Pretty Leslie

by R. V. Cassill

“We didn’t decide anything. Of course there wasn’t any reason not to tell you the truth, but I suppose this is the sort of thing you always get into, fooling around with nonprofessional models.” He was working himself up to anger. His tiny anger seemed infinitely pitiful, like that of a mountaineer falling through space and angered by the rock that crumbled in his grip. “I didn’t have to see you tonight, doctor, and I’ll tell you something. She wanted to pose. Girls come here, they can pose in their bathing suit.”

  “You had to see me tonight,” Ben said. “My wife is gone. I want to know where.”

  Patch gaped. “Gone?”

  “She’s taken her clothes and personal things. I won’t bother you any more. Mr. Patch, I’m aware of what has been going on and I … I want to know where my wife is. You see, it’s all over now and maybe I ought to kill you, but we won’t bother you any more. I want to know where she’s gone.”

  Patch’s chin rested on the back of the chair between his legs. He was thinking. He was trying to muster the scattering rabbits of panic fleeing through his mind, trying to think what to do, not any more what to say. He got up from his chair and moved to another one farther away from Ben, leaning on it without sitting down. He had moved out of the brilliant light around his easel into the relative gloom near the aquariums.

  “How would I know where she’s gone?”

  Slowly Ben said, “I thought possibly you meant to join her.”

  That idea seemed to numb the other man. He shook his head slowly and ponderously, mystified by the swarm of possibilities set loose in the simplicities of his life. Seemed on the verge of understanding, at last, how he had been victimized.

  “It was never like that between us,” he said.

  Then Ben was on his feet, too, ambling softly closer, talking quietly. “You never thought of that? When I told you on the phone she was gone, you weren’t worried about where? Or when you’d see her again? Or ever see her again? You were just afraid to face what you’d done to me?”

  “I don’t know where she’s gone—”

  “But you’re going to help me find her. Settle this, understand once and for all.”

  “—but you know as well as I do why.”

  Ben had thought he was prepared for everything. Waiting for time to unravel what time never could, he had reviewed all the abominations that at closer or longer range he must bring in view to accept Leslie when this impossible affair wore her down and she asked for help.

  “No, I don’t know why,” he said. He was still moving, still closing the distance between himself and Patch, but his tone was very low, almost pleading. Like a beaten boxer still assuring himself he must take a few to land a few, he was letting go his guard entirely. “I don’t know why,” he said.

  “She was taking you on all the time,” Patch said. “In spite of what she promised me. I knew it. Christ!” He made a face of disgust, loathing carried to its ultimate, the face of a man obliged to spew out the object of his loathing. He had been edging back from Ben. Now he stopped and faced him. “When she found out she was knocked up, she didn’t know whose it was. Why shouldn’t she run for it?”

  Ben stopped. “I didn’t know,” he said meekly.

  There. He had got the blow he came asking for. Right between the antlers. Leslie was pregnant. This creature knew. He didn’t. It had been—and, dear God, such a long chain of reasons had made it so—impossible for Leslie to tell him the worst of her trouble. Never mind the rest. Never mind her infidelity, or lies, or the wayward hatred for him that must have been satisfied by the very degradation of what had been inflicted on her here. He had waited to be there in case of the worst, had paid out all his reserves of patience to be with her when her hour had come. She had turned with her agony to a stranger who didn’t want it. He had wanted it and had been refused.

  It was the world he was striking away from him when he lifted his hand, brushing it off like the torment of gnats goading a sick animal. All he could visualize in that suspended instant before he struck was the ice-cold patch of open water steaming in the river as if it were boiling. He knew he was going in.

  The blow was blind and in no real sense aimed. It merely carried Patch off his feet like a distant blast, cushioned by the air, and sent him sliding across the floor.

  He was on his feet, like something too big to be a cat, too small to be a man. His right hand clicked and a blade sprang down magically from his clenched fingers. He had dreamed of niggers coming for him with their razors out of the sexual darkness. He had dreamed of the doctor coming for him with a huge scalpel. He was ready now to fight those dreams.

