Pretty Leslie

by R. V. Cassill

  She felt much better when she had fixed herself a very late lunch and eaten it alone on the terrace. Half a bottle of cold white wine, a good wine stashed away for a special occasion or the spoiling attendant on some convalescence, relaxed her into a torpid strength. Now, in the sun, she could permit herself a recollection of how it had been last night. Cured of the morning shakes, she could even congratulate herself on not, after all, managing her adventure too badly.

  It had been, all things considered, something which she owed herself. She felt the stability of her life restored, and now from afterward she could look at the episode with the same sophisticated detachment with which (for some scattered moments, at least) she had anticipated it. Though in anticipation she would never have expected that her partner could have been little Don Patch.

  Was it not tidy? Ben was gone. Ben would never know. All the rest of the world—neighbors, fellow workers, Dolores (poor old Dolores)—fooled or ignorant. Herself appeased (ah, that was most important of all, to come to terms with the old bogeys of the self and find they were not so terrifying after all). Other women had done more. It was not excessive. And best of all (her mood was swinging strongly toward triumph now) there need be no sticky aftermath. As the wine glowed in her veins, it occurred to her that it was positively a stroke of genius to have chosen (yes, chosen) silly Don Patch for the agent. Someone with whom she could not possibly get emotionally involved and go on to do something silly. He was, as of now, dismissed.

  Would that require some management? It might, it might. But in her present mood she welcomed the challenge of holding him at a distance by superior social strategems. (She giggled to recall how solemnly he had announced his respect for doctors. Much might be accomplished by sticking to the line, “The doctor is at home again. Silly boy, of course I can’t see you.”)

  And if he talked—what could he say? To whom could he talk? She thought that even if he told Dolly Sellers, Dolly would assume he was lying. If he told any of the other men at the Studio, they might beat him for the insult. If he wrote things about her in the john, wrote her number in a slum telephone booth—well, she told herself with the high heart of a cavalier, she was living big now and had to expect some losses.

  At the very peak of her euphoria—when the sun was still a handsbreadth above the gilded motionless elmtops and the perfect weather seemed to embalm the lasciviousness of some antique island in the Grecian archipelago, herself the drowsing priestess of this suburban, Delphic silence—that old cardiac busybody Vendham Smothers had to intrude with a special errand.

  “This is Garland Roberts, Mrs. Daniels,” he said, crouching toward her. A corded arm, extended behind him in a circling gesture, indicated a blond girl of eighteen.

  Leslie started from her doze. Since Vendham was both familiar and unpleasant to look at, she stared at the girl.

  Garland was perfect. At least her skin was the pure and flawless color of honey. Her hair was nearly the color of the wine still left in Leslie’s glass, and the individual strands had the luster of a golden mirror. The features didn’t count much. She might have been anyone—Miss Rheingold or one of those incredibly depersonalized photographs in Playboy. Her nice, anonymous features, including brown eyes, gave skin and hair a chance to reveal their perfection.

  She said, “Hi.”

  “Garland lives on Burridge Place,” old Smothers said, and then with a hundred flourishes explained his special mission. Garland, at the crisis of her life, was confronted with a problem—university, college, or a career. Her academic record in high school was perhaps no indication of her genuine concern with things of the mind. It was the foundation of her acquaintance with venerable, dying old Smothers that she adored poetry.

  “Yeats,” Garland said. She showed all of Miss Rheingold’s matching teeth in a shyly frank smile. “I really do.”

  “‘Only God, my dear, could love you for yourself alone, and not for your yellow hair,’” Smothers said. “Remember the evening I quoted that to you?”

  Garland nodded and he explained that he had been taking his constitutional on Burridge Place one evening in the springtime just past, had seen her “right there in the middle of the sidewalk” and could not help shrieking (as he no doubt had) the appropriate verse into her face, an old man’s prerogative.

  Did not Mrs. Daniels understand how, after this, the friendship—and with it friendship’s generosity and concern—had ripened; how in the winter of his life he had championed in this blooming girl the hidden spiritual core?

