Pretty Leslie (24 page)

“What's wrong with me?” she demanded of Ben when she reported to him all an engaged girl would like to report of her reaction.

“Well.…”

He was smiling, hesitant, eager to help if and when it became apparent that she needed help, but nevertheless reluctant to annoy her with ponderous analysis based on thin evidence.

“But I'm a
liberal
,” she protested. He laughed as if his heart would break.

“If you'd only take my psychic life seriously, you could help me get into my summer clothes,” she said, panting. And because he had laughed at the wrong time (What would have been the right time? She loved his ease and counted on it for reassurance, but assumed the right time to laugh was some ideal moment that could not be placed in the actual calendar of their hours together), she did not tell him then or ever how the Fat Girl had led her from the window to the bed. She had lain, sweating and shaken, with an afterimage of sundown brilliance fading to violet intense abstraction in her optic nerves and the sound of the angry scream throbbing like a pulse in her ears. She wondered, with her eyes opening on the telephone, whether she should call the police. (But Bert
was
the police. For what further sacrifice or immolation were they to be called?) Eyes closed again, she felt the smothering envelopment of a husk around her, flesh enveloping her flesh like a lewd apparatus to move her supine joints and muscles, a not at all liberal will enveloping her will, forcing her to confess how much she liked to see the cop slashing with his club.

Surely it was not her own hands that opened and adjusted her clothes as she lay there in terror and delight. It was not the perfect A.C.L.U-A.A.U.W. type, eager to be a suburban wife who donated tithes to progressive causes and slum clearance, whose damp tracing with a middle finger transposed the actual scene in the street into darker and less tolerable pantomimes. Day before yesterday at lunch Peepers had told the gang a story: A Negro woman in South Carolina was held on the fender of a car. While headlights played on her, she was raped repeatedly by a gang of whites. At lunch, Leslie had been as shocked and angered as anyone else, but what had been a growl of pity and hopelessness was, in this re-enactment, a hungry moan of assent.

She would never tell anyone that—not even herself in her brisk hours of competence, wit and friendliness.

Not long afterward (and still almost a year before she was married) she had got her promotion from copy editor to junior reporter. For once in her life she knew how hard she had worked for something. Office politics aside (and her vast ignorance of music aside, too, though that was the field to which she was assigned), she understood that the managing editor and the Man himself (
Doom
, Peepers called him, taking the name from a story of Faulkner's) would never have let her name go on the masthead among the reporters if she had not, in job after job of increasing responsibility, shown them her capacity to concentrate energy where it counted. She did not have to know music as long as she knew where and how to go for the newsworthy word on it, and would never shirk her commitment to the assignment until it was done.

It was a big thing—the reasonable, practical compensation for her misfired dreams of becoming a great writer like Thomas Wolfe—and she wanted to deliver the prize she had won. She wanted to take it to Ben, beam modestly, and say, “There.” But after work on the day the word came down, she had some drinks of celebration with Peepers and Cornwall and Meredith Gilley—all of them reporters of some standing, glad to welcome her now as an equal. About ten-thirty that night she taxied home alone, expecting to find Ben in the apartment, since he had a key now and had promised. He had been there but left a note saying he was back at Bellevue, would
probably
call later. In any case, she was to go have dinner if she hadn't already eaten.

She didn't want food, and in her disappointment blamed Ben for urging her to take it on and thereby put on even more weight. Now that she was advanced and would, from time to time, be traveling all over the country, she
had
to slim down.

Her disappointment led to no outright rebellion. She knew she damn well didn't want to stay in the apartment with the Fat Girl on this of all nights. But instead of going back uptown where she knew she'd find at least Cornwall and Meredith rounding out the evening with food, she put on a Spartan humor and old clothes, and went to the neighborhood bar.

She had buddies there too—Max the bartender who was studying social psychology at the New School, Biddy the Beautiful Barfly who was a very inexpensive, talkative companion and who boasted that at seventy she still didn't have to wear a brassiere, Oscar Holt, the Social Democrat, and a painter named Carpenter who told her stories of good times on the Project back in the thirties.

