Pretty Leslie (41 page)

“But why did she wait until now—if you're telling the truth—to quit?”

“Dolly's got some funny bourgeois ideas about right and wrong,” he said, grinning. “It wasn't just what happened. I told her how I felt about you. She thought it over. She didn't want to be in the way. She thought it would be better if she didn't see either of us again. I mean if things were going to go on.”

“Nothing's going to go on,” Leslie said. “I've explained it and explained it. But Dolly—”

Well, she had ideas about right and wrong, too. She was a little jealous of Dolly for making the gallant, severing gesture before she had, but since there was no way to retrieve lost time, she followed Dolly's lead. When she told Daddy Bieman she was leaving, he held onto her hand and wrist for nearly an hour in his office. “We just can't lose you,” he kept saying. “You've got to keep contact. It isn't your work, it's you. We're birds of a feather. You're one of the
guys
here, you know.”

“I've felt a little uneasy since Dolores died,” she said.

“Calfert was one of the guys, too,” he said. “Well, keep in touch.”

He gave her a hundred dollars for severance pay—took it out of his wallet like an indulgent grandfather wanting his indulgence recognized by a spoiled child.

Before she could get out of the office and out from under the fountain of his sentimentality, he added a second bill and made an indecent proposal. Mother Bieman was going to the Mayo Clinic for a checkup and … would Mrs. Daniels …? No? Some time later? Well, as long as she
kept in touch
.

There was no reason to conclude from his offer that he had heard anything touching the truth of her conduct. The only thing was that in other circumstances she might have laughed at his senile bawdiness. Now it seemed to hang around her for days afterward like a bad smell of uncertain origin. Maybe he did know about her and the contemptible Patch. Maybe everyone knew. Probably not. Possibly.… The possibility pursued her.

It was near the end of August when Leslie quit her job at Bieman's Studio. She had not discussed the move with Ben. As far as he could tell from the diminished but never totally halted flow of gossip she brought home from the shop, she still enjoyed the “guys” there as much as ever. Lester Glenn, Seymour Rife, Carl Tremayn, Don Patch, String Bieman, Ozzie Carter, Dolly Sellers, and the rest—he had not laid eyes on any of them this summer, but in the unaltered flow of Leslie's gossip, he heard familiar additions to their sayings, their homelife, cute comments of their children, romances (the character named Patch and the character named Dolly Sellers, for instance, broke up and made up with positively indecent regularity; Leslie appeared in Dolly's corner of the ring like the second of an unpromising flyweight, a stumble-bum with heart) and the intrigues of Daddy Bieman.

One evening she simply announced that she had quit. “So many other things that could be done,” she said dryly and lightly, not so much inviting his comment as inviting him to listen to a parliamentary decision already voted on by the representatives in her head. “I think I'll fly home for a week. I'll stay with Flannery in the mornings when I come back. Nothing's been done to the house for so long.”

“All right.”

“Maybe I'll start to look for a permanent place for us when I come back. Somewhere beyond suburbia. Ozzie Carter says to scout the little towns north of the lake.”

“Good.”

“Assuming we're going to be permanent.” Not the faintest emotional preference colored this half-question. She was at least pretending to offer him the choice of splitting or staying, now that he had had plenty of time to weigh her crime.

“Sure,” he said.

She could not make out exactly what he was up to these days. She could not be certain that he was changed at all. When she changed jobs, it was like passing through the River Jordan and coming out all purged on the other side. She was vaguely aware, then morally certain, then rationally convinced in detail (and by counting back the days on her fingers (that he was at great pains to steer clear of Their Subject since the very day she left the Studio for good. She verified this the way a woman verifies the time of her conception by counting back from the eventless hour of her certainty.

If she was right—and she knew she was right—it meant Ben was pretty sure her affair had involved one of the “guys” from the Studio. Not too hard a guess. She remembered that the identity of the man had seemed to torture him. She repented causing him this unnecessary suffering—as it now appeared to be.