  “Really, I’m more at ease with Vendham than—” Garland made an openhanded gesture to illustrate the myriads with whom she found barriers to confidence. She sat on the chaise at Leslie’s feet. Leslie withdrew her toes a safe six inches from contact. “Vendham’s—” Another gesture appealed for the words to express his ineffable warmth, insight, and high-mindedness.

  “I’ve argued … college!” Vendham said, grinding his toe on the flagstones like a delicate adolescent as his secret bias popped out. “Oh, now listen, Garland.… If you’ll permit me, maybe I can summarize a few of your arguments for Mrs. Daniels so we can get the benefit of her view on the matter. May I? Well, Garland has an older brother in the Military Academy.”

  “Not West Point,” Garland explained.

  “She feels that the financial burden on her parents of sending her to—say, if she’s accepted there as I have every reason to think she would be—to Smith, or to Vassar, or to Radcliffe, or Barnard—I believe you told me you’d attended Smith and Barnard, Mrs. Daniels?”

  Probably she had. As she stared on them both with drugged eyes, already feeling like the victim of vampires, Leslie told herself she had no one but herself to blame for ever opening her mouth to the old vulture. Someday, inevitably, he would have brought to mock her this shiny, virginal, imperturbable reminiscence of the years that had never kept their whole promise to her, saying—as he did now—“I saw that you could tell her whether it was worth requiring a sacrifice, as it would be, by her parents to ask for the best.”

  Leslie wet her lips with her tongue. She felt, simply, that these unlikely two knew everything about her, had heard her cry out in Ben’s dishonored bed, and had come now with a special, tantalizing form of inquisition to play at cat and mouse with her. She stared again at Garland’s perfect smile and had all she could do to hold her lips steady over her own herbivorous front teeth.

  “I’ve considered working for a year. Two years,” Garland said. The voice had the pure impersonality of a recorded message answering back from some number frantically dialed while one hand held the lips of a wound together. “I’m still young,” she said with terrible simplicity. For the first time, fully, Leslie realized that she was not. Reminded by this walking signboard of youth, she understood what price she had squandered in last night’s transformation.

  “I’m still young and I could work two years here in Sardis and then go to college,” Garland said. Her speech was not only lacking in qualification but seemed to forbid any. These were facts and she was a fact. Her beauty and her uncomplicated virginity were facts tough as steel.

  “I’m afraid,” the sugary voice of Vendham Smothers said, “I’m afraid that if you went into business you’d never get to college. Now, as sure as we are sitting here, earnestly discussing what it is right to do, in your case, there would be the temptation to … marriage.” His neck stretched like a lascivious turtle’s, and his sick eyes wobbled on the girl’s blouse as he hurled this probability onto the fertile suburban air. Phallic and phalloid, the trees and telephone poles and the very grass around the terrace thrust toward Garland’s inviolate potentiality.

  “Well, there are boys,” she admitted, not so much with gravity as with the authority of an extraterrestrial visitor from a mineral planet, not greatly moved by biological phenomena.

  “There are boys,” Vendham Smothers said in agony. “Oh, I’ve seen it happen so many times. Girls with promise. Girls with something to contribute. They’ve been lost,
lost to the world, because they dallied and thought they’d go on to college later.” Lost to Vendham Smothers, some sag-haunched, four-eyed, blooming slip of a sow’s ear. Lost to the library. Lost to “things of the mind.” Gone to business.

  “I’d be delighted to hear your experience at Smith, Mrs. Daniels,” Garland said politely.

  That was mere formality. Neither of them meant to talk to Leslie. Neither cared that she had even graduated from junior high. They were exploiting her like some neuter duenna whose presence gave to their unlikely courtship some flavor of the reasonable, the conceivable.

  They talked for the better part of an hour over her nearly prostrate body. Vendham’s arguments—in favor of any college, even the local University, but preferably a select girls’ school, the best—danced like a faun. Out of the rotting forest of his body, lust bellowed. But still the maiden was unseduced. There were “financial considerations.” There were the wishes of her parents to keep her home. There were boys.

