Pretty Leslie

by R. V. Cassill

  It probably was at that, though it was equally probable that Dave didn’t know quite what she meant. It was enough that her condescension had gone through his defenses. He couldn’t take the ring and he couldn’t force it on her. He was belittled. His one recourse was to get out quickly.

  Dolores meant to beat him to that, too. She took a swift step backward—probably meaning to head for the basement and say good night to Leslie. One of her spike heels snapped. She collapsed embarrassingly on the tile floor.

  When the men tried to pick her up there seemed to be no proper place to catch hold. The soft wads of flesh were ready to slip off her heavy bones. Dave’s exertion-reddened ear came near her mouth as he tugged at her. She spoke to him in a whisper. His whole head turned turkey-wattle purple, but he did not let go until they had her on her feet.

  “However you want it, lady,” he mumbled. “Sorry. I didn’t know you’d take it so hard.”

  That was supposed to be a reflection on her tact, but tact no longer counted. There had been an encounter of passion with doubt, and passion had the roundabout victory. It had caught Ben. He did not make the mistake of arguing further about the ring. He put it up safely in a cupboard. Leslie could take it to her at work sometime.

  It was not much later when he drove her home, welcoming the chance to let go his responsibilities for the party—welcoming as much, though not quite so understandably, the prospect of getting a relaxed word with her.

  She walked across the grass to his sports car in her stocking feet, needing no help, thank you. She thought it just as well, “considering everything,” she said with a grand, suggestive chuckle, not to say good night to Leslie, whom she would see at work on Monday morning. A wise decision. He supposed Leslie might have had to be told about the rumpus, would have wanted him to “do something.” It appeared that he and Dolores understood there was nothing to be done. No one even knew for sure what the argument had been about. As he thundered his little car through the suburban streets, sympathetically holding his tongue, he could see from the way she lolled in her bucket seat how far she had depleted her reserves of strength.

  The night was almost incredibly mellow with a dampness from the river settling among the trees and houses and a corn-yellow moon following the car like a kite.

  The breeze cooled their faces, and once when he turned to look at her he was startled to see an adolescent girl riding with him, an unbearable steadiness of trust in her shadowy eyes as she watched him drive.

  They drove past the Menankha Country Club and heard the band playing some song unrecognizable to him. “‘Drifting and Dreaming,’” she said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “A sirupy tune. It was popular, oh, about 1927.”

  “Oh. I thought you said it was 1927.”

  “What?”

  Then they decided they were both too groggy to talk. They rode as if both asleep, driver and passenger, over the high bridge. Below them the river spread like a flooding current of moonlight down through the black silhouette of skyline and on among woods and farms toward the Gulf. It was a river she had known a long time ago. The skyline and this bridge were as new to her as to him. He remembered how she had lived here once and had then come back, and the thought seemed to have some compelling meaning he could not quite seize.

  A car full of teen-agers passed them. The kids hooted mockingly—as if mocking lovers; but he supposed the real inspiration for boos was the sight of his expensive little car. He was rather used to such harmless assaults.

  He thought they were quite close to her home when she said, “You’re a dandy, Ben.” The voice was a young girl’s.

  “Gee,” he said. “Gee, thanks.”

  “You are,” she said from the dauntless tranquility of her age. “Leslie is, too. I suppose you know what a crush I have on her. I don’t mean nonsense. I mean love. I love her.”

  “Yes,” Ben said, rather awed.

  “I know enough about people to know you’re better than she is. She’s awfully good.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you know?” she asked, as if from a drugged clairvoyance that might have been desperate if melancholy had been denied it. “Yes, you know.”

  “There’s so much wrong with her,” he said. He had not believed there was anyone alive to whom he could say such a thing. He had less the sense that he was betraying her than that—somehow—he was delivering her home.

  “Considering what a freak world it is, you’ve got the best possible marriage.”

  “The pathology is written on our foreheads.”

