Pretty Leslie (38 page)

What lacked in his women—and of course, obviously, most of all with the Negroes—was quality. He couldn't pride himself on a single one of his conquests. At least he didn't. At the age of twenty-six, his taste for women was soured, and the mere number of them loomed beyond the curtains of his mind like a sinister reproach. More and more his moments of masculine pride were limited to the hours when he actually made them extend themselves and admit by their groans that he was the better man.

Sick. He knew it was sick. And for all that he had been through, he had never lost a simple adulation for health. It was the health of those imagined astronauts in his earliest drawings that had lured him on to the tricky career of an artist. It was the image of a whole, invulnerable man that goaded him through his career of sick promiscuity.

He could not give up women any more than he could quit his compulsive painting; because to quit painting would be to admit that those lazy scornful classmates of his at art school had been right. Not to best a woman would be an admission that he was not a man at all. Not to find at the pinnacle of so much effort and so much dread a splendid woman who would make up for all the pigs, slobs, and racial outcasts on whom he had trod water for so long would be to drown in the slops of a world he hated with all his heart.

Hence Leslie Daniels. First he had admired her beyond reason. Discounting (as he knew how to peel away and discount) his natural habits of disparaging everyone, it was fair to say he adored her. Love sprang from despair and futility. He shared her conviction that she could never look at him except with condescension and amusement.

He had to do a scratchboard illustration for a beer advertisement. As it came out, a magnificent and Junoesque young woman was shown handing, with unexplained amusement and more than mild condescension, a glass of frothing poison to a fawning young man; the setting was rural. If the woman did not look much like Leslie, that lack of resemblance only camouflaged the passion he had devoted to the columnar neck and splendid shoulders, conceived in her image.

He collected photographs of her. At the shop Lester Glenn was always using up company film and paper to portray his friends and fellow workers. Amid the rejects of his work fell several shots of Leslie: taking off her coat as she arrived for work, picking her large front teeth as she squinted into the keys of her typewriter, gazing like a goddess out of the rear window at the parking lot below, leaning back in her swivel chair with her thumbs stuck in the pockets of a smart little leather vest. These were carried home and pinned on Patch's bulletin board. He thought that someday he would try a portrait of her or use her broad, lovely face in an allegorical picture of the Armed Services that he had in mind to do. (It was tentatively titled “Victory in Korea” and would show a mammoth, lamenting nude withdrawing into the clouded North while Douglas MacArthur and other fighters clawed vainly after it.) But he earnestly doubted whether he had the right to use Leslie's face tacked onto a nude figure, even allegorical.

Then his image of Leslie's life changed like a shadow box moved from artificial light into the gleam of afternoon sun. Dolly's illicit confidences showed Leslie to be “like all the rest of them.” He found he resented Leslie (the Leslie who said, “My God, you put all the holes in their helmets.”) for betraying the Leslie who never condescended to speak to the guilty consort of Negro women. He began to hang around her office more after that, looking for occasions to drop delicate insults like soiled tissue in her path.

He began to entertain the prospect that “someday” he would come to terms with her for being less than he had assumed she was. The someday of their imagined rendezvous was as indefinite as the future date when art critics and museums would throw the money changers out of the art temple and welcome him as the new Michelangelo who had gone silently on with his task while the mob had whored after modern art. That is, he knew that such a day was altogether against probabilities, but he liked to chew on the fantasy nevertheless.

Even on that great day at Bieman's farm, when so much had happened with such shocking quickness, his persistent following after her had been without hope of immediate reward or even much notice. Naturally he knew the direction he was heading with her, but only as a fastened compass needle knows it must go as far north as it can.

When she took him to her house, he expected a nightcap because she had said they would have a nightcap. When she came out wearing nothing but a robe, he had been really frightened.

The fear had gone through many modulations before morning came. He could not have stayed with her so long, he supposed, if he had not been afraid of mockery, a mockery whose source he never bothered to define. He had been afraid she would not let him rise until he was sexless as a baby.

His fear had seen him through. When he left her sleeping and shuffled out into the first morning light—intending to get the hell out of the neighborhood and sleep in a park or even a ditch until the buses started their Sunday routes—he felt that intense, weak-kneed thanksgiving of a combat pilot returning from his last mission or a survivor of the Light Brigade riding back down the littered floor of the valley. God, what a woman. God, what a struggle. Already he sensed the elation of knowing how he would look back on (and perhaps someday tell about) this most heroic night of his life. He had made it.

He had made it like Jack, now climbing down the beanstalk with his loot. He could still feel the vine tremble above him with the weight of the pursuing giant. He did not get away unobserved. A couple of kids parked in a big blue convertible watched him leave the house—perhaps roused to attention by the fear that he might be coming out to spy on them. He would remember the girl's blond hair and her blue eyes bright as the flame of acetylene torches fixed on him as she watched him cross the side lawn and turn down the block.

They're neighbors, he thought. They'll spread the word. He felt like crying. Like Jack, he wanted to yell for his mother to bring the axe and cut down the dreadful beanstalk he had been climbing. Tired to death, he walked on, expecting every minute to hear the sound of a pursuing car. When he was almost run over by a Pontiac on Kimbark Avenue, his first thought was that someone was trying to pay him off for what he had done.

It was only some golden, nameless, unworldly sense of glory that sustained him until he got home. And a feeling that he had touched the goal of his life, that he would never have to go through the great effort again.

He lived in a small, smoke-blackened building just outside Sardis' principal business district. Downstairs was an auto supply house, and the front of the building was mostly covered with a sign
EXHAUST FUMES KILL
. The front windows of his second-floor apartment looked out between the letters of the last word.

