Pretty Leslie (28 page)

On another day it might have been so. But long before the sun dropped behind the elmtops and the curtains of suburban shade caused her skin to twitch and rise in small goose bumps, she recognized how this chaste, mad argument parodied not only the scene she had enacted the night before, but all commerce between male and female.

Smiling, she closed her eyes, and she was in the company not of Smothers and his Garland but the zoo keeper of Sue Wilder's story and the pathetic female chimpanzee who lured him to the night of his bestiality. And knowing this was like having no longer any lids for her eyes. Nothing any more—ever—could be shut out, she thought.

“I certainly tend to side with Mr. Smothers,” she said. “I know my own life would be much poorer without the things I picked up in college.”

“You're probably right,” Garland said. “Only—” Only the wise female chimpanzee never went to Smith.

“If you'll excuse me,” Leslie said. “If you'll excuse me, I'm going out this evening and I have to make some phone calls first.”

Garland was on her feet in a second, all apology for having taken so much of her time when Mrs. Daniels must be a busy woman and the problem wasn't one that had to be settled today anyhow. Smothers was so rapt in his real obsession that he acted as if Leslie had been rude in terminating the interview so soon. Which goes to show, which goes to show, she thought, in a frightful depression of fatigue.

She meant to call Dolores Calfert. That inspiration had come to her while she agonized through the interminable discussion about college or not for
mademoiselle en fleur.
She needed the company of someone older and she needed it bad. She thought that before today she had never known so definitely what she needed—just as heavy drinkers are never so sure as legit alcoholics that they need a drink. She had to have Dolores' laughter, neither kind nor unkind, interested but not obsessed, or she thought she would begin to have the visible shakes.

Nevertheless she took time to bathe before she went again to the telephone. It was time to cleanse herself, to restore with cleanliness and fresh clothing that walking, talking dummy of a woman who, if she knew nothing else, knew how to get through a week with humankind.

While the water sizzled and gurgled and the suds rose like a dream of Christmas from between her soothing fingers, she thought of places she and Dolores might go this evening. It hardly occurred to her that Dolores might be otherwise occupied.

There was (1) the Chez Papa Room in the Lister Hotel, always fun and neither too noisy nor too public for really good talk; (2) the terrace of the North Side Club, a dandy place to repair a hangover; eating outdoors while the sunset faded always helped remake the personality; and (3) that new place up the river from the lake that Ben had been to but she never had. He said you ate on a screened porch. There would be June bugs knocking against the screen. No music but a jukebox. (She saw herself in white ambling back to the table after having made surprise selections.) Down below, among elm branches like seaweed, the boatmen would be bringing their outboards back to the dock, arranging their gear after a fine Sunday on the water.

Rising from the foam of the bubble bath, there was a new (new and greater, as they said) Leslie Daniels, phoenix woman, a known sinner who had been, in the good old way, ennobled by enduring a major sin, daring enough to go down into the depths of hell (at least risk her own sanity) to find what witchcraft had blighted her marriage. Now she knew. She knew what was wrong with Ben, how out of his very goodness and gentleness, he failed to understand women and therefore failed them.

Even now she found no fault with this just man, but she knew that the fault was there and generously meant to ease it away. Probably without his knowing. Just to give him herself changed, wiser as she felt herself to be, no longer afraid to admit what it meant to be a woman—wouldn't that in itself teach him what he had never yet known?

“The trouble with Ben,” she would say to Dolores in the splendid frankness of equals that she now anticipated, “is that he always makes a woman feel inadequate by being too womanish—gentle—himself. He doesn't understand that could be a hidden form of cruelty. He has to learn we're not such delicate creatures.” Dolores would know what she meant. Any woman who had lived a real woman's life would know.

And would Dolores guess what had happened to her? Yes and no. There is a splendid mechanism in the female mind that suspends knowledge between light and dark, so a woman may hold in her mind even the details of the physical without quite admitting to herself that the physical exists. She did not want Dolores to know she had been unfaithful. But she trusted Dolores to sense that she was no longer quite the same girl.

