Pretty Leslie

by R. V. Cassill

“If you say so, then perhaps you know,” Martha said, with scorn burning unevenly in her voice. She was trying to play Medea, but she had no children of her own to sacrifice, and the horrid appetite for blood was contradicted by her conviction that she really loved Leslie for undisciplined wonders and even her unconventionality.

  Ah, Christ, she knew nothing—except what Ben knew too: that whatever ailed Leslie was in some mysterious way contagious; that always around her there had been and would be an epidemic of disasters large or small. There was no second Troy for her to burn. She had fallen in the tinder of shabby, yearning lives. She, last of all, would foresee exactly what harms she might do to people. “So we have to take care of her in areas where she’s blind,” Martha said.

  “Yes,” said Ben, whose gut was full of fire or sometimes ice. He had heard the same commandment from other, more authoritative lips than Martha’s.

  “I made up my mind last summer to accept anything from Leslie,” Martha said. It was her one grand gesture—and it was rather spoiled if Ben swore to her there was nothing to forgive between Dave and Leslie. In spite of her determination not to burn, Leslie had given her the hotfoot by coming up with Garland. The pretty arsonist was still at large, and those who loved her tolerantly must get the matches out of her hands. “If it wasn’t Dave—”

  Ben had been resting his face in his hands for several minutes. When he lifted it to reply, he might have scared Martha into silence if she had really been attentive to his expression. “I’m not going to discuss Leslie with you,” he said. The you would have killed her if she hadn’t been down at grass level sniffing like a bloodhound.

  “—it can’t have been that incredible Patch.”

  This was not the first time Ben had heard the name. He had heard it very frequently from Leslie. The adjective fitted the figure that Leslie had drawn for him in her caricaturing stories—the incredible Patch, goofy Don Juan, seducer of little naive girls … girls with a personality defect … not girls with big handsome loving professional men as husbands … little Patch would never dare aim so high. Already a faint and recognizable trace was appearing in the confusion, something that linked the facts he already knew like an imaginary line, like the mythic figure one’s eye draws over the points of the stars, like the figure of a child-killing giant that a pitying diagnostician may read from a skimpy chart.

  “Ho,” he said. “That little eccentric fellow where she used to work?”

  Martha had been guessing fanatically. She had laid eyes on Patch exactly once—on a day when she lunched with Leslie and her husband. Fishing, going fishing. There had been some talk about his always fishing … and the mad, blind pride of Leslie saying “me” to explain what the man was fishing for. Maybe some time when the talk had gone back to Dolores Calfert’s death, she had heard Leslie say, “We took her home in the rain.” We.…

  Nothing. The frantic, baffled, long-maturing guesses of a desperately envious woman. But in Ben’s face some undisguisable recognition of the same name.

  “It couldn’t have been Patch,” she said. “It’s unthinkable. And I want you to remember, Ben, if you feel you can’t see me again after I’ve said these unforgivable things, that it hurt to get them out. It hurt like hell.”

  She had taken the scent. One would have had to kick her in the head to get her off it, as one kicks a hound compelled to ignore all halloos or whistles or commands when it smells not only the new scent of the running creature but the fear of death, that irresistible quarry, stretching the steps, hovering under leaves and grass blades, bidding, Come, follow to the end.

  She had no notion she was hounding Leslie. She had gone after her own problems. In the classic manner (or in imitation of something she had seen in a Bergman movie, something Continental) she had arranged a showdown with young Miss Roberts.

  Miss Roberts had not needed to see the movies. She had the classic manner. It was a gift of unperturbed nature. On the one hand she scarcely bothered to conceal her contempt of the older woman’s complexion, features, figure and coarse black hair (she scarcely bothered to feel the contempt either—why should she?). On the other, she was innocent. If Dave Lloyd had slobbered over the pure alabaster of her youth, he had jolly well done so in private, savoring his anticipations and gnawing the dry bone of promises never articulated by anything louder than the hiss of nylon when she rubbed her knees together. She was chaste as the snow that would in its own time end this season of tangled farce and unspeakable torment. She had had “luncheon” once with Mr. Lloyd, yes. She had gone with him to a “place” where he possibly intended her to have a drink. She had drunk 7-Up. Two 7-Ups, to keep the record exactly straight, while Mr. Lloyd, who seemed to know what he was doing, had nine or ten Gibsons. Then—she did not mind being frank, since she had nothing whatever to be ashamed of (and since she could certainly see, as anyone with eyes could, why Martha might be worried)—frankly she had gone to a motel once with Mr. Lloyd. She would certainly not explain the circumstances in detail. It was merely that she had finally “perceived” not only what Mr. Lloyd was up to, but how recklessly far he was prepared to go. She had gone to the motel with him in order to be sure of strict privacy while she tried to reason with him and get him to come to his senses.

