Pretty Leslie (35 page)

What he sensed rising from her then, almost but not quite palpable as an odorous veil that wrapped his head, was her beastly submission. As if someone had struck him an enormous blow with a fist, nearly smashing the back of his head, he saw her as she had been—had always been—when she gave what she had never given him.

She seemed to be drawing him down to rend her, to draw blood, to make her whine and beg. And then, so easily, the deep nerve centers that would not ever respond to love would pass their messages. The loins unlocked would perform their womanly functions. With a pained, chimpanzee shriek she would be his wife.

“The fault's not yours,” he said huskily. “Let's have none of this talk of killing. At least we can stop short of talking like that.”

But, maddeningly, he sensed her closing herself against him as they tried—and dear God, he thought, no one ever tried so hard as they to find the way to each other—to find some acceptable communion.

They wanted to love, but they could not even manage to give each other sleep that night. In half an hour the uneven tides of quarreling were high again. Both in robes, sweating in the front room beyond the range of the new air conditioner in the bedroom, they were maddening each other with their inability to come at the simple truth.

“I only asked you who,” he said. He was slopping a highball from the glass in his hand. “You can give him everything and you cannot give me the simple syllables of a name. David Lloyd.”

“Don't be silly,” she said like an insulted princess. “It certainly was not David. Ugh.”

“Who? Who? Who? Who?”

“You're ridiculous.”

He threw the remaining contents of his glass straight up. The ice cubes rebounded from the ceiling like cold stones.

“The cleaning woman will like that,” Leslie said. “So I'm a whore. Let's go to bed and you can tell me about the divorce in the morning.”

Comically, humbly, he knelt to gather up the cubes. He rattled them like dice in the glass. From the floor he looked up at her and said, “Old girl, this isn't us, is it? I really
have
accepted it. I really am not aiming to stone you, whatever my crazy old lady would have thought was right.”

“Accepted what? I didn't say I'd done anything.”

“Oh
Jesus
. Darling, it's three in the morning. Hours ago we agreed.… I put it as gently as I could. I didn't throttle you. I—”

Now she had the signal for tears. “Does it occur to you that I'm dying? That the reason I won't—and I
won't
—discuss it with you is that there isn't anything left of me? I'm being
crucified
. Damn it, I can't stand what's happened. I love you.”

“You can't stand a dangling—”

“Goddamn you. Goddamn you.”

“Just stop telling yourself it's you who made me—sweet Ben,
dear
Ben—talk so bad. This is
me
talking. Goddamn it, I'm
somebody. I
am yelling. I'm tired of this mealymouthed farce of a marriage where you have to give your permission before I can say anything. Fuck you. Fuck you.”

Then both of them, like actors in some delirious dream, faced each other and laughed uproariously. It was too unbearably ridiculous to go on with.

“All I want to know is for Christ's sake who?” he said.

“Why?”

“Because you're unwilling to tell me, I guess.”

“That means it's important,” she assented gravely. “I guess you're right again. Again.”

“Who?”

“I won't tell you,” she said. “Please don't. I can't stand any more. Please don't.” Hearing the timbre of her own voice then, she looked up in terror. It was as if she were in another scene, begging another man not to make a woman of her. And both of them there now recognized, however obscurely, what echo they had heard.

“Who?” he said.

“Please don't. Please don't ask. I'm not going to tell you.”

Neither slept that night. What sleep they got for the remainder of the week was largely the result of drugs and a painfully careful protocol of politeness they worked out with each other. They managed to see friends. They seemed—even to each other—to be unchanged from the times before, as long as they were with others. Alone together, they had no recourse left except the frigidities of politeness or the heat of quarreling.

Monstrously—both of them knew it was monstrous—they broke into the very peak and pitch of their quarrels to try the bed or couch. They talked for hours, like two ancient Viennese professors about how, the circumstances being strained, they ought not, they really shouldn't, even come close to sexual excitements.

And fell on each other like dogs, moaning and whining and tearing each other for what they could not have.

There was no neat or dramatic terminus for that period of the summer. Only as the days went on, there seemed to be a kind of withering in the fury that flung them together and kept them apart. There were times when each could tell himself that time was healing the wound.

Ben stopped asking who had been her lover. She sometimes used the formula, “If I were sure it made no difference, of course I'd tell you.
He
—the man—isn't of any importance at all. He's no one I care about. You know that.”

“And isn't that the pity of it.”

“It makes me pretty disgusting,” she agreed.

They thought they were getting well. They thought they were turning into zombies. Carefully they avoided talking about children—South American children, the children Leslie might bear, Ben's patients. Any children at all.

But they found that summer that the subject matter for quarreling is limitless. With the root of their marriage cleft—or exposed as never having been more than an illusion—and not to be healed or made real by any force they could yet imagine, they sharpened their wits on each other. Talked. Endless talk about why, exactly why, precisely why, why indeed Leslie had worn her girdle to the airport. The knowledge that
this
was not what they meant soured them both.

Yet, as strong as anything that pulled them apart, something not yet defined seemed to find its strategems for renewing them, teasing them—if that was what it amounted to—with promises that the best might come out of this worst. Slowly and doggedly they seemed to be approaching an honesty about the past beyond anything they had thought possible or needed before. The frankness of despair turned out sometimes to be better than the evasions of complacency. The mere fact that they treated a crime like an affliction was surely, they each thought, a promise that the chief things uniting them were still intact.

Not quite miraculously they began to make love again in the hot nights. Cripples mating on crutches. The image popped into their earnest dialogue without appalling them. They were scared and fighting for their lives. Cripples, then—but there was a new tenderness and a new respect that led on to the tempting hope that two new people were emerging from a chrysalis of nastiness and suffering.

