thumping.

“I’m not coming back next semester,” he heard himself say. “I’m dropping out.”

Sharon rolled over immediately and stared at him, her cheeks wet.

“I’m giving up my deferment,” he said. “I’m going to do whatever they want me to do, which probably means Vietnam.”

“That’s insane!”

“Really? You were the one who said it was the right thing to do.”

“No, no, no.” She sat up and hugged the bedspread to her chest. “It’s already unbearable that Mike is there. You can’t do that to me.”

“I’m not doing it to you. I’m doing it because it’s right. My lottery number is nineteen. It’s just like you said—I should have gone already.”

“God, Clem, no. That is insane.”

In the year of his childhood when his genius brother had been old enough to play chess and young enough to be beaten, Clem had always, before moving to checkmate, asked Perry if he was sure about the last move he’d made. He’d considered this a gracious question for an older brother to ask, until one day Perry had choked up with tears—as a little kid, Perry had always been crying about one thing or another—and told Clem to stop rubbing it in. It was unclear to him now why he’d imagined that Sharon’s response would be any different.

“Vietnam won’t kill me,” he said. “We’re out of ground combat.”

“When did you start thinking this? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I’m telling you now.”

“Is it because I said I was in love with you?”

“No.”

“It was a mistake to say that. I don’t even know if it’s true. It’s like there are these words, they’re out there in the world, and you start wondering what it would be like to say them. Words have their own power—they create the feeling, just by the fact of your saying them. I’m so sorry I tried to make you say them. I love that you were honest with me. I love—oh, shit.” She slumped, crying again. “I am in love with you.”

He took a last puff on his cigarette and carefully mashed it out in her ashtray. “It wasn’t anything you said. I already sent the letter.”

She looked at him uncomprehendingly.

“I mailed it on the way over here.”

“No! No!” She began to beat on him with her little fists, not painfully. The sex scent rising off her and the aggression of his speech act inflamed him afresh. He thought of the time he’d staggered around her room with her impaled on him, how her smallness had made this excellent thing practicable. Fearful of falling back into the pit after so nearly breaking free of it, he grabbed her wrists and made her look at him.

“You’re a wonderful person,” he said. “You’ve totally changed my life.”

“That’s a good-bye!” she wailed. “I don’t want a good-bye!”

“I’ll write to you. I’ll tell you everything.”

“No, no, no.”

“Can’t you see this isn’t equal? I love who you are, but I’m not in love with you.”

“Now I wish I’d never met you!”

She threw herself onto the foot of the bed. The pity he felt was infinitely realer than the idea of being a soldier. He pitied her for being so small and loving him, and for the logical bind in which he’d put her, and for the irony of her having made him the person who would leave her, by introducing him to more existential forms of knowledge. He wanted to stay and explain, to talk about Camus, to remind her of the necessity of exercising moral choice, to make her understand how indebted he was to her. But he didn’t trust his animal self.

He leaned over and pressed his face into her hair. “I do love you,” he said.

“If you loved me, you wouldn’t leave,” she replied in a clear, angry voice.

He shut his eyes and was instantly half asleep. He forced them open. “I’ve got to go pack up my room.”

“You’re breaking my heart. I hope you know that.”

The only way out of the pit was to stand up, be strong, and walk away. When he opened her door and heard her cry out—“Wait!”—it nearly broke his own heart. Shutting the door behind him, he was seized by a spasming that he was surprised to recognize as sobbing. It was wholly autonomic, as uncontrollable as vomiting but less familiar—he hadn’t cried since the day Martin Luther King was assassinated. In a salty blur, he ran down a damply carpeted flight of stairs, past a thudding mass of Who sound in which the treble now was audible, down through a sharp smell of morning pot ignited in the common rooms, and out into cold, gray Urbana.

Five hours later, at the bus station, where snow had begun to fall, he handed over his duffel bag and his mammoth suitcase, the lugging of which across campus he’d taken as a foretaste of basic training, and claimed one of the last free seats on the Chicago bus. It was an aisle seat deep in the smoking section, with a baby shrieking in the seat directly behind it. Clem was missing Sharon so much, was aching so steadily at the lost hope of any future meeting, was feeling so persistently close to further tears, that he might as well have been in love with her. Though greater concentrations of smoke than were already in the bus could hardly be achieved, he took a cigarette from his peacoat, flipped up the lid of his seat’s ashtray, and tried to suppress his emotions with nicotine. The monstrous job of breaking Sharon’s heart was behind him, but there was still more work ahead of him today.

Camus was wholly admirable, and his thinking made sense when Clem and Sharon discussed it. When Clem was alone, though, he could see a problem with Camus. Perhaps because he was French, Camus was a closet Cartesian—he assumed the existence of a unitary consciousness that rationally deliberated moral choices, when in fact a person’s real motives were complex and uncontrollable. Clem, borrowing from Sharon, had a good moral argument for giving up his student deferment. But if the moral argument were all he’d had, he might not have written to the draft board. Other strong choices were available. For example, he could have worked to raise public awareness of the immorality of deferments; he could have broken up with Sharon simply because their relationship made it hard for him to study. The particular choice he’d made was aimed squarely at his father.

For the longest time, for more than sixteen years, Clem had admired his father precisely for his strength. In the beginning, in Indiana, where the parish house had been decaying faster than his father could keep up with its maintenance, Clem had been awed, even frightened, by the roping and contraction of his father’s large muscles when he swung a pickax or drove a nail; by the torrents of sweat that ran off him when he scythed weeds on a hot August day. The sweat had a unique, indefinable scent—not stinky, more like the smell of a young toadstool or fresh rain, but still upsetting to Clem in its intensity. (It was a revelation, much later, when he worked for the nursery in New Prospect, to catch the exact same smell from his own soaking T-shirts. As far as he knew, no one in the world except him and his father produced that smell. He wondered, indeed, if anyone else could smell it.) One push from his father at a swing set had sent him so high that he clutched the chains in fear of falling off. One mild flick of his father’s wrist, and a baseball came at Clem so hard it stung his palm through his glove. And the yelling. His father’s voice, raised in anger (always at Clem, never at Becky), was a sound so blasting that a spanking, which his father did not believe in giving children, might almost have been preferable.

In Chicago, he’d come to appreciate his father’s moral strength as well. When he read To Kill a Mockingbird, in junior high, he recognized Atticus Finch and felt proud. His political views were a perfect replica of his father’s, and they must have been authentic, because they survived his mother’s praise of them. He shared his father’s abhorrence of the Vietnam War and his belief that the struggle for civil rights was the defining issue of the day. During his father’s campaign to desegregate New Prospect’s public swimming pool, he went ringing doorbells by himself, handing out literature and repeating verbatim his father’s words about racial prejudice. Although he didn’t have his father’s scope of action, didn’t have a pulpit to preach from, didn’t ride a bus to Alabama, he followed his example in smaller ways. The jocks at Lifton Central who persecuted the faggots, the wussies, soon learned to keep away from him. When he saw someone weak being picked on, he became so hot with anger and so numbed to pain that he could hold his own in a fight. He mostly wasn’t friends with the kids he defended—they were social pariahs for a reason. He was just doing what his father had taught him was right.

The only sore points between them were religion and Becky. Nothing metaphysical made any sense to Clem, neither God the Father nor, still less, the absurd Holy Spirit, and something had gone wrong from the start regarding Becky, some jealousy or overprotectiveness on his father’s part. Being alone with Becky made Clem aware of a peculiar duality in himself. He would have had a fistfight with anyone who said a word against his father, but he couldn’t stop trying to undermine his sister’s respect for his father’s Christianity. What made this even stranger was that his own ethics were basically Christian. He admired Jesus greatly, as a moral teacher and a champion of the poor and the marginalized. But there was an imp of perversity in him, a sarcastically dissenting alter ego, and being alone with Becky brought it out. He walked her through the absence of evidence for immaterial forces, the lack of hard corroboration for the stories in the Bible, the unprovability of the proposition that God existed, the imperviousness of “miracles” to scientific experiment; and it worked. He made a junior atheist of Becky, and this became another thing that united them, another thing to love about his sister—the way her lip curled whenever God came up at the dinner table.

If he was more circumspect with his own atheism, it was partly out of respect for Jesus and partly because he and his father worked so well together. His father was patient in teaching him to use tools, and Clem, no matter how tired he got, refused to be the first to quit when the two of them were moving earth or raking leaves or painting walls. He wanted his father’s approval, for his work ethic no less than for his politics, and he appreciated how frequently and warmly his father expressed it—he couldn’t have asked for a better dad in this regard. When he started tenth grade, and his father had the inspiration of reorienting his church’s youth fellowship toward a work camp in Arizona, Clem saw no reason to let metaphysics stand in the way of joining it.

Rick Ambrose had come aboard at the same time. During the first year, when he was a full-time seminarian and only a part-time fellowship adviser, Ambrose had worn his hair short, shaved his face, and deferred to the associate minister. But after the political tumult of the following summer—Clem had campaigned for Eugene McCarthy, working alongside his father, who in August had his lip split open while trying to intervene between cops and protesters in Grant Park—Ambrose returned to the fellowship with long hair and a Fu Manchu. Some of the boys from the church, notably Tanner Evans, had adopted the same look. There was a new rowdiness on Sunday nights, a new impatience with authority, as long-haired kids from other churches, or from no church at all, started showing up at meetings, but it never occurred to Clem to worry about his father. Who cared if an ordained minister still carried a Bible and started every meeting with a metaphysical prayer? MLK had been devout, and no one had admired him any less for it. Clem didn’t know a man who worked more passionately for social justice than his father, and when you really loved someone, the whole person, you simply accepted the little things you might have wished were different. He could see eyes being rolled when his father waxed religious at a fellowship meeting, but Becky herself rolled her eyes like that. It didn’t mean she didn’t love him.

By the spring of 1969, the group was so large that two chartered buses were waiting in the church parking lot on the first afternoon of Easter vacation. Two separate work camps were planned for Arizona, and it would have made sense to divide the group by destination. Instead, as quickly became clear, there was a cool bus—identified as such when Ambrose dropped his luggage next to it; promptly mobbed by the Tanner Evans crowd—and an uncool bus, with Clem and his father and the squarer kids from First Reformed. For Clem, a bus was only a means of transport to the thin air of the mesa, the smells of pinyon pine and frybread, the chance to haul rocks and pound nails for a people his country had robbed and oppressed. The whole notion of coolness was puerile. Nobody in New Prospect was more socially desirable than his sister, and he knew for a fact, from the stories Becky had told him, that popular kids had no more substance than unpopular ones. Because he had Becky, he’d never gone out of his way to make friends at school, and the few good friends he did have were not in the fellowship, but he was on friendly enough terms with many of the square kids. Even the sour fat girl, even the compulsive punster, even the immature blurter had interesting things to say if you put them at ease and took the time to listen. This was what Jesus would have done, and Clem felt good about doing it.

His father, however, seemed restless and distracted on the square bus. Their driver was a little slower than the other driver, and his father sat directly behind him, ducking his head to peer down the road, as if he were anxious about falling behind. Clem went to sleep early. When he woke up in the night and saw that his father was still peering through the windshield, he put it down to excitement, anticipation. The real situation didn’t become clear until morning, when their bus caught up with the Ambrose bus, at a Texas Panhandle truck stop, and his father made Ambrose trade places with him.

Theoretically, there was nothing wrong with this. His father was the leader of the group, and it was arguably correct to share his ministerial presence with the other bus. But when Clem saw how eagerly his father bounded onto it, without a backward glance, something shifted inside him. He sensed, in his gut, that his father hadn’t switched buses because it was right. It was because he selfishly wanted to be on the other bus.

That evening, when they rolled into the town of Rough Rock, Arizona, Clem’s instinct was confirmed in the awfulest of ways. In the dark, in a dust cloud lit by headlights, there was a melee of baggage handling as the group sorted itself into the half that would stay in Rough Rock, with his father, and the half going on to the settlement at Kitsillie, up on the mesa, with Ambrose. Weeks earlier, when everyone signed up for one location or the other, Clem had chosen Kitsillie because its primitive conditions suited him, but most of the kids boarding the Kitsillie bus had chosen it because of Ambrose. Among them were Tanner Evans and Laura Dobrinsky, their musician friends, and the group’s cutest girls. The bus was fully loaded and ready to go, missing only Ambrose, when Clem’s father climbed aboard with his duffel bag.

There had been, he said, a change of plan. It would be better, he’d decided, if he led the Kitsillie contingent and let Rick stay in Rough Rock, where there was dormitory housing. After a moment of stunned silence, the bus erupted with cries of protest from Laura Dobrinsky and her friends, but it was too late. The driver had already closed the door. His father took the aisle seat by Clem and clapped him on the knee. “This is great,” he said. “You and I get to spend a whole week together. It’s better, don’t you think?”

Clem said nothing. From farther back in the bus came urgent, angry female whispering. His father had trapped him in the window seat and he thought he might die if he didn’t get away. The shame of being the son of this man was new to him and searingly painful. It wasn’t that he cared how he personally looked to the cool kids. It was how weak his father had made himself look to them, by abusing his petty authority to commandeer their bus. And now his father was using him, being all fatherly, so as to pretend that he’d done nothing wrong.

The pretending continued on the mesa. The old man seemed willfully blind to how much the Kitsillie group resented him for taking Ambrose’s place. He didn’t seem to realize that he was nearly fifty, twice as old as Ambrose, not interchangeable. Yes, he was stronger and more skilled than Ambrose, and, yes, he was full of energy—returning to the mesa, reconnecting with the Navajos, walking the land he loved, always fired him up. But every morning, when he organized the work crews, no one volunteered to be in his. When he went ahead and selected a crew, and busied himself with tools and supplies for the day, a funny thing happened: every girl in his crew who was friends with Laura Dobrinsky traded places with someone from a different crew. He had to have noticed this, and yet he never said a word about it. Maybe he was too cowardly to make an issue of it. Or maybe he didn’t care what the girls thought of him. Maybe all he’d wanted was to prevent them from spending the week with their beloved Ambrose.

Clem was a crew leader himself, the only non-adult to whom his father gave responsibility. A year earlier, this expression of trust would have thrilled him, but now he was merely grateful that he never had to be in his father’s crew. During the day, hard physical labor dulled his fear of returning to the schoolhouse where the group was camping out, but the shame was always waiting there at dinnertime. He felt obliged, by his principles, to eat with his father, who was otherwise shunned, and to submit to his fraudulently hearty talk about the trench he was digging for a septic line. Seeing his peers all laughing and eating together, Clem felt uniquely cursed and isolated. He wished he were the son of someone—anyone—else.

It was a fellowship tradition to gather as a group around a single candle after dinner and share thoughts and feelings about the day. Every night at Kitsillie, there was a wall of stony silence from the cool girls. Late in the week, his father went so far as to ask the prettiest of them, Sally Perkins, if she had anything to tell the group. Sally just stared at the candle and shook her head. Her refusal to speak was so pointed, the tension around the candle so high, that it ought to have triggered a full-on confrontation, but Tanner Evans knew exactly when to strike a chord on his twelve-string and lead the group in song.

