Pretty Leslie (33 page)

“What for?”

“For what I've done to you.”

“You didn't do anything to me. I'm nervy. Edgy. That's all. It really appears that I've lost some of my detachment about my patients. I've been thinking about Sandra Peterson. Really, I worried more about those kids while I was gone than I do when I'm here.”

“I don't want to mess you up,” she said. She knelt beside him and with infinite, humble delicacy reached out to touch his cheek. Tentatively, waiting to see if he would accept it, she smiled at him.

“You're my God,” she said. “Everything I do is for you. Do you understand that, Ben? I'm not a self any more. I just pray that I can keep myself straightened up so I'll be all right for you.”

He was uneasy with suspicion of her tenderness. He said, “I love you. You love me.”

“I took the thing out,” she said. “Ben, please.
Please!
”

Now she crowded onto the couch beside him. “God,” she said, “Oh God, you excite me. I didn't know men could be like you.”

When they had failed again, she said, “Was it the light? Would it have been all right if I had turned it off? I wanted it so much. I thought if we were quick—”

“I don't know,” he said. “I think we need rest.”

“Will you come back to bed with me?”

“Oh yes. Yes, may I?”

“Please,” she said. With their arms around each other's waist they went back to their right places in the bed.

“Sleepy?” she asked. “Want to talk? I'd like to talk a little bit if you don't mind. You don't want a beer, do you? May I have one? But if we talk, you won't be in any shape for tomorrow.”

He promised gently that he
would
be all right, would take a speedball if necessary.

So she began, with wonderful and for him unslackened, hypnotic charm, to tell him about many secret things that had begun to clear in her mind while he was gone. She told him about the “fat girl” and how, on that day she was sure he remembered in her apartment on Grove Street, she'd almost literally had a vision of the fat girl lying disgustingly in his arms. She thought the fright she had taken then had always blocked her. It had made her sex less than it rightfully should have been and—who knew?—it might have something to do with the bad mystery of why she couldn't get pregnant. She told him about the cop who had “hurt her,” and who had driven away all the childish fantasy about the fat girl—or more likely had driven it into a deeper level of her unconscious where it did more harm than ever.

“Only I'm over that now,” she said mournfully. “I don't know what got me over it unless it was Dolores' death. I guess your being so far away had something to do with it, too. Maybe. Psyches are such queer things. The important, funny thing is that I feel just now ready to be your wife. I guess that's why I was so … shy … with you all day. As if this were the beginning of something. You remember little Pie Sundberg with his two kids and his squeaky line ‘I'm not old enough to be a father.' Well, maybe you didn't know him. I feel like that. That I'm old enough now. Want to marry me, sport? This is the last time I'll propose.”

“Yeah,” Ben said. “I'll marry you.”

So she told him a “funny thing.” The funny thing that she had never had the courage to confess to him until this crucial, promising present was about her coming. Before they were married she'd been able to come sometimes and sometimes she hadn't. Somtimes “fairly big” and sometimes “hardly anything at all; barely; outside.” But the times she had come were always the “impossible” or the “disgusting” times when she was most ashamed of what she was doing.

“You knew about Claude? About me and Claude Peepers?” she asked.

“No.”

“I should have told you. I want to tell you. Yes, it's true. I had an affair with him. Just gruesome. Why, Maggie was in the hospital delivering young Martin. We went to his
house
. It was hideous.”

“But it was good.”

“Well … well, yes. I suppose women are supposed to come. It says so in the books. Yes. I think the reason is just that it was so revolting to everything I believed was right. Then … do you want to hear this?”

“Yes.”

“But it's so
late
. Anyway, I guess that wasn't the worst. With some men, not always, once or twice, I'd not only not love them but I'd have all these
dirty
fantasies while I was doing it.”

“And that worked for you?”