This night it just happened that Bert, the policeman, came in, too, around one-thirty, and when she announced she was heading for home, said it would be a pleasure to see her safely there. He walked beside her with his nightstick dangling from his wrist, hardly saying a word (and probably thinking how handsome he was with his short-clipped blond hair rising in a perfectly straight line from his collar to his cap—no back to his head at all). Quite, quite amusing, really, considering what she really thought of him.

But at her door he tried to come in. There was a half-comic, partly ugly, absurd and frightening struggle with the door itself, in which at one time she pinned his wrist and knee between the edge of the door and the jamb. Then, when he was inside, without preliminaries, he tried to force her onto the bed, still not saying a word.

They fought by the window, rolled biting and kicking and clawing each other across the big rag rug which was the only thing she had brought from home. They managed to upset a sack of empties in the Pullman kitchen. The icebox door was pulled open by someone's hand desperately clutching for a stay. The lemon-colored wedge of light that came from it was the only illumination of their battle.

He was stronger than she, of course. She “got out of it,” she supposed, only because he lost interest in going through with his first intent.

He began to punish her with his nightstick. At first the blows seemed directed at the backs of her knees, as if he meant to bend her legs suddenly and force her down again. But then he went over into pure chastisement of the ragged, lurching creature whose wrists he held in his left hand.

She was a sight by this time. Her hair was a great mess, blouse and jacket gaping. Her girdle had been tugged down nearly to her knees and she hobbled grotesquely in one shoe as she tried to dodge the sting of the stick.

He beat her across the front of her thighs, on her haunches and belly, and in the morning she found a single, straight blue line of bruise across her chest. He hurt her about as badly as she could be hurt without sustaining a serious injury. When he was through, he tossed her down like old clothes and walked out serenely proud of his profile and his authority. She was not even sure he had lost his cap in the struggle.

But nevertheless, the whipping was salutary in some way she could not have foreseen. It seemed to have fumigated the apartment, exterminating the haunts. When she put her torn clothes into the incinerator, it seemed that many perverse fears and dreams of childhood went down the chute with them into the flames.

She flew out to Minneapolis on an assignment (her first as reporter) within forty-eight hours, and Ben never had a chance to see the bruises. He never heard about the battle, either, and since the worst of the fantasies were purged now, there seemed less reason than ever to tell him about them and submit to his analysis.

She did not (as she half expected to) regain her slender figure in the months thereafter, but the Fat Girl—the oppressive, invisible mocker who had shared so many nights with her—came back only one more time. That was on the hot Sunday when Ben—so uncharacteristically, so shockingly—forced her body to respond in a way she hated. It had upset her as if she had come, in all good faith, into a room where her true love had promised to wait for her and there, on a soiled, rumpled bed, among cups and comic strips, had found him wrapped in the dumpling dimpled arms and bulbous legs of a fat intruder.

chapter 13

S
HE HAD PRACTICED EVASION
and defense all her life; so she should have been as safe inside the sophisticated harlotry of manners and rationalization as a Crusader's wife, protected by moat, stone wall, and chastity belt from the lust of the stay-at-home besieger. A shield of rubber, proportionally as tough as the oxhide shields of Amazon warriors, protected her from conception. Emotional prejudices of twenty years armored her against “caring” for the pioneer between her knees. The horse and foot of her experience (“I'm a married girl, after all; and there are no novelties for me”), phalanx behind phalanx of assurances that sex was only sex, and minefields of prejudice about female rights would appear to have made her impregnable. So if she was taken—taken in the ancient and unalterable sense implied by the myths (carried off by a bull, trodden by a swan, enveloped by a divine fog)—she was taken by treachery. And since she was taken thus completely, the treachery must have been her own, like a suicide.

She hardly needed a man for her purposes. Alas—the man was there, not a figment of her rebellious imagination. Lucky Don Patch was there with notions of his own and, beyond question, something to lose or gain by the outcome of this encounter. When she said, “Enough” (and thought her satiety would end the evening), she was speaking only for herself.

She could not believe she had any more to give. (The city points to the gutted museums, the bankrupted treasury, the scrambled cables, pipes, and rails, the broken plate glass, the crumpled furniture of the outdoor cafés, the leafless chestnut trees splintered around the waterfront promenade, even the toys in rubble, and asks, “What do you want of me now?”) Why should he struggle for it?

