Pretty Leslie (43 page)

“Don't you know that parakeets catch pneumonia very easily?” Leslie heard herself shrieking.

“I don't know much about parakeets,” Flannery said.

“You don't think.”

“I think about what I'm supposed to.”

“And I have to foresee every possible emergency.”

“You have to think about people's feelings sometimes,” Flannery grumbled, insulted and unwilling to meet Leslie's eyes.

“Yes,” Leslie said, crushed, letting go with both hands, falling through space like a humiliated child pretending to be a grownup acrobat. “I have to think of them. I'm sorry, Flannery.”

“Sorry don't always make it right,” Flannery said, all too wisely…

She didn't know exactly what to do with Bill. It seemed improper to throw him out with the garbage. She had neither time nor the inclination to bury him in the garden. So she wrapped him in newspaper and took him with her in the station wagon when she drove to work. She had some notion of stopping at a pet store and asking them to cremate the poor bastard. But she wasn't sure they did that kind of work.

So Bill was still lying in his newspaper shroud between the seats of the wagon when she picked up Don Patch that afternoon. The papers had sprung loose so that his bright feathers peeped out, and Patch spotted him as soon as he got in the car.

That started him off on what it meant to have a pet. He had lost some that he loved in his time, too. He told her about a little woolly pup that had been run over one Sunday afternoon down in Missouri. Poor thing had come up on the front porch with carrion in its mouth. He and his mother scolded it and took the dead toad away—so the pup went back to the road for more.

“You don't really get over a thing like that,” he said.

“Yes, you do. You have to,” Leslie said. But it made her feel stronger to be with someone whose sentimentality outdistanced hers.

She made no pretense of hunting for a house that day. It was a lovely, warm afternoon after cold days and rain. The maples were losing their last leaves, so that underbrush and evergreens showed through the thicket of woods. With the windows of the station wagon rolled down, they could smell the fallow earth of the cornfields and the mold of leaves that clogged the ditches.

There was melancholy in the earth. She sensed its grief, so disproportionate to the death of one poor dumb parakeet, but there nevertheless, like an infinite reservoir that any slight occasion might draw on. The great sadness of sun and meadow would be there whether nations died under their crazy bombs or careless maids let the cold wind in on pet birds. A death, any death, was only an occasion for recognizing what was always there.

She kept taking all the corners from one graveled country road to another, past white country schoolhouses and farms that seemed already deserted. After the gush about the bird, she and Patch found little to talk about, and she did not know where she was going. Killing time in honor of the way time killed everything else.

But there, as if she had known where she was headed, the gravel left off. Ahead of them was a narrowing, muddy lane that descended between tall trees. It was slimily rutted. Some car or truck had been through since the rain, but she was afraid to go farther.

She had stopped in front of an overgrown farmyard with no farmhouse. (Only the barns and sheds still stood, arced around the weed patch where the house had burned.) There was no other farm in sight.

“Let's walk,” Don suggested. He nodded down the mud road ahead of them.

“We'd better go back,” she said. She was craning her neck to see if the lane to the farmyard permitted space for a careful driver to turn around without getting stuck. She had started to back when he turned off the ignition.

“No,” she said.

“Come on and walk.” His tone was very light, more a plea than a command.

“No.”

“Let's take the bird down and bury him in the woods.”

She made a face. With anyone else she would have laughed in astonishment. Only a child would have had such an inspiration.

“And say prayers over it?” she scoffed. With both gloved hands hanging on the wheel, she turned to give him a long look. “All right,” she said. “We will bury old Bill with appropriate ceremony and a sense of what his death commemorates.” She remembered Bill had been an onlooker when something began. When it was over, he had died too.

Patch followed her as they went down the muddy road among the tall, soundless maples. Overhead among bare branches clouds were running like chill whales swimming far under a net.

They had not gone more than fifty yards down the slope when mud clogged her pumps. It clung so tight and gooily that she could hardly lift her feet.

“Take them off,” Patch suggested. “It's still warm enough to go barefoot. It's still warm enough.”

To keep her balance while she removed the shoes, she rested one hand on his shoulder. When she had set one pale foot after the other in the brown clay, she was only an inch taller than he with his uplift of mud. He tried to kiss her.

“I thought we understood,” she said. “There's nothing like that.”

She was holding her shoes by their straps and he was holding the paper with the bird's carcass, but nevertheless he managed to huddle against her like a puppy protesting the onset of cold. She could not wish him suffering.

“Did you ever see someone burned alive?” she asked. “That's me. For what happened last summer. You have to think about other people's feelings sometimes, Don. I was trampled in the mud. You know what it means to think you're rotten and stinking all the way through? To want to tear your own damn body apart with your nails for what it's done, scratch till the blood comes …?”

Eerily, eerily, the truth of her suffering and remorse penetrated both minds. He drew back to look at her shyly. She felt the suffusion of passion in her loins as when once she had remembered the black woman defiled on the fender of a car. “I'm not fit to spit on,” she said with a shiver, “but I've got to go on living. Come on, let's bury this bird.”

He gave in. Shrugged a little before the riddle. “It might be easier back in the farmyard. We haven't got a shovel.”

“
Now
he thinks of that. After my feet are mud to the ankles. How'm I going to get my shoes back on?”

“They'll wash.”

“With what?”

“Water.”

“There's no water out here. Are you going to find us a pump, too?”

She bullied him on this trivial point until they got back to the station wagon. Heard her voice again uneven and high-pitched, but she was unable to quit picking on him.

“Cut it out,” he said. “I led you down the road, so I'll clean your feet.”

He lowered the tail gate on the station wagon and she sat on it. “I suppose you have towels, too?” she said, breathing easier now that they were back at the car.

He crept down into the ditch beside the road. In a puddle he wet his handkerchief and pulled a clump of yellow grass.

