Pretty Leslie (32 page)

She waited for him to catch the piquancy of her discovery, to smile with her. The smile would unite them, show once again how deeply in accord their tacit recognitions were. All he had to do was recognize. Then he could have everything.

But he was looking at her with bewilderment and hostility—like a man who suddenly understands that it is not he but his beloved who has been listening to another dialogue instead of theirs. Or, as the woman thought, suddenly and unexpectedly taken in adultery: like any husband who has found out “everything.”

chapter 16

H
E KNEW NONE OF THE FACTS
yet and still did not realize that he had to find them out. If they had been presented to him like laboratory findings, typed neatly on appropriate forms and sheathed from soiling in a manila folder, he would have accepted and read them for one reason only—that to concentrate on them was to postpone confronting the truth they implied. As that summer went on without visible disaster, cooled, ended, and fall came, he would begin to scratch for facts, but in the facts he was not so much trying to learn the truth as to immunize himself against it before it fully invaded his life. In his first panic he guessed that the events of his absence (and he only said to himself then, “Whatever they were”) had not so much changed the relation between him and Leslie as demonstrated it had never been what he absolutely had had to assume.

Do you know? Dolores Calfert had asked him. Do you know the kind of bargain it takes with life to get permission from it to love another human being?

Yes, he knew—nothing except that for a certain time hunger, anxiety, lust, and egotism had been kept within tolerable limits by a bargain he was not even asked to understand. His presence had been required. He had been asked for things. If he had loved, that was his own business, an indulgence, quite unnecessary to the deathward passage of their days. Dolores had not eluded him more successfully by her death than Leslie by offering him her constant company. He had held her like a boy snipe-hunter, crouching faithfully by a creek bank in the dark, holding the bag, hearing the water gurgle past but no snipe call except in his eager imagination—while elsewhere someone laughed at his mistake. She had always hung her body on his like a decoy, while she whored elsewhere, deserting not only the firm limbs and belly soft as overripe fruit, but the very nerves that should have answered
I
when his love said
Thou
.

Did he know now what his first nightmare in Caracas meant? Yes, he knew. The pistol pointed at his head was the threat of Nothingness, warning him to go no further in his attempt to find out who she was.

This was the truth he could not postpone forever. At first he only guessed how long it had been stalking him. On the night of his homecoming to Sardis his bravest conjectures about what was happening only made him pity them both. It passed through his mind that he might wake her from her dangerous sleep by shock, but he lacked anger. He feared to aggravate her guilt more than he hoped to gain by slapping her with it.

At the threshold of illicit knowledge, he felt the same intolerable responsibility for the right decision that he had felt when he hunted for the collapsed vein in Mandy Tabor's leg. He tightened his will for the struggle—and yawned lazily into her questioning gaze. He beamed from a moony face, suggested they complete their reunion celebration at home.

“Isn't
that
a daisy idea?” she said, flirting, holding back a little so he would lead her.

“It lacks novelty.”

“Well, I don't pretend to be Teresa Echeverría-Röhde.” But of course she yearned with her whole, orphaned nature to be someone with a jingly name he might have picked up in an exotic town and loved there once and for all in a single night, immune to the confusion of day after day. If she were only Teresa, named after that most stalwart of female saints, she would show him by a recklessness like martyrdom the giant power of her love. She had power. Corrupted by life, she merely lacked aim.

“Pretend to be her if you want.”

“Take me to Caracas!”

“I've just been,” he groaned.

“And I get what's left,” she said, gnashing her teeth as if she had literally forgotten who gobbled the forbidden feast in his absence. “I'm flattered.”

For the time being, it was enough for him to see how well they could still skim over thin ice. His whole appetite equated ignorance with luck. He took a good look at the stars as they walked from the restaurant to his car, decided not to ask her what their horoscope was for that still unfinished day. All the way home he told her lies about how jolly Caracas had been—not to make her envious, not at all, but so in her necessary fantasy she could go there and spread Teresa's legs for the
norteamericano
buccaneer.