  He was ready, but he still hoped everything would be all right. From his position of strength he was ready to negotiate his fantasies and fleshly crimes. With a switchblade open in his hand he was reasonable, was master of his present danger.

  Ben was still shambling after him. He was backing away, turning as if on the radius of a child’s merry-go-round, moving around the wall of aquariums and back into his living area. But his pursuer was slowing. They both stopped before Ben came within ten feet of him again.

  “All right,” Patch said. “Maybe it’s a good thing you came tonight. Maybe it is. I’ve written you two or three letters. I’ve still got them and you can have them. Maybe it’s a good thing we got to talk. I figure I know you pretty well, doctor.”

  Ben’s heavy breathing answered him.

  “I’ve always had a lot of respect for you. We could have been friends without your wife. We think a lot alike.” He paused to consider if this assertion needed bolstering. “Leslie spent a lot of time telling me what a fine man you are. How you are with your children.”

  “Patients,” Ben wheezed. “Not children.”

  A shadow of sympathy moved on Patch’s forehead. “How you were with her, too, though she went too far. She thought you’d take … what she did.”

  “No,” Ben said. “Not take.”

  “It’s pretty tough,” Patch said. He had been a Marine. He had watched over the barbed wire while the starving Koreans marched past in their unforgotten wasteland. He knew how to sympathize. He was not a hard man.

  “Pretty tough,” Ben said softly, as though amused a little by the words. He took another step toward the shining knife.

  “I’ll talk to you again if you want me to,” Patch said. There was pleading in his voice. A plea not to come nearer. “When you’re more yourself. Any time. Tomorrow.…”

  Ben seemed to consider this. He paused again. All his progress was the creeping toward a refuge that fled faster than his wounds let him follow. Always. He would not even make it to that ghastly freezing and burning hole in the ice of the river.

  He lifted his hand.

  “You don’t want to go after her,” Patch said. “You’re a good man and she’s a stinking cunt. Don’t you understand that yet? She’s not worth it. She’s not worth following. Doctor, can you hear me?

  What happened then? Perhaps he gave the knife to Ben. Or Ben’s downward clutch began before the distracted eye saw the movement and responded. At any rate their hands met at breast level. The knife was rendered. Ben struck upward and felt the blood slick the knife handle and the falling body wrench it from his grip. Patch’s face was the face of Judas surprised by his Master. A marriage was fully consummated. So long desired.… At last.

  Ben said, “Leslie …?”

  He knelt and counted the last signals of pulse in Patch’s wrist. Imagined already he was in the water and that the ice was sealing him under, the ice triumphing over the illusion of heat.

  Like something far off—at the very limit of auditory range, if it was really a voice commanding him—he recognized the imperative for calling the police. That was the fair thing to do. So he would call them.

  Only there seemed no hurry for that. It took no one else to certify that Patch was dead. And moreover, it would take no one but himself to exact the payment for that crime. He had lived under a sort of suspended sentence all his life. Tonight, clicki
ng in the pocket of his coat, he had the means to carry out the sentence.

  But time enough for that, and in the liberty of a leisure he had bought at so much cost, he took the time to ransack Patch’s apartment for signs of Leslie. He did not know what he was looking for—and in fact he found nothing, exactly nothing except the feathers to indicate she had ever been here—but it seemed to him that it might be a comfort to find a crushed empty pack of her cigarettes, a handkerchief, bobby pins, or a note she might have sent some time while the affair went on.

  Nothing. Patch’s impulse to neatness had been ahead of him. It was uncanny, but there was no physical sign of her abandonment or disarray.

