“Sarah, this is another of the crew. Don Patch,” Leslie said. “Sarah Coleman. Mr. Patch is an … artist.”
He was furious with embarrassment. “Commercial artist,” he said with inept humility. “Leslie, how about it?”
She smiled her most innocent smile. “About? What?”
“I want to see you.”
“I’ll be in tomorrow. And the next day.”
“Now,” he said loudly. “Now. Today.”
“We’re in a hurry,” she said.
“I’m not,” Sarah said. “I can wait. I’ll go down to the corner—isn’t there a dime store? I can meet you back here.”
“We … are … in … a … hurry,” Leslie said into Sarah’s ear, clutching her arm. The elevator stopped at the main floor and several people idled aboard.
“Wait,” Patch said. He had caught up with them by the time they turned left down the sidewalk. He was drunk with the quick anger of humiliation. He lunged and caught Sarah by the arm. Her jaw literally dropped and her eyes bugged as he brought his face close to hers. “Tell your busy friend I’m getting horny,” he said. “Tell her I’ve got business to talk over with her in bed, that I need it now, not tomorrow.”
Then, while terror, shame (not for what he had done but for himself, for them), and rage played hot and cold on his skin, he thought all three of them were going to faint there among the morning pedestrians. He wanted to plead with Leslie, Why’d you make me do this? But she was the first to speak. All composure lost, she wailed, “Why’d you have to do this? If you had something to say to me, I’d have … talked.”
“Taxi!” Sarah shouted. She stiff-armed Patch twice in the face, backing toward the curb. A taxi stopped directly behind her as she retreated. She flopped gracelessly onto the seat, waving arms and legs like a kitten defending itself, said, “Quick, Leslie!” For a moment in the farce of action they were mad, glad, sad New York girls again, acting out some routine from a musical comedy winding deviously toward a happy end.
Leslie shook her head. “No, hon. You go on. Go on home. I’ll be there pretty soon. I’d better talk to him.”
“I have some rights,” Patch spluttered.
Finally, with mournful dignity, she bowed her head a little and said, “I suppose you have.”
chapter 18
MAYBE THE GUILTY FLEE, Leslie thought, if no man pursues or pursueth. (You can’t fight home truths, however stale; their very staleness may be a part of their smothering force.) But when the guilty flee (when she fled down a corridor of days and weeks, nights and months) everyone and everything is swept into pursuit like a wakened pack.
If she had just stood firm on her sincere conviction (wasn’t it sincere? It must be, since she had entertained it both before and after the event in question) that a limited adultery with no strings attached is, at worst, a moderate misdemeanor to which a “person willing to take the consequences” is somehow, as it were, in our time, “entitled”—oh, shit, was she to be dragged back into the dark ages of everybody’s superstition and feelings just because she wavered a little out of respect for their damn prejudices? (She thought of her admissions to Ben as concessions.)
“I won’t be,” she said to Sarah. Of course within hours after that mad scene on the street—among the affluent morning shoppers—she had to tell Sarah what was (or rather had been) going on this summer. “All right, I had me a one-night stand with a guy. It’s all getting to be like the Scarlet Letter. F.”
“He doesn’t, well, look like a Don Juan,” Sarah ventured, rather smug that she was in a position to make this point, after having endured Leslie’s remedy for her complexion.
“Male-type cats are just as gray in the dark as female-type,” Leslie said with that old King Street swagger which once upon a time had kept Sarah at bay like a lion tamer’s cap gun. “Dear God, he’s not a Don Juan. You know, sweetie, I walked about a mile with him, over to a dear little shady bench in Sergeant Driscoll Park, you know. And I listened for most of an hour. And do you know what his complaint is? I—me, Leslie Skinner Daniels—seduced him, used him, and then tried to ‘cast him off.’ He said, ‘Cast me off.’ And he cried. Oh, I despise men who cry.”
“Oh well,” Sarah said. “As long as Ben doesn’t know.”
“As long as Ben doesn’t know,” Leslie agreed cautiously.
