Pretty Leslie (21 page)

“Never mind. Never mind,” she said, as if soothing a psychopathic child, thankfully to be delivered soon to an institution, but not, therefore, to be abused. “Never mind, Patchy. I'll see that you get home. Only don't be mad at Dolly. She has her troubles, too.”

She turned the key. She stopped the ripples of laughter coursing her throat as she brought the car out of the drive onto the wet highway. But over the zing of tires in the moisture, she thought she heard hysterical laughter not her own, and thought she knew where it was coming from. She felt her lips strangely taut and strained as they formed into a grin of complicity with the Lord of Error and Mischance.

chapter 11

L
ATER
—as late as the following Tuesday when she drove to the airport to pick up Ben—she would still be fitting together the pieces of that night. She had to make some sense of it, she thought, even at the price of leaving her emotions shredded and tangled. The parlor had to be neat even if the basement had to serve as sewer, dump, and one more little Sargasso Sea within the Big One.

But the skirt of Reason won't cover everything. Even granting the worst reasonable interpretation of her actions and misfortunes, about half of them were irreconcilable with the rest. One woman could not have acted as contrarily as she had.

“I couldn't have done it.” That formula flashed in front of her like a prompting card for a failing actress. When she read it her dogged brain, still not dried of alcohol by Tuesday morning, responded dutifully, “Sequitur: It must have been someone else.” And somehow this mournfully inadequate falsehood could still, on Tuesday morning, drive her to echo that sourceless laughter she had heard in the rain. Now she might as well laugh like that herself, quite irresponsibly. Nothing else seemed open to her. Gaiety would, at least, see her through Ben's homecoming. She could not look beyond that. She wanted it so much to be good for him.

But whether she had or had not been literally herself that night (and when Ben came through the silver door of the plane, she would have to admit there could have been no absolving substitution), the circumstance of wearing another woman's dress had
something
to do with it. (Everything in chaos had something to do with something; God knew how much and how.) She had got a hint of masquerade the minute she shucked off her own wet print and accepted another garment. Why not say that “it all began” there? For after that, giant oaks grew from tiny acorns with the speed of black magic.

They had taken Dolores home first, of course. By Tuesday she would habitually think:
We
took Dolores home.…

On the drive Dolores had not once roused from her silence, misery, or intoxication—whatever it was. That hush, where one expected responsive good humor, hung in the car like an accusation. And Leslie supposed that she had resented that mildest of accusations. She always had resented accusations. “You know how I am about threats,” she often said to Ben. Her mother had always led her with a carrot, never driven with a stick.

Obviously Dolores had to be considered an adult. Was it Leslie's fault that she had misjudged her capacity? Had she neglected Dolores more than she had intended when they reached the farm at noon? To the first question: No. To the second: Yes. Both guilt and innocence imposed on heated up her resentment. Whether they should have or not.

Don helped her get Dolores into her house and up the stairs to the second floor. Surprise—he was not only very gentle and considerate in managing that tricky ascent; he took charge in a businesslike way, as if he were used to handling the sick. Modestly he loitered in the hall while she got Dolores undressed. Then he came in to make sure she had everything handy for the night. He brought towels and a basin from the bathroom. He stirred up a double Alka-Seltzer. He seemed to move in the quick hothouse intimacy of the sickroom like a little male nurse. And Dolores, even, appreciated his attentions. “I'm such an old fool,” she said, addressing her apology evenly to both of them. “Go on. I've got my pills.”

“What pills?” Leslie wanted to know. But Don seemed to know, to have made the necessary provision for Dolores.

“Go on.”

Don took her arm to lead her down the stairs.

Not all, she would reflect, was mischance in what immediately followed, nor attributable to a lapse of personality. Don had his designs. He'd had them for a long time. Persistence paid off; that was all one could say.

He deliberately lied when she asked, “Where can I drop you?” He told her he lived on MacAlister Road.

She had said, “Good,” quite innocently, therefore. “That's not very far from our house.”

He said, “I know.” She didn't immediately ask him how he knew. Why should she?

