Pretty Leslie (9 page)

But she kept a careful eye on Ben as long as Leslie was gone. Maybe the moment would come for a light, decisive distraction to cover what she hoped was not so. Maybe it wouldn't. In any case she liked to watch the way he was handling his party.

His brown eyes shadowed by thick brows looked familiar—at least in the way they smiled at different times than the mouth, the way they never seemed probing or aggressive, but seemed to miss very little. When someone needed a drink or a new stack of records for the hi-fi, Ben's hand was there, and his politely questioning face that said, “I'll give you what you need. What is it?” Deferential as a busboy, never slighting anyone though others needed him and were calling to him, running a constant easy stream of priorities through his mind, twisting his ears like radar because he couldn't have eyes in the back of his head—he seemed to her like a money player with the bases loaded, two strikes and three balls, ninth inning, consulting the silly horsehide pill like an astrologer, knowing that everyone who watched him cared, whether they should or not, how he threw the next one.…

When Leslie had been out of sight three quarters of an hour, Dolores said, “Ben, I was promised something.”

He was crouched by a carton of ice on the floor near the bar, refilling the ice bucket. “Anything. Everything!” He grinned. “If we have it, it's yours.”

“Leslie's told me all about you and she says you do magic. I thought—”

“Sure,” he said, “sure.” He stood up and wiped his hands on his pants. “I'll tell you. I do them better in the light than down here where it's dim. Let's go up to the kitchen in about five, ten minutes and I will bewilder and astound you. O.K.?” He had, he indicated, just a few more drinks to serve. Then he was hers.

As she turned away from him she saw that Leslie was back.

No. Leslie had never been gone. There across the room she stood beguiling her little group of listeners with a story. Her hands were up in front of her face, making a cartoon in the air. Her splendid figure was all twisted with the effort of making some comedy real enough so nothing would exist for the others except the moment of hilarity and illusion. Of course she had never left the party.

Well, of course she had. Had got back just in time to make the shrewdest watcher concede that no serious offense could have been committed in her absence. She had only been teasing and—the shrewdest observer thought with a sigh—probably did not even realize how she teased so many people all at once.

There—over there—was cadaverous David Lloyd trying to calm his wife, no doubt telling her that however she felt about leaving parties at a civilized hour,
he
damn well needed a stiff drink. Anyone might after a disappointment with Leslie.

In love again, sadly, Dolores thought: She doesn't see at all. God, be kind to this house. Whether they deserve it or not, they need it.

chapter 5

I
N THE BASEMENT
there was still dancing. The muted, commercial lasciviousness of South American music could be heard up in the kitchen like a rumor of unlikely depravity. The hostess, once again, was dancing. She would go on while guests remained who wanted to dance. And Ben, as he had been doing all evening, was herding the strays—who wanted to talk medicine, who did not want to dance with their own husbands, who drank too much too quickly (he had had to mop the upstairs bathroom where Anita Short had missed the stool), whose rhythm of gaiety would not match the central rhythm of the party.

Now he was in the kitchen doing sleight of hand for Dolores—not because she had seemed a stray, but because he had promised Leslie to consider her as one. Sue Wilder and Harley Short (whom Ben had helped put Anita to sleep in the back seat of the car parked on the lawn) were also watching, while behind them Jenny Cressman was prowling Leslie's kitchen, estimating whether she could afford one like it.

Ben opened his palm. “I'm sorry, Harley. Are you sure you gave me a five? You saw him give me a five, Dolores? No. It was only a one. See?” He unfolded the bill. George Washington looked down his nose.

Sue Wilder grabbed his fingers quickly and forced them apart. No five-dollar bill fell from between them. “You were palming the one,” she said.

“Of course,” Ben said. He timed his stare into her eyes and the subsequent smile with the sureness of a fly-fisherman drawing a trout to his net. “How?”

She shook her head in stubborn bewilderment and began to rifle his sleeves, his breast pocket, shirt pocket, and even the collar of his shirt. “Where's the five?” she demanded. “Ah, baby, what'd you do with it?”

