Pretty Leslie (16 page)

“What?” she whispered as she felt the lazy rhythm altered. Her eyes opened full on him with a dubious question and she tried to raise her shoulders as if she were going to roll him off. “No. No. Gently. Ben, please!”

But he had crossed some line of reticence or of manners in this now familiar encounter. And he thought he knew better than she—thought that on this day as perhaps never before he was capable. Lunging, rocking bone to bone, pinioning her arms, taking the shock of her thrashing head against his cheekbone, he asserted his possession and at last, for once, dominated her.

For a while and at intervals he believed that the tension of her heaving body was the sign of uncontrolled passion, that she was meeting him, trying for consummation they had not yet reached. At other intervals he knew that she was fighting him, sweating hate for him, the male, as well as for what was involuntarily clenching and tearing at her own body.

“Nasty sweat,” she said with a prim little-girl gasp—not here, not with him, refusing to be in this situation and trying to recall him to their real intimacy, the way they could catch each other's faintest hints of preference. She wanted him to sit up and chuckle with her at the farce they had tumbled into. And this frightened him, fixing his determination. The scattered advice of fraternity bull sessions, of rakehell med students, of the literature on the subject (“There is a literature, Dr. Daniels, fundamental neural responses, no such thing as a frigid woman, only inept men”) began to avalanche like scattered clods through his mind. A sudden anxiety that, having gone this far, he would spoil things for good unless he persisted. Shock after shock wave of coldness that meant, among other things, that love was no longer an issue and that he could go on as long as he had to.

“That hurts,” she said. “No. Oh no. No. No. No. No. No. No.” He was not hurting her, so he found a position that would. Experimental now, ready to try anything, he pummeled, hunched, raced, teased, rocked, pounded, persisted—on and on, once hearing a cup crash over the edge of the bed, once hearing the sloshing of an unpainted boat as children rocked it in muddy water. Then—at last, at last—a yipping cry of bereavement as the creature tore free.

He lay still and trembling on her sweated body. His face was buried in the pillow like that of a drowned child in water. But the procession of guilts moved through his mind like the vanguard of an army. He knew what he would see when he drew back to look in her eyes—the unbelievable hatred of one violated against her will, one transgressed against who had only, in her infinite kindness, meant to make him happy.

It was there, the curious red coal in each brown eye, like a coal smoldering under dank autumn leaves. “What have I done to you?” he whispered in anguish, kissing the taut line of her jaw.

She would not have his anguish—as if he had forfeited his right to expose so naked a feeling; should, at best, have expressed it to her in words that gave her room for maneuver and management of it, never in her quaking, vulnerable cavity.

“Well,” she said, sitting up and shaking her pretty hair, making a laugh hard as flint, “well, at least I'm normal. I was beginning to wonder. Weren't you?”

“I asked too much too soon,” he guessed. “Of course you're normal.” (And what is normality? the bewildered doctor asked. A placebo for the unique human creature who has found her uniqueness unbearable?) “A demon seized me,” he said shakily, trying to match her good sportsmanship. He needed a drink, needed it bad, needed air, needed Aunt Peg to take him out of here, on a long journey, across a bridge far above the mud-colored water, needed the detachment that four years of medical school and two of interneship had given him about most things. “I didn't mean.…”

She climbed by his repentance like a mountain climber coming up a rope. She tugged his ear and lit cigarettes for both of them. “If any man ever intended any more with me, I'd take the veil. Mortal woman is only meant to bear so much. Beasty!” She was and was not joking. And perhaps, he thought then for the first time, she needs a man who will hear only the joke, the good-buddy tone, and not the despair and violation it guards.

“Where'd you learn all your tricks, mister? They make you pass a test before you get your diploma? Buddy, you've just told me the life story of a girl with more padding than me. Who is she, you demon? Who taught you all that?”

“You,” he said with a laugh, drowning in honesty, wanting to get her dressed, out of here, onto some neutral street where they could amble hand in hand like lovers.

“I know you've had other women,” she insisted. “Which of them … wanted to be hurt?”

