Pretty Leslie (34 page)

He had meant to warn her that the Lazios were watching. He had felt that though they were far down below, they might have seen what they shouldn't see.

He refused to take what he had seen on her face as evidence (though as a practitioner he would have fit it with more substantial signs to establish a diagnosis; doctors are not lawyers; evidence is whatever urges the mind toward comprehension; none of it is inadmissable in the art of medicine). He let it go in the current of time that carried the other wastes.

In these days when a part of his mind trailed in the slime of unacceptable conjecture, he found his appreciation heightened for the good things that still came, the way a man with an inoperable malignancy will learn that common pleasures are more precious than he has suspected. Blocked currents of love piled up until, shyly, tentatively, like a trickle of water seeking a new stream bed through desert country, they found new objects. He had never been a better doctor or found a warmer relation with his patients.

Like a boy musing on a parable he heard in Sunday school, he brooded on one morning when he made a routine examination of a newborn baby.

Wayne Hindemith Klassie still had the rhubarb stalk of cord protruding from his belly and was still uncircumcised. All his joints were in order. He had the correct number of fingers, toes, ears, eyes, tonsils, apertures and reflexes, plus a delicate spiny-looking fuzz of jet-black hair like defensive weaponry on a skull still cylindrical from its great passage. Lashes like (Ben thought) the spider-fine filaments of hair on Leslie's back and cheek.

There was a murmur of air-conditioning machinery in the busy nursery adjoining the examining room. White-capped nurses came and went among the wailers and sleepers, and at the front windows admiring relatives were lined up looking for individuality where yet, thank God, there was none.

He shone his tiny flashlight in Baby Klassie's mouth. He listened to the fine, swift trot of Baby Klassie's heart. Tapped him for reflexes. He rolled the infant head to the side to check the eardrums, and where there was absolutely no resistance, still there was a wholesome wail. In what the baby wanted was all its strength.

One of the nurses, a smart little mutt whom he knew slightly, came past the table behind him, not so much pausing as simply hanging suspended, as nurses learn to do when they want to seem both busy and sympathetic.

“Baby Klassie!” she said, sucking the amusement from the punning name that separated him from all those others here in her care so briefly. “
Klassie
.”

The name hummed like a honey-hunting bird in his ear as he lifted the boy. He thought, What a long way he has to go. How good and how terrible that the boy had to go it alone.

Suddenly he felt like crying, for through Wayne Hindemith Klassie he was in love again with them all and all of it. “Stop wiggling, kid, I'm not going to drop you,” he said to the boy, who had just reminded him how many ways there still were to love the fugitive soul he had married.

Colin Dowling stood between his knees in the consulting room and before he would let Ben insert a spatula into his mouth had to announce, “The cherries are redder than any red in the world.”

That was the way Ben felt too. He said, “You mustn't let the birds get them.”

He had the zest of a condemned man waiting for a new trial. He had never taken so much pleasure from driving around the city. He enjoyed giving more free medical advice (it really only amounted to consolation for a man in perpetual fear of an attack) to Vendham Smothers over the back hedge. “You'll outlive us all, Vendham.” Vendham was not consoled. He wanted a better promise than
that
.

He enjoyed going swimming with the Lazios and finding Leslie the best of them all on water skis, Junoesque in her black bathing suit, impeccably happy as she rattled through the foam behind the big boat. He enjoyed “racing death” as he wove through traffic on his way to make a house call (and tape a sprained ankle) in the South Side factory workers' district. As before, he liked his work, himself, and his home—Leslie in the garden as always, Leslie with stories to tell him about her hours at the Studio or with the neighbors. Leslie unchanged. (So he said, “If someone had her on her back, what's the harm in it? Who am I to rock the boat? Why pay more than anybody, anything, will ask of us?”)

The Biemans came to dinner one Sunday evening.

“Mother Bieman's such a goose,” Leslie said when she told Ben they were coming. “I hope you like Daddy.”