“Yes. Well, it
worked
. I suppose when you feel a tickle in your nose you want to sneeze. And that's the way it was. I'd feel so soiled afterward. So the only time you made me do it, I didn't like it. I didn't want things to be that way between us. I love you. I've always loved you so much. I thought those dirty fantasies would come back if I—”

“Came?”

“Yes.”

“So you never have,” he said. His voice was level enough. Level with the stone foundations of some imaginary, soundless dungeon in a dark valley. The fact seemed sufficient unto itself, to require neither comment nor amplification. Like the fact of nothing. What was to say about it?

“No. Yes.” Between the no and the yes, what note of panic uncertainty? Some glint of hope like a faraway candle in the waste? Pure hopeless lie? “Women aren't like men,” she said impatiently. “It's hard to say.”

“Yes or no aren't hard to say.”

“It's always been
good
with you,” she said gamely.

“You should have told me.”

“There was nothing to tell. It
was
good. I didn't—don't—have any complaints. What I'm trying to lead up to is this: Do you remember how ghastly stubborn I always was about psychiatry and the terms and all? Well, wasn't I just afraid that someone would take my nasty little secret away from me and force me to be a woman and not a child?”

“Maybe.”

“Damn right. Well, I know that now. I really think I know. I mean it when I say I want to marry you. Be your woman. Hank called on Sunday—oh, you're supposed to call Mother and tell her she's not dying; I'll explain later—and began to tell me why he wouldn't have analysis. And there's something wrong with
every
damn member of my family. I saw it then. I was ready to see that, finally. To admit it. And I do want, now, to welcome your mind. All of you. I
want
you to know things about me. Like, of
course
, my wearing a girdle to meet you at the plane was the same sort of
symbol
as putting that damn diaphragm in tonight. I'm not going to fight you ever again when you point out things like that.”

“I didn't …” he said. Then it seemed to him that whatever she was babbling, and whether he believed her or not—or believed already that she was throwing a red herring in her panic that he would find out what she was not willing to tell—it seemed that he heard a note of longing in her voice that would, if it had to, take the place of hope.

He heard it thrilling and far off, like a morning bird in the trees of their lawn. It seemed to him that it was the only thing that counted.

“Everything will be all right,” he said.

“If we make it be. I don't want to deny anything,” she said. “I can do anything. Do you understand? I can do
anything
. I've got some glimpse of how strong I am.”

As if cheered on by her own shout, she turned to him for the third time that night. In sheer desperation she carried him with her, clawing him frantically onto her, into her, ignoring everything but the sheer ceremony of bringing him to orgasm.

There was a touch of dawn in the sky before they succeeded. And if the success was pitiful and botched, at least afterward both of them could sleep.

He knew—perhaps at the instant he found her prepared against conception—that she had slept with another man while he was in South America. But there was a long pilgrimage from that knowledge to the time when he was ready to let her know he had her secret. Why should he let her know he knew how, in her confession, she had been lying—since he had heard beyond any mistaking the note of hope and love for him that had probably dictated the lie itself? If she had slept with someone else and had got a damn good scare from it and was cured of her wanderlust—was that not all the better? Like deliberately exposing a child to an epidemic disease. Henceforward, would she not be immune? Wasn't that exactly what she was trying to tell him in her dishonest confession (dishonest for
his
sake, perhaps, more than hers)—that she felt herself immune? More to the point, was it not a tacit promise not to repeat her straying?

Thus the diagnostician reasons, not too brilliantly—neither requiring nor possessing nor in this case wanting the immediate certainty of the clairvoyant, rather making reason and logic into the brake that slows the deadly pace of intuition. He reasons thus while he clings to the precautions of methodology that he has earned with so much effort. (“Tomorrow we can see it all more clearly, Mother. If young Dick is still not taking nourishment in the morning, then we'll see.…”)

The weeks went on evenly. The summer was indivisible after all. There was no before and after. Before Ben went to Caracas they had been in trouble. They had tried to voice their trouble when he came back. They had twisted in their chains, rattled them, then stopped rattling.