“This is really grim for me, Leslie. No one. No one at all. And I didn't quite realize I was hurting you.”

They were both defeated by the outcome. It was right there that he passed up the chance to tell her that he had been at least technically a virgin until they got together. He sensed she might be rather ashamed of that, so now he decided never to tell her.

The more complicated terms of her defeat made her try to get even.

For the rest of that uncomfortable afternoon she pouted and commanded like a convalescent princess. No, she would not put her clothes on. She was going to get bally well drunk, and since he liked the bouncy-bouncy so much, she was going to give him his fill of it as soon as she got nice and tanked.

She drank straight bourbon from a bottle she kept in her refrigerator. Naked, pretending to be drunk before she really was, she leaped around the apartment doing housework, getting her typewriter out of its case and starting a letter—to whom?—to a buddy, buddy boy in France, she said. She tore the letter out of the machine and leaped like a gazelle for the bed. When he came at her call, she evaded, bit and pinched. She began to cry after a while, tiny tears of anger that seemed to furrow her cheeks like coursing acid.

“You think you're pretty goddamn smart, you,” she said. “With all your working on me like I was some lab animal. Go on, analyze me. Now you know what it takes, buddy Buster. Now tell me about my misspent girlhood. The sex lecture. Give us maidens the lecture, doctor. Hoo hoo hygiene.”

“I love a witch girl,” he said mournfully.

“Bring me a drink.” She snapped her fingers at him. “Don't think you're such a big shot because you made me come. Others have done it. O-o-o-others. Mothers.”

“And lived to regret it?” he asked wryly, mournfully.

She stared at him as if in shock that he had noticed some telling pattern in her behavior. “What's wrong with me? What is it? Oh, damn. It's never happened before in the light or except when I was good and damn well drunk. Way over. What's wro-o-o-ong?”

Already he was too wise to make that kind of guess for her. Her tears might indeed be heartfelt. Probably they were. They were also a trap. She was trying to bait him into “analyzing” her so she would have a legitimate grievance against him—or one, at any rate, that she habitually and unopposedly claimed as legitimate.

“You're complicated. You've never closed yourself to variety. Everything has to be paid for. Aren't you feeling the predictable growing pains of a woman in love?” That was as far as he would go with detachment. He was not sure whether it was flattery or counsel, rather hoping it would turn out to be a mixture of both.

It did not touch the secret resentment of her secret Self. “It's not love when you use me like that.” She pouted. She recognized his evasion of her trap and let him know this was a separate offense, compounding the first.

Once that afternoon she ran to the window. Still naked, she let the spring blind zip all the way up. She yelled and waved at some teen-age boys lounging on a railing across the street. One of them was pointing when Ben wrestled her back out of sight. Of course he was at fault for laying violent hands on her.

“Don't you understand that could be dangerous? Those kids will watch for you now when you go in and out of the building. At least they might annoy you.”

“Maybe they'll do worse,” she said with smirking hostility.

“You wouldn't want that,” he said, at the stern end of his patience, trying to restrain the note of condescension.

“Maybe I would. Maybe that's
what
I want,” she said, defying him to prove otherwise. She liked to be brave in visualizing what might happen to her. But still she was terrified of being alone, of walking this relatively safe street at night without an escort.

That sorry and enlightening day ended when she made herself sick by drinking too much. By then she was a real whirligig of emotions, yearning for whoredom and the convent, for a return to infancy and a career as adventuress, for Ben to straighten her out and to leave her for Christ's sake
alone
. He gave her a vitamin injection and left her typing frenziedly, presumably to some man who must return and save her from a terrible mistake.

“How I love my little machine!” she sang histrionically as he went out. He heard it rattle like a printing press while he went down the stairs.

After that she came close to breaking their engagement. Again she dated the “slaves who were in love with her”—men from the magazine or their acquaintances, part of a network to which she never had and never would introduce Ben. She behaved like anyone with a bad case, multiplying penalties as if their sheer profusion would at last establish the reality of an offense. Once or twice he decided she was gone.

