Pretty Leslie (40 page)

“Yes.”

“Oh.” He nodded owlishly, rounding his eyes and his mouth to signify in dumb show that he could have said a whole lot about
that
if he wanted to. What, with your
husband
for once? And after swimming, something else, hey? With your husband this time?

“I'm afraid I don't understand the …
objective
of this conversation,” Leslie said.

He got up then, loitering toward the door, terribly, terribly sad and terribly hurt. He had not come in out of hostility. For whatever reason he had come, he had not wanted to fight. So she kicked him in the teeth. “Well, I'm sorry I bothered you,” he said. “Me, I'm just a buckeye painter. I don't dig all this Hoffmande Kooning stuff. Pardon me for being a cockroach.”

“Oh, please,” she said. “It's too hot for all that. I
don't
understand why Bieman can't afford air conditioning. Why I work for a man who.…”

He nursed the offense she had given him until it turned in the only direction it could have. Then he wrote her a letter, which he put in an envelope marked
PERSONAL, PERSONAL, PERSONAL;
he sealed it carefully, and left it in the middle drawer of her desk one afternoon.

The stiff and stylized letter (
nothing
offensive in either statement or allusion) ended with a request for a reply. “I believe I am entitled to that at least,” he wrote.

He waited nine days, avoiding all contact with her for that time, giving her her chance, depriving her of excuses. When she had given no indication of getting his message, he wrote again. Again he was careful of his terms. It was a letter from a sensitive friend. He mailed it to her house.

It came back unopened inside an envelope with the printed return address of Dr. Ben Daniels, M.D., F.A.A.P. For most of an afternoon, unable to turn to the solace of his work, Patch circled the drafting table where the intact envelope lay like a sachet of poison.

He got out his old Remington from under the bed and typed a letter to Dr. BD, MD, FAAP. Just the facts. The simple facts. Signed, respectfully yours, Donald Van Tyler Patch.

The sight of his bold signature under the nitroglycerin facts seemed to him the most glaring exposure of himself he had ever conceived. (As if somehow, that name in blue on the speckled typewritten page were the substitute for all the great drawings he had meant, once, to make.) A drop of blood would complete the design. The doctor was bigger than he. What was more likely than that the doctor would hunt him down and beat the piss out of him, or make him eat the letter? He laughed angrily and tore the sheet up.

Then he got drunk. He shambled naked around his apartment workshop like William Blake with no Mrs. Blake to keep him company. He stuck his hand, once, elbow deep in one of the aquariums and studied the queer distortions the water gave it. If he could copy this distortion in a painting, would it be modern enough to suit people with ordinary modern tastes? The hand seemed to be detached from his body. To prove it was not, he caught a little fantail and laid her in an ashtray.

He sat for a long time drinking and watching her flop amid the butts and ashes until her bright scales were foul and she died.

That night he dreamed that the doctor had him on an obstetrician's table. Was cranking up his legs tied to the stirrups. Was approaching him with ornate-handled carving knife and fork. He screamed as he woke.

Later he dreamed that he saw Leslie emerge from a plain of black water. Her hair was plastered obnoxiously to her head and neck. In her mouth she held a red rubber bone of the kind one buys for dogs.

He dreamed that he was dressed in an explorer's costume and pith helmet; that he had fallen into a jungle bog or pit of quicksand; that the child Leslie was watching him from the bordering underbrush; that she would not hand him the stick he begged her for.

The next day he wrote “I want to see you” on a card and stuck it, unsigned, in her typewriter. He began to plot the steps by which he would tighten the pressure until she gave in. Call it blackmail if you wanted to. He had some rights, he told himself. As a matter of fact, he had some rights her husband didn't.

On the day that card was waiting for her, she brought a friend with her to work.

Patch was there early that morning, fussing at the table and cupboard assigned him (where infrequently he did quick changes or touched up his things). It seemed to him possible that there might be fireworks when she found the card. Out of curiosity and some vague hope, he had wanted to be on hand—at the same time close to the exit door in case he thought it better to run.