They rode in silence for several blocks. The rain had begun to fall again, little shell bursts of white fire in the gleam of her headlights. She felt that in spite of drink she was driving expertly and she entertained the half-formed thought that she had come a long way from that lane east of Jamaica where once she lacked control. When she accelerated up the long approach to the bridge, the big car seemed lionhearted like herself. She felt as if its power might be coming from her own heart and limbs.

“I hear you keep fish,” she said with a not very friendly laugh.

He didn't even turn his head toward her.

“Someone told me you painted … allegories.”

“I don't ask people to look at them,” he said bitterly. “I suppose they're my own business while I'm alive.”

The monstrous, deeply veiled conceit of “while I'm alive” caught like a hook at her interest. Worth baiting? Worth knowing? Maybe, maybe. Seymour Rife would know about the rare fish—might not guess, as she could, the rarest fish of them all.

“How do you know where I live?”

He grunted in masculine exasperation, as if she had been grossly flirtatious in asking, while he could not stand a flirt. “Calfert has everybody's phone number and address pasted under the counter by the switchboard. I make it my business to know details.” Now he fidgeted in his pockets for a cigarette. With an obvious effort at calm he said, “I drove past one Saturday.”

“Did you see us on the lawn?” Her tone was coaxing, because it really seemed touching, seemed to honor her, that he had taken the trouble. Yet, it made her mad that he had dared.

“There was no one home.”

“Maybe we were inside. Morning or afternoon?”

Again he said with queer emphasis, “There was no one home.” Good heavens. Had he rung the bell to see? Parked and walked into the back lawn?

“Right!” he commanded suddenly. Without having intended to at all, she twisted the wheel and was driving north on Desseintes Boulevard. Her teeth ground in irritation.

But she said, calmly enough, “I'd meant to go through on Howard. I guess you ought to know your own way home, though.”

In thirty seconds she guessed, and in a full minute she was sure, why he had not answered this observation. He was directing her toward her own house.

His presumption took her breath away. For just a minute she felt as long ago she had felt on the roller coaster at Coney, down on the slummy side of the Island, weightless, queer, about to sail on and out from the seat and the metal railing gripped in both hands.

“I'll hoof it from your place,” he said. He hadn't been presumptuous at all, just awkwardly, improbably, loutishly gallant. Why didn't he relax and let her drive him to his door through the rain?

Already she was missing the excitement of her misunderstanding, almost, it seemed, mourning that ancient promise of childhood that she could (close her eyes and see if she couldn't) fly right off the peak of the lights and glitter at Coney Island and sail over house and highway, never back to her commonplace bed again. Oh, it would have been more than fun! She had always meant—sometime—just once—to let go of the safety rail and fly. If it had killed her it would have been worth it to fat little eight-year-old Leslie Skinner.

“I'll drive you to your door,” she said firmly.

“No.”

“Why not?”

The showdown was there. Vainly later she would try to make this pinpoint moment bear the responsibility, as if what happened was all chance.

“Because it's too far,” he said breathlessly. “I live back there across the river.”

When she realized he had lied to her, her first thought was of a knife.
He carries a knife
, she thought, remembering a black man and woman snorting their lust in the very darkest thicket she had ever dreamed of. She slowed the car and edged nearer the curb. It took all her courage to sneak a look at him.

He looked so meek and so much like a grave, homely, hick little boy, staring through a window at the rain. She repented her fright.

Its power was still running in her nerves. Her excited pulse neither weakened nor slowed. The moment of dire alarm (so unnecessary, she realized too late) had fallen like a torch among oily rags, and now in the subterranean galleries of her consciousness somber and uneven glows began to spread. He seemed to know so many details. Had he known when he lied that her husband was out of town? The subterranean burning got smoky, as if stifling. Her mind was too slow to field all the possibilities of the moment.

She looked again and saw him through the most treacherous conjecture of her love. She couldn't help (couldn't help) thinking: Poor waif is still like Ben was in Kansas in that other life I'll never know about because he doesn't know it any more either. Poor silly Patch with his Gauguin dreams, inept as a turtle out of water.