  “I’ll bet you’re a very good doctor.” Meaning: Don’t imagine you can dodge from me with your jargon. Don’t be afraid to listen, sweetie. What I say won’t hurt much.

  “I’d like to help,” she said. “And, believe it or not, a woman like me learns things. I could help if … I wish Cy could have seen her. He’d have loved her. She’s better than my daughter Esther. We never fooled ourselves about the children. Cy knew exactly how good every human being he ever met was. He was like a jeweler appraising. Do you know?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, you know. He’d have adored her.”

  “I believe you.”

  “She deserves … what you give her. Don’t forget that, brother.”

  No response.

  “I deserved Cy. Jesus, dear God, I hate it that man is dead. Only a dumb ball player, but he was the smartest man I’ve ever seen. He didn’t die until he died. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know? Yes, you know. Do you know how good a marriage can get to be? A woman doesn’t need any more than her marriage. It can be a beautiful thing.”

  He heard and understood as if he were talking to himself and getting answers absolutely purified of any need to pretend things were different than his anxiety knew them to be. What kind of ghost had he put in his car tonight? He was afraid to look at her face again—as if this time he might fall too painfully in love.

  But when he stopped in front of her house and the streetlight shone on her, he saw how her makeup was beginning to seep over her bagging unwholesome face. She grinned back at him as if to say, Yes, this too is part of the beautiful thing.

  “Good night, handsome.” She pinched his cheek.

  He offered to walk up the lawn with her to her door.

  “I’ve come home barefooted before this,” she said, refusing.

  He waited nevertheless, waiting for her to put on an inside light. She was a long time making it to the door. He could see her pause and lean into the shrubbery by the porch steps and was afraid she might be ill.

  Then he saw her in dark, fat silhouette against the sudden light from her hall. She waved and undulated. For laughs. Home safe. Returning, costumed as she had left except for one ring left as a pledge. The last of the torch singers.

  He was halfway home before it occurred to him what they had really been talking about. About Leslie’s walking out of her own party with Dave Lloyd, of course, and about the curious, bloodless duel he and Dave had fought afterward.

  All the time she was consoling me that I couldn’t quite make the dice fall with a nine, he thought, that I almost won but didn’t quite. Yes, he knew that. He never quite won where Leslie was concerned.

  chapter 6

  ONCE THERE WAS A LITTLE GIRL named Leslie Skinner feeding ducks on a chilly day. The water of the pond across which the ducks swam to her was brown, with blue-gray ridges of ripple not quite exactly the color of the sky. The ducks swarming around her feet were of many colors and sizes—such a collection of types as a park or zoo would collect, not the flock of a commercial breeder. There were tame mallards and pintails, fat white waddlers with bills and feet yellow as paint. There was a variety of colors and shapes like those of the merry-go-round horses, stacked for winter storage under canvas across the pond. A few females of a smaller breed competed most nimbly for the chunks that the three-year-old tossed them.

  “Leslie, sweetheart,�
�� her father said, “quick now, throw the rest of it. You’re not really feeding them. We have to meet Mama back at the car in a minute. Mama’s waiting.”

  As her hand hesitated full of bread, she wondered what kept the ducks warm in the impossible cold of such water. Of course they had their feathers, just as she had a nice Sunday coat, buttoned to her chin. The feathers were wet. Surely the cold would come through them, would touch its misery against their yellow-and-rosy skin. Inside their coats of feathers there must have been hearts, pumping excitedly the way hers did. But what did those wild hearts pump instead of the comfortable blood that warmed her so well? What could run in their veins that wouldn’t be chilled when it was brushed, outside the skin, by the muddy, blue-brown horror of cold water?

  There was something altogether uncanny about those water-sleek bodies contorting and struggling and darting their long necks like snakes just below and beyond the white tips of her shoes and the mudbank on which she was standing. Fearing the uncanny thing that made them immune to cold, she did not want to feed them from her warm hand. These inhuman hungers were not the gentle, grateful bird friends she expected.