  “It’s mostly that I’m not sure of myself,” Garland said with a delicate frown—Garland who was more offensively, terribly sure of youth and position than any mortal had a right to be.

  “A-a-a-ah.” Smothers laughed. “If you think you’re unsure of yourself now, wait—just you wait, young lady—until they get through with you at a really good school. They’ll tear every one of your ideas wide open. Rip ’m into little pieces. Go right through everything you think is certain. Make you question, question.…” His eyes glowed bright red with this vision of (presumably intellectual) rapine. “Then! Then you’ll slowly gather up what is your own, and in your own time put it all back together again.” The image was of a nymph alone, assembling her tattered clothing from marsh and sward, pensively covering her ravishment with the salvaged rags.

  “You could be a great woman!” he cried in despair. “Help me persuade her, Mrs. Daniels. Help me make her see.” Garland could be what she was—already great enough for her task of demoralization—or she could be crowned with academic laurels; and she would never, never, never, never, never be for dying old Smothers anything but a vision that must torment him into his grave. That was what the wheezing vowels and the froth at his mouth declared.

  This scene should have been pure comedy. It was meant to be one of those lurid grotesque vignettes from life in which Leslie delighted, part of the human scrapbook she had been assembling since she quit hoping to be Thomas Wolfe.

  On another day it might have been so. But long before the sun dropped behind the elmtops and the curtains of suburban shade caused her skin to twitch and rise in small goose bumps, she recognized how this chaste, mad argument parodied not only the scene she had enacted the night before, but all commerce between male and female.

  Smiling, she closed her eyes, and she was in the company not of Smothers and his Garland but the zoo keeper of Sue Wilder’s story and the pathetic female chimpanzee who lured him to the night of his bestiality. And knowing this was like having no longer any lids for her eyes. Nothing any more—ever—could be shut out, she thought.

  “I certainly tend to side with Mr. Smothers,” she said. “I know my own life would be much poorer without the things I picked up in college.”

  “You’re probably right,” Garland said. “Only—” Only the wise female chimpanzee never went to Smith.

  “If you’ll excuse me,” Leslie said. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going out this evening and I have to make some phone calls first.”

  Garland was on her feet in a second, all apology for having taken so much of her time when Mrs. Daniels must be a busy woman and the problem wasn’t one that had to be settled today anyhow. Smothers was so rapt in his real obsession that he acted as if Leslie had been rude in terminating the interview so soon. Which goes to show, which goes to show, she thought, in a frightful depression of fatigue.

  She meant to call Dolores Calfert. That inspiration had come to her while she agonized through the interminable discussion about college or not for mademoiselle en fleur. She needed the company of someone older and she needed it bad. She thought that before today she had never known so definitely what she needed—just as heavy drinkers are never so sure as legit alcoholics that they need a drink. She had to have Dolores’ laughter, neither kind nor unkind, interested but not obsessed, or she thought she would begin to have the visible shakes.

  Nevertheless she took time to bathe before she went again to the telephone. It was time to cleanse herself, to restore with cleanliness and fresh clothing that walking, talking dummy of a woman who, if she knew nothing else, knew how to get through a week with humankind.

  While the water sizzled and gurgled and the suds rose like a dream of Christmas from between her soothing fingers, she thought of places she and Dolores might go this evening. It hardly occurred to her that Dolores might be otherwise occupied.

  There was (1) the Chez Papa Room in the Lister Hotel, always fun and neither too noisy nor too public for really good talk; (2) the terrace of the North Side Club, a dandy place to repair a hangover; eating outdoors while the sunset faded always helped remake the personality; and (3) that new place up the river from the lake that Ben had been to but she never had. He said you ate on a screened porch. There would be June bugs knocking against the screen. No music but a jukebox. (She saw herself in white ambling back to the table after having made surprise selections.) Down below, among elm branches like seaweed, the boatmen would be bringing their outboards back to the dock, arranging their gear after a fine Sunday on the water.