  That, in all its horror, was the simple truth. Martha could only gnash her teeth and try to swallow it. The chunk was too big to go down. If she had paused to take good stock of her position, she might have seen she could stand to be the wife of a philanderer; it was considerably harder to be the wife of a ridiculously unsuccessful one.

  She wanted to bury Garland under an avalanche. She had only wads of tissue paper to fling. She flung them anyway. She knew that Garland respected Mrs. Daniels, and Mrs. Daniels would be told forthwith that Garland did not deserve her confidence.

  Was she crazy? Garland wanted to know in all sincerity. “You must be crazy. My friend Mr. Smothers warned me about Mrs. Daniels long ago. She’s got a steady boyfriend who lives across the river. Vendham—Mr. Smothers—knows who he is.”

  Before Garland let her out of the trap into which she had stuck her neck, Martha knew too. At any rate her suspicions were confirmed by something Vendham Smothers had heard from Flannery, who had overheard a few telephone conversations that didn’t sound quite right to her.

  Confirmed suspicions plus a badly dented ego and a wish to be helpful had brought Martha to something she had never done in her life before. She went spying. She had a name to go on. She had a telephone book from which to get the address. She knew Leslie’s schedule. She needed no more.

  From a candy shop across the street she watched Leslie arrive in a cab before the building with its morbid sign. She watched Leslie scamper for a green door and start upstairs beyond its tall, narrow windows. It was nearly two hours before Leslie came down again and walked north to a bus stop. Now that her spying was successful, Martha made up her mind never to tell what she knew. Unless at some just imaginable crisis in the Danielses’ lives it became expedient to use her information.

  Waiting for an overt crisis can be a dull, dry business. Many people maintain a façade of tranquility which may be a blessing to their friends and social peers but is no service to themselves. Heart disease and ulcers are the only too well-known consequences of repressions, not least among professional people, and now it was clear to Martha that in spite of what had been said about taking care of Leslie, it was Ben who best deserved consideration.

  Something else bothered her about the impression Ben and Leslie gave of going on exactly as lovingly as before. They still saw the same friends and acquaintances on about the same schedule. Still gave parties and went to others. Would still pop up downtown at some theater or bar, looking pleased with each other’s company. And this, ever so faintly but definitely, hinted at collusion. Not only was there a continuing irregularity. It must have been agreed on.

  Martha was in collusion with exactly nobody in this world on anything that counted, and she felt the anxiety of the natural-born insider
left out. Suppose Ben had quite consciously lied to her about Leslie and Dave? He had been gone several days last summer. Both Patch and Dave might have profited from whatever agreement he had with Leslie. Just as Macbeth had murdered sleep, Leslie Daniels murdered the assurance of those who thought they had taken her measure.

  Martha came to Ben’s office one day, dressed in her best, as if for a funeral or wedding, and waited until all the patients and Miss Gompers were gone.

  She had thought everything out. She was determined that for everybody’s good it was time that the truth was known. She told him where Leslie sometimes went on her “free” afternoons. Stiffly she asked him if he did or did not know that. (“Tell me the truth,” she said. He only answered, “Oh my” in the tone of a man much older than he was, though perhaps not even the ancient could seem sadder than he when he was truly shaken.)

  The poor man hadn’t known. But he had to know. She felt deeply that he deserved to know. So she told him as much as her evidence made absolutely positive. Of course she didn’t know precisely what went on up in the apartment. But from the candy shop across the street she had tried Patch’s phone number before, during and after Leslie’s visits. While Leslie was there, the phone was left unanswered. Any other time—and as soon as she was gone—a piping brusque voice said, “Patch of Bieman’s Studio” because after all it was a business phone (and after all Patch was the pompous little ass Leslie had caricatured him to be).

