Pretty Leslie (6 page)

And there was something in her not yet relaxed supine figure to suggest attention, as though listening still, if no longer watching: a constant guard scanning the three distinct layers of suburb that separated them from the slum belt around the commercial city.

“You know what LaVerne was telling me this morning?”

LaVerne Grace, as he was supposed to remember, was the divorced girl at Bieman's Studio. She did “mechanicals”—whatever those might be. “LaVerne was talking about a cousin of hers, female, and she mentioned that the poor girl had lost one eye when she was little. And she said, ‘She's made a handicap of it.' I said, ‘Goodness, it
is
a handicap.' But she insisted. Lots of people have glass eyes.”

Ben's smile bobbed appreciatively and Leslie wallowed in his tolerant observation as in a warm bath.

“I told Dolores about it on the way home. She didn't quite get the point either. But she laughed because she knew it had amused me. Dolores would rather kill a human being than a healthy laugh.”

Leslie said, “She laughed and shook her bowlful of jelly, and then gave me a long—I think serious, you can't always tell with her—talk about the way a girl could learn to always offer herself in profile so men couldn't see how her glass eye failed to track. Dolores always has some pointers for the game.”

Ben wet his mouth with a highball. “I ask myself what I would do if Dolores Calfert offered herself to me in profile.”

“Ben, you could tickle her.”

“You'd be jealous.” He shook his head in a firm, well-henpecked negative.

“I'd be proud,” Leslie insisted. Ben saw that he had been, like the rest of Leslie's familiars, fictionalized. My husband, the Don Juan of Rixton Dell. Maintains his practice for a front. Doles pills to infants, but my dear, O my dear, it's the mothers who
constitute his practice
. What did she say about him—or just day dream about him—to inflate him enough for her restless interest? “And Dolores would be so pleased. No one at the shop ever takes the bait unless it's idiot boy Don Patch. And she tries so hard. It's not every switchboard operator who comes on with Chanel Five.”

“Is she the one who inscribed Patch's name above the john?”

“That would be Dolly Sellers, who's confusedly jealous because Don seduced her buddy Pat.”

“You know this of your own knowledge?” Ben asked with judicious, deadpan amusement. “Is there really a bulletin board there where someone posts the score? I mean posts it the morning after, so you gossips won't waste your coffee break?”

“We do our work,” Leslie said, with stylized reproach. “People confide in me.”

“They certainly do.”

“Naturally Pat gave no inkling.”

“A telltale sign in itself!”

“What? But Dolly rather more than hinted she knew. I put two and two together.”

“That's a vocation like any other,” he said. He thought that the sum of all the twos Leslie had added together since marriage withdrew her number from the column amounted to an astronomical surmise. All the rest of the world fornicated, to her knowledge—but she had him and was above all that.

“Poor Dolly,” she said, “wasting away for a silly little Ozark Don Juan who does the most gruesome airbrush paintings. Someone told me he did exactly the same kind of things for his own pleasure. Ugh. He's nobody's prize.”

“You advised her to buy a new brassiere and get perspective,” Ben guessed.

“She just needed someone to talk to,” the heroine of compassion said loftily—the loftiness itself a feigned one, her frivolous response to the world's morbid frivolity.

To these frivolities of hers he had two keys. One opened an easy door to what she wanted him to believe: that they were oh-so-democratically superior to those she fictionalized. The other key (he hardly admitted its possession) opened on her ingrown fear of the real world. He knew by now that she
had to
miniaturize life and love and the human race out of fear that they would eat her up. Possessing both keys, he would have been unthinkably callous not to listen and smile. Loving her as he did, he must hide behind the smile and hope that her high perch never gave way.