If Clem’s father was relieved to avoid a confrontation, he shouldn’t have been. The explosion that followed ten days later, at the first Sunday meeting after the Arizona trip, was more violent for having been suppressed. The evening was unusually hot for April, the fellowship meeting room as airless and rafter-smelling as an attic. Everyone was in a hurry to get downstairs for activities, and most of the room quieted when Clem’s father stepped forward to deliver his opening prayer. He glanced at Sally Perkins and her friends, who were continuing to talk, and raised his voice. “Heavenly Father,” he said.

“This room could sure use an air conditioner,” Sally remarked, loudly, to Laura Dobrinsky.

“Sally,” Rick Ambrose growled from a corner of the room.

“What.”

“Be quiet.”

After a pause, Clem’s father tried again. “Heavenly Father—”

“No!” Sally said. “I’m sorry, but no. I’m sick of his stupid prayers.” She jumped to her feet and looked around the room. “Is anyone else here as sick of them as I am? He already ruined my spring trip. I’m literally going to throw up if he keeps doing this.”

The contempt in her voice was shocking. Whatever might be happening in the country at large, however angrily authority was being questioned, nobody could speak like this at church.

“I’m sick of it, too,” Laura Dobrinsky said, standing up. “So that makes two of us. Anyone else?”

En masse, the rest of the cool girls stood up. The heat in the room was suffocating Clem. Laura Dobrinsky addressed his father directly.

“The younger Navajos don’t like you, either,” she said. “They’re sick of being ministered to. They don’t want a white guy condescending to them and telling them what his white God wants them to do. Are you even aware of how you sound to other people? Maybe you had a good thing going with the elders, way back when. And maybe they’re still cool with that. But they’re elders. The missionary bullshit won’t cut it anymore.”

Rick Ambrose was glowering at his boots, his arms tightly crossed. Clem’s father’s face had gone white. “May I say something?” he said.

“How about trying to listen for a change?” Laura said.

“If I can do nothing else, Laura, I believe I do know how to listen. It is my job to listen.”

“How about listening to yourself, then? I don’t see much evidence of that.”

“Laura,” Ambrose said.

Laura turned on him. “You’re defending him? Because he’s, what, the ordained minister? That’s a strike against him as far as I’m concerned.”

“If you have an issue with Russ,” Ambrose said, “you should take it up with him directly.”

“That’s exactly what I’m doing.”

“One on one.”

“Fuck that. I have no interest in that.” Laura addressed Clem’s father again. “I have no interest in a relationship with you.”

“I’m very sorry to hear you say that, Laura.”

“Yeah? I seriously don’t think I’m the only one here who feels that way.”

“I don’t either,” Sally Perkins said. “I don’t want to have a relationship with you. In fact, I don’t even want to be in this group if you’re in it.”

More than half the group was on its feet now. Over the tumult of voices came Ambrose’s bellowing. “Sit DOWN. Everyone SIT DOWN NOW and SHUT THE FUCK UP.”

The mob obeyed him. Though Ambrose was technically subordinate to Clem’s father, everyone knew who the group’s real leader was: who was strong and who was weak.

“We’re going to skip the prayer tonight,” Ambrose said. “Is that okay with you, Russ?”

The older man nodded meekly. He was weak! weak!

“You’re not listening to us,” Laura Dobrinsky said. “You don’t get it. We’re telling you either he goes or we go.”

There were shouts of agreement, and Clem couldn’t stand it. However ashamed he’d been of his father in Arizona, he couldn’t stand to see a weak person beaten up. He raised his hand and waved it. “Can I say something?”

Immediately all eyes were on him. Ambrose nodded with approval, and Clem stood up unsteadily, his face burning.

“I can’t believe how mean you guys are being,” he said. “You’re going to walk away because you don’t like a two-minute prayer? I’m not into it, either, but I’m not here for prayers. I’m here because we’re a community committed to service to the poor and the downtrodden. And you know what? My dad has been committed to that for longer than anyone here has been alive. He’s more committed than anyone in this room. I think that ought to count for something.”

He sat down again. A girl next to him touched his arm supportively.

“Clem is right,” Ambrose said. “We need to respect each other. If we don’t have the guts to work through this as a group, we don’t deserve to call ourselves a community.”

Sally Perkins was staring at Clem’s father. She seemed to take cruel satisfaction in his inability to look at her. “No,” she said.

“Sally,” Ambrose said.

“Let’s put it to a vote,” she said. “How many people want to stay in this group if he’s in it?”

“We’re absolutely not doing that,” Ambrose said.

“Then I’m leaving.”

She stood up again. More than half the group stood up. Clem’s father’s eyes were wide with pain. “I’d like to say something,” he said. “Hear me out, all right? I’m not sure where all this is coming from—”

Laura Dobrinsky laughed and walked out of the room.

“I’m sorry if I’m not the person you want me to be,” the old man said. “I guess I still have a lot to learn from you guys. I care about this group, deeply. We’ve been doing great work, and I’d like to help us continue to do that. If you want Rick to lead the prayers, or Rick to lead the group, I’m okay with that. But if you care about personal growth, I’d like the chance to experience it myself. I’m asking you to give me that chance.”

Clem experienced a petrification so literal it seemed as if his body might shatter if tapped with a hammer. His father was begging. And not even to any avail. Sally Perkins had walked out, and half the group was following her, crowding the doorway in their eagerness to side with her. The old man watched them with dumb animal bewilderment.

Ambrose, whose position was unenviable, suggested that Russ lead a breathing exercise while he went and reasoned with the defectors. Again the old man nodded submissively. Among the church kids who remained when Ambrose was gone, Clem was surprised to see Tanner Evans.

“I want us all to breathe,” the old man said, a tremor in his voice. “I’m going to lie down—we’re all going to lie down and shut our eyes. All right?”

He was supposed to keep speaking, to lead the group in a visualization, but the only sound was the buzz of the defectors downstairs. As Clem lay in the heat and tried to breathe, his mind went back to Becky: how his father had always wanted her to be his special friend, and had seemed to resent that Clem was also her special friend, had tried to separate her and Clem and have a private relationship with each of them, and how peculiar it was that he’d singled them out, since Becky was popular and Clem could take care of himself. Neither she nor he needed extra attention the way, for example, their younger brother did. Perry was rich in gifts but poor in spirit, and their father, who in public made such a big deal of attending to the poor, found nothing but fault in Perry. And now the same thing had happened in the fellowship. Instead of ministering to the socially needy, his father had tried to separate the popular kids from Ambrose and take them for himself. He wasn’t just weak. He was disgusting—a moral fraud.

Hearing footsteps, Clem sat up and saw his father following Ambrose out of the room. No one was even pretending to do the breathing exercise now. Tanner Evans looked at Clem and shook his head.

“You know what?” Clem said. “I don’t want to talk about it. Can we just not talk about it?”

There were murmurs of relief. His peers understood.

“I’m not quitting the group,” he added. “But I think I might go home now.”

He tottered from the room and down the stairs as if he’d been excused for medical reasons. Back at the parsonage, he went straight to his room and locked the door, picked up an Arthur C. Clarke novel he’d borrowed from the library, and absorbed himself in someone else’s world. Two hours disappeared before he heard a tap on his door.

“Clem?” his father said.

“Go away.”

“May I come in?”

“No. I’m reading.”

“I just want to thank you. Clem. I want to thank you for what you said tonight. Can you open your door?”

“No. Go away.”

The pain his father’s weakness caused him was like an illness, and it persisted in the weeks that followed. At the next Sunday meeting, he reminded himself of Tim Schaeffer, a boy from the group who’d had surgery for brain cancer and returned to meetings for two months before he died. Everyone wanted to be Clem’s partner in trust-building exercises, no one gave him shit if he didn’t feel like opening up with his feelings. Rick Ambrose told him, privately, that he’d witnessed few acts of greater strength and courage than Clem’s standing up to defend his father. Ambrose proceeded to confide in him, ask for his help with logistical decisions, and make an affectionate running joke of his atheism. Never referred to, but obvious to Clem, was Ambrose’s recognition of his need for a new father figure.

He no longer respected the old man. Having glimpsed his fundamental weakness, he now saw it at every turn. Saw him exploiting Becky’s politeness to drag her on their Sunday walks, saw him distancing himself from their mother at church functions and chatting with other men’s wives, heard him blackening Rick Ambrose’s name because young people liked him, heard him reminding people who didn’t need reminding that he’d marched with Stokely Carmichael and integrated the swimming pool, saw him gazing at himself in the bathroom mirror, touching his shaggy eyebrows with his fingertips. The man whose strength Clem had admired now seemed to him a raw blot of egregiousness. Clem couldn’t stand to be in the same room with him. He was giving up his student deferment to show his father what a strong man did.

The smoke in the Chicago-bound bus and the weather outside it were enforcing an early twilight. Snow falling on the cornfields dimmed and smudged the furrows and stubble, the distant cribs. The baby in the seat behind Clem had invented a word, buh, and fallen in love with it. Each time she said it—Buh!—she squealed with fresh delight, at intervals timed perfectly to keep him wide awake. Without his taking any action, the bus was carrying him forward, toward the task of telling his parents that he’d written to the draft board, away from the violence of what he’d done to Sharon. The depth of the violence was becoming ever more apparent, his aching more grievous. The only relief he could imagine was Becky’s blessing.

Disgusted with herself, the overweight person who was Marion fled the parsonage. For breakfast she’d eaten one hard-boiled egg and one piece of toast very slowly, in tiny bites, per the advice of a writer for Redbook who claimed to have shed forty pounds in ten months, and whom Redbook had photographed in a Barbarella sort of jumpsuit, showing off her futuristically insectile waistline, and who had also advised pouring oneself a can of a nationally advertised weight-loss drink in lieu of lunch, engaging in three hours of vigorous exercise each week, repeating mantras such as A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips, and buying and wrapping a small present for oneself to open whenever one succeeded in losing x number of pounds. Excepting a decade’s supply of sleeping pills, there was no present that Marion wanted enough to serve as a reward, but she’d duly been going to Tuesday and Thursday morning exercise classes at the Presbyterian church and would have gone there today if Judson hadn’t been home. Deprived of the proper half sandwich, with mayonnaise, to which an hour of Presbyterian calorie-burning would have entitled her, she’d lunched on two stalks of celery with cream cheese in their grooves. These had almost got her out the door, into the chute of an afternoon without temptations, but one of the cookies she’d baked with Judson had broken in half. Seeing it broken on a cooling rack, among its whole fellows, she’d felt sorry for it. She was its Creator, and to eat it was a kind of mercy. But its sweetness had unleashed her appetite. By the time her disgust caught up with her, she’d eaten five more cookies.

In her tennis shoes and her oft-mended gabardine overcoat, she proceeded past trees whose bark was darkened by the moisture their frozenness had condensed, past residential façades no longer promising the marital stability they had in the forties, when they were built. Her gait felt more waddling than striding, but at least she didn’t have to worry about being noticed. Unless it was to pity her for not owning a car, no one gave a thought to a pastor’s wife out walking by herself. As soon as people had met her and identified her position in the community, situated her at the Very Nice end of the all-important niceness spectrum, she became invisible to them. Sexually, there was no angle from which a man on the street might catch a glimpse of her and be curious to see her from a different angle, no point of relief from what she and time had done to her. She’d become invisible especially to her husband in this respect. Invisible to her kids as well—rendered featureless by the dense, warm cloud of momminess through which they apprehended her. Although she considered it possible that not one person in New Prospect actively disliked her, there was no one she could call a close friend. However short on money she was, perennially, she was even poorer in the currency of friendship, the little secrets that friends shared to build trust. She had plenty of secrets, but they were all too large for a pastor’s wife to safely betray.

What she had instead of friends, on the sly, was a psychiatrist, and she was late for her appointment with her. She detested jogging, the thudding downward flesh-tug of her heavy parts, but when she turned onto Maple Avenue she started running with short and shallow steps, which conceivably burned more calories, per unit of distance, than walking did. The houses along Maple were a free-for-all of competitive decoration, their shrubbery and railings and rooflines infested with green plastic vines bearing fruits in dull colors. It wasn’t clear to Marion that the charm of Christmas lights at night was enough to offset how ugly the hardware looked in daylight hours, of which there were many. Nor was it clear that the excitement of Christmas for children was enough to make up for the disenchanted drudgery of it in their adult years, of which there were likewise many.

At Pirsig Avenue, she slowed to a marching pace. The only person in New Prospect who knew she was seeing a psychiatrist was the receptionist at the thriving dentistry practice of Costa Serafimides, in a low brick building near the train station. Dr. Serafimides’s wife, Sophie, saw her psychiatric patients in a small, unmarked room between identical rooms in which plaque was scraped and cavities filled. Anyone who noticed Marion in the waiting room would assume that she was there for such work. Once she was in Sophie’s office, she could hear the squeak of rubber-soled comfort shoes, the whine of motive cords on pulleys, and smell the pleasant antiseptic peculiar to dentistry. The office contained two leather chairs, shelves of reference works, framed certificates (Sofia Serafimides, MD), and a deep-drawered credenza full of drugs. It was like a modernized confessional box, a not greatly secluded place to have the inside of one’s head scraped, with payment exacted not in future Hail Marys but in cash on the spot.

Marion in her early twenties had been a seriously practicing Catholic. She’d believed, at the time, that the Church had saved her life, or at least her sanity, but later on, after she’d met Russ and made herself a level-headed Protestant, she’d come to see her youthful Catholicism as another form of craziness, more sustainable than the form that had landed her in a hospital at the age of twenty, but morbid nonetheless. It was as if, in her Catholic phase, she’d lived under a vault that made the sunniest day dark. She’d been obsessed with sin and redemption, prone to being overwhelmed by the significance of insignificant things—a leaf that fell and landed at her feet, a song she heard playing in two different places on the same day—and paranoid with the sense that God was watching everything she did. When she’d fallen in love with Russ, and had received the wonderfully concrete blessings of her marriage to him, one healthy child after another, each one of them precious enough to have sufficed, she’d closed a mental door on the years when the sun had been dark and her only friend, if one could call an infinite Being a friend, had been God. The incessantly praying girl she’d been at twenty-two signified mainly as the person she was blessed not to be anymore.

Not until the previous spring, when Perry had had his sleep troubles, his problems at school, had she opened the mental door again, to compare his symptoms with what she remembered of her own, and not until her first visit to Sophie Serafimides, in the clinically scented little room, did she experience real nostalgia for her Catholic years. She remembered how soothing the transactions of the confessional had been and how she’d loved the immensity of the Church’s edifice, the majesty of its history, which had made her sins, grievous though they were, feel like tiny drops in a very large bucket—richly precedented, more manageably antique. Christianity as Russ preached and practiced it laid very little stress on sin. Marion had long been inspired, intellectually, by Russ’s conviction that a gospel of love and community was truer to Christ’s teachings than a gospel of guilt and damnation. But lately she’d begun to wonder. She loved her children more than she loved Jesus, whose divinity remained something of a question mark, and whose resurrection from the dead she basically didn’t believe in, but she absolutely believed in God. She could feel His presence inside her and around her all the time. God was there—no less now, when she was fifty, than when she’d been twenty-two. And to love God even a little bit, even only when she happened to ask herself if she did, was to love Him more than she could love any person, even her children, because God was infinite. She wondered if good Protestant churches like First Reformed, in placing so much emphasis on Jesus’s ethical teachings, and thereby straying so far from the concept of mortal sin, were making a mistake. Guilt at First Reformed wasn’t all that different from guilt at the Ethical Culture Society. It was a version of liberal guilt, an emotion that inspired people to help the less fortunate. For a Catholic, guilt was more than just a feeling. It was the inescapable consequence of sin. It was an objective thing, plainly visible to God. He’d seen her eat six sugar cookies, and the name of her sin was gluttony.

