Pretty Leslie

by R. V. Cassill

  Betrayed this far by memory, the inertia of reason carried him beyond, for it was the logic of her adultery—was it not?—that some ingredient as life-giving as it was revolting made their passages different from his with Leslie. It had not taken him forever to name this other ingredient. It was cruelty, the simple mating of masochistic and sadistic impulses, if you wanted to put it in those terms, but more profoundly it was the obedience to a law of life he could accept only by destroying. Oddly, it matched the law of his own life—decency, moderation, and generosity grown from a root of murder. He could not accept it.… Well, then, had he ever truly accepted his own life?

  It is a dangerous thing to teach the gentle that cruelty is the hidden mainspring of life and of love too. He had destroyed a child once when children tried to teach him that hideous lesson. He knew that he was forbidden to kill again—not just as ordinary men are forbidden, but in some way analogous to the constraint on a man lying in actual chains for killing already committed. Only in a dream of chance, when he had guessed lightly about killing Austin Calumet, had he tampered with the notion that the power was still his. He had been wrong. He had no such power. He knew that when he killed again it would have to be himself. He had prepared and measured the poison soon after the new year began.

  In spite of the chains on his tires he nearly got stuck when he turned into his own driveway. The snow bulged in not-quite-geometric globes over all the shrubbery of the lawn and sloped like dunes from the hedge and the patio wall. Both garage doors were open and twin drifts like fingers pointed into its gloomy shelter. The track Leslie had made when she took the station wagon out that morning was almost obliterated.

  Not quite! The undulation of ruts still shaped the surface of the later fall. He knew when he saw the snowed-over ruts that she had been gone a long time. His calls to Patch had been wasted, the vain illusion that a lesser and by now familiar evil might once again substitute for the worst. It looked again as if Martha was right. This time Leslie had gone farther.

  There were no visible footprints on the lawn and only the tips of a few reddish twigs to show the edge of the sidewalk. He waded to the back door because the back of the house was Leslie’s, because they had never quite been at home in the front rooms, rooms that faced the neighborhood more publicly. The silence in the house was hostile as a new tenant, already installed. It crowded at him the minute he shut the door behind him, and he had the temporary notion that it was only, at bottom, another of Leslie’s transformations. She had changed herself—oh, maybe because the eeriness of the snowfall had suggested it—into a witch of silence, laughing at him for getting so upset when really it was only herself, all the time, inside the witch costume. They were children still, playing one more game of the truth she refused to relinquish.

  It took him only five minutes to confirm the accuracy of Martha’s conclusions. Half a dozen pieces of luggage and all of Leslie’s best clothes were gone. Her boxes of snapshots and high-school yearbooks had been taken from her desk and the high shelf of the bedroom closet. She was gone and her flight had been deliberate. She had even taken books and records with her, and the Soutine reproduction was gone from the living room wall. Account books, the check book—showing a balance of eleven hundred and twelve dollars in their checking account—and a stack of bills due were laid out on her dressing table in plain sight for him. But she had left no note.

  Only in his second tour of the silent house he found a note from Flannery:

  Dear Sir: Mrs. Daniels said she would not need me any more. If you need me, call MW 3 2856. If not you will only owe me for the remainder of this week.

  Sincerely yours,

  (Mrs.) Flannery Dowell

  He read it like something Leslie had dictated with great care to give him the message he must not misunderstand. He was not sure he had it exactly. There was no mistaking its assertion that Mrs. Daniels would not be back.

  After he read it, he sat down at the kitchen table. Already the silence and its meaning were beginning to seem normal. He already tasted some of the treacherous relief of being alone, with time to think everything out in new terms. Snow was falling more lightly on the house now than it had in the hours past; the wind that presaged clearing skies was already whipping it down from the roof. But the house seemed muffled and it was as if all his senses were numbed in the same proportion, the way a freezing man feels the euphoria of his death creep on him under the snow.

  If she was gone and gone for good, how easy everything was. By her flight she had taken onto herself the whole responsibility for what she was. He need not quibble at the mountains of contradictory evidence required for justice in the hardest of cases. Everything was so simple. (“Mother and I talked it all over—God and all—and we decided it was so simple,” Leslie said.)

  He went to the refrigerator to fix himself a drink. He was glad for the homely light flaring on inside over the array of packaged meat and the dishes in which Leslie salvaged vegetable leftovers. He was pleased by the efficient click of the latch as the door closed like a coffin lid.

  He knew when he had felt like this before. He had watched Aunt Peg’s face as the train went over the great bridge at St. Joseph. She said, “We’re going to have a fine life.” Something like that. She said it was only fair of Leslie to clear out, once and for all, forever, after having made an insoluble mess of their marriage. At least it was to Leslie’s credit that she had done the fair thing. She had cut out with neither man. At least she had left him free.

  Free.

  He was glad he had not responded in panic to Martha’s panic call that announced Leslie’s taking off. There had been no apparent rhyme or reason to his afternoon thus far, but at least he had not hurried. He had been right to take his time in coming home. Now he had all time to ponder out the mysteries of responsibility and justice. He must take his time. For the moment, he must sit still.

