Pretty Leslie (30 page)

Yet, this girl with the name like a prolonged musical phrase did manage to make him feel like a playboy. In the cathedral she lectured him on the eternal tragedy of South American history. It was impossible to make out whether she was anticlerical or even anti-imperialist, but what she clearly did not like was the North American preoccupation with self that blinded good minds to the human condition at large. With a fluid, passionate—and very charming—accent she pitied priest and landowner, conquistador and Indian, peasant and ranchero equally. And declared that none of the past mattered if only “those up there”—the politicians, doctors, and military who made up the conference—would decide to use the freedom of new techniques to redeem the future.

“The childrens,” she said in her charming accent, as she stood with him in the ancient gloom of the nave and peered up at the highest windows, “the childrens gonna be saved or lost inna next few years. Never sucha crisis. They won't see. They come here and all they remember is how it was. Troubles. Good things. They won't forget nothing. So the childrens gonna die. Grow up to be little hoodlums.
Norteamericanos
. Somebody's got to give'm something.
Comunistas
who think they hate communism. Nazi bunds. They won't even let them starve.” As the priests had known how to do.

Ben was an easy convert. All she seemed to be asking was a sentimental agreement. “It's all new to me,” he apologized. “I'm afraid that I kept my eyes fixed on one thing for a long time. Medical school does that. I was a fraternity boy who thought that saving the patient was the one great good you had to aim at.”

“You better save'm,” said Dr. Echeverría-Röhde.

“I wish you could talk to my wife. She's more socially conscious than I.” He remembered that Leslie had been madly for Adlai as far back as her high-school days.

Dr. Echeverría-Röhde seemed only mildly interested in Leslie's political activism. She had spotted an outdoor café near the corner of the Plaza Bolivar where they would be unlikely to meet anyone from the convention. She would like a glass of Perrier, she thought.

That evening the two of them and a Colonel Stroud from the Pentagon skipped the convention meeting and went down to a beach resort at Puerto Azul. Lapped by exotic music, a little bit drunk with the holiday spirit, Ben sat at the table while the other two danced. He could not dance to these rhythms, but it was clear to him that if he wanted to, he could drive Teresa back to Caracas alone. For the last time then, feeling the old mystifying erotic impulse behind it, he thought of parking somewhere and trying, just for practice, to confess to her that he had murdered someone.

Then, as the intent became quite clear, too clear to pretend he hadn't had it, he began to laugh at himself, hard, long laughter like sobs. He was still laughing when the others came back to the table and asked what was so funny.

Colonel Stroud took Teresa home to her hotel. Ben had a nightmare instead.

He was in a basement interlaced with Moorish buttresses angled in all directions. The basement was gray, green, and gloomy like the lower level of a jungle. He became aware of others down there with him—a man and a woman, probably. He edged his way among the buttresses, saw that they enclosed open spaces of keyhole shape. He peered through one of these to see who the woman was. A big pistol barrel pointed straight through the aperture, a foot from his forehead. He woke up strangling.

The next morning, crisply showered, shaved by the hotel barber and freshly manicured (with the only professional manicure he had ever had), he sat in on a business meeting of the conference. There he did the only thing he fully trusted—told the simple, statistical truth in the face of all the dreams, hopes, cupidities, and plain personal interest bidding for his support.

So he had another nightmare that night. He simply dreamed the world was flat, after all, in spite of what his nice grade-school teachers had told him. It was flat to infinity and he was the only upright thing, living or inanimate, on its endless surface. In his effort to lower himself to the horizontal he crawled right out of bed and woke on the tile floor—smiling of course at the ridiculous thing he had done.

He had one more talk, over cocktails, with the girl whose name jangled in his ear like those lengths of bamboo suspended from cords, made to sound when brushed by a passerby. Since the evening he had let her go off with Colonel Stroud she lectured him more sternly and with greater pity. As she sipped her Gibson she explained to him the humanistic justifications for birth control and how it could be misused. “You
norteamericanos
come talking about a popoolation explosion and bring your oral contraceptives and those theengs. You think they are guns, gonna kill off the indigenous popoolations. Like a blockade. Talk about how much fun the
descaminados
has with no childrens to worry about. They don't know it's fun.”

