Pretty Leslie (36 page)

“Three nights,” she said brutally.

“—three nights, then, isn't a reality any more. It's another circumstance we've worked over and chewed up and digested until it's part of us. There isn't any other man, Leslie. The quarrel was always between you and me. I've thought it over. I've read this summer. Talked to people. Psychiatry. Psychology of women.”

“Done your homework,” she said with an awful feeling that he was trying to diminish her to nothing and that she must fight to prevent him.

“Yes. It's probably all I can do for us. I don't think
who
the man was or what his technique may have been had anything to do with your … satisfacton. You were wound up. You've been winding yourself since you were a little girl. Someone pushed the button—”

She began to laugh savagely.

“—and the spring unwound. You didn't really need a man there.”

Even as he spoke, he felt the mere ingenuity of his explanation. It had been long and earnestly sought. It was the best his mind and observation could give him. It was nevertheless a substitute for the one piece of information she still steadfastly refused to give: who was the man? (After all, yes,
he
might have been some fantastic stud, such a figure as only terrors and envy can conceive, not impossibly appearing in the flesh at the right time, the time dictated by chance, to take in one cutting the harvest of virginities she had saved from all her previous bedding. Probably not, possibly yes.)

At any rate he would not ask again who, among strangers or their acquaintances, it might have been. The scar was formed. However important that withholding might have been, he would not open the wound again to probe for the secret.

He wanted out of this summer as he had once wanted out of Kansas and its itching heat. He wanted to be on a train, leaving not only a place and a circumstance to which his strength was unequal, but to leave a
time
—as if a time and all its contents could be sunk to the ocean's bottom like a barge of atomic waste.

He had no more questions.

Sarah Coleman Rattner stopped with them for a three-day visit on her way to Reno for a divorce. Leslie had not seen her for nearly four years. They had parted then on less than friendly terms. What did it matter? It had occurred to Leslie that Sarah (who knew nothing of the tight web that had caught her) would be the ideal person to understand it
if
she knew—as Leslie hoped she never would. Sarah had a crooked mind. So she had written—no cry from the depths, but a bright matronly letter that ignored whatever cause they might once have had to quarrel.

Sarah responded by an offer to appear. How wonderful. Sarah would bring the answer to a riddle she did not even know existed.

Sarah was thin. She had spent too long living on a model's diet after she gave up dancing. Hunger had at last taken its toll of her complexion, and the first thing Leslie noted when she met her at the train was the unevenness of her skin under its thick makeup, like a lava bed seen from a great altitude. “Oh darling,” she said and cried a little as she hugged her old friend. Whether she was crying over the ravages of acne or for her own unconfessable trouble, she could hardly tell. At any rate, once she laid eyes on the living Sarah, it was perfectly clear that no help or good counsel would come from that quarter.

Dining with Leslie and Ben at home, Sarah picked at her once lovely chin and defended Adlai Stevenson “in spite of what's been happening at the UN.” (The past spring had seen Lumumba murdered, Cuba invaded.)

“The point is he was acting under orders,” Sarah insisted sadly. “It wasn't
his
policy. Apparently he tried his best but was overruled.” She was sure that things would have been “even worse” if someone else had been Ambassador to the UN.

Who cares? Leslie thought. Once she and Sarah and all the other smart pretty girls in New York had thought that everything would start to be all right if Stevenson were President. How silly and far away that time seemed.

“We might have
invaded
Cuba if it weren't for Stevenson,” Sarah said. The Danielses would not argue with that.

After dinner Leslie boiled lemon peel in a bucket of water and made Sarah drape a towel over her head and hold her face in the steam. They talked about King Street and Irene Dale.

“The man she married is making thirty-five thousand dollars a year in the greeting-card business,” Sarah said from inside her towel drapery, “and you remember the time she tried to get me to go dike.”

“I remember everything,” Leslie boasted.

“Well, yeah. Do you still want to be a writer?”

“I just want to be somebody else.”

