Pretty Leslie (31 page)

“Two? South Americans?”

“Or three. I don't care how many we take. But I'm tired of the shilly-shallying, trying to play close to the edge of propriety. I think Les is too. We ought to act like the privileged people we are, take the children we want.…”

His face was flushed, his hand trembling in its gesture. “After all,” he said with a deliberately glib evasion, “my folks were missionaries. It ought to be worth something that the old people went insane trying for something they believed in. Who am I not to pitch in a little?”

“I think that would be good,” Maureen said. “
Good
.”

But if her approval was so simple, how account for the quizzical look in her eyes when she asked, “Why are you trying this idea out on me?”

“It's spilling out. I haven't really got home with it yet. I'm going to call Leslie, date her up for the evening.”

“And propose.”

“I want the circumstances favorable,” he said.

When he called then—from a booth in the corridor—the phone at home rang without an answer. That didn't matter. He still had a few things to get out of the way before he could leave the hospital. He stopped in Bettina Thayer's room to catch up on her chart, looked at red Baby Brannigan, still in the incubator where he'd left him last week. He called the parents of Scofield Johannes and was gratified to learn they were willing to go through with an operation for Scofield's squint.

He called home again. “Where were you?” he said, when Leslie answered. “I called a while ago. Thirty-five or forty minutes.”

“I told you,” she said. “Ben, did you need the car? You said you wouldn't need it.”

“I forgot what you told me,” he said, adding one more tally against himself for inattention. “That seems to be the point, darling. If I appeared to be listening to you this morning, I wasn't.”

“You had things on your mind.”

“It wasn't Teresa Echeverría-Röhde in her bikini,” he said. “I even forgot to ask you about Dolores' funeral. When?”

“I told you I'd promised Garland-for-God's-sake-Roberts we'd go over to the shopping center and I'd help her pick out summer clothes. Garland's just a dumb neighborhood girl, and honest, Daddy, we didn't so much as speak to a man, though many whistled—at Garland, not me; wait till you see her. Can I pick you up? Is that why you're calling?”

“No no no. I called because I was afraid I'd missed the funeral. No, that
wasn't
why I called—”

“It was this afternoon,” Leslie said. “In Washington. Her daughter flew in Sunday for the body. That's probably why I forgot to mention it.”

“I expect you did mention it.”

“Well,” she conceded, “we weren't on the same wavelength.”

“Honey?” Pure plea. Hear my tone. Does it matter what I say?

“What?”

“I
really
missed the hell out of you while I was gone. I think we're abnormally attached—as we keep saying—and better face it. I've got something to tell you tonight.” He heard her catch her breath—the microscopic sound like a scratch on some mystery whose outlines even he could not yet grasp. “There's a place up the river I want to take you. I've told you about it before. I'll be home in twenty minutes. Lay me out some clothes and we'll get away before the rush-hour traffic. I want to
hear
you. You understand?”

“I know,” she said. “This morning was agony, wasn't it?”

“Agony?”

“Well, I mean—”

“It wasn't that bad. Was it?”

“I can't quibble,” she said. “Is it worth quibbling?”

When he went back into Maureen's office, Keith Lazio was there, returning a set of X-rays. Keith was an orthopedic surgeon, the one Ben and Maureen usually called when they had fracture cases. This afternoon he had a story to “end all popular psychiatry” or outlaw it.

It seems that a certain woman of whom he had just heard, mother of two, a four-year-old boy and baby girl, was conscientiously determined that her son should have no inhibitions about being male. She had so encouraged him to value his penis that neither the neighborhood girls nor his baby sister were safe from his predations. “And the payoff, the payoff was when his mother got him a doll. Or he
got
a doll, whoever gave it to him. The kid was all in an uproar because the thing didn't have a penis. So, so you know what that damn-fool mother did? You know what she did?”

He waited just a second too long for his punch line, and Ben said, “She painted a horrible scar and stitches on the body.”