“Well, I—”

She had not meant him personally. She put her hand on his wrist and shook her head merrily to reassure him that she knew he was no conquistador with new weapons. “I'd like to see some of them who eat so much every day, they take summa the kids home with them, then they know more about this popoolation explosion.”

She had not meant him personally this time either.

But perhaps hers was the only voice he had heard very clearly amid the oratory and the bargaining, so on his way home be began very cautiously to take personally what she had said.

It didn't seem very likely to him that he and Leslie could bring some of the kids up over the border to live with them. But it didn't seem impossible.

He had watched the flaring exhausts of the plane burning in the night over the Gulf. Wakeful, he had tried to rationalize his presentiments about homecoming. He knew he had learned something. The world was new to him and strangely promising—just because he had got his long perspective. He hoped he was not coming empty-handed (except for some reasonably attractive hammered-silver cups) back to Leslie; and his decision not to tell her about the Kirkland boy was merely negative. He still believed she had asked for giants. Giants enough to challenge her had been rumored—somehow—in what he had heard in Caracas.

He laughed clear as a bell. “I messed up the grand strategy for a minute, so it looks like this is the end of my free junketing around the globe.”

“Of course,” Leslie said.

“Why of course?” Martha wanted to know.

Leslie's eyes welled tears. “Well, every other dirty self-seeking bastard there will swell his prestige a little bit and be invited somewhere else or sent. Ben will always fix his own clock. Wherever and whenever.”

“Don't fret,” he said. “We'll still squeak out Europe next year. Out of fees.”

“I want to go to Japan!” Leslie said, her determination (like the misery on which it was founded) solid as a rock. In the last forty-eight hours she had told herself at more than one black moment that she deserved death for what she had done to him. But she wanted to be taken to Japan for his sake. He would be so proud of taking her there. It seemed too much to ask that he miss all the abundance of life because of her fault. (Henceforward—she could see it so plainly!—every deprivation would come to them labeled as her fault, because that's the way things were on account of some shitty double standard.) “Madame Butterfat wants to go to Japan, you, Pinkerton.”

Ben had to pat her knee under the table, at the same time trying to hypnotize Martha with small talk and smiles, just to keep the hysteria down at a tolerable level. Hell with that.

“I knew you'd suspect all kinds of things just because I wore a girdle.…”

This outbreak was so grossly isolated from context that he had to turn to her. They peered into each other's eyes as if eyes really had depths where answers to unphrased questions might be found.

Nothing. All was secret except some new inadequacy in their communication. And his homecoming was to have been so nice.

“You wanted to look nice for me, baby,” he said. “You look wonderful. That's all.”

If that was all
then
… then
why
, before they even left that bar and shook sticky Martha, did he have to mention Dr. Teresa Echeverría-Rö? So she'd know the name of every dietetic hotshot specialist that had attended the convention with him? Well, hard-lee.

No. It seemed likely that this lady was mentioned merely because Leslie had said there were some who would keep traveling, now that they had been to Caracas. Ben remembered that his friend would be in New York for two months in the fall.

“Ah,” Leslie said, handling his pale information like news, “she's coming.”

“To New York.”

“Will you see her there?” It was a joke, of course. Why didn't he understand it was pure play on her part, the kind of thing that Leslie, his almost boringly familiar wife, was
always
pulling? She was only pretending to be a jealous wife. Why didn't her innards know she was pretending? Why were they squirting so hideously much bile into her system, the bile turning into the kind of jealousy the damned in hell must know when they look up?

But Ben hardly laughed. Martha looked wise. If it had been she welcoming Dave home from a convention, of course there would have been no joke about it.

