Isabelle seemed to have forgotten that she’d dumped Marion nine months ago. Her life in the meantime had been so crowded with event that high school was already historical to her, and indeed it did now seem remarkable that Marion had ever imagined their remaining friends after graduation. But she no longer felt like murdering Isabelle. Instead, she felt sad about what life was doing to her. Nine months later, when life had done even worse to Marion and she had no one to turn to, she not only remembered Isabelle’s sloppy kindness at the corner of Ninth and Grand. She remembered that Isabelle lived in a bright-red bungalow behind the Egyptian Theatre.
She’d become—had made herself—a problem Bradley had to manage. A few days after her second slippage, a blond customer in her thirties had come to the showroom. Nearly all the customers at Lerner were men, and Marion hadn’t seen Bradley work his magic on a woman since she’d become obsessed with him. Suddenly the cartoonish plasticity of his features seemed grotesque. After the woman left, without buying, Marion’s hatred of his wife came to a screaming boil and blew a gasket in her head. When he went to the men’s room, she followed him into it and threw her arms around his neck, tried to climb him. Her question was when they could make love again. She desperately needed to make love with him again, and in his fear of being caught in the men’s room he agreed. They went back to Culver City that very evening. The pleasure sex gave her was increasing exponentially with each encounter. Bradley avowed that, until that night, he’d never understood what passion was. He avowed that he was absolutely mad for her. When he drove her home, he told her she had to quit working at Lerner and find a better place to live.
She went to work in the steno pool at a property-management company where a former Lerner salesman, a friend of Bradley’s, worked. The friend found her an efficiency apartment in Westlake, and Bradley paid three months’ rent in advance, peeling bills off the stack he kept folded in his front pocket. Technically, this made her a kind of prostitute, but to her the bills represented so many dollars that wouldn’t go to his wife and his boys, dollars rightfully hers, redeemable against a future in which she’d be his wife. Her surety was their rightness for each other. Through April and May and June, she experienced the rightness on the apartment’s Murphy bed, among the cigarette burns on the carpet, on the checkered oilcloth that covered the little dining table. After sex, the words she struggled to speak elsewhere came easily. Bradley brought her new books to read, and she now followed the war in Europe avidly, because it interested him. Most thrilling to her was his Spanish screenplay, for which she was acting out the character of the German ambassador’s daughter. As their joint idea for the story emerged in detail, she made shorthand notes on it in bed, a nude stenographer. Working on the story excited her extremely and excited Bradley, too. When he took the pad and pencil from her and set them aside, she lay back for him in a state of not-herselfness, imagining herself as the ambassador’s daughter, as if she were the actress playing her. At work, it wasn’t hard to find an idle hour for typing out the story notes, sometimes adding new ideas of her own. The unattached young men in the office might have known about her situation with Bradley—she seemed to be invisible to them. She was the taciturn girl who was proficient in Gregg and didn’t misspell words.
In July, Bradley took Isabelle and his boys on a car trip to Sequoia and Yosemite. Marion had begged him to use his vacation to get started on the screenplay, which she’d now completely outlined for him, but he said he owed the vacation to his boys, and off they went. As long as she hadn’t had to go more than four days without seeing him, as long as their rightness for each other was regularly confirmed, she’d avoided further episodes of slippage. But a weekend alone, after a week with no hope of seeing Bradley, was endless. The very sun seemed evil to her in the way it dawdled in her windows, took its insolent time in going down. She couldn’t read a book or go to the pictures. The passage of time needed vigilant monitoring. She sat perfectly still, trying not to even blink, until the fear of relaxing her vigilance became apocalyptic, as though the world might end if she so much as flexed a muscle in her foot. She was very, very low. For some reason, she was especially averse to bathing, the sensation of water on her skin.
Bradley was due back on the night of Saturday the 27th and had promised to come and see her on Sunday. She spent Saturday night on her back with her eyes open, because to close them was to picture him in bed with his Isabelle, to consider the countless hours that Isabelle had had to undermine his confidence as a writer, and to entertain the suspicion that Isabelle was right: to see him as he really was and see herself as she really was, a lonely girl trading her body for a fantasy. Time was the enemy when she was alone, because the fantasy required effort to sustain and her strength was finite. In the morning, unslept, unbathed, she boiled and ate two eggs and lay down again. The sun had an evil new trick of changing its position suddenly, jumping forward, as if to mock her for Bradley’s non-arrival. It was setting by the time she heard a tapping on her door, the turning of a key. How she must have looked when he saw her on the bed! Flat-haired, puffy-eyed, parched-lipped, mad. He kneeled on the floor and kissed her cheek. She didn’t feel a thing.