Detour by Martin M. Goldsmith Read Free Book Online Page A

move. I began to sob hysterically, like a woman. Strange sounds came involuntarily from my throat, high and silly and weird. I tasted salt and knew I was crying. Then, all of a sudden, I sprang into the car, pressed the rumble-seat button, pulled out my half-filled valise, and flung it down into the gully. If they found a dead man now, it would be me. I fastened down the top on the right hand side of the car as I drove off. It was still raining, and the drops streaked down the windshield like tears.

II. SUE HARVEY
    I WAS a fool to have let him—but it was done. Done, done, done, done....
    That word kept drumming in my ears like a funeral march all the way home in the car. I was trying to coax myself to calm down, to forget it, and never to let such a thing happen again. But it didn't calm me and I couldn't forget it and I felt miserable and even worse than that.
    I wanted to cry, and it was all I could do to hold myself in. Why give him the satisfaction of seeing me shed tears, I told myself, proving it had made a difference? He might begin to think I was in love with him, or perhaps that I was having a crying jag. Men can't understand women—at least regarding things like that.
    When a man gets finished, he's through; his appetite's been satisfied, except that now he wants a plate of ham and eggs. We girls are quite another story. We have emotions and what not. We feel things. Any woman will know what I'm talking about. So I felt terrible.
    Oh, I had made slips before—who hasn't?—but this one wasn't quite the same, because I'd known all along what he was planning to do and what to expect.
    Good heavens, his manners were obvious enough, and the technique he employed had whiskers on it so long it would have fallen flat in the Middle Ages. Then, too, I hadn't been so drunk I wasn't able to see whatever there was to look at.
    Yet, without being taken by surprise, and with every chance in the world to stop him, he got what he wanted. Oh, I struggled all right, told him I didn't like him that much, that I hardly knew him, that I was in love with someone else, and anyway, pu-lease, I was not that kind of a girl; I even slapped him once or twice, hard. But after saying “No!” about a dozen times, something happened, something that had never happened to me before. Although I still did not want him to have me, I found my “No!” getting just a trifle weaker; and then, curiously, all fight drained out of me and I gave up struggling entirely.
    In the end, I didn't exactly give myself to him.
    He took me.
    Don't ask me why or how or when. I asked myself the same thing until my head spun. I didn't love the man—that much I was certain—nor did I even like him, when it came to that. He was very handsome and an actor and all the rest of it, but he was also the vainest, most self-centered individual I had ever run across.
    When he finally won the argument about going to his apartment, did he show me etchings, a picture of his mother, or the customary rare something or other bachelors always have in their apartments? He did not.
    He brought out his scrapbook. And after all the build-up he had been giving himself I was a little surprised to discover that although he had plenty of press notices, most of them were no larger than a postage stamp.
    But I didn't hate him, even after it was all over. If I hated anyone, it was myself for having been so foolish. It made my cheeks burn when I realized what he must think of me: a little tramp, just another Hollywood pushover. What else could he think?
    In my shame I almost wished I was in love with the man. Then I could ease my conscience by telling myself it had been foreordained—even if he didn't know it, the conceited thing.
    I sat silently in the car, angry with myself and with him, at the same time trying to solve the problem of how it had happened.
    I had never set eyes on him before seven o'clock when he drove in and ate dinner, tipping me a little too liberally. When he came back