“I’m throwing up a lot,” she agreed. “It’s hard to keep food down.”
He sighed in frustration. “For the last time: We can’t see each other again. Never, ever. Do you understand?”
“Yes. No.”
“No contact of any kind. Do you understand?”
She knew that it was important to say yes, but she couldn’t say it honestly.
“What you need to do now,” he said, “is get yourself home. Can you do that for me? I want you to go back to San Francisco and let your family take care of you. You are the sweetest thing. It’s killing me to see what’s happened to you. But what you did today was just beyond the pale.”
Her chest clotted up with a new worry: that she’d finally liberated Bradley but was now too wrong in the head for him to want her. The irony surged up and strangled her like stomach acid. She retched out five words. “Will she divorce you now?”
“Honey—Marion. How many ways do I have to find to say it? We can’t be together.”
“You and I.”
“You and I.”
The hyperventilating set in, and he reached into his jacket. The stack of money he put between them on the seat was thick. “I want you to take this,” he said. “Buy yourself a first-class ticket north. And then, as soon as you get to San Francisco, I want you to see the best psychiatrist you can find. Somebody who can help you.”
She stared at the money.
“I am so sorry,” he said. “But there’s nothing else I can give you. Please take it.”
“I’m not a whore.”
“No, you’re an angel. A sweet angel who’s in very bad trouble. I mean it—if there were anything else I could give you, I would do it. But this is all I’ve got.”
She finally understood that she was nothing to him but his paid slut. The money on the seat seemed to her a dangerous, loathsome reptile. She found the door latch and half fell, backward, from his car. With a loathsome hand, he extended the money toward her. “Please, Marion. For God’s sake.”
When she came out of her slippage, some morning or another, probably the very next one, she felt inexplicably better. It was as if her hatred of the man trying to pay her had made a crack in her obsession with Bradley Grant. The obsession was still in her, but it was weakened now, more readily observable for what it was. Inside her front door, wrapped in an advertising flyer and slipped under the door, she found the stack of money. She methodically cut each bill into tiny pieces and flushed them all down the toilet. This was a terrible mistake she had to make to ease her mental pain.
In the first days of December, less distracted by pain, she was capable of reading the newspaper again, taking an interest in Mussolini’s attack on Greece, and venturing forth to seek work. Her employer references weren’t in order, but she still had her looks. She found a job as a greeter at a big Safeway supermarket, offering customers bite-size samples of featured food products, and was surprised by how little she minded it. She liked having only one thing to say and saying it over and over. Repetition calmed her fear of the thing she was now able to admit was inside her. But the smell of certain foods, meat products especially, was revoltingly intense to her, and her fear was growing with the thing inside her. One day, when she was sticking toothpicks in miniature canned franks, her fear impelled her to walk out of the store, run home, and obey the commands of her feral intelligence. She hit herself in the stomach and jumped up and down violently. She swallowed a mouthful of ammonia and couldn’t keep it down. When she tried again and blew the ammonia out her nose, the explosion in her head was so extreme she thought she was dying.
In her narrative to Sophie, a straight line led from Bradley’s offer of money to the night she wandered the streets of downtown Los Angeles in the rain, raving on themes of sluttiness and murder, barefoot, her blouse soaking and unbuttoned, until she was picked up by the police. But the line hadn’t been straight. It had led through an eviction notice; a tearful scene with her property manager; telegrams to her mother and to Roy Collins, asking both of them for emergency money; and a phone call to Bradley at Lerner Motors. The property manager gave her until the end of December to pay her overdue rent. Her mother, it later turned out, was on a ski vacation with her friends. Roy Collins wired her twenty dollars of travel money, along with a terse offer to employ her. Bradley hung up the phone as soon as he heard her voice.
Definitely pregnant and definitely not interested in carrying his baby, she took a streetcar out to Hollywood. The streets were dry and dusk was falling, the holiday tinsel and ribbons in store windows emerging from the cheapening glare of daylight to glow and beckon. She was able to entertain rational thoughts and ordinary feelings—resentment of her mother, the thought of the darkness that had fallen on Europe, hatred of Bradley and his wife, appreciation of the fender lines of a custom-body Cadillac passing the streetcar, curiosity about her sister in New York, the ques tion of Shirley’s own sexual experience or lack thereof—for no more than a few seconds before the terror of her situation welled up in her afresh and scattered them. When she saw the Egyptian Theatre, she stepped off the streetcar and asked a newspaper seller where Selma Avenue was. Her main hope now was Isabelle Washburn. Even if Isabelle couldn’t give her money, she could provide sisterly advice and sympathy, which Marion was very much in need of. In the dark, it was hard to tell the colors of houses, but eventually she found a distinctly red one. Dim, warm light was in the curtained front windows. She walked right up to the door and knocked. Almost immediately, the door opened; and there stood Satan.