The Three Roads Read online

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I don’t drink.”

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

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

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

  “My first name’s Bret.”

  “Mine’s Paula.”

  “I know.”

  “Really? I thought movie writers were practically anonymous.” Damn it, she said immediately to herself, I had to get that in, didn’t I? I never can resist a chance to brag.

  “I didn’t know you were a writer. I asked Bill what your name was an hour ago—as soon as I saw you.”

  “Why?” From any other woman it would have been a request for flattery, but from her it wasn’t. She simply wanted to know.

  He took her at her word. “You look honest. I won’t deny you’ve got the trimmings.…”

  “Did you say your name was Diogenes? Lieutenant (j.g.) Diogenes?” She was flattered after all, but a little irritated too.

  “You asked me,” he said uncomfortably. “I thought I’d like to talk to an honest woman for a change. I haven’t really talked to a woman for over a year.”

  He was sitting in an awkward and embarrassed attitude with his hands on his knees. His hands were brown and thin, ridged by taut tendons and veins that branched into small blue tributaries, like a contour map of a country she didn’t know.

  “Does it feel so strange?”

  “The whole country seems strange. It strikes you when you come back to civilian society after some sea duty. People seem to be thinking exclusively about themselves.”

  She thought about the number of bonds she had bought and the number of pints of blood she had given, and wished her record had been better. “Is it different at sea?” she said defensively.

  “Maybe not so very different. We have our in-groups and our out-groups. There’s a good bit of anti-Semitism, especially among the officers, and of course the Negroes on board get a separate deal. But there’s something else besides, an over-all feeling for the ship that comes before everything else. Am I boring the living daylights out of you?”

  “No. But I’ll bet you’re a sociologist in real life.”

  “Not me. I studied history and law.”

  “You’ve been to Washington then.”

  “I was an underling in the State Department for a while. Does it stick out like a sore thumb?”

  “Everybody that goes
to Washington comes back so serious-minded.”

  He answered a little peevishly: “You overestimate me. I always have been serious-minded. I suppose I’ve gotten worse since we came into the war.”

  “Were you out long, this last time?”

  “Long enough. Just over a year. Nothing to gripe about really. But it makes you feel kind of wooden.”

  She had noticed that there was something wooden about his face. It was a lean brown mask, as if the pressures of war had forced it into a rigid mold and the Pacific sun had dried and baked it. Each bone and muscle was distinctly anatomized under the tight skin, but the sense of life was to be found only in his eyes.

  They were hard and deep, dyed dark blue by the uniform he was wearing.

  His eyes were watching the couples still caught and gyrating in the currents of the music. “It’s coming back to the States that really gets you down. When you’ve been out for a while you’d willingly barter your soul for a couple of weeks Stateside. You catch yourself secretly wishing that the engines will break down and you’ll have to come back for repairs. As a matter of fact that’s what happened.”

  “You have two weeks?”

  “Three weeks. Nineteen days left. But now that I’m here I don’t like it.”

  That had the earmarks of a direct insult, and she could not keep the sharpness out of her voice. “What don’t you like?”

  “Civilians, I guess. It wasn’t so long ago that I was one myself. But now they seem so damn frivolous. There’s method in their frivolity of course. They don’t forget to look out for number one.”

  “I take it I strike you as frivolous?”

  “Sure you’re frivolous. You said you wrote screenplays, didn’t you?”

  “I try to write as good ones as I can.”

  “Did you ever write one that wasn’t about a couple of nitwits fighting for a permanent possession of a pair of false breasts? Did you ever see one that wasn’t?”

  “You haven’t seen many movies, have you?” She was trying hard to be superior, but she couldn’t suppress the anger in her voice. “You probably never heard of Grand Illusion, for example?”

  “Never did,” he admitted cheerfully. “But I’ve seen enough movies—too many. We have one every night on the ship. Even in the Pacific you can’t get away from Hollywood. It covers the globe like a thin coat of paint.”

  Her reason was beginning to recover and to reflect on the novelty of her position. Like nearly everyone below the rank of producer, she had become hypercritical of Hollywood. Griping on the job was the occupational disease in the writers’ building (in the producers’ building it was stomach ulcers). But it was a little late to tell him that he had taken the words out of her mouth.

  “I suppose you’ve got to have your daily crack at Hollywood,” she said more coolly. “All intellectuals do, don’t they, like the Boy Scouts and their daily deed?”

  “You don’t have to be an intellectual to get fed up with general lousiness.”

  “Of which lousiness I seem to be an integral part?”

  “Why reduce everything to the personal?”

  “But it’s all I can see,” she chirped ironically. “General ideas are terribly bewildering to a frivolous addlepate like me.”

  “That griped you, didn’t it?” He stood up unexpectedly and reached for her hand. “Let’s get out of here. It takes about an hour for boogie-woogie to explore its limitations.”

  “You’re as opinionative as hell,” she said. But she rose obediently and followed him out of the room.

  The concrete steps that led down from the studio to the shore were steep, and there were a hundred and fifty of them. Paula was silent as they descended, concentrating on her three-inch heels. When they were part way down she stumbled and took hold of his arm. She stumbled again before they reached the bottom, and his muscles tightened in her hand and became as hard as wood. It gave her a queer feeling, and a rather frightening one, which her fancy translated into an image of the body beneath the blue uniform, a body carved by exertion, pared lean by the wind, polished by the sun, with blankness like a fig leaf guarding her mind from the bronze loins.

  She was glad when the sea spread out before them, and she let her mind spread with it under the pure stars. They walked along the dark path toward her hotel. The tide was high and bringing in a heavy surf that roared lonesomely in the deep coves and struck upon the rocks with white polar paws of foam. It was wild and terrifying to her, like the mating of horses. She shivered a little, though her coat was warm, as if the sea might be able to reach her where she stood.

  She couldn’t bear to be passively frightened. Deep in her heart she was an animist who believed that the sea was conscious of her and threatening her personally. She stepped over the low wall beside the path, ventured out on a slippery rock just above the reach of the spray, and stood there laughing at the ineffectual waves.

  He came up behind her shouting: “You must be crazy! In those heels!”

  She turned and laughed at him too. A gust of spray came up and drenched her legs, but she went on laughing.

  He put both arms around her and dragged her away from the edge.

  “Don’t count too much on those invisible wires. You’re not drunk, are you?”

  “I’m just feeling good. I showed him I wasn’t afraid.”

  “Him?”

  “ ‘He,’ then, if you must be technical. I showed he!” She laughed in his face.

  His embrace was rough and awkward, as if he was performing an unwilling duty, but after years in Hollywood she didn’t care for men who were smoothly expert in such matters. She held her face turned up to his to let him kiss her if he wished. When he disregarded the opportunity she felt like a hussy, and her exultation changed to anger.

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

  “I suppose I’d better.”

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

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

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

  “I bet it’s cold.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Is it hard?”

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

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

  “Eighteen days now.”

  “Are you going to stay here?”

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

  “No folks to go home to?”

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

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