Then he took the worst of the mud from her feet with his fingers. Using the stiff grass, he sawed between her toes, working the stuff loose, leaving little fragments of gravel clinging to the stained skin like ore in a gold pan.

After that he went meticulously and neatly to work with his handkerchief.

“I like'm devoted in word, thought, and deed,” she said. She imagined that he was making a work of art out of her big feet. She guessed that the same finicking that guided his hand on a commercial painting or drawing was involved in this cleansing. She liked it. It restored a balance between them. It made up for what she had revealed to him in the road.

He stood up with a wide grin. “Does that suit Her Majesty?”

“Lovely,” she said, holding her feet up level with the bed of the wagon and wiggling all her toes.

He jammed the muddied handkerchief in her face, rubbed it over the neck of her blouse and into her hair. And then his gaze was a perfect mirror for what she knew herself to be. She realized she could not have borne the shame except that it was exactly what he wanted.

“Come on to the barn,” he said.

She followed like a cow on a leash because he wanted what she truly was. Others had wanted what she appeared to be.

After that, through the early winter, she slept with him twice or three times a week. Sometimes it occurred to her that Ben knew; sometimes she analyzed everything carefully and concluded he could not know. A woman can hide such things. A woman with great talents or management can keep more than one life going.

She went to his apartment when she could—always but once in the daylight, usually in the afternoons. They had from one to three hours together. Very quickly the visits fell to a routine, like marriage, without a pretense of courtship or coquetry. They wasted none of their time on that, and since a realistic appraisal of their situation would have been as unbearable for her as it was beyond his wish, she diverted all discussions by agreeing with his sentimentalities. He thought they were living “outside bourgeois morality” as artists should. She said, Yes, they were above it.

He always (always! she marveled, marveling at the very strangeness of herself and her response) hurt her. The meeker his approach, the more certain he was to find the moment and the means for insult to her soft depths. She tried to teach him not to, being unable to discover that the infliction was intentional. She succeeded only in establishing a ritual: always when he was through with her he would ask dubiously, “Did I hurt you?” with that thin, disbelieving smile insinuating she was different from all other women.

He muddied her, shamed her, and the shame was like a narcotic that sent her away from his place with strange dreams in her head and a narrowed focus of attention like a drunkard's. In that way he made her need Ben more and more. Ben was the healing cleanliness that turned her from frog to princess—and often she was with both of them in the same twenty-four hours, requiring both.

It can't go on this way, she told herself in terrified moments of lucidity. But the fact that it had come this far—so very far beyond the predictable—insinuated the outlandish propriety of the situation. After all, in the trial of her life, it had been proved that she needed more than one man. She needed cruelty as well as kindness. She needed the dark and the illicit as well as the comfortable and the secure. She knew it could not go on. A certain royal smugness made her congratulate herself for each succeeding week when she managed its continuation. Though she pretended to, as the imperious, starved female in her nature wallowed in triumph, she was not really thinking about the future.

Christmas came. She bought Ben a wristwatch, a set of tires, a Danish arm chair, pajamas, records, a cuddly brown sweater, and a case of Volnay wine. He laughed at her extravagance and seemed comfortably, protractedly delighted with the gifts.

She bought Patch a book of Michelangelo drawings for $3.75 at a cut-rate counter in a department store. He seemed hardly more than indifferent to her gift. When she delivered it he took her to bed, though she was dressed for a party later and had only half an hour to spend with him.

The impossible duality of her marriage would go on because it had gone on. Because her ruses, her cunning, her new energy went on, proving her capable of anything. Some time in December she got pregnant.

Part Four

chapter 19

H
E HEARD
from Martha Lloyd that she was gone—just as he had first heard from Martha, in the weeks before Christmas, that she was continuing her affair with Donald Patch, or had gone back to him.

The phone rang in his consulting room late one morning in February. It was a morning when a woolly white snowstorm was transforming the city. A new cold front was moving in, according to reports. The snow came like a preparation, a cold blanket to frustrate the intenser, barren cold of clear days and a steady blue wind blowing down from Canada.

“I don't understand why you're so sure,” he said. “She didn't tell you.”

“I told you she's not at work. So I went past the house to see if she was ill.” Martha was toppling wildly between smugness and alarm. “Your maid Flannery seems to know more about it than we do. She said Mrs. Daniels was ‘clearing out.' And I couldn't get her to say any more than that, though she knows. Then
she
cleared out. Flannery. So I looked in Leslie's closet. She must have taken the whole car full of clothes. The parakeet's gone too.”

“The bird died in October,” Ben said. “Of pneumonia.” A fact like the other scant straws of actuality that would have to do until the whole picture cleared.

“I think you ought to call the bank,” Martha said. “Dave's first wife simply cleaned out their joint account when she left him, and the savings account, too.”

“Thank you, Martha,” he said in a tone of dismissal.

“Oh Ben.…”

“I'll find out what's going on, of course,” he said. “Thank you.”

“If I'd had any inkling that she meant to actually leave with the guy, I'd have told you. You know I would.”

“Thank you,” he said and hung up.

Thank you, Martha, for having phoned instead of bringing the news to me personally. He could imagine her crawling over him like a great, slimy saurian with rudimentary legs if she had been actually present at this moment of his undoing. Either fastidiousness or accident had kept her at phoning distance. He was grateful to whichever was the true cause.

He still had one patient to see before his morning was over. He consoled himself that Martha had been quite wrong about the bird. He went into the other consulting room where Sue Marie Oliver was awaiting him with instinctive dread.

Thank you, Martha, he said to himself as he moved silently and smiling to the door of the waiting room where Sue Marie's brother was deep in conversation with Miss Gompers. He listened awhile as if the conversation had to be remembered well.