  Rising from the foam of the bubble bath, there was a new (new and greater, as they said) Leslie Daniels, phoenix woman, a known sinner who had been, in the good old way, ennobled by enduring a major sin, daring enough to go down into the depths of hell (at least risk her own sanity) to find what witchcraft had blighted her marriage. Now she knew. She knew what was wrong with Ben, how out of his very goodness and gentleness, he failed to understand women and therefore failed them.

  Even now she found no fault with this just man, but she knew that the fault was there and generously meant to ease it away. Probably without his knowing. Just to give him herself changed, wiser as she felt herself to be, no longer afraid to admit what it meant to be a woman—wouldn’t that in itself teach him what he had never yet known?

  “The trouble with Ben,” she would say to Dolores in the splendid frankness of equals that she now anticipated, “is that he always makes a woman feel inadequate by being too womanish—gentle—himself. He doesn’t understand that could be a hidden form of cruelty. He has to learn we’re not such delicate creatures.” Dolores would know what she meant. Any woman who had lived a real woman’s life would know.

  And would Dolores guess what had happened to her? Yes and no. There is a splendid mechanism in the female mind that suspends knowledge between light and dark, so a woman may hold in her mind even the details of the physical without quite admitting to herself that the physical exists. She did not want Dolores to know she had been unfaithful. But she trusted Dolores to sense that she was no longer quite the same girl.

  The telephone rang. It was Garland Roberts.

  “I did want to sort of apologize. I mean, I did feel we were taking up your time when you didn’t want us there. But Vendham … either he’s got that old transistor plug in his ear listening to classical music or he’s talking. I mean I did want to meet you. I’ve heard so much about you. But I didn’t want you to think he was such a great friend of mine. I wanted to apologize.…”

  She didn’t want to apologize. She wanted, after all, to court, to pay her tribute to something in whose presence she felt herself crippled and incomplete. In spite of her seeming vacuity she had sensed the great transformation, envied it, wanted to do it honor. Wanted to be near it. Yearning toward womanhood, she knew more than she knew she knew.

  Leslie hung up gloating.

  The phone rang again. David Lloyd. David Lloyd himself, full of his self-importance and sniffing. When she recognized his plaintive voice,
Leslie knew she had been expecting him to call while Ben was gone.

  He was (small surprise) downtown by himself and had just thought.… That she was lonely? Well no, hell no, Leslie, he hadn’t thought that exactly. He was lonely, heh, heh, to put his limp little cards right out on the table, and he had a couple of stiff martinis in him and had thought she might like to go dancing with him after they’d had dinner, of course, maybe at the Chez Papa.… Where was Martha? Well, Martha was home, of course, and the two of them had discussed earlier in the day whether they shouldn’t drop by and take Leslie maybe swimming at the lake or golfing, though it was too hot for that, but Martha had put the kibosh on their good intentions by not feeling very well, so here he was on his own and past forty and ready to crawl right across the floor and lick her dainty big shoes if that was what she wanted.…

  “David, I think we’re old enough friends so I can be very frank with you.” She could positively feel the needle penetrate his eardrum and pick around in his injured cranium, but she knew he didn’t dare hang up now. She had him on the hook; would make him writhe. “I may even have been at fault about what happened the night of the party in the alley. I’m willing to admit that. But the point is that circumstances have changed. I told Ben what we’d done. I know it wasn’t anything, but I didn’t want it on my conscience. Ben has never been anything but absolutely level with me, and I thought I owed it to him. He doesn’t hold it against you. It’s like him to understand it was partly my fault, too. But I don’t think, in view of your friendship with him, that you’d want to be in the position of ever again even supposing anything could happen between us. I want to humbly beg your forgiveness if I led you on. Will you forgive me? I’d like to hear you say you do, because it’s very important to me.…”

  Oh, she wrung him. She would not let him off the line until she had forced him to dribble a fully articulated “Yes” to her demand for forgiveness. She hung up the phone this time like a farmer hanging up a gelding knife.