Pretty Leslie (26 page)

When it threatened to become intolerable she said, “… beside the still waters … yea though I walk through the valley and the shadow of death … no evil.” And that helped. Helped her bear the hurt she had caused Mary Jo on a day when everything had begun with the bravest of intents.

chapter 14

S
HE WOKE ALONE,
a little before eleven o'clock on a fair Sunday morning. It was perfect to be alone, and so she woke up smiling.

The smile would not bear the weight of consciousness. It must have composed itself very deep below the levels of anxiety—even below the levels of knowing herself an individual—that gave meaning to her dreams. It was as if muscle and gristle, bone and fluid of her body, were for once permitted a free expression. They smiled as long as she lay curled like a grub and motionless.

But when she straightened her body under the sheet, the pain in her loins signaled the discord of all that had happened, the disparity of being a female with a mind. “Oh, Jesus,” she said and hit the pillow with her fist.

She sat bolt upright, thinking, He must still be here somewhere. He had no way to leave. He's in the bathroom, the kitchen, the basement. Someone will see him through the windows.

With light robe trailing behind her, she flew through the house, checking room after room in order of the likelihood that Patch might be there (might be using Ben's razor in the bathroom, fixing eggs for himself in the kitchen, amusing himself with pool at their pool table in the basement, or curled up on the living room sofa, reading Steve Canyon on the spot where last night's fantasy had begun).

He was gone. She peered out through the kitchen curtains across the Sunday greenery of the lawn and saw that the station wagon was parked where she had left it. He must have walked away, after all. She could only hope it had been before light, for if no one else in the neighborhood rose early Sunday mornings, she was sure that Vendham Smothers got up, as he went to bed, with the sun. And Ben had often complained that Walter and Donny Snavely rose early on purpose to wake the neighborhood with cap-gun fighting or by falling off their jungle gym.

But even while she was peering out and gnashing her teeth in anxiety that some neighbor might know, she resented his going without saying goodbye. This was not the
time
to leave her alone. He could at least have left a note—and she went to look for one on her dressing table or the top of Ben's chest.

Of course there was no note either. But on the rug beside the bed lay a pair of shorts that seemed to have shrunk in the wash until they were only big enough for a boy. The basic material of the garment was white. Enormous red roses, fully three inches in diameter, were printed on the white. When she saw this vulgarity, she tumbled onto the bed crying.

Toward one o'clock she put on old Bermudas and halter, tied a big bandanna over her hair and went to the garage. In the spring she and Ben had picked up an oak highboy at a small town auction. It had sat for months against the garage wall, waiting to be refinished. In May she had spent a few hours of work on it. Half the old varnish had been scraped away. Now it seemed to her that if she worked very hard, she might have it ready to move into the house by the time Ben came home.

First she coated the ornamental carving on the legs and lower drawer with varnish remover. The stinging, insidious odor of the glop reminded her of something. As she went on, mechanically daubing it into the curlicues with her blunt brush, it seemed to her the stuff reminded her of something she had never literally smelled. She paused a moment as if listening. Very slowly she brought the brush end near her nose. She saw the snotlike beads of the remover (actually a very repulsive consistency) jiggling in the black hairs of the brush. It smells like Hell, she thought, an appropriate reflection—half amusing—for Sunday morning.

Disturbed by the guilt of sniffing at the brush, she turned her head toward the garage door. There, with bare legs spread and a corn-popper toy dangling from her folded arms, stood Liza Grant. Liza was two and a half. Against the blue and green backdrop of the open door, she seemed to tower monumentally—some outraged queen of childhood, not only sober as a judge but grieved as an executioner come to take her disinterested vengeance.

“You diddun take me to Sunny school,” Liza charged.

“Oh.” Another area of memory opened for Leslie, with a sound like a glacier breaking into giant icebergs on a ghastly promontory.

“You promised.”

“I
know
I promised. Sweetheart, I'm sorry.”

“Mama took me.”

