Pretty Leslie

by R. V. Cassill

  When he returned she was standing again, again drawn as if hypnotically to approach the fish and peer into the one-foot thickness of water as if it were a bottomless ocean. She was leaning back like a model in a pose, and one hand was lifting her hair from her sweating neck. “God. It’s as if she died on purpose today,” she said. “I mustn’t say that, but I must. Everyone else has a right to his habits of mind. I have too, and I won’t be cheated just because I see connections between things that other people don’t. Every time I let some boy kiss me or.… In high school, I swear, I absolutely swear my mother would be on crutches when I got home from a mad date or cut herself with a paring knife or break out in a hideous rash so I’d have to feel guilty. She did. No wonder I’m what I am. And I deserve something. I deserve one minute I don’t have to account for to anybody but myself. One minute. You said I was cheating. Last night you said it. I could have killed you for that. I can still kill you. I wasn’t. I wasn’t. I wasn’t. I’m the one who’s been cheated. Shit. Why am I a woman? I’ve got to have babies. Someone’s always got to be on top of me. Oh no. Oh no. Look. You get to do your own work, at least. Look. Nobody stops you and tells you what you ought to be wearing, how you ought to make people think of you, what you can or can’t do. I won’t have it. I won’t be guilty for her dying. I won’t. I won’t. I won’t.”

  He had thought he was through, that he had made it through. He supposed, Donald Patch did, that if nothing else would protect him, his fatigue would. Last night had exhausted him, emotionally and physically. He couldn’t have repeated any part of it if he had wanted to.

  But the pure fury was there in his stuffy apartment that night. And if Leslie did not truly know why she had come—even after Patch understood and tried feebly to avoid it—something else knew for her.

  It made her drink and babble. Before he felt the full support and incitement of alcohol in his veins, he saw how quickly the bourbon had hit her. He had only the faintest idea of what she was talking about—mostly about herself, how and why she had wanted to be a writer, how she’d walked along the railroad tracks at sundown wanting to eat dirt and tear herself with her nails; he retrieved only such scattered fragments from her autobiographical spew. It excited him tentatively to see her abandon herself to the drink—as if he were watching her give herself to some golden space athlete, writhing in the big chair before his very eyes. And for the first time (perhaps the first time in his life it had ever happened with a woman) he felt some unwanted response to her as a person, a human thing bound to the cross of her nature and of time. The lost, diverted, imperfect artist in each was recognizing its broken complement. He wanted to talk to her. Really talk.

  He had things to say. He could tell her, as he had never come close to telling Mildred, how he had felt when he read The Moon and Sixpence, how truly clean it was when Gauguin or Strickland or whatever you wanted to call him had renounced the world for art. He wanted to tell her about his discharge from the Army, how he had never imagined that he could really be an artist, had never known what art was in reality, until one day he had laid over in Chicago on his way home from Camp McCoy, had wandered into the Art Institute, spent five hours there, had come out to sit on the steps beside one of the lions and had broken into tears, crying all by himself, at what he had learned in that one afternoon. One evening in the K. C. Art Institute he had been alone in their Egyptian collection. He had stared at a cat-headed goddess until she, basalt and eye fused in some fearful compound, animal and divinity measuring him, had stared back. The awe he had felt. Never anything like that since. All his work was just what others would have said it was—the worthless, laborious excrement of his fear.

  He might have told her that. She gave him no chance. She worked herself up like an Indian going on the warpath. Before he had found a single decent break in her stream of talk, she had got on his lap.

  She was a heavy girl. He felt her weight and her power crushing him. He responded with anger to her insensitivity. Didn’t she guess at all how tired he was? From the anger, flowing straight on like molten stone, his sex was roused.

  She got what she came for.

  Again they were most of the night in bed. As on the previous night, there were alternations of tenderness and furious hallucination. He loved her. She frightened him. He punished her.

