Pretty Leslie (25 page)

“You can,” he said.

“What about you?” (Her mother said, Always be considerate of others, Leslie, if you expect true friendship.)

“I don't have to.”

“Don't want to? Why don't you have to? Am I no good for you? Am I good as … good for you?”

“Good.” He illustrated with a lunge that banged her head against the veneer upright of the bed. So comic, she thought. He's so absurd.

In her helpless laughter she choked, “Wait. You've convinced me. Why aren't you laughing, too. We mustn't—people don't—take this too seriously. Wait. Please. I love this.”

“I love this.”

“I love your dick.”

“I love your pussy.”

“I love your … cock.”

“I love your cunt.”

“Do you mind if I say things to you? I never have.” Girls, women, always never haven't something. Always there is more to give. Always, when the right time comes, all they have saved.

“If you want to,” he conceded, without, for that, much enthusiasm.

“Does it
please
you if I say the things to you?”

“If you want to.”

“I want to please you. You please me.”

Some thoughts had always been too good to waste on daytime when there were other
people
. They were for the night and were kept until she could draw quilt and coverlet tight over her face, and think them over, relive them, all alone. That time that Mary Jo said her cousin visiting had walked past the door from the bathroom, turned, run in quick and stuck it in her—. Afterward a funny black fluid came out and marked on the sheet like a butterfly Rorschach. That thought had been thought until it was worn like a child's quilt, down to the last crossing over of bright threads between the pudgy fingers, twiddled at sleep's edge. And with it the
word
, like a significant shape of broken glass found in the swampy grass by the pump at Sunken Orchard Beach, laced over with mud and fern, its dangerous edges soothed in the fold of her skirt until she could take it out and home and think, how happily, it
might have
cut her. That word—ass—salvaged after the thought of cousin long faded, and other words, now showed why she had saved them. Their jagged edges seemed to draw blood from the dark itself as she wielded them, shocking herself into the freedom beyond the boundary of the forgivable. And when the words seemed to find a pattern and rhythm of their own, they aligned themselves hierarchically until they stood like a pyramid of jagged edges, climaxed at the top with words which, in the circumstances, were most obscene of all—“I love you.”

They must have said it together, teeth clicking on teeth, as they shuddered. For then, gently before it was surprisingly, he began to withdraw. Like some heartbroken animal in captivity, turning in on itself to glimpse the wilderness refuted by the steel-mesh walls of the cage, ever softer and more pathetic as it curls itself tight on the visionary freedom of death, he softened and broke the tight contact. As she understood what had happened—and that she had missed the moment when he was open to her as she to him—a scald of jealousy poured over her. She tried hopelessly to keep him where he had so securely been.

He rolled onto his back beside her, put his forearm across his eyes. “I'd like that beer now,” he said.

“Did you come?”

His reticence now was like a deliberate evasion. She had missed something, and the bereavement of her loins flowered in jealousy. With an anger she did not even bother to interpret, she slipped into her robe and went to the kitchen. She didn't get glasses for the beer. Punctured cans were all he deserved.

She put a bedside lamp on when she returned and sat upright on the side of the bed where he lay so limp. She had almost to force his fingers open to receive the beer can.

“Smoke?” she asked. Then, impatiently, she lit cigarettes for both of them. She had to move his arm from across his eyes so she would not burn him when she put his cigarette between his lips. (Why not burn him? Didn't he deserve it? But the questions came a little too late for her to act on them.) She saw that his eyes were glittering as if glazed with tears. Not tears, though. If she could interpret his expression at all, it was a grin.

“I suppose you think you really put me over the jumps,” she said bitterly. “Isn't that the expression?”

He had not gone to good schools. He didn't know. Her ladylike touch seemed vulgarity to him. He made a face. “I didn't think you'd do it,” he said reproachfully.