“Did she …?” Leslie was going to ask if Mrs. Grant had come to the Danielses' back door to inquire why someone was not up and dressed to keep her promise. Then she recalled that somewhere in that area of time still sealed off with her adultery, there had been a knocking. She could not be sure whether she had heard a knocking at the back door or remembered the knocking of the bed's headboard against the wall while some chimera rode her.

“I made a blocks,” Liza said. “Miss Garga helped me. We made a city for children to live. Miss Garga helped me.”

“A city?” Leslie asked. Painfully she got up from her crouching position (sore and juicy, she thought, hoping she had not spotted her shorts) and set the bowl of remover on the top of the highboy. She smiled (she thought she smiled) as she walked slowly toward the little girl. Other days she and Liza had showered together in the lawn sprinkler. Liza had come freely into her kitchen for cold milk or juice from the refrigerator and brown or white cookies. The two of them had sat like contemporaries playing with Bill, the Foolish Bird.

Something like that—some retribution for failing her promise to Liza—was in Leslie's mind now as she peeled off her scabby red rubber gloves and beamed. Liza dropped her toy and ran.

Or was that what really happened at all? The child was gone and Leslie was crouched with her arms folded (like Liza's) across her midriff as she tried to get her breath. But in the vanishing, in the refusal of time to tap on in its orderly way, she could not be entirely sure there had been anyone in the garage door at all. (And the formula came to her: If Liza wasn't here, then
he
wasn't in my bed last night. But there was absolutely no comfort or forgiveness in such a formula—neither alternative of belief was acceptable.)

I've got to finish this, she told herself grimly, and turned back to the highboy. By now the remover had raised a poxy scab of blisters from the varnish, tough little varicolored membranes that
did not
, as the instructions on the can promised, come off readily with the application of soap and water, but had to be pried and tugged off individually.

As she scrubbed savagely into the ornament with an old toothbrush, she told herself, I only had to go to the door to see if Liza was scampering across the lawn or up the alley toward home. And this reminded her that she could—perhaps she ought—to call Don Patch and find out how he had slipped away from her house. Did she know—could she find—his telephone number? She was not even sure he lived in the city. She remembered what he had said about Dolores' list posted by the switchboard at the studio. Leslie had a key to the place, but she certainly wasn't going to
that
much trouble merely to satisfy a trivial (wasn't it trivial?) curiosity. She wondered if Dolores might not have a list of everyone's numbers at home. But if she called Dolores, how explain her need?

“Telephone, Mrs. Daniels.” The ancient, quavery, phlegmy voice was not originating in the garage. “Mrs. Daniels?”

“Yes,” she said, once again hauling herself creakily to her feet. (This time the shorts were spotted. Definitely.) She went breathlessly to the garage door. “What is it?”

Vendham Smothers, pigeon-breasted in his gay sport shirt, was craning across his hedge. A bony finger jabbed in the direction of her back door. “Quick, quick,” he wheezed. “Your phone's been ringing, and I knew you were here. Saw the car parked. Heard you in the garage talking to Liza and thought you might not have heard it. Quick!” His yellow-toothed smile out of a gray face emphasized the urgency with which she must answer. As if he knew that someone was trying to reach her with news of death.

She touched wood for luck as she picked up the phone. Her heart was thumping like a rusty pump.

“Lizzer?” It was her brother Hank calling, using a nickname she had not answered to since she was eleven.

“Oh. Are you at the station? Airport?” She hoped he was. The relief that it was not someone else on the phone kindled a very brief but very intense flare of fondness for Hank.

“Why would I be at an airport? It's Sunday
morning
. Happy Hank is on his patio with his princess telephone in his lap. I can't even see an airplane except for maybe a contrail or two, presumably headed for Kapustan Yar. Yar, yar, as they say in Faulkner.”

“I'm sorry you're not,” Leslie said. “Ben's gone, you know.”

“Gone?” The flabbergasted, heart-struck syllable grating into her ear from the instrument came with such force that for a minute she was persuaded she had given away the monstrous secret of last night, in some ellipsis had communicated to her nervous brother the whole, sufficient reason why her husband might have packed his bags and left her.

Recovering lightly, she said, “He's only in South America. He'll be back day after tomorrow.”