Playing her game with a novel fear of it, he was grateful for the dark in their bedroom and superlatively grateful that—whatever he guessed to have happened (whatever she would know for sure and be trying to evade by her fantastic jealousy of a woman she had never seen)—the idiot responses of their bodies came gleeful as children who neither remember nor care that they have played the same game hundreds of times before.

Her leg, warm, shaven, and soft, was wrapped sweetly over his. Mouth to mouth they welcomed him home with nicer language than they had found all day. His hands recognized their wife. Her hands claimed a familiar treasure brought home strange from another country, quite unconcerned what dogs had chewed it in the gutter of a Venezuelan nightmare.

All was going well.

Then a cacophony of voices burst into his mind, like drunken fraternity brothers catching him in a happy dream. They meant to pull the covers off and shame him. Why hadn't he roistered with them like a man tonight? Someone had boffed a Kappa right downstairs on the grand piano while he disgraced the house by turning in with
Playboy
. Manfully they demanded to know why his sack was always crumby with paper tits. And over their noise he heard the clamor of loudmouthed Brother Fulker (big-eared and gap-toothed and plainly destined for chiropractic, but nevertheless more rightfully one of them than Ben) shouting, “Now's no time for thee-oh-rizing. Get it inner. Get it inner.”

Without letting Leslie know he was in argument, he tried to answer hastily, “I don't voluntarily theorize, but the mere fact of an initial unwelcome theory or even of recognition provokes a countereffect of recognizing that I'm theorizing, Brother Fulker. Result: yang and yin simultaneous, mutually canceling, also called abúlia. Inability to act.”

If I weren't thinking about it, I wouldn't have to think about thinking about it about thinking about thinking about it.… Veins collapsing in nature's most vicious circle.

Gone.

“What's the trouble, darling?”

He could not stand the pity that came from realizing she meant to take care of him—that she had to when his house of cards came down like this. “Nothing,” he said. “Fatigue.” At least the cunning mouth would still work against the rude frankness of the body.

Her fingernails hung on skin slack as an empty wallet. Her kiss was consolatory—and at the same time desperate beyond belief, her lips shrunken tight and probably bloodless under the remnants of lipstick.

The pity he saw was that she had needed reassurance this night worse than he. One had dragged the other into quicksand, and it was odds even who needed support more desperately now. If they had not both needed a successful night so much—the theory that would never stop again continued—it would have been easy to go on pretending as long as they had to that everything was all right. He knew that much and wished he didn't.

“Sweet dreams,” he said. “Tomorrow we'll get back on an even keel.” He rolled away from her. Stiff on his back, he covered his eyes with his forearm. “Sorry,” he said presently. You shoulda listened to me, stupid Brother Fulker said. You shouldn't think you could let that Colonel take Ready-Evachukky home and get out of it scot-free. She spotted what was wrong with you. You go down there and catch a sociable disease and bring it home to your wife. You should always have lissuna me.

Mandy Tabor died, leaving her skin empty as a snakeskin on the table between him and Jaeger. The truth was (as he saw it now in ghastly, convalescent clarity) that he had been in a state of hallucination since the day of that emergency in the operating room. Of course, according to all the laws of probability, Mandy had died. He had simply refused to recognize it until now. He had had that fuss with David Lloyd and gone to Caracas with the delusion that he had saved her. Dave had simply been too much the gentleman to tell him the truth bluntly, but when the dice fell eight instead of nine, he should have understood that meant Dave had already scored with her in the alley and Vendham Smothers had heard all about it on his silly transistor radio with the earplug. Everyone knew but Ben.

He could not go on refusing to admit that people were dead, no matter if the happiness of Aunt Peg and Leslie and all the others who counted on him depended on sustaining the lie. He had to wake up to the truth so he could lie more consistently to others. Tomorrow he would make up a new set of lies. He would recommend religious consolation to the Tabors. He would send some very old, dried-up flowers to the Kirkland family in Kansas. He would take a pair of surgical scissors (or lawn shears) and cut the cord to the earplug on Smothers' radio. He would forgive Leslie her romp with David. Then.…

Mabye they would all let him rest.

