Pretty Leslie (4 page)

At least they were listening gravely, Martha sucking on her martini like an anteater vacuuming an anthill. Leslie stared beyond her listeners at the grave moosehead on the wall (the Oak Room prided itself on retaining the flavor of the nineteenth-century Midwest, the myth of paunchy mid-continental tycoons) and her eyes brooded on the huge colored lithograph of the pride of the North German Lloyd line. In the corner of her vision the red-vested livery of baronial servants flickered romantic signals—all this seeming to be part of her story, the setting and the gin part of its spell.

Of course she was the only one who really fell under the spell. Susceptibility to her own voice made her a poor storyteller. She finished—or stopped trying, at least—to find a broad look of skepticism on Dave's face. He had a comment on Ben's superstition.

Which made her feel like Delilah who had just delivered Samson to the Philistines. It was only safe to communicate trivialities after all.

“He's not at all superstitious in the sense you mean,” she defended. “You want him to be a machine? You've missed the point or I didn't make it or something. He's the least swayed by superstition of anyone I've ever known. Subconscious ones and all, I mean.”

“You mean mine are subconscious,” Dave said, mocking her by his pretense that he had been caught and corrected.

She said, “I don't see how he can stand me with all mine.”

“All
yours
,” Dave said. He did not mean to forgive her for introducing melodrama into his lunchtime. His eyes purposely flicked her breasts and flushed throat like a roué tapping a chippy with the back of his fingernails, mildly but ruthlessly arrogant in his dismissal. He had tried to make it plain he appreciated the results of her massage. If he wanted Ben's thought, he indicated, he would get it from Ben himself.

“Ben's a thoughtful human being, not some mere pillpusher,” she said—and realized that even now she could not help using argument as a kind of flirtation. However serious she might make her attack, still it would be a sort of flirtation with Dave. “Superstitious? It isn't Ben who reads the daily horoscope in the paper, or won't light three on a match, or won't bet on the horses without calling a numerologist.”

“You never did that,” Dave said, voluptuously pleased at this response to his teasing.

“Once I did. I called this old woman who's down somewhere on Union Avenue—way down—”

“Down in the Negro district,” Martha said. “This boy of Ben's who died—”

“She gave you a winner?” Dave asked, lighting a cigar and smiling crookedly at her through the smoke.

“—and asked for a card for the entire afternoon. She gave me it and I was just breathless, wondering whether I dared trust her, and, oh”—Leslie brushed a red-brown wave of hair from her forehead as she leaned forward into the excitement of this reminiscence of herself—“oh, telling myself if I didn't have faith it couldn't work and all that sort of nonsense that you
do
tell yourself when you monkey around with superstition. I weakened a little bit and told Ben
before
we went to the track. He grinned—he
really
isn't superstitious—and said, ‘We'll see, we'll see,' in that way of his I can't stand. That, just that, put my back up, so I said to myself I
will
believe. So I did believe. I got two winners and three places in eight races. How about that?”

When she had finished, she had the faintly confused notion that the point of her story cleared Ben once and for all of any suspicion that he might be superstitious toward his work. She tried to recall exactly why she had started her reminiscence, meaning to lead back to the point of departure. If they'd give her a minute, she'd round out her demonstration.

Martha said, “I suppose what is worrying Ben is the injustice in that the little white girl should be ‘resurrected,' or whatever word you used, and the little black boy, Austin, had to die. I can see that there's a riddle in that. Someone like Ben—”

“The boy's numerology was up. Where's the riddle?” Dave said. In his postprandial drowsiness he resented that his wife's presence was the condition imposed that he might listen to Leslie Daniels get excited (for once, about something; about her husband, why not? Dave did not dare dream of a closer contact, and for vicarious satisfactions one brand of excitement in a woman was the same as another). Fully alert, he would have seconded his wife's liberalism. Torpid, he fell back on the little-boy trick of teasing. Anyway, the women ignored him now.

“I don't think it's a question of justice,” Leslie said.