“Do what?” He was such a stranger to her it was hard to know how to display anger. He had just taken every advantage of her generosity. And he was reproaching her for being easy. How illogical could this encounter get? “You lied to me about where you lived,” she said. “Oh, get out of here. Go walk home in the rain. Christ, what have I done?”

Her clawless histrionics made no impression—probably they didn't even amuse him. He shook his bony head. “You women, just because your husband is out of town … I suppose you all do it.”

“Your wife too.”

He denied it. “Mildred's hard to get along with. She doesn't understand what it means to have an artistic temperament.”

“You?” She tried to laugh. The absurd, imperturbable arrogance confronting her seemed to have its full sanction in what she had done for him. As far as she now had the right to judge, he was Paul Gauguin talking to a Philistine.

“But I know she'd never cheat on me.”

It was maddening. She tried to argue with him on every point and quibble at his words. “Cheating. That's a terribly corny old-fashioned-type word.” She was sure that she had cheated nobody of anything. What she had given was hers to give. But she might as well have been arguing with the wind. He knew what he knew.

“Broads have the same impulses as men,” she told him, as if perhaps he had never been told of that twentieth-century discovery. “Why shouldn't I have a one-night stand?”

He shrugged. If she was the kind of woman who thought that way.…

She wasn't any
kind
of woman. She was Leslie Skinner, the hell-bent fat girl who did as she pleased and looked on his like the way a bomber stares on his fellow men through a bombsight.

“I don't like you,” she said. “Very simply, I do not like you.”

And that made how much difference? Buttered what parsnips? She had squealed on her back under him. Her finely measured evaluation of his charm could take nothing back from that.

“I don't get it,” he said slowly. “I've been watching you for a long time around the shop. The others all said coarse things about you. I thought they were out of their minds.”

“Well, piss on them,” she raged. Little Leslie would punish them all by smashing the kewpie they wanted. At least
they
were paid off justly by Don's presence in the place they envied.

“I sort of fell in love with you, thinking you were superior to just about any woman I ever had the opportunity to know very well.”

She refrained from saying he
didn't
know her well. Thinking was a hell of a lot more trouble than it was worth just now, and argument naturally induced thought.

“You looked like the real goods. Everyone has a type they're most attracted to.”

“So my ten-year-old friends used to tell me.”

“I used to try to imagine how you'd look undressed. Partly undressed.”

“Thanks just a heap. Excuse me, would you like to be alone with my body?” She laughed and laughed, just for a moment gloriously detached from this unthinkable comedy.

“I don't get why you did this,” he said earnestly. “You've got a thirty-thousand-dollar home and a good husband. You're not a bohemian. You seem to have all the good solid instincts. I don't get it.”

“You've had it,” she said in extremity. “Drink your beer and shut your tiny mouth.”

He did not have to do anything at her command now. He kept on staring at her like a vast, perhaps dangerous riddle until she reached out and pushed him in the chest. She pushed him prone and with one forefinger closed his eyes as the eyes of the dead are closed.

He said quietly, “You've got everything, but you were easier to push over than Dolly Sellers.”

That hurt, and she saw a little too late—after the poisoned barb was set—that it had been intended to. With some helpless part of her intelligence she knew, even then, that this impulse to hurt her was an extension of the same knowledge and contempt that guided him to hurt her inside … and to the insult she responded as she had responded to the physical bruising.

“Dolly,” she sneered. Her free hand ambled coquettishly down his chest. “I suppose Dolly was better than I?” No answer. “Satisfied you more?” No answer. “Knows how?”

She wanted to shake him by the shoulders because he would not respond, would not help her now when she needed it. She began to tremble and fidget. She set the icy circle of the beer can squarely on the middle of his abdomen, and when he recoiled, she said, “Answer me. Am I so terrible?”

He made her answer that herself. He lay like a stone while her hand went the unthinkable distance across the flat of his belly and began to fumble life into his member. She heard his breath quicken like a fox's when he hears the hunter. There was no more guidance from him than that.