The telephone rang. It was Garland Roberts.

“I did want to sort of apologize. I mean, I did feel we were taking up your time when you didn't want us there. But Vendham … either he's got that old transistor plug in his ear listening to classical music or he's
talking
. I mean I did want to meet you. I've heard so much about you. But I didn't want you to think he was such a great friend of mine. I wanted to apologize.…”

She didn't want to apologize. She wanted, after all, to court, to pay her tribute to something in whose presence she felt herself crippled and incomplete. In spite of her seeming vacuity she had sensed the great transformation, envied it, wanted to do it honor. Wanted to be near it. Yearning toward womanhood, she knew more than she knew she knew.

Leslie hung up gloating.

The phone rang again. David Lloyd. David Lloyd himself, full of his self-importance and sniffing. When she recognized his plaintive voice, Leslie knew she had been expecting him to call while Ben was gone.

He was (small surprise) downtown by himself and had just thought.… That she was lonely? Well no, hell no, Leslie, he hadn't thought
that
exactly.
He
was lonely, heh, heh, to put his limp little cards right out on the table, and he had a couple of stiff martinis in him and had thought she might like to go dancing with him after they'd had dinner, of course, maybe at the Chez Papa.… Where was
Martha?
Well, Martha was
home
, of course, and the two of them had discussed earlier in the day whether they shouldn't drop by and take Leslie maybe swimming at the lake or golfing, though it was too hot for that, but Martha had put the kibosh on their good intentions by not feeling very well, so here he was on his own and past forty and ready to crawl right across the floor and lick her dainty big shoes if that was what she wanted.…

“David, I think we're old enough friends so I can be very frank with you.” She could positively feel the needle penetrate his eardrum and pick around in his injured cranium, but she knew he didn't dare hang up now. She had him on the hook; would make him writhe. “I may even have been at fault about what happened the night of the party in the alley. I'm willing to admit that. But the point is that circumstances have changed. I told Ben what we'd done. I know it wasn't anything, but I didn't want it on my conscience. Ben has never been anything but absolutely level with me, and I thought I owed it to him. He doesn't hold it against you. It's like him to understand it was partly my fault, too. But I don't think, in view of your friendship with him, that you'd want to be in the position of
ever again
even supposing anything could happen between us. I want to humbly beg your forgiveness if I led you on. Will you forgive me? I'd like to hear you say you do, because it's very important to me.…”

Oh, she wrung him. She would not let him off the line until she had forced him to dribble a fully articulated “Yes” to her demand for forgiveness. She hung up the phone this time like a farmer hanging up a gelding knife.

So she and her life were all composed again—crime and punishment balanced splendidly as in the dogmas of a professional church—when she was ready to call Dolores. The future was as much under control as the past. With a Leslie deftness she was already considering the future
as
past and could think of the evening to come in terms of what Dolores
had
said or done for her. Dolores gave me that last little necessary pat of assurance when I needed it.…

The voice of a strange woman answered her call.

“Are you … one of the family?” the woman asked.

“Mrs. Daniels. Just a friend.”

“Oh. We'd been expecting Esther's call from California.”

“If Dolores is there—”

“She isn't.”

“If she comes back within the next, well, half hour, she can call—”

“Mrs. Daniels, I'm sorry to be the one. Mrs. Calfert passed away. Yes. Sorry. I'm Evelyn Graber. I live next door. You see, I knocked this morning and Dolores wasn't feeling at all well. I had coffee and she took some bicarb but
no
coffee. She thought it was gas. She wasn't at all comfortable lying down. I'm so sorry. Then this afternoon when I knocked I didn't get an answer. I called the police. They've just left with the ambulance. I'm waiting here, expecting a call from the children. I know we all loved her.”

Mother! I meant to write to you! Really!

“…
waaahk
…!”

“It was her poor old heart,” Evelyn Graber said. “I don't know if you knew it or not, but she'd been warned.”