A bright, cynical eye popped through a gap in the toweling, staring up out of the steam. “Metaphysics get all of us in the end,” Sarah said thoughtfully. She told what a sonofabitch Rattner had been turned into by the passage of metaphysical time. He really had promise when she married him. “We've come such a long way with nothing to show,” she said. “That's the horror of it.”

But Leslie had already decided that her misery loved no such company, and she balked Sarah's obvious wish to complain.

They sat up late remembering names, dates, events of a life that did not seem so much to have been used up as swallowed whole, never digested, never even altered from what it had been, just there.

Leslie thought of her adultery. This too is part of the Sargasso Sea. Like everything else. Already it's no more important than the time I stole Sarah's bouillabaisse to feed Roger Klein. And realizing this was so made her feel cheated.

chapter 17

H
E SUPPOSED
, Don Patch did, that he had lucked into something pretty extraordinary when he scored with Leslie Daniels. And that he had lucked back out of it with the same surprising ease. There were times when he thought no part of it was his doing.

He remembered very well when she had first started working part time at the Studio last winter. He had thought then—the first time he saw her, the first he overheard about her from jerks like Seymour Rife and Ozzie Carter—that she was about as far beyond any hopes of his as his grade-school teachers when he first began to think about women. In fact she reminded him of that Opal Hardy who just one winter had taught third and fourth grades down home in Constable, Missouri.

Drawing pictures of spacecraft (always with seats and bunks for just two aboard, always bristling with meticulously drawn cannons and ray projectors) when he should have been studying arithmetic or reading, he had
come to terms
with Miss Hardy. In real life she might not like him very much (he didn't care). In the spacecraft she wore the pink-and-purple smock which she'd worn only one spring day in the classroom (probably because the other teachers or possibly the principal had told her it wouldn't do for work). She sat beside him while he fired the cannons and disintegrated the whole population of Constable and all the Mississippi Valley up to St. Louis, which was as far north as he had ever been, and consequently marked the boundary of the world where all the people he despised and feared seemed to live. (He had no feelings about people he had never seen; it was only those he knew who raised the great obstacles to what he wanted.) Then, while the spacecraft zoomed upward and backward, rearing into the unillumined reaches among spotlight stars, Miss Hardy opened the top of her smock. The features of her face dissolved. She began to heat up like fever. She never said a word, but she squeezed him hard. Then afterward (while the spacecraft spiraled back down toward the chalk-smelling classroom in Constable) she spanked the hell out of him, invariably lowering his overalls to do so.

Actually Miss Hardy never laid a hand on him. It was his old man who used to lay on with switches or his belt or his razor strap. (Strop? The sound of the bright blade on leather when his dad sharpened it was
“strop, strop, strop”
; when he went to the barber shop with his dad, the barber called it
strop;
the leather sang on his legs as if it were
stropping
a blade when the old bastard laid on.) He used to wish wildly that it was the other way around—that Miss Hardy would punish him or even that his mother would do it if he had it coming (as he was always convinced he did); but she was such a stringy, dishwater, whining rag of a woman that she'd never strike with more than her hand, maybe not that. And in the confusion of sentimentalities that attended his year as Miss Hardy's pupil, he used to imagine sometimes that his daddy had stropped her. He could never, in his most ferocious and bloody daydreams, imagine lifting his hand to give her pain, though he thought, “She has it coming.”

So when Mrs. Daniels reminded him of Opal Hardy, he had never gone out of line to imagine any real contact with her. It offended him like a bad smell when the regulars at the Studio took liberties in talking about her.

