Pretty Leslie (45 page)

She had to tell him. After she had told him, she tried her best to make it up to him on the couch in the consulting room. Merely tried … because in spite of their mutual reasons for getting even with David and Leslie, Ben couldn't make it. He followed her lead as a man would who could not bear to refuse what was generously meant. He even came around to pretending it was his idea. But with all the help she gave him, their attempt was a pretty ghastly failure. He said, “Oh my” again and sat beside her for a very long time. It was dark before they left his office that day, and while they tarried he had let his phone ring a few times without answering it. Elaborately he assured her that his failure wasn't in the least due to her not being attractive. Probably, he said, it had something to do with his crossed-up feelings of friendship for Dave.…

In a pig's eye it did. He was only thinking of Leslie. How long are we all going to go on paying for that bitch's recklessness? she asked herself.

“Don't worry, sweet,” she said to Ben. “She isn't worth it.”

He said, “I suppose I don't quite have the same reasons as you for thinking that.”

No, not the same, but stronger reasons, Martha supposed. And in spite of lying there in a disarray of clothing on his couch, in spite of knowing she had made a fool of herself, she was quite genuinely shocked by his passivity toward Leslie's affair. It went beyond forgiveness. It was positively depraved.

Masochism, she supposed. Or something a little more convoluted than that, and she supposed that doctors were no more immune to it than anyone else.

“Perhaps this is just a phase Leslie is going through,” she said.

Her terms seemed to amuse him just a little, and she was glad she could even do that much if she couldn't offer any other consolation he wanted.

“It will pass,” he said.

“It's funny how none of this takes back all the good things we've ever said to each other about Leslie.”

“It doesn't take anything back, does it?”

“I know you don't like to make house calls and are awfully busy,” Catherine Evergold said. She sat stiffly upright on the edge of her sofa, head cocked as though still listening up the stairs they had just descended from young Tim's room.

“I don't dislike them,” Ben corrected. “I'm against them on principle when they aren't necessary. The principle is that I need your mercy.”

Mrs. Evergold perked up her ears and waited for an explanation of this puzzler. He laughed. It wasn't quite as hard to explain as she seemed to imply—only a little hard for a man who has just come in from the cold and snow. It was colder when he got here than before his lunch. The snow was still falling heavily, but the clouds were paler as the cold front moved in.

“I mean,” he said, “that at least according to my wife I never had a real boyhood.” Then he cocked his head and looked just as puzzled as she. Had Leslie ever really said that? Not as far as he could remember. It was a thing Leslie might have said. She understood that. “So,” he went on with a bright smile, “I'm trying to keep my life to a routine and give myself as much freedom as I can.”

“You've certainly always been good about coming when Tim needed help,” she said doubtfully. “But I see how it could be. Look, now that we wheedled you out, can't I give you some coffee or tea? Or, well then, how about some harder stuff if you …?”

“Drink on duty? Like a policeman isn't supposed to?”

“Yes,” she laughed. “I guess I was thinking of ‘like a policeman.'” It seemed odd to him how much her laughter was like Leslie's, when you came right down to it. She probably had the same style of wit and fondness for games as Leslie, and how many millions more were there like them? Ring any doorbell and find one. But not his. Nobody home.

“Someone's covering my calls for the rest of the day,” he said. “I believe I'll have a shot of Scotch on the rocks.”

“We've got some brandy if you'd rather,” Mrs. Evergold said. “It's a cold day, how about it?”

“Scotch, please. May I use your phone?”

He was acutely aware of her watching him while he dialed. Surely she must have heard a voice answer “Patch of Bieman's Studio,” so of course it seemed odd to her that he hung up without a word.

“Well, cloaks and daggers,” she said. She had sniffed something not quite right, and her immediate reactions were to wonder if he had done the right thing for her little Tim—and to want in on whatever dangerous game he was playing.

