Pretty Leslie

by R. V. Cassill

  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 sh
e 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.

  But whatever it proved, Ben came back smiling. He did not ask for an accounting. As things turned out, she did not give him one. The morning they met “to talk things over” after she’d stayed out of sight for a week, they took a cab down to Battery Park. They sat on a bench near the seawall.

  He didn’t prod or hurry her. He let her smell the morning. He sat beside her watching the boats come and go through the overcast across the comfortable, roomy harbor waters. The gulls were flying in white swarms over near the Jersey coast. A girl’s thoughts went out with the boats, and all at once she began to laugh about sneaky, pompous Claude Peepers and his fear that he’d overextended this time, caught one that would be hard to ditch when the wife came home. The continent behind her and all her unmanageable past seemed negligible. She took a huge mouthful of air and said, “‘Send me giants.’”

  Ben had smiled in that knowing way of his. He said, “They’d meet their match.”

  She had second thoughts. Fears. “I’m only quoting. There’s no one here to be honest. I don’t know who I am.”

  He didn’t answer. It was very sweet to think he was probably agreeing with her. From a declaration of moral bankruptcy one could start again, voyaging out like the ships in the morning calm.

  “Oh shit, do you still want me?” she said. “This is the last time I’ll propose, but …”

  “You know I want you, though no giant.”

  “Ah, even that’s not my own. It’s from a high-school play. The girl can’t do any better than quote something she’d like to say for herself.”

  “But it was the right quote,” he said, with the lilting enthusiasm of one about to set out to the earth’s end. “‘Send me giants’ too,” he whispered. But then he pretended to cower in reaction to his audacity.

  Probably the offense she had done him paid off well. Its blind violence turned them as a mason turns stones in a wall until he finds the faces that fit snugly, resolutely together. They did not share a knowledge of what she had done, but they shared the effects compatibly. It was a successful sin. It led on to a confidence in their marriage that might otherwise have been absent.

  Its good effects, though, were bought at the price of the rough candor they had shared before. They had seen the shadows of their vulnerability, had been warned. Now they would get along better by asking less. Civility had begun to replace the anguish of enchantment.

  The tone of banter and play by which they habitually communicated came almost necessarily from their fears of looking too squarely at what they were. If, in the course of time, it gave them a private code, it also limited them to it.

  Yet the limitations had never chafed—probably because they had time, had given each other time, the great gift of successful marriages.

  If Ben no longer heard in her chatter the trace of whole systems of thought, beyond its superficialities he still caught the gracious hint of magnitudes, attending like genies among the trees and shadows of their lawn. In his heart he believed they would, in time, show themselves in their strength. This was no ordinary woman he had married.

  The extraordinary creature on her chaise stared at the powers of light and dark in the evening sky, but merely snorted, “‘Buy her a new brassiere’ indeed!” She reached out to lay appreciative fingers on her husband’s wrist. “I ought to have you talk to Dolly. I try to be your devoted missionary, but I’m sure you could help her better than I.”

  “Are you sure Dolly needs more help than nature gives her?”

  Leslie nodded. “That Patch youth is a little snake. Fascinating, and she’s such a bunny.” She leaned back away from him and clucked for her bird. Clucked again. With a swift, ungainly flutter of wings, Bill came down from the fence to waddle in her cupped hands, reptilian green in the twilight, his little eyes hard as seeds. “Who you can help with is Dolores Calfert. I’ve asked her to our party Saturday night. Perhaps it wasn’t wise. I don’t know. When I invited her I wasn’t even thinking of would she fit with the others. I like her.”

  “Then why won’t the others at the party?”

  “They will. They will.” Leslie rubbed her bird as if in occult consultation. “It’s only she’s such a goose. For her age she’s so giddy. I really wanted you to meet her again—have a chance to hear her tales, I mean. Maybe you’ll have a chance to in spite of the crowd. And, Ben, be kind to her.”

  “Did you think I wouldn’t be?”

  But it was not he—not he alone—who was being asked not to condescend. Mistress Leslie was asking him to share, and help her repudiate, some unmanageable fault she found in herself. There was nothing new in that.