  Once when they stopped to talk (was it talk? He felt as if they were both wearing rubber masks and that the masks grinned and sounded off to each other), she said, as if it were a great joke, “‘Exhaust Fumes Kill.’” Her amusement offended him. He called her a cheating, dirty bitch and made her tell him he was a better cock than her husband. Bigger, harder. Stayed longer.

  That was what caught him, drove him on, would not let him be released from her. She would do things—at his command, sometimes of her volition—that no woman had ever done for him before, though he told her “the niggers” had. The sheer realization that she had crossed the last boundary of abandonment was like a circuit of shocks that kept his tired body performing.

  That night ended with a farce. There was light in the east, dawn coming, and she still refused to leave. At least she wouldn’t go unless he drove her home. “Damn it, I’ve never been with a male type who would shove me in bed and not take me home. You’re a mean little nothing, Patch. You’re not an artist. You and your silly hairbrush pictures. Pitchers. Buckeyes. Do you even know what a buckeye painting is?”

  “Airbrush,” he corrected, pulling on his clothes, turning his back on her and hopelessly combing his short curls in front of the mirror. “You’re drunk.”

  “I’m very drunk. You know it, I’m drunk. And you’re going to take me to my door. Home.”

  “You can stay here. Sleep on the floor.”

  “You going to work?”

  “I work here.”

  “I’m not going to work today. Too haunting. Dolores will nawt be theh. Dear God.” She curled up in a ball on the daybed, face tight against her knees. She tried to pull the blanket from the floor to cover herself.

  Finally, drunk or not, she left. Presumably she drove home by herself.

  And then he was sure it was over. They had never pretended that love was involved in what they had done. It had ended in a fight. What could bring them together again?

  During that day he came to the conclusion that she would probably quit her job, now. After all, she didn’t really need it. He thought she would be ashamed to see him again. Surely she knew he would not quit. The job was necessary to his career.

  She came back to his place that night. She was just there, like a duty laid at his doorstep. She had not phoned in advance.

  Whether or not he figured all the reasons for her coming again, he knew that she had come because she was afraid. Afraid of time running out on her, he supposed, of the husband coming home next day and making her face up.

  She had got her hair cut, so that it seemed she was trying to look like a boy. Or maybe she thought it would do for a whole personality change, though that masquerade and the others she attempted were too thin to hide the fundamental fear.

  He considered the likelihood that she was afraid he might give her secret away to the husband. Well, maybe he would. After the hostilities of last night, he had told himself that the doctor (a figure looming more and more visibly, though falsely, in his thoughts) deserved a better wife. Through part of the day while he worked, he had felt a growing, comradely sympathy for the doctor and all the trouble he must have had with this one.

  Yet, in the situation, with the physical Leslie there before him, her fear and his disgust combined to rouse him. They worked for him as anger had worked the night before. He could not restrain himself. The temptation to pick on the fallen was too strong.

  Only this time she was utterly placid, inactive. She lay like a penitent grateful for her punishment. She got it.

  Now surely it was over. All over.

  He did not go to the Studio until Thursday of that week, and then he was surprised to see her “still there
”—as he put it to himself. That day he got only a long-distance, back view of her as she sat in her cubicle, all alone for a change, rattling on her typewriter. Or pretending, at least, to be very busy. He thought she must have sensed his presence, coming and going. Someone would tell her he had delivered a batch of work.

  It was in the next week that he realized she was going to try to carry it off as if nothing had happened. He tamped that knowledge away like a man tamping powder into a muzzle-loader, grinned, and felt his respect for her begin to settle back like an image reflected on water that has been disturbed by something flung into it. Good for her, he thought. She had more strength—or character, or just endurance—than he had believed. And then when he got from her a few signs that their affair was permanently closed, he relaxed. She spoke to him with the distant, aloof friendliness he had known in the spring. She kidded him about Dolly without batting an eye. Hard as nails. Good.