In his refusal to accept the prospect of losing her he saw the perversity of their compact—if she had not needed him so much, he might have let her go; if he had not so much needed her need, that need itself might have withered. It seemed to him just possible he might be one of those doctors who require a wife to be chronically ill. So be it.

She came back to him—or rather resumed the relationship as before—on her own terms. She hinted grossly that she had been to bed with one of her “gang”—and refused to be explicit beyond her hint. Ben smothered his curiosity, thinking it a small sacrifice considering the prospective gain.

No. He did not need a permanently flawed wife. To think so was to permit the tyranny of impertinences from the past, just as to expect perfection between them immediately was to deny the future its reasonable tasks. He loved this complex, unfinished girl. Nobody married out of total approval. To be a human couple meant the acceptance of some doubts, overcompensated by hope and affection.

Idly or not so idly, on the very eve of their wedding Leslie asked, “Do you really think I'll turn out to be what you want? Can I?”

He promised her everything with his rhetorical question: “Ever try to smother a baby?”

“Good heavens. Why should I have?” She had murdered no children. Where was the application?

He shuddered at his choice of example but finished it. “I only meant the little devils will fight like a grown bull if they have to. Necessity turns on strength that's absolutely unpredictable.”

She cuddled, nodding soft hair against his cheek. “I'll try to smother you, you try to smother me. We'll have everything. I'll be great for you. You'll see.”

“I will see,” he said.

He kept his doubts about her like a prudent reserve, never to be called on in the ordinary course of things. But he had had an inexpungeable glimpse of the way her real life refused to mesh with the reality she inhabited, how within the flesh that his hands might touch (or someone else's) there was another flesh for herself alone—or for those inferred lovers of a perpetual dream. For this division he was no more tempted to use a clinical term than she was. Clinical terms are only valuable when treatment is conceivable. One does not treat a total personality—at best, one treats a malfunctioning part to bring it into harmony with the whole. About the whole person, the doctor, like the lover, must accept or reject, and he could not imagine himself able to reject her.

In the spirit of just deserts for everyone, though, he was glad that Peg had died in ignorance. The bargain as he made it for himself would have chilled her. She might have wondered why she had ever bothered to bring him away from Kansas. Looking beyond the pleasure principle was too much to ask of the good woman. She had staked her soul on the idea that hardihood and wisdom ought to end in a soft foolish happiness. Let her soul go in peace.

Anyway in the faint, tolerable vacillation of his days after he married Leslie, he was never sure for long—never found it worth while to remember long—that Peg
had
died in an illusion. Perhaps the old contradiction of innocence and trouble was really vanished with the circumstance from which Peg had rescued him.

Once, in the first year of their marriage, he had to fly across the continent. He made the trip in daylight. Over Kansas he looked down at the very placid geometry of the valley of the Kaw and saw that time had swept it clean.

Green and brown, voiceless, innocent in the sun, the prairie had no ghosts that could rise to hurt him. Now it was an uncompelled choice to remember that a dog was dead and Billy Kirkland was dead. And if they were dead, the obsessed boy was gone who had wished them off the earth. At an altitude of sixteen thousand feet the Kansas landscape looked like the floor of a well-endowed nursery. Swimming pools lay like discarded jewels on the carpet. Drive-in movies were the toy fans dropped by junior girls. Speedboats drew their Sunday wakes in the gleaming Kaw. Highways were ribbons loosened from an abundance of gifts. He would never again imagine this Midwest a court of death.

Once since they had moved from New York to Sardis, he had come on a very odd photograph of Leslie as a child. Of course she had been so much photographed all her life by a doting family that one almost expected to see the marks of the process on her, like a chemical tint of the skin. He had seen almost literally dozens of albums, mostly Leslie all alone.

This was the only picture he had seen that showed her to have been fat. Really fat. An eight- or nine-year-old girl round as a Japanese wrestler. Under her short skirt her legs expanded up from the ankles like vases. Her arms were inverted cornucopias. Her smile was like something painted on a basketball.