His flesh stood full and strong in her hand and still he did not make a move toward her. “I haven't had as much experience as you seem to think,” she said. She licked her dry lips. “I only asked about Dolly because I don't know. How could I know? You know. You're a man.”

Then with a cry like something crushed in the road, she threw herself across him. “There's some things I won't do. Haven't ever. Please. Quick. I don't care if I'm as good as Dolly. Lover, please.”

Before he entered her again he said—in precise, small words—“They're all whores.”

In the second hour, one thought sustained her—that she must not leave this duel the loser. She knew, with instantaneous and unqualified knowledge, queer though the proposition might be, that this time he was after Ben.

Clairvoyantly she saw a dear, harmless boy pursued through the woods by a witch. He (the boy) was running on a white dirt road under the massed and interlaced branches of live oaks, or some other tree that had poisonously shining leaves. From time to time he turned his tormented face over his shoulder and tried to see what or who was chasing him. Sometimes the face was not that of her husband (transformed into a child) but that of the promised child she had not yet borne Ben. The child never, she believed, saw the lineaments of the pursuer, might not even know whether it was real or a fantasy. But she knew. For she was the woods of shiny black leaves through which pursuer and pursued ran their desperate race, and it was up to her to hold back—as the forest with its leaves holds back the wind—the angry nemesis. She had to absorb this evil, dissipate it through the myriad dark branches of her nerves.

I've got to outlast him, she thought.

He was after Ben's reality, imprinted on her. As if by sorcery he meant to find every caress of Ben's—laid over her body and responses like chain mail—and, link by link, undo them until she was naked to him as a stranger, naked to his strangeness. Breasts, throat, lips, ears, ribs, buttocks, and the pathetically indefensible sensibilities of her inner thighs—besides the unguessed complexity of her sexual parts—must be reformed to the imperative of
him
. And each part, by its responses, displaced Ben.

He lured, forced, gentled, lifted, crushed her into positions she could not remember having read about. And each time she cooperated with the adjustment, she told herself, I'll beat him here—like a losing gambler accepting blackjack after faro after draw after stud after red dog after dice after flipping coins, in the illusion that some new game may be luckier than the last and the snowballing ruin yet be reversed and all the family jewels redeemed before morning light. With each shift she lost more easily. Only the determination—as ill-defined as ever—remained: I've got to beat him.

She twisted and bucked and pitched, fighting him for what he would not release. He stuck like a grim and bewildered cougar on the back of a mare while she, in frenzy, tried to scrape him loose on an overhang of boulders or roll and crush him. Each time her strength waned, he seemed to advance. It was as if presently great jaws would close on the spine of her neck and all be over then. I've got to show him, she thought.

“What?” he said.

Then his knees were bearing cruelly into both her arms. She saw a ghost standing, neither light nor dark, neither human nor inhuman, upright against the faint luminescence around the spread of window curtains. She sighed a little then, nodded, and accepted the last humiliation he (it? they?) had intended for Ben's unfruitful wife.

In the third, last hour of their anguish, she was purely, submissively, helplessly his. Broken, she made herself think of nothing but him. She forgot his name as she forgot Ben's. And served.

Now it was not Ben he was after, but some incarnation of all that was newest in herself, as if he must now recapture and subdue what he had liberated on this night in her, as if he must put the summoned female genie back in the lamp from which his touch had released it.

He rode high and stiffly and steadily now. The area of pain (where they met and knew each other, like tribesmen dancing in the small circumference of firelight) was shifted from the center of her body to a peripheral contact of abrading hair and bony parts.

Sometime he said, “Ssssh, the neighbors will hear.” She had, she realized, been crying aloud incessantly. But she wanted to tell him the neighbors were fifty yards away beyond closed windows—until it came through her fog that he knew that. She put the corner of the pillow in her mouth to mute her halleluiahs of submission.

Now there was only pain. She accepted it with joy because (though she was the one who felt it) it was his.