  But his relief was no more stable than his disgust and dislike for her. As soon as he saw (what she had meant him to see) how a lady puts the lid on an inconvenient, juicy memory and stashes it on the shelf with the other preserves and jellies, he knew the bad boy’s temptation to wreck things again. To smash the whole shelf. She went a little too far, he thought, in her pretense that nothing had happened. After all.… After all!

  He told Dolly Sellers. They were sitting in his car at a drive-in movie, drinking beer. Bored with the huge spectacle on the screen, teased with the memory of the excitement and terror he had known in pure form for exactly three nights of his life, he laid his head on Dolly’s shoulder and said, “You know our friend Mrs. Daniels? You know something? Want to know something?”

  Dolly thought he was lying. Even after he began to fill in the details, she said doggedly that it was just his nasty imagination. But it was interesting to watch how the story—truth or fiction—made her, so to speak, come apart at the seams. As she kept on insisting he was a liar, her insistence became an indirect plea to tell her more, more.

  That night in his apartment, behind the emblematic sign warning that exhaust fumes kill, she wandered around in a kind of awe, touching things with a trailing finger, peering into the murk of the aquariums as if Leslie’s reflected face might be still imprisoned there to stare back at her from a drowned girl’s eyes.

  She said, “Tell me, do you love her? Or what?”

  Patch said, “Yes.”

  “I mean, do you want to marry her, or what? I mean, if she loved you, would she get a divorce?”

  “Some people don’t think in those terms,” he said. Leslie and he. He and Leslie. He felt transformed, the initiate of an unworldly society. “Some people don’t place the highest value on marriage,” he told her. He was thinking of Strickland and Paul Gauguin. He understood the peculiar sort of gratitude he owed to Leslie Daniels for elevating him beyond bourgeois morality.

  The next day he invented a reason for going to the Studio, walked right into her cubicle (as he had never done before unless others were in there gassing and joking with her), sat down beside her desk and waited for her to finish reading the mimeographed sheets she held in her hand.

  Though she did not turn her eyes enough to see the tip of his two-tone shoes or the ink-stained delicate fingers that twitched his cigarette, she knew at once who her visitor was and probably what he wanted. She knew what he wanted, but he wasn’t sure yet. Maybe just to be friends. Maybe just to laugh together about what had happened and agree (with the lofty smile that she would teach him) that it had been fun. Jolly, what? He could pretty well imagine her saying it, just like that.

  Her neck and face were empurpled when she finally dropped the trembling sheets and asked, “What do you want?”

  “Waiting. I’m waiting for String to look over some roughs. I didn’t have anything to do.”

  “I have.”

  Her eyes flared like ray guns. She was trying to disintegrate him. In spite of sitting in the catbird seat—great God, it was she, not he, who should have been trembling like the guilty sinner—he felt like a schoolboy called on to explain his inexplicable breach of decency. Neither spoke until she realized their terrible, silent hostility would give them away to anyone who happened by. Then she said, “Really, I have more than enough on my mind this morning.” She didn’t look as if she had slept well. “I want to get away early today.”

  “Going swimming?” he asked politely. “It’s a hot one. A genuine scorcher.”

  “Yes,” she said grudgingly.

  “Going swimming?” he asked as if he had not heard her at all. “With your husband?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.” He nodded owlishly, rounding his eyes and his mouth to signify in dumb show that he could have said a whole lot about that if he wanted to. What, with your husband for once? And after swimming, something else, hey? With your husband this time?

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand the … objective of this conversation,” Leslie said.

  He got up then, loitering toward the door, terribly, terribly sad and terribly hurt. He had not come in out of hostility. For whatever reason he had come, he had not wanted to fight. So she kicked him in the teeth. “Well, I’m sorry I bothered you,” he said. “Me, I’m just a buckeye painter. I don’t dig all this Hoffmande Kooning stuff. Pardon me for being a cockroach.”