“It doesn't matter what he did with it,” Jenny Cressman said from ten feet away. “The point is how well he did the trick.”

“Did you learn that as practice for surgery?” Dolores wanted to know.

Ben nodded.

“But you don't do surgery?” she asked. “You'd be very good at it. You'd be a good magician, too, if you had to make your living that way. Cy and I knew some. We went a couple of times to the magicians' convention.” Her face began to convulse with some memory, selected like a cookie for a grandchild from the sweet-smelling jar of the past. “Greatest stunt we ever saw was at a convention. Man showed up and asked to be put on the bill—they show off their stunts to each other. He wanted to be crucified on stage. He had poor old Cy picked out to drive in the nails, because Cy expressed interest. Well, the pros thought it would be a dandy illusion all right and they had him scheduled. Then Cy and some of the others got to talking and they couldn't figure out the trick. They put it up to the man and he said there
wasn't
any trick. They were supposed to crucify him and that was that. Really crucify.” She was staring hard at Ben's face and when he laughed there was an almost electric flow of sympathies between them—as if she had been talking about him and, somehow, he knew it.

“Splendid,” he said, the gentle rustle of laughter going on in his throat.

“You said you saw the act,” Harley Stone said.

“The crazy bugger wouldn't take no for an answer,” Dolores said. The tops of her breasts jiggled like leaves in a fall wind, and it was hard to tell from the tone of her voice whether she was smothering laughter or hiccups or sobs. “They
un
scheduled him, all right.”

“Spoilsports,” Sue said with a laugh. She stuck two fingers inside Ben's shirt for exploration. He lightly knocked her hand away. Harley worked on the one-dollar bill with his fingernails to see—well, perhaps to see if the five was inside it.

Dolores said, “He got some of his buddies to nail him on out in the corridor beyond the exit nearest the stage. I remember we could hear the pounding before they carried him in. A juggler was on, but I was listening to this pounding—I don't know why.”

“And they carried him in like a flag?” Jenny asked. She was supporting her weight by clinging to an open cupboard door, swaying lightly back and forth. She shifted her feet and folded her arms as the projected vision flowered in her mind. “Hanging on the cross?”

Dolores didn't even bother to nod. “It was a big, hefty four-by-four cross and it took two big men to carry it with him on it. I'll tell you, it stopped the show when they came across in front of the stage. Everyone began to hoot and stamp, because it was plain there was no illusion. The guy was bleeding. You can always tell real blood.”

“Here's your five,” Ben said to Harley. He pulled the bill out of Harley's ear—Harley the natural stooge now because he was so engrossed in the story.

“I see,” Harley said. “I see. It isn't the nailing on that hurts. It was how long He hung there that killed Him. Isn't that so, Ben?” Harley was a lawyer.

“Don't try it to find out, Harley.”

Harley blinked. “No, but I mean probably any normal human being could stand it—that is, merely having the nails put in.” He set his chin assertively. He had just explained, perhaps, why his wife was lying in their car, stiff as a corpse and redolent of puke.

“Some people are more sensitive than others,” Ben said to him gravely. Dolores tinkled a laugh. “I have another little ploy I do with money,” Ben said to her.

He was making three bills out of two and one out of three—with sleeves rolled up and outraged Sue standing on his right side, determined to catch him—when he saw Dave Lloyd's midriff moving in the pass-through. Dave joined them quietly.

He was no drunker than most of the others, more sober than some, and he watched Ben's tricks appreciatively. But Leslie, when she had walked around the neighborhood with him a while ago, had chilled him beyond what was called for. He needed to get his own back.

“Very nimble,” he said after a while. “What you ought to tell them, Ben, is that you do it for real.”

“I do it for real,” Ben said to Sue, who once again had failed to see where the extra bills were hidden.

“Leslie told me and Martha,” Dave said loudly, good-humoredly, “how you was in communication with the supernatural and traded off this little spade for the white baby. You was in the beyond and made a bargain with old Magoo. Anyway, the baby was dead and you brought her back to life, wasn't that it?” He waved his hand back and forth to imitate a big-time magician. Finally he brought it swooping to rest on Dolores' bare shoulder. She shivered and let it lie.

