The Crossroads

by John D. MacDonald

  The shop bell jingled and he had no way of knowing whether the customer had left or another had arrived, until he heard the quick tick of her heels coming toward the storeroom. He got up and stubbed out his cigarette in the ash tray on the shelf under her mirror, and turned toward her, smiling.

  “Don’t you dare come near me,” she said.

  “Sell anything?”

  “A wildly expensive little music box. And I felt sad while I wrapped it. It plays that Sugarplum Fairies thing.”

  “Tomorrow, then.”

  “Oh, yes, darling. Yes. Yes.”

  “It is love, you know.”

  “Keep telling me. Please.”

  “I’ll tell you tomorrow. Forty times.”

  “Make it fifty.”

  “You’re beautiful.”

  “You can keep saying that, too. A lovely lie, darling.”

  He got back to his house a little after eleven. He called Nancy but there was no answer. Clara was sitting in the living room. The blinds were half-closed against the sunlight. She sat on the couch wearing a dressing gown, her graying hair stringy, a glass at her elbow, staring at the television set. It was turned very loud. She liked it loud. He went and stood over her and said, “Where’s Nancy?” You had to speak loudly and distinctly and then wait in patience for her to comprehend the question.

  She looked up at him slowly. She was never too bad in the mornings. “Nancy? Uh … Nancy went out.”

  “Where?”

  … “I don’t know.”

  He checked the kitchen. There was no sign of Nancy having fixed her own breakfast. So he rode over to the Motor Hotel Restaurant. She was alone at a corner table in the almost empty room, reading a book as she ate. She was wearing her most recent favorite costume, leotards or leotights or whatever they called them, and an exceptionally baggy sweater. A lock of her black hair fell across her forehead. The young beauty of her pinched his heart. Though she was not as big as her grandmother had been, she looked very much like the girlhood photographs of Martha McCarthy. Chip guessed that was why Papa liked to have her come and see him.

  She looked up as he approached the table and smiled and closed her book. He sat down and said, “What kind of a breakfast is that?”

  “It’s brunch, sort of. Orange juice and a steak sandwich and a coffee shake.”

  The waitress hurried over and said, “Can I get you something, Mr. Drovek?”

  “Coffee, please, Sally. What time did you roll out of the sack, Nance?”

  “Elevenish. And now you ask me what time I got in. Five minutes of two. And now you give me a blast and shoot me into orbit.”

  “Pretty late, punkin.”

  “Well, the second movie wasn’t over until quarter after twelve. And then we ate down at the Haven, and then we took Jupe all the way in to Walterburg. Honest, I didn’t know it was getting so late.”

  “How does this most recent hero drive?”

  “Oh, he’s a real good driver! He’s very careful.”

  He studied her for a few moments. “Is that going to be the summer, punkin? Sack in ‘till noon and tear around all night?”

  She sucked at the coffee shake, frowning into the distance, and then said, “That’s what I want to talk to you about, Dad. I know I’m supposed to be sixteen, but couldn’t you fix it so I could have a … regular kind of a job?”

  “Do you really want to work?”

  “Yes.”

  “This isn’t a whim? You won’t work a week and decide it’s a bad idea?”

  “I won’t goof, Dad. I’m not Uncle Pete.”

  “What makes you think Uncle Pete goofs?’

  “Oh, Dad! For heaven’s sake!”

  “All right, if you mean it, I can fix it. How about working for your Aunt Joan over in …”

  “No, thanks. I want to be a counter girl at the Haven.”

  “That’s hard work, honey. And it can get rough down there. You know that. It takes an older girl who …”

  “Dad, I know it’s hard work. Gosh, I’ve been in there often enough. But … well, they seem to have fun too. It’s what I want to do.”

  He grinned at her. “And they have cute uniforms?”

  “Will you let me?”

  “There’s one condition. I’ll make sure you don’t get any special treatment.”

  “I wouldn’t want that.”

  “And the condition is that you stick it the whole summer. Right up to August. That will give you a little break to rest up and get ready to go away to school. You won’t come moaning about being on your feet all day. You’ll stick it out.”