“You're tired,” Leslie said huskily, out of the pitch-dark.

“No. Yes. Very.”

“It was unforgivable of me not to realize how tired you were. I wanted you, lover. Selfish
toujours
. Want me to rub your back?”

“I'm all right.”

“Of
course
you're all right. Of course. My man.” She began to nibble at his jawbone with tiny kisses. They felt like the mouths of many small fish, painless but alien.

“Don't,” he said, managing a bit of a laugh. “Whatever you feel, it only tickles me. I don't need a back rub.”

He sensed that the panic which had grabbed them both was subsiding. It eased back into the darkness like some ice-cold tidal wave. They were going to be all right in spite of … the things he was not yet ready to think about.

But then she said, “What happened?” He recalled exactly the moment of discovery when the cacophony of thought had made him impotent. Recalled and would not have spoken of it aloud if she had not trespassed on his vulnerability by saying, “Too much Teresa in her bikini?”

“Oh, for Christ's sake, Leslie.” He took a very deep breath. “Why, may I please be told, are you wearing a diaphragm? I didn't know you had one any more.”

“Was that it?”

“It was more than a faint surprise.…”

Now it was her turn to withdraw into silence. He heard the rhythm of her breath begin to accelerate before she said, “All right, so I married a goddamn doctor. I wasn't quite expecting a goddamn vaginal examination, you know.”

“Sorry,” he said. A pause. “Let's not talk about it tonight. O.K.?”

She didn't answer. He was trying to fight down his anger, calling it childish, then finding it compounded just because it was childish, because, by some combination of personalities and circumstance, he had just now been reduced to being a child again, mad as when he pulled the brake lever and let the something run over something; they could not do this to him. Too damn bad, he thought with perfect clarity, the thought absolutely disconnected from what preceded and what followed it, that Billy Kirkland is dead. Is not here to kill again.

“Doctor?” he asked with helpless sarcasm. “Anyone with a finger, my dear, would have noticed.”

“Not everyone uses fingers,” she said, her spite tuned to his.

“Well,” he said. “Well, I guess … I guess … I guess they don't.” He sat up, struggling to silence himself, struggling to find the eye of the needle through which he might escape this unbearable room.

“I really … am tired, hon.” He gathered up his pillow and the bedspread in his arms and left the room. He heard her sit upright as though to speak to him before he left, but she said nothing.

He lay with his teeth clenched, telling himself over and over again that he was
sorry
—terribly
sorry
—that Billy Kirkland was dead. That appeasement seemed a necessary preparation for all the processes of order he must apply to his thoughts. One of the difficulties he had in this phase of the incoherent night was in trying to keep Billy distinctly separated from the little colored boy who had died with his brain full of lead.

But then he began to get used to the living room couch, just as on the last several nights he had got used to hotel beds, and, without having thought of Leslie again (
that
he dared not think of tonight), he began to review his talk with Maureen about Sandra Peterson. Maureen was convinced that the child's palpitations were functional and she wanted to get her to a psychiatrist. “If you get an electrocardiogram, you'll never convince her parents, never, that the trouble isn't organic, Ben. What have you got against psychiatry these days?” And he was replying—as he had not replied this afternoon in the actual conversation with Maureen—“It leaves too many things out of account.” He was on the verge of saying, It leaves God's will out of account, but he omitted that—and at the same time knew that tomorrow he was going to do as Maureen recommended and that it would be against his best judgment. All right. Better men than he had used a crutch when they needed it. The important thing was to know when you needed one.

He thought he had managed sleep (he was not sure; his mind was still active) when he saw a light in the room and Leslie was standing close to the couch.

“Can you forgive me?” she said pitifully. “Can you ever?”