her circle, Nora says, "We were all flesh and hot dinners, baby poppers, nest builders. Our men had dongs of conventional size, and lived within the rather wide norm of conventional existence" (p. 95). Just as Ruth becomes part-human, part-divine, Leslie too transcends the mere human in Nora's mind. While Leslie Beck
is
in reality a rather conventional man, albeit an adulterous one, Nora imagines him to be a super human to satisfy her own restlessness. Prior to their first sexual encounter, which takes place several stories high at an unfinished construction site, Nora remarks: "He stood in his natural state in his natural place; he was meant to poise between heaven and earth; he had elevated me and I was honored" (p. 98). Nora cannot see that Leslie is "naturally" just a man, and a rather ordinary one at that. In her imagination he is her savior, rescuing her from her life with her husband.
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In one of Weldon's classic "comic turns," Leslie Beck the magnificent becomes a victim of his lovers' imaginations. By allowing himself to be reinvented as a trickster figure and a
super
human he is no longer thought of as a human. Despite her claim that "the dimension of his prick was neither here nor there" (p. 98), Nora comes to view Leslie only on her own terms: "He was a fool, he had no taste, he would swim around out of his depth and be laughed at; but his one great attribute he used and used it well. God will forgive him" (p. 100). Yet part of Nora understands that she is blinded by her own need for excitement, for secrets ''which are to true love as artificial sweetener is to sugar.... A cheat. Everything costs. Nothing is for nothing. Fewer calories, more cancer" (p. 174). The personal costs of her affair with Leslie are almost expected: the loss of her family, friends, and respectability. Yet there are costs for Leslie Beck too.
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The novel opens and closes with an older, faded Leslie Beck. His power, unlike that of a "natural trickster," has diminished with the passage of time: "He was not the man he had been. His face was shriveled in upon itself. The hair was now sandy, not red; it no longer flourished, as once it had. The full mouth had narrowed" (p. 186). Because Leslie Beck had so fully accepted his role as an invincible trickster figure, a devouring animal, he is perplexed as the inevitable loss of his sexual abilities leads to the loss of his own identity. Referring specifically to his dead wife, Anita, Leslie comments on the way women have "used" him: "she needed me, she used me. It was her life force, not mine. I was nothing. Just a kind of brush she used" (p. 189). Just as Anita needed her image of Leslie Beck the trickster to inspire her art, so Nora needed to project her own "life force" on to Leslie in order to justify her restlessness and her own discontent. Leslie's realization that he "was nothing" is sadly accurate. What appeared to be his Tarzanlike conquering of the women he knew was
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