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.”