The Crossroads

by John D. MacDonald

  She had been one of those girls who leave very little mark or memory with their contemporaries. She was considered pretty and mannerly and sweet. The rules about dates and hours were so strict that the few boys who became interested in her soon gave up, swerving toward more accessible pastures. At her high-school graduation the students were permitted to arrange whom they would walk with. The leftovers were assigned partners by lot. Clara was toward the end of the line, marching to “Pomp and Circumstance” with a boy so squat, pimpled and myopic as to be the class grotesque.

  For three years following her graduation she had worked for her great-uncle, typing his sermons, keeping up his scrapbook, reminding him of his social, religious and medical appointments. And she had kept to her familiar routine of acting as an assistant hostess to her great-aunt.

  Taking the job at the Motor Hotel Restaurant was the bravest thing she had ever done. It was her gesture of revolt, a symbol of her desire to be a person in her own right. It had caused a clean break with her aunt and uncle. She was told sonorously that she was going to hell. She moved to a cheap furnished room and went back and forth to work by bus. It was while she was still learning the taste of freedom, and still somewhat terrified by her own revolt, that Chip Drovek had become interested in her.

  And she did not have the strength to continue to reaffirm her independence. Oddly, the church social and church supper training made her a good dining-room hostess. He married her. They honeymooned at Myrtle Beach. He was anxious to investigate the policies and operations of tourist facilities in that area. She was a shy bride. She seemed to have a deep and unshakable conviction that the pleasures of the flesh were evil. After the infrequent occasions when he was able to arouse her, she felt a guilt and shame that kept her from looking into his eyes. She far preferred to be merely a convenience for him, something to be used, and unchanged in the using—resenting and resisting any preparatory love play.

  When she became pregnant with Nancy, two months after their marriage, he told himself that after the birth of the child she would become a more adequate partner, and that he would get to know her. There was a polite remoteness about her he could not penetrate. After Nancy was born she seemed content, but to Drovek she seemed to be playing at being a wife and mother. The basic significance of her role seemed to escape her. As though she played in a sandbox, filling the little tin cups, making little cakes.

  After a time he began to feel that she was a very simple, uncomplicated person. Her habit patterns were almost ritualistic. She was obsessive about housework, cleaning and washing and scrubbing herself into exhaustion, but she was an indifferent cook. He could no longer achieve any sexual response from her. He regretted marrying her. There was a tastelessness about her. No one had any strong opinions about her, one way or the other.

  Now he could realize, with a certain irony, that part of the quick growth of the Crossroads Corporation was due to her inadequacies. He needed an outlet for the energies she could not temper.

  Gradually he became aware of another person hidden behind the surface simplicity, an intricate, confused, ritualistic, captive stranger—a person he could not reach. One afternoon in February, when Nancy was nine, he had come home and found Clara passed out on the kitchen floor. It was the first time he had known her to take a drink. She had finished off more than half of a fifth of bourbon. When she was sober again, her remorse was almost frightening. He was afraid she might kill herself.

  Two months later she did it again. The remorse was not as intense. By that summer she was drinking steadily all day long, becoming helpless and incomprehensible by nightfall. She gave up what little entertaining she had done. She did not take care of her face, hair, clothing, figure, or the house. Nancy stopped bringing her school friends to the house. Drovek had Clara institutionalized. He had long talks with the head of the small and expensive private retreat, about the problems of the female alcoholic in today’s society. Everyone in the Crossroads Corporation was aware of his problem. When he brought her back home, there was no liquor in the house. She seemed submissive, quiet, uncaring. Meals were brought in from the restaurant. A woman took care of the housework. A week later Clara disappeared. Drovek reported her missing. They found her ten days later in Knoxville; Tennessee, filthy, malnourished and unable to remember where she had been or what she had done. She was institutionalized again. And again. Drovek tried psychiatric help, A.A., various drugs. Finally an adjustment, a compromise, was reached. He stocked liquor for her, bourbon. She drank it with plain water, no ice. As long as it was available, she had no desire to leave the house. Food was brought in. Sometimes she ate it. It was a tragic parody of marriage. Bad for him, horrible for Nancy. Clara made no scenes. The liquor bloated her. She had a gray, indoor pallor. Sometimes she would talk to him for a long time, quietly, but it was impossible to follow her.

  She was, Drovek had been told by the doctors, hopeless. This was as adequate an adjustment for her as any. She was drinking herself to death. Liver and kidney damage, fatty degeneration of the heart. He felt guilt about Nancy. He knew he should have sent her away to school when she was thirteen or fourteen or even younger. But he had not been able to part with her. Now it had been arranged for her to go away this coming autumn.

  At infrequent times during the past few years, Drovek, driven by devils, had gone on business trips to investigate other operations similar to the Crossroads Corporation. In distant cities he had rented the temporary services of amiable, skillful, professional young women, indulged himself in meaningless lust and returned with some of the inner pressures eased, feeling obscurely soiled, but less prone to irritation, to hasty unwise decisions. He knew he could readily find the same surcease among the less professional female employees of the corporation, some sturdy willing waitress or counter girl who could be depended upon not to make an unpleasant issue of the relationship, but such an arrangement would soon become known, and would diminish his authority. Anyway he did not want a relationship of any duration, or any meaning. He preferred to wait until he needed a concentrated, explosive release and could buy it with money from a stranger in a far place, with no compulsion to remember her name or her face.