  Free, then. He was free.

  With a kind of wonder, as if the circumstances had at last confronted him with a simple diagram of the end of love, he realized that it must have been months ago that he had stopped believing that he loved his wife. Perhaps he had not loved her after Caracas. The game had been over when he came back from South America. Why had they gone on with it, almost to the point of tragedy? Fair and sensible people would have called it off much sooner, all things considered.

  He took a great breath of air into his lungs. His eyes, turning almost instinctively toward the brilliance of the late-afternoon windows, looked on the pure transforming expanse of white.

  Free. His evening was free. His life was free.

  His belly knew it. His loins knew it. It did not take even a click in the silence to signal to him that he wanted a woman. He dropped his hand to his lap in good-humored awe. That was not a dead stick. No flagpole to carry the banner of a cause long since lost. Like something invisible in the heart of a seed under the snow, it stirred with the blind sense of unencumbered time to come. Alive. Dear God, he was alive, and he had been so near death.

  He wanted a woman. Even Martha. If Martha were here they would make up for that horrid silliness of that day on the office couch. This time she would not have to play the male role, nor he the merely compliant one, fearful of embarrassing her when her wish was vulnerably clear, then failing even in compliance. He had a man’s impulses and he was a man. Leslie had not killed that. In fairness it might be said she had made a good try and had come awfully close.

  He was free to want a woman. Not just for this evening but for his life. This time, better a brainless gold-digger than a neurotic for whom no medical term had yet been invented … and perhaps Leslie had anticipated just such a sentiment when she tried so clumsily to nudge him after that brainless Garland Roberts. In fairness let it be said that no one had a better picture of his secret heart than Leslie. If only pictures had been enough.…

  He was glad he had not called the bank to find out how much money she had taken. He hoped Leslie had taken everything. That would fit wit
h the neatness of the break she had contrived. The more money she had taken, the better her chance of establishing herself somewhere else with a minimum of looking back to him. From this moment he wanted her to be as free as she had left him.

  Free. He tried to get up from his chair. Nothing would move. His legs wouldn’t lift him. When he tried to thrust himself up from the table with his arms they bent like wet spaghetti. At last he managed to set the angle of thumb and forefinger of both hands against the table’s edge. Splinters of pain shot through his limbs and belly as he lurched erect. He vomited on the linoleum. Then his back and kidneys seemed scalded as adrenalin pumped into his veins.

  He stood there weaving and sweating. He had to remember every minute of the afternoon, see himself at every stage, for if there was a moment he could not account for, it seemed to him possible that in the blacked-out interval he might have taken the poison he brought from his office. The numbness to which he had been succumbing was like that which predictably would follow a lethal dose.

  He could not remember. He went to the closet where he had hung his topcoat and felt in the inside pocket.

  The envelope was there. He took the phial out with clammy hands and held it toward the light to count the capsules inside. There were three. All three. He was all right.

  He was all right but he had nearly died. He could not, with any trick of reason or pill-counting, shake that truth from his head. He had been about to die when he sat there in his euphoric dream of freedom. Worse, about to let Leslie die. He did not have the faintest notion of where she might be, really. But the snow gave him the kind of hint he needed to start from. Serene and placid, virginal, benign, transfiguring … it was death. Their death had been in his guts. He knew its taste when he puked on the kitchen floor.

  “Patch,” he said into the phone, “listen to me. Patch.”

  No answer. But the phone had not been hung up on him either.

  “Patch, I want to know where my wife is.”

  “I don’t know you,” the scared voice said.

  “You know me, Patch. I’m through with pretending anything. Where is she?”

  “Is she gone?”

  No profit in this. The afternoon was ending. Time was closing down on him. “Patch, I’m coming over to see you. Listen. I don’t know what I think of you. Don’t care. Listen. You’ve had your fun. You’re going to help. I’m going to find my wife.”

  “Not tonight,” the shivering, tiny voice told him. “I’m going out now. I’m going out.”

  “If you go out I’ll find you.”

  “We don’t have anything to talk—”

  “Please!”

  Then he was hurrying. He was still buttoning his coat when he got to the car and he had forgotten a hat. But he felt better. Maybe just from discovering he could still run.

  As he crossed the bridge in rush-hour traffic, he saw a strange phenomenon in the river. It was not yet completely frozen over. Between the shelves of ice covered with dazzling white snow, the dark water was steaming. It must be terribly cold, only a degree or two warmer than the ice itself. But the air was cold enough now to raise steam. It was ice-cold but it gave the illusion of approaching a boil. He studied this freak as he fussed along in the slow stream of traffic, thinking it had some message for him, as every common sight did now.

  chapter 20

  HE SAW THREE WING FEATHERS from Leslie’s bird before he had gone well inside Patch’s apartment. They were scotch-taped up like a small bouquet or crest above the corner of an aquarium. And of course he would not have recognized where they came from, if he had not, for so very long now, been reading sign on the trail that brought him here.