Nothing happened. There was no sign. She came into the place jabbering with this made-up string bean, a stylish-looking doll with a bad complexion. They went directly to Leslie's cubicle where she could not have helped seeing his card. Then she must have tossed it right into the wastebasket or tucked it in her purse.

She introduced the friend to everyone except him and generally carried on as though she was the boss's daughter instead of an employee like everyone else. She couldn't have done a lick of work, and before eleven she and the friend said goodbye for the day.

He followed them to the elevator. There were two strangers aboard with the three of them and he saw no possibility of speaking until those two got off at the third floor. As the doors glided shut he said, “Well?” He thought that Leslie was suppressing a militant smile, the smile of someone ready to do battle happily.

“Sarah, this is another of the crew. Don Patch,” Leslie said. “Sarah Coleman. Mr. Patch is an … artist.”

He was furious with embarrassment. “Commercial artist,” he said with inept humility. “Leslie, how about it?”

She smiled her most innocent smile. “About? What?”

“I want to see you.”

“I'll be in tomorrow. And the next day.”

“Now,” he said loudly. “Now. Today.”

“We're in a hurry,” she said.

“I'm not,” Sarah said. “I can wait. I'll go down to the corner—isn't there a dime store? I can meet you back here.”

“We … are … in … a … hurry,” Leslie said into Sarah's ear, clutching her arm. The elevator stopped at the main floor and several people idled aboard.

“Wait,” Patch said. He had caught up with them by the time they turned left down the sidewalk. He was drunk with the quick anger of humiliation. He lunged and caught Sarah by the arm. Her jaw literally dropped and her eyes bugged as he brought his face close to hers. “Tell your busy friend I'm getting horny,” he said. “Tell her I've got business to talk over with her in bed, that I need it now, not tomorrow.”

Then, while terror, shame (not for what he had
done
but for
himself
, for them), and rage played hot and cold on his skin, he thought all three of them were going to faint there among the morning pedestrians. He wanted to plead with Leslie, Why'd you make me do this? But she was the first to speak. All composure lost, she wailed, “Why'd you have to do
this?
If you had something to say to me, I'd have … talked.”

“Taxi!” Sarah shouted. She stiff-armed Patch twice in the face, backing toward the curb. A taxi stopped directly behind her as she retreated. She flopped gracelessly onto the seat, waving arms and legs like a kitten defending itself, said, “Quick, Leslie!” For a moment in the farce of action they were mad, glad, sad New York girls again, acting out some routine from a musical comedy winding deviously toward a happy end.

Leslie shook her head. “No, hon. You go on. Go on home. I'll be there pretty soon. I'd better talk to him.”

“I have some rights,” Patch spluttered.

Finally, with mournful dignity, she bowed her head a little and said, “I suppose you have.”

chapter 18

M
AYBE THE GUILTY FLEE,
Leslie thought, if no man pursues or pursueth. (You can't fight home truths, however stale; their very staleness may be a part of their smothering force.) But
when
the guilty flee (when she fled down a corridor of days and weeks, nights and months) everyone and every
thing
is swept into pursuit like a wakened pack.

If
she had just stood firm on her sincere conviction (wasn't it sincere? It must be, since she had entertained it both before and after the event in question) that a limited adultery with no strings attached is, at worst, a moderate misdemeanor to which a “person willing to take the consequences” is somehow, as it were, in our time, “entitled”—oh, shit, was she to be dragged back into the dark ages of everybody's superstition and feelings just because she wavered a little out of respect for their damn prejudices? (She thought of her admissions to Ben as concessions.)

“I won't be,” she said to Sarah. Of course within hours after that mad scene on the street—among the affluent morning shoppers—she had to tell Sarah what was (or rather
had been
) going on this summer. “All right, I had me a one-night stand with a guy. It's all getting to be like the Scarlet Letter.
F
.”

“He doesn't, well, look like a Don Juan,” Sarah ventured, rather smug that she was in a position to make this point, after having endured Leslie's remedy for her complexion.

