Pretty Leslie (37 page)

Not even mooning. He would not permit himself that, either. That would have been beneath his queer dignity. Rather, the tribute he paid her was to recognize her quality, to trouble her as little as possible, according to some notion of spacecraft chivalry he had picked up from the comic strips long ago.

He had been intensely aware of her for three months before he even knew she recognized him as a regular member of Bieman's staff. Maybe she thought he was another of the free-lancers who sometimes were called on for a special job.

Then one rainy April afternoon he had ridden down from the seventh floor in an elevator with her. Just the two of them in the grimy, brown old cage that smelled of ancient cigars and cable grease. She was wearing an electric-blue raincoat that afternoon with a red polka-dot scarf squeezed up fluffily around her throat. Eyeing each other warily from opposite sides of the car, neither spoke until they were two flights above the ground floor.

“You did that football painting for the
Warbler
,” she said in a voice full of wonder. The
Warbler
was the University annual. This year it was to have a frontispiece in full color. Patch had done the painting, brought it in the day before. Carter and his assistant were engraving it now. After they had photographed it, they had put it on an easel in the reception room.

Patch said that yes he had. He was feeling a little breathless and excited as he always did when someone wanted to discuss the esthetic quality of his work. And he was fairly proud of this job.

Leslie shook her head in apparent astonishment. He had never been shut in close enough to her before to realize how much taller than he she was. Either she must be a giantess or he was a schoolboy again. His mouth felt sticky as sometimes when he had ridden into outer space with Miss Hardy.

“My God,” Leslie said. “You even put in all these tiny holes in their helmets. The labels on their jerseys. I've never seen anything like it.”

That was all the time they had for conversation that day. The spaceship came to earth, its doors slid open and Leslie walked quickly by herself across the lobby.

He was not sure whether she had been ridiculing him or praising him for the detail in his painting. But he watched her sprint across the sidewalk through a shower and throw herself into a cab—then turn to look back, surely to see if he had come out after her. His heart swelled with elation, as if he knew she had shared a dream with him. She had looked at his painting. She had seen the powerful bulging shoulders, the punishing cleats on the shoes of his football players, the heroic smiles as the ideal ball carrier set his foot on the neck of a prostrate opponent. She knew. Whatever crappy tastes she had in art, she could not have been entirely immune to the vision that had possessed him while he sat at home, far into the last ten nights, with his airbrush and his tiny sables shaping his dream of broken bones, touching in every detail.

Nobody at the Studio—unless it was that old tub of guts at the switchboard, Dolores Calfert—could have guessed his passion for Leslie Daniels. Probably—and it was just as well—Mrs. Daniels herself had only fitful intuitions of the part she now played in his life.

He gathered information about her. Dolly Sellers was one pretty good source. She was more in awe of Leslie's personal air of authority, her vitality, and her endless sociability, and just as fascinated as he. And Dolly heard a lot—probably a lot that she didn't comprehend, he thought. She nearly always went with Leslie on her coffee break in the morning, and pretty soon she knew not only that Dr. Daniels had a cozy little practice and a sports car that he doted on, but where and when the wedding had taken place and that it was one of those romantic marriages, uncertain up to the last minute because of the number of boyfriends making their final bids, that they had the wedding dinner at a Chinese place called Loo Chow's, and that Leslie, girl athlete, had run the mile in high school, though she gave up everything but the modern dance in college when she lost weight.

For this information Don Patch dated Dolly through several weeks. To get the real dope—girl talk—he had, of course, to seduce her.

That was a partly revolting chore. He repeated it as infrequently as he could, just enough to keep Dolly off the track of his real feelings. He did a clean job of misleading her. She believed, for instance, that just because he continued to speak contemptuously of Leslie Daniels, he really thought Leslie was a pretentious, snotty bitch and, on account of her size, not his type. And Dolly would never know how, as she was bounced around his apartment floor in front of his aquariums, the truth that Leslie Daniels would never pig it like this blazed reassuringly in his head. He never imagined Leslie as going farther with anyone, husband included, than opening the top of a purple-and-pink smock. That revelation of unspeakable beauty would suffice the gentry and the artists of this world.