When Leslie Skinner Daniels was in high school at home in Manhasset she had “run the mile.” She had queened it among teachers, boyfriends, temporary employers, parents, traffic cops, and all, as perhaps only a talented high-school girl can. Nothing had seemed too much for her. The world yielded like a dumpling to a fork. What she wanted she could have; what she could not have seemed to her either nasty or undesirable. It was desirable to have a date every night of the week, desirable to go into Manhattan to eat or drink at places everyone had heard about—Chumley's, Toots Shor's, The Brass Rail, Longchamps, Minetta's, Childs, Birdland, Charles, Luchow's, Everglades, Glass Hat and the Astor Roof. (Among her dear possessions was a swizzle stick from Toots Shor's where she had been taken once and once only by a boy known to his classmates as “C-Note Stern.”) Desirable also to have daily bodily contact with a male—necking, soul-kissing, breast-petting (she had allayed early fears of “frigidity” by discovering how much she liked to have her breasts manipulated) and, on large occasions, bringing the boy off in a handkerchief. It was nasty, on the other hand, to let a boy put his fingers really in you, and when she graduated no one ever had.

Desirable to have supporting roles in the school plays. To get what grades she chose. To have a band of girl friends, loyal as an African tribe, not only to her but to the glamour that year by year she discovered or invented. All of them knew that “over there”—in Manhattan—waited the crowns that they would, in good time, inevitably wear.

Desirable to have a mother and father who might fret or quarrel, between themselves, about her drinking or her uneven study habits, but who wanted, above all, for her to “learn how to take”—whether of love or the world's goodies. Desirable to have an intellectual history teacher who not only respected her mind but told her pal Genevieve that “Leslie has a cute way of carrying herself.” For his morale-building observation he got the privilege of watching her carry herself. Exactly that and no more. It would have been nasty of her to lead him on.

Beyond these desirables—and the good, memorable trivialities of her young life were literally innumerable, sheaves and bundles of daily blessings of which an enormous fraction had been remembered in her diaries (from pediatric records on, her life was documented like a summit conference)—she had a spiritual life of great magnitude. Sunday school had merely coached her in attitudes of the soul. She was “an atheist” at fourteen without shedding a single prejudice inculcated by the church, merely ready to find the grounds for faith, hope, and charity in what she liked to call Experience. She found herself in literature among the morbid heroines—Tess, raped by moonlight; Desdemona, unjustly slain; Catherine Henry, dying in childbirth; Charlotte Rittenmeyer, bleeding and fever-stricken by her abortion. (When she had read
The Wild Palms
for the first time, she put on jeans and took a long walk by herself down the railroad track. Under a bleeding sky she clenched her hands until the nails cut her palms. “I want to eat dirt. I want to eat dirt,” she said to herself in ecstasy. Someday, over there in Manhattan, she would have an abortion. She had to have. It would be the measure of her soul.) Then, at seventeen, she knew she was going to be a writer. The diaries were her training, her preparation. Someday they would turn magically into the works of a female Thomas Wolfe—when she had a whole trunkful, perhaps.

She had “run the mile” in high school—to use her aphoristic phrase. After high school it came to her as a deadly shock that perhaps she had been entered in a furlong race. From high-school graduation on it threatened to become clear to her that exactly because she was more than ordinarily gifted she had been denied the privilege of the easier race. So she quit a little short of the wire. She bewildered one after another of the people who loved her or expected much of her by hauling up just when things seemed to be in her grasp. When she won, it was by aborting the contest before it was quite over. The men in her life had to learn that when Leslie was through, there was no use to go on competing.

She went two years to Smith. It was hard to explain (to herself, of course—no trouble at all to invent explanations for her parents) why she quit there, but it had something to do with having lost her virginity to a repulsive boy from Penn State while most of her friends were losing theirs to the Ivy League.

At the U of Wisconsin in her junior year she began to major in “creative writing.” Her teacher expected a lot from her. She was one of his stars, and he and she enthused for some months over a story she had begun, to be called “The Dead Sea.” It was the story of her life, she said solemnly (solemnly to herself; she was always teasingly ironic with the teacher). Her life was like the Dead Sea into which so many rivers discharged and from which nothing came. (“Nothing has come
yet
,” he said with an encouraging correction.) She poured stuff from her diaries into the story and, yes, it was rich in complication as her high-school days had been. Her teacher was so pleased with the way her talent was maturing that he seduced her and talked of leaving his wife and children to go to Europe with her.

She never finished the story. Perhaps in fidelity to its subject there should be no issue from the Dead Sea where her imagination held so much.