As she marched through the Pirsig Avenue business district, she tried not to look at the store windows, whose displays of merchandise reproached her for the gifts she was giving her kids. It was true that Russ opposed the commercialization of Christmas and had set a meager budget for it, but this was hard on the kids, especially Judson, who was growing up in such a prosperous suburb. She’d bought him a football game that a toy-store salesman had assured her every boy wanted but Judson was probably too bright to enjoy for long. For Becky she’d bought a cute suitcase that had been marked down in price, probably because it was the wrong size to be useful. For Clem, as a token of his scientific ambitions, she’d bought a secondhand microscope that was probably obsolete in comparison with the ones at his school. And for Perry—oh, Perry wanted so many things, and would have made creative use of all of them, and was so considerate of her, so much on her wavelength, that he’d hinted only at presents he knew she could afford. She’d bought him the cheapest of cassette recorders, the kind of thing that an appliance store displayed to assure the buyers of other cassette recorders that they weren’t getting the worst one. And all the while, at the back of her hosiery drawer, all the while she’d had an envelope containing the eight hundred dollars in cash she hadn’t yet spent on her sessions with Sophie Serafimides, whom she was paying to be her friend.

Beneath this selfishness lay deeper circles of guilt. She lied and she stole, and once upon a time she’d done far worse than that. She’d lied to her husband from the moment she met him, and she’d lied to her daughter not fifteen minutes ago, on her way out the back door—“I’m late for my exercise class.” She was late, all right. Two hours late for a one-hour class! The dollars in the pocket of her gabardine coat were twenty of the fourteen hundred she’d received from the Wabash Avenue jeweler to whom she’d taken the pearls and the diamond rings she’d set aside when she emptied her sister’s apartment in Manhattan. At the time, as the executrix, she’d told herself that she was redressing an injustice perpetrated by her sister; that Becky already had too much money coming to her and didn’t need costly jewelry. The theft might still have been forgivable if Marion had followed through on her intention to spend the money on Perry and Clem and Judson, to whom Shirley had left nothing. But after her first “hour” with Sophie, in June, when Sophie had suggested that weekly counseling would be more valuable than a sleeping-pill prescription, and had explained her sliding fee scale and asked Marion if she could afford, say, twenty dollars a week, and Marion had replied that she did, in fact, have a small personal fund at her disposal, there was no more denying the evil of her theft.

Thanks to her running on Maple Avenue, she arrived at the dental office just five minutes late. The parking lot was emptier than usual, the waiting room occupied only by a mother and a boy reading Highlights for Children, apparently unconcerned about the oral discomforts awaiting him. That the mother and her son were Black spoke to the liberalism of the Serafimideses, whose educations had taken them not only to the suburbs but also, as Marion knew, because she’d asked, out of the Greek Orthodoxy of their childhoods; they belonged to the Ethical Culture Society. The receptionist, a paragon of discretion, sixtyish and Greek herself, gave Marion a silent nod of permission to go straight to the sanctum.

Sophie Serafimides was a chair-filling dumpling of a woman with beautiful olive skin and a great volume of crinkly white hair. Although Marion had been struck by her angelic surname when she found it in the Yellow Pages, she’d chosen Sophie for her given name. The attending psychiatrists who’d treated her in Los Angeles had been men of such insufferable male condescension that it was surprising she’d recovered her sanity at all. To have found a female clinician in New Prospect was something of a miracle, and if she’d “transferred” onto Sophie any of her issues with her unloving, reality-avoidant mother, who’d died of liver disease in 1961, fully estranged from Marion, she had yet to become aware of it. Sophie Serafimides was all about reality. She radiated—exemplified—Mediterranean warmth and good sense, which itself could be insufferable, but not in a way for which Marion could blame her.

Nothing pleased the dumpling more than to be brought a fresh dream, but Marion didn’t have any dreams for her today and preferred confession anyway. After hanging up her coat, she sat down and confessed that she was wearing her exercise clothes because she’d had to lie to Becky about where she was going. She confessed that she’d gobbled up—crammed into her mouth, stuffed herself with—six sugar cookies. Sophie smiled pleasantly at these confessions. “Christmas comes but once a year,” she suggested.

“I know you think I’m too obsessed with this,” Marion said. “I know you think it’s beside the point. But do you know what I weighed this morning? A hundred and forty-three pounds! I’ve been starving myself since September, doing my knee bends and my sit-ups, avoiding sweets, and I’ve lost six pounds in three months.”

“We’ve talked about counting things. The way we use numbers to punish ourselves.”

“I’m sorry, but, for a person my height, a hundred and forty-three pounds is objectively a lot.”

Sophie smiled pleasantly, her hands folded on her belly, the ampleness of which didn’t seem to embarrass her. “Eating cookies is an interesting response to feeling overweight.”

“Well, Becky was being a pill—she’s suddenly unbearable. I could handle it if it was just a matter of being irritable and secretive, but Tanner Evans called the house last night, trying to find her, and I didn’t hear her come home until after midnight, and this morning she was up bright and early, which is unusual. She isn’t telling me anything, but it’s obvious how happy she is. And I was thinking about the sweetness of being in love for the first time—how nothing in the world is sweeter.”

“Yes.”

“Tanner is a great kid. He’s talented, he goes to church, he’s really quite beautiful. When I think about my own adolescence, what a disaster it was … Becky is the total opposite. She’s a good person who makes good choices. I’m proud of her—I’m happy for her.”

Sophie smiled pleasantly. “So proud and happy, you had to eat six cookies.”

“Why not? I could starve myself for a year, it still wouldn’t make me eighteen again.”

“You really want to be eighteen again?”

“If I could go back and be like Becky? Unlive my life and do it over again? Absolutely.”

The dumpling seemed to resist an impulse to argue the point. “Okay,” she said. “And what else?”

She already knew the answer. The what-else was always Russ. Marion, in the waiting room, had seen patients emerging from the clinic with expressions more distraught than dental work could account for, and every one of them had been a middle-aged woman. From this she’d gathered that Sophie’s clientele consisted mainly of wives, depressed wives, wives whose husbands had left them or were about to, as the epidemic of divorce ravaged New Prospect. Given a clientele like this, it was understandable that Sophie would view all husbands as a priori suspect. To a hammer, everything looked like a nail. During their first “hour” together, Marion had sensed that Sophie disliked Russ sight unseen. In subsequent “hours,” she’d tried to explain that her marriage wasn’t the problem, that Russ wasn’t like other husbands, that he’d merely been shaken by a humiliating career crisis, while Sophie, in her pleasantly smiling way, had asked Marion why, if she wasn’t worried about her marriage, she kept showing up on Thursdays to talk about it. Finally, in August, Marion admitted that something had come over Russ—he was standing up straighter, taking better care of himself, while seeming acutely repelled by her and snapping at every little thing she said—and that she was no longer so sure what he might do. To Sophie, this represented a “breakthrough” on Marion’s part, and she’d graciously allowed that her marriage might be worth fighting to keep. She suggested that Marion put herself out into the world more, develop more of an independent life, give Russ a new context in which to see her. Maybe, since money was an issue anyway, she could take a half-time job? Or a university-extension course? Marion’s own plan of action for her marriage was to lose twenty pounds by Christmas. Sophie, who was far heavier than Marion, and yet apparently still attractive to her wiry little dentist husband, had approved her plan reluctantly. If she wanted to lose weight, she should do it for her own sake, as a way of taking control of her life.

“I think Russ lied to me at breakfast,” Marion said now, to please her paid friend, who took each fresh complaint about Russ as a sign of progress toward—what? A realistic recognition that her marriage was dead? “The minute he came downstairs, I could tell he was excited. His legs kind of waggle when he’s happy, he’s like a little boy. Or like Elvis—he can’t keep his hips still. He was wearing the shirt I got him for his birthday, which I knew would look nice on him, the blue in it picks up the blue in his eyes, and that seemed strange, because all he’s doing today is pastoral visits and a delivery run to the church in Chicago and an open house tonight, which he would have changed his clothes for anyway. So I asked him if he had any other plans, and he said no, and I started wondering about the delivery, because Frances Cottrell is in that circle. Frances—”

“The young widow,” Sophie said.

“Exactly. She’s going to wreck someone’s marriage, and now she’s in the service circle Russ leads in the inner city, and so I asked him who else was making the delivery with him. And it was like he was expecting the question. He practically interrupted me to answer. He said, ‘Just Kitty Reynolds.’ Kitty’s in the circle, too. She’s retired now—she used to teach at the high school. The thing was how quickly Russ answered. And then the shirt, and his legs waggling, so.”

“So.”

“Well, he never mentions her. Frances. I happened to see her in the parking lot one day when they were leaving for the city. The only time he’s ever referred to her was when I asked him about her that night.”

“She’s young.”

“Younger. She has a boy in high school.”

“Young is young,” Sophie said. “Costa likes to talk about the first warm day of spring, when the young women all come out in their summer dresses. It lifts a man’s spirits to be around attractive younger women. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. I like seeing those summer dresses myself.”

It was interesting how Sophie, who played the prosecutor when Marion defended Russ, turned around and argued for tolerance when Marion impugned him. She wondered if this was a subtle therapeutic strategy or just a way to keep her coming back every week with twenty dollars.

“I guess I haven’t reached that higher plane,” she said irritably. “You know what I think made me eat the cookies? I think Becky was one too many happy people to handle in one morning.”

“You preferred it when Russ was suffering.”

“Maybe. Yes. Did we somehow determine that I’m not a bad person? If we did, I must have missed it.”

“You feel you’re a bad person.”

“I know I’m a bad person. You don’t have any idea how bad.”

Sophie’s smile gave way to a more censorious expression. The timing of her therapeutic frowns was comically predictable. Marion felt infantilized by it.

“I could have eaten the whole batch of cookies,” she said. “The only reason I didn’t was there wouldn’t have been any left for Judson. But I definitely could have eaten all of them. Six pounds in three months of starving myself, and it’s not as if anyone has noticed. It’s not as if I deserve to be thin. The disgusting thing I see in the mirror every morning is what I deserve.”

Sophie glanced at the spiral-bound notepad on her little side table. She hadn’t written on the notepad since the summer. There was a hint of threat in the glance.

“It’s not just me, by the way,” Marion said. “I think everyone is bad. I think badness is the fundamental condition of humanity. If I really loved Russ, shouldn’t I be rejoicing to see him happy again? Even if it meant him being with the fair young widow and lying to me about it? I don’t really want him to be happy. I only want him not to leave me. When I saw him in that shirt this morning, I wished I’d never given it to him. If suffering is what it takes for him to stay married to me, I’d rather that he suffer.”

“You say that,” Sophie said, “but I’m not sure you believe it.”

“Also, for your information,” Marion said, her voice rising, “I’m paying you money I can’t afford to be here, so I don’t really care to hear about how well adjusted you and your husband are.”

“You may have misunderstood what I was saying.”

“No, I understood you very well.”

Sophie glanced again at her notepad. “What did you hear me to be saying?”

“That you’re not depressed. That you have a happy marriage. That you have no idea what it’s like to look at a girl in a summer dress and wish a terrible life on her, a life as terrible as your own. That you’re lucky enough not to know how lucky you are. That you’ve never had to find out how selfish all human love is, how bad all people are, and how the only love you can be sure isn’t selfish is loving God, which isn’t much of a consolation prize, but it’s all we’ve really got.”

Sophie drew a slow breath. “You’re giving me a lot today,” she said. “I’d like to understand better where it’s coming from.”

“I hate Christmas. I can’t lose weight.”

“Yes. I’m sure that’s a disappointment. But I’m sensing something else here.”

Marion turned her face toward the door. She thought of the money in her hosiery drawer and the ugly cheap cassette recorder she’d bought for Perry. It wasn’t too late to go out and get him a set of good stereo components, or a really nice camera, something he would truly enjoy having, something to atone in some tiny way for the blackness she’d put in his head by being his mother. The other kids would be all right, but she was very much afraid that Perry wouldn’t, and it was unbearable to know that the instability she could sense in him had come from her. If she kept seeing Sophie, the money would be gone by summer, and all she’d have to show for it would be the biweekly moments when Sophie, with an odd backhanded motion, without looking, reached behind her and opened a credenza drawer to fish out another handful of free physician samples of Sopor™, methaqualone, 300 mg. The samples were the one indisputably useful thing Marion got for her twenty dollars a week. A prescription would have been cheaper, but she hadn’t wanted to be a woman with a prescription. She’d preferred to pretend that her anxious depression was temporary and the drug samples were an ad hoc way of managing it. Perry’s most worrisome symptoms had abated, and in the fall he’d joined the church’s youth fellowship, and she’d allowed herself to believe that Sophie was right—that the problem was her marriage. She’d believed that Sophie could help her get better. But she wasn’t getting better. The Sopors did help her sleep more soundly than being confessed once had, but at least in the confessional she’d been able to speak the worst truths about herself. She could be as crazy and unhappy as she wanted without being expected to fight to save her marriage, which she now believed there was no saving, because she’d never deserved it in the first place, because she’d obtained it by fraud. What she deserved was punishment.

“Marion?” Sophie said.

“It’s not working.”

“What isn’t working?”

“You. This. Me. None of it.”

“The holidays are very hard. The end of the year is hard. But the feelings that get stirred up can be useful to work with.”

“A breakthrough,” Marion said bitterly. “Are we having another breakthrough?”

“You feel you’re a bad person,” Sophie prompted. Twenty dollars was the bottom of her fee scale, but it evidently still bought Marion the right to be hateful, as she never allowed herself to be with anyone else, and to receive pleasant smiles in return.

“It’s a fact, not a feeling,” she said.

“What exactly do you mean by that?”

Marion closed her eyes and didn’t answer. After a while, she began to wonder what would happen if she continued to say nothing, stayed silent for the rest of their “hour,” and then left the office without another word. She had enough Sopors to last another week, and she was very tempted to refuse to give Sophie anything more to work with, to make the dumpling just sit there and look at a patient whose eyes were closed, to punish her for not having helped her get better, to drive home how little she was better; to be the person who was withholding, not the wife and mother being withheld from. Each potentially therapeutic minute she stayed silent was another forty cents wasted, and the deliberate waste of minutes was tempting in the same self-spiting way that eating cookies had been. The only waste more evilly satisfying than to say nothing for the rest of the “hour” would have been to be silent from the moment she sat down. She wished she’d done that.

After several minutes of silence, marked only by the whir of dental equipment down the hall, she gave Sophie a half-lidded peek and saw that her eyes, too, were closed, her expression neutral, her hands loosely clasped on her lap, as if to demonstrate her powers of professional patience. Well, two could play at that game.

