Pretty Leslie (3 page)

“So yes,” she said. “Why don't I get a massage?”

In twenty minutes the realer Leslie (always someone's idea, the real female servant of the envious, stay-at-home people, of older women and pimpled girls) lay on a table being sweetly pummeled by a mute Swedish oak with hands like truncheons. (Dolores had supplied the address, like a penciled assignment passed to a call girl.) The people's servant, relaxing in her skin, did not forget her obligation to make it all up to Martha for dragging her along to this rite. Martha doted on Ben. She deserved to hear his latest adventure.

“‘Constantly,'” Leslie said, into the damp crook of forearm that supported her face. “Ben was upset, or not really upset but just amused—or not even amused but ever so little
shocked
that this woman—” (She was a strict adherent of the Hippocratic oath and supposed it came a little more natural for women than for men not to tell the whole truth and give away names and such.) “—this woman should need to have it explained to her what
constantly
meant, as for instance whether it meant she could leave the baby long enough to put clothes in the drier or go turn on the sprinklers in the lawn—she wanting him to take over her whole life, like letting go of a steering wheel in the middle of traffic and assuming that someone else, merely because it's his profession, will grab it. It's the little things that exasperate him when he's exasperated.…”

“He's so patient,” Martha said, planting the tiniest of barbs in that flawless but by no means delicate rump on the massage table.

“A monster of tolerance,” Leslie agreed, “but like getting parents to bring their kids
in
when they're sick instead of expecting him to go on house calls. He's lazy, too, and that's a virtue. That is, you see, it can be in the long run. There's principle involved too.”

Martha asked, “When you come right down to it, what
does
constantly mean?”

Wouldn't she though? Wouldn't it be Martha who would practically go off her chair at the opportunity of a semantic hassle? Leslie had a sense that she was betrayed by an inopportune shift of listeners. Dolores Calfert and Dolly Sellers would have had too much tact to quibble.

“That is, if Dave complains about constant demands I make on—”

Oh crap, oh dear. Leslie closed her eyes and refused the messages coming in her ears. Knock, knock, not home. Still knocking, Martha? Wait until I change my personality, put on my collegiate horn rims, dahling. Yet, in the concentration on herself (quite like concentrating on the mirror while she got her makeup just right), she admitted that repeating what Ben told her
did
make her sound trivial.

No doubt Martha's third ear (which might be visible if you shaved her dowdy hair) had been registering this triviality all along and would hold it against poor, innocent and nowise trivial Ben unless she was lured off the scent. Better give her the image of a real flip to divert her.

“Ben dreamed my parakeet got loose and flew over the stove,” she said. She peered out through the red-brown, limp strands of her hair (getting to be a nuisance length though Ben thought it “womanly”) to see whether Martha's neck had stretched at the mention of dreams. Martha read a lot of Erich Fromm, and would as soon interpret a dream invented on the spot as the icky ones that no sensible person would ever tell her.

“The stove?” Martha said. “Great God.”

Stove
must mean something special in Fromm, Leslie thought. Not …? Could it …? Stove …? Mine? Not mine. Hers maybe, and if so, poor David. No wonder he went around with such exaggerated lines between his brows.

“Not only over the stove,” Leslie said grandly, closing her eyes and submitting to the rhythm of heavy hands beating her shoulders, “but right over the flame—” (Flame? Could that mean …? Never mind. Let Martha think as nasty as she liked.) “—so poor old Bill singed himself like a chicken. I've never singed a chicken, have you? I wonder how I know how a chicken
is
singed. From a childhood trauma? It looked so naked over the fire, huh? That kind of jazz? Anyway Bill was just a mess from his adventure. And Ben picked him up, with rubber gloves, and the point of the dream was that Ben wasn't concerned about the bird.”

“That
may
have been the point of the dream,” Martha said significantly.

“Or may not, huh? Well, you know how deep Ben can be. Levels under levels under levels. But he said it was the point—you know, that he was more concerned about how I'd take it than what happened to the creature. He wondered how he could ever tell me. Wasn't that sweet of him?”

