Pretty Leslie (5 page)

Her
father
, whom she had not seen since Christmas two and a half years ago, her first and only trip home to Manhasset with Ben, was probably still telling the story of the time she was her high school's delegate to the UN. “It was one of these projects that brought in kids from all over the Island as well as the boroughs, and God knows what they did to the state of the world when they had their mock sessions in some theater. Probably gave the whole U.S. away to the tribes without the law. Anyway, dear Leslie met this Buddhist boy from Southeast Asia, some country down there. She was always telling people to come and stay with us. Months passed. World problems remained. Leslie completely forgot the Buddhist boy. But he showed up. He showed up at our house in the middle of summer, because Leslie had invited him—yes, she had.

“I believe his father was a
real
representative to the UN. At any rate I expect Leslie was by then competing with her dear friend Mary Jo Anavelt for the attentions of one of our local
white
boys. So onto me it devolved to entertain the Buddhist. That young fellow came at me like a debater. Night after night he argued at me while Leslie was, you know, probably out on a date with some America First boy or possibly a Bundist. Anyway, it surely seemed that she had forgotten her liberalism and giving away the country.

“Ah well, I enjoyed it. He was a splendid boy with a first-rate intelligence. I think if Leslie hadn't presently told him to go back home he would have made a Buddhist out of me. I often wonder where that chap is today.…”

He nodded as if the Buddhist might be just offstage, still waiting in the wings with the rest of the multitude who had appeared transiently in Leslie's show and been dismissed.

Now Leslie had been married four years. She and Ben were beginning to lose that inertia that had kept them balanced through the hectic times of their engagement. Two years ago they had left New York, more or less on principle—to get out of the rat race, to get away from the many too many people Leslie had known too slightly, to get away from her family, to make a genuine fresh start in Illinois.

They meant to stay here in Sardis, though they had not yet bought a house. Just now they were leasing a sufficient semiranchstyle modern house (with a grand big basement playroom and a spacious lawn) but when they talked about “their” house it was understood they meant the still-undiscovered place they would buy. They did not mean to build unless they had to. They thought that someday the right place would turn up. (Things had always “turned up” in Leslie's life. For example, even Ben had turned up, once upon a time when it was not at all clear to her how she was going to survive emotionally, in a rough winter.) They wanted a roomy
old
house—maybe one into which they could project their own favorite haunts, an echoing place.

Leslie believed that when they found it and moved into it, that would be their last move. She wanted it to be.

They were settling fast from the romp of their unmarried years. Not quite yet rooted. Leslie's show was not quite over. Loves and legends on every wind had blown on her since puberty. At twenty-seven she still had the habit of rendering every day into a legendary facsimile of itself.

Her days at work and afterward were spent with people Ben very seldom saw. He had his practice. It was her right to have an endless part in the human comedy. What evening did she not have something fresh to tell him about Lester Glenn, Seymour Rife, Carl Tremayn, Don Patch, Richard (String) Bieman, Jarvis (Daddy) Bieman, Ozzie Carter, Dolly Sellers, Dolores Calfert, LaVerne Grace, Pat Reynolds, or Ish Kabibble (Ben could retain only so many names from the abundance of stories before all of them began to sound like nonsense syllables), who were her co-workers at the Studio?

They had a colored maid named Flannery Dowell. Flannery came each morning about the time they left. She usually stayed until Leslie got home, between noon and three or four o'clock. Ben seldom saw her, either, but Leslie pumped her for life stories and then retold them. Ben was well informed on the dietary habits, fashions, mores and dreams of the South Side. He knew the names of many dance halls, taverns, churches, and parks where Flannery had been, where he and Leslie would never go except at second hand. That is, he had heard about them. Sometimes he got the impression that Flannery herself—though she ironed his shirts and kept the house immaculate—was a fictional creation of Leslie's.

He had the same impression of some seventeen minors and fourteen adult females (and one stay-at-home male, Vendham Clay Smothers, who had been a librarian before his coronary) who lived within sight or voice of the Danielses' back lawn, garden or alley.