  “Shake, boss!”

  He shook her firm young hand. “You asked for it, punkin. You’ll go on the eight to four shift. You’ll be setting your alarm for seven. That’ll put a crimp in your night life. You’re sure, now?”

  “I’ve thought it over. I’m sure as sure, Dad.”

  “You’ll start Monday. I’ll fix it up. Don’t you let me down, punkin. Report at eight. They’ll know you’re coming. Now how about going with Joan tomorrow to see your grandfather? You haven’t been to see him in a long time.”

  “There’s a picnic tomorrow. We’re all going swimming, a whole mess of us. Four cars.”

  “He asked me about you this morning.”

  “I know I should … Say, I could go up there right now. How about grounding yourself and letting me have the red bug?”

  “You be careful.”

  “I’ll be real careful.”

  “No joy rides. Ride up there and ride back and leave it in front of the office.”

  A few minutes later he stood out in front of the restaurant, watching her. He saw her get across the highway in a safe and conservative way, and disappear beyond the bowladrome. A few minutes later she reappeared, a busy little red dot, trailing a spume of dust, halfway up the long hill. He walked slowly to the office, a big sandy man with a thoughtful look on his hard-boned face, his eyes on the ground.

  THREE

  Sylvia Drovek awoke a few minutes after noon, drifting reluctantly, heavily upward out of the protective layers of sleep. Finally she opened her eyes, her very dark eyes with the long black curling lashes. She was aware of a little area of dread in her mind, but she was not anxious to identify it, or to face the day. The room air conditioner hummed. Sun came in around the blinds in narrow shafts. The blanket was fleecy and yellow. Her black hair was sprayed across the pillow.

  She listened for any sound of Pete in the house, and then remembered he had phoned at nine last night from Richmond. Party sounds had been audible behind his slightly tipsy voice. “Honeybundle? Say, I’m going to stay over here. A great guy named Kip showed up. An old buddy from Tokyo. If Boss Brother comes around showing his teeth, you tell him I’m making a special deal on a million gross of plastic toothpicks.”

  That crazy Pete. A man with ten thousand close intimate friends. People were always showing up at some crazy time like three in the morning. And Pete would bound up and get dressed, delighted with them. They’d drink and make crazy talk and kind of close her out of things, somehow.

  She pushed the covers aside and sat nude on the edge of the oversized bed. The rink. The skating rink. “Let’s you and me go take a couple of turns around the rink, chubby stuff?” That crazy Pete. All I’m good for.

  She held her legs out, ankles together, feet arched like a toe dancer, and was pleased for the ten thousandth time that her legs touched all the way up, evenly, smoothly. Like I was some kind of one-woman harem, she thought. Just wait right here for him. Not like what I thought marriage would be.

  The realization she had been avoiding, the little area of dread and excitement, became more clearly defined in her mind. This was Mark’s day off. This week he had Friday off. So for once I won’t go to him. What can he do if I don’t? But she knew she would go. She wished she could have stayed asleep. Since this thing had begun she had slept harder and longer than ever before in her life. Deep sleep, without dreams, that somehow did not leave
her feeling refreshed or even completely rested.

  She got up and padded across the deep blue rug and turned the air conditioner off. She was twenty-four, four years younger than Pete, a short girl, five foot three. She weighed a hundred and twenty-six pounds. She looked bulky in clothing. Her most becoming outfits were sweater and skirt combinations where she could call attention to the slimness of her waist by wearing wide ornate belts. In any derivative of the sack she looked square as a little box. But in her skin, she was succulently, firmly lovely. If she had any figure defect it was being rather long-waisted, slightly short-legged. The opulence of thighs and calves tapered to tiny ankles, small feet. All of her was rounded, smooth and slightly dusky. She felt most comfortable, most confident and at ease with herself in her skin, knowing she looked her very best, and comfortably proud of herself.