So she told him that Daddy Bieman had brought her home that night, both of them “pretty well canned,” and had made her “a couple of times” on the living room couch.

Only Leslie Skinner Daniels could have cooked and seasoned the lie so carefully with grains of truth. It came out as a long story, beginning with the banter beside the pool at the farm, touching on the way she'd been “really moved” by his comments on “America and art and why we're here, not in New York,” on his joking invitation (Freud tells us that jokes always camouflage a serious intent; this proved how right he was) to come look at his paintings, and ending with his very recent offer to give her two hundred dollars.

“I should have taken it,” she said. She liked the touch of boldness contributed to her broth by such an attitude. To have taken money, however long after the service, would have classified her, once and for all. Once and for all they would label her act. Realize it was an ugly but redeemingly reckless sport. Wouldn't they? “I'm really sorry I didn't take his money,” she said.

She had chosen well the evening for her confession. She and Ben had been at cocktails with forty nice people in a doctor's house. Now, after dinner, they were drifting around town, exploring new bars, finding nice ones (ones that seemed to them again glamorous and exciting because in their autumn mood they felt themselves a bit glamorous and still, after the years they had known each other, excitable; still capable of renewal as the seasons passed.) A good little colored band hooted and moaned through a barbaric indoor gloom as Leslie shrugged and began her confession. A bony, full-breasted chocolate girl sang of lamentable love.

While Leslie rose to her theme, Ben sat curled at his ease on the other side of their booth, studying his hands as if he held something in them. He did not once look up at her until she was finished, but she felt his relaxation was a support. When she had finished, she reached over and lifted his face to make him look at her. “Shouldn't I have told you?” she asked earnestly. Had she chosen the wrong identification after all to assign the man? “Not ever? I wanted to get it off my conscience if I have one, and if I don't, what is it that hurts?” Calm as Madame Roland on the scaffold, she said, “You can condemn me now. I know he's a repulsive old man, but—”

“No,” he said. He was smiling like a Buddha, a smile that would have been silly if it had not been dignified by his great wish for everything to be all right.

“I'm glad you know, and I can't explain why I wouldn't tell you when you asked.”

“Stubbornness. Pigheadedness.”

She laughed with him ruefully and agreed.

“It's all right,” he said. “We're past the point where it matters.”

“Are we, doctor? Are we?” Her eyes searched his face like fingers reading Braille.

In some novel aspect of their physical selves, they were more truly husband and wife than they could have been before “the trouble.” She gave what treachery to him had taught her how to give, as if deceiving him had taught her to deceive the watchdogs who had guarded her maidenhood like a prisoner. They went together as far as gentleness would take them, on and down into a sleepiness where each lost the defining lineaments of male and female. Yours mine, mine yours.… How could you tell and what did it matter? They were together like sleeping angels.

As she drowsed toward sleep, she remembered to be so pleased with her lie about old Bieman that she began to think it must have been the truth. It had worked. Ergo, it was true. The lie, which proved her capable of anything, had worked like forgiveness. Now all was healed for Ben, and that
was
her forgiveness.

But the salt of pain was absent. Something in her had not been compelled, and whatever had been left out blossomed into the confidence that she was able, still, to be just with little Don Patch. His “rights” were not so great as he thought, but honestly, honestly (lying to others, honesty with herself became a greater obligation, she felt), he had some.

Summer was ending in a languor of drought when Leslie went to New York. Fall had begun when she returned to Sardis, bright crisp days with frequent, brief showers in the mornings and protracted golden afternoons; very springlike. Leslie responded to the seasonal change like a bride beginning a new life in the newness of spring. Or perhaps like a woman sweeping away the ashes after a war, completely undaunted and even already forgetful of havoc.

She had brought new clothes from New York. She was a new woman. Let everything begin from that, she seemed to say.