Disaster was shown up to be only a game—one of Leslie's games which, after all, Ben had cautioned himself not to confuse with reality. Reality was the continuity of their lives in which they bought, consumed, admired, exploited, despised, endured—the seamless continuity of citizenship in which they swam like fish in a tank, a fluid medium that swept away the waste of their quarrels at the same pace as it took their pleasure. They went on as before because they could, because it was, finally, easier, than not to do so. If something was lacking, they didn't notice it—much.

Nor even often. They lived like picnickers, very little disturbed by ants in the salad, a little dirt on the jelly sandwiches. There was more to be gained by ignoring it than by noticing. Ben, when he once characterized himself as a fraternity boy who thought that the good he performed as a doctor was sufficient, had at least characterized the conditioning of a major part of his life.

Neither dreams nor guilt could prevail against the conditional health of indifference. If they had played house by their own rules, no one forbade them to go on playing.

In late July Leslie worked consistently on promotion for Frontierland at the Studio. She was rewarded with a fistful of tickets when the new attraction opened alongside the old amusement park. Most of these tickets went to Ben's patients. They were a greater success than the harmonicas, especially with the four-to-nine age group.

One night Ben and Leslie went with the Lazios and their children. They found pretty much what they expected. Frontierland was a bore. The frontiersmen were plaintly recruited from the Salvation Army and their buckskin clothes looked newer than plastic. Leslie said that if the Sardis Alcoholics Anonymous had blown a whistle to call its membership, the whole surly tribe of Indians would have gathered in one of the tepees to testify. The hourly attack on the fort was noisy all right. The staged gunfight in a Western street splashed a lot of powder smoke on the night air. But there was nothing for kids to do except watch. They might as well have been home in front of TV.

In comparison, Leslie thought, the amusement park next to Frontierland had a positively robust air of tradition. Ferris wheels, motordomes, shooting galleries, stands where you could buy cotton candy, a roller coaster, and a Sky-Dip did more to recreate a sense of the past than all the exploding muskets and six-guns of Frontierland.

She was at her very best—spieler and participant, sophisticate and child—at the shooting gallery and on the roller coaster. Ben loved her bewhiskered with cotton candy, laughed with the others at her impersonations of a little girl going on the rides for the first time. On the ferris wheel he saw her face illumined like that of a child before a cathedral altar, watching the near lights and the far-off lights over their city, the neon-tipped skyscrapers and the planes heading every which way.

He was the only one she could persuade to ride with her on the Sky-Dip. It was a monstrous girdered arm rotating on a tall steel shaft. Two cars were suspended from the ends of the arm. In motion they corkscrewed upward. Then, just before they were tripped into an abrupt descent, the cars jerked out by centrifugal force, jiggling madly.

“It's a man-killer,” Leslie promised with gleaming eyes.

So she and Ben got aboard it. They spun round and round on the ascent. Down below Dr. and Selma Lazio and the two Lazio children watched with condescending smiles and waved occasionally.

Then the action hit its climax. It was spinning at a torturing speed. Ben felt his stomach thrust to the side then compressed by the shock of a ten-foot fall. He thought something must have broken in the machinery. It whirled faster and faster.

If one thing was clear, it was that this was not pleasure but sheer torment. It belonged with those freak amusements of childhood in which pain and nausea are the central features.

“I want off,” he said superfluously. There was no way to get off until the predetermined gyrations were finished. He looked to see if Leslie could be enjoying this—or preparing to toss her cotton candy.

Her lips were back from her teeth and she was chuckling steadily. Her head bobbed like a trip-hammer. Her knees were together, her feet braced far apart on the floor of the car. She was a hag, a witch riding this mechanical broomstick in utter abandonment, not so much to pleasure as to some more compelling satisfaction.

“Leslie?”

She didn't—wouldn't—answer.

“Leslie!” he said in shame.

“Can't you take it?” she called good-humoredly.