“I have a disturbed patient,” he said, knowing that he was lying badly. “I need to know where he is this afternoon. Something—” he made a whirligig gesture with his hands—“ultracomplicated.”

“Must be.”

He was already edging toward the door. “The thing about Tim is that one or two more of these infections and we're going to have to seriously consider taking out his tonsils.”

She was trying to hold him by proffering the drink in her outstretched hand. “I didn't know they took out tonsils so much any more, with penicillin and all.”

“We can't go on indefinitely like this,” he said. “There has to be a decision. I've used penicillin a lot with Tim rather than some bacteriostatic drug, because too often these upper respiratory infections drag on and on for several days and I'd rather stop them hard and quick.”

“Sure. Don't you want your drink?”

“I've got to get home,” he said. “Sure. We still take out tonsils. Some things pass and some don't change. Tim's are getting a little spongy. You saw the white spots on them. But there's another possibility. I've tried Immunivac on five or six children last winter and this. I'm not sure yet, I.… You know I'm not radical. If you can't help, at least don't hurt.”

“That's a good principle,” Mrs. Evergold said as she watched him turn and wade through the new snow toward his car.

He had never yet seen the rough slovenly interior of Patch's apartment where the goldfish swam in their endless monotony amid the fuzzy greenery of the aquariums. He hadn't seen Leslie enter or leave the green, old-fashioned street door from which the paint was peeling like bark, though he had driven past the door once, on purpose to fix it in his mind. He had seen Don Patch once, too, as if once and once only were required to provide an actor in the imaginary scene that even memory of the peeling door could evoke. (His mind fastidiously refused more knowledge than was required for the judgment he still supposed he would sometime be able to make; the mind dipping through clouds like an eagle in an old print to snatch up a lamb and carry it to the mountaintop.)

His fashion of spying through the weeks of midwinter had been as abstract, as remote from whatever passion or sensual immediacy must be assumed to exist, as it well could be. He had merely taken over Martha's device of phoning. It was like keeping Leslie in view on a radarscope. After she left work and before she got home (still to wait for him there each evening with the old familiar concern for welcoming him with some special treat of gossip or enthusiasm) she was a blip in motion on an abstract screen that represented their city. He wanted no more than that, as if in merely knowing always where she was he might be simultaneously taking care of her and preparing her condemnation. Moreover, a knowledge of the times she had been with Patch gave him a chance to compose himself, to prepare against the shock of surprise, so she would not prematurely guess the extent of his knowledge. Lacking her talent for shifting personality, he had matched her by sheer willpower in the game of innocence they were playing with their lives at stake.

He tried to discipline himself to the essential. Yet it was fatally easy to know all that went on in that other life, fearfully hard not to become something like a ghost looking back from beyond at the sensual reality of the living pair.

Memory was the betrayer of his discipline. It could hardly have failed to trap him thus, for the fundamental rule of sexuality is the repetition of the absolutely simple, the basic fact of bodies thumping a rote.

And it was precisely the memories that made Leslie dear to him beyond all reason or hope of freeing himself from their marriage of the flesh that made him the voyeur at her infidelities. That was the intolerable contradiction which at last had to break him.

To remember how she swiveled on the balls of her feet when she unhooked stockings from a garter belt was to see this peculiarly graceful part of the ritual enacted in front of certain close-set blue eyes.
So
(he remembered; he saw) she would (she did) turn her cheek into her shoulder and abase her eyes as she skinned down her pants to her ankles.
So
she leaned on a chair back and looked up with a supplicating wait-a-moment smile, as if pleading her husk of awkwardness—in a moment to be unencumbered and clothed with grace in her nudity—while she freed one foot after the other from hose and undergarments.
So
her eyes questioned before she closed them with a kind of deliberation, letting her face lose the fullness of womanhood and become a girl's face, assenting to the displacement of consciousness from the frontal lobes to the great branches of nerve in her trunk.
So
she lifted her knees considerately for Donald Van Tyler Patch.
So
she forgot them in her loosening until her strong, fine legs had lazily flattened on his sheet or coverlet. In one bed as in another the same reddish coals could be fanned in the luminescence of her eyes.