We have been warned. Hank called to warn me, Leslie thought. Old Smothers was a warning. All the dreams. The black between dreams. Garland, pretty Garland, who never was alive. All warnings.

“Is there anything I can do?” Leslie said. She felt her nails in her palm and remembered that when she was very little her mother had made a thumbstall for her because in sleep her thumbnail pressed too sharply into her palm. That was a warning too, one she had ignored with all the others.

“Why, no, dear,” Mrs. Graber's soft voice said. “Why, no, it's all taken care of now. If you'll give me your number I'll certainly let you know about the funeral.”

“Please,” Leslie said. “Oh, please.”

Now she gyrated through the empty house like a woman locked up with a leopard. It was stalking, it was near. She had to think what might be done to outwit it. Ben would be back soon. Ben would blame her for Dolores' death. Of course. He ought to blame her. She had been left behind to take care of his friend. No friend when he came home.

She heard a rending of metal high in the air. Looping, descending, drifting streaks of fire and bodies falling from high up into the gray ocean south of Battery Park. Ben. Ben among them plummeting.

No, she said. No, I don't want that.

I will face it, she said. I will face my woman guilt and beat it.

Listening for the silent footfalls of the leopard, she once again leafed through the phone book. PAN, PAR, PATCH.…

“This is Leslie, Mrs. Daniels,” she said. “I've got to see you tonight. Tonight. Can I come over, please? Right away? Please!”

Part Three

chapter 15

D
ESCENDING
from the silver belly of the plane, descending past the stewardess's smile and tacit congratulations for a safe return, he saw within a moment that Leslie was waiting for him. Beyond the mesh fence by the terminal buildings she was standing with—standing against—Martha Lloyd like a young officer well displayed by the company of a floppy civilian. From gemlike toenails to the perfection of her hair (she'd had it cut short, so the ends only flared a little from her head in that succinct curve dear to baroque wood-carvers, carving this time in red walnut) she looked as if the cellophane had just been peeled away a moment before the great airplane touched its wheels on the Sardis runway. Pretty Leslie.

Martha wore a floppy hat that looked as if it were a part of Leslie's trick—so ineffective, so not-quite-right beside the precision of Leslie's white, tan, and auburn sleekness. It was not beyond belief that this defaulting hat was indeed Leslie's recommendation, made when she stopped to pick Martha up on her way to the airport. (“I'm
not
wild about it, hon. But it's only Ben we're going to meet. He's only been gone six days. After all.” The deviation in her argument too slight to be the occasion for contention, the advantage she sought too slight to refuse her.)

And the last touch of a female calculation he despaired even yet of understanding was that, for the first time since their wedding, Leslie was wearing a girdle that morning. (“I don't like fat girls,” she had always explained—as if her refusal of this illusion were an explanation that qualities of character alone kept her slim and trim. To wear a girdle would be to confess a lack of spiritual fastidiousness. Or so she had always tacitly maintained.) He thought when he came grinning into her arms that he had seen a girdle's effect. To make sure, he pinched her, tweaked elastic.

“Here now, here!” she said when she realized what he was doing. (He would think later, pondering the discords of the day, that bad timing had made his slight offense enormous, the way a finger held close to the eye can blot out mountains. Yes, he would blame himself first for the botched communication between them.) An immense blush that seemed to start below the neckline of her dress boiled up and over her jawbone to confirm for him (an ace too late) that wearing the girdle had been no small decision for her, that on this triviality she had staked big wagers. “I put on a couple of pounds while you were gone, darling,” she told him. She broke quickly from his kiss and turned her head away in some offense that only a child would have been willing to claim aloud.

“Kiss for me?” Martha demanded. “Yum, yum. Your bitch wife didn't even want me to put on
lipstick
.”

“I was afraid we'd be late,” Leslie said.

“Compulsion neurosis. Worse than cancer.”

“It was compulsion to bring you at all,” Leslie growled fondly. And Ben wondered why she had—why on this specific morning she had had to.