In the summer, in the early rush of their paid friendship, Marion had told Sophie the truth about certain things she’d outright lied to Russ about, or had omitted to mention and now could never tell him. The principal facts were that she’d spent fourteen weeks in a mental hospital in Los Angeles in 1941, following a severe psychotic episode, and that, contrary to what she’d told Russ in Arizona, soon after she’d met him, she had not had a brief, failed marriage to an unsuitable man in Los Angeles. There really had been a man, who really had been married, albeit not to her, and she’d felt obliged to warn Russ that she was previously used goods. She’d made her “confession” in a legitimate storm of tears, fearing that her having been “married” and “divorced” would cause her beautiful good Mennonite boy to recoil in horror and refuse to see her again. Thankfully, Russ’s forgiving heart and his sexual attraction to her had carried the day. (It was his more sternly Mennonite parents who later recoiled.) She’d believed that she’d become a new person in Arizona, firmly grounded in reality by her conversion to Catholicism, and that the ghastly events in Los Angeles no longer mattered. By the time she gave Russ half the truth of half her story, she’d stopped going to confession.

It wasn’t until she found her way into Sophie’s box, more than twenty years later, that she realized how much she’d needed to unburden herself. Because patient confidentiality was as strict as the confessional’s, she could have safely gone ahead and told the dumpling everything, but some things were only for her and God (and, once upon a time, in Arizona, God’s priestly intercessor) to know. The absolution Sophie had given her was not of her sins but of her fear that she was manic-depressive. Apparently, she was merely chronically depressed, with obsessional and mildly schizoid tendencies. Compared to manic depression, these terms were a comfort.

Up to a point, the story she’d told Sophie in the summer, while Sophie jotted on her notepad, was the same story she’d told the young Russ. It began with her father, Ruben, the capable son of a German Jewish widower in the San Francisco shoe-repair trade, who’d attended Berkeley around the time of the great earthquake. Rooting for Berkeley’s football team, the Golden Bears, Ruben had gotten the idea of starting his own business to manufacture athletic uniforms. The nation had gone crazy for high-school and collegiate sports, and after he finished college he had some success selling uniforms to high schools. The universities, however, were controlled by men from old California families who conducted all their business in the same Jew-excluding milieu. Marion reckoned it was partly cold business calculation, partly social ambition, and presumably some modicum of sexual attraction that led Ruben to pursue an “artistic” young woman from that milieu. Marion’s mother, Isabel, was a fourth-generation Californian from a family whose once-extensive property holdings, in the city and Sonoma County, had largely been squandered—poorly husbanded, inopportunely liquidated, charitably donated to garner status points, inadvisably divided among shiftless offspring—by the time she met Ruben. One of Isabel’s brothers ruthlessly managed what was left of the family’s land in Sonoma, the other was a landscape painter of scant means and little note. Isabel herself had vague musical aspirations, but all she actually seemed to have done with herself was appreciate culture in San Francisco, ride around in the cars of richer friends, and spend long weekends at their country houses. How exactly Ruben found his way into one of those houses, Marion never learned, but within two years he’d parlayed an advantageous marriage into contracts with the Stanford and Cal athletic departments. By the time Marion was born, he was the largest manufacturer of athletic gear west of the Rocky Mountains. He built Isabel a three-story house in Pacific Heights, and it was there, as a rich girl (for a while), that Marion had grown up.

In her memory, the house was darker than a Catholic sky. Thick curtains further dimmed the fog-enfeebled daylight falling on the heavy, stained-oak furniture then in style. Her mother seemed to view both her and Shirley as aberrations that her body had unaccountably twice housed for nine months, their births a regrettable interruption of her social life but otherwise a relief on the order of passing a kidney stone. Her father’s heart might have had room for two daughters if the first one, Shirley, hadn’t filled it inordinately. His obsessionality (the dumpling’s word) served him well in his business, Western All-Sport, to which he devoted sixty and seventy hours a week, but at home it served to make Marion feel invisible. Ruben’s darling was Shirley. When he happened to look at Marion directly, it was often to ask, “Where’s your sister?” Shirley was the really pretty one, even as an infant, and took his adoration as her due. On Christmas morning, she didn’t tear through her immense haul of presents with a normal child’s greed. She unwrapped them like a wary retailer, carefully inspecting each of them for flaws of manufacture, and sorted them by category, as if checking them against a mental invoice. The repeated chiming of her voice—“Thank you Daddy”—was like the chinging of a cash register. Marion took refuge from the excess by absorbing herself in a single doll, a single toy, while her mother yawned with open boredom.

Christmas for her mother was an enforced separation from the four friends with whom she did everything. The friends were from old families with less depleted fortunes, and, although three of them had husbands and children of their own, all five were in love with themselves as a unit. They’d been the marvelous fivesome of the Class of 1912 at Lowell, where they’d jointly decided that, if the world had a problem with their marvelousness, it was the world’s problem, not theirs, and for the rest of their lives they never tired of lunching together, shopping together, attending lectures and theater together, reading books together, advancing worthy civic causes together. Marion came to see that her mother’s place in the fivesome had always been the most precarious—she’d begun with the least money and then married a Jew—and therefore the most fanatically defended. Isabel lived in fear of being the fifth wheel, and at Christmas she fretted about the three friends whose husbands were also good friends, the non-fivesome gatherings that might be happening without her.

Spoiling Shirley wasn’t the only thing her father couldn’t stop doing. Beginning when Marion was six or seven, he never seemed to sleep at all. Awakening at a small hour, she could hear him playing ragtime, self-taught, on the piano two floors below. He was also a self-taught architect and spent other nights alone with his drafting tools, forever redesigning an even bigger house. At work, he bought businesses above and below him—his obsessive goal was to open a nationwide chain of sporting-goods stores—and he made more speculative investments as well, employing his special insight as a stock picker, his special gift for well-timed margin purchases. He smoked enormous cigars and wore a coonskin coat to Cal football games, sometimes taking Marion to sit with him in his fifty-yard-line seats, since Shirley and her mother had no interest. He talked nonstop throughout the game, in a technical language mostly beyond a seven-year-old’s comprehension. He knew the name of every Golden Bear player and carried a little notebook in which he drew Xs and Os to show Marion how a play had worked, or to design new plays that he intended to show Cal’s head coach, Nibs Price, whose job, he confided to her, he could have done better. He never behaved rudely, but his voice was loud and excited, and Marion was uncomfortably aware that other fans kept looking at him.

How like a mental illness a nation’s economy was! She later wondered how much longer, if the stock market hadn’t crashed when it did, her father’s manic period might have lasted, and whether, if his illness had set in later, he could have managed to be manic in the midst of a depression. These hypotheticals were hard to entertain, because the coincidence of the market’s crash and her father’s crash seemed so inevitable in hindsight. In the weeks following Black Tuesday, he duly scrambled to salvage what he could of his highly leveraged holdings, but his voice, on the phone in his study, from which he communicated with New York before going to the office, sounded the way it had when he’d made funeral arrangements for his father. Marion came home from school and found him in the parlor in his shirtsleeves and suspenders, staring at the cold grate of the fireplace. Sometimes he spoke to her about the singular misfortune that had befallen him, and the little she understood of margin purchases and mining futures, as an eight-year-old, was still more than her mother and her older sister cared to know. Her mother was scarcer than ever, and Shirley was coldly disappointed by the diminished flow of goods to her, the meagerness of Christmas in 1929, the vaporization of the Larkspur weekend house in whose pool she’d been assured she would be swimming the following summer.

It was a testament to her father’s abilities that, even when the light in his eyes had gone out, he not only saved the house but put meat on the table and continued to pay for Shirley’s dancing and voice lessons. He now worked as the sales manager for Western All-Sport, which he’d sold, for less than its book value, to cover his other losses. In a mental state like the one for which Marion was later hospitalized, if not worse, he dragged himself out of bed every weekday morning, dragged a razor across his cheeks, dragged himself to the streetcar, dragged himself through meetings for a company he had no hope of making his again, and then dragged himself home to an unforgiving wife, a favored daughter whose disappointment tortured him, and Marion, who felt responsible for what had happened. Because she was invisible, she’d noticed things the other three of them hadn’t. She’d known that something wasn’t right.

As her father, too, became invisible—a gray-skinned ghost who slept in his study, spoke in a murmur, shook his head when asked to repeat himself—she did her best to be his caretaker. She met him at the streetcar in the evening and asked him how his Golden Bears were doing. She tapped on the terrible closed door of his study and braved the bad smell in it to bring him a piece of fruit she’d cut up. He’d always loved fruit above all other foods, the Californian freshness and variety of it, and even now a light flickered in his eyes when she urged a cut-up pear on him. He didn’t smile when he ate it, but he nodded as if it had to be admitted: the pear was good. And Marion, at ten and eleven and twelve, was already aware of how inextricably mixed up good and evil were. When she got her father to enjoy a piece of fruit, there was no telling if the glow she felt was purely love or also the satisfaction of being a better daughter than her sister.

Like the Great Depression, the dark years seemed to have no end. In the fall of 1935, Shirley boarded an eastbound Pullman sleeper, as happy to be escaping San Francisco as Marion was glad to see her go. With something of his old financial magic, her father had come up with a semester’s tuition money for Vassar College, thereby fulfilling a long-standing promise to Shirley. But the effort seemed to have finished him. Within weeks of his darling’s departure, nothing could induce him to dress and go to work. Isabel, who for six years had occupied herself with such threats to her way of life as the rage for contract bridge, a game which, horribly, only four women at a time could play, now finally was forced to reacquaint herself with reality. She obtained a small loan from her Jew-hating brother in Sonoma and persuaded the owners of Western All-Sport to grant her husband a short furlough. Although Marion always felt that she and Shirley had drawn very poorly in the mother lottery, she had a grudging admiration for Isabel’s resourcefulness in a pinch. Isabel’s self-preservative instincts, her ultimately successful battles to maintain her standing in her fivesome, were both laudable and pitiable in their way. And so, as ever, Marion blamed herself for what her father did.

The problem was that she’d discovered theater. Shirley had been the family’s presumptive talent, Marion the invisible one, but as soon as her sister left for Vassar, Marion and her best friend had tried out for their school’s fall production of The Five Little Peppers. Aided, perhaps, by the fact that she was short, she’d landed the part of the smallest and most adored Pepper, Phronsie, and discovered that she, too, had talent. With a familiar sense of ambiguity, uncertain if she was doing something good or something bad, she became a different person in rehearsals, became visible to the other players, entered a kind of trance of not-herselfness. Because the school theater was where this happened, she was smitten with the wobbly paint-smelling flats, the great thunking toggle switches of the light board, the backstage hanging sheet of tin that was endlessly fun to make thunder. After school, instead of going home to look after her father, she stayed to rehearse and paint flats.

In early December, during the play’s first dress rehearsal, she was being Phronsie, preparing to charm a real audience, when a gray-braided school administrator entered the theater and called her down from the stage. It was a rainy afternoon, already dark at four thirty. The administrator silently walked her to her house, where all four of her mother’s friends had already gathered. Her mother was sitting by the cold grate, her expression blank, a folded sheet of stationery in her lap. There had been, she said, an accident. Perhaps embarrassed to be mincing words in front of her friends, she shook her head and corrected herself. Her expression still blank, she told Marion that her father had taken his own life. She spread her arms, beckoning Marion to come and be embraced, but Marion turned and ran from the room. To get to her father’s study, to find him there and show them they were wrong, she had to run up two flights of stairs, but it seemed to her that she was going down, hurtling down a tunnel of guilt toward her punishment. She could hear, strangely distant, the screaming of the girl being punished.

A boat captain that morning had seen a man pulling a child’s red wagon on a pier below Fort Mason. When the captain looked again, too soon for the man to have gone back up the pier, the wagon was standing at the end of it. Two hours later, when a body was raised from the water, the police deduced that the wagon had contained the heavy chain the man had locked around his neck and shoulders before jumping. The wagon, a well-made toy of solid steel, its red enamel still bright, had once been a Christmas gift to Shirley, later a stand for potted geraniums behind the house. Marion never read the note that her father had left behind while her mother was out breakfasting with her friends, but it was apparently not an apology or a farewell but simply a confession of the financial situation he’d hidden from her. The family’s debts were hopeless, there were liens on everything, multiple liens, a tissue of fraud and bankruptcy. The last conceivably leverageable dollars had been spent on Shirley’s first semester at Vassar.

In the story Marion told Sophie about herself, a story she’d worked out in the hospital and in her years of Catholic introspection, her guilt was inextricable from her ability to dissociate. Two nights after her father’s death, with the definitive thunk of a light-board switch, she turned herself into Phronsie Pepper, telling herself that the show must go on, and proceeded to be adorable onstage for two hours. After each of the show’s three performances, she returned to her grief and her guilt. But now she knew that a switch inside her could be flipped at will. She could turn off her self-awareness and do bad things for the momentary gratification of them. The trick of dissociation was the beginning of her own illness, although she didn’t know it yet.

She and Shirley were allowed to finish the semester at their respective schools, but the house was about to be repossessed, its furnishings sold at auction. Her mother crisply informed her that she, Isabel, was going to stay for a while as a houseguest of the richest of her friends. Shirley, who hadn’t bothered to come home for the funeral, which some previously unseen cousins of her father had materialized to pay for, intended to find work and lodging in New York City. But what to do about Marion? Her maternal grandmother was senile, and Marion would be one houseguest too many at her mother’s friend’s. The only people who might take her in were her mother’s brothers. If her mother had sent her to her uncle in Arizona, James, the landscape painter, Marion still might have been saved from herself. But Isabel believed that Jimmy was a homosexual, unsuitable as a guardian, and so her younger brother, Roy, in Sonoma, had agreed to house Marion until she finished high school.

Roy Collins was a man of many hatreds. He hated his forebears for pissing away money that should have been his. He hated Roosevelt, labor unions, Mexicans, artists, fairies, and socialite phonies. He especially hated Jews and the socialite phony sister who’d married one. But he wasn’t one of those weak men, like his fairy brother or his suicide brother-in-law, who shirked a man’s family duties. He had four kids of his own whom he supported by working hard at the farm-machinery distributorship he’d started with the pittance his grandparents had left him. Although his wife and his children were too cowed to disagree with him, he liked to remind them, at nearly every meal, how hard he worked. Marion didn’t find Roy especially suitable as a guardian, but he did have money. He was the opposite of her father, a lot richer than one might have guessed from the plainness of his house in Santa Rosa. He’d kept his business solvent through the heart of the Depression, and, as the sole trustee of the family orchards and vineyards, he’d borrowed from himself so heavily, on the trust’s behalf, that his own name ended up on the titles to the land. Marion didn’t learn about this until she went to Arizona, but it went some way toward explaining why Roy had fed and clothed her for three and a half years, and why he so hated his sister and his brother. It would have been harder to rob them if he hadn’t.

Until she was fifteen, Marion had been the mild daughter, the easy daughter, but to live with Roy Collins was to flip the switch in her. The two of them fought about the cigarettes she’d started smoking. They fought about the way she wore her socks, the friends she brought home from Santa Rosa High, the lipstick he couldn’t prove she’d stolen from the drugstore. Once she flipped the switch, she hardly knew what she was shouting. At her new school, she gravitated toward the theatrical girls, the fast girls, and the boys who chased them. Her own fast credentials were in order because she came from the city and her father had killed himself. She smoked fiendishly and used the suicide to upset people. She thought that if she was bad enough, hateful enough, Roy might give up and send her somewhere else. But he knew what she wanted, and he sadistically refused to give it to her. Much later, she had the thought that he’d been sexually attracted to her; that people were cruel to what they were afraid of loving.

