The Crossroads (7 page)

When Sylvia was sixteen she and her best girl friend ran away to New York. Sylvia, at sixteen, looked twenty-one. Indeed, at twenty-four she looked twenty-one. The girl friend looked younger than sixteen, and her family was apparently more eager to have her back. She was picked up and held. Her parents came down and got her. Sylvia, by lying about her age, got her first job in a big five-and-ten in Brooklyn. But she wanted to be in Manhattan. That was her dream. And be a model. Her second job was in a dress shop on Twenty-sixth Street. She was calling herself Sylvia Marlowe, had pruned the last of the baby fat off her hips, adopted an exotic hair styling, learned the colors that suited her best, had begun
to wear barbaric costume jewelry, had invented a mysterious past which gave her mixed English and Indonesian blood, had acquired a little trace of very suspect accent, and felt herself to be in the midst of life. Through her new contacts she became a store model for a large Jewish furrior on Thirty-ninth Street, and learned how to walk and turn and smile. As many of the potential customers were of approximately the same build, she did well. It was understood that she was to be available for business entertaining. Scintillating conversation was not a prerequisite. She became familiar with the cuisine and decor of most of the expensive second-class night spots in New York, as well as the interiors of too many of the more tolerant hotels. She did not like the sneaky little inward voice that kept telling her she was being Bad. But it did not happen often, and then only with men she thought were Cute, and the gifts of money were sometimes surprisingly generous. But she still wanted to be a Real Model. She registered with several agencies. The camera made her look much chunkier than she was.

When she was nineteen she finally got a call from the least reputable agency with which she had registered. She took the day off and reported at ten in the morning at a basement studio way down on Eleventh Street, dressed in her best. It was a dreary, grubby, damp place, cluttered with jury-rigged spots and floods and weary props. Butts were stamped into the concrete floor. A few people were standing around aimlessly. The man in charge was sallow and cynical. He took her name.

“Strip down, sweetie,” he said.

“Right here?”

“Right here, sweetie.”

Feeling as if she were in a confusing dream, she went to a small couch and took off her best clothes, not looking directly at anyone. “You can keep your shoes on, sweetie. The floor’s cold.”

She turned toward the man, looking beyond him at the dark wall. “Turn around, sweetie. Now back. What you think, Archie?”

“Okay, Clyde.”

“What’s this … for?” Sylvia asked in a small voice.

“Didn’t they tell you? This is photo illustration, sweetie, for a string of true crime books. They keep sending down malnutrition cases, so I ask for a girl with a little meat. Now let’s go to work, kids. Use you in this one, Joe. It says here teen-age killer backs away in horror from girl’s body on motel bed. Knifed in back. Archie, put her diagonal on the bed, face down, hair and arm hanging over the edge, you know. End of the sheet across her bumpus. Stick that bloodstain on her back left center. Joe, get yourself that big switchblade out of the gear box.”

It was a long and exhausting day. Rather than explain exactly the pose they wanted, Archie would shove and pull her into the right position. His hands were like ice. He moved her around in a completely impersonal way, like a butcher shifting a side of beef in a walk-in cooler. And sometimes they yelled instructions at her in such a nasty irritable way that she felt close to tears. “Hold that scarf higher, sweetie. Higher! You got a pair of pretty things, but we can’t use them in the picture. Okay. Hold it. We’ll try again. Baby spot, Archie.” And, “Chrissake, can’t you look scared? Come on, sweetie. Bug your eyes, show your pretty fangs. Think of snakes or something. Hold it.” And, “Sweetie, you are not for Chrissake supposed to hold that lamp like it is a priceless art object. You are about to heave it at Joe’s head. Make like Whitey Ford, sweetie. And scowl at Joe. You hate him. He kicked hell out of your old grandmother. Scowl! Hold it.”