“I think you’re a big fool to have done it. Unless, you know, it’s not very good with Ben. Or I suppose it always gets tiresome. With one person.”
“I was a fool.”
“Ben’s so good. So gentle. He really babies you. He’s a saint.”
“They’re the hardest people to live with,” Leslie said. “You feel your inadequacies so sharply.”
“Inad—? You mean you couldn’t …?
“I can do anything,” Leslie said, her eyes getting stormy, full of warning. “Don’t push me, hon. Don’t fish. You never know what you’ll catch.”
Sarah was diverted by the warning. She skimmed off and began an apparently endless catalogue of her “search.” “Isn’t it terrible that women are evidently much better off usually—tranquiler—with their second husband? I mean, tragic really.”
Leslie squealed a top sergeant’s laugh of total disdain. “No one would be so out of her right little mind as to entertain the fantasy of marrying our boy Patch. For one thing, he’s a mythomaniac, like the one in Man’s Fate. He thinks he’s living the artist life, God help us, because he’s so out of touch, because he’s clever with some realistic techniques. A schiz, a far-out. Furthermore, sad to say, I don’t like him. Further … you saw him.”
“Though small—”
“Don’t talk dirty. Phui. Not even the simple shepherdess Dolly Sellers would marry that one. Unless I’m being thoughtfully lied to, which I probably am.”
“I don’t know Dolly Sellers.”
“She’s a lump of poor clay at the Studio. She and I confide. She tells me his atrocities and shortcomings. She’s his regular lay.”
“Oh.”
“Oh what, for Christ’s sake? Are you hinting I’m jealous?”
“Now, don’t jump down my throat. I accept all this hogwash about a one-night stand and so on and so on, but I’ve been around enough to know these things don’t always work out rationally. I knew a girl who was raped—Evelyn Conrad; you knew her too, though you didn’t know that. She used to get terrifically jealous when she’d see this fellow later with other women.” She remembered this, was sure of it, though she could no longer remember why, if the crime deserved the name she gave it, the man had been free to go around (and in the same neighborhood, the same circles) with others.
On and on they went, spoiling what was supposed to be a nice afternoon among the pleasures of well-heeled Midwestern suburbia. This was the fourth day of Sarah’s visit and her last afternoon in town and Leslie had wanted her to understand the difference in their luck. She wanted to queen it over her old friend, because otherwise she would have had to envy her.
Her hopes had been spoiled. She was caught in a pointless, endless exchange of misinformation about love and the female—while they swam at the Highland pool, had drinks on Evy’s Venetian Roof.
If the two of them agreed on one point, really, it was that Ben shouldn’t know.… So it was small wonder that Sarah boarded her train at midnight with her morale definitely improved, her pimples looking better. She had understood with intuitive certainty that Ben did know.
Dolly’s attack—pursuit, or whatever it ought to be called—was sharper and subtler, more cruel, really in that it plainly came from such weakness. She quit her job.
The morning she was told this fact, Leslie guessed the reason. It raged in her mind like an accusation of her own littleness. Dolly needed the job. Leslie didn’t need hers—or needed it much more, but for less honorable reasons. She had drinks with Patch, who ultimately, roundabout, and slyly, confirmed her guess. “I suppose she must have found out about us,” he said.
“There’s only one way she co
uld have found out.”
“It was when I was so mad at you, when I was writing you those letters,” he said. “Sure, I told her. I might have told a lot of people if you hadn’t come around and started acting human.”
“But why did she wait until now—if you’re telling the truth—to quit?”
“Dolly’s got some funny bourgeois ideas about right and wrong,” he said, grinning. “It wasn’t just what happened. I told her how I felt about you. She thought it over. She didn’t want to be in the way. She thought it would be better if she didn’t see either of us again. I mean if things were going to go on.”