Her best friend, Isabelle Washburn, was prettier and taller than Marion, a shining blonde with a sharp little nose that drove the boys wild, but Marion was smarter and more daring and made Isabelle laugh. Isabelle fancied herself an actress, but she couldn’t be bothered to join the Thespian Society. She preferred going to the movie house, where the ushers, in deference to her nose, would often let in her and Marion for free. Marion’s former self was now mostly a memory, but to her the theater was still the place that had distracted her from her father, a place of guilt, and so, although she might have ruled the thespians, she never tried out for another play. She threw herself instead into the real-life drama of discussing boys, provoking boys, and, finally, falling in love with a boy, Dick Stabler, who lived down the street from the Collinses.

Dick was beetle-browed and husky-voiced, with a mild congenital lisp that made her weak in the knees; he looked and sounded the way she imagined Heathcliff. His parents rightly distrusted her, and her senior year was a serial drama of subterfuge and secret outdoor locations where she could be alone with Dick and kiss him and let him touch her breasts. She’d determined that she was “oversexed”—at times, she was literally cross-eyed with her urges, ill with them, dying of them. She was ready to do whatever Dick wanted, including marrying him, but he was bound for college and a higher grade of wife. In the spring, there came a night when his parents heard a noise in their parlor, well after midnight, and his father crept downstairs to investigate, switched on the most glaring light in all of Santa Rosa, and discovered her and Dick on the parlor sofa, clothed but fully horizontal. After this embarrassment, and under the steady pressure of his parents’ disapproval, Dick’s passion for her faltered. She was left feeling dirty and bad. Her uncle, in one of his rages, went so far as to use the word slut, and instead of shouting back at him, as she’d done so many times, she collapsed in tears of self-reproach.

Her mother, in San Francisco, was still a houseguest. In her infrequent letters to Marion, she claimed to miss her baby, but she couldn’t impose on her hosts by inviting her baby to stay with her, and she wouldn’t subject herself to Roy’s hostility by coming to Santa Rosa. When Marion took a bus to the city to meet her for lunch at Tadich’s, a month before she finished high school, it was eight months since she’d last seen her. She was there to discuss her future, but her mother, whose hair had turned white, and whose cheeks offered red evidence of morning drinking, had exciting news of Shirley in New York. After some difficult years at a Gimbels perfume counter, Shirley was now on Broadway—in a small role, to be sure, but launched as an actress, with prospects for larger roles. Isabel’s maternal pride, a quality hitherto absent in her, might have seemed poignant to Marion, suggesting as it did a woman desperate to keep up with friends whose sons were Ivy Leaguers, if Marion hadn’t felt so enragingly effaced by the news. She felt that someone, probably she herself, ought to murder both Shirley and her mother, to avenge what they’d done to her father. Her “talented” sister in particular needed murdering. When a waiter brought her a plate of fried sand dabs, a Tadich specialty, she ashed her cigarette on them.

At home, in Santa Rosa, Roy Collins had been wearing her down, preying on her shame and self-reproach, and had just about convinced her that she would, indeed, be very lucky to start work as a clerk in his distributorship after she graduated. An earlier dream, which was to head to Los Angeles with Isabelle Washburn and try to break into the movies, had gone dormant in the months of her obsession with Dick Stabler. She’d seen less of Isabelle and become more realistic. Although she’d smoked her way to weighing one hundred and three pounds at the doctor’s office, careful attention to the calves and ankles flashed onscreen at the California Theatre had led her to suspect that her legs were too peasanty for Hollywood. Isabelle, however, whose legs were better, still intended to go to Los Angeles, and she’d never retracted her invitation to Marion. Sitting in Tadich’s, her cigarette ends soaking up melted parsley butter while her mother nattered about the doings of the Francisca Club musical committee, evidently too repelled by the scowling of her baby to broach the subject of her future, Marion experienced a rage so murderous that her decision made itself. She was going to go to Los Angeles and flip the switch and see what happened. She would make herself visible, and she was definitely going to murder someone. She just didn’t know who.

Isabelle had a plan for being discovered by Hollywood, involving a cousin who was William Powell’s physician, and although she gamely allowed that Marion could be a part of it, she seemed unthrilled that Marion was going with her. In Los Angeles, at the Jericho Hotel, to which they’d retreated after learning that the homes for aspiring actresses all had waiting lists, Isabelle no longer laughed at the things Marion said. When her doctor cousin asked her out to lunch, she decided it was better, after all, if she met him alone. Getting the picture, and adding Isabelle to her list of people in need of murdering, Marion moved into a ladies’ rooming house on Figueroa Street. She went to some of the agencies that advertised in the newspaper, but there were a million other girls like her. When she’d exhausted the three hundred dollars that Roy Collins had given her, with an angry vow never to give her anything else, she took a job in the back office of Lerner Motors, which was the largest General Motors dealership in Los Angeles. With her first paycheck, she bought a stack of old plays for a nickel apiece and read them aloud in her room, trying to recapture the feeling of not-herselfness, but she needed a theater and had no idea how to get into one. How had Shirley done it? Had someone discovered her at the perfume counter?

Her first Christmas alone wasn’t so bad that it didn’t later seem good. A girl in the Lerner back office had invited her to dinner with her family, but she’d had enough of other families’ Christmases. In the afternoon, she rode the streetcar to the end of the line in Santa Monica and sat by herself on a bench by the water, parceling out her cigarettes, writing in her diary. She read the entry from exactly one year earlier, when Dick Stabler had given her a silverplate chain and she’d given him a leather-bound volume of Khalil Gibran and her longing for his touch had colored every minute. The weather in Santa Monica was fine, the far snow-capped peaks floating bodyless above the winter haze. Everything seemed more or less in balance. A breeze from the east kept the marine layer offshore, and the sun’s downward progress was made tolerable, less alarmingly a reminder of life escaping from her, by the timeless repetition of the waves, their breathlike breaking on the wide, flat beach. The pressure that was lately always in her head, the loneliness and something less definable, a low-grade dread, was balanced by her outward composure. She was a girl interesting enough to herself to sit alone, pretty enough to draw glances from men walking by with their families, tough enough that no one bothered her for long, and smart enough to know that being discovered while sitting on a bench was just a daydream. When the sun finally sank into fog, she walked to the first diner she found open and ate pressed turkey with canned gravy, potato puree, a slice of cranberry jelly.

“Marion?” Sophie Serafimides said.

One of Marion’s hips had gone dead and prickly. She was used to an arm or a foot going to sleep, but not a hip muscle, not since the last time she was pregnant. She suspected she had her heaviness to blame for it.

“I’m afraid our time is almost up,” Sophie said.

Marion shifted her weight, allowing blood back into her hip, and opened her eyes. Snow was falling on the rail tracks outside the window. The white flakes seemed speeded up by the half-closed slats of the venetian blinds.

“I’d like to know what you mean with your silence,” Sophie said. “If you think you might tell me, we could do a double session. I had some cancellations—you’re my last patient today.”

“I only brought twenty dollars.”

“Well.” Sophie smiled pleasantly. “You can think of it as a Christmas present, if you want.”

Marion shuddered.

“The holiday seems to have a particular association for you,” Sophie said. “Will you tell me what it is?”

Marion shut her eyes again. The Christmas she’d spent alone in Santa Monica later seemed like the last day that she and the outside world had been in balance. In the first weeks of 1940, storm after chaotic storm dumped rain on Southern California. The streets were black and oily with it on the evening she stayed late at Lerner Motors to type up papers on the preposterous sale that Bradley Grant had made. Sideways rain was slapping the window of her boardinghouse room long after midnight, when she wrote in her diary, Something awful has happened and I don’t know what to do. It must never, ever happen again.

Bradley Grant was the star salesman at Lerner. Although Marion was lonely, she’d taken to eating her lunchtime sandwich in an unused room in the parts department. There, she at least had the undivided companionship of a book, until Bradley Grant began intruding on her. Bradley was fifteen years older than she was, but he had the fatless body of a teenager and a face whose handsomeness was hard to judge; there was something cartoonlike about the stretchiness of his features, especially his wide mouth. When he saw Marion with a volume of Maupassant stories, he invaded her lunch-hour sanctuary to hold forth on Maupassant. He was an avid reader, a literary man by training. He struck her as being most interested in himself, so overflowing with words that he had to troll the parts department to find an outlet for them, but one day he brought her his own copy of Homage to Catalonia, by the English writer George Orwell. He was distressed about the rise of Fascism in Europe, about which she knew essentially nothing. She duly read the Orwell and began to pay attention to the front page of the newspaper, in order to seem less ignorant to Bradley. One day, he remarked that a girl as intelligent and pretty as Marion ought to be in the front office, and the very next day she was transferred to the front office. At Lerner, the lesser salesmen were rank perspirers, changing their undershirts at midday, afraid of the pink slip every Friday, but Bradley Grant was so valuable to the dealership that only the owner, Harry Lerner, could overrule him. After her transfer, Marion continued to eat her lunchtime sandwich in the back. Becoming a front-office typist and file fetcher was hardly her idea of being discovered.

On the day a person was born, only one date on the calendar, her birthday, was significant, but as she proceeded through life other dates became permanently exalted or befouled, the date her father killed himself, the date she married, the dates her children were born, until the calendar was densely checkered with significance. On the evening of January 24, a young man in a dripping fedora walked into the Lerner showroom shortly before closing time. A lesser salesman sidled up to him and got the brush-off. At Lerner, they called any man who came inside to flaunt his automotive knowledge, or to be fawned over for a couple of minutes, or just to get out of the weather, with no intention of buying, a Jake Barnes. Bradley Grant, who’d coined the name, and who’d already closed three sales that day, strolled up to Marion’s desk with an apple and ate it carefully while he studied the young Jake Barnes. “I like his shoes,” he said, dropping the apple core in her wastebasket. “Is there somewhere you need to be?” There was never anyplace Marion needed to be. Within a minute, on the floor, Bradley had a hand on the Jake Barnes’s shoulder and was helping him into a brand-new Buick Century. She watched Bradley’s features stretch into cartoons of astonishment, indifference, compassion, stern admonition. With a gliding tread that let him hurry without seeming to hurry, he returned to her and told her to keep the showroom open and a manager on duty. “Jake and I are making a little cash run,” he said, gliding away again. An hour later, he and the young buyer were back on the floor and Marion was typing up the paperwork.

“How easy was that?” Bradley exulted when the buyer was gone. He was bumping one fist on the other like a dice roller. “What do you want to bet I can’t move another car today?” His energy reminded Marion of her father’s in the pre-crash years. They were the only ones left in the office, and he couldn’t sell a car without authorization from a manager. “There’s a T-bone steak in it for you,” he said to Marion. “What do you want to bet?” Before she could answer, he grabbed an umbrella and ran out of the showroom. From the front door, smoking a cigarette, she saw him working the cars braking at the corner of Hope and Pico, saw drivers rolling down their windows, saw him gesturing at their vehicles and then at the dealership. It was insane, and she didn’t know who he was doing it for, himself or her, but watching him brought her latent dread to the surface. Later, in Arizona, she came to think that the sight of Bradley in the rain, with his umbrella, had been a premonition of pure evil. People who weren’t seriously Catholic didn’t understand that Satan wasn’t a charmingly literate tempter, or a funny red-faced devil with a pitchfork. Satan was pain without limit, annihilation of the mind.

“This gentleman has come to the sensible realization that he no longer wishes to drive a Pontiac,” Bradley said, ushering into the showroom a heavyset bald man who smelled of drink. It had taken him less than half an hour to find a customer, but he was soaked with sideways rain and street spray. He asked Marion to get the gentleman a cup of coffee while—he winked at her—he had a word with his manager, and then he asked her to pull the keys for the cherry-red ’35 Oldsmobile coupe for which the gentleman wished to trade in his Pontiac. The gentleman, he added, would be paying by personal check. The two men returned to the back lot, where the red car was parked. Marion might have walked out and let Bradley close the sale by himself if Roy Collins hadn’t made her such a rule-breaker. When the sucker drove away in his Oldsmobile, Bradley produced a flat pint bottle of whiskey and two clean coffee cups. Perched on a seat warmed by the sucker’s fat butt, at Bradley’s desk, she could see a small studio photograph of Bradley and his wife and their two little boys. She wondered if the T-bone steak was still coming or if he’d forgotten. She lit another cigarette and sipped the whiskey. “I sure hope that check doesn’t bounce.”

“It won’t,” Bradley said, “but I’ll cover it if it does. Even without it, we did better than break even.”

“His car was worth more?”

“It’s one year old! I could have offered him a straight swap, but then he would have started thinking, ‘Hey, wait a minute…’ So I made up a number and let him take me down to half of it.”

“That was mean,” she said.

“Not at all. Half the fun of owning a superior brand of car is knowing you could pay for it.”

“You were doing him a favor.”

“It’s psychology. This job is all psychology. My problem is I’m so damned good at it. Did you see me in the street? Have you ever seen anything like it?”

She shook her head and took another sip of whiskey.

“It’s like a compulsion,” Bradley said. “I’m in it and I can’t get out of it, because I’m so damned good. People know they’re being suckered and they let me do it anyway. They come in here, they’ve made a solemn vow to themselves, they’re going to be strong, they’re going to drive a hard bargain. But they only buy a car once a year, or once a decade, or maybe they’ve never bought a car, and here’s me who sells cars day in and day out. They have no chance! I’m going to make them weak, and they’re going to go home and lie to their wife. They’re going to tell her they got a great deal. There’s only one red car on the lot, and the guy’s got to have it because it’s red and, goddamn it, there’s only one of them, and what are we going to do tomorrow morning? Get another red car out there. I swear this job is killing my soul.”

Marion set her cup on his desk, intending to drink no more. She wondered if she should mention food, or simply go home to bed hungry, but the words kept pouring out of Bradley. In college, in Michigan, he said, he’d written plays and published poems in the college magazine, and then he’d come to Los Angeles to break into the movies as a writer. His soul was still alive then, but he’d met a girl who had dreams of her own, and one thing led to another, and now he was just another member of the goddamned middle class, suckering people for a living. Ideas came to him in the night, original script ideas—like, during the Spanish Civil War, the daughter of Hitler’s ambassador to Spain is secretly in love with a Republican intelligence officer, the Fascists are holding the officer’s wife and children hostage, he asks the daughter to help them escape from Spain, and she can’t be sure if he really loves her or if he’s only using her to save his family—he had a million ideas, but when was he supposed to work on them? At the end of a day, his soul was too deadened. The only shred of human decency still left in him, the only way he knew he wasn’t the worst person in the world, was how much he loved his boys. They were a weight on him, yeah, a drain on his creative energy, but the responsibility was the only thing standing between him and perdition. Did Marion understand what he was saying? The boys weren’t negotiable. His marriage wasn’t negotiable. He was never leaving Isabelle.

There was an upsurge in Marion’s dread. “Your wife is named Isabel?”

The woman in the studio portrait actually looked a little like Isabelle Washburn. She was older and thicker but similarly blond and small-nosed. Marion stared at the picture, and Bradley stood up and came around his desk and crouched at her feet.