  Though her maiden name had been Kesson, and the bloodline was vaguely Scots-English-Irish-Dutch, she had blue-black hair, a Mediterranean cast of features, the sulky, sensuous, sexy expression of a nymph in the Mohammedan Paradise who found herself among unsatisfactory infidels. Pete claimed that it was obvious that one of her great-great-grandmothers had had certain dealings with a Spanish gypsy. For the past ten years she had been relentlessly pursued by males from fifteen to sixty, with varying success. A few of those who came to know her well enough to learn the basic contradiction between her appearance and the girl inside could say, with surprise, “You know, Sylvie’s a pretty good kid!” An uncomplicated kid. She was ashamed of the times she had been Bad. And she wished she could always be Good. The relationship with Mark was Bad.

  She had been born and brought up—to the age of sixteen—in Lowell, Massachusetts, the middle child of five children of a little, wiry, sour, savage, sallow tool-and-die-maker and a fat, dim, defeated woman who always looked as if she had just finished weeping or was just about to begin. Her childhood was marked by the hard little unpredictable hands of Rudy Kesson, by squalls of rage and pain and terror.

  When Sylvia was sixteen she and her best girl friend ran away to New York. Sylvia, at sixteen, looked twenty-one. Indeed, at twenty-four she looked twenty-one. The girl friend looked younger than sixteen, and her family was apparently more eager to have her back. She was picked up and held. Her parents came down and got her. Sylvia, by lying about her age, got her first job in a big five-and-ten in Brooklyn. But she wanted to be in Manhattan. That was her dream. And be a model. Her second job was in a dress shop on Twenty-sixth Street. She was calling herself Sylvia Marlowe, had pruned the last of the baby fat off her hips, adopted an exotic hair styling, learned the colors that suited her best, had begun to wear barbaric costume jewelry, had invented a mysterious past which gave her mixed English and Indonesian blood, had acquired a little trace of very suspect accent, and felt herself to be in the midst of life. Through her new contacts she became a store model for a large Jewish furrior on Thirty-ninth Street, and learned how to walk and turn and smile. As many of the potential customers were of approximately the same build, she did well. It was understood that she was to be available for business entertaining. Scintillating conversation was not a prerequisite. She became familiar with the cuisine and decor of most of the expensive second-class night spots in New York, as well as the interiors of too many of the more tolerant hotels. She did not like the sneaky little inward voice that kept telling her she was being Bad. But it did not happen often, and then only with men she thought were Cute, and the gifts of money were sometimes surprisingly generous. But she still wanted to be a Real Model. She registered with several agencies. The camera made her look much chunkier than she was.

  When she was nineteen she finally got a call from the least reputable agency with which she had registered. She took the day off and reported at ten in the morning at a basement studio way down on Eleventh Street, dressed in her best. It was a dreary, grubby, damp place, cluttered with jury-rigged spots and floods and weary props. Butts were stamped into the concrete floor. A few people were standing around aimlessly. The man in charge was sallow and cynical. He took her name.

  “Strip down, sweetie,” he said.

  “Right here?”

  “Right here, sweetie.”

  Feeling as if she were in a confusing dream, she went to a small couch and took off her best clothes, not looking directly at anyone. “You can keep your shoes on, sweetie. The floor’s cold.”

  She turned toward the man, looking beyond him at the dark wall. “Turn around, sweetie. Now back. What you think, Archie?”

  “Okay, Clyde.”

  “What’s this … for?” Sylvia asked in a small voice.

  “Didn’t they tell you? This is photo illustration, sweetie, for a string of true crime books. They keep sending down malnutrition cases, so I ask for a girl with a little meat. Now let’s go to work, kids. Use you in this one, Joe. It says here teen-age killer backs away in horror from girl’s body on motel bed. Knifed in back. Archie, put her diagonal on the bed, face down, hair and arm hanging over the edge, you know. End of the sheet across her bumpus. Stick that bloodstain on her back left center. Joe, get yourself that big switchblade out of the gear box.”