“Do they really call each other Mother and Daddy?”

“It's what they are called in heaven. You'll see.”

He saw two more giant puppets in Leslie's everlasting variety show. As predicted, Daddy B. reminded him of a raffish Eisenhower.

“Now, if there's any vitality in this country, and I think there's a lot of vitality, I think that it comes from the stock and the tradition. Now, you've been to South America and you know that it's generations of slackness
plus
the Catholic Church—”

“Ben thought the South Americans were in
tensely
vital,” Leslie put in.

“That's what I mean,” said Daddy B., unperturbed as if he really had meant that.

“Ben had a fleeting impulse for us to adopt one of the brighter children, a really good child from down there.”

“That's what I mean. You young people have got the tradition of not being so goldarn hidebound,” Daddy Bieman said with unabashed flattery. He put his arm around Leslie's tan shoulders and went on, as if continuing the same subject, “This girl never wastes my time with the way
I
think things should be done. You should come around and watch her rule the roost, Daniels.”

“She tells me about it,” Ben said—as if he saw it all, from water-cooler politics to executive office with his wife the reigning monarch.

Mother Bieman, with martinis glittering in her jeweled hands like the most fabulous jewels of all, kept searching for ways of giving them something.

First she hinted that she would still like them to have one of the puppies Leslie had seen at the farm. Then she regretted not having brought sweet corn. “I thought I would and Daddy said, ‘Don't be an ass.' And of course I wouldn't have brought them with the thought that they would in any way interrupt your plans for dinner tonight, but you know he thought if I came in carrying
produce
you'd immediately put the kettle on.…” When Ben told her about Leslie's finds at the auctions, Mother B. wanted to see them, then wanted to contribute an extra cobbler's bench—that she happened to have in the attic—for Leslie's living room.

They ended the evening early. Bieman and Leslie got in a raucous game of pool on the table in the basement and left their spouses with the pale, dilute conversation of onlookers. When Mother B. found that Ben didn't know about Billybird's pedigree or the least thing about bird care, she felt it necessary to tell him about the creatures on the farm that she (and some variously named colored man—Ben thought that Otho, Hill, and Shorty were all probably the same slow-witted servitor) had saved from subhuman diseases and afflictions.

He did his best to listen—trying not to mind that this old goose was not nearly so rewarding as Dolores Calfert—but when he nodded, Mother B. remembered that he was a doctor with many dependent on him the next day.

“I'm sorry,” Leslie said later. “I didn't mean to get so absorbed in play with the old goat. But he's such a competitor. So am I? Well … did you have any fun at all?”

“They were fun. It was a good evening. I liked it,” Ben said.

He spoke the literal, yearning truth. It was exactly such nights, however tinctured with boredom, that he was trying to hold onto when he felt the wash of sand running from under his feet.

He felt a brief, ignoble exaltation of relief when Leslie's period came. It would have been too damn bad, too bitterly ironic, if—after all the months of trying to get her to conceive—one single passing encounter should have done the trick. He saw that, as his Aunt Peg had always propagandized him, the world was not made up of poetic injustices that singled this man or that (not even him, unluckiest of all in the Billy Kirkland episode) for particular evil fates. Rather it was made up of probabilities. The probability was that Leslie had got out her diaphragm for her one-night stand (two or three nights, what did it matter?). The probability that no live seed could get past jelly and rubber was demonstrated again to be the fundamental law of medicine and the world. Fatuously, in his relief, he even told himself that Leslie and he had had some sort of tacit understanding that as long as they were careful, either might “experiment.” While he was in Venezuela he had not experimented either with Dr. Echeverría-Röhde or the American secretary to the conference who had had drinks one afternoon with him and Dr. Bing. But
he might have
. Admitting that to himself went a long way—did it not?—to excusing Leslie.