“There’s so much soul in your eyes,” he said. “Your soul is so alive, I see you and I feel like I’m dying. I’m—God! Do you have any idea how much soul there is in you? I look at you and I think I can’t live if I don’t have you, but I know I can’t have you … because … Or unless. Because. Unless. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

No amount of whiskey could have overcome her dread, but she drank what was left in her cup. The view from the street was obstructed by shiny floor models, but there were angles from which a person walking by could see Bradley at her feet in the showroom lights.

“Say something,” he whispered. “Say anything.”

“I think I should go home.”

“Okay.”

“And maybe find someplace else to work.”

“God, no. Marion. I’d die if I couldn’t see your face anymore. Please don’t do that. I swear I won’t pester you.”

It was strange to think that the man crouched at her feet had been having such thoughts about her. He was a fascinating person, but in the end, even if one discounted that he was married, he was just a car salesman. She’d weathered the upwelling of dread with her good sense intact. She made a move to stand up, but Bradley caught one of her hands and held her in place. “I wrote something about you,” he said. “Can I tell you what I wrote?”

Taking her silence as consent, he recited a poem.

A woman walks, her name is Marion

Her hair is dark but smells of bright

Sun piercing clouds with clarion splendor

Her eyes downcast but full of light

And darkness both, her mind a wide sky

Both serene and threatening: untouchable

“Who wrote that?” she said.

“I did.”

“You wrote that.”

“It’s the first thing I’ve written since I don’t know when.”

“You wrote that about me?”

“Yes.”

“Say it again.”

He recited it again, with a bashful sincerity that made him definitely handsome. She was having a delayed reaction to the whiskey, an opening of certain floodgates. The apparent tilting of the showroom floor seemed to prove that the cars had their parking brakes set. Despite having seen Bradley persuade a stranger, twice in three hours, that the stranger wanted something he shouldn’t have wanted, she wondered if he really might have talent as a writer. The subject of his poem was specific, not interchangeable. She herself had felt herself to be dark and light, sky-wide, and he’d made a rhyme with her name.

“One more time,” she said.

She thought a third hearing might tell her, for sure, if he had real talent. In fact, it told her nothing, because all she could hear was that he’d written a poem about her. She leaned back in the chair and let the whiskey shut her eyes. “Hoo-eee,” she admitted. The switch in her was in the Off position, which was another way of saying she didn’t care. Her father with a chain around his neck, dead on the bottom of the bay. Her sister uncatchable no matter how Marion might run. She didn’t care.

When Bradley drew her to her feet and kissed her, it was as if her body were picking up at exactly the oversexed point it had left off with Dick Stabler. It was horrifying how much a man wanting her was what it wanted. She felt she couldn’t press herself against Bradley hard enough, she needed harder pressing, and Bradley gave it to her. He backed her against the immovable weight of a gleaming Cadillac 75 and pressed her where Dick Stabler hadn’t dared to. There was a thing that her hips were capable of doing but hadn’t ever done. To let them do it, to fully relax them, even upright, even in a dress, with Bradley between her knees in his still-damp trousers, felt momentous. Roy Collins, on the eve of her departure from Santa Rosa, had predicted what would happen if she wasn’t careful in Los Angeles. Roy hadn’t used the word slut again, but he’d made it very clear that if Marion got in trouble she could expect no further help from him. And now here she was, opening her legs for a married man. Over Bradley’s head, when he happened to lower it to her neck, she saw the uneven steps the office wall clock was taking toward eleven o’clock, the hour at which she’d be locked out of her rooming house. She was feeling ill with hunger as the whiskey wore off.

As if putting a bookmark in a novel, she pushed him away and wordlessly moved to get a cigarette. He, too, said nothing while he turned off the bright lights, locked the front door, and led her to his ’37 LaSalle. By the time they reached her house, they had only ten minutes to talk before the night manageress threw the deadbolt.

She put out the third of the cigarettes she’d chain-smoked. “I don’t see how I’m going to go to work in the morning.”

“Same as you always do,” he said.

There was a problem that needed solving before it worsened, but she suspected that the problem had no solution—that she was no stronger than the man who came to Lerner and saw the only red car. Rather than waste her last minutes on pointless talk, she slid over and put her arms around Bradley. The car shook in the gusts of wind and she with it. Inside the house, as soon as she’d shut her door behind her, she touched herself the way she’d learned to in the frustrated aftermath of making out with Dick Stabler. But those had been more innocent days. Now she felt too lonely to concentrate on dispelling her sexual urge, too scared of her badness to surrender to it. She needed to cry instead; and this was the first time the slippage occurred.

It was one in the morning and she couldn’t account for two hours. Her sad little room, with its nicked and peeling furniture and its smoke-saturated fabrics, its lamp overbright but wrongly positioned for reading in bed, presented itself as a collection of random places that she thought she might have stared at, pushed her face into, banged her forehead against. Her bedspread lay in a heap in a corner. There was no fresh smoke, but her ashtray was upended on her bed, a dirty avalanche of old butts and ashes at the base of the pillow. Her impression was of a person who’d frantically defended herself against evil spirits beating on the window in the form of sideways rain. Now she was painfully hungry, but she appeared to be uninjured. No one in the world is more alone than I, she wrote in her diary.

The next morning brought a break between storms. She ate a big plate of eggs before she went to work, and the sky above the city, the startling blue gaps between the rushing clouds, was an encouraging reminder of more innocent San Francisco winters. She thought she might be all right if she changed her routine, ate her lunch with the other office girls, and made sure never to be alone again with Bradley Grant. But when she arrived at Lerner and tried to say good morning to her manager, she discovered that the slippage hadn’t left her uninjured.

Her condition was that she could barely speak. The impulse that should have led to speaking was diverted into swallowing and blushing, a clotted sensation in her chest, an involuntary recollection of opening her legs. All morning, on and off the floor, her mind was so scrambled with self-consciousness that when she opened her mouth her mind lagged behind and then dashed forward, propelled by the anxiety that what she was saying was unintelligible. Each time, she found that she’d spoken halfway appropriately, and each time this seemed like amazing luck.

At lunchtime, in the lounge with some other girls, she sat in a posture of friendly attentiveness and tried to listen to their conversation, but her eyes refused to look at whoever was speaking.

“… on sale at Woolworth’s, you wouldn’t think they’d…”

“… an inch too wide to fit, how on earth do you measure it three times and get…”

“… me to the premiere last Thursday, he knows the guy who…”

“… but then your hands smell like orange all day, even if you wash them…”

“… Marion?”

Without raising her eyes, she turned toward the girl, Anne, who’d said her name. Anne was the one who’d invited her to Christmas with her family. Anne was kind.

“I’m sorry.” Despite great effort to breathe, Marion’s voice was choked. “What did you say?”

“What happened last night?” Anne repeated with a kind smile.

“Oh.” Marion’s face burned. “Oh.”

“Mr. Peters said Bradley was still selling at nine o’clock.”

She thought her head might explode. “I’m so tired,” she found that she had said.

“I bet you are,” Anne said.

“What … do you mean?”

“I don’t know where that man gets his energy. He’s like a selling fiend.”

The lounge was a minefield of female eyes on her. She tried to say more but quickly realized it was hopeless. All she could do was stand up and go back to her desk. Behind her, in her imagination, there ensued an appalled discussion of her sluttiness.

Although she’d spent an inordinate amount of time alone in Los Angeles, she didn’t consider herself shy. The way her new condition felt to her was that every person who spoke to her was somehow Bradley Grant; every exchange of words, no matter how trivial, a rehearsal of the dire conversation she feared she would be having with him. A year later, in the hospital, one of the psychiatrists asked her if she wouldn’t rather be like other girls, not always so deathly serious—there was nothing wrong with small talk—gaiety was attractive in a girl—wouldn’t it be nice to escape from her thoughts in the flow of a light conversation? Marion wanted to file a criminal complaint about the psychiatrist. She happened to know that not all men required gaiety. She wondered how many other women on the ward had encountered the kind of man excited by morbid taciturnity: the literary kind of man, for whom craziness was romantic, or the sensualist kind, to whom still waters betokened sexually churning depths, or the chivalrous kind, who dreamed of saving someone broken.

Bradley was all of those kinds of man. At least two other unmarried girls at Lerner were prettier than Marion, and Anne was as much a book reader as she was, so something else must have attracted Bradley. He’d detected craziness in her before she’d sensed it herself. Without her knowing it, her new condition made her more interesting to him, not less. On January 31, another fateful date, she returned from a protracted afternoon bathroom break and found, on her desk, an envelope with her name typed on it. Bradley was outside on the lot with a customer while the lesser salesmen stood at the windows, watching their lives go down the drain. It seemed likely to her that she’d been pink-slipped, and she opened the envelope to make sure. Seeing a typewritten poem, she ought to have thrown it in her wastebasket or at least waited until evening to read it. Instead, she took it back to the bathroom and locked herself in a stall.

SONNET FOR MARION

I dream I’m at the wheel and I’ve forgotten how

To drive or never learned. I’m dreaming I’m

Nineteen again. The car is young and powerful,

It seems to drive itself, and by the time

I find the brakes I’ve gone into a spin,

A blur of storm-tossed palms and traffic lights.

And you are at the wheel, not I. Within

You a calm capability, as on that night—

Oh, that night, when I was spinning and you

Were speed and safety both. Did I only dream

That, too? In your sustaining arms I knew

What I had doubted: I’m younger than I seem.

To dream of happiness, wake up, and walk on air

Is to know the chance of happiness awake is there.

Sitting in the stall, she tried to read past the sheer fact of the poem and understand what he was saying. The word that made no sense to her was capability. She was hardly even capable of speaking! It didn’t occur to her that Bradley might simply have used a faulty noun. She wondered if he’d meant that she was capable of saving him: if somehow, in the showroom of a car dealership, she’d been discovered after all, by a man of sufficient talent to fulfill his dream of writing for Hollywood, a dream his marriage had smothered but Marion might be capable of reviving and might yet join her own dream with. Wasn’t that what the poem was saying? That some dreams were so vivid that they became reality?

She returned to the floor feeling elated, incipiently capable, and was disappointed when she could barely decipher her manager’s words to her. Now it was elation, not shame, that scrambled her mind, while the more general and important fact—that there was something diseased about a mind so easily scrambled—continued to elude her. When Bradley came back into the showroom with his customer, he was like a powerful magnetic field and she a charged needle. The field repelled her when she turned in his direction and attracted her when she turned away.

In the evening, as closing time approached, the field approached her desk. “I’m such an ass,” he said.

The manager, Mr. Peters, was standing within earshot. Bradley sat down sideways on a desk. “I promised you a T-bone steak last week,” he said. “You’ve probably been thinking, yeah, another salesman’s promise.”

“I don’t need a steak,” Marion managed to say.

“Sorry, doll, I’m a man of my word. Unless there’s somewhere else you need to be?” It was clever of him to approach her in the presence of Mr. Peters, who was older and sexually blind to her. It made the invitation seem innocent. “I thought we’d go to Dino’s, if that’s okay with you.” Bradley turned to Mr. Peters. “What do you think, George? Dino’s for a steak?”

“If you don’t mind the noise,” Mr. Peters said.

The rain outside was hurling itself down vertically, the car lot a shallow lake with currents rippling in the showroom lights and cresting at the storm drains. Marion sat in Bradley’s dark LaSalle with him, facing a fence in an unlighted corner of the lot, while the rain made a warlike sound on the roof. In her head, she rehearsed a short sentence, I’m actually not hungry. Even in her head, she stumbled over the words.

Bradley asked her if she’d read his poem. She nodded.

“It’s a tricky form, the sonnet,” he said, “if you’re strict about the rhyme and meter. In the old days, the word order was more flexible, you know, In me thou seest, where late the sweet birds sang, but who talks like that anymore? I wonder if anyone ever really said In me thou seest.”

“Your poem is good,” she said.

“You liked it?”

She nodded again.

“Will you let me buy you dinner?”

“I’m not actually … actually not I’m—not hungry.”

“Hmm.”

“Maybe just take me home?”

The rain came down harder and then abruptly let up, as if the car had gone under a bridge. When Bradley leaned toward Marion, she shied from the magnetism.

“This is wrong,” she said, finding the voice she used to have. “This isn’t fair.”

“You don’t like me.”

She didn’t know if she liked him. The question somehow wasn’t pertinent.

“I think you have talent as a writer,” she said.

“On the basis of two little poems?”

“You do. I could never write a sonnet.”

“Sure you could. You could make one up right now. Da-duh, da-duh, da-duh, da-duh, rhyme A. Da-duh, da-duh, da-duh, da-duh, rhyme B.”

“Don’t ruin it,” she said.

“What?”

“Don’t ruin what you wrote for me. It’s so beautiful.”

He tried again to kiss her, and this time she had to push him away.

“Marion,” he said.

“I don’t want to be that kind of girl.”

“Which kind is that?”

“You know which kind.” Her face cramped up with tears. “I don’t want to be a slut.”

“You could never in a million years be that kind of girl.”

She pressed on her face to stop the cramp. “You hardly know anything about me.”

“I can see into your soul. You’re the opposite of that kind of girl.”

“But you said your marriage is not negotiable.”

“I did say that.”

“Do you write poems for your wife?”

“Not since a very long time ago.”

“I don’t mind if you write poems for me. I like it. In fact, I love it. I wish—” She shook her head.

“Wish what?”

“I wish you’d write a play, or a movie, and I could star in it.”

Bradley seemed astonished. “That’s what you want?”

“It’s just a dream,” she hastened to say. “It isn’t real.”

He put his hands on the wheel and bowed his head. He could so easily have opened the door a crack and said he wasn’t sure about his marriage. He must have sensed that she wasn’t well. Perhaps he felt that lying to a nutty girl wasn’t sporting.

“What if I did,” he said. “What if I wrote a part for you. Maybe the daughter of the German ambassador—I almost think I could do it, as long as I could picture you in the role. That’s what I’m missing, something beautiful to picture instead of all the ugliness I bring home. I don’t get any support at all from Isabelle. She doesn’t even like it when I read a book. She’s jealous of a book! And boy does she get angry when I try to tell her about a new idea. It’s like she’s Dr. Freud and I’m the patient, just because I have ideas for a screenplay. ‘Oh dear, the patient is displaying symptoms again. We thought we’d cured him of ambition, and now he’s had a relapse.’ She’s so bitter about her own dreams, she can’t stand the fact that I still have my own.”

“Do you love her?” Marion said. Hearing herself ask this question made her feel older and wiser: capable.

“She’s good with the boys,” Bradley said. “She’s a good mother. Maybe a little too anxious—every little sniffle is a sure sign of whooping cough. But you wouldn’t believe how quickly the most interesting person in the world can turn into the most boring person you’ll ever meet.”

“She used to be interesting.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. She sure as hell isn’t now.”