“That is sweet,” Martha said. She was evidently doing a Frommian sum in her head. She'll think she's really got an old insight on me now, Leslie thought. I don't care if she has. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but insights run off like cold (?) water off a duck's back. “Oh, what are you putting on me?”

“Oil,” the masseuse said.

Martha's calculating eyes were fixed on the masseuse, so much like a towering matron in her kitchen, kneading the dough for a loaf of bread or maybe a sugar cake.

“No, it's appalling,” Leslie said drowsily. “For one thing it's so horribly true to character. Poor, took-advantage-of Ben Daniels, devoted in word, thought, and deed. Still … I can't see anything really wrong with a devoted husband. Is it a bad sign, Martha? Do you know, Martha, we haven't spent more than a night or two apart since we got married? Four years, and I'm a doctor's wife. That's batting almost a thousand, I guess. But appalling the way it suggests I dominate him emotionally.” There, Leslie thought, that's exactly the insight dear Martha was going to have about me, and now she knows I have it too. “I don't care about the damn bird. He's just, you know, costume. I pretend I'm one of these silly frigid bitches that focus their emotions on some pet. That is, now and then I pretend that. Not very often. But I'd make a
pâté alouette
out of Bill without batting my pretty eyelashes. Ben knows this. I think the appalling thing is that
in his dream
Ben would think I cared, when he knows consciously I truly wouldn't. Don't you?”

“I'm bored with dreams,” Martha said. She was watching the masseuse pour oil into her cupped palms in preparation for slapping it onto Leslie's back. “What kind of oil is that?”

“I mix it myself,” the woman said without a smile. “Good for the skin.”

“No doubt,” Martha said, arching her eyebrows and grinning at the rebuff. She lit a cigarette and crossed her legs. She looked at the three-inch scar on Leslie's back and wondered why it never showed at the beach. It would be hard to find a bathing suit cut high enough to cover it. “I suppose you and Ben are psychoanalytically oriented, and if you are, you are. Ben hates the lousy bird. So what? Does he have to dream to know that?”

Leslie laughed and swung her long legs from the table. In three quick, shy strides she reached the dressing room where she had left her clothes. She left the door slightly ajar so she could talk to Martha while she dressed. She felt great, as she always did after a massage. She felt herself. How odd and wonderful it was to be reminded that the person who grumped to work in the mornings and caught cold so easily in the bad months, who went to pieces like an overworked mop on the first day of her periods and suffered annual hay fever, was not the real, the true Leslie Skinner Daniels. Along with everything else, she was hungry now, with a keen, clean appetite, and for a moment she supposed that the hunger would be visible on her face when she and Martha went out onto the street, a bonus of beauty that people passing would notice.

In the dark cubby her underwear gleamed—reminiscent, oddly, of the incandescent color she loved on Bill's wings and breast. She had never liked white underwear, nor bedclothing either. Too hospitally, she had always told Ben. So they slept on sheets striped brown and white or yellow and white, like Christmas candy. What if she were to buy—this afternoon, perhaps, since she and Martha had three hours free for shopping—some really gaudy underthings? A new costume for Ben to be devoted to. A girdle, say, in “parakeet green,” though she never wore girdles, owned only one. She would say to the salesladies, “What, you have nothing in parakeet green?” Then mauve, or orchid at least. Something to make Ben laugh, part of the endless act they carried on. If she could costume herself recognizably like Bill and then, with dramatic silliness, undrape and say, “Look at who you really dreamed about. Poor Leslie.” Ah, she really wasn't as silly as that, but all these little touches were fun. Were more of an asset to The Marriage, she supposed, than the makeweight job she worked at five mornings a week in Bieman's Studio.
That
barely paid for her lunches and clothes. Still the massage today was on her own money, and she had enough left for lunch and drinks with Martha.

“Where do we eat?” she called to Martha. She heard the pages of a magazine slap shut before Martha answered, and she could picture Martha's eyes narrowed in calculation. Martha weighed every decision, no matter how small.