Betrayed this far by memory, the inertia of reason carried him beyond, for it was the logic of her adultery—was it not?—that some ingredient as life-giving as it was revolting made their passages different from his with Leslie. It had not taken him forever to name this other ingredient. It was cruelty, the simple mating of masochistic and sadistic impulses, if you wanted to put it in those terms, but more profoundly it was the obedience to a law of life he could accept only by destroying. Oddly, it matched the law of his own life—decency, moderation, and generosity grown from a root of murder. He could not accept it.… Well, then, had he ever truly accepted his own life?

It is a dangerous thing to teach the gentle that cruelty is the hidden mainspring of life and of love too. He had destroyed a child once when children tried to teach him that hideous lesson. He knew that he was forbidden to kill again—not just as ordinary men are forbidden, but in some way analogous to the constraint on a man lying in actual chains for killing already committed. Only in a dream of chance, when he had guessed lightly about killing Austin Calumet, had he tampered with the notion that the power was still his. He had been wrong. He had no such power. He knew that when he killed again it would have to be himself. He had prepared and measured the poison soon after the new year began.

In spite of the chains on his tires he nearly got stuck when he turned into his own driveway. The snow bulged in not-quite-geometric globes over all the shrubbery of the lawn and sloped like dunes from the hedge and the patio wall. Both garage doors were open and twin drifts like fingers pointed into its gloomy shelter. The track Leslie had made when she took the station wagon out that morning was almost obliterated.

Not quite! The undulation of ruts still shaped the surface of the later fall. He knew when he saw the snowed-over ruts that she had been gone a long time. His calls to Patch had been wasted, the vain illusion that a lesser and by now familiar evil might once again substitute for the worst. It looked again as if Martha was right. This time Leslie had gone farther.

There were no visible footprints on the lawn and only the tips of a few reddish twigs to show the edge of the sidewalk. He waded to the back door because the back of the house was Leslie's, because they had never quite been at home in the front rooms, rooms that faced the neighborhood more publicly. The silence in the house was hostile as a new tenant, already installed. It crowded at him the minute he shut the door behind him, and he had the temporary notion that it was only, at bottom, another of Leslie's transformations. She had changed herself—oh, maybe because the eeriness of the snowfall had suggested it—into a witch of silence, laughing at him for getting so upset when really it was only herself, all the time, inside the witch costume. They were children still, playing one more game of the truth she refused to relinquish.

It took him only five minutes to confirm the accuracy of Martha's conclusions. Half a dozen pieces of luggage and all of Leslie's best clothes were gone. Her boxes of snapshots and high-school yearbooks had been taken from her desk and the high shelf of the bedroom closet. She was gone and her flight had been deliberate. She had even taken books and records with her, and the Soutine reproduction was gone from the living room wall. Account books, the check book—showing a balance of eleven hundred and twelve dollars in their checking account—and a stack of bills due were laid out on her dressing table in plain sight for him. But she had left no note.

Only in his second tour of the silent house he found a note from Flannery:

Dear Sir: Mrs. Daniels said she would not need me any more. If you need me, call MW 3 2856. If not you will only owe me for the remainder of this week.

Sincerely yours,

(Mrs.) Flannery Dowell

He read it like something Leslie had dictated with great care to give him the message he must not misunderstand. He was not sure he had it exactly. There was no mistaking its assertion that Mrs. Daniels would not be back.

After he read it, he sat down at the kitchen table. Already the silence and its meaning were beginning to seem normal. He already tasted some of the treacherous relief of being alone, with time to think everything out in new terms. Snow was falling more lightly on the house now than it had in the hours past; the wind that presaged clearing skies was already whipping it down from the roof. But the house seemed muffled and it was as if all his senses were numbed in the same proportion, the way a freezing man feels the euphoria of his death creep on him under the snow.