Pretty Leslie (22 page)

Did the mirror rebuke her? She defied it, mutely whispering, “I never knew what I wanted when I had the chance.” Her mind was so swift that before the defiance was out, she realized it was really intended for her mother and she was speaking of those thousand and one promising nights of high-school petting when the promise got its neck wrung like a chicken's. The frustrated hands of high-school athletes and fops seemed again to be tickling her legs, fingering for a purchase. Once C-note Stern had offered her a real bill and she had turned it down. She had been cheated of that amusing memory.… Now her heart and loins flooded with gratitude to Ben, Ben, Ben for giving her all the opportunities including this one to make up for the aborted, lost, should-have-been-triumphant past. Ironic? What did she care for ironies in the intoxication of her freedom?

I didn't want to leave the music, she thought. Dolores made me leave. Dolores wouldn't like this. But Dolores made me come home.

She put her hand on the knob of the linen closet. On an upper shelf—and hopefully not unsafe from age and neglect—was the fluted round case, like a compact, that contained her diaphragm. God, she owed it to Ben and his liberality
not
to get pregnant.

How could she get pregnant? This was only a joke. In life's theayter she was pretending to be Jean Harlow. (Hadn't she echoed, “I'll slip into something more comfortable” right out of the Harlow mouth?) She was a bright (frustrated) literature student in a Smith dormitory, winning her wings for her performance as Molly Bloom. Freeeee-froooong, yourself, fat Molly.

She hesitated to open the linen closet. Jean Harlow and Molly, yes. Pandora, no. Oh, this might get out of hand even given the fact that it wasn't Blazes Boylan out there with his big white teeth and straw hat, but only little Don Patch who could be stopped any time. She had stopped—how many times?—the hottest boys in Manhasset High. It was herself, the rampant false bridegroom, she could not trust.

But she had to open the box to punish Ben. He must be punished for his absence, for not being here to take advantage of this (she was pretty sure) ovulation after all that messing with the charts. The merciless female who opened the closet and the fluted box knew Ben was to blame for not having given her a child
before
. He had prepared her and fled. This ghastly treachery would be paid in full.

It was unreasonable, but it could be reasoned out. She knew a moment absolutely devoid of lust. In it she thought, Of
course
I have hostilities against Ben (though Martha may have struck that jargonish word in my ear). Hostilities were anathema to a neat housewife. She had best be after them with pail and rag before he (husband) came home again. She remembered saying to David Lloyd in the alley, “Of course Ben and I hate the hell out of each other.” She had said it because Dave said so many low things about Martha. That did not deny it its degree of truth.

Her jelly was up there, too, she hoped, swinging the door wide. But now she found she could not reach the high shelf. Dragging up a stool to reach it seemed like
going too far
. And she wanted to sob with the way circumstances pointed both directions. Oh, she'd fornicate (that was already decided, or “handed down” like a decision from the bench) but she was damned if she'd climb a stool for the privilege. All the world knew how stubborn she was about unfair handicaps.

So the dark crannies of the cupboard had to lure her up, baiting her curiosity and reminding her of one early time when she and Mary Jo Anavelt had ransacked a bureau in the Anavelt house looking for what Mary Jo said her mama kept in the top drawer “all the time.” Illicit memory justified the illicit present.

God, she was trembling. Scalded as if from a boiling shower. Before, when it had seemed necessary for planning, she had always been ashamed by this crouching and probing. It had seemed to bind her still to that night home from college when she was washing herself in too hot a shower, almost faint, but singing lustily, “We are poor little lambs.” Whiffenpoof. It had happened, the possession and deliverance. The girl possessed by the god. The awful, draining shock of knowing something had been taken from her.

It happened now as the springing circle of rubber expanded into place, and she thought, Oh, God damn, cheated again. She sat down to smoke a cigarette and resent every accident or statistical possibility that might still have saved her. Everything about me is so strong, she thought. And that had to fizzle away so weakly.

By the time she returned to the front room, she had almost literally forgotten there was anyone with her in the house. She came out with an abandoned, unhurried stride as though expecting at most a few minutes of abstract and pretended love play with her parakeet. She called first to the bird, but it would not come down to her from the curtain rod.