She had no close friends, but she made
friends
on buses and elevators, in cafeterias, before department store windows, at service stations. She married, found fault, and divorced between the hot bus stop at Fourteenth and Grand and the cool one at Rixton Dell, seven blocks from their front door. She mothered five children when Mrs. Snavely and Mrs. Grant had the Eastern Star in for bridge. She told June Tabor she was pregnant—and two hours later found that the loginess in her body had presaged the curse.

She took Liza Grant to Sunday school every Sunday for three months, and as far as she could tell she was now committed to taking her until Liza was old enough to drive. She took the Grant and Snavely children to the Sergeant Driscoll Memorial Pool. Lost one by drowning, another to a sideburned sex fiend (or “feent,” as she would caricature him later, altering the mode of fiction from melodrama to farce), betrothed a moppet of three to a bronze beach-boy type of fourteen, herself died in the arms of a lifeguard (whose eyes she never saw behind the aluminized reflection of his sunglasses), became the second mistress of a potgutted paterfamilias who helped her teach the flutter kick to her charges, was blackmailed into membership in a vice ring by a fat blonde who waddled inadvertently into her booth in the pool dressing room, was converted to Judaism by a doddering family group seated in the shade beyond the steel mesh, was given the opportunity to ghostwrite an autobiography by a hairy-chested, beetle-browed gentleman of Romanian extraction who had been through “plenty” with the packing-house workers before organization. At the afternoon's end she was manumitted like Flannery's grandmother by Mrs. Snavely, in whose past there lurked a story Leslie still meant to “get.”

The humor of inadvertence, of misfires, of pomp showing its backside, was almost unbearably rewarding to her. “There was this radio announcer,” she told Ben. “Disk jockey. I had the radio on in the wagon because Ricky Snavely wanted to hear about a contest and which boxtop you send … anyway”—now she imitated a treacly, solemn tenor—“‘Love,' he said and then he paused. ‘Love … is the only thing that can make midnight seem like ten o'clock.' Ben, what kind of a mind …? ‘Love is the only thing that can make midnight seem like …' I can't stand
that
.”

She picked out japeries and tactlessness so she could avoid them herself. Lack of suppleness, inability to adapt or make herself over in her situation, seemed to weigh on her like the threat of old age and doom. One of her chief pleasures in her job (and more important to her than salary or the occupation of time she could always spend with interest elsewhere) was in making herself part of the gang—not just by friendliness but by projecting a character with problems they would recognize as being like their own.

Ozzie Carter thought she was working to help pay off a debt her husband had incurred in medical school. (Ben's aunt had left him enough to see him meagerly through.) Dolly Sellers thought her husband was a spendthrift with a passion for expensive cars. (The wagon was paid for. The Alfa was being paid off on a three-year plan, eighty a month.) Dolores Calfert probably thought Ben was her second husband. She thought the first had been a student at Penn State who died young of a melanoma behind his eye. For weeks La Verne Grace thought she was a divorcée… They possessed these erroneous impressions because (1) Mrs. Carter had an unpaid medical bill of nearly four thousand dollars; (2) Dolly's father had bought a secondhand Merc and expected Dolly to help pay for it; (3) Dolores' husband was dead; and (4) LaVerne's husband had knocked up a coed, whom he therefore was obliged to marry. Leslie had not wanted them to think her more fortunate than they.

“Well,” she told the boys at the service station where they traded, “a lot of nights I go over to Bernie's Stirrup and Spur. I mean sure there're a bunch of places downtown where I stop for a
drink
now and then, supposing I'm on the town. Bernie's you find the kind of
people
you can drink with. I mean I've been gardening or something, who wants to dress up?” She always wore slacks and a sweatshirt when she took the cars in for service. There surely must be a Leslie who went eternally in slacks from working-class bar to working-class bar, watching the fights, memorizing ball scores, putting small bets on the horses,
loving
the pinball machines and maybe not what you'd call really
averse
to driving out by the lake with a guy without having to know him
too
well.

“You hear what Ed Sullivan pulled the other night?” the attendants asked her.