  “Oh, please,” she said. “It’s too hot for all that. I don’t understand why Bieman can’t afford air conditioning. Why I work for a man who.…”

  He nursed the offense she had given him until it turned in the only direction it could have. Then he wrote her a letter, which he put in an envelope marked PERSONAL, PERSONAL, PERSONAL; he sealed it carefully, and left it in the middle drawer of her desk one afternoon.

  The stiff and stylized letter (nothing offensive in either statement or allusion) ended with a request for a reply. “I believe I am entitled to that at least,” he wrote.

  He waited nine days, avoiding all contact with her for that time, giving her her chance, depriving her of excuses. When she had given no indication of getting his message, he wrote again. Again he was careful of his terms. It was a letter from a sensitive friend. He mailed it to her house.

  It came back unopened inside an envelope with the printed return address of Dr. Ben Daniels, M.D., F.A.A.P. For most of an afternoon, unable to turn to the solace of his work, Patch circled the drafting table where the intact envelope lay like a sachet of poison.

  He got out his old Remington from under the bed and typed a letter to Dr. BD, MD, FAAP. Just the facts. The simple facts. Signed, respectfully yours, Donald Van Tyler Patch.

  The sight of his bold signature under the nitroglycerin facts seemed to him the most glaring exposure of himself he had ever conceived. (As if somehow, that name in blue on the speckled typewritten page were the substitute for all the great drawings he had meant, once, to make.) A drop of blood would complete the design. The doctor was bigger than he. What was more likely than that the doctor would hunt him down and beat the piss out of him, or make him eat the letter? He laughed angrily and tore the sheet up.

  Then he got drunk. He shambled naked around his apartment workshop like William Blake with no Mrs. Blake to keep him company. He stuck his hand, once, elbow deep in one of the aquariums and studied the queer distortions the water gave it. If he could copy this distortion in a painting, would it be modern enough to suit people with ordinary modern tastes? The hand seemed to be detached from his body. To prove it was not, he caught a little fantail and laid her in an ashtray.

  He sat for a long time drinking and watching her flop amid the butts and ashes until her bright scales were foul and she died.

  That night he dreamed that the doctor had him on an obstetrician’s table. Was cranking up his legs tied to the stirrups. Was approaching him with ornate-handled carving knife and fork. He screamed as he woke.

  Later he dreamed that he saw Leslie emerge from a plain of black water. Her hair was plastered obnoxiously to her head and neck. In her mouth she h
eld a red rubber bone of the kind one buys for dogs.

  He dreamed that he was dressed in an explorer’s costume and pith helmet; that he had fallen into a jungle bog or pit of quicksand; that the child Leslie was watching him from the bordering underbrush; that she would not hand him the stick he begged her for.

  The next day he wrote “I want to see you” on a card and stuck it, unsigned, in her typewriter. He began to plot the steps by which he would tighten the pressure until she gave in. Call it blackmail if you wanted to. He had some rights, he told himself. As a matter of fact, he had some rights her husband didn’t.

  On the day that card was waiting for her, she brought a friend with her to work.

  Patch was there early that morning, fussing at the table and cupboard assigned him (where infrequently he did quick changes or touched up his things). It seemed to him possible that there might be fireworks when she found the card. Out of curiosity and some vague hope, he had wanted to be on hand—at the same time close to the exit door in case he thought it better to run.

  Nothing happened. There was no sign. She came into the place jabbering with this made-up string bean, a stylish-looking doll with a bad complexion. They went directly to Leslie’s cubicle where she could not have helped seeing his card. Then she must have tossed it right into the wastebasket or tucked it in her purse.

  She introduced the friend to everyone except him and generally carried on as though she was the boss’s daughter instead of an employee like everyone else. She couldn’t have done a lick of work, and before eleven she and the friend said goodbye for the day.

  He followed them to the elevator. There were two strangers aboard with the three of them and he saw no possibility of speaking until those two got off at the third floor. As the doors glided shut he said, “Well?” He thought that Leslie was suppressing a militant smile, the smile of someone ready to do battle happily.