  She had to tell him. After she had told him, she tried her best to make it up to him on the couch in the consulting room. Merely tried … because in spite of their mutual reasons for getting even with David and Leslie, Ben couldn’t make it. He followed her lead as a man would who could not bear to refuse what was generously meant. He even came around to pretending it was his idea. But with all the help she gave him, their attempt was a pretty ghastly failure. He said, “Oh my” again and sat beside her for a very long time. It was dark before they left his office that day, and while they tarried he had let his phone ring a few times without answering it. Elaborately he assured her that his failure wasn’t in the least due to her not being attractive. Probably, he said, it had something to do with his crossed-up feelings of friendship for Dave.…

  In a pig’s eye it did. He was only thinking of Leslie. How long are we all going to go on paying for that bitch’s recklessness? she asked herself.

  “Don’t worry, sweet,” she said to Ben. “She isn’t worth it.”

  He said, “I suppose I don’t quite have the same reasons as you for thinking that.”

  No, not the same, but stronger reasons, Martha supposed. And in spite of lying there in a disarray of clothing on his couch, in spite of knowing she had made a fool of herself, she was quite genuinely shocked by his passivity toward Leslie’s affair. It went beyond forgiveness. It was positively depraved.

  Masochism, she supposed. Or something a little more convoluted than that, and she supposed that doctors were no more immune to it than anyone else.

  “Perhaps this is just a phase Leslie is going through,” she said.

  Her terms seemed to amuse him just a little, and she was glad she could even do that much if she couldn’t offer any other consolation he wanted.

  “It will pass,” he said.

  “It’s funny how none of this takes back all the good things we’ve ever said to each other about Leslie.”

  “It doesn’t take anything back, does it?”

  “I know you don’t like to make house calls and are awfully busy,” Catherine Evergold said. She sat stiffly upright on the edge of her sofa, head cocked as though still listening up the stairs they had just descended from young Tim’s room.

  “I don’t dislike them,” Ben corrected. “I’m against them on principle when they aren’t necessary. The principle is that I need your mercy.”

  Mrs. Evergold perked up her ears and waited for an explanation of this puzzler. He laughed. It wasn’t quite as hard to explain as she seemed to imply—only a little hard for a man who has just come in from the cold and snow. It was colder when he got here than before his lunch. The snow was still falling heavily, but the clouds were paler as the cold front moved in.

  “I mean,” he said, “that at least according to my wife I never had a real boyhood.” Then he cocked his head and looked just as puzzled as she. Had Leslie ever really said that? Not as far as he could remember. It was a thing Leslie might have said. She understood that. “So,” he went on with a bright smile, “I’m trying to keep my life to a routine and give myself as much freedom as I can.”

  “You’ve certainly always been good about coming when Tim needed help,” she said doubtfully. “But I see how it could be. Look, now that we wheedled you out, can’t I give you some coffee or tea? Or, well then, how about some harder stuff if you …?”

  “Drink on duty? Like a policeman isn’t supposed to?”

  “Yes,” she laughed. “I guess I was thinking of ‘like a policeman.’” It seemed odd to him how much her laughter was like Leslie’s, when you came right down to it. She probably had the same style of wit and fondness for games as Leslie, and how many millions more were there like them? Ring any doorbell and find one. But not his. Nobody home.

  “Someone’s covering my calls for the rest of the day,” he said. “I believe I’ll have a shot of Scotch on the rocks.”

  “We’ve got some brandy if you’d rather,” Mrs. Evergold said. “It’s a cold day, how about it?”

  “Scotch, please. May I use your phone?”

  He was acutely aware of her watching him while he dialed. Surely she must have heard a voice answer “Patch of Bieman’s Studio,” so of course it seemed odd to her that he hung up without a word.

  “Well, cloaks and daggers,” she said. She had sniffed something not quite right, and her immediate reactions were to wonder if he had done the right thing for her little Tim—and to want in on whatever dangerous game he was playing.