Lazio showed his canine teeth and shook his head in pure outrage. “You need a rest, Ben. You had a rest? Take another.”

“I'm sorry I spoiled your story. What did Mother do?”

“She sewed one on. Next time I tell it, though, I guess I'll use your ending.”

“Just don't attribute it to me,” Ben said with a shivery laugh. “It was just a passing fancy.”

“I see,” Lazio said. “I see.

“Maybe I'd better not adopt any little Latins until I have myself checked out,” Ben said to Maureen in the form of a farewell.

He labored that night in the restaurant by the river—he could tell himself later that he really labored—to make some kind of order out of the utter, humorous, sour disorder of the day of his return. And again and again details that should have remained without significance swelled like bubble gum out of Leslie's pretty mouth and his own.

“Why did you ask where I was, then?” Leslie wanted to know about his call to her.

“No reason. I told you I'd forgotten you were going out. After all, I don't know who Garland Roberts is.”

“But you never used to ask where I was,” she persisted. “I don't ask where you are.”

“I'm a doctor. I work.”

“I know that. I know that,” she soothed. “But I come in tired and hot and utterly out of sorts with
that
girl. I'm supposed to account for where I've been.”

“What did Garland do?”

“She's all right. I was out of sorts.”

“Why?”

No answer—except for a purely theatrical smile and a blinking of eyelashes over a highball glass. As he very well knew, from having been told at least four times, it was a mannerism she had learned in high school to make herself “fascinating.”

Submitting to the poisonous circularity of their talk, he said, “It was a purely offhand question. You usually volunteer all information.”

She was not really offended. “I suppose I do suffer a kind of verbal diarrhea. End of a great wishful career as a writer. Big mouth. Nothing else.”

Now they were finishing their second cocktails on the verandah above the boat landing. The afternoon breeze had fallen into an evening hush. The maple leaves around them, like a green stage curtain they were sitting too close to, hung moist and limp, green arrows pointing down to the dock where the evening boatmen set forth in their outboards under the antennae of glass poles, and the bright stretches of the river whose farther shore was blocked from view.

He had been here before once, and the view toward the water had reminded him of a painting of Monet's of a summer resort spot on the Seine below Paris. He had brought Leslie here so that, as a sort of preparation, a celebration of all the sensibilities they shared, he could call that similarity to her attention. Now, sweating and uncomfortable, he thought it literally impossible to form the words for such an idea. It was no longer merely politic for him to feel the blame for their inability to communicate. He had a strong sense that all day his attention had been insufficient and that now he was paying the accumulated price.

Then Leslie was saying, “The trouble with us is we've always gone out of our way for people with problems. Jesus, we have our own lives to lead. Take Garland for an example. That girl is like she had been coached just to be my nemesis. She makes an absolute minimum demand for my sympathies—just enough to get me hooked—and then when she's got me off balance, she leads.”

“Tell me about it.”

Leslie spun her hands like a woman winding wool. “I just
did
.”

“Oh.”

“You mean the details? I don't know. Well, I'd promised her to go look at some clothes. She didn't need help. She knows her figure like a dressmaker. The thing is that since puberty she's never weighed one pound more or less than she should have. She made me feel I'd gone along for the ride. That's all.”

“I despise the wooden little bitch,” Ben said agreeably.

That was not all. All too vividly Leslie remembered the moment of the afternoon when Garland had lifted sea-blue eyes and said, “Some people think a girl shouldn't go with a shorter boy. But your husband's shorter, isn't he, Mrs. Daniels?”

The answer was no—but the answer was blocked by the instantaneous recognition that Garland meant someone else.

Garland was holding a white-and-blue print dress against herself. She was not smiling, nor insistent, nor fishing for information, since neither gossip nor guile could be of any use to her, who needed nothing. She was just registering a fact of life when she said, “He's a living doll. I hope he didn't
think
anything when he saw me riding with that boy so early Sunday morning. We were only turning around in your driveway. Not parked.”