Thus, sometimes, he reasoned in the seclusion of the tiny laboratory he had set up in a coat closet opening from his office. He might be peering down through his microscope at a smear of blood, counting white cells within the hairline rectangle that reduced the conglomerate to order and control, when he thought, Who am I to find anything personally painful—anything directed at me or harming me—in the biologic discharge? What was there to take offense at in some anonymous gush of white fluid into the orifice that ten of his friends had pried open with rubber gloves and nickel instruments, not only with his consent but with his prayerful hope that they could help him?

There were a thousand things in his life to hold him steady and give him perspective. As long as Leslie was not going on with an affair (and he was sure she was not), as long as she had not fallen in love with anyone else (he believed with all his heart that her promise of deeper love for him was not pure fabrication, that it ran deep and true in her), then he was, at the worst, no loser from what had (probably) happened while he was away.

In sum, he found no moral question that justified his probing beyond what Leslie chose to tell him. As long as he was not again jolted into impotence, there was no psychological motive strong enough to make him fight her for a secret he preferred not to share.

What they had still to act out before they were set free was dictated by forces more primal than morality or anything properly labeled a constituent of the personal psyche. The game they wanted to refuse was begun long before. The rules they wanted to ignore were the rules of time itself, stifling or punishing every passion that trifles with delusions of independence.

“As long as …” Ben had said to himself. In July he was impotent again—not for a few hours but for several days, almost two weeks.

The onset was an inflated parody of the first time. In Leslie's expectant embrace, intrusive voices had yelled their poison into his mind. Again he had the hallucination of loud-mouthed Fulker waking him from a dream. “Stop thinking, you maniac. Stickitinner.”

He felt as if he had to answer Fulker—or someone—before he could continue. And before he could settle on the justifying answer, it was hopelessly too late.

“Ah, darling,” Leslie mourned, into the darkness which was no longer privately theirs. “Something's bothering you you won't admit to me. Maybe we both ought to—”

“See a psychiatrist?”

“Why not?”

“Because I don't want to.”

“Baby. Oh baby. My love. I don't want you sick. You're going to be sick if you—we—don't get help.”

“That's right. I am sick. Sick of it.”

“Then—”

“Don't you understand? I am sick in my soul. That's not a word, is it? Soul, soul, soul, asshole.”

He heard her crying terribly and could not reach out to comfort her. Finally she choked, “Ben, what have I done to you? Oh, my God. Ben, I'm going to help you. You know that. Ben, I'm here. Take all the time you want. I'll be here. Like a rug. Use me. For anything, Ben.”

He spoke through rigid lips. “You don't seem to remember that my mother went crazy trying to tell black idiots that they had souls. That I'm her son. When I say I'm sick in my soul,
don't
talk to me about psychiatry.”

He had frightened her badly. “All right,” she said chastely. “I don't believe in it, either.”

“I will tomorrow,” he said with a grudging laugh. “I always believe in it when I'm around the hospital. Only at night I don't.”

“We'll wait until tomorrow, then.”

“What'll we talk about until the sun comes up?”

“I don't know,” she said meekly. “About love?”

“Love! ‘Samuel, Samuel,'” he said. “How can I talk about love when I can't feel it without an erection? It's disgusting.”

“Maybe it's better to admit you hate me,” she said, playing—oh, not cutely, not too obviously—the role of Nurse Nan.

“How can I hate you? I don't understand you. You still haven't come with me, have you?”

She was silent for a moment until she decided on the truth. “No.”

“But he made you come, didn't he?”

Again it was a long time before she brought herself to answer.

“Who?”

“Tell me who.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“About my trip. While I was gone.”

“Oh.”

“Yes, ‘oh.'”

“All right. What do you want to know?”

“Who made you come.”

“
No!
”

He reached across her and turned on the bed lamp. Recoiling, he paused above her, leaning on one arm. He stared down into her face with such hatred that she closed her eyes.

“God, I wish you'd kill me,” she said. “If you knew, why didn't you whip me when you came home? I'm not smart. You're my husband. You could have punished me. As much as I deserved.”