Marion could simply have offered him friendship and inspiration. She wasn’t yet nutty enough to believe she could star in a movie he’d written. His stroke of genius salesmanship was to describe a person she felt like murdering. He didn’t know that his wife had the same name as Marion’s mother and her faithless school friend, but as soon as he gave her a more detailed Isabelle to hate, the door was open for nuttier thoughts to rush in. The thought that she, Marion, really was more capable than he. The thought that he was too kindhearted to face the obvious truth. The thought that only she could save him from unhappiness, only she could rescue him as a writer, by believing in him and helping him face the truth about his loveless marriage. What kind of vengeful witch got jealous of a book? Isabelle needed murdering for that, and the way for Marion to do it was to move over on the seat. She was short enough to kneel on it, slender enough to fit between him and the steering wheel, and once she was in his arms the dimension of moral significance disappeared.

Bradley Grant took her virginity on the seat of a 1937 LaSalle Series 50 with fogged-up windows, on the lot of Lerner Motors. The act hurt less than certain girls in Santa Rosa had led her to suppose it would, but later, in the bathroom at her rooming house, she discovered more blood than she expected. The white porcelain ran red as she rinsed her underlinens. Only in the morning did she realize that her monthly period had started.

There wasn’t much room for her condition to worsen, but in February it worsened. She felt trapped in a metal cube that was filling up with water, leaving only a tiny pocket of air at the top to breathe. The air was sanity. At every turn, she encountered constriction, most cruelly in how little time she had alone with Bradley. All day, she worked within a hundred paces of him, but he said they had to be very careful. At lunchtime she pressed him into a corner of her old sanctuary in the parts department, but the room had a window through which their corner was obliquely visible. Harry Lerner had forbidden further selling of cars after closing time, and Bradley kept finding reasons he had to go home in the evening. They finally resorted, again, to the seat of his LaSalle. Although it seemed a lot riskier on a moonlit night, without fog on the windows, she kept him there until 10:45. The following week, on his day off, he took her to a motel in Culver City, but even there she felt constricted, because it wasn’t enough to make love. They needed to discuss the future, because surely Bradley now understood that he couldn’t stay married to Isabelle, and their lovemaking left no time for talk. Not until they were back in his car did she ask him if he’d started writing again.

“Not yet,” he said.

It was a reasonable and honest answer, but it greatly upset her. The distance to her house was diminishing as he drove, their time for talking dwindling, the cube filling up with water.

“I don’t know if I can do it,” he said.

“Have you tried?”

“All I can think about is you.”

“That’s all I can think about, too. I mean—you.”

“I just don’t know if I can do it.”

“I know you can.”

“Not writing,” he said. “This. I don’t know if I’m cut out for loving two women at the same time.”

Less than a mouthful of air was left in the cube. All Marion was able to say with it was “Oh.”

“It’s tearing me in two,” he said. “I’ve never met anyone I’ve wanted like you. Everything about you is exactly right. It’s like I was born with your face imprinted on my brain.”

She didn’t have the same feeling about him. If she’d passed him on the street a year ago, she wouldn’t have looked twice. For a moment, as if from outside herself, she could glimpse the outlines of the thing inside her, the obsession that was growing in her, and recognize it as an object foreign to a normal person’s desires. But then, in a blink, she was inside it again.

“Let’s go back to the motel,” she said.

“We can’t.”

“It wasn’t enough. I need more time with you.”

“I want more, too, but we can’t. I’m already late.”

Late meant Isabelle. The prospect of relinquishing Bradley felt so life-threatening to Marion that if she murdered Isabelle it would be an act of self-defense. She began to hyperventilate.

“Marion,” he said. “I know it’s hard for you, but it’s even harder for me. It’s tearing me in two.”

He said more, but her breathing drowned it out. Black cars and white buildings, winos with paper bags and women in sheer stockings, loving two people and tearing me in two. Either she breathed so hard she passed out or another slippage was occurring. The hand that Bradley put on hers, in front of her rooming house, was burning cold. She still couldn’t hear what he was saying, she only knew she had to get away.

The second slippage was worse, the number of hours unaccounted for greater, and afterward she found scrapes on her knuckles, a red bump on her forehead. She was an hour late for work the next morning and wept disproportionately when Mr. Peters mildly chided her. At lunchtime, fearing suffocation if she stayed inside, fearing death if Bradley tried to speak to her, she fled the dealership and walked randomly on named and numbered streets. Snowfall from the storms extended down the spectral mountains, but the March sun was strong, spring already in the air. She was beginning to breathe more freely when she caught sight of a familiar face. Coming toward her, in the crosswalk at Grand Avenue and Ninth Street, was Isabelle Washburn. Marion lowered her head, but Isabelle stopped her by the arm.

“Hey, kid. Aren’t you even gonna say hi?”

Underneath a light coat with a sheen both lavender and green, Isabelle wore a green-on-white polka-dot dress, not cheap. She’d side-curled her hair and adopted a slack-jawed way of speaking that sounded copied from the movies. It transpired that she blamed her nincompoop cousin, rather than her utter lack of acting talent, for the failure of her plan for being discovered, but she was making okay money as a photography model and living with some other gals in a bungalow behind the Egyptian Theatre. It could have been Marion’s imagination, diseased by her own wantonness, but Isabelle’s repeated references to her landlord gave her the impression that he was more than just a landlord. Her artificial new way of speaking suggested a heart hardened by rough experience. “So anyways, that’s me,” she said. “Whatcha been up to yourself?”

“I’m well,” Marion said, which was so funny to her she almost laughed.

“Landed on your feet and all that?”

“Fine, fine. Yes. I have a steady job. Which I should probably get back to.”

Isabelle frowned. “Whadja do to your head?”

“I couldn’t tell you.”

Isabelle dug in her purse. “Lemme put some powder on that.”

Right there on the street corner, Marion let her erstwhile friend apply makeup to the bump on her forehead. The casual sisterliness of the ministration choked her up. Isabelle raised her chin with her finger and inspected her with a professional eye. “That’s a little better,” she said, closing her compact. “You know, we really ought to get together sometime. You used to crack me up so much. Remember Hal Chalmers and Pokie Turner? Dick Thtabler? You ought to just drop in if you’re ever out my way. I’m literally right behind the Egyptian, on Selma, it’s a bright-red house, you can’t miss it.”

Isabelle seemed to have forgotten that she’d dumped Marion nine months ago. Her life in the meantime had been so crowded with event that high school was already historical to her, and indeed it did now seem remarkable that Marion had ever imagined their remaining friends after graduation. But she no longer felt like murdering Isabelle. Instead, she felt sad about what life was doing to her. Nine months later, when life had done even worse to Marion and she had no one to turn to, she not only remembered Isabelle’s sloppy kindness at the corner of Ninth and Grand. She remembered that Isabelle lived in a bright-red bungalow behind the Egyptian Theatre.

She’d become—had made herself—a problem Bradley had to manage. A few days after her second slippage, a blond customer in her thirties had come to the showroom. Nearly all the customers at Lerner were men, and Marion hadn’t seen Bradley work his magic on a woman since she’d become obsessed with him. Suddenly the cartoonish plasticity of his features seemed grotesque. After the woman left, without buying, Marion’s hatred of his wife came to a screaming boil and blew a gasket in her head. When he went to the men’s room, she followed him into it and threw her arms around his neck, tried to climb him. Her question was when they could make love again. She desperately needed to make love with him again, and in his fear of being caught in the men’s room he agreed. They went back to Culver City that very evening. The pleasure sex gave her was increasing exponentially with each encounter. Bradley avowed that, until that night, he’d never understood what passion was. He avowed that he was absolutely mad for her. When he drove her home, he told her she had to quit working at Lerner and find a better place to live.

She went to work in the steno pool at a property-management company where a former Lerner salesman, a friend of Bradley’s, worked. The friend found her an efficiency apartment in Westlake, and Bradley paid three months’ rent in advance, peeling bills off the stack he kept folded in his front pocket. Technically, this made her a kind of prostitute, but to her the bills represented so many dollars that wouldn’t go to his wife and his boys, dollars rightfully hers, redeemable against a future in which she’d be his wife. Her surety was their rightness for each other. Through April and May and June, she experienced the rightness on the apartment’s Murphy bed, among the cigarette burns on the carpet, on the checkered oilcloth that covered the little dining table. After sex, the words she struggled to speak elsewhere came easily. Bradley brought her new books to read, and she now followed the war in Europe avidly, because it interested him. Most thrilling to her was his Spanish screenplay, for which she was acting out the character of the German ambassador’s daughter. As their joint idea for the story emerged in detail, she made shorthand notes on it in bed, a nude stenographer. Working on the story excited her extremely and excited Bradley, too. When he took the pad and pencil from her and set them aside, she lay back for him in a state of not-herselfness, imagining herself as the ambassador’s daughter, as if she were the actress playing her. At work, it wasn’t hard to find an idle hour for typing out the story notes, sometimes adding new ideas of her own. The unattached young men in the office might have known about her situation with Bradley—she seemed to be invisible to them. She was the taciturn girl who was proficient in Gregg and didn’t misspell words.

In July, Bradley took Isabelle and his boys on a car trip to Sequoia and Yosemite. Marion had begged him to use his vacation to get started on the screenplay, which she’d now completely outlined for him, but he said he owed the vacation to his boys, and off they went. As long as she hadn’t had to go more than four days without seeing him, as long as their rightness for each other was regularly confirmed, she’d avoided further episodes of slippage. But a weekend alone, after a week with no hope of seeing Bradley, was endless. The very sun seemed evil to her in the way it dawdled in her windows, took its insolent time in going down. She couldn’t read a book or go to the pictures. The passage of time needed vigilant monitoring. She sat perfectly still, trying not to even blink, until the fear of relaxing her vigilance became apocalyptic, as though the world might end if she so much as flexed a muscle in her foot. She was very, very low. For some reason, she was especially averse to bathing, the sensation of water on her skin.

Bradley was due back on the night of Saturday the 27th and had promised to come and see her on Sunday. She spent Saturday night on her back with her eyes open, because to close them was to picture him in bed with his Isabelle, to consider the countless hours that Isabelle had had to undermine his confidence as a writer, and to entertain the suspicion that Isabelle was right: to see him as he really was and see herself as she really was, a lonely girl trading her body for a fantasy. Time was the enemy when she was alone, because the fantasy required effort to sustain and her strength was finite. In the morning, unslept, unbathed, she boiled and ate two eggs and lay down again. The sun had an evil new trick of changing its position suddenly, jumping forward, as if to mock her for Bradley’s non-arrival. It was setting by the time she heard a tapping on her door, the turning of a key. How she must have looked when he saw her on the bed! Flat-haired, puffy-eyed, parched-lipped, mad. He kneeled on the floor and kissed her cheek. She didn’t feel a thing.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner,” he said. “We had a mouse problem. Mouse poop all over the kitchen. I finally found a nest of them in the space behind the phonebook drawer. Four little baby mice in chewed-up phonebook paper. I tried to ladle them out with a metal spoon, so I could let them go outside, but they started crawling away—it was horrible. I had to crush them with the spoon, which turns out to be pretty hard when you’re reaching inside a cabinet and you can’t see what you’re doing and your wife is screaming in your ear.”

How many times did you fuck her? someone said loudly. The atrocious word argued against its having been her, but who else could it have been?

“I wanted to be here earlier,” Bradley said, as if he hadn’t heard the question, “but everything was such a mess. The boys were fighting, they had too much time together in the car, and, Jesus, the mice. The parents are still in the cabinets somewhere. I can’t stay long.”

“Why stay at all?” she definitely said.

“I’m sorry. I know it was hard for you, but it was hard for me, too.”

“You don’t know what hard is.”

“Marion. Honey. I do know.” With a mouse-butchering hand, he brushed hair from her eyes and stroked her head. “I’ve done a bad thing—a bad thing to you. You’re so beautiful, so fragile, so serious. Oh God, you’re serious. And I’m just a goddamned car salesman.”

She began to cry, hysterically. It ate into the little time they had, but it was a release from the desiccated paralysis she’d suffered for two weeks. It restored her to sensation again, and by and by it had the added cruel benefit of making Bradley stay far longer than he’d intended to—of complicating the lies he’d have to tell when he got home—because he couldn’t resist her fragility. Her tear-wet face compelled a rough undressing of her, and she was serious, all right. As he had his way with her, she focused intensely on his face, alert to any subtle sign that his pleasure in her had diminished. Her own pleasure had become incidental. The only thing that mattered was Bradley.

Three nights later, he surprised her by showing up at her office and asking her out for a hamburger. As he drove to a Carpenter’s, her feral intelligence, which was warning her that no good could come of surprise changes to their routine, was at war with the hope that he’d finally found the courage to leave Isabelle. Her feral intelligence was correct. In his car, at the drive-in, after eating his burger in nervously wolfing bites, while hers sat untouched on her lap, he licked a bit of bloody ketchup from his finger and said he’d done some hard thinking on his vacation. He said—oh, what was it he was saying?—find my way to putting them through the pain of made my bed and now I’ve got to lie deserve a man who’s worthy of your one-hundred percent not fifty percent because fifty percent is not be alone with you again because you’ll never stop being the person not fair to you isn’t fair to I’m never going to be a realistically realistic it’s just not fair to I should have known worst thing terrible realistically so terrible get over it never get over it … While Bradley’s rubbery features stretched expressively, she could feel the varieties of redness surging in her own face, tomato, scarlet, crimson, garnet, beet, as if she were a chameleon. Imagining how comical she looked, she started laughing.

He stared at her, and the worry in his face was even funnier to her. She waved a limp hand, as helplessly laughing people did by way of apology, and tried to control herself. “I’m sorry,” she said. Another mirthful snort escaped her. “I was thinking about the baby mice.”

“Jesus. Why are you laughing at that?”

“Because—poor you. Having to mash them with a spoon.” She giggled and then laughed harder, caving forward with it. Perhaps she was aware that Bradley couldn’t very well abandon her while she was acting crazy, but she was legitimately in the grip of her hilarity. He would certainly think twice before he took her out in public again. This thought, too, was hilarious to her.

“Should I be worried about you?” he said when she’d finally regained control.

“You should worry about yourself,” she said. “I’m a lot bigger than a mouse.”

“What does that mean?”

“What does it sound like it means?”

He glanced at the Ford coupe parked to his left, the uniformed backside of a female carhop leaning in the passenger-side window.

“I need you to believe that I will never get over this,” he said, his expression very serious. Marion adjusted her own expression correspondingly, but her attempted severe frown felt so ridiculous that she giggled at it.

“Please, please, please,” he said.

“I’m trying to be serious, but maybe you had me wrong.”

“We have to stop,” he said.

“Oh. Why?”

“I told you. It was the very first thing I told you. I’m not going to destroy my family. I’m not going to leave the mother of my children.”

“You also said you’d die if you couldn’t be with me. Does that mean you’re going to die now?”

He covered his face with his hands. If she’d ever really liked him, she definitely didn’t now, but the matter of liking was more irrelevant than ever. She could clearly perceive the contours of her obsession with him. It would have been sensible to tear it from her skull, but the object had grown too large to be removed without splitting her head open. Despite its sick enormity, it was also too beautiful to her.

“I’ll probably die if I can’t be with you,” she said, in a factual tone.

“No, you won’t. You’re going to find somebody who’s better for you.”

“Do you see what I’m saying, though?”

“Honestly, I’m not following all of it.”

“You’re wrong,” she said, opening her door. “That’s all. I know you’re wrong.”