Leslie had mumbled in a hopefully reassuring way. No one
thought anything
.

“I mean I wouldn't want Mr. Smothers to know,” Garland said.

“He's so interested in me. I mean my mind.” And there was no way to say to her that if she didn't tell Mr. Smothers whom she had seen, then Leslie certainly wouldn't. But she had felt the misery of being in any way at a disadvantage before Garland—as if that, that of all her miserable entanglement, were something that counted hugely.

Anyway, as she reviewed the afternoon and told herself for the fifteenth time that the chances of Garland's ever dropping the right fragment of information into the right ear at the right time were infinitesimally small, she was grateful that Ben felt like talking.

His absorption (and her pose of attention, leaning toward him, eyes fixed on his, an earnest nod now and then) permitted her to review what needed reviewing (I've handled it all very well so far. I'm ready for what he expects when we go home. He won't miss anything that was his.) and left her the luxury of drifting far away on thoughts quite disconnected from the last few days. She remembered one weekend at Smith (when she had been as young as Garland and at least a better person if not as happy—at least a better person) when her date from Amherst had not showed up. She and Sarah had gone for a long walk under the bare, groaning trees, talking about love. She remembered the feel of her fur collar against her cold cheeks in the dark and how she could withdraw her face deeper and deeper in its depths to escape the wind. And she had said to Sarah, had actually said these words, “I feel that incredible sadness of being young.”

How far away was the time when she could talk like that! How silly it seemed, and yet now (perhaps because of what had happened, all of it) she felt eagerly close to the point at which she could say such things again. “I feel that incredible sadness of being—” What? A woman, perhaps. She felt very womanly tonight, with her secrets as well as with the receptivity she was offering to Ben. She had so much to tell him. He must not—must not—expect her to put it in words. He must—and would—receive it. Receive it all, at last.

She rose on the peak of an immense love for him (who?) and it occurred to her that the great gift she had to offer was just in being “not a woman but a network.” Elated in her privacy, she felt as if she was “running the mile” again, about to go. And it seemed that the salt Sargasso Sea of her life was now ready to discharge its booty of treasures and flotsam—for in her adultery she seemed to have found the moral test that could call up reserves of strength that nothing else had. It was incredible and ghastly (looked at one way) but she was in process of mastering it, of bringing it safely into calm waters and their lives (all of them, oh, all of them) into a new harbor.

So, reassured, she must listen to Ben. The rest of this night was his.

He was saying now, somewhat grumpily, “All right, all right. This adoption was just an idea.” He ordered them another drink and, almost in panic, told himself that he had failed, again, to make contact. He had been so full of his idea of the adoption that one more time he had failed to pay attention to her. Now he could look back and be sure that she was leading up to something important in her tentative comments about Garland Roberts.

He wiped his face with a napkin. After all, he had merely indulged himself in his attempt to establish intercourse with her. The trip—which had given him perspective and time to think about where their lives stood—had led him to an emotional excess. His notion of taking into their lives some hopeless waif from another continent had been probably just a fantasy of trying to repeat his own rescue (and therefore make it seem more solid, less a freak or fantasy than he sometimes, still, feared it was). All this he had compulsively discharged on her. Now he needed her to help him sort it out, trim away the dream and excess, and examine it for merit.

“It was just an idea,” he said. “But surely you have some comment on it. You know me.” (Did she?) “You know yourself, us.” (Who? Personalities were fictions of an old dream that meant to dream itself out to the end.) “Just tell me what you're thinking.”

She nodded and prepared to answer him out of the deep thoughtfulness with which she had been listening.

With guileless loving eyes she said merrily, “Why is it I'm always bumping into blind men?”

“What?”

“It's true. This afternoon with Garland, I wasn't watching where I was going. Thump. I ran into someone. It was a blind man with a
stick
. I realized that I've been doing it ever since high school. The people I bump blindly into are in
var
iably blind.”