  “Feeding the ducks”—Mother made it sound like being kind to her baby brother, who was always warm and pampered in his crib, and who grinned a silly, perpetual gratitude to her when she brought him a toy or a bottle.

  The trouble here was she couldn’t help knowing the ducks were something stronger than she was. Altogether—maybe because there were so many of them—they were stronger and they could not be pacified by feeding. Still their hunger would swarm to her feet. The more bread she gave them, the more of them would come across the pond.

  Her father could not understand her hesitation. He got definitely out of sorts with her. “For heaven’s sake, Leslie. Can’t you just open your hand and let the bread drop? There’s more in the sack if you’re afraid it will be gone too soon. Leslie, throw it!”

  With a sudden flurry of impatience he took the candy-striped paper sack from her right hand and shook it upside down. All the crumbs and crusts she had been saving showered among the darting heads of the ducks.

  It was only after the sack was empty that she realized she had wanted to give the bread herself. “I wanted to,” she whined. “I wanted to give it to them and you’ve thrown it all out now, Daddy.”

  “Can’t help it. You were too slow. Come on. Give them what you’ve still got in your hand and let’s go home. Leslie!”

  “I don’t have enough left to give,” she reasoned cunningly. She knew he was trying to trick her. She had tricks to match more than his. “Carry me, Daddy. I’m cold.”

  “A big three-year-old like you? Daddy’s cold too. He can’t carry you all the way to the car.”

  He could, too. She scowled under the broad fold of her stocking cap, planted her feet squarely, stuck out her lip—and he had to carry her.

  He didn’t intend her to be comfortable while he carried her. Her belly jolted on the bones of his shoulder, padded so inadequately by his overcoat.

  But she was getting her way now, making the situation conform to her infant will, and when they had gone thirty yards from the edge of the wintry pond, at last she drew back her left arm and hurled the bread she had been afraid to drop to the ducks.

  If they need it so bad, they can waddle up here and find it, she thought self-righteously. I was a good girl. I fed them when they were hungry in the cold water. She could remember that.

  Then, satisfied with herself, she hung like a sack and peered back across the jolting shimmer of pond water receding behind her father’s steps, becoming smaller, more manageable, more toy-like in the arc of her vision. Across the pond she could still make out the rows of cages where the old lion and the families of monkeys and bears were kept in summer.

  It seemed to her she could hardly wait for the winter to be over (though it had hardly begun yet). In the fine weather she would trip along in front of the cages between Daddy and Mother, displaying less fear than Hank or Bob, her brothers. The big, stinky, disgusting animals in the cages had never scared her at all. Then why had she been frightened by the ducks whom she ought to love?

  She decided she hadn’t been. There would have been no fuss at all if Daddy hadn’t got impatient and tried to hurry her.

  That was Leslie about twenty-three years ago. Now on a summer Saturday night in a candy-striped bed in her own home she was completing the same emotional orbit. It was three o’clock. Ben lay beside her, apparently drifting toward sleep. But she sat upright, cross-legged, in a filmy pink robe that she had not bothered to tie. She could not sleep until she had balanced her accounts.

  “I hadn’t been unaware,” she said, “that Dave’s been waiting a chance to make a pass. I wasn’t born yesterday—maybe the day before—but anyway he’s given certain indications. To put it crudely, he’s pinched and patted in a pretty stupid way. A certain amount of that, sure. But I’ve had marks just from his helping me out of a car. But when he said ‘Let’s take a walk’ tonight, I merely thought since he’d been having a hard time with Martha that he needed a little something to build up his ego. I mean, I suppose I knew he’d think it was a triumph if I’d merely agree to step outside. You know how I am about feeling needed.”