But with it all, there went the grim suspicion that to condone the cause of their strife would be to surrender themselves unconditionally. Then they would be impersonal digits in an amoral population. If what Leslie had done did not matter, then why not expect her to do the same thing again at the dictates of chance and circumstance? This prospect was more ominous to Leslie, really, than to Ben. More than he, she hungered for some formula of retribution that would dignify her lapse (as she sometimes thought it now). If scarlet letters had been in fashion, she would have worn one on every light summer dress and her bathing suit as well.

Her period was two weeks late in August. The preciousness of each day, finally each hour, was augmented by a swelling hope that she was pregnant. Secretly, almost breathlessly, she began to conceive that her adultery with Don Patch was a modern semi-demi-psychological-metaphysical equivalent of the Annunciation. (“No angel with a lily for this girl,” she growled to herself—rather thrilled, nevertheless, to think that ancient mysteries were being so coarsely disclosed to her. All the dirty jokes she had ever heard about Mary and Joseph “took on a new psychological dimension,” she thought. The child she would bear would be Ben's, of course, but “not quite” Ben's. Of course this line of fictional speculation was nothing she could discuss with him. It was her secret, the glory of her mania.)

She superstitiously hid from Ben the fact that she was late. At least she avoided calling his attention to it. But in a house full of charts that diagramed her menstrual cycle it was hard to suppose he had not noted. In his cell of silence he was waiting as hopefully as she.

She spent one weekend on hands and knees cleaning and waxing every floor in the house, crawling in a torpid rapture of conviction that the heaviness in her body could mean only one thing.

The stain of blood on Monday morning told her that she had lied to herself again. Everything had lied to her. Her body and its most animal promptings had been part of the deception she had taken in good faith, had been the bait for a worse disappointment than any so far. Worst of all, the blood told her she had failed Ben again. Had failed him from the very peak of her conviction that she “could do anything.” She had been to hell and back this summer, she thought, and all she had to show her husband was sore feet from the trip.

It was all so simple, she thought. She had lied about so many things, why had she never lied about the right thing before?

“Whooooo. Whooooeeee. Let me get my breath.”

Count ten, fifteen, twenty, to pretend the convulsion had really interrupted her breathing. Then stir ever so softly like the Sleeping Beauty who knows the Prince is on the premises and in just a jiffy will remember the utterly dynamic kiss he bestowed.

“Jeez,” she said, “huh-uh, no, wait. Don't
move
. Too tender. Whhhoooosh! Everything
changes
.”

Count twenty-five, thirty, forty, fifty, to give him time to remember that last glad yelp and pitch with fingernails thrust madly in his ribs. While counting, think fondly what a dear, naïve goose he is to attach so much importance to it, anyway, as if only that could prove him a man to himself. Love him for your generosity to him. Remember how silly of Violet Snavely to interpret such fakery as the product of hate.

Give him the grand, dispassionate kiss of a French general distributing medals, to show not only that all passion is spent, exploded, consumed, used up in the prescribed manner but that you recognize his devotion beyond the call of duty in waiting for you.

Count fifty, sixty, seventy, while you wrestle with feelings of envy a little bit sharper than the nights when there was no fakery. But hold your goddamn tongue.

Then spoil the whole charade by talking so much and so extravagantly that a fifteen-year-old sheepherder would see through the whole rotten performance. Better than anybody, ever. Like that one time I told you about, only without any black fantasies or needing to feel
punished
. Like the first time I did it myself only
without
all that icky undergraduate guilt. Did I tell you what I was singing that time in the shower when it first dawned on me I could? That Whiffenpoof song.…

Ben took it all quietly, though if she had wanted to—cared a good goddamn (at the moment she didn't care about anybody or anything)—she could have put her finger right on the
sentence
when he stopped believing she had really made it with him.

So he lay pretending he was well pleased and going to sleep. But then when he thought she was asleep, he put on his light robe and pussyfooted to the kitchen. She heard the icebox door open. Heard ice tinkle. Thought, My God, was it so bad he's got to
drink
to forget it?

All right. She had done her best, and he might as well hear that she was tired of being blamed for the whole problem, which, as he might remember, did not date exactly from this July. She hunted her own robe, followed him out. She mixed a drink as big as his.

She was, she said, sick of the role of guilt in which
he
had cast her for the whole damn summer. “I don't
feel
guilty,” she said now (meaning that the intense emotions of guilt were transformed by long pain into something more like anger and rebellion). “I
never
felt really guilty,” she said (meaning that a curtain of forgetfulness was fixed in place and she was ready to attack any reminder from him of just how sick with guilt she had been a few weeks before).

“Other women we know have done it. We're not the backwoods jokers we've been pretending to be. Let's stop the pretense. I thought it was tacitly understood.…” (Meaning it was understood that a romp in bed was her prerogative as long as there were no consequences.)

Since he was not visibly scarred by the summer of consequences, he could only make her recognize there
had
been some by emphasizing what divided them. “
You
understood what you wanted to understand. I never understood anything of the sort.” He remembered when he had weighed the argument of tacit understanding. It seemed a long time ago. All he really wanted now was to be done forever with the overextended nightmare—which had not, thank God, totally eclipsed their lives; they still had work, friends, and good times—which had made their house and their privacy things to be avoided and fled, where once they had been the haven both returned to eagerly.

And as if she sensed his wish to forget and have done, she goaded him back by revealing parts of the truth she had kept from him in June.

Yes, “this man” had made her come. Yes, “big.” Yes, obviously that was why the experience had been so upsetting. Yes, of course her sentiment that now she was ready to be a woman and mother must have sprung from the promptings of an experience she had never had before, a confidence in her own body she had never been given.

Ben said tiredly, “I don't care about that any more, Les. It would have blasted me apart if you'd told me in June. I think I'm grateful to you for sparing me that. I
think
I am. What happened one night—”