  This was the pattern of his emotional life up until the fourteenth of the past February when he had met Jeana Louise Portoni. From conversations with Joan he had been informed that the previous tenant had failed, largely because of poor taste in buying merchandise and a hostile attitude toward the customer, and that a Miss Portoni had purchased the lease and the stock. He noticed the new name on the shop—Jeana Louise—and thought it pleasant. He also noticed that she changed the display window frequently and that it was always handsome, not junky and cluttered as when the previous tenants had been in there.

  On Valentine’s Day, noticing the shop was open, he had gone in to get some little thing for Nancy. He had given up the pointless routine of buying things for Clara. She seemed not to need or notice gifts.

  The girl was tall and rather slender, and she had a quick light way of moving that pleased him. Her face was delicately structured, her hair legitimately fair, her brows and lashes slightly darker than her hair, her mouth somewhat heavy without being sullen. She smiled readily and she had a habit of looking at you with an almost disconcerting directness with her blue-gray eyes.

  He bought some gold earrings with little bells on them for Nancy, and, as she was gift wrapping them, he said, “Have you decided you bought into a good thing?”

  She frowned at him. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I’m Chip Drovek.”

  She blushed. “Oh, of course. I should have known that. I just never saw you up close. Yes, Mr. Drovek, it’s working out better than I hoped even. I had to clear out some horrible junk at first.”

  “It looks nice in here.”

  “Thank you. Mr. Clear has been very nice. He let me have those little cards made up to put on the tables over in the restaurant. I’m still working on Mr. Merris to get the same cards put in the rooms.”

>   “He says no?”

  “It seems to be against his policy.”

  “I say yes.”

  “Just like that?” she asked, her eyes wide.

  “Just like that.”

  She laughed. “Golly, don’t say it in such a way Mr. Merris will get mad at me.”

  “Got a piece of paper? I’ll let you say it. What’s your last name?”

  “Portoni.”

  “Mrs.?”

  “Miss. Don’t look so skeptical, Mr. Drovek. My people came from northern Italy. We’re as blond as Swedes.”

  He wrote, “Dear Wally, Let’s try Miss Portoni’s literature in the rooms. She’ll bring you this note and assure you she didn’t go over your head. I saw the cards at the restaurant and asked her if she’d talked to you about putting them in the rooms. I’ll talk to you about policy on this sort of thing one of these days. Chip.”

  “Take your cards with you. Got enough?”

  “I had billions printed. I guess I got carried away. Fell in love with the way my name looks in print. Here’s one.”

  “Very handsome. Who designed it? Maybe we can give them some business on other stuff.”

  She blushed again. “I did. My checkered career. I was an art major in college. Design. Oh, and I’ve taught school. Kindergarten. And I’ve been a disgruntled housewife. Now I’m a divorcee.”

  “Miss?”

  “I demanded and got my own name back. But I always wanted to run a gift shop. I love beautiful things. I like people, and I like to sell. But I do get carried away a little. That darn glass bowl over there. Isn’t it wonderful? I had to pay forty dollars for it. I’ll probably never sell it. People look at the price and wince, visibly. But I like having it around.”

  “How did you happen to find this place?”

  “My biggest brother lives in Walterburg. I lived in Philadelphia while I was married. There were certainly no pleasant associations up there. I asked for a settlement instead of alimony. I didn’t want anything to do with him in any kind of permanent way, like getting checks. So I came down to Walterburg and looked around. While I was applying for a teaching job I kept hearing this little voice saying gift shop, gift shop, gift shop. So I found this one. And a little apartment in those so-called garden apartments up there beyond your shopping center. You know it was almost a relief to find the Droveks didn’t own my apartment too.”

  “It’s beyond our empire.”

  “So here I am, and I love it dearly, and I’m beginning to get some trade from Walterburg. One day I’ll be after the corporation for more room, and I’ll probably be right here until I’m a little old lady.”

  “We like happy tenants.”

  “You’ve got one.”

  A customer came in. He said goodbye and left. It had all been brisk and casual and friendly. No reason for any special awareness. But she kept coming back into his mind at odd moments, and he was surprised at how distinctly he could remember her face, her smile, her eyes.

  One day when Joan was out of the office, he took that chance to look at Jeana’s folder. It contained a copy of the credit report. He learned that she was twenty-eight, had been born in Buffalo, New York, had attended Syracuse University, had been married for four years to one Arthur Brinker, an associate professor of economics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. No children. Her present address was Apartment 22, Sylvester Garden Apartments. He told himself it was just idle curiosity.

  He also learned, by observation, that she walked to and from work. One evening in late February, when there was a bitter wind, and driving sleet, he arranged to stop his car outside her shop just as she closed the door and tested the snap lock. He swung the door open for her. She hesitated, then recognized him, and scampered to the car.