Dolly, grateful as most women seemed to be for the bruising he gave her, relented thereafter in her defense of Leslie. She was his, on his side now. His thought was hers. So she confided at last what Leslie had told her in confidence (and probably as advice on the ways of the world, offered so she wouldn't feel too bad about her own submissions): Leslie was no virgin when she got married. There had been men
who
.

He took the news with a mixture of disgust and elation. “Why would she tell you?” he wanted to know.

“I guess she doesn't attach as much importance to
that
as … some of us do,” said hopeful Dolly, speaking from her proper instinct for monogamy, still kidding herself that if she remained loyal to her guilty conscience she might become the second Mrs. Don Patch.

“Why would she necessarily tell you the truth?” asked Patch, who saw that the truth was too good for Dolly and supposed that Leslie would judge from the same loftiness as he.

“Maybe she didn't,” Dolly said. She wanted to believe whatever Don believed.

And of course she had no way of knowing what that might be. No one had ever had. His wife had picked and picked and picked at the stone walls of his brain. Now, still bewildered but worn out and permanently broken of her curiosity about the artist's mind, Mildred was back in Arkansas living with her parents and her two children, evidently quite content with the money he sent her each month in envelopes that contained no message from him. He had married her when he came home from the Korean War, before he understood that going to art school in Kansas City might change not only his image of the good life but his chances for getting it. At the Art Center there he had hung at the fringes of a gang of painters whose contempt for him and his wife he easily interpreted as contempt for her. When he saw that there was better to be had, he went after it. That was the way of the artist. He gave his wife
The Moon and Sixpence
to read. She thought it was a dandy book. She enjoyed it thoroughly, but missed the resemblance between himself and Strickland (or Paul Go Gan, who was behind it all) that she was supposed to grasp and adjust to. She knew he got into bed with the wives of several guys who didn't like him; he told her when he had. But she thought that the wives didn't like him either (they shared their husbands' envy, he let her understand) and that confused her, for she could not afford to admit to herself that she didn't like him either, though she had willingly borne him two children.

Poor Mildred. She was happier back home in Arkansas, living in a comfortable old house enlivened by airbrush paintings of jets, destroyers, spacecraft, and infantrymen charging over the sulfur-yellow bodies of Oriental men and women. Hot evenings when she shared ice cream with the younger and older generations of her own blood, swinging in the darkness of the porch, she answered a lot of questions about how “Don was getting along with his art work” and took a lot of young cousins into the house to peer by artificial light at the melodramatic paintings. They were her excuse for being where she was while Don was where he was. Though she still could not understand quite why, she kept echoing the theme that artistic people work terribly hard with their minds and are therefore different.

He made few friends with men. One reason (surely not the most important) was that he worked harder and on a different schedule than most of those he had a chance to know. From the time he entered art school he began to discover that his classmates put in an average of one-third to one-half the time that he did on their drawings or canvases. But it took him two or three years to be absolutely sure that this indolence of theirs—the unwillingness to spend nights as well as days rapt in the intense fiction that what they were depicting was a true and distinct world, a Creation to which they owed the breathless concern of the Creator refusing a break between the Third, Fourth, Fifth, or unbearable Sixth Day of the formation of the world—that this lack of commitment on their part accounted for their use of big, sloppy brushes and their taste in modern painting. They won the prizes and the approval of the instructors, but what he won from his fanatic concentration they would never know.

The only one of the instructors (except the commercial art people, who said rather unenthusiastically that he was a whiz at certain types of rendering) who ever took a sustained interest in his work commented once, “If you were religious—if you had the temperament or vision or whatever the hell he had—you might end up a kind of William Blake.”