  In a manila folder filed neatly and appropriately labeled (Mrs. L. Daniels) amid folders of animal, landscape, and figure photographs, he found the pictures of her that Patch had used for his allegorical painting. Hardly more than snapshots taken by an amateur using flashbulbs, they showed Leslie leaning naked on a chair back, her breasts drooping as they did not in the ideal painting, pubic hair in shameful view, and on her face the humiliated quizzical grimace of the born good sport who will try anything once, the pursed mouth of a wisecracker who says, “I’ve seen everything now.”

  He burned the pictures in the paint-stained sink.

  And he found the letters that Donald Van Tyler Patch had written to him and never mustered assurance to send. One was a brag: I will tell you what I can do for your wife that you could never do. The next was closer to a friendly, solemn warning: Get away from this woman before it is too late. She is more than she seems to be. She is dangerous as the jungle animals we dream about. The third was a cunning plea: Take her back. Nothing has gone so far that it can’t be retracted. I believe she truly loves you, but has been made to feel inadequate. Take her off my failing hands.

  Respectfully, Donald Van Tyler Patch.

  About them, through their careful rather elegant expressions, came the unmistakable tone or emanation of love. They were love letters, only inadvertently addressed to Ben Daniels MD FAAP. Homosexual in their overtones, as a psychiatrically oriented man might feel, they were written to a Donald Van Tyler Patch who had gone to med school and later married an energetic girl named Leslie, who knew how to make everyone fall a little too much in love with her. This Donald—a stalwart television personality just beginning to gray at the temples, grave, witty, sophisticated, untouchable and wise, no quicker to diagnose than to forgive the aberrations of those who wanted the best—would have answered better than the man who took the proffered knife. The letters expressed a mad dream of reconciliation in which Leslie figured as the disposable instrument.

  The real Patch lay reconciled on the floor below his goldfish when Ben let himself out of the apartment and headed home.

  The snow had stopped altogether. Its work was done. Snowplows and shoveling crews were clearing Sardis’ streets and digging out the last of the stalled cars as Ben drove toward the bridge. From the high spans he saw that the gap of open water was smaller now. By morning it would be closed and the wind would have leveled it white with frozen snow. He knew it would be closed. He did not have to be here to see that it was.

  He wanted only a little more of the time that he had bought. Not to change anything. It had always been too late to change things. It had been an illusion—not merely his at first—that time would bring the opportunities to revamp the dooms levied on him a long time ago. He wanted some time to breathe and see that, after all, those dooms had been unalterable. It was a kind of salvation to know he had held out against them this long, all these borrowed years.

  In the afternoon at home he had been afraid of letting go into the freezing numbness that had aped the numbness of his poison. Still afraid, with that ungodly fear by which women like his Aunt Peg, or Dolores Calfert, or (yes) Teresa Echeverría-Röhde, and Leslie herself had led him as on a tether, leading him on to a belief in life against his wiser promptings. He was going back where he belonged, as if already embarked for Kansas. Even to Africa, where the witch doctors who presided at his father’s death had told the truth that drove his mother insane.

  He welcomed the voyage. He wanted to savor it a little in anticipation before he paid his fare.

  He was free. His freedom was no longer the mere feeling of freedom, nor was it one of those idealized and impalpable goals the women in his life had used to lure him on. He was not going on. It was the nature of his freedom to rest while everything else hurried around him. He had it. He clutched it like a tangible thing. But quickly enough there was a threat that it might be snatched from him.

  He was still stamping the snow off his boots in the kitchen when he heard the phone ringing. He knew that it was Leslie and his first feeling was panic. She meant to cheat him of what was his alone. This awful repose.

  “I tried to call an hour ago. Where were you?” she said. Her voice was clear and calm, the volume was normal, as if she were calling from next door, and his panic grew in face of the possibility that she was still in town or had come back. Perhaps her flight had been only another theatrical gesture—begun, as all her gestures were, in the conviction that she meant to go through with it but, like everything else in her life, abandoned when the harm was done and she needed shelter.

  “I was with a patient,” he said calmly enough. “Where are you?” His tone said that nothing was amiss. Once again the Danielses were handling all complications by their dexterous imitation of success.

