Pretty Leslie (42 page)

Did she know too little about Ben's work? She did. Therefore hadn't his very tolerance of this been always an unspoken accusation?

Hadn't she drifted all her life in the salt water of economic comfort, making nothing of her opportunities—while he, quite clearly, had crawled up the slope from a miserable childhood? That truth accused her now as if it had come from his lips. To meet it she began to project the figure of Teresa Echeverría-Röhde.

Hadn't she usurped the husband's natural prerogative to be the first to stray? If
he
gets a little on the side, then
she
has a right—that was the formula Leslie and her friends had always used in college arguments, and she seemed to be oddly stuck with it now when she did her moral homework. It wasn't the same if you reversed the sequence.…

The gander ought to have his sauce, she told herself in moments of perturbed erotic fancy (more frequent now than they had been for years; since the time she lived alone in the apartment on Waverly Place). Justice requires a balance. Whether he wanted to or not—and he showed no signs that he did—Ben ought to get even. And getting even, in Leslie's stimulated imagination, meant a few nights of pure carouse with an utterly impossible person (like impossible Don Patch). She had considered Sarah, during Sarah's little visit. Had decided that Sarah with her acne and Dachau boniness was not a fair offering to Ben. She was quite sure Ben would rather treat Sarah with vitamins and diet, soap and water, than tip her into a lustful bed.

So she chose Garland Roberts. Garland was still around. After all, she had “elected” a year of going to business instead of college. She was working downtown now in a title and abstract office. Her speech was beginning to sound like business letters. She said “effectuate” for “carry out,” “facilitate” for “make easy,” “utilize” for “use,” “procure” for “get,” and, when she could rise to it, “subsequent to” for “after.” She wanted to procure a car that she could utilize in getting to the job. It would certainly facilitate her life if she could acquire maybe a little Studie convertible. They didn't utilize much gas, did they?

Ben admired her for this elegance. It relaxed him like a martini to hear the ornamental words tumble like glass beads from her mouth. After she “dropped by”—once or twice a week in the evenings, usually on her way home from work—he was full of chuckles and the determination to imitate her. At Leslie's urging he would admit that she was certainly very pretty. Nubile, no doubt.

But one evening after Leslie had managed to leave them, not very gracefully, alone in the house while she drove on a laboriously protracted errand, she returned to find Ben alone and not at all amused.

“What are you trying to do, pimp that girl for me?” he asked.

“Where is she?”

“Well, we both felt very uncomfortable. Garland doesn't have much conversation with me. I got the impression that she—poor Garland—knew you were trying to effectuate something.”

“And?” Leslie could not look at him. It was very icky to be caught, as she seemed to be, in the very throes of a heroic fantasy, caught in the cold light of adult eyes.

“And I don't like it,” he said.

The little incident carried more weight than it deserved, like a joke that fails to get its expected laugh when the teller is all exposed with confidence. His response showed Ben farther away than she had lately thought he was.

But stoically she told herself that maybe Ben had once been too dependent on their marriage. Good, then, if behind his usual mask of playfulness he was withdrawing into some fortress of himself. Whatever happened now was good. It had to be, because it would be too terrible if it weren't. And if Ben was growing in independence, that justified the independence that willy-nilly was thrust on her.

She had to be capable of anything now. When the surface of her life flowed on like rote—as it usually did—still the lower currents wandered among the stony surprises of an unknown stream bed. When she could no longer believe her marriage to be the center of her life, there was no center except herself. Her marriage would not provide a measure for expediency. Then her capabilities beckoned like obligations. She had never been fully tried. She
must
try herself.

One of the things she could do was be just to little Don Patch. Which did not at all mean giving in to the threat he represented. She weighed the threat and dismissed it. Everyone knew (or ought to know) how she was about threats. Long ago her family had learned never to threaten Leslie. Threatening only clinched her stubborn resistance, and they never had the heart to break it by sheer power. So she learned by five never to give in to threats—and had not yet learned any better. Crawling out of her cave, now she was still an unlicked cub.

It was not fear of Patch or the fuss he might cause that determined her to see him again. He might lurk around their neighborhood (as apparently he had done before). He might write to Ben or see him or call him. That didn't worry her.

She knew that it was within her power to see him again and establish a different kind of relationship—therefore it seemed her duty to do so. She had mocked him as a grotesque character and had found that however grotesque he was, she had no right to mock. She remembered his collection of exotic fish and the inarticulate passion they represented—little gold and black signals flashing in the green dimness, signaling nothing she could read except the appeal: “Break my code.” Cloak-and-dagger hints from the aquarium … she found herself puzzling them over a great deal.

Patch had said, “We ought to take off for a tropical beach.” It was the only utterance she could remember from their physical bouts that had about it any suggestion of love beyond the physical, any tint of romance. Merely because it was so cryptic she tried to link it with other things she knew about him. Was it not a grudging echo of his whole romanticized conception of himself as artist? Surely behind his sociopathic hostility lurked the ambition to shed himself like a skin and contend for his real life as a man should. If this ambition was without detail, if it was only restlessness, discontent, some kind of dignity lay just in his refusal to accept the ugly self he was. Who had had more experience with that discontent than she? And with the experience went a longing to communicate it.

So she called Don Patch one day that fall and told him she was driving into the country to look for a house. Would he care to ride along?

It was no lie that she was still house hunting in the afternoons. That was her commission from Ben. She had asked him in wifely earnestness if it wasn't time now to look for a place in which to end their days. “Go down the sunset trail.”

“Sunset trail?”

“You know what I mean.”

He knew what she
had
meant, once upon a time, when she talked about forever. In loyalty to that still possible meaning he urged her to get out while the weather was still good and look for the imagined house where they could live in peace. They could still have what they chose—if they could find it.

