Pretty Leslie Read Online Free

women and pimpled girls) lay on a table being sweetly pummeled by a mute Swedish oak with hands like truncheons. (Dolores had supplied the address, like a penciled assignment passed to a call girl.) The people’s servant, relaxing in her skin, did not forget her obligation to make it all up to Martha for dragging her along to this rite. Martha doted on Ben. She deserved to hear his latest adventure.
    â€œâ€˜Constantly,’” Leslie said, into the damp crook of forearm that supported her face. “Ben was upset, or not really upset but just amused—or not even amused but ever so little shocked that this woman—” (She was a strict adherent of the Hippocratic oath and supposed it came a little more natural for women than for men not to tell the whole truth and give away names and such.) “—this woman should need to have it explained to her what constantly meant, as for instance whether it meant she could leave the baby long enough to put clothes in the drier or go turn on the sprinklers in the lawn—she wanting him to take over her whole life, like letting go of a steering wheel in the middle of traffic and assuming that someone else, merely because it’s his profession, will grab it. It’s the little things that exasperate him when he’s exasperated.…”
    â€œHe’s so patient,” Martha said, planting the tiniest of barbs in that flawless but by no means delicate rump on the massage table.
    â€œA monster of tolerance,” Leslie agreed, “but like getting parents to bring their kids in when they’re sick instead of expecting him to