She worked right up into the evening. And after the agency took their cut, she had nearly eight dollars left. Best of all, Clyde wanted to use her again. Five days later. After the second session, she quit her regular job. And a month later she was living in a Village apartment with Clyde Denglert. His physical demands on her were slight and infrequent. He was not a well man. He wanted to do art photography. He submitted pictures to exhibitions, and sometimes received an honorable mention. Through him she found other modeling jobs of the
same caliber. Her money and his went for survival, plus the expensive equipment he felt he needed in his art photography work. It was a living arrangement, not emotional. A few times, out of frustration and irritability and hopelessness, he beat her. But he was always contrite. He was forty-two years old and nothing had come true for him. One day, when she was twenty, walking with Clyde through a slushy dusk to the corner bar, his heart stumbled. He went down onto his hands and knees. As she tried to help him up, his heart stopped, and he folded onto his face in the dirty March slush.

Her friends told her that she should sell off a bunch of the expensive camera equipment before the brother arrived from Cleveland. But she didn’t. The brother showed no gratitude. He treated her like dirt. She kept the apartment. A girl friend moved in with her. She was a part-time model, and free-lance hustler. Sylvia resisted her friend’s urgings to pick up some of the easy money floating around. She lived on her fees and sometimes, when things were slow, she would take an evening job as a waitress.

By the time she was twenty-two she had come to realize that she was as far as she would ever get as a model. She would never appear on a magazine cover. And she realized she was bored.

Six months later she went with a male model to one of those big haphazard Village parties. She drank too much. The party swirled around her. Somehow she ended up with a big guy named Pete. He was with a friend named Barney, and Barney was with a cute blonde she had never seen before called Woonsocket. They went to a lot of places, the four of them. She gathered that they were all celebrating something, but she wasn’t quite sure what it was. It was either that Pete had just gotten out of the service, or that he had to go to work. In some little jazz joint uptown, he counted out so much money on the table it scared her. Pete was fun. He kept having crazy ideas. All of a sudden he decided they’d all go to Mexico right then. So they went charging around in a taxi. Pete made some phone calls. They got his and Barney’s stuff
out of the Hilton-Statler, and picked up Woonsocket’s clothes at her place, and Sylvia’s clothes at hers. Twenty minutes out of Idlewild she explained carefully that it was the first time she had ever been in an airplane. It knocked the rest of them out. They had to have a drink on it. Barney passed the jug around. The hostess kept telling them to please make less noise.

After a while they all slept. When Sylvia woke up she was a little scared. But there were more drinks. The party came alive again. They took the party to a big suite in the Del Prado. And somehow a lot of other people joined the party. That crazy Pete didn’t slow down a bit. The next day it was decided that everybody would get married. All the new friends came along. Pete hired mariachis to come right along with them and play music at the place where they had the civil weddings, a big gloomy old building. At the last minute Barney backed out. Pete decided he would marry both of them. But then Woonsocket remembered she was already married, and maybe it would be illegal. So Sylvia and Pete got married, with the mariachis playing bullfight music in the big gloomy building.

The next day that crazy Pete suddenly gave out. He just folded. She went to bed too. She woke up toward evening with a terrible headache. Pete was still sleeping. She went down and ate alone. When she came back he was still sleeping. She went to bed too. When she woke up the following morning she could hardly believe that she was in Mexico. It didn’t seem possible. And a little later she suddenly remembered she had gotten married. She gasped and sat up. Pete was sitting on the edge of the other bed in his underwear shorts, staring gloomily at her.

“Good morning, I think,” he said.

“Good morning, Pete.” He didn’t seem crazy at all.

“Sylvia. I have the name right?”

“Yes.”

“I have been sitting here with the nasty suspicion that you are now the first Mrs. Peter Drovek. Is that right?”

“Yes,” she said in a tiny voice.

He shook his head sadly. “God damn!” he said. He
got up and went over to his clothes, began to take crumpled bills out of the pockets, smooth them out and put them on the bureau, U. S. currency in one pile and Mexican in another.

The slow sad tears filled her eyes and began to run down her cheeks. He saw her in the mirror. He turned and stared at her for a moment, then came to her bed, sat on the edge of it and took her hands. “Hey now!” he said gently. “Hey now!”

She tried to smile but the tears still ran. “I … can’t help it. It wasn’t so m-much my idea. You were the one. You wanted to get married. Nobody could stop you. I don’t even know anything … about you!” She gave a wail of despair, tore her hands away, and plunged her face into the pillow, her back toward him, sobbing.