“Nothing’s going to go on,” Leslie said. “I’ve explained it and explained it. But Dolly—”
Well, she had ideas about right and wrong, too. She was a little jealous of Dolly for making the gallant, severing gesture before she had, but since there was no way to retrieve lost time, she followed Dolly’s lead. When she told Daddy Bieman she was leaving, he held onto her hand and wrist for nearly an hour in his office. “We just can’t lose you,” he kept saying. “You’ve got to keep contact. It isn’t your work, it’s you. We’re birds of a feather. You’re one of the guys here, you know.”
“I’ve felt a little uneasy since Dolores died,” she said.
“Calfert was one of the guys, too,” he said. “Well, keep in touch.”
He gave her a hundred dollars for severance pay—took it out of his wallet like an indulgent grandfather wanting his indulgence recognized by a spoiled child.
Before she could get out of the office and out from under the fountain of his sentimentality, he added a second bill and made an indecent proposal. Mother Bieman was going to the Mayo Clinic for a checkup and … would Mrs. Daniels …? No? Some time later? Well, as long as she kept in touch.
There was no reason to conclude from his offer that he had heard anything touching the truth of her conduct. The only thing was that in other circumstances she might have laughed at his senile bawdiness. Now it seemed to hang around her for days afterward like a bad smell of uncertain origin. Maybe he did know about her and the contemptible Patch. Maybe everyone knew. Probably not. Possibly.… The possibility pursued her.
It was near the end of August when Leslie quit her job at Bieman’s Studio. She had not discussed the move with Ben. As far as he could tell from the diminished but never totally halted flow of gossip she brought home from the shop, she still enjoyed the “guys” there as much as ever. Lester Glenn, Seymour Rife, Carl Tremayn, Don Patch, String Bieman, Ozzie Carter, Dolly Sellers, and the rest—he had not laid eyes on any of them this summer, but in the unaltered flow of Leslie’s gossip, he heard familiar additions to their sayings, their homelife, cute comments of their children, romances (the character named Patch and the character named Dolly Sellers, for instance, broke up and made up with positively indecent regularity; Leslie appeared in Dolly’s corner of the ring like the second of an unpromising flyweight, a stumble-bum with heart) and the intrigues of Daddy Bieman.
One evening she simply announced that she had quit. “So many other things that could be done,” she said dryly and lightly, not so much inviting his comment as inviting him to listen to a parliamentary decision already voted on by the representatives in her head. “I think I’ll fly home for a week. I’ll stay with Flannery in the mornings when I come back. Nothing’s been done to the house for so long.”
“All right.”
“Maybe I’ll start to look for a permanent place for us when I come back. Somewhere beyond suburbia. Ozzie Carter says to scout the little towns north of the lake.”
“Good.”
“Assuming we’re going to be permanent.” Not the faintest emotional preference colored this half-question. She was at least pretending to offer him the choice of splitting or staying, now that he had had plenty of time to weigh her crime.
“Sure,” he said.
She could not make out exactly what he was up to these days. She could not be certain that he was changed at all. When she changed jobs, it was like passing through the River Jordan and coming out all purged on the other side. She was vaguely aware, then morally certain, then rationally convinced in detail (and by counting back the days on her fingers (that he was at great pains to steer clear of Their Subject since the very day she left the Studio for good. She verified this the way a woman verifies the time of her conception by counting back from the eventless hour of her certainty.
If she was right—and she knew she was right—it meant Ben was pretty sure her affair had involved one of the “guys” from the Studio. Not too hard a guess. She remembered that the identity of the man had seemed to torture him. She repented causing him this unnecessary suffering—as it now appeared to be.
So she told him that Daddy Bieman had brought her home that night, both of them “pretty well canned,” and had made her “a couple of times” on the living room couch.
Only Leslie Skinner Daniels could have cooked and seasoned the lie so carefully with grains of truth. It came out as a long story, beginning with the banter beside the pool at the farm, touching on the way she’d been “really moved” by his comments on “America and art and why we’re here, not in New York,” on his joking invitation (Freud tells us that jokes always camouflage a serious intent; this proved how right he was) to come look at his paintings, and ending with his very recent offer to give her two hundred dollars.