“Male-type cats are just as gray in the dark as female-type,” Leslie said with that old King Street swagger which once upon a time had kept Sarah at bay like a lion tamer's cap gun. “Dear God, he's
not
a Don Juan. You know, sweetie, I walked about a mile with him, over to a dear little shady bench in Sergeant Driscoll Park, you know. And I listened for most of an hour. And do you know what his complaint is? I—
me
, Leslie Skinner Daniels—seduced him,
used
him, and then tried to ‘cast him off.' He said, ‘Cast me off.' And he cried. Oh, I despise men who cry.”

“Oh well,” Sarah said. “As long as Ben doesn't know.”

“As long as Ben doesn't know,” Leslie agreed cautiously.

“I think you're a big fool to have done it. Unless, you know, it's not very good with Ben. Or I suppose it always gets tiresome. With one person.”

“I was a fool.”

“Ben's so good. So gentle. He really babies you. He's a saint.”

“They're the hardest people to live with,” Leslie said. “You feel your inadequacies so sharply.”

“Inad—? You mean you
couldn't
…?

“I can do anything,” Leslie said, her eyes getting stormy, full of warning. “Don't push me, hon. Don't fish. You never know what you'll catch.”

Sarah was diverted by the warning. She skimmed off and began an apparently endless catalogue of her “search.” “Isn't it terrible that women are evidently much better off usually—tranquiler—with their
second
husband? I mean, tragic really.”

Leslie squealed a top sergeant's laugh of total disdain. “No one would be so out of her right little mind as to entertain the fantasy of marrying our boy Patch. For one thing, he's a mythomaniac, like the one in
Man's Fate
. He thinks he's living the artist life, God help us, because he's so out of
touch
, because he's clever with some realistic techniques. A schiz, a far-out. Furthermore, sad to say, I don't like him. Further … you
saw
him.”

“Though small—”

“Don't talk dirty. Phui. Not even the simple shepherdess Dolly Sellers would marry that one. Unless I'm being thoughtfully lied to, which I probably am.”

“I don't know Dolly Sellers.”

“She's a lump of poor clay at the Studio. She and I confide. She tells me his atrocities and shortcomings. She's his regular lay.”

“Oh.”

“Oh what, for Christ's sake? Are you hinting I'm jealous?”

“Now, don't jump down
my
throat. I accept all this hogwash about a one-night stand and so on and so on, but I've been around enough to know these things don't always work out rationally. I knew a girl who was raped—Evelyn Conrad; you knew her too, though you didn't know that. She used to get terrifically jealous when she'd see this fellow later with other women.” She remembered this, was sure of it, though she could no longer remember why, if the crime deserved the name she gave it, the man had been free
to
go around (and in the same neighborhood, the same circles) with others.

On and on they went, spoiling what was supposed to be a nice afternoon among the pleasures of well-heeled Midwestern suburbia. This was the fourth day of Sarah's visit and her last afternoon in town and Leslie had wanted her to understand the difference in their luck. She wanted to queen it over her old friend, because otherwise she would have had to envy her.

Her hopes had been spoiled. She was caught in a pointless, endless exchange of misinformation about love and the female—while they swam at the Highland pool, had drinks on Evy's Venetian Roof.

If the two of them agreed on one point, really, it was that Ben shouldn't know.… So it was small wonder that Sarah boarded her train at midnight with her morale definitely improved, her pimples looking better. She had understood with intuitive certainty that Ben
did
know.

Dolly's attack—pursuit, or whatever it ought to be called—was sharper and subtler, more cruel, really in that it plainly came from such weakness. She quit her job.

The morning she was told this fact, Leslie guessed the reason. It raged in her mind like an accusation of her own littleness. Dolly
needed
the job. Leslie didn't need hers—or needed it much more, but for less honorable reasons. She had drinks with Patch, who ultimately, roundabout, and slyly, confirmed her guess. “I suppose she must have found out about us,” he said.

“There's only one way she could have found out.”

“It was when I was so mad at you, when I was writing you those letters,” he said. “Sure, I told her. I might have told a lot of people if you hadn't come around and started acting human.”