“Please, please, please,” he said.
“I’m trying to be serious, but maybe you had me wrong.”
“We have to stop,” he said.
“Oh. Why?”
“I told you. It was the very first thing I told you. I’m not going to destroy my family. I’m not going to leave the mother of my children.”
“You also said you’d die if you couldn’t be with me. Does that mean you’re going to die now?”
He covered his face with his hands. If she’d ever really liked him, she definitely didn’t now, but the matter of liking was more irrelevant than ever. She could clearly perceive the contours of her obsession with him. It would have been sensible to tear it from her skull, but the object had grown too large to be removed without splitting her head open. Despite its sick enormity, it was also too beautiful to her.
“I’ll probably die if I can’t be with you,” she said, in a factual tone.
“No, you won’t. You’re going to find somebody who’s better for you.”
“Do you see what I’m saying, though?”
“Honestly, I’m not following all of it.”
“You’re wrong,” she said, opening her door. “That’s all. I know you’re wrong.”
As she made her way home, past Westlake Park, she didn’t feel low. She felt nervously elated, like a general on the eve of a decisive battle. She and Bradley were in a crisis that she needed all her wits to navigate. To have walked away from the drive-in voluntarily, to not have made a screeching scene and begged him to reconsider, seemed in hindsight an inspired tactic. Now she just needed to be patient. Between his job and his family duties and his attentiveness to her, Bradley had been too overstretched to exercise his talent as a writer. The fantasy of him returning to her apartment, unannounced, in the middle of the night, after a month of separation, fired up by the screenplay he’d written and desperate to get her opinion of it, the fantasy of their reading the pages together and her finding them magnificent, was so compelling to her, so enjoyably repeatable and refinable, that she hardly slept that night. In the morning, she felt like skipping on her way to work. Instead of burying her head in a newspaper, she chatted with the other typists and smiled at the unmarried men.
For a number of weeks, she was sustainedly elated—uplifted by her certainty that her strategy of not pestering Bradley, of letting him wonder about her and feel remorseful, of leaving him alone to write, would bring him back. Imagining that he could somehow see her and be jealous, she let one of the young men from the office take her to dinner and a movie. Afterward, she couldn’t remember the man saying anything at all, which led her to wonder if she’d talked nonstop about Hitler and Ribbentrop and Churchill. Perhaps she had. The man didn’t ask her on another date, and this was fine with her, because he barely existed. The edges of existence more generally had begun to fray, her lack of sleep taking its toll. Finally, one evening in September, she decided to leave work early and go and see Bradley at Lerner Motors. The date, 9/9, was irresistibly auspicious.
Bradley was drinking coffee with Mr. Peters and blanched at the sight of her. Nervous but residually elated, she greeted the other girls as if they’d been great friends of hers. One of them had an engagement ring, another was expecting and about to quit, a lesser salesman had been fired. To reconcile her urgent need to speak with her utter lack of personal things to speak about, Marion expressed strong opinions, derived from the newspaper, about the situation in Europe and the necessity of American intervention. One by one, the girls excused themselves, until only Anne remained. Anne remarked, kindly, that Marion didn’t seem well, and Marion allowed that she’d been having trouble sleeping. Anne asked if she’d like to come home with her and have some soup.
“No, I’m here to see Bradley,” Marion said. “He still owes me a T-bone steak.”
Anne’s expression became grave.
“He’s a man of his word.”
“Why don’t you come home with me instead,” Anne said.
“Another time,” Marion said, walking away. Her head was pounding and her body felt made entirely of chalk. She might have preferred to be asleep if sleep had been a possibility. Bradley was standing by the still-unsold Cadillac 75 with a red-haired man, an obvious Jake Barnes, and listening with cartoonish raptness. He had a way of making every customer feel astonishingly interesting. Marion walked up to the Jake Barnes and said, “I’m very sorry, but I believe I was here before you.”