“All right, you sonofabitch,” she said. She would cheat him, too, before his very eyes.

Don was on his feet. He stood frowning at the Soutine reproduction above the bookshelves with his head lowered like a bull calf. He looked as if he meant to charge its incendiary reds. He had not fixed a drink either for himself or her.

“And why the hell not?” she asked. “You've had plenty of time.” Her voice softened. Maybe he had been too shy. “Well, fix them now,” she said.

“You've had enough to drink,” he said sullenly.

“You're telling me I can't have one?” She could hardly, she let him know, believe her ears. She swept past him like a Sherman tank on her way to the liquor cabinet. He tried to catch her as she came near. The mere smell of expensive perfume was enough to weaken his resolve. His hand hardly clung a second to the sleek film of her robe.

Again he said, “You've had enough.” When she turned and held out a highball to him he would not take it. But he seemed to accept that if there was a trial of strength he was outclassed.

What did he have to count on, then? Nothing. They sat side by side on the gray, foam rubber sofa a foot apart. He had no conversation that could even turn her gaze to him. The knees of one inclined toward the knees of the other at an angle whose lines would have met only a few miles short of infinity. Everything waited on her impulse—or decision, if she could make one. They both knew she might toss him out like garbage almost any time.

“Your husband must be quite a guy,” he said.

“What makes you think so?”

But he had meant nothing. Perhaps it was the only flattery that he could think of, poor fellow. He fidgeted under her scrutinizing smile, added, “I've always respected doctors.”

“You'd like to have gone to medical school.”

He shook his head. “I'm a born artist,” he said. His Adam's apple wobbled as if he was going to start talking about art.

“Mmmmm. Really?” Leslie leaned forward to rest her elbows on her knees. Her replenishing store of sensuality (no doubt stimulated by—but merely stimulated, not at all dependent on—the presence of a strange man in her house at one o'clock in the morning) made her think fondly, fully, adoringly of Ben. She seemed to be a goldfish, floating in the bowl of him. He set the transparent, protective limits of her life. His tolerance buoyed her up like water. (Had he been alarmed at Dave Lloyd's treacherous attempt on her? He had not taken it seriously.) It did not seem to matter where he might be at this hour. She didn't care what time it was in Venezuela. (Was it dawn there already? If it was, then this night was already past; what was past could have no harm in it.)

Her pulse murmured like the surf the dear man might be listening to. Alone? She liked to think that he might not be alone. Why shouldn't he be with some inconsequential broad, wandering on the beach? She was not going to let him outdo her in tolerance.

So she reasoned. (At least, dear God, she thought later, it had seemed not only like reasoning at the time, but the lofty reasoning of a liberated soul.) She had never been a more loving wife than when Don Patch finally made a now-or-never move to kiss her. In her high-school diary, where she had graded about three thousand kisses, she would have graded this one as “not bad.”

She watched him with terrible, quiet eyes as he bent to loosen the ties of her robe. It occurred to her that the way he was trembling, he might very well just die when he exposed her, like a rash infidel trespassing through the veils of a shrine—like a little boy killed playing at war with real dynamite. His pink mouth gaped pitifully to draw in a nipple. Poor tike, poor tike, she thought. Poor little mongrel. She put her arms around his head and rocked.

She had not expected to mind the dim lights of the room, but when he tried to part the robe below her waist she resisted. “Wait,” she said. “Wait, please. Go turn off that light.”

She thought he was moving to obey and she thought he had jolly well better. But then with a whine and a quick shuddering manipulation like a dog shaking water from his shoulders, he jerked the white lips of the cloth back from the less pure white of her loins, stared down in a kind of agony at the mound bulged upward by the tight clenching of her legs.

For a moment while she savored the violation of his stare, they were motionless as a piece of statuary in some obscene park where only bad children go. Then she said in a voice of pure hatred, “I was a little fat girl.”

He might well have been bewildered by such an announcement and its timing. But when he shook his head it was simply an admonition to her to stop talking altogether. She saw that he was about to open his clothes. She said, “Not in here. Come on.” She wanted the bed because it was Ben's. She would not want to remember such a gross, natural, total inversion of moral logic, but she felt it keenly then. She wanted the dark because the light showed Ben's absence. She wanted only the familiar around her as she enjoyed her purely private dream.