  It was a long and exhausting day. Rather than explain exactly the pose they wanted, Archie would shove and pull her into the right position. His hands were like ice. He moved her around in a completely impersonal way, like a butcher shifting a side of beef in a walk-in cooler. And sometimes they yelled instructions at her in such a nasty irritable way that she felt close to tears. “Hold that scarf higher, sweetie. Higher! You got a pair of pretty things, but we can’t use them in the picture. Okay. Hold it. We’ll try again. Baby spot, Archie.” And, “Chrissake, can’t you look scared? Come on, sweetie. Bug your eyes, show your pretty fangs. Think of snakes or something. Hold it.” And, “Sweetie, you are not for Chrissake supposed to hold that lamp like it is a priceless art object. You are about to heave it at Joe’s head. Make like Whitey Ford, sweetie. And scowl at Joe. You hate him. He kicked hell out of your old grandmother. Scowl! Hold it.”

  She worked right up into the evening. And after the agency took their cut, she had nearly eight dollars left. Best of all, Clyde wanted to use her again. Five days later. After the second session, she quit her regular job. And a month later she was living in a Village apartment with Clyde Denglert. His physical demands on her were slight and infrequent. He was not a well man. He wanted to do art photography. He submitted pictures to exhibitions, and sometimes received an honorable mention. Through him she found other modeling jobs of the same caliber. Her money and his went for survival, plus the expensive equipment he felt he needed in his art photography work. It was a living arrangement, not emotional. A few times, out of frustration and irritability and hopelessness, he beat her. But he was always contrite. He was forty-two years old and nothing had come true for him. One day, when she was twenty, walking with Clyde through a slushy dusk to the corner bar, his heart stumbled. He went down onto his hands and knees. As she tried to help him up, his heart stopped, and he folded onto his face in the dirty March slush.

  Her friends told her that she should sell off a bunch of the expensive camera equipment before the brother arrived from Cleveland. But she didn’t. The brother showed no gratitude. He treated her like dirt. She kept the apartment. A girl friend moved in with her. She was a part-time model, and free-lance hustler. Sylvia resisted her friend’s urgings to pick up some of the easy money floating around. She lived on her fees and sometimes, when things were slow, she would take an evening job as a waitress.

  By the time she was twenty-two she had come to realize that she was as far as she would ever get as a model. She would never appear on a magazine cover. And she realized she was bored.

  Six months later she went with a male model to one of those big haphazard Village parties. She drank too much. The party swirled around her. Somehow she ended up with a big guy named Pete. He was with a friend named Barney, and Barney was with a cute blonde she had never seen before called Woonsocket. They went
to a lot of places, the four of them. She gathered that they were all celebrating something, but she wasn’t quite sure what it was. It was either that Pete had just gotten out of the service, or that he had to go to work. In some little jazz joint uptown, he counted out so much money on the table it scared her. Pete was fun. He kept having crazy ideas. All of a sudden he decided they’d all go to Mexico right then. So they went charging around in a taxi. Pete made some phone calls. They got his and Barney’s stuff out of the Hilton-Statler, and picked up Woonsocket’s clothes at her place, and Sylvia’s clothes at hers. Twenty minutes out of Idlewild she explained carefully that it was the first time she had ever been in an airplane. It knocked the rest of them out. They had to have a drink on it. Barney passed the jug around. The hostess kept telling them to please make less noise.

  After a while they all slept. When Sylvia woke up she was a little scared. But there were more drinks. The party came alive again. They took the party to a big suite in the Del Prado. And somehow a lot of other people joined the party. That crazy Pete didn’t slow down a bit. The next day it was decided that everybody would get married. All the new friends came along. Pete hired mariachis to come right along with them and play music at the place where they had the civil weddings, a big gloomy old building. At the last minute Barney backed out. Pete decided he would marry both of them. But then Woonsocket remembered she was already married, and maybe it would be illegal. So Sylvia and Pete got married, with the mariachis playing bullfight music in the big gloomy building.

  The next day that crazy Pete suddenly gave out. He just folded. She went to bed too. She woke up toward evening with a terrible headache. Pete was still sleeping. She went down and ate alone. When she came back he was still sleeping. She went to bed too. When she woke up the following morning she could hardly believe that she was in Mexico. It didn’t seem possible. And a little later she suddenly remembered she had gotten married. She gasped and sat up. Pete was sitting on the edge of the other bed in his underwear shorts, staring gloomily at her.