“Depends on whether you want to see my husband or not,” she answered. “Since we're late, we can catch him now.”

“Goodness yes,” Leslie said. “Dave's always so pleased to see me. Golly. Of course.”

“Mmmmm. I was afraid of that. I told him we
might
meet him in the Oak Room. So he'll be there. But it doesn't matter. He only has to cross the street.” Martha's husband was advertising manager for the Sardis
Record
. He was forty-five to Martha's thirty-five to Leslie's twenty-seven. He had cynical lines in his face, though his character—what one knew of it—was more complicated than that. And it was perfectly true that he was always glad to see Leslie anywhere and any time.

On their way to the Oak Room—just after they had crossed Governor in a glorious noontime hiss and honk of traffic—they ran into Donald Patch. He was window-shopping in a sporting goods store, and from the way he turned just as they approached, Leslie supposed he must have recognized her—her walk or something—in the reflections on the glass. He turned, anyway, with a big-toothed grin that absolutely excluded Martha, seemed to blot her out of his field of vision as mechanically as if he had held one hand up over his left eye.

“Go-eeng feesh-eeng?” Leslie asked without slowing her stride.

“Any time you see me, I'm fishing,” he said. He had no chance to say anything more, for they swept on past him like ladies who have already sniffed the crystalline fragrance of a lunchtime martini.

“Fishing for what?” Martha said. Her lips were pursed quite unattractively as she waited for the obvious admission. “What a plebeian little sniffer.”

“For me.”

“I'm sure. What's he got for bait?”

“Just nothing, darling. Just nothing. Unless you like curly red hair.”

“In a sofa pillow, baby. I have to admit I haven't seen anything quite like it since we mistakenly detoured through the Ozarks last winter. It's a coiffure I believe to be favored by the Sunday-school dandies of Petal, Mississippi. How hick.”

“Donald's not exactly a hick. He does free-lance for Bieman's. Some photography. Some airbrush stuff. He's supposed to be pretty good. I've seen his name lovingly lettered in the ladies' room.”

“Good God.”

“Don't disparage my following.”

“With that following, I'd run,” Martha said.

“It's all I've got left,” Leslie mourned. “You should have known me in New York, when I worked at the news magazine. The word on me there was ‘She's not a woman, she's a network.' But chaste as a lily! Chaste as a lily!”

“Some people would brag about anything,” Martha snarled.

Then, with sunlight dazzling around them like silent laughter, as if all nature and the city, too, were as pleased with Leslie Daniels and her life as she was herself, they were there.

Praise the day in the evening. Praise June in July. Praise the lunch when you pay the check.

It should have turned out nicely, after all, since she preferred David's company to Martha's (because he apparently preferred hers to Martha's), and maybe it turned out all right, since at worst it was blah. But at least it sapped her mood. Get your vegetative nervous system in shape and the vegetable parasites go for it with their spongy little teeth.… She believed that a failure to read her horoscope that morning had betrayed her into having lunch with the Lloyds at all.

Though she knew they disliked each other and seldom agreed, they seemed to side against her now. (You get too far up, too drunk with June, and everyone tries to pull you back down with them.)

Somehow they made her think it necessary to correct any impression of frivolity she might have left with Martha (though a while before, that was exactly the impression she intended to give), so, hoping for Dave's support, she tried to finish the story she had begun with Martha. While they drank their second martinis, she showered them with melodramatic lines about Ben, the black boy, and the Tabor baby.

“While he was trying to thread this incredibly tiny vein …” (They were listening … but what exactly had Ben known or realized or sensed while he panted to save the child? Ben communicated splendidly with her. It was awfully hard to translate him faithfully to others. Yet she was by far the more articulate of the two. So, as now, it was often up to her to supply the color that would recreate what she sensed in his account. They ought to be in awe of him. She had to awe them.)

“There was something literally uncanny guiding him … was really down there in the land of the dead … had to give up something, like a mortgage on his own life, for the right to bring her back … returned to the good old safe and sane o.r. with the child following—walking? of course, not of course, really but not literally
walking
behind him—and the interne Jaeger said …”