(“They's something there the doctor ain't gettin',” Rife said over his drafting board, lifting his mud-black coffee in its wilting paper cup, and licking his rootlike canines. “Reaching,” String Bieman said. “Using
up
,” said Ozzie Carter, known for his moderation in all matters of opinion. “Among us creative people there is a well-founded superstition that where there is smoke there is
fah
,” String said, “and when dear Leslie looks up at me from her typewriter I detect the thin, fine smell of frogjaw.” “That is the odor of breeding. You hayseeds is knowed incapable of distinguishing between crotch sweat and Chanel Number Five.” “Ladies burning at both ends,” Rife mooned, caressing his ulcer with semiliquid sediment of coffee. “They will not last the night.” And the stimulus of Leslie Daniels set him reminiscing, while the others came and went, half listening, of “intellectual broads” he had known in college, at the Art Students' League or during his summer in Paris. “A girl with a good mind is
always
easier.” “Feelthy creative man,” String called him. “Because she condescends to treat you apes like you still had
it in you
, like you could
get one up
, you malign her behind her back.” “Anytime,” Rife said. With a darting hand he drew a scratch-paper cartoon of himself behind Leslie's back, shrieked like a stuck pig, crumpled the sketch quickly and tossed it in his wastebasket. “I've never known a sweeter, more liberal, and—I dare say even in present company, knowed for misinterpretation—
generous
lady in my life than Madame Doctor Daniels, and you creative pigs aren't fit to pull up to that with a tuxedo
and
a spoon
and
a napkin,” Carter said. “If you can take the word of a famous Italian connoisseur, that is strictly table pussy, and if she had to marry someone, a doctor is none too good for her.” And then Rife, the coffee burning his poor stomach like conscience, would say, “Oh Jesus, you
guys
. People in other walks of life are not so depraved. Listen, here's a fine, intellectual woman, hoping to be a mother, to rear her children in the best American tradition—a literary sensibility, a good guy, a buddy to the lowest. I tremble when I think that God is just and hears every dirty word that's been said here since noon, and I, for one, have work to do. Get out of here and repent.”)

Though the talk about Leslie followed a fixed parabola of outlandish suggestion and matching repentance for its excess, Don Patch never forgave those others who forgave themselves so handily (meaning no harm). Grinning as he listened, he felt the hidden teeth grind in his grin. He retrieved from the wastebasket two or three of the unspeakable cartoons Rife had drawn of her. He kept them at home, filed in a neat folder labeled “Mrs. Ben Daniels.” It seemed to him that if the time ever came when he could do so easily, he would show them to Mrs. D. and let her know who her real friends were.

As for making friends with her (this was quite distinct from being her distant true friend), he had no capacities and no lucky prospects for advancing in this direction at all. Though he was on a retainer basis at the Studio, he did most of his work at home. He spent even less time at the shop than Leslie did, and, coming at irregular hours, he was never sure when a week might go by without his seeing her at all.

She had a glass-partitioned cubicle next to String Bieman's office. (Daddy Bieman had a smartly paneled, secluded office at the extreme rear of their floor in the Alleman Building.) All the regular staff of layout people, designers, typographers, photographers, salesmen and accountants seemed to have legitimate excuses for dropping in at her cubicle, and from her first month she ran a kind of morning salon—coffee and doughnuts and smart talk—to which he might have been welcomed if he had not supposed he disdained that. (These grown and balding men went sniffing after her like puppies, and he told himself at first, at least, that he would not. He had the reasonably correct impression that he would lower himself in Leslie's eyes if he tried to hang around her cubicle with nothing much to say for himself.)

Also—at first, at least—he had a dreamer's exaggerated respect for Leslie's talents and the amount of work she did. Before she ever put her auburn head in Bieman's door, the scuttlebutt had informed him that Daddy B. had found a hotshot reporter from some big magazine or other to write copy for him. The Studio was beginning to branch out a little, to change itself into a combined ad agency and art shop, where for twenty years it had taken the art jobs that came its way, left the space selling and copy preparation to other agencies in town. They were doing some promotional material for the University that spring. Banks, churches, and a new Frontierland near the lake were being courted as clients, and Leslie was taken on to give tone to the new business they anticipated. Everyone said (and Patch listened like a spy) that she was doing “a fine job.” Everyone said she worked hard. He was pleased to hear it, as though the compliment were to himself. She was his lady, even back in the time when he saw himself the perpetually unrecognized courtly lover, mooning from afar.