  “Dolores thinks I ought to have a baby too,” she said.

  “I trust you told her you deserved a gold star for trying?”

  Suddenly Leslie was flustered. The column of her neck flushed. She slapped—not viciously—at her parakeet and tossed him into the air. But Bill did not want to fly. He raised and moved his wings only enough to keep himself from falling hard on the stones under the chaise. He waddled importunately back to catch and claw at a hanging fold of her skirt.

  “I don’t tell all, old man. In case you’re worried.”

  “No. The truth might endear me to … oh, you know, Dolly, Dolores, LaVerne.…”

  Her composure climbed on his good-natured spoof—very much like the bird climbing her skirt to regain his place in her lap.

  She said, “As a matter of fact I did tell her about our frequenseenallthat. How often. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. Are you mad at me for telling? I babble too much.”

  Ben finished his drink and tapped his upper lip with a forefinger. He waited a minute before he answered. “What was her comment?”

  “Well”—Leslie fumbled in the air, waiting for a friendly spirit to coach her in exactly the right words—“well, you don’t know Dolores well enough to catch the nuance. Dolores always laughs about sex. But different kinds of laughter. Mostly real healthy. Gutty. She’s been there. So, naturally, she laughed, but it wasn’t a snide laugh or anything, and what she said was ‘God give us all such a husband’ or something like that.”

  “Mmmmm.”

  “Are you mad?”

  “Good Lord, no. I’m only thinking about whether to blush or not when I see her Saturday. I guess I won’t.”

  “There must be a lot of husbands who … need it every night,” Leslie said.

  “Was that Dolores’ observation?”

  “Well, she knew a man—a woman, rather—in Hawaii who spoke of morning, noon, and night. Hercules Someone-or-other. What are you thinking?”

  “Of the dreams I must inspire at Bieman’s Studio,” Ben said. Then with an indescribable note of irony, a little different than she had heard yet this evening, he said, “And my great need.”

  Three hundred and forty nights a year—uncounted, or at least unrecorded, so that memory said merely every night—that need was fulfilled. But whose it was, husband’s or wife’s or both, remained a mystery that not even age could be expected to unravel. If she seemed disinclined, he brought her to it like a duty. If he seemed disinclined—or went out late on calls, or was kept until an awkward hour by someone’s illness—he could expect to find her waiting and eager.

  It was for both the haven within the haven of the house within the shelter of his profession, prosperity, and expectations. It was safety itself, and whether she needed its reassurance more than he needed to give her the reassurance that only his flesh in hers could provide was beyond all asking. Night fell. The crowded day was banished. They coupled because they must. The act—the “frequency” as Les
lie called it when she spoke of it in generalities—was within the limits of normality. If the specters of lust and fear that clapped them together were not, what man or woman could unweave all the threads of his own hunger and justify them? In the socket of flesh the upright flesh was not required to give its reasons. Was home. Let no man—or no fret about typicality—put that asunder.

  Only Leslie did fret about it—perhaps for the simple reason that she felt herself the one responsible, perhaps for the delicate reason that she could not be quite sure why Dolores Calfert laughed whenever she thought of sex.

  In the deep June twilight, caressing her bird as if he were a clay thing that she was fashioning to perfection, Leslie asked, “Why is it all these types—Dolores and Martha and, you know, other older women—think I should have a baby?”

  In the past year, when the eternal forum in her own head had long since decided that the honeymoon was over and the habit of the marriage set, she had begun more and more to speak of her desire for a child as explanation for the puzzling frequency.

  “Am I some sort of surrogate? Daughter substitute? Is it just their frustrated instinct, I mean, trying to find a place to break out, like an infection hunting the right place for a pimple?” She giggled through the gloom, amused by her own fantastic figure. “And the reason I don’t get pregnant just some resistance to being used?”

  “I’ll talk your problems over with the staff, lady,” her husband said.

  “Don’t you dare. Hon, I noticed you needed a manicure. Can I give you one?”

  “Tonight? You can give me one. Tonight you can give the monster what he needs.”

  “Yes, I can.”

  Demurely she rose and went into the house to prepare their evening meal. Mistress of an impenetrable game.