Now Leslie was committed to going on until she
made
them laugh. “Of course when
my
husband gets a visitor, you can bet it won't be any greasy
mañana
type or reverse Dr. Schweitzer. Oh no. Some pantheress with enough of the tarbrush to make her teeth show in the dark. Pretty?”

“You seem to know she is,” Ben said.

“Would be,” Leslie insisted. Her heart twisted wretchedly, like a crippled pup, smothered in her chest. She felt so generally ashamed of herself for being dragged by her joke instead of riding atop it. “Is she?”

“Reasonably. Yes, she's pretty.”

“Photographs?” Leslie extended her hand as if she meant to be given them now.

“She promised to send them,” he teased. (Bad timing, the wrong time for teasing, he would tell himself later. No serious mistake except in timing.) “In her new bikini.”

“You've seen her in a bikini?”

“Oh, he's seen
me
in a
bikini
,” Martha saw fit to add.

“Yes.”

“And?”

“Smallish. Rather small. Rather vital.”

“Vital is the word you used about those wonderful children.”

“I liked them.” He would not say how much he liked them. There was no way to measure. No way to express the measurement.

“You
loved
the little tar babies,” Leslie said.

“Leslie!”

“Oh, come on, Martha. I know they're
colored
. They're Indians, mestizos. Look, sweetie, I wore an Adlai button too. It does seem to repress
humor
when you blow your automatic whistle on everything I say.”

“And if I don't like your humor, why did I intrude on this tender scene?” Martha asked. “It happens I was asked. Browbeaten. Dragged from bed. Shit.”

“And now, just when it appears I have to fight for my husband, you trick me into looking like a bitch in front of him.”

“I …
trick … you?
”

They laughed together, comradely, and went to pick up Ben's luggage.

She's been up to something while he was gone, Martha Lloyd thought. And she thought it was probably with David, probably that Sunday night when he was gone so long. She minded this prospect much less than she would have expected to. After all, Leslie didn't seem too happy about it. David had been sore as a crippled old dog since Sunday night. It was over, and there was no reason they couldn't all continue as friends, she thought. Only, poor Ben.…

He was in Maureen Connally's office at Mercy Hospital that afternoon when the determination to call Leslie jelled. He would call and apologize. It was all his fault that communication between them had been so ragged in the morning at the airport. If it was not his fault, then it was expedient to take the position that it had been. From such a position he could operate.

“I've got a great idea to spring on her,” he told Maureen. “You've heard the whole bit about how we've tried to get her pregnant.”

“I haven't been asked to check you out for technique, but—”

“It's a date. Anyway, the next logical step, given my kindly nature and status in the community, is obviously adoption.”

“I hear the creaking of juggernaut,” Maureen said. Maureen was permanently but faintly embittered by her divorce three years ago. She was a great horse of a woman with piercing black eyes under bangs of black steel wool, and the colleagues who had also known her husband refused to take sides after he ditched her for a sophomore majoring in dramatic arts at the University. They said she was too smart for comfort and they meant she was homely and scratchy and not to be loved except by children—who seemed to adore her. She was bitter, but she kept her bitterness safely contained, like a specimen preserved in alcohol. “Common sense catches up to the best and worst of us. Why the hell not?”

“All right, adoption,” Ben said. “We haven't been quite so lacking in common sense as our friendly detractors might think. We've had a good life. Leslie and I have kept going.”

“You haven't lost momentum,” Maureen agreed. “I only meant that Leslie needs a baby almost as much as you do. Why later than sooner?”

He was faintly shaken by this flat-footed analysis of Leslie. No, Leslie wasn't that simple a mechanism.… However, “It came pretty clear to me among the mestizo children. I want one of them.”

“An Indian?”

He shook his head impatiently. Why that question always? “I don't think so. I think a white one. Nearly white. What does it matter? I only thought this—Leslie, whether she looks it or not, has strength that isn't going to be used by easy things. I'd like—like her—to reach way down to the bottom and pull up somebody who doesn't have a chance. Somebody who's damned and doomed, as our friend says. And make them a life.”