Heedless of the slush in her shoes, she ran across the street and took shelter beneath the awning of a travel agency. She wasted two matches before she got a filterless Lucky lit. Her first drag was reminiscent of losing her virginity—painful and awful and excellent. She knew very well that cigarettes had killed her sister. She also knew, from reports in the paper, that the risk of cancer was proportional to total lifetime exposure. Shirley had erred in not taking a thirty-year break from her exposure. Marion didn’t intend to smoke forever, just long enough to regain the figure of the girl who’d given her virginity to Bradley Grant.
A measure of her disturbance was that, although she felt light-headed, the Lucky didn’t make her sick. It made her want another one. She walked only two blocks, jumping at the sound of every passing car, jangled and buffeted by the snowy mayhem of it all, before she sat down on a bench outside the town hall and lit up again. Had cigarettes always been so delicious? She gladly noted her lack of hunger. The thought of Doris Haefle’s Swedish meatballs—how many of which Marion had eaten, exactly a year earlier, she’d enjoined herself to keep count of, before losing count—turned her stomach. Snowmelt was seeping through her coat beneath her butt. The boughs of the town hall’s ornamental hemlocks sagged under heavy loads of white. She was smoking the second Lucky faster than the first one; an elation long lost to her was building in her chest. To do something with it, she spoke aloud a word she didn’t think she’d used since the morning the police picked her up in Los Angeles. She said, “Fuck!”
Oh, it felt good.
“Fuck Doris Haefle. Fuck her meatballs.”
A hatted commuter, briefcase in hand, head lowered against the driving snow, paused on the sidewalk to look at her. She raised the hand with the Lucky in it and waved to him.
“Everything okay?” the man said.
“Never better, thank you.”
He continued down the sidewalk. Something about his gait, the determined slant of his body, reminded her of Bradley. Bringing her Lucky to her lips, she saw that its coal was about to burn her fingers. She frantically shook it into the snow.
Bradley would be sixty-five now. Old, but not so very old, not in a preservative clime like Southern California’s. Did he still think about her? Or had he, like her, entombed his memories and tried to make himself a different person? It would be terrible if he’d forgotten her. But even worse if he remembered her only as the girl who’d behaved unforgivably: if their months of bliss had all been blotted out by the day she’d gone to his house and spoken to his wife. Why had she had to do that? Why had she had to hurt an innocent third party? Everything might be perfect if she hadn’t.
The matches were damp now—she scorched a fingertip lighting one. To make an informed guess about which version of her had stayed with Bradley, whether the good might outweigh the very bad, she tried to summon her memories of his passion for her. The memories wouldn’t sit still, one bled into another, but she had the impression of a great many instances of passion. Even when she’d lost her mind and frightened him, he’d had to struggle to keep away from her. Later, yes, surely, he’d hated her for going to his wife. But so what? She’d hated him, too, for rejecting her. The hatred had quickly faded. What remained in her memory was the thrilling rightness of being with him. Maybe, with the passage of time, he’d come to feel the same way?
She imagined abandoning Russ before he could get around to abandoning her. Wouldn’t that be a surprise. The fantasy of losing thirty pounds and ditching Russ was so satisfying that she might have been content to keep indulging in it, sitting on her bench, if it hadn’t occurred to her that the library had a collection of phonebooks …
In the mangy snow behind the library, she flicked the end of her fourth cigarette into the parking lot. The facts of the world had submitted to her state of mind. She now had good reason to hope that Bradley was alive in Los Angeles; she had an address and a phone number. Electrified by nicotine, she wondered what to do next with her disturbance. Low on the list of options was smelling the meatballs of Dwight Haefle’s nasty wife. For a moment, she worried that Becky might be waiting at home to go to the open house; that her sense of duty had prevailed over her need to be with Tanner Evans. But this seemed unlikely, and Becky, if it came to that, could go by herself to the open house with Russ, who’d be happier with that arrangement anyway. He was proud of Becky’s beauty and preferred parading it in public, every Sunday afternoon, to being seen with his wife.