As she made her way home, past Westlake Park, she didn’t feel low. She felt nervously elated, like a general on the eve of a decisive battle. She and Bradley were in a crisis that she needed all her wits to navigate. To have walked away from the drive-in voluntarily, to not have made a screeching scene and begged him to reconsider, seemed in hindsight an inspired tactic. Now she just needed to be patient. Between his job and his family duties and his attentiveness to her, Bradley had been too overstretched to exercise his talent as a writer. The fantasy of him returning to her apartment, unannounced, in the middle of the night, after a month of separation, fired up by the screenplay he’d written and desperate to get her opinion of it, the fantasy of their reading the pages together and her finding them magnificent, was so compelling to her, so enjoyably repeatable and refinable, that she hardly slept that night. In the morning, she felt like skipping on her way to work. Instead of burying her head in a newspaper, she chatted with the other typists and smiled at the unmarried men.

For a number of weeks, she was sustainedly elated—uplifted by her certainty that her strategy of not pestering Bradley, of letting him wonder about her and feel remorseful, of leaving him alone to write, would bring him back. Imagining that he could somehow see her and be jealous, she let one of the young men from the office take her to dinner and a movie. Afterward, she couldn’t remember the man saying anything at all, which led her to wonder if she’d talked nonstop about Hitler and Ribbentrop and Churchill. Perhaps she had. The man didn’t ask her on another date, and this was fine with her, because he barely existed. The edges of existence more generally had begun to fray, her lack of sleep taking its toll. Finally, one evening in September, she decided to leave work early and go and see Bradley at Lerner Motors. The date, 9/9, was irresistibly auspicious.

Bradley was drinking coffee with Mr. Peters and blanched at the sight of her. Nervous but residually elated, she greeted the other girls as if they’d been great friends of hers. One of them had an engagement ring, another was expecting and about to quit, a lesser salesman had been fired. To reconcile her urgent need to speak with her utter lack of personal things to speak about, Marion expressed strong opinions, derived from the newspaper, about the situation in Europe and the necessity of American intervention. One by one, the girls excused themselves, until only Anne remained. Anne remarked, kindly, that Marion didn’t seem well, and Marion allowed that she’d been having trouble sleeping. Anne asked if she’d like to come home with her and have some soup.

“No, I’m here to see Bradley,” Marion said. “He still owes me a T-bone steak.”

Anne’s expression became grave.

“He’s a man of his word.”

“Why don’t you come home with me instead,” Anne said.

“Another time,” Marion said, walking away. Her head was pounding and her body felt made entirely of chalk. She might have preferred to be asleep if sleep had been a possibility. Bradley was standing by the still-unsold Cadillac 75 with a red-haired man, an obvious Jake Barnes, and listening with cartoonish raptness. He had a way of making every customer feel astonishingly interesting. Marion walked up to the Jake Barnes and said, “I’m very sorry, but I believe I was here before you.”

Bradley’s gaze looped all around her without alighting on her. “Marion,” he said.

The Jake looked at his watch. “It’s all right.”

“No, no.” Bradley placed a hand on her back and turned her away. “You need to wait,” he told her, as if speaking to a child.

“Is that not what I’ve been doing?”

“Just—wait. All right?”

She waited, prominently, smoking a cigarette, on one of the leather couches for customers. The inside of her mouth was chalky, too. Her lack of sleep had broken the formerly continuous world into sharp fragments. The worried looks of Anne and Mr. Peters, at their desks, glanced off her like arrows off a thing of chalk.

Without knowing how she got there, she found herself outside with Bradley, on the sidewalk around the corner from Lerner. The tops of the street-shadowing buildings blazed in the setting sun. The air was acrid with motor exhaust.

“Oh, honey,” he was saying. “You look so tired.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I didn’t mean it in a bad way. Just—have you been eating enough?”

“I eat eggs. I like eggs. I’m sorry.”

“You keep saying you’re sorry when it’s me who should be sorry.”

“I’m sorry.”

Bradley squeezed his eyes shut. “Oh, God.”

“What?” she said eagerly.

“It’s killing me to see you again.”

“Will you come home with me?”

“It’s better if I don’t.”

“You don’t have to stay long.”

He sighed. “There’s a PTA meeting I promised Isabelle I’d go to.”

“Is it an important meeting?” she said, genuinely curious.

The long wait was over. She stood patiently outside a phone booth while he lied to his wife. She was patient in his car with him, too. It was he who was impatient—as soon as they were inside her building, he pushed her against the wall by the mailboxes and kissed her savagely. She still felt chalky, but apparently to him her flesh was pliable, and that was enough.

Except that it wasn’t. The goal of her waiting had been achieved, but the waiting had stretched the connection between her obsession and its object past the breaking point. Their lovemaking, repeated several times before he left her apartment, delighted her only in what it signified. The actual person on top of her, the panting car salesman with coffee breath, was a stranger to the world she lived in now. Although she clearly signified something to him, too, she was beyond trying to imagine what it was.

Later, in Arizona, she couldn’t remember why she’d told him he didn’t need to be careful. Maybe, being confused about so many things, she’d been confused about her time of month. Maybe, knowing that Bradley didn’t love the alternative to being careful, and not daring to diminish his pleasure in their reunion, she’d simply hoped for the best. Or maybe, although she definitely didn’t remember wanting to be pregnant, her feral intelligence had disastrously miscalculated without her being aware of it. But there was also the fact that, despite her obvious unwellness in the head, Bradley had believed her when she said he didn’t have to be careful. Was it possible that he, too, without being aware of it, had wanted to make a baby? In Arizona, in the absence of any clear memory, she concluded that her pregnancy had been God’s plan for her, His way of testing her: that His will manifested itself in the actions of His children, regardless of their reasons. This settled the question.

When she told the story of her crack-up to Sophie Serafimides, it wasn’t hard to omit the pregnancy, because more than enough other things had happened to explain her landing in a locked ward. There was the late night, a week after the first reunion, when Bradley showed up at her door with a half-emptied whiskey bottle. There was the second night of that sort. There were the two weeks in which she didn’t see him, and then the dreadful letter he sent her. There was her second visit to Lerner Motors, which didn’t go well, and her third visit, when she tried to make Bradley smell her hand, with which she’d touched herself privately, and was hustled out the door by Mr. Peters. There was her ensuing catatonia at the property-management company, which resulted in her being fired. There was the stretch of days that she mostly couldn’t account for, interminable days in an apartment on which rent would soon be due. Finally, there was the warm November afternoon when she went to Bradley’s house, whose address she’d found in the phonebook, to have a word with his wife.

The neat, nearly identical houses on Keniston Avenue looked to her like toy houses or a movie set. She was very frightened when she rang Bradley’s doorbell, but she couldn’t think of any other way to show him he was wrong. Paradoxically, she needed to enlist his wife’s help. When Isabelle learned that Bradley was in love with someone else, namely Marion, whose face had been imprinted on his brain at birth, she’d understand the folly of her marriage. Imagining Bradley divorced was more pleasurable and less strenuous to Marion than wondering why she hadn’t had her monthly period. She hoped it was only because she was malnourished and emotionally stressed—she’d heard of such things—because her chances with Bradley depended on her being his liberation. A baby would make him feel trapped and disgusted, and she could never play the German ambassador’s daughter if she was fat with one.

To her great surprise, a blond boy of seven or eight opened the front door. In her thousand imaginings of the scene, no one but Isabelle had ever come to the door.

The boy stared at her. She stared at him. The moment seemed to last about an hour.

“Mom,” the boy shouted over his shoulder. “There’s a lady here.”

He went away, and Isabelle Grant appeared with a dish towel in her hands. She was thick in the middle, not as tall as Marion had pictured her. Like Isabelle Washburn, she seemed more pitiable than murderable. This, too, was unexpected. “Can I help you?” she said.

In Marion’s face the chameleoning reds, not the least bit funny to her now.

“Miss?” Isabelle said. “Are you all right?”

“Your, uh, your husband,” Marion said.

“Yes?”

“Your husband doesn’t love you anymore.”

Now alarm, suspicion, anger. “Who are you?”

“It’s very unfortunate. But you bore him.”

“Who are you?”

“I … well. Do you see what I’m saying?”

“No. You must have the wrong house.”

“You’re not Isabelle Grant?”

“Yes, but I don’t know you.”

“Bradley knows me. You can ask him. I’m the person he’s in love with.”

The door slammed shut. Feeling that she hadn’t made herself sufficiently clear, Marion rang the doorbell again. From inside she heard children’s pounding footsteps. The door sprang open. “Whoever you are,” Isabelle said, “please go away.”

“I’m sorry,” Marion said, with real remorse. “I shouldn’t have tried to hurt you. But what’s done is done. You just don’t satisfy him. Maybe, in the long run, it’ll be better for you, too.”

This time, the door didn’t slam, it just clicked shut. She heard the deadbolt turning. After some unaccounted-for minutes, she found herself still standing on the welcome mat. It was all so disappointing. For days, she’d imagined that speaking to Bradley’s wife would entirely remake the world; that her mental pain, which had been growing steadily since he sent his dreadful letter to her, would cease in an instant and she would be in a world where decisions were easy. But the pain was still there. It now took the form of not knowing what to do next. She would have liked to simply stay standing on the welcome mat, but she was sane enough to recognize the badness of going to Bradley’s house—all she’d accomplished was to cause Isabelle pain without relieving her own. She turned and walked back to the sidewalk. Coming to a small park, she saw a box hedge behind which she could discreetly lie down. She rested her cheek on a tussock of grass between bare clods of earth. Although there was dog poop close enough to be smelled, she lay there until darkness fell.

When she got back to her building, Bradley’s LaSalle was parked in front of it. He could have let himself into her apartment, but he was sitting at the wheel. He jerked his head to indicate that she should get in with him. She was frightened, but she did it. She cowered against the passenger door, trying to make herself smaller.

“What do you want?” he said angrily.

“I’m sorry.”

“No, seriously. What do you want? Tell me what the hell you think you want.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s too late for sorry. I’ve got an unholy mess on my hands now. I swear to God, Marion, if you go anywhere near my wife again, I’m calling the police.”

“I’m sorry.”

“The same goes for Lerner. We’ll call the police, and you know what they’ll do? They’ll put you in a hospital. You’re not right in the head. It kills me to say it, but you’re not.”

“I’m throwing up a lot,” she agreed. “It’s hard to keep food down.”

He sighed in frustration. “For the last time: We can’t see each other again. Never, ever. Do you understand?”

“Yes. No.”

“No contact of any kind. Do you understand?”

She knew that it was important to say yes, but she couldn’t say it honestly.

“What you need to do now,” he said, “is get yourself home. Can you do that for me? I want you to go back to San Francisco and let your family take care of you. You are the sweetest thing. It’s killing me to see what’s happened to you. But what you did today was just beyond the pale.”

Her chest clotted up with a new worry: that she’d finally liberated Bradley but was now too wrong in the head for him to want her. The irony surged up and strangled her like stomach acid. She retched out five words. “Will she divorce you now?”

“Honey—Marion. How many ways do I have to find to say it? We can’t be together.”

“You and I.”

“You and I.”

The hyperventilating set in, and he reached into his jacket. The stack of money he put between them on the seat was thick. “I want you to take this,” he said. “Buy yourself a first-class ticket north. And then, as soon as you get to San Francisco, I want you to see the best psychiatrist you can find. Somebody who can help you.”

She stared at the money.

“I am so sorry,” he said. “But there’s nothing else I can give you. Please take it.”

“I’m not a whore.”

“No, you’re an angel. A sweet angel who’s in very bad trouble. I mean it—if there were anything else I could give you, I would do it. But this is all I’ve got.”

She finally understood that she was nothing to him but his paid slut. The money on the seat seemed to her a dangerous, loathsome reptile. She found the door latch and half fell, backward, from his car. With a loathsome hand, he extended the money toward her. “Please, Marion. For God’s sake.”

When she came out of her slippage, some morning or another, probably the very next one, she felt inexplicably better. It was as if her hatred of the man trying to pay her had made a crack in her obsession with Bradley Grant. The obsession was still in her, but it was weakened now, more readily observable for what it was. Inside her front door, wrapped in an advertising flyer and slipped under the door, she found the stack of money. She methodically cut each bill into tiny pieces and flushed them all down the toilet. This was a terrible mistake she had to make to ease her mental pain.

In the first days of December, less distracted by pain, she was capable of reading the newspaper again, taking an interest in Mussolini’s attack on Greece, and venturing forth to seek work. Her employer references weren’t in order, but she still had her looks. She found a job as a greeter at a big Safeway supermarket, offering customers bite-size samples of featured food products, and was surprised by how little she minded it. She liked having only one thing to say and saying it over and over. Repetition calmed her fear of the thing she was now able to admit was inside her. But the smell of certain foods, meat products especially, was revoltingly intense to her, and her fear was growing with the thing inside her. One day, when she was sticking toothpicks in miniature canned franks, her fear impelled her to walk out of the store, run home, and obey the commands of her feral intelligence. She hit herself in the stomach and jumped up and down violently. She swallowed a mouthful of ammonia and couldn’t keep it down. When she tried again and blew the ammonia out her nose, the explosion in her head was so extreme she thought she was dying.

In her narrative to Sophie, a straight line led from Bradley’s offer of money to the night she wandered the streets of downtown Los Angeles in the rain, raving on themes of sluttiness and murder, barefoot, her blouse soaking and unbuttoned, until she was picked up by the police. But the line hadn’t been straight. It had led through an eviction notice; a tearful scene with her property manager; telegrams to her mother and to Roy Collins, asking both of them for emergency money; and a phone call to Bradley at Lerner Motors. The property manager gave her until the end of December to pay her overdue rent. Her mother, it later turned out, was on a ski vacation with her friends. Roy Collins wired her twenty dollars of travel money, along with a terse offer to employ her. Bradley hung up the phone as soon as he heard her voice.

Definitely pregnant and definitely not interested in carrying his baby, she took a streetcar out to Hollywood. The streets were dry and dusk was falling, the holiday tinsel and ribbons in store windows emerging from the cheapening glare of daylight to glow and beckon. She was able to entertain rational thoughts and ordinary feelings—resentment of her mother, the thought of the darkness that had fallen on Europe, hatred of Bradley and his wife, appreciation of the fender lines of a custom-body Cadillac passing the streetcar, curiosity about her sister in New York, the question of Shirley’s own sexual experience or lack thereof—for no more than a few seconds before the terror of her situation welled up in her afresh and scattered them. When she saw the Egyptian Theatre, she stepped off the streetcar and asked a newspaper seller where Selma Avenue was. Her main hope now was Isabelle Washburn. Even if Isabelle couldn’t give her money, she could provide sisterly advice and sympathy, which Marion was very much in need of. In the dark, it was hard to tell the colors of houses, but eventually she found a distinctly red one. Dim, warm light was in the curtained front windows. She walked right up to the door and knocked. Almost immediately, the door opened; and there stood Satan.

She didn’t know it was Satan. The man was short, almost elfin, with a full white beard and suntanned cheeks, a large shiny tanned bald spot on his head, and kindly wrinkles around his eyes. “Come in, come in,” he said, as if he’d been expecting her. Marion said she was looking for Isabelle Washburn. “Isabelle no longer lives here,” the man said, “but come in. Please.”