By the time she had graduated from Barnard she had aborted the dream that she might be a great writer along the lines of Thomas Wolfe. The habit of the diaries persisted, and she went looking for a job in publishing after she had taken an apartment with two other girls in the Village. Something more of her willingness to run the great race disappeared when she found what kind of jobs were available to her. Yes, she could work—for fifty dollars a week and benefits. The work would not have taxed a ten-year-old with a bent for neatness and thoroughness. Advanced, in several months, to the position of copy editor, she found that the principal requirement was to make a check mark above each and every word to indicate that she had given it individual attention. Someone else took care of the sense of sentences and paragraphs. Only the corporate social life of the magazine with its infinite opportunity for intrigue and complication demanded her ingenuity.

She could, and did, still make anyone she wanted to fall in love with her. The tactics were exactly those that had worked in Manhasset High, but there was less savor to it now, and on those relatively rare occasions when she went to bed with a man, either he or she was much too careful to make an abortion necessary. If she still felt cheated by such luck, the passion once roused in her by the concept of bloody death like Charlotte Rittenmeyer's now seemed a bit of romanticism fortunately outgrown.

She knew and confided in literally dozens of people in Manhattan by the time she became junior music reporter for the magazine—and was candid only when she typed the loose-leaf sheets for her diary:

One advances the delicate trace of a whole system of thought, which cannot of course become firm and able to withstand rough handling until it has been communicated and chewed around, and it is totally misunderstood or worse, rejected as irrelevant or trivial, simply because it is the faint-test symbol of what it stands for. Then the ephemeral web of thought can be pulled out of shape or destroyed or shelved so long that oneself loses the key to its symbols—all because one was unable to perform the simple act of
telling
another human being about it.

So she wrote in her diary of this period. Perhaps it was not an entry worthy of a great diarist—but it was true enough of her own relation to the world of her acquaintance. The Dead Sea that had been prophetically glimpsed before she quit the race was becoming an increasingly familiar reality.

She expected no salvation when she got engaged to Ben. Only, from the first she found in him no disposition to reject anything that came from her as “irrelevant or trivial.” His acquiescent patience accepted whatever experience caromed through her mind as if indeed it might be the delicate evidence of a whole system of thought, some visionary world whose sibyl she must be, with or against her will. He did not seem merely to find her lively or loquacious, as if she were a queen-sized talkative doll. He cocked his head and listened as if he wanted to believe, at least; he heard the overflow of new rivers pouring from the salt richness of all she had taken in.

Maybe not. When she had first agreed to marry him she had written in her diary:

God, God, tired, tired, so tired. It's a poor reason for marrying someone, even someone dear who asks for it that way if it can't be any better. Unfair to him. Fair. Who knows? I can't go on another year like this one just past. With Peepers, Jeff, Alvin, Borgnine (maybe Sue B. too) I've become a liar and a drunk, and when I'm swilling the stuff down I become tiresome, inane, and false. An anti-intellectual, I don't read, I don't think any more. I lie, for effect, to make me even for a moment important because I suppose I don't feel important enough anyway. I've abandoned all the feelings I ever had about goodness and real love. So if B wants a dead horse (whore) to keep in his cave, think of the money we'll all save. Yes, she said, yes I will, I certainly will yes marry him. And I do love him if I am ever capable of loving anyone.

She was not a drunk. There were other harsh inaccuracies in the self-appraisal, along with truth. It was only after she had done him a great wrong—something worse than he would have admitted it to be if she had confessed—that she told herself without equivocation that she loved him well.

She had made a quarrel over nothing—really nothing as far as she could understand. It was one of those things that went snowballing, because she was humiliated by her own contrariness, until it got too big to imagine taking back. They were practically man and wife then, but she deliberately went out of her way to have an affair with Claude Peepers (a mad, disgusting affair that she knew would be over as soon as Mrs. Maude Peepers went home to Westchester County with the newborn Peepers heir—God, what kind of girl sleeps with a man
because
his wife is in the hospital being delivered?). She did it out of remorse, to make it perfectly clear to herself that she was not fit to marry someone who cared for her the way Ben did.