His apartment offered no luxury except space. Mostly it consisted of a very big room across the front of the building. One side of this was furnished for living with a daybed, chest, chairs, a table and some bookshelves. The major part of the room was used as his studio. It was filled almost to the point of clutter with tables, easels, cupboards for his equipment and supplies, and some gym devices he had bought at auction once, intending to build his body up to ideal dimensions.

The living space was divided from the studio part by a bank of shelves holding nine big rectangular aquariums. In the back of the apartment was a kitchen where he ate, and another small room used for storage.

The aquariums made a sort of living wall. The fish were always, here or there, in motion. The color and value of the water changed with the conditions of light in the apartment. Also a cluster of rubber hoses brought air into the tanks from a compressor in the kitchen, so floral bunches of bubbles rose constantly through the varicolored water.

All that Sunday Patch was too feeble to work, too edgy to fall into a real sleep. Hangover, he called his condition. He lay knocked out on his daybed watching the fish. Hour after hour the fantails and catfish, his black mollie and the neon tetra drifted like something in the fluid of his eyes. Like angels, perhaps.

In the afternoon when thunderheads brought a procession of shadows over the city, he was aware of the way their shadows darkened the small cubes of water, changing all the relationships like glazes washed onto a wall of paintings. In the seaweed clumps that grew in most of the tanks, tiny monsters seemed about to wake.

He saw fleets of guppies, sleek as modern warplanes (the fish had always made him think of Air Force weaponry) that seemed to approach him in formation until they encountered the glass of their tanks and veered away.

He saw snails move. First they would raise a minute turbulence in the bottom sand. With occasionally perceptible motion (creatures of time itself, calling no attention to their goals by speed) they changed their positions on the long green blades of the water plants.

Watching them, he contentedly lost the sense of his own body. He drifted like them in the fluid buoyant medium of the hot afternoon. He could imagine himself under water, like his fish, but if he were, then he must be drowned. Yes, it was like that, like having been changed by a physical convulsion great as drowning, so that he had been brought back through last night's mysteries to a fluid comfort he never should have left in the first place. He was back where he did not have to dodge or fear or hate or paint or chase women. Something more essential than love—or anxiety either—sustained him: a sense that he had completed his course like a spawning salmon bruised by rocks and waterfalls, but successful. He was like those creatures who have all they need without exertion as they lapse gently toward their death.

For his euphoric state he felt a vague gratitude toward Leslie Daniels, though he had already forgotten what she was like—maybe like the movement of these fish. Leslie Daniels. Then he forgot her name, too.

It seemed that the delightful fish, trailing their plumes of fins, swam through his ribs and his empty skull. He slept.

Something was taking care of him. He didn't need to worry about that.

Her phone call woke him. He answered the phone too groggy to find an excuse for telling her not to come. The tone of her voice alarmed him. He was sure something had gone wrong. They had been found out or she was hurt. He was more afraid of not finding out the danger than of confronting her again. So he gave her the address. He told her to recognize the building by the big sign painted on the front.

He stayed scared, but from the moment she said a winded “Hi” and slipped conspiratorially through his apartment door, he was completely bewildered about what she wanted.

First she seemed only to want to look around. With him following at her elbow, she paced through the studio area. She studied each painting on the wall as if its abundance of minute detail were something she had better read now, like the small print on a legal document already signed.

She asked a few brisk questions—very much in the tone of a lady reporter—about which of his works were “commercial” and which “he had done for himself.” She smiled at the photos of herself pinned to his bulletin board, but passed them lightly as if she had already known they were there. She opened the cupboard that held his materials. She said that everything was just about as neat as his paintings and drawings. Everything was certainly in its place and she supposed there was a place for everything.

Then her apparently systematic survey brought her around to the fish. She had heard about them. Nevertheless she had not expected them to be so familiar. She did not know the names of the various species. The three-inch black catfish with bulging snout seemed an utterly improbable creature, a wildly decadent joke. It was as if a long oozing of mud had been given life and motion. Yet its velvety beauty could stir her memory as if she, too, had once kept such a pet.

“It looks like a swimming rat,” she said.

He was shocked a little and offended. “Oh no.” It pleased her that he could be shocked by such a trivial thing. That seemed to give her an advantage for which she had been intuitively maneuvering.

She was standing before the bank of aquariums like a great lady shopping among the paintings on a dealer's wall, a shrewd shopper who knew that all his actual paintings were fakes compared to the living motion in the water. She used the glass of the tanks as a mirror to locate his position behind her. “How about a drink for the broad?” she snapped.

By the time he had brought it, still unable to think of anything to say to her, she had moved around the dividing wall and was sitting on the daybed. She drank lustily from the glass. At last—as if prepared at last for the obvious—she said, “Well, Mr. Patch, we made quite a night of it.” It was the tone she had often heard her mother use with repairmen who came to the house to service some appliance she had ineptly broken.

He nodded cautiously.

“When lightning strikes, it strikes,” she said. “I've always believed that. I've never tried to deceive myself about my own actions. I accepted the guilt beforehand. There's nothing on my conscience. No good to lie to oneself. Bad show. It happened, so it happened. No use denying it. Whether it should have or not. It happened.”

“You wanted it,” he said, as if he had been very unjustly accused.

“And now it's over,” she said rapidly. “I mean, I didn't want you to think anything was
beginning
.”

Then why is she here? he thought. But he did not grin.

“Oh God,” she said. “I'm being crucified. I can't stand what's happened.” Then, as if realizing this could not possibly make sense to him—as if admitting somewhat against her inclination that she was not alone with her thoughts any longer—she said, “Dolores Calfert died this morning.”

He thought she was joking. He could not understand why she wanted to joke or where her joke was tending, but what she said was simply incredible. Of course he had meant to ditch the old girl last night. He had not wished for her death.