But Patch didn't hear her say
Enough
, or if he was listening, it was not to the structuring consonants of the word, but to the pure tonal communication of the vowels, to which neither tongue, lips, nor palate could any longer add a meaningful qualification.

He heard the woman groan in misery and fulfillment. Interpreting it in his own way, he rolled back along the plain of her inner thigh (like infantry massing for an assault on a panicking civilian crowd before the cease-fire has come down through the chain of command) to feel his aim and then drive with unaltered determination at the bruised mouth of her womb. Veiled from conception, it was unprotected against the signal of pain, and that signal (to bring the military simile to an end) brought up from the sewers and cellars of her being the column of disaffected and traitors, those with scores to settle—those who knew what still remained to be surrendered to this invasion. Now her guilts begged with her hungers, like novices soliciting beside the tanks with the whores. Punishment and lust were simultaneous. There was no longer any limit, within or without, which could enforce an end to the looting or betrayal.

So his refusal to stop became her leisure to enjoy—enjoy not merely the stretch and impact of their bodies, so terribly exposed, but also, in recollection, the cunning expedients of the day by which she had singled (chosen? Yes, chosen) this man from the crowd at Bieman's farm (more than that … had chosen him from all those anonymous thousands of hot males who at one time or another would have gloried in this office; so she thought the Fat Girl, that dark, denied sister, would at last cry, “This is the one.”) With a sure instinct of choice, had she not goaded him on to follow her even when the light part of her mind believed she was trying to squelch him? (“Ah love to be suhved …” Was she not now served as she loved it, by this man disguised as black?
Nigger
, she gloated silently, oiling her hands with the sweat of his back.)

In the passage beside the farmhouse stairway, hadn't she been cunning to show him by her faintness the chink in her armor of poise? (Cunning in the same encounter to recognize in his blush the morbid epithelial ruddiness of that head now thrusting up through the dark soil of her body.)

Cunning
not
to dance with him. Cunning to remember and recreate in herself the emotion of that day when she had peeled Mary Jo's finger with the bumper, grinding flesh on stone. (From her crags of pain she peered down at the man ambushed in the gulley, exulted in the pain she must be giving. She set her nails in his ribs and dragged. She felt the length of him shudder, in delirious glee thought, He hurts because he's longer than Ben, I hurt because I'm tighter with him.)

She had been cunning to linger until the rain soaked her, so she had to change into Mother Bieman's dress, the loose garment of a heavier woman. (Now that she had no more need to hide the truth from herself, it was very comfortable to admit that the Fat Girl was not another self, like some silly Mrs. Hyde with a Halloween Egyptian mask face, fangs under fat lips, lardy eyes and hair painted on stone, but
herself
. How uttahly, too too unnessery allatime to worry about “division of personality” when always, yes, she had been really, now, one girl and indivisible, quite whole, as now, now, now when her mother's bed twanged like tambourines beneath her wallowing haunches.

Cunning to have used Dolores in the role of duenna and husband's friend, that stimulating guard to be outwitted like conscience itself—and cunning to have pretended to herself more pique with Dolores than she had really felt. (So all the long day and every detail had disguised another which now they, cooperating for this leisurely, unbearable unstoppable consummation, had willed and lived.)

“Don, Don,” she said, “I can't again. I can't. I can't. I never have before.”

“Yes you can. Sure you can. A woman like you,” he said in her averted ear.

“Honestly, truly.” Her face was deep in the pillow, so the little words were like Christmas tree ornaments, rolling out across its swollen surface, bright-colored bubble galaxies, to whom it might concern. Someone, if he was there. “Never more than once before,” she explained as if this were some drowsy night with Ben, when he was—oh, so patiently—trying to understand her. “With nobody. I didn't think I could. Now it's twice already. I can't any more. Billy, Billy. Wheet. Wheet. Let me bring you a nice cold beer. Whe-eh-ere's ma-eeh buh-er-uddy? We'll have a friendly cigarette, old sport, and—what
time
is it?” There was no band on her wrist, and then she remembered that he had ceremonially unbuckled the watch and slipped off her wedding ring, before he covered her.