She pressed on her face to stop the cramp. “You hardly know anything about me.”
“I can see into your soul. You’re the opposite of that kind of girl.”
“But you said your marriage is not negotiable.”
“I did say that.”
“Do you write poems for your wife?”
“Not since a very long time ago.”
“I don’t mind if you write poems for me. I like it. In fact, I love it. I wish—” She shook her head.
“Wish what?”
“I wish you’d write a play, or a movie, and I could star in it.”
Bradley seemed astonished. “That’s what you want?”
“It’s just a dream,” she hastened to say. “It isn’t real.”
He put his hands on the wheel and bowed his head. He could so easily have opened the door a crack and said he wasn’t sure about his marriage. He must have sensed that she wasn’t well. Perhaps he felt that lying to a nutty girl wasn’t sporting.
“What if I did,” he said. “What if I wrote a part for you. Maybe the daughter of the German ambassador—I almost think I could do it, as long as I could picture you in the role. That’s what I’m missing, something beautiful to picture instead of all the ugliness I bring home. I don’t get any support at all from Isabelle. She doesn’t even like it when I read a book. She’s jealous of a book! And boy does she get angry when I try to tell her about a new idea. It’s like she’s Dr. Freud and I’m the patient, just because I have ideas for a screenplay. ‘Oh dear, the patient is displaying symptoms again. We thought we’d cured him of ambition, and now he’s had a relapse.’ She’s so bitter about her own dreams, she can’t stand the fact that I still have my own.”
“Do you love her?” Marion said. Hearing herself ask this question made her feel older and wiser: capable.
“She’s good with the boys,” Bradley said. “She’s a good mother. Maybe a little too anxious—every little sniffle is a sure sign of whooping cough. But you wouldn’t believe how quickly the most interesting person in the world can turn into the most boring person you’ll ever meet.”
“She used to be interesting.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. She sure as hell isn’t now.”
Marion could simply have offered him friendship and inspiration. She wasn’t yet nutty enough to believe she could star in a movie he’d written. His stroke of genius salesmanship was to describe a person she felt like murdering. He didn’t know that his wife had the same name as Marion’s mother and her faithless school friend, but as soon as he gave her a more detailed Isabelle to hate, the door was open for nuttier thoughts to rush in. The thought that she, Marion, really was more capable than he. The thought that he was too kindhearted to face the obvious truth. The thought that only she could save him from unhappiness, only she could rescue him as a writer, by believing in him and helping him face the truth about his loveless marriage. What kind of vengeful witch got jealous of a book? Isabelle needed murdering for that, and the way for Marion to do it was to move over on the seat. She was short enough to kneel on it, slender enough to fit between him and the steering wheel, and once she was in his arms the dimension of moral significance disappeared.
Bradley Grant took her virginity on the seat of a 1937 LaSalle Series 50 with fogged-up windows, on the lot of Lerner Motors. The act hurt less than certain girls in Santa Rosa had led her to suppose it would, but later, in the bathroom at her rooming house, she discovered more blood than she expected. The white porcelain ran red as she rinsed her underlinens. Only in the morning did she realize that her monthly period had started.
There wasn’t much room for her condition to worsen, but in February it worsened. She felt trapped in a metal cube that was filling up with water, leaving only a tiny pocket of air at the top to breathe. The air was sanity. At every turn, she encountered constriction, most cruelly in how little time she had alone with Bradley. All day, she worked within a hundred paces of him, but he said they had to be very careful. At lunchtime she pressed him into a corner of her old sanctuary in the parts department, but the room had a window through which their corner was obliquely visible. Harry Lerner had forbidden further selling of cars after closing time, and Bradley kept finding reasons he had to go home in the evening. They finally resorted, again, to the seat of his LaSalle. Although it seemed a lot riskier on a moonlit night, without fog on the windows, she kept him there until 10:45. The following week, on his day off, he took her to a motel in Culver City, but even there she felt constricted, because it wasn’t enough to make love. They needed to discuss the future, because surely Bradley now understood that he couldn’t stay married to Isabelle, and their lovemaking left no time for talk. Not until they were back in his car did she ask him if he’d started writing again.