  She named a town near the Kansas border. It was his first assurance that she was not heading home to New York, and the knowledge thrilled him out of all proportion to the fact. There was some quality of legend in a flight without destination. Her choice of running west affirmed some identity more important than her physical voice. There was a chance of communicating what he knew and had to say to a girl running west through a storm, no hope at all of saying it to a lawful wife. Such anger as he could summon out of his failing concern with the world was meant to warn her that his love was not for the wife she had been.

  “You’re leaving me?” he said. “I suppose I have that straight, don’t I? And I suppose you’re calling because you want me to tell you it’s all right to run off like this?”

  “No,” she said in a tiny, obedient voice.

  “To give me explanations?”

  “I wouldn’t want to dirty you with them and maybe they would be lies. Or else you’ve already had them. Ben?”

  “Yes?”

  “I called to see if you were all right. Don’t laugh.”

  “I wasn’t laughing.”

  “I’m scared of going on and scared of coming back. Not scared for myself. Just scared.”

  He licked his dry sticky lips. “Because you’re pregnant. I guess we knew that’s where the fear would be. Was.”

  “Oh. You know that,” she said. “Already.”

  In her confirmation he felt the same—and in the circumstances proper—thrill of relief as when she told him she was running west. It would have been the last, unspeakable abomination of irony if she were not pregnant, an irony that would have smashed his freedom and by sheer ugliness ruined his power to pay for the life he had taken.

  “Then I suppose you’ve seen him. You weren’t supposed to ever have to. Oh God, Ben. I did such a lousy job of covering my tracks.”

  Then he was laughing at her. He laughed with hysterical force, as much to drown out her being ashamed of Patch (instead of her guilt) as to respond fully to her gross misstatement—for he knew that no one had ever been a scout by night in this world with greater stealth and cunning than she. He had never seen her naked as a wife must be to her husband until he found his way to Patch’s apartment. He hadn’t known what he could do best for her until Patch rendered the knife. “Cunning,” he said. “Give me some credit for following.”

  “But don’t follow this time,” she said. “That’s what I called to tell you”—as if she had just now stumbled on the reason that had motivated her a while ago. “It would be just like you
to. Even knowing.”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t call because I was chickening. It’s more about the child and whether you’d want.… It’s you I’m thinking of. It’s your child. There isn’t any … much … doubt of that. You know?”

  “I know.”

  They were saying some things to each other that no doubt needed saying, but the words were failing them. Everything depended on tone and nuance, and it was as if while great animals were attacking in the dark they had nothing but smiles and whistles for defense.

  It seemed to matter very little if he told her or didn’t about the murder. She would inevitably know about it some time tomorrow when he was dead too. Whatever was to be communicated must be delivered now.

  Then he heard her laugh oddly, taking the absolute stretch of his tolerance, taking it by right, because he was her husband. “No. It doesn’t have a father. It was only me with either of you. I caught it like a cold. I did it all.”

  He recognized the crazy truth, simpified to a joke, but ringingly, perfectly true as none of her soberer confessions had ever quite been. It was as if a living voice and the best authority were confirming what he was ready to admit when Patch gave him the knife. Impossibility and absence were the terms of his right marriage. He and Leslie had blundered toward each other for years without finding what she had just given—one responsible signal of love, better than an old age of compromise and longing that soured more with every passing year. And he wanted to answer back that, yes, he knew she had skipped unspotted through degradations. They had never touched her.

  He had to have the right answer for her, and neither his life nor his death was adequate to express what he meant. There had to be a word. Actions were only actions, and to leave love to them was to trust it once more to the flesh in which it had gone astray, was to invite some Patch or other to intervene again and scramble the necessary message. To let her come back to the shambles of tomorrow without the one instruction he intended was no more his right as husband than to tolerate her wallowing in Patch’s bed. It was to betray her again into dark without relief. They would be at her hard tomorrow—the police, her family, their friends, and the merely curious.