  Maybe what he recognized was just the taste that prompted Leslie to save them when Bill died of his October cold, to turn them over to a man who would paste them up like a souvenir of boyish conquest.

  And a gnawing, despairing envy in the thought: She would know better than to save such feathers for me. He had not known how to encourage the symbol-giving, token-passing child, trying to grow up inside an already finished woman. He had not wanted to encourage that child either, nor could he wish now that he had. So the feathers sat up there gaudily in the fluorescent light as an emblem of irremediable separations.

  He noticed the feathers before he bothered to realize that Patch was certainly not turning his back on him. The little man was afraid.

  Only, brave enough to let me in, Ben thought. Or not necessarily brave, just confident from Leslie that I’m not up to violence. He followed Patch past the feather-crested corner of the aquarium into the studio area of the apartment, aware that some prudence or even fastidiousness on the little man’s part was steering him away from the living quarters. From the bed. The evasion was, in the circumstances, another admission, just as Patch’s sidewise, crab-like movement toward some chairs by an easel was an admission of fear that could have only one inspiration. These confirmations clicked into place with the accumulated, abstract evidence of weeks—of months now. Tumblers falling in a lock about to open.

  Patch had been working. On an easel under a battery of spotlights there was a panel considerably larger than any of the paintings or drawings framed or matted on the wall. A jar of sable brushes sat before it on the corner of a miraculously neat palette, and the hose of an airbrush looped up the frame of the easel like one of the serpents attacking a cubist Laocoön.

  His gesture that invited Ben to take a chair was expansive enough to invite him also to consider the painting on the easel. About one-quarter of it, at the left, was still unpainted—charcoal tracings on a stark gesso surface. But across the rest of the foreground a melee of soldiers, marines, sailors, tanks and howitzers strained to follow some mirage in the clouds. The mirage was Leslie Skinner Daniels, naked as a monument, weightless as a balloon in Macy’s Thanksgiving parade, idealized (without pubic hair or any noticeable sag to breasts snowy as the Korean mountains below her feet), and mournful. The clouds in which she swam (or floated) were tinted with the orgiastic brilliance of the parakeet feathers.

  The awful, fraudulent innocence of the painting was Patch’s plea. He knew the story of Goya and the Duke of Alba. He assumed correctly that Leslie Daniels’s husband would know it too.

  “Mrs. Daniels has been good enough … Leslie’s been posing for me,” he said. “I suppose.… There’s probably quite a lot you have to explain to me. But then, there’s probably an explanation due you, too. I didn’t understand from your phone call.… Will you have a drink?”

  Ben nodded. He was staring at the painting on the easel in a rapture of disbelief. He still supposed, because of the technique, that it had some commercial destiny, but his mind would not close on any likelihood of its having been commissioned either to aid recruiting or to rouse masculine tastes for beer, tobacco, or firearms. Perhaps it was meant to hang over the bar at some American Legion clubhouse, since the charcoal tracing at the left was plainly a portrait of Douglas MacArthur wearing his famous cap and the five stars of a General of the Army. Of course Leslie must have seen the painting as a colossal joke. And of course she could not have posed as this floating, allegorical figure without having been suspended from the ceiling by ropes and harness.

  On the rim of the glass that Patch handed him, he tasted his own vomit. The liquor hung an instant in his throat before his stomach would accept it. At once he felt a curious drifting away into intoxication—too quickly for it to have been the effect of the alcohol.

  “It’s quite a striking likeness,” he said of the painting. “I didn’t come here to—”

  Patch was straddling a chair just opposite him, leaning crossed arms on its back. His white face was grimacing with earnestness. “I told her she ought to explain to you.”

  How did he know …?

  “It’s a tricky situation in many cases for the professional as versus the layman not to understand. The human body made up of cubes, cones, cylinders and a surface reflecting light in various aspects, all related perspective, tone,
value, color that can’t be reproduced though relatively with the color wheel and pigments. To an artist the body, far from any thoughts of prudery, is a composition, angles, flats, perspective curves, repetitions and the line of beauty. We don’t think of the body as being a woman at all but forms. If you’ve read any art history you know how many of the old boys would take the position.… Nude is traditional and a lost art but there’s still the tradition of nothing replacing, my teachers always made a point of it, working from nature.”

  The poor bastard was pleading for his life, self-righteously, condescendingly, and with a confusion of doctrine that would not have impressed an adolescent enthusiast.

  Ben said, “How did you know Leslie hadn’t told me she was posing for you?”

  “Well, from your phone call.”

  “Did I sound mad?”

  “Worked up about something unnecessarily. Something hadn’t been explained to you.” Patch’s hands were shaking badly. He tried to light a cigarette without putting his drink on the table beside him. Some of it slopped brightly on the floor. “She could tell you,” he said. Fishing for information. What was this about Leslie being gone?

  “Was that what the two of you decided you would tell me? That she’d been posing for you?”