Pretty Leslie

by R. V. Cassill

  Actually Miss Hardy never laid a hand on him. It was his old man who used to lay on with switches or his belt or his razor strap. (Strop? The sound of the bright blade on leather when his dad sharpened it was “strop, strop, strop”; when he went to the barber shop with his dad, the barber called it strop; the leather sang on his legs as if it were stropping a blade when the old bastard laid on.) He used to wish wildly that it was the other way around—that Miss Hardy would punish him or even that his mother would do it if he had it coming (as he was always convinced he did); but she was such a stringy, dishwater, whining rag of a woman that she’d never strike with more than her hand, maybe not that. And in the confusion of sentimentalities that attended his year as Miss Hardy’s pupil, he used to imagine sometimes that his daddy had stropped her. He could never, in his most ferocious and bloody daydreams, imagine lifting his hand to give her pain, though he thought, “She has it coming.”

  So when Mrs. Daniels reminded him of Opal Hardy, he had never gone out of line to imagine any real contact with her. It offended him like a bad smell when the regulars at the Studio took liberties in talking about her.

  (“They’s something there the doctor ain’t gettin’,” Rife said over his drafting board, lifting his mud-black coffee in its wilting paper cup, and licking his rootlike canines. “Reaching,” String Bieman said. “Using up,” said Ozzie Carter, known for his moderation in all matters of opinion. “Among us creative people there is a well-founded superstition that where there is smoke there is fah,” String said, “and when dear Leslie looks up at me from her typewriter I detect the thin, fine smell of frogjaw.” “That is the odor of breeding. You hayseeds is knowed incapable of distinguishing between crotch sweat and Chanel Number Five.” “Ladies burning at both ends,” Rife mooned, caressing his ulcer with semiliquid sediment of coffee. “They will not last the night.” And the stimulus of Leslie Daniels set him reminiscing, while the others came and went, half listening, of “intellectual broads” he had known in college, at the Art Students’ League or during his summer in Paris. “A girl with a good mind is always easier.” “Feelthy creative man,” String called him. “Because she condescends to treat you apes like you still had it in you, like you could get one up, you malign her behind her back.” “Anytime,” Rife said. With a darting hand he drew a scratch-paper cartoon of himself behind Leslie’s back, shrieked like a stuck pig, crumpled the sketch quickly and tossed it in his wastebasket. “I’ve never known a sweeter, more liberal, and—I dare say even in present company, knowed for misinterpretation—generous lady in my life than Madame Doctor Daniels, and you creative pigs aren’t fit to pull up to that with a tuxedo and a spoon and a napkin,” Carter said. “If you can take the word of a famous Italian connoisseur, that is strictly table pussy, and if she had to marry someone, a doctor is none too good for her.” And then Rife, the coffee burning his poor stomach like conscience, would say, “Oh Jesus, you guys. People in other walks of life are not so depraved. Listen, here’s a fine, intellectual woman, hoping to be a mother, to rear her children in the best American tradition—a literary sensibility, a good guy, a buddy to the lowest. I tremble when I think that God is just and hears every dirty word that’s been said here since noon, and I, for one, have work to do. Get out of here and repent.”)

  Though the talk about Leslie followed a fixed parabola of outlandish suggestion and matching repentance for its excess, Don Patch never forgave those others who forgave themselves so handily (meaning no harm). Grinning as he listened, he felt the hidden teeth grind in his grin. He retrieved from the wastebasket two or three of the unspeakable cartoons Rife had drawn of her. He kept them at home, filed in a neat folder labeled “Mrs. Ben Daniels.” It seemed to him that if the time ever came when he could do so easily, he would show them to Mrs. D. and let her know who her real friends were.

  As for making friends with her (this was quite distinct from being her distant true friend), he had no capacities and no lucky prospects for advancing in this direction at all. Though he was on a retainer basis at the Studio, he did most of his work at home. He spent even less time at the shop than Leslie did, and, coming at irregular hours, he was never sure when a week might go by without his seeing her at all.

  She had a glass-partitioned cubicle next to String Bieman’s office. (Daddy Bieman had a smartly paneled, secluded office at the extreme rear of their floor in the Alleman Building.) All the regular staff of layout people, designers, typographers, photographers, salesmen and accountants seemed to have legitimate excuses for dropping in at her cubicle, and from her first month she ran a kind of morning salon—coffee and doughnuts and smart talk—to which he might have been welcomed if he had not supposed he disdained that. (These grown and balding men went sniffing after her like puppies, and he told himself at first, at least, that he would not. He had the reasonably correct impression that he would lower himself in Leslie’s eyes if he tried to hang around her cubicle with nothing much to say for himself.)