“I certainly don't mean Ben didn't do his best for both of them,” Martha said. “Even my smart-aleck, jealous—oh, terribly jealous gooey old letch—husband would understand that. The point Ben would see is that of course Mandy Tabor doesn't live in a home where the paint on the wall has
lead
in it. Only these ratty old places where Negroes live here in Sardis would have these layers on layers of crumbling, flaking old paint.”

“Well,” Dave said, “
now
I'm enlightened. Thank you, sweetheart. I didn't know until this very moment that all children ate the walls of home sweet home.”

“It's called pica,” Leslie said.

“Of course not all children do it,” Martha said.

“Darn cute of them little spades to think of it,” Dave said. With a promise that he would take this delicate matter up with Ben, he excused himself from the table and made his way to the cashier's pulpit.

“No. Let him pay,” Martha said to Leslie. “Senile old brute. I told myself this morning he deserved to have lunch with you. Now I regret it. He's really gone to hell badly in the last year or two. Oh, forget him. We'll have another brandy and then go enjoy the hell out of shopping.”

But, as if the wind had changed outside and brought a colorless overcast across the blue sky, the whole mood of the day was changed. The afternoon seemed to stretch ahead like a huge prairie that they would have to cross on foot. Martha felt the need to explain, with picayune hairsplitting, exactly the shade of antagonism that had grown up between her and her husband in nine years of marriage. She was his second wife. Certain “areas” in his nature had been permanently blighted before she had her chance at him. He had two half-grown boys in California and blamed Martha—oh, quite subconsciously—for spoiling the relationship he might have had with his sons. She had foolishly agreed not to have children, and though the agreement had long ago been tacitly abandoned, neither of them could muster enough enthusiasm now to get an infant. “I know it sounds absurd to say you need enthusiasm,” Martha grumbled. “But when you don't have it, you somehow fall back into the same old cautious habits month after month, and I'd simply not want to go to the bother of talking the old man into it now.”

The dining room was emptying. Some of the blinds that had been drawn at noon had been raised by waiters, and there was a midafternoon tawdriness to the place. The antlers of the moose looked like a hatrack, and Martha paid no attention. She grasped Leslie's hand in both of hers and with little beads of tears at the corners of her eyes, she said, “Promise me, love. Promise me you and Ben will have a baby as soon as you can.”

Leslie wanted to get her hand out of this clammy contact. At the same time she was moved by a thrill of possibility, glorified at the responsibility that seemed thus to be thrust on her.

“Don't worry,” she said uneasily. “We mean to. I want a little girl.” She tried to make her voice resonant with good, maternal cheer. “I've always wanted a little girl. Next year we'll have one.”

Martha shook her head. She withdrew her hands from Leslie's and said sepulchrally, “People who tell themselves ‘next year' never have them. You believe me, I know.”

“But that's—” Leslie brightened, rang the words out gaily—“pure superstition. Now we see where the Lloyds and the Danielses stand. Oh, I know you care. I didn't mean to mock. But don't worry about me, please. Ben and I are going to be all right.” She ended laughing. The laughter was thin as a watered drink, tiresome as this restaurant with its crumby tables and the relaxing red-jacketed waiters. “Let's get out of here if we're going,” she said.

The weather in the streets had not changed when they went out. The tall buildings of midtown Sardis threw longer shadows, a mellow violet falling diagonally across the uprights of stone, glass and brick, and the western end of the street dazzled like a burning acetylene torch. Eastward, over the river and the lake behind the dam, there was such a blue as appears only over water in the middle of June. The traffic of three o'clock in this neighborhood seemed to idle, jostling amid the buildings without a strong tidal impulse.

“I'm tired,” Leslie said, as they waited for a light to change at the end of the first block. She smiled apologetically, a smile intended to express finality.

Martha turned a quizzical eye. “Shopper's fag,” she said. “And we haven't even crossed a merchant threshold. O.K. Me too. How about a movie? I never go in the afternoons. Or we'll drive out around the lake. Ah, let's do that. I'd like to.”

Her tone was that of a wooer who understands that she has been tedious.