The first thrust was of unbearable violence. But more demoralizing than the pain of it was the lightning stroke of surprise—someone was with her who hardly recognized the values she set upon herself, let alone respecting them. It was as if she were just now discovering she was neither by herself nor with a husband who wished to please. The recognition was devastating. He had come to her bed meek as a lamb. Now this reckless infliction of pain, quickly fading, eternal. She would never be allowed to drift again.

“Wait,” she said. She summoned all her strength and with a quick roll of her hips forced him out. “Really,” she said. “You may not understand, but that hurt. I'm not Dolly or somebody like that. Don't be so rough again.”

She saw the tips of his teeth glint and thought he was laughing at her. She tried to sit up. She put a hand on his chest to push him away. “I mean it. You've got to promise not to hurt me or we can't go on.”

She had said what she had to. She knew he would not promise and that she would not prevent him from entering again.

There was no rhythm to his assault. (She would remember this with unfaded surprise as the memory became more detailed and she found him different in this respect, as in others, from any of the men who had taken her.) He seemed merely to be adjusting himself, unhurriedly taking aim, taking as long between strokes as necessary to be sure, then throwing his whole weight and force into and against her.

“No,” she said, “no, no, no, no, no, no, no.”

He could no more hear her than he could have heard a dream figure calling from inside another skull. Deaf, he bunched his muscles, pinned her flat, tinkered for aim, then struck.

He was going to maim her. She was sure of that. With a gurgle of fear she set all her fingers in his curls, thrust until she could see a death's-head dangling from the inverted cup of her hands.

“No more,” she begged.

He got the point of his elbow on her throat, leaned his weight on it while she tried to thrash her head from side to side. The death's head leered.

Now it was as if an unknown—perhaps never created—island in the darkness of her body began to be identified. It was a nothing, taught by the rote of pain to
know itself
, to know of its own blind cunning that it must survive at the expense of her body and mind. Clawed like the symbol for cancer, it scratched for its survival inside the smothering cave. It moved on ponderous, hairy feet toward the source of light, lumbering like an elephant on spidery, insufficient legs toward the destruction that created it. And was free, gasping its gratitude in gouts of venom, slobbering its monstrous tears at the mouth of the cave, rolling pinpoint eyes and blinking over a white landscape. From its chimerical throat bubbled moans of praise for the Creator, humility and incomprehension that something so uncouth had been drawn slimy from the clay and permitted to know itself. Its cry would not even be an ape cry for millions of years. It tried to sing its alleluia from beyond the history of male and female.

It had found salvation, not she. “Lover, lover, lover,” she chirped. Her fingers reveled praises in his ears. Thirstily she pecked at his face—eyes, nose, cheeks, lips, and chin—with dozens of tiny kisses like the pecking of a bird. “Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful,” she said. The sound of the words she could not help terrified her.

“Enough,” she said. “Oh my God, enough. Let me sit up. Here. Wait. Enough. Let me get you a cigarette. Please. No. No. No. No more.”

chapter 12

S
HE HAD BEEN A FAT LITTLE GIRL.
Between seven and ten she had been a real butterball. Even her hands and feet were fat (though not monstrous; she was merely the only girl in the fourth grade who had dimples for knuckles).

Sometimes she had minded being fat more than at other times. Sometimes she had gloried in it, discerning her disgusting appearance to be a type of revenge not only on her mother but on everybody. Her fatness was a sign of the bestiality of the race (something like that was her precise thought if not her verbalized concept). Other times the real Leslie disengaged. She took a walk from the fat girl. Went somewhere else and had splendid, ethereal adventures. Later, when she had been convinced that her obesity was not a permanent condition (though before it had changed toward normality), she was very proud to find herself repeating the fable of the ugly duckling. She had the advantages (disguise, compassion, freedom from premature exposure) of a seed with the husk still on. Without undergoing the embarrassment of plumpness she could not so much have enjoyed discovering herself a swan.