“Yeah. Whaddee pull? I mean I watched the program, but I don't recall what you're re
ferr
ing to exactly.”

“You think you might be in Bernie's tonight? I mean around
ten?
”

“Well,
probably
,” Leslie said.

She had been in Bernie's exactly once. She and Ben had gone in one night after dancing at the North Side Country Club. They had liked it a lot—for its “characters”—for what they very well knew a Marty type would call its “action.”

She confessed to Violet Snavely that sex disgusted
her
, too.

“I had a good figure,” Violet said. “In college my figure was not—it really wasn't—just ordinary. I know my breasts are
full
, but in college they didn't sag at all. Fellows liked them. Now I always go into a booth at the pool and shut the door when I dress. I simply wouldn't swim at Driscoll because the booths don't have any doors. You may think what's a figure for if not for the husband.…”

“Pretty ridiculous,” Leslie said. “I knew a perfectly revolting obstetrician who was against breast feeding because he said, ‘The breasts are for the husband.' And no man who understands a woman would say a thing like that.”

“He doesn't care if I've got a figure. He wants it to relax his
nerves
.” Mrs. Snavely's blue eyes narrowed with fury as she leaned over the coffee table toward Leslie. She said, “It's nothing to me any more. It took me three years before I could come with Donald and as soon as I got adjusted I was pregnant with Joe. I don't even try any more.”

In a sweep of compassion Leslie said, “Sometimes I fake an orgasm just to get him off. So I can have a little peace and quiet.”

She had thrown gasoline on smoldering ambition. Violet Snavely began to grin in a very unattractive way. Her voice sounded positively uncanny as she whispered, “Think how much a woman would have to hate her husband to fake one.”

“It's not that I hate Ben,” Leslie said—for once thinking she had gone a little far. “I mean, it might be out of sympathy, concern, to reassure a man.”

Not—if the hag-hard smile could be trusted—in the Snavely bed.

The profit of these white lies—and not very contritely Leslie considered herself a liar, an absolutely compulsive mimic, and probably a mythomaniac, whatever that was besides the Baron Clappique in
Man's Fate
—was nevertheless Ben's when he came home to her.

He lapped it up devotedly.

On the days when he worked at the clinic he usually pulled his Alfa into the drive between six and seven. Thundering idly into the garage, he waved or gestured with his packages to Leslie, who, in the fine month of June, was always loitering somewhere behind the house waiting for him. She had always managed to be alone when he came home. He found that a compelling bit of niceness in a woman so naturally gregarious. It was one of the signs that their marriage was distinct from the good and bad in the life around them. In her stories Leslie made that life serve the lofty happiness they shared with no one else.

Sometimes she waited for him in the slapdash little garden at the back of their lawn. There they grew only the varieties of flowers that the seed store man called “easy.” Leslie had said, “I'm not going to have a garden that requires a whole literature. We can get you a better avocation than that, Pop.” And of course if a mood had required it, her imagination could have summoned up night-blooming orchidasters, ailanthus, shy woodbine, medicinal heather, flesh-eating hyberoras and cyndromats that lured vermin to their death. All she needed of actuality was a little patch of dirt to start with.

In cool or rainy weather she was apt to be in the garage working on her antiques. Before she started work at the studio she had gone through an auction phase. She had four really good pieces—clotted with paint and varnish, of course, so that getting them ready for the house remained a formidable undertaking. What matter? She had lots of time, lots of rags, lots of solvent. For now the antiques were something to be busy at while she waited for Ben.

Once or twice a week it was her pleasure to have set up the patio behind their house for a party of two. Snacks and liquor were out on a fresh tablecloth. A smart, iron-framed easy chair was drawn up conversationally in front of the chaise on which Leslie, freshly made up for him, reclined.

On such evenings as he came from the garage, she had a book or a writing pad or a crossword puzzle in her hands. He thought he had never caught her with her head actually reclining on the pillow behind it. But he did not quite believe in her absorption in her props of the busy life. Behind her papers she was chewing up and digesting the world she had swallowed with quick bites during the day—chewing it up for him.