“I should have taken it,” she said. She liked the touch of boldness contributed to her broth by such an attitude. To have taken money, however long after the service, would have classified her, once and for all. Once and for all they would label her act. Realize it was an ugly but redeemingly reckless sport. Wouldn’t they? “I’m really sorry I didn’t take his money,” she said.
She had chosen well the evening for her confession. She and Ben had been at cocktails with forty nice people in a doctor’s house. Now, after dinner, they were drifting around town, exploring new bars, finding nice ones (ones that seemed to them again glamorous and exciting because in their autumn mood they felt themselves a bit glamorous and still, after the years they had known each other, excitable; still capable of renewal as the seasons passed.) A good little colored band hooted and moaned through a barbaric indoor gloom as Leslie shrugged and began her confession. A bony, full-breasted chocolate girl sang of lamentable love.
While Leslie rose to her theme, Ben sat curled at his ease on the other side of their booth, studying his hands as if he held something in them. He did not once look up at her until she was finished, but she felt his relaxation was a support. When she had finished, she reached over and lifted his face to make him look at her. “Shouldn’t I have told you?” she asked earnestly. Had she chosen the wrong identification after all to assign the man? “Not ever? I wanted to get it off my conscience if I have one, and if I don’t, what is it that hurts?” Calm as Madame Roland on the scaffold, she said, “You can condemn me now. I know he’s a repulsive old man, but—”
“No,” he said. He was smiling like a Buddha, a smile that would have been silly if it had not been dignified by his great wish for everything to be all right.
“I’m glad you know, and I can’t explain why I wouldn’t tell you when you asked.”
“Stubbornness. Pigheadedness.”
She laughed with him ruefully and agreed.
“It’s all right,” he said. “We’re past the point where it matters.”
“Are we, doctor? Are we?” Her eyes searched his face like fingers reading Braille.
In some novel aspect of their physical selves, they were more truly husband and wife than they could have been before “the trouble.” She gave what treachery to him had taught her how to give, as if deceiving him had taught her to deceive the watchdogs who had guarded her maidenhood like a prisoner. They went together as far as gentleness would take them, on and down into a sleepiness where each lost the defining lineaments of male and female. Yours mine, mine yours.… How could you tell and what did it matter? They were togethe
r like sleeping angels.
As she drowsed toward sleep, she remembered to be so pleased with her lie about old Bieman that she began to think it must have been the truth. It had worked. Ergo, it was true. The lie, which proved her capable of anything, had worked like forgiveness. Now all was healed for Ben, and that was her forgiveness.
But the salt of pain was absent. Something in her had not been compelled, and whatever had been left out blossomed into the confidence that she was able, still, to be just with little Don Patch. His “rights” were not so great as he thought, but honestly, honestly (lying to others, honesty with herself became a greater obligation, she felt), he had some.
Summer was ending in a languor of drought when Leslie went to New York. Fall had begun when she returned to Sardis, bright crisp days with frequent, brief showers in the mornings and protracted golden afternoons; very springlike. Leslie responded to the seasonal change like a bride beginning a new life in the newness of spring. Or perhaps like a woman sweeping away the ashes after a war, completely undaunted and even already forgetful of havoc.
She had brought new clothes from New York. She was a new woman. Let everything begin from that, she seemed to say.
For a week she and Flannery scrubbed and waxed and painted. Black and white sisters. Nobody knowed the trouble they’d seen, but to come home as Ben did to find them in the kitchen in their smocks drinking beer together and yarning like fishermen, nobody would guess they had a care in the world except what to clean tomorrow.
Then for another week Leslie cruised the small towns just north of Sardis, presumably looking for abandoned mansions that with a little ingenuity could be fixed up to have the coziness of an apartment, the grandeur of a château. Perhaps she was looking for a farmhouse like the Biemans’ as a base for the new phase of her life which was beginning with such hints of energy and large determination.
At the end of September she tried to promote a job for Garland Roberts. She got into negotiations with Dave Lloyd on this matter, told Garland that even though she might have to start at the paper with a pencil-sharpening job, she could hope to work up sometime to the position of reporter.
Pretty Leslie Page 31