Pretty Leslie (7 page)

But whatever it proved, Ben came back smiling. He did not ask for an accounting. As things turned out, she did not give him one. The morning they met “to talk things over” after she'd stayed out of sight for a week, they took a cab down to Battery Park. They sat on a bench near the seawall.

He didn't prod or hurry her. He let her smell the morning. He sat beside her watching the boats come and go through the overcast across the comfortable, roomy harbor waters. The gulls were flying in white swarms over near the Jersey coast. A girl's thoughts went out with the boats, and all at once she began to laugh about sneaky, pompous Claude Peepers and his fear that he'd overextended this time, caught one that would be hard to ditch when the wife came home. The continent behind her and all her unmanageable past seemed negligible. She took a huge mouthful of air and said, “‘Send me giants.'”

Ben had smiled in that knowing way of his. He said, “They'd meet their match.”

She had second thoughts. Fears. “I'm only quoting. There's no one here to be honest. I don't know who I am.”

He didn't answer. It was very sweet to think he was probably agreeing with her. From a declaration of moral bankruptcy one could start again, voyaging out like the ships in the morning calm.

“Oh shit, do you still want me?” she said. “This is the last time I'll propose, but …”

“You know I want you, though no giant.”

“Ah, even that's not my own. It's from a high-school play. The girl can't do any better than quote something she'd like to say for herself.”

“But it was the right quote,” he said, with the lilting enthusiasm of one about to set out to the earth's end. “‘Send me giants' too,” he whispered. But then he pretended to cower in reaction to his audacity.

Probably the offense she had done him paid off well. Its blind violence turned them as a mason turns stones in a wall until he finds the faces that fit snugly, resolutely together. They did not share a knowledge of what she had done, but they shared the effects compatibly. It was a successful sin. It led on to a confidence in their marriage that might otherwise have been absent.

Its good effects, though, were bought at the price of the rough candor they had shared before. They had seen the shadows of their vulnerability, had been warned. Now they would get along better by asking less. Civility had begun to replace the anguish of enchantment.

The tone of banter and play by which they habitually communicated came almost necessarily from their fears of looking too squarely at what they were. If, in the course of time, it gave them a private code, it also limited them to it.

Yet the limitations had never chafed—probably because they had time, had given each other time, the great gift of successful marriages.

If Ben no longer heard in her chatter the trace of whole systems of thought, beyond its superficialities he still caught the gracious hint of magnitudes, attending like genies among the trees and shadows of their lawn. In his heart he believed they would, in time, show themselves in their strength. This was no ordinary woman he had married.

The extraordinary creature on her chaise stared at the powers of light and dark in the evening sky, but merely snorted, “‘Buy her a new brassiere' indeed!” She reached out to lay appreciative fingers on her husband's wrist. “I ought to have
you
talk to Dolly. I try to be your devoted missionary, but I'm sure you could help her better than I.”

“Are you sure Dolly needs more help than nature gives her?”

Leslie nodded. “That Patch youth is a little snake. Fascinating, and she's such a bunny.” She leaned back away from him and clucked for her bird. Clucked again. With a swift, ungainly flutter of wings, Bill came down from the fence to waddle in her cupped hands, reptilian green in the twilight, his little eyes hard as seeds. “Who you can help with is Dolores Calfert. I've asked her to our party Saturday night. Perhaps it wasn't wise. I don't know. When I invited her I wasn't even thinking of would she fit with the others. I like her.”

“Then why won't the others at the party?”

“They will. They will.” Leslie rubbed her bird as if in occult consultation. “It's only she's such a goose. For her age she's so giddy. I really wanted you to meet her again—have a chance to hear her tales, I mean. Maybe you'll have a chance to in spite of the crowd. And, Ben, be kind to her.”

“Did you think I wouldn't be?”

But it was not he—not he alone—who was being asked not to condescend. Mistress Leslie was asking him to share, and help her repudiate, some unmanageable fault she found in herself. There was nothing new in that.

“Dolores thinks I ought to have a baby too,” she said.

“I trust you told her you deserved a gold star for trying?”