  Also—at first, at least—he had a dreamer’s exaggerated respect for Leslie’s talents and the amount of work she did. Before she ever put her auburn head in Bieman’s door, the scuttlebutt had informed him that Daddy B. had found a hotshot reporter from some big magazine or other to write copy for him. The Studio was beginning to branch out a little, to change itself into a combined ad agency and art shop, where for twenty years it had taken the art jobs that came its way, left the space selling and copy preparation to other agencies in town. They were doing some promotional material for the University that spring. Banks, churches, and a new Frontierland near the lake were being courted as clients, and Leslie was taken on to give tone to the new business they anticipated. Everyone said (and Patch listened like a spy) that she was doing “a fine job.” Everyone said she worked hard. He was pleased to hear it, as though the compliment were to himself. She was his lady, even back in the time when he saw himself the perpetually unrecognized courtly lover, mooning from afar.

  Not even mooning. He would not permit himself that, either. That would have been beneath his queer dignity. Rather, the tribute he paid her was to recognize her quality, to trouble her as little as possible, according to some notion of spacecraft chivalry he had picked up from the comic strips long ago.

  He had been intensely aware of her for three months before he even knew she recognized him as a regular member of Bieman’s staff. Maybe she thought he was another of the free-lancers who sometimes were called on for a special job.

  Then one rainy April afternoon he had ridden down from the seventh floor in an elevator with her. Just the two of them in the grimy, brown old cage that smelled of ancient cigars and cable grease. She was wearing an electric-blue raincoat that afternoon with a red polka-dot scarf squeezed up fluffily around her throat. Eyeing each other warily from opposite sides of the car, neither spoke until they were two flights above the ground floor.

  “You did that football painting for the Warbler,” she said in a voice full of wonder. The Warbler was the University annual. This year it was to have a frontispiece in full color. Patch had done the painting, brought it in the day before. Carter and his assistant were engraving it now. After they had photographed it, they had put it on an easel in the reception room.

  Patch said that yes he had. He was feeling a little breathless and excited as he always did when someone wanted to discuss the esthetic quality of his work. And he was fairly proud of this job.

  Leslie shook her head in apparent astonishment. He had never been shut in close enough to her before to realize how much taller than he she was. Either she must be a giantess or he was a schoolboy again. His mouth felt sticky as sometimes when he had ridden into outer space with Miss Hardy.

  “My God,” Leslie said. “You even put in all these tiny holes in their helmets. The labels on their jerseys. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  That was all the time they had for conversation that day. The spaceship came to earth, its doors slid open and Leslie walked quickly by herself a
cross the lobby.

  He was not sure whether she had been ridiculing him or praising him for the detail in his painting. But he watched her sprint across the sidewalk through a shower and throw herself into a cab—then turn to look back, surely to see if he had come out after her. His heart swelled with elation, as if he knew she had shared a dream with him. She had looked at his painting. She had seen the powerful bulging shoulders, the punishing cleats on the shoes of his football players, the heroic smiles as the ideal ball carrier set his foot on the neck of a prostrate opponent. She knew. Whatever crappy tastes she had in art, she could not have been entirely immune to the vision that had possessed him while he sat at home, far into the last ten nights, with his airbrush and his tiny sables shaping his dream of broken bones, touching in every detail.

  Nobody at the Studio—unless it was that old tub of guts at the switchboard, Dolores Calfert—could have guessed his passion for Leslie Daniels. Probably—and it was just as well—Mrs. Daniels herself had only fitful intuitions of the part she now played in his life.

  He gathered information about her. Dolly Sellers was one pretty good source. She was more in awe of Leslie’s personal air of authority, her vitality, and her endless sociability, and just as fascinated as he. And Dolly heard a lot—probably a lot that she didn’t comprehend, he thought. She nearly always went with Leslie on her coffee break in the morning, and pretty soon she knew not only that Dr. Daniels had a cozy little practice and a sports car that he doted on, but where and when the wedding had taken place and that it was one of those romantic marriages, uncertain up to the last minute because of the number of boyfriends making their final bids, that they had the wedding dinner at a Chinese place called Loo Chow’s, and that Leslie, girl athlete, had run the mile in high school, though she gave up everything but the modern dance in college when she lost weight.

  For this information Don Patch dated Dolly through several weeks. To get the real dope—girl talk—he had, of course, to seduce her.

  That was a partly revolting chore. He repeated it as infrequently as he could, just enough to keep Dolly off the track of his real feelings. He did a clean job of misleading her. She believed, for instance, that just because he continued to speak contemptuously of Leslie Daniels, he really thought Leslie was a pretentious, snotty bitch and, on account of her size, not his type. And Dolly would never know how, as she was bounced around his apartment floor in front of his aquariums, the truth that Leslie Daniels would never pig it like this blazed reassuringly in his head. He never imagined Leslie as going farther with anyone, husband included, than opening the top of a purple-and-pink smock. That revelation of unspeakable beauty would suffice the gentry and the artists of this world.

  Dolly, grateful as most women seemed to be for the bruising he gave her, relented thereafter in her defense of Leslie. She was his, on his side now. His thought was hers. So she confided at last what Leslie had told her in confidence (and probably as advice on the ways of the world, offered so she wouldn’t feel too bad about her own submissions): Leslie was no virgin when she got married. There had been men who.