  “I have a disturbed patient,” he said, knowing that he was lying badly. “I need to know where he is this afternoon. Something—” he made a whirligig gesture with his hands—“ultracomplicated.”

  “Must be.”

  He was already edging toward the door. “The thing about Tim is that one or two more of these infections and we’re going to have to seriously consider taking out his tonsils.”

  She was trying to hold him by proffering the drink in her outstretched hand. “I didn’t know they took out tonsils so much any more, with penicillin and all.”

  “We can’t go on indefinitely like this,” he said. “There has to be a decision. I’ve used penicillin a lot with Tim rather than some bacteriostatic drug, because too often these upper respiratory infections drag on and on for several days and I’d rather stop them hard and quick.”

  “Sure. Don’t you want your drink?”

  “I’ve got to get home,” he said. “Sure. We still take out tonsils. Some things pass and some don’t change. Tim’s are getting a little spongy. You saw the white spots on them. But there’s another possibility. I’ve tried Immunivac on five or six children last winter and this. I’m not sure yet, I.… You know I’m not radical. If you can’t help, at least don’t hurt.”

  “That’s a good principle,” Mrs. Evergold said as she watched him turn and wade through the new snow toward his car.

  He had never yet seen the rough slovenly interior of Patch’s apartment where the goldfish swam in their endless monotony amid the fuzzy greenery of the aquariums. He hadn’t seen Leslie enter or leave the green, old-fashioned street door from which the paint was peeling like bark, though he had driven past the door once, on purpose to fix it in his mind. He had seen Don Patch once, too, as if once and once only were required to provide an actor in the imaginary scene that even memory of the peeling door could evoke. (His mind fastidiously refused more knowledge than was required for the judgment he still supposed he would sometime be able to make; the mind dipping through clouds like an eagle in an old print to snatch up
a lamb and carry it to the mountaintop.)

  His fashion of spying through the weeks of midwinter had been as abstract, as remote from whatever passion or sensual immediacy must be assumed to exist, as it well could be. He had merely taken over Martha’s device of phoning. It was like keeping Leslie in view on a radarscope. After she left work and before she got home (still to wait for him there each evening with the old familiar concern for welcoming him with some special treat of gossip or enthusiasm) she was a blip in motion on an abstract screen that represented their city. He wanted no more than that, as if in merely knowing always where she was he might be simultaneously taking care of her and preparing her condemnation. Moreover, a knowledge of the times she had been with Patch gave him a chance to compose himself, to prepare against the shock of surprise, so she would not prematurely guess the extent of his knowledge. Lacking her talent for shifting personality, he had matched her by sheer willpower in the game of innocence they were playing with their lives at stake.

  He tried to discipline himself to the essential. Yet it was fatally easy to know all that went on in that other life, fearfully hard not to become something like a ghost looking back from beyond at the sensual reality of the living pair.

  Memory was the betrayer of his discipline. It could hardly have failed to trap him thus, for the fundamental rule of sexuality is the repetition of the absolutely simple, the basic fact of bodies thumping a rote.

  And it was precisely the memories that made Leslie dear to him beyond all reason or hope of freeing himself from their marriage of the flesh that made him the voyeur at her infidelities. That was the intolerable contradiction which at last had to break him.

  To remember how she swiveled on the balls of her feet when she unhooked stockings from a garter belt was to see this peculiarly graceful part of the ritual enacted in front of certain close-set blue eyes. So (he remembered; he saw) she would (she did) turn her cheek into her shoulder and abase her eyes as she skinned down her pants to her ankles. So she leaned on a chair back and looked up with a supplicating wait-a-moment smile, as if pleading her husk of awkwardness—in a moment to be unencumbered and clothed with grace in her nudity—while she freed one foot after the other from hose and undergarments. So her eyes questioned before she closed them with a kind of deliberation, letting her face lose the fullness of womanhood and become a girl’s face, assenting to the displacement of consciousness from the frontal lobes to the great branches of nerve in her trunk. So she lifted her knees considerately for Donald Van Tyler Patch. So she forgot them in her loosening until her strong, fine legs had lazily flattened on his sheet or coverlet. In one bed as in another the same reddish coals could be fanned in the luminescence of her eyes.