“Find us our house,” he said cheerily.

So she had a task, as well as an excuse, for cruising in the countryside around the city, browsing away her afternoons in the small towns. To take Don with her on her trips seemed innocent and safe.

By the middle of October she was seeing him at least once or twice a week. Their meetings were always very chaste. It even amused her to see how formally he refrained from allusion to what had happened in the summer.

They met downtown for drinks or lunch sometimes—never in his apartment. Little by little, guided by caution, working with charm, she got him to tell her about his real life—that is, about the one he might have lived if things had gone a little different for him at crucial points.

He was not sure he was really a painter. She guessed, with an odd commotion of pity and astonishment, that he was maybe a doctor, a healer whom everyone had to look up to. Great God—he was, or thought he should have been, Ben.

“But you work so hard at your art,” she reminded him, cutting into the stream of hints and longing.

Yes. But that might have gone differently too. “If I could have made it to the South Seas,” he said, “I wouldn't have been
just
an artist.” He knew that even in our time there was still a way out. He could have had a rich life to go with his art if he had found the right brown-skinned woman in the right thatched hut under the right coconut tree.

If she did not believe in his vision, she believed in his longing. His lust for the Gauguin beach seemed somehow like a tribute to her.

She was asking nothing for herself. In these days of their renewed acquaintance she remembered that in adolescence she had wanted to be a saint before she had wanted to be a writer. The intimations of those days returned in a haze of sentimentality and commanded her to respect this man just because he had caused her so much suffering.

She had to draw his thoughts out patiently. Her patience gave them a value in her own eyes. There was something in what he said. When he was out of her sight, she recast his image as that of a handicapped younger brother, more worthy of her concern than her own brothers because more handicapped by life. When she was with him she took the imprint of his eccentricity.

She questioned him about the beach he wanted. “I mean, the tropics are very undisciplined. How do you reconcile that with the sort of tight way you like to paint?”

He didn't know what she meant. It had never in his life been brought home to him that things had to be reconciled. You took them as they came if you could. You stayed alive by trusting no one.

She knew he didn't trust her now. (Ben still trusted her.) More and more she wanted to win his trust. At least that. But on her own terms. She meant to pull him out of his shell, not to be dragged into it with him again. Of course it was a dangerous game, but she was capable of anything now.

She persuaded him to drive down to Arkansas to see his wife and children. While he was gone she suffered a queer ten days of anxiety and hope. She didn't know exactly what to expect, but she had told him she hoped he would bring his family back to live with him.

He came back to Sardis alone and embittered. Sure,
Mildred
had wanted to make it up. She had gone to bed with him “like a mop” because he was her husband. The children … yes, they were nice. He had brought back some new snapshots to show Leslie. In her heart she quailed sympathetically when she saw them. They were very ugly and stupid-looking kids. While she could not approve, she understood why he might reject them.

She drove to St. Louis with him one day for an hour in the art museum. She was determined
not
to press her own views. She meant to listen to him and try finally to grasp the connection he saw between his own garish and slick work and the “old masters.” She found he did not like the big Correggio, the Lawrence portrait, the Dutch interiors, or the Ingres allegory any better than he liked the Cézanne still life or the Degas pastels or the cruel and sick Beckmann portrait of an actor. Whatever tastes he had gone through in his art-school days, he seemed to like nothing any more that had actually been put on canvas. Except his own work, of course.

The only object that stopped him in the museum was a casting of Rodin's John the Baptist. Before that gaunt, flayed, striding figure he grinned an involuntary tribute. “That's
real
,” he said. Through his eyes she saw the terrible nudity of the prophet and was a little sickened, a little faint. A man ought to die, just curl up and die, suffering the diet of locusts this specter had eaten in the desert. But still he came on with outrageous enthusiasm on his face.

“I don't like it,” she muttered, but said nothing more because of her resolve to hold her tongue.

Of course she forgot her impression of the sculpture in a few days, but until she did, that tall bronze scarecrow seemed to be racing faster than her other pursuers to bring her to earth. If anything could, just such a figure would catch her before she had a chance to make good all that had always been wrong. For she could imagine that in the sculptured face she saw Ben's likeness—at least she had seen in bronze his enthusiastic pretense that he still loved her when she was no longer, in her mortal shape, worth it. Bereaved of all except loyalty, he suffered onward in his pursuit. Oh, let him lie down and rest. Cunningly, beyond cunning, she connived at his peace.

She was not a schiz. There were no real divisions of personality to anesthetize her as she began her double life in earnest. There were, instead, alternations of circumstance too swift and savage to permit her any equilibrium except that of the moment, wherever she found herself. Now when she could not bear the continuities of time, she found them inescapable.

She knew herself capable of great deceptions. Little things tripped her. She woke one morning with an edgy feeling of the precariousness surrounding her, depressed, about to get the curse. She read her horoscope in the paper: “Be especially careful not to embark on financial partnerships without thorough investigation.” The advice sounded like her mother's. She respected it and resented it.

Then, before she left the house for work, she found that Bill was dead. He was stiff as a bright-colored stone in his cage. She hid him until Ben had gone to his office.

She did not mean to accuse Flannery of causing the bird's death, but it came around to that. And it would have been bad enough to make an unjust accusation. That would vent her feelings and she could have called back from the office to say how wretchedly sorry she was. She could have taken all the blame on herself, as she felt she needed to.

No, she was denied even that simple misery. It turned out that Flannery had been to blame. Yesterday had been cold. She had opened the windows when she cleaned the room where Bill was caged. Evidently he had taken his mortal chill from her carelessness.