For a week she and Flannery scrubbed and waxed and painted. Black and white sisters. Nobody knowed the trouble they'd seen, but to come home as Ben did to find them in the kitchen in their smocks drinking beer together and yarning like fishermen, nobody would guess they had a care in the world except what to clean tomorrow.

Then for another week Leslie cruised the small towns just north of Sardis, presumably looking for abandoned mansions that with a little ingenuity could be fixed up to have the coziness of an apartment, the grandeur of a château. Perhaps she was looking for a farmhouse like the Biemans' as a base for the new phase of her life which was beginning with such hints of energy and large determination.

At the end of September she tried to promote a job for Garland Roberts. She got into negotiations with Dave Lloyd on this matter, told Garland that even though she might have to start at the paper with a pencil-sharpening job, she could hope to work up sometime to the position of reporter.

Garland had no ambition to become a reporter. She took a job at a title and trust company instead. Leslie went to work for the advertising department of the paper, working only mornings again as she had done at the Studio. She liked the gang there very much, and according to Dave was instantly popular. She was quite close to the Lloyds this fall. No friction or suspicion had ever marred their friendship—for there was no past. They were new friends whom she had just discovered when she recently moved to town.

It was October in the public parks. Red and gold and frosty in the mornings on the suburban lawns. Grasshopper generations of children rode bikes and played football under the eye of a sun that might as well have bred them out of the summer grass like insects; without history, without futures that could properly be called individual; the golden children of a season that pampered them.

For Ben it was October of another year, as if he had wakened from a suspension of time, the interrupted summer of his childhood in Kansas which the tranquilization of some drug had promised would never have to be resumed. Now dimly—but always less dimly—he sensed that even if he had got away like an escaped convict, that implacable year waited for him like a sentence that sometime he had to serve.

He tried to serve it by his profession and by his constant at-the-elbow support of Leslie in whatever she decided was the right thing to do now. He only wanted to be there when she needed him. Be where? Back in the servitude of an implacable justice grinding small. Serving a sentence that no one had ever known how to impose on him and neither his conscience nor the silent universe of things had ever known how to remit.

At the fringes of every day, old realities reappeared like poor and perhaps criminal relatives mustering to put the bite on him, now that he was living well. Now that Leslie had failed him, he began to depend on his profession more and more like a drug. He had to have the satisfactions it gave him not only to blur out his queer recollections of the past, but now to hide the probability that somehow he had misused a splendid woman in the same way, had used even the potentialities of her sexual nature as a narcotic against the just claims of his fate.

He was a good doctor. Only that was sure. But he had needed to be a good man as well. He had needed a human success; at best he had won a stalemate of indefinite extension. So only his profession suspended him above despair.

As the fall advanced, he had presentiments that time was running out. Too often in lapses of attention, lapses of professional mental discipline, he had fancied that Billy Kirkland had got at Leslie and put a hook in her mouth. Every suspicion—of her renewed friendship with Dave Lloyd, for example—was founded on that revolting image. So he had no choice but to renounce suspicions. As long as he could, he must dole himself facts he could handle emotionally as palliatives against the overwhelming truth.

But the bad dream mined his world like a load of explosives; it was the intuition of reality against which not even his training or his social place promised any permanent defense.

Even to call his fancy of returning to another earlier year insane was to understate its meaning. He knew that. Insanity was a condition (and dear God, perhaps a desirable one). What he had to face once again was an obligation to act where no conceivable action was right.

She convinced herself that now Ben (self and circumstances, happiness and character) was unchanged from the previous year. The gulf that summer opened under their feet had been closed. They had been broken. They were stronger now as the broken places healed. (Honestly it had closed; honestly they were stronger—and therein lay all horror, that a heroine recovering from disaster had learned a taste for disaster, with new confidence would repeat the risk again.)

She would gather reasons, like poison herbs—reasons why she must still tamper with deadliness. She was stronger. Part of her strength was the recklessness of those who have eluded pursuit too long. She invented accusations from Ben which previously she would have been too timid to consider. Too self-centered.