Patch took this as a compliment. (Perhaps it had been meant as one.) He liked the hard, honest lines in Blake's figures. The wooden musculature and articulation didn't bother him. The unworldly backgrounds and drapery of male and female simply reminded him of those colored comics that had first aroused his impulse to take pencil in hand and draw. So he read biographies and prophetic books of Blake's. He made his wife, like Blake's, sit around naked with him while he worked, hours and days on end. He spoke to her prophetically (conversation with Mildred could only have been a bore, anyway); and when he was excruciatingly tired (and the hour was wrong to go find his classmates in the tavern near the school), and when he thought he had milked them for everything he might learn from them, when he could not stand quarreling with them again about de Kooning and Hoffman, he used her sexually. “An artist's wife ought to be like a mattress”—he had read or heard that somewhere. Mildred was like a mattress.

When he finally chased her home and moved like a lone wolf from Kansas City to a job that would presently lead him to the steady job in Sardis at Bieman's Studio, he found that he still needed women for relaxation almost as constantly as he had needed her. Nothing else—not alcohol, not movies, not reading, though he indulged moderately in all these things—could cut the extreme and finally maddening tension he built up in his long periods of work.

So what social life he had was geared to the constant search and the few reliable talents for seduction he had carried over almost unchanged from junior-high days. Persistence and insult were the foundations of his method. When he was a child at an ice-cream social once, he had stood where an outdoor bulb cast sharp shadows on the grass and had chunked rocks and sticks at the shadow of a snotty girl he yearned for. When he finally glanced up at the three-dimensional girl, seeing her aware of this symbolic abuse, he had been surprised to see the warmth and invitation of her smile.

He had trusted insult and abuse ever since. The persistence that carried him through days of labor on one small section of a painting provided the same gratifying results with the women he needed. Maybe it worked up a kind of tension in him that they recognized intuitively, brought forth a kind of promise that everything except their minds recognized. At any rate, once he got himself in the social position to make himself noticed by a woman day after day and month after month, impatience or antipathy for him seldom kept them from following him at last to his bachelor apartment and workshop.

In the past three years none of them had come back very often. He had not encouraged them to. The first time was the time that counted for him with women. After that he began to get a little afraid of them. He was afraid of the appetites he wakened, as if afraid that they would take all his energy from his work unless he got rid of them.

Mildred's two pregnancies had something to do with this fear. The hungry mouths of children threatened his work and his vision, too, but the fear encompassed more than that. Maybe he had never cleared from his mind some warning given him in childhood (in God knows what bull session of aspiring junior athletes and American Boys) that “one drop of semen is worth a hundred drops of blood,” so the moment of ejaculation was a crisis of real terror with him when he seemed to be floundering without limbs at the edge of an immense and greasy precipice. He hated to give them what they all—after a night or two when they were content to concentrate on their novelties and pleasures—seemed to want most. So they multiplied in numbers, his almost anonymous mistresses.

There had been a period, a year or so ago, when most of them had been Negro. He was not quite sure how this colored string had begun. Perhaps the inspiration for it had been wakened in him that night when he and Mildred were walking through a Kansas City park and he had pulled a knife to order the offending Negro man out of the bushes. With fear of that black man to provide the nudge, he had found that Negro women were as susceptible to insult and persistence as the white pigs he herded over his threshold.

Eula Clyde, a girl who worked just one month in the mailing room at the Studio, had been the first of the blacks. Eula had friends, artistic ones in the jazz world, here and in Chicago. She introduced him “ay round,” as she put it.

Not to call them niggers while he persistently courted them and quickly got rid of them was no great strain. After all, he still had those magic, prolonged, private hours of work, when, with airbrush hose over his forearm and a pot of tea steaming beside his left hand, he crouched like a redheaded little gnome over a scratchboard or in front of a canvas. Then he was free to incorporate his associations from the real world with the hallucinations that grew out of his creative hand. He could correct, he could punish, he could annihilate—just as on the plane surface his hands and tools could—the imperfections of race and sex. With the tip of his tongue in the corner of his mouth he would ease a minutely detailed stencil away from the edge of an airbrushed garment … then sing, “Nigger-bitch-a, bitch-nigger-a. Nig-a-pig-a.” With such catharsis, his mouth was purified for the milder insults. (“You're a jealous chick, Eula. You're a mean little teaser, Julie Anne. You're a square little housewife in your bones, Lily.”) That worked, that won.