  Did he know? Yes, he knew. He had been told by Mother Skinner how generously Leslie had responded to Hurricane Ida at the age of six. She had wanted to join the Catholic Church at twelve because Somebody needed her. She had married him because he needed her worse than anyone else, and since this was so, he had no right to quibble.

  “I suppose it was foolish to go down the alley, but we’d already moseyed around the block and were smoking a cigarette by the hedge when that crazy-ass Vendham Smothers came out from behind it, pulling that transistor plug out of his ear—” Ben’s thick chest began to throb with chuckles. Vendham Smothers had been given a new radio by his grandchildren. He carried it in a leather case slung round his neck. From it a slack wire ran to a nickeled plug in his ear, and it was his habit to remove this plug when approached and explain that he certainly wasn’t listening to rock ’n’ roll (yellow smile) but only “the best” from a station in Iowa that played classical records all day long.

  “—and saying, ‘That yee-oo, Mrs. Daniels?’ Christ, I felt like some high-school broad caught red-handed. So I thought we’d better stay off the sidewalks in case we have any other crazy neighbors. After all, even if we aren’t permanent here, I have to live with these biddies. So I made the mistake of cutting through the alley with him. Two blocks over.”

  “You don’t have to tell me.”

  Leslie tinkled her drink thoughtfully—the last, reluctantly finished perpetuation of their party—and said, “I know you don’t take this seriously, but I tell you your friend Dave went right to the point. There was a panel truck parked back there and he was trying to get me in it.”

  Ben laughed. He knew. Yes, he knew.

  “No joke. He made me really angry. I told him off. I said a few truly unforgettable things about their marriage. I suppose that’s the end of the Lloyd-Daniels friendship, and who’s sorry?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “I let him understand that I considered it pure charity to have left with him in the first place and I thought it a clear sign of waning virility that he had to go for me like that in a dark alley. I actually used those words, which I suppose are pretty hard on a man. Ben?”

  “Mmmmm?”

  “We give too much to other people. Look at all the time I spend hauling kids to the pool or to church, listening to every frigid housewife in the block. That sounds hard. I want to be hard. Ben, let’s live for ourselves. Have a kid and move to the country. Build a house with our own hands.”

  “Yes.”

  “Ben? Make love to me. I want to forget everything.” She finished her drink, walked to turn out the light, came into his arms.

  She had been afraid in the alley with Dave. He had opened the doors on some stranger’s panel truck and tried to force
her onto her back on the floor. He had touched her in a frightening way before she got both feet drawn back together and kicked him in the chest. It was very much as she had been afraid of the ducks a long time ago. She had not understood how they could stand the cold. She could not understand someone who wanted to take another man’s wife in the back of a truck that smelled of dry cleaning.

  Ben reassured her. He made her feel generous as she had felt when she threw the bread to the ducks a long time ago. She needed to be needed. But only by him. She needed to give him the sleep he needed. They fell asleep together.

  They passed each other that night on the immeasurable voyages of sleep. While she settled downward in the gravity of a black star, he rose, choked and fighting, to a sort of intensified wakefulness.

  Waking in an hour, he could not recognize the room. The actual darkness was transposed by his insomniac condition into a surface, like a face of coal on which an intense light is played. It was not, by now, an unfamiliar state.

  The threshold into such states was always a dream with a particular root, a particular connection with a reality that was not a dream but a purposely suppressed memory. So naturally (he thought of it by now as natural, perhaps merely because it was so common) the dreams were structured on mystifying accusations against which he had no strength to defend himself.

  Unidentifiable authorities accused him of infecting every one of his patients, of being the propagator of the diseases that each week he cured. Right in front of him, children began to cough and gag, grow flushed and comatose. Arms and legs broke like hard candy when he meant to examine them. Eyes began to squint, disgusting rashes appeared. Tongues became coated like sugared crullers. When he offered medicine, the multitude of children began to recede “according to the laws of perspective”—that phrase was printed across his vision to explain his frustration at seeing them diminish in size and become unreachable.