  He took the news with a mixture of disgust and elation. “Why would she tell you?” he wanted to know.

  “I guess she doesn’t attach as much importance to that as … some of us do,” said hopeful Dolly, speaking from her proper instinct for monogamy, still kidding herself that if she remained loyal to her guilty conscience she might become the second Mrs. Don Patch.

  “Why would she necessarily tell you the truth?” asked Patch, who saw that the truth was too good for Dolly and supposed that Leslie would judge from the same loftiness as he.

  “Maybe she didn’t,” Dolly said. She wanted to believe whatever Don believed.

  And of course she had no way of knowing what that might be. No one had ever had. His wife had picked and picked and picked at the stone walls of his brain. Now, still bewildered but worn out and permanently broken of her curiosity about the artist’s mind, Mildred was back in Arkansas living with her parents and her two children, evidently quite content with the money he sent her each month in envelopes that contained no message from him. He had married her when he came home from the Korean War, before he understood that going to art school in Kansas City might change not only his image of the good life but his chances for getting it. At the Art Center there he had hung at the fringes of a gang of painters whose contempt for him and his wife he easily interpreted as contempt for her. When he saw that there was better to be had, he went after it. That was the way of the artist. He gave his wife The Moon and Sixpence to read. She thought it was a dandy book. She enjoyed it thoroughly, but missed the resemblance between himself and Strickland (or Paul Go Gan, who was behind it all) that she was supposed to grasp and adjust to. She knew he got into bed with the wives of several guys who didn’t like him; he told her when he had. But she thought that the wives didn’t like him either (they shared their husbands’ envy, he let her understand) and that confused her, for she could not afford to admit to herself that she didn’t like him either, though she had willingly borne him two children.

  Poor Mildred. She was happier back home in Arkansas, living in a comfortable old house enlivened by airbrush paintings of jets, destroyers, spacecraft, and infantrymen charging over the sulfur-yellow bodies of Oriental men and women. Hot evenings when she shared ice cream with the younger and older generations of her own blood, swinging in the darkness of the porch, she answered a lot of questions about how “Don was getting along with his art work” and took a lot of young cousins into the house to peer by artificial light at the melodramatic paintings. They were her excuse for being where she was while Don was where he was. Though she still could not understand quite why, she kept echoing the theme that artistic people work terribly hard with their minds and are therefore different.

  He made few friends with men. One reason (surely not the most important) was that he worked harder and on a different schedule than most of those he had a chance to know. From the time he entered art school he began to discover that his classmates put in an average of one-third to one-half the time that he did on their drawings or canvases. But it took him two or three years to be absolutely sure that this indolence of theirs—the unwillingness to spend nights as well as days rapt in the intense fiction that what they were depicting was a true and distinct world, a Creation to which they owed the breathless concern of the Creator refusing a break between the Third, Fourth, Fifth, or unbearable Sixth Day of the formation of the world—that this lack of commitment on their part accounted for their use of big, sloppy brushes and their taste in modern painting. They won the prizes and the approval of the instructors, but what he won from his fanatic concentration they would never know.

  The only one of the instructors (except the commercial art people, who said rather unenthusiastically that he was a whiz at certain types of rendering) who ever took a sustained interest in his work commented once, “If you were religious—if you had the temperament or vision or whatever the hell he had—you might end up a kind of William Blake.”

  Patch took this as a compliment. (Perhaps it had been meant as one.) He liked the hard, honest lines in Blake’s figures. The wooden musculature and articulation didn’t bother him. The unworldly backgrounds and drapery of male and female simply reminded him of those colored comics that had first aroused his impulse to take pencil in hand and draw. So he read biographies and prophetic books of Blake’s. He made his wife, like Blake’s, sit around naked with him while he worked, hours and days on end. He spoke to her prophetically (conversation with Mildred could only have been a bore, anyway); and when he was excruciatingly tired (and the hour was wrong to go find his classmates in the tavern near the school), and when he thought he had milked them for everything he might learn from them, when he could not stand quarreling with them again about de Kooning and Hoffman, he used her sexually. “An artist’s wife ought to be like a mattress”—he had read or heard that somewhere. Mildred was like a mattress.

&n
bsp; When he finally chased her home and moved like a lone wolf from Kansas City to a job that would presently lead him to the steady job in Sardis at Bieman’s Studio, he found that he still needed women for relaxation almost as constantly as he had needed her. Nothing else—not alcohol, not movies, not reading, though he indulged moderately in all these things—could cut the extreme and finally maddening tension he built up in his long periods of work.

  So what social life he had was geared to the constant search and the few reliable talents for seduction he had carried over almost unchanged from junior-high days. Persistence and insult were the foundations of his method. When he was a child at an ice-cream social once, he had stood where an outdoor bulb cast sharp shadows on the grass and had chunked rocks and sticks at the shadow of a snotty girl he yearned for. When he finally glanced up at the three-dimensional girl, seeing her aware of this symbolic abuse, he had been surprised to see the warmth and invitation of her smile.