The Crossroads by John D. MacDonald Page B

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 thesame 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 stuffout 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