Leslie dropped her lids and shook her head. “We'll be seeing you and Dave on Saturday anyway. And oh, a new man from the hospital, a neurologist Ben met, is coming. I understand his wife is quite a doll. Tell Dave.”

Martha did not spoil the day further by coaxing. She knew Leslie. She knew the point at which Leslie folded her petals and left the whole wide world to get along—as beautifully as it could—without her.

chapter 3

S
HE WAS
twenty-seven that summer and had lived in many places. Among childhood friends in Manhasset, at school, and in Manhattan she had left legends behind her—of course not large-scale legends but a sort of colorful abandonment of debris like the fascinating junk left in a playground when the children go home. The host of people who remembered her to this day had not so much known her as known things about her. Colorful, memorable remarks, follies, or lightning-swift generosities that must have come from a rare individual.

But perhaps, in spite of what people said, she was nobody at all.

“Don't you see,” she said once to one of the nice men who had loved her, “what I was always most afraid of was that I was hollow.”

That was easy to refute. He said, “Hollow people aren't afraid of being hollow. Nuts aren't afraid of going nuts. Your worry saves you.”

She liked to be consoled, so she said maybe that was the case. But the comfort of logic was unbearably transient. The man said, “Aren't women supposed to be hollow? I mean, to adapt themselves to a male type and take their form from him?”

Leslie tapped her large front teeth and thought it over. “Oh God,” she said. “Oh God!”

When she was alone in the present she knew she was nothing at all. But when she remembered all she had done (good God!) and thought and said, it seemed to her, too, that a hollow person could not have left such vivid traces behind her, like a path of confetti. And she, naturally, remembered more of the Leslie legend than anyone else. Others only had parts of it. They had never seen her diaries.

She remembered how her mother used to tell of a trip the family had taken through the South in the late forties. “Leslie even flirted with a
chain gang
,” Mrs. Skinner said. She could not get over it, never seemed to cease marveling, since of course it was all so innocent.

Poor chained convicts on a dusty road in Georgia—what a fleeting appearance they had made in the legend of this heroine of the Republic. It took Mr. Skinner ten minutes to change the tire while plump young Leslie simpered and smiled across the ditch and barbed-wire fence that separated her from the astonished cons. Then time separated them forever, except in Mrs. Skinner's tale.

There had been multitudes in her legend of love. As late as her twenty-second year when she left college for her first job, she wrote on a loose-leaf sheet that became part of her diary, “I know that it is wrong to think about love as much as I do, yet I seem
constantly
reverting to the subject. Something badly wrong with me?”

In her progressive high school at home in Manhasset she had been led to Yeats's line about an “old lecher with a love on every wind” and delightedly made it her own. More than that, she conceived a bearded old rowdy (a little handsomer than Bathless Groggins in the comic strips) as her daydream alter ego, and in her seventeenth year thought of herself as “essentially male in my apparent Don Juanism” (another introspective diary entry), an old, dirty rogue male. At the beginning of her college years, independence already dwindling, she suppressed the “old lecher” part of the line and on winter nights in her dormitory at Smith merely dreamed of a love on every wind.

A diary entry from June, 1953:

Just listened to Hallelujah Chorus—God, that's beautiful! Saw Rust and Ed this afternoon for cokes. Ed says all off between him and Rosemary. I pray for both their sakes it is not. For a change no reading this evening before going out. Frosty, Jas., Woodrow and I played bridge
jusqu'à
nine thirty. Frosty wanted to hypnotize me for an “experiment”—I said OK—I couldn't open my eyes—REALLY!—but I wasn't completely under. She said I was to go downstairs and kiss Tommy Greer—Alice's Tommy. He's
cute
—I knew damn well what they'd told me, but I'm frustrated—so what the hell, I made like I wasn't. We all sat around the breakfast nook—they were about to die! Finally they all left and Tommy and I stayed & kidded. We were about to leave when I looked at him and said “chicken.” He said hell no & kissed me.
Peachy
—nice! God, I wanna
neck!
I love Mary Jo, Tommy, Frosty, Willa, Rosemary. Glad I'm not frigid. Tommy proved.