  “What a horrible day!” she said. “You’re saving my life, Mr. Drovek.”

  “A pleasure, Miss Portoni.”

  They talked about weather. He drove her to the garden apartments. She pointed out hers. With her hand on the inside door handle she said, “Well, thank you again.” She seemed hesitant.

  “Are … are those apartments comfortable?”

  “Mine is absolutely tiny. It’s called a garden studio apartment.”

  “I’ve never seen one of those.”

  She hesitated and then smiled at him. “I make divine powdered coffee. And if I’m alone I can’t put brandy in it. There’s something so terribly disreputable about drinking al …” She stopped abruptly.

  “Don’t look so upset,” he said harshly. “I’m not sensitive about it. I can’t expect anybody in the area not to know it. And it has gone on a long time.”

  “I can put either foot in my mouth so easily. Come see how the bachelor girl lives.”

  He went in with her. It was very small, immaculate, nicely decorated, fragrant with her living. She chattered continually, amusingly, but with an edge of strain in her voice. They sat at the little dining table in the end of the living room, outside the door of the kitchenette, with coffee and brandy. When her chatter died away there was an uncomfortable silence.

  “Look,” he said heavily. “We’re not easy with each other. Because you think you said something wrong. I can fix that by telling you how it is.”

  “I don’t want you to …”

  “Sometimes you want to talk about a thing like that.”

  “All right, Chip,” she said, looking down.

  He rested his heavy arms on the table and told her. He tried not to color it, not to appeal for sympathy. He made it as factual as a case history. When he finished there was a silence again, but this time it was more comfortable. She looked up at him, frowning, and said, “But what can you do?”

  “Nothing. Live with it. I’d better go. Thanks for the coffee, Jeana. Thanks for listening. Thanks for … being the sort of person you are, so I could talk to you.”

  “I’m not much of anything.” she said.

  She went to the door with him. Night had come. The highway was a river of lights, moving with a rare slowness. He put his topcoat on and turned toward her. They looked into each other’s eyes for perhaps ten long seconds. He saw her mouth soften, saw the slow deep breath that lifted her rather small breasts under the cinnamon cardigan. When he reached for her she came meekly and obediently, blushing, into his arms, but with nothing meek or shy about the textures of her mouth.

  He took her to bed that night, in her three-quarter bed in the tiny garden studio apartment, with the wind whining outside and intermittent gusts of sleet rattling against the windows. They went to bed as hungry strangers, victims of a mutual attraction stronger—as they confessed to each other at another time—than anything they had ever felt before. They could not subdue their need. Quenched for a time it would rise again. When he left her they were no longer strangers. It was the last time he ever left his car in front of Number 22. From then on they were careful, devious—cautious, greedy schemers.

  When they could talk easily with each other, to the companionable glow of the shared cigarette, he learned that she had never been promiscuous. It eased those jealousies he had felt because of the very ease with which he had acquired her. She could not understand what had happened to her. Nor could he. Together they tapped latent stores of sexuality of which they had both been previously unaware. They took each other to far, strange, sometimes frightening places. And, as what had begun as naked need changed slowly into love, they found an ever deeper, more gratifying use of each other. They shared a little guilt at their overwhelming sensuousness, but guilt was forgotten in the whine of need, the chortle of pleasure, the great cry of completion. They talked in the gentle darkness of how there had never been truly another woman for him, or a man for her. They talked of this new magic. They wondered what would happen to them.

  And they were both aware of the trap. He could not accept—nor did she want him to—the moral and emotional responsibility for destroying the pattern of Clara’s vague existence, and thus destroying what was left of her. Nor could th
ey parade their relationship and consider themselves decent. It had to be secretive. For a time Jeana had been as sure of love as he was. But now in June she had come full circle, had begun to wonder, aloud, if it was only the rationalization of the strength of the physical attraction. Though the savageness of their need seemed to grow ever stronger, he had begun to wonder if he would lose her through her own self-doubt. Their helplessness seemed to increase her doubt and her sense of guilt. I want you is a shallow substitute for I love you.

  He knew there could never be enough of her, of her supple, nimble pleasures. During all the hours he could not be with her she stood smiling in one corner of his mind, stepping out from time to time with a bawdy demureness to stop him in the middle of a sentence, or blur the page in front of his eyes. Their excesses led to renewal rather than exhaustion. He felt more intensely awake and alive than ever before in his life, his mind more quick and sharp, his energies keyed higher. And, as though her body sought to please him, there had been an actual physical change in her slenderness obvious to both of them, a deeper, warmer curving of her hips, a swelling heaviness of breast, even a more resilient texture and pliancy to her skin. Her eyes were shining and she walked, swaying, on tiptoe for him. For a time she thought that the physical changes, in spite of her precautions, might be due to pregnancy, and she was terrified. When she found her fears were groundless she was pleased that she could change in this way for him, that the body had this magical ability. She sat at her dressing table and smugly admired her new abundancy, telling him that this was by far the most pleasant solution to her ancient dilemma of whether or not to experiment with falsies, having spent, as she said, all her college years looking like a smuggler of small green pears, two at a time.