“Oh. Medical,” Hank said.

“Is something wrong? Why are you calling?”

“Sunday morning. Phone rates only an inconsiderable fraction of what on a busy weekday.”

“I understand,” Leslie said, in a prim little-sisterly tone that meant precisely, You've been drinking and it's only a little past one in Roslyn, Long Island. “Where's Sally and the kids?”

“It may be that they're sailing.”

“You won't tell me.”

“I'll tell you.”

“Gee. Thanks.”

“Only. What the hell do you want to know for? I don't want to know. I wish
I
didn't know they were sailing.”

“Wait till I get a cigarette and a coke,” Leslie said. This was going to be a long one. The idea that she could help—could be of service to someone who of course, not much but naturally, she loved—was already doing wonders to stabilize her emotions. She felt as she used to feel when he came home from college, complaining about his pimples and his stupidity and his rotten friends, opening himself to a positive deluge of her high-school certainties. Maybe it was from the habit of dealing with Hank that she got started picking up lame ducks, aiding those in trouble.

He had called to tell her just how big a mistake it had been for him ever to marry Sally (eight and one-half years ago) and how pointlessly accidental as well as humiliating it was to have “sired” three children. “There's nothing wrong with the kids. They're O.K. average. But why should I
have
children?”

Leslie suggested (stretching her bare leg, showering it with white ashes, watching Bill creep like a cowardly acrobat on the traverse rod, remembering how enormously she'd come that first time, burrowing her shoulder blades into the upholstery as she used to do at home) that maybe he was some kind of religious nut. But he didn't laugh. He really was out in the patio where God could stare right down from the sky at him, and he wasn't spending all this money on a long distance call for jokes.

“There's something badly wrong with every member of our family,” he announced.

“Not me,” she said flippantly. And unexpectedly Hank agreed with her. He was that serious!
That
, among other things, was what he had concluded in a week of what amounted to almost religious retreat, thinking on company time and absolutely lousing up at the office in spite of being sixty-five hundred dollars in debt. “Six five,” he repeated in awe. “I never intended that. It makes me twinge like a criminal, which is what's wrong with me. I won't ever pay it. How could I with these millstones on my neck? But I have intentions of paying it.” Which led him to analyzing their mother and her famous parsimoniousness. Which connected with why he should feel guilty about his debts
and
about not making enough to sustain Sally's morale, and was probably the reason why he was wasting all this money talking to Leslie.

“You could write me a letter.”

“We're not the kind of people who ever write,” he said with ominous despondency. And while he went on to explain that, she speculated that one Donald Patch had never so much as written a note to anyone in his life. He could at least have scrawled something on her mirror with her lipstick. Could have murdered her and written his message in her blood.

Hank said, “Sally's been after me to go into analysis. The reasons why I won't …” Leslie had heard, perhaps twenty times, the complete catalogue of reasons why he would not submit to two, three, maybe four years of poking and probing: there was always something left over, some ingredient of the personality that analysis didn't touch, so that if one wanted to, one could walk out of the last session with an analyst and right there at his door commit the acts or think the contradictory thoughts that brought him seeking help in the first place.

Anyway, what he had meant to convey was that she, Leslie, was somehow intact, was spared the horrid strain of bad luck or twist that covered the rest of the Skinner family like a blight. She had made sense of her life, was not saddled, in marriage, with trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's-ear situation.

His note of envy was genuine—as it always had been since that time in childhood when he had discovered girls were given things that boys had to pay for—and as the familiar flattery laved her, she found her mind drifting to a curiosity about whether Patch was still asleep at this hour. She dropped her third cigarette into the neck of her coke bottle, and fumbled in the drawer for the phone book. P, PA, PAN, PAO, PAP, PAR.… Her knees fell apart unnoticed. Experimentally she raised and lowered her legs in a rhythm achieved by flexing her arches. Then, as her loins and abdomen flooded with horrid warmth (Patch, Donald, art. 935-2016) she seemed to fall momentarily asleep like a child in the shameful warmth of a wet bed.