“That makes us even, Sylvia. What’s your name? I mean, what was your whole name?”

“Sylvia Marlowe,” she said, her voice muffled and sulky.

“How old are you, dear?”

“Twenty-two.”

“Ever been married before?”

“N-no!”

“What do you do for a living?”

“I’m a model.”

“Dear Jesus.”

She whirled and looked at him with a contorted face. “Don’t you say that! I’m not a whore. I’m a real model. I’ve been modeling for years!” She whirled away again.

“All right, dear. No offense meant. Where did we meet?”

“At a party in the Village.”

“Oh. Barney’s pals. I remember it vaguely.”

“I wish I was dead,” she said.

“They used to arrange marriages. And they seemed to work out. You might be quite a shock to the clan, baby.”

“We can get it all canceled maybe. Everybody was stinking.”

He was silent for a long time. She didn’t know what he was thinking. The tears still ran.

“Sylvia, baby, has this marriage been consummated?”

“What? Oh. No. I mean I don’t think so.”

The bed shifted under his weight. He slid under the covers beside her and his arms went around her. In a little while the tears stopped.

When it was over that first time, Pete held her in his arms. They lay side by side, looking into each other’s eyes. Pete stared at her with an odd thoughtful expression. “Honeybundle,” he said finally, “this mixed-up marriage may turn out to be one big fat drunken mistake. But in one department, commonly considered essential to bliss, things seem to be supernifty.”

“You talk funny,” she said, putting her fingers to his lips to be kissed.

“Hand me that phone, chunky stuff, and I shall set up a mild celebration around here. Brides love to wallow in champagne.”

And that seemed to be the last time that Pete ever talked to her in a real serious kind of way. That crazy Pete. He thought he was running out of money but it turned out Barney had picked his pocket for safekeeping. So there was enough for the three of them to go to Acapulco. From there Pete wired his people that he was married. They’d put Woonsocket on a plane back to the States. Barney found a new girl in Acapulco. They took a big cabana at the Hotel de las Americas and spent most of their time either in bed or around the pool drinking and eating Chinese food. And there were new friends, as always, to join the group. She sort of liked being married, she decided. Pete was crazy and cute. She gathered that he and his father and brothers and sister owned a motel. She worried about the money. It seemed to be a lot to spend if you just owned a motel down south someplace.

They flew back and had a couple of days in New York. She packed up the rest of her stuff and shipped it on ahead. She found out Pete had a Corvette in a storage garage. They had a goodbye party for Barney and drove south. Pete drove in a scary way, but they certainly made good time.

And then she had to meet the rest of the family. Pete
acted nervous about that, about the only thing she had ever seen him nervous about. She stopped worrying about the money they had spent when she saw that it was a real big business, with people working for the Droveks all over the place. They all seemed friendly enough to her. Not real close like, but friendly. Everybody was so terribly busy there didn’t seem to be any time for family get-togethers. She and Pete lived in the big motel in a nice room and their house was started right away. She tried to get them to build the kind of a house she wanted, but Pete explained that it wasn’t as if they’d own it. The corporation would own it and they would just lease it from the corporation. So the architect who’d done the other work designed it and the decorators who did work for the Droveks decorated it and furnished it, and neither she nor Pete had anything to say about it, except Pete did get them to put in that great big bed. That crazy Pete.

He went to work right away. He’d had four years of college and three years in the service, and now he would work for the Crossroads Corporation for the rest of his life. She found out about the money. Pete’s salary was a hundred and fifty dollars a week, and from his stock they got about twelve thousand dollars a year. But that didn’t mean there was a lot for her to spend. That crazy Pete spent an awful lot of money. He went on trips to see friends. He didn’t seem to want to take her along. Sometimes he would. But it wasn’t much fun. It wasn’t that he didn’t like her. He just didn’t seem to want her in that part of his life. And she certainly knew he wasn’t going off to play around with other girls. When he would come back he would be after her something fierce in that big bed, like he couldn’t ever get enough, but always kidding, sort of. Making jokes. Calling her funny names.