Suddenly Leslie was flustered. The column of her neck flushed. She slapped—not viciously—at her parakeet and tossed him into the air. But Bill did not want to fly. He raised and moved his wings only enough to keep himself from falling hard on the stones under the chaise. He waddled importunately back to catch and claw at a hanging fold of her skirt.

“I don't tell
all
, old man. In case you're worried.”

“No. The truth might endear me to … oh, you know, Dolly, Dolores, LaVerne.…”

Her composure climbed on his good-natured spoof—very much like the bird climbing her skirt to regain his place in her lap.

She said, “As a matter of fact I did tell her about our frequenseenallthat. How often. There's nothing to be ashamed of. Are you mad at me for telling? I babble too much.”

Ben finished his drink and tapped his upper lip with a forefinger. He waited a minute before he answered. “What was her comment?”

“Well”—Leslie fumbled in the air, waiting for a friendly spirit to coach her in exactly the right words—“well, you don't know Dolores well enough to catch the nuance. Dolores
always
laughs about sex. But different kinds of laughter. Mostly real healthy. Gutty. She's been there. So, naturally, she laughed, but it wasn't a snide laugh or anything, and what she said was ‘God give us all such a husband' or something like that.”

“Mmmmm.”

“Are you mad?”

“Good Lord, no. I'm only thinking about whether to blush or not when I see her Saturday. I guess I won't.”

“There must be a lot of husbands who … need it every night,” Leslie said.

“Was that Dolores' observation?”

“Well, she knew a man—a woman, rather—in Hawaii who spoke of morning, noon,
and
night. Hercules Someone-or-other. What are you thinking?”

“Of the dreams I must inspire at Bieman's Studio,” Ben said. Then with an indescribable note of irony, a little different than she had heard yet this evening, he said, “And my great need.”

Three hundred and forty nights a year—uncounted, or at least unrecorded, so that memory said merely every night—that need was fulfilled. But whose it was, husband's or wife's or both, remained a mystery that not even age could be expected to unravel. If she seemed disinclined, he brought her to it like a duty. If he seemed disinclined—or went out late on calls, or was kept until an awkward hour by someone's illness—he could expect to find her waiting and eager.

It was for both the haven within the haven of the house within the shelter of his profession, prosperity, and expectations. It was safety itself, and whether she needed its reassurance more than he needed to give her the reassurance that only his flesh in hers could provide was beyond all asking. Night fell. The crowded day was banished. They coupled because they must. The act—the “frequency” as Leslie called it when she spoke of it in generalities—was within the limits of normality. If the specters of lust and fear that clapped them together were not, what man or woman could unweave all the threads of his own hunger and justify them? In the socket of flesh the upright flesh was not required to give its reasons. Was home. Let no man—or no fret about typicality—put that asunder.

Only Leslie did fret about it—perhaps for the simple reason that she felt herself the one responsible, perhaps for the delicate reason that she could not be quite sure why Dolores Calfert laughed whenever she thought of sex.

In the deep June twilight, caressing her bird as if he were a clay thing that she was fashioning to perfection, Leslie asked, “Why is it all these types—Dolores and Martha and, you know, other older women—think
I
should have a baby?”

In the past year, when the eternal forum in her own head had long since decided that the honeymoon was over and the habit of the marriage set, she had begun more and more to speak of her desire for a child as explanation for the puzzling frequency.

“Am I some sort of surrogate? Daughter substitute? Is it just their frustrated instinct, I mean, trying to find a place to break out, like an infection hunting the right place for a pimple?” She giggled through the gloom, amused by her own fantastic figure. “And the reason I don't get pregnant just some resistance to being used?”

“I'll talk your problems over with the staff, lady,” her husband said.

“Don't you dare. Hon, I noticed you needed a manicure. Can I give you one?”

“Tonight? You can give me one. Tonight you can give the monster what he needs.”

“Yes, I can.”

Demurely she rose and went into the house to prepare their evening meal. Mistress of an impenetrable game.

chapter 4

L
ESLIE WAS HALF RIGHT
. Dolores Calfert was an old goose. Even someone handicapped with a glass eye could have made that out—probably because Dolores wanted everyone to. She paraded her goosiness the way an aging fighter might advertise his slowing footwork or his weakening left-hand punch—the better to bring the unwary close enough to be nailed by a hard right.