“Who's Magoo? The Devil?” Ben asked. “You heard an odd story, Dave.”

“I admit Leslie probably corned it up. You know how Leslie is, always bringing everything around to herself
one
way or another. My strongest recollection of our talk is of how a crone gave her a winning card at the track and she got two winners and three places in eight races.”

Ben had the choice of accepting this line of digression or getting mad. He knew, of course, that Leslie had left the party for a while with Dave, and he didn't mind that. He could have minded very much this sour aftermath. He accepted few invitations to share disapproval of Leslie's faults. He chose digression.

“She made all of twenty-three fifty. Be it understood that my wife has faith in the occult, and as a matter of fact the predictions turned out to be letter-perfect on six horses out of eight, and one of the other two was scratched. Knowing that in advance—”

“She couldn't know she knew,” Jenny said. Ben acknowledged her reservation with a bow as he rebuttoned his sleeves and put his jacket back on.

He shook his head in grief. “Knowing that,” he said, “she made twenty-three dollars and fifty cents. You see, don't you? If she'd just bet her winnings on each successive race, we could have paid the mortgage and taken a year off. Irony of fate, that same day I lost nearly a hundred dollars. That explain anything about our bargain with the Devil, Dave?”

It might have explained a mutual attitude toward Leslie, or toward the female mind in general. And apparently Dave took it that way. But he wanted more. He had been teased and humiliated. He had to crow.

“I'm glad you didn't really raise the dead, my friend.”

“Or pretend that I had. I don't remember saying—”

“No, Leslie.
Leslie
wanted us to swallow all this mummery about the superhumanness—superhumanity?—of the doctor. ‘Down there in the land of the dead' Moses went down. ‘Well, Leslie,' I said—”

Ben closed his eyes in great fatigue. “You're a boor,” he said jovially. Behind closed lids he saw a loutish, freckled, yokel zookeeper boasting his superiority to some fictitious and enamored female chimpanzee. The fellow must have had something in common with Dave Lloyd.

Then, with undetectable anger, he said, “I don't know how Leslie reported the story. But what happened was not coincidence.”

“It's
all
coincidence,” Dave said. “The whole fucking world.” He dug his nails cruelly into Dolores' shoulder—of course without being conscious of it.

She swayed a little, affected not to notice. Her worried gaze hung on Ben—as once it must have hung on the crucified man at the magicians' convention.

And suddenly it was very odd for Ben to feel that he had to slap Dave Lloyd down for her sake and not for Leslie's. He was committed now and he said, “I take it you know the basic facts of the ‘two cases.' What gave me the fits was wondering whether I intended them to come out as they did. Anyway I wouldn't
call
it coincidence. We don't know everything about cause and effect.”

Dave did not even nod for an answer. From Sinai he had brought the tables of the law. The world was coincidence, they said. Instead of answering, he offered a cigarette to Dolores, struck a kitchen match, lit her cigarette and Sue Wilder's. He was about to light his own, smirking crudely, when Dolores lunged up and blew out the flame. “No one's pulled that on me since high school,” she yelled in her Sophie Tucker voice. “You were trying to do it on purpose.” As, of course, he had been.

We all seem to know what's going on, Ben thought. No one knows how to say it. With a feeling that he ought to speak nearer the reality, he said, “Dave, it's true. I
chose
for Mandy Tabor to live.” He felt his recklessness mount with each word, an altogether unfamiliar (and altogether too-well-known) recklessness. It was not the thing to say at all. He knew that well. It might get back to the Tabors through Sue Wilder if not through the Lloyds. “I've toyed with the idea that saving Mandy meant choosing for the colored boy to die. A man thinks … of course I haven't any metaphysical idea of what happened.”

“Only a magic one. God save science,” Dave said.

“Everything depends on what you mean by
chose
,” said Harley, whose sensitivity could catch at least this logical point in the argument.

Dave said, “Plainly he means he extrasensoried it. Willed it. Brought her back from the grave like Lazarus. Isn't that what you mean, Ben boy?”