She was lost.

It did not occur to her that she was lost at all. It occurred to her that she was a clever, resourceful woman, completely in command of the situation, and in a position to make of it whatever she chose. She had meant—had she not?—to find the perfect way to squelch him, on this day and no later. Once and for all.

“Since you don't live close—and I'm
sooooo
tired—why don't you drop me at home, take the wagon on, then bring it back tomorrow?
Not
earlier than one
P.M.
Thank
God
, it's Sunday.”

“I could do that.” He seemed to be studying the merits of the proposal, unaware of her. In study his upper lip crept down over the lower one, pointed as an anteater's. He looked so ridiculously bewildered, she could imagine no risk. She could handle him like Bill the parakeet, poor old subhuman Bill who doted on her so pathetically.

With the faintest tremor of excitement shivering her voice, she said, “Or, you can have a nightcap with me, if you like, before you go home.” She took a delighted breath and goaded him one step further: “My husband is in South America.”

“Oh.”

She swung onto their block, saw that only the Carpenters' and Rozaks' lights were still burning. She idled in the street at the entrance to her own driveway. “Well?”

“I'd appreciate a nightcap.”

“Huh?”

“Ma'am.”

“I'd appreciate a nightcap,
ma'am.''
You poor little coon. You asked to learn your place. White lady's going to teach you, because she can.

One fiction did not exclude another in the polyphonic clamor of her thoughts. She was a theater with four movies running on separate screens at once. She was a drunkard's multiple image of the female pink elephant. She was Wonder Woman with her whip and lariat, Big Sister, Nurse Nan, and Jean Harlow (starring in
Hell's Angels
, revived at the Modern Art) in successions so rapid that they bewildered her at least as much as Don.

When she led the way into the dark house and switched on the light, she was so dazzled by the splendor of formica, chrome, glassware and Monel metal (like the hypothetical Asiatic peasant come to plunder America) that she gasped, and went on immediately into
gratitude
(dear God, even that, she would remember later) to Ben for making her mistress of so much and giving her the freedom to use it as
she
saw fit, no accounting asked. God Bless America. Here was the prodigal plenty offered to the children of the pioneer.

A mad bird flashed toward her through the jungle, and Jane flinched back enough to contact the hand of a Tiny Tarzan against the bare, sunburned skin of her arm.

“It's only Bill.” It's only my falcon, said the Princess with the sea-cruel eyes. She gave the delirious little creature a perch on her shoulder and swept on into the living room.

She pulled the traverse cords to close the curtains across their glassed wall. “Do hap yourself,” said Katharine Hepburn, gesturing at the bar.

Silly Don seemed hypnotized by the color print on the stone breadth of the fireplace chimney. “It's modern art,” he said, reprovingly. It would have been unkind to laugh at him for his tone.

“It's a Clavé,” she said. “An early Clavé, but a Clavé Now, if you'll excuse me for a jiff …” She had meant merely to go to the bathroom, made the rapid-fire amendment that she might manage the game better in clothes of her own, amended further to say, “… I think I'll slip into something more comfortable.”

Harem ladies with their eunuch could not be more harmlessly engaged than she, she thought, parting her lips so that her mouth was taller than wide, and drowning in the dark reflection of herself in the bathroom mirror. Her loosened hair looked almost black. Her eyes were hardly defined in their shadowy sockets, and the white collar of her negligee, like the erected ruff of a bird, created yet another image for the multitude she was no longer so much editing as merely watching. They said that at moments of such intent as hers broads stopped thinking. Broads said that themselves and they lied. The shuttle of her mind had never been faster.

She saw a girl from a steel-cut illustration for the Eve of St. Agnes. Some legend about seeing the bridegroom in the mirror on St. Agnes's Eve. She saw the bridegroom. His face was hers. She hugged him too; at least she clasped her elbows against her sides in a rudimentary hug, idolizing her body in its liberty and its splendid, humming capacities.