There were no glass eyes at the Danielses' party on Saturday night. Tolerant, friendly, knowledgeable eyes glanced from every corner of the party room in the basement when Dolores, in goosey splendor, walked down the steps with Ben's hand irregularly supporting her elbow. Leslie thought she heard someone say appreciatively, “It's Sophie Tucker.”

Not quite Sophie Tucker, perhaps, but into the uniformity of young professional marrieds—doctors, lawyers, CPAs, an architect and a reporter (also a stringer for
Life
), Ben's colleagues and the parents of his patients, the wives as visibly interchangeable as the husbands, Dave Lloyd the oldest and Leslie, of course, the youngest—Dolores splashed like a white Hottentot.

Her upswept hair was white-blond at a distance. From close behind her Ben saw a rainbow of browns, auburns, lion-pelt yellows and aster reds streaking up into the pale curls. Her fat ears dangled ornaments like half-sized saltshakers.

She saw Leslie through the crowd and yoo-hooed, waving her arm. The skin of this splendid arm (and of her equally splendid shoulders, of the superlative mammary bundle she swung like searchlights) was as mottled as her hair. Its chief tone was white—the white of a corpse or a toadstool. Around her elbows, dished in the dimples of fat like lilypads in pools, were veritable planetariums of freckles. (Red, white, and blue, Ben thought, surrendering, his dull clutch on reality in the presence of such incarnate fantasy.) He had seen Dolores before. Once he had shared a coffee break with her and Leslie between his morning calls. He had simply never seen her dressed up.

“Don't introduce me,” she said breathlessly, over her shoulder to him. He thought it would have been sheer impertinence to try. One way or another, his friends would recognize her as she made her triumphant way down the steps and straight across to the bar.

He went ahead of her and came up to the other side of the formica counter as she landed both elbows like twin, erotic blimps on its damp surface. Without lowering his gaze from her smile, he tried to count the rings on her dimpled hands. He counted eight, three of them engagement rings of a size that had disappeared with the stock market crash. “Honey, make me something that will catch me up,” she said. He noticed the pallor of her gums inside the crashing scarlet of her lips.

Then Leslie was on her, hugging the huge, old mottled shoulders above the leopard-skin silk of her overfilled summer dress. An orphan pink pig on the great sow of the world.

“You've got some good heads here tonight,” Dolores rumbled. “Don't you introduce me to
anyone
, sweetheart. Now, let me take my time now and look
around
.”

Leslie slipped onto the bar stool beside her. “They're all talking about emphysemas and psittacosises now,” she said conspiratorially. “Some of them are. Our parties always start dull. But you wait.”

“Wait? What are you talking about? I just got here. Don't be in such a hurry, love.”

“No. But I want to be sure.”

“That I have a good time?” What a vain worry. Dolores shrugged. She had come to have a good time, hadn't she?

“Leslie wants you to have had a good time,” Ben said. “The party will only be real to her tomorrow when she remembers it.”

All at once, for the first time Dolores had ever seen the self-assurance wilt, Leslie looked like a child caught in social error. She sagged toward Ben. “Ah, am I really like that?”

“Of course not,” he said. “You're Leslie.”

“I'm me, all right,” she said, disposing of that grief like garbage on a paper plate and instantly brightening on a new tack. “Dolores, there are all sorts here. You'll find someone to amuse you. A minute ago Sue Wilder was telling the
stupidest
story. Really. About a female chimpanzee who tried to seduce the keeper in her zoo.”

Dolores bellowed happily.

“No, no,” Leslie insisted, putting her fingers in the soft crook of a fat elbow, “it wasn't a joke. That's what was so funny about it. She insisted she'd read it ‘in a book.' You know how some people will say they've read something in a book to make it seem authoritative. Well, this female chimpanzee would look very mournful whenever the keeper got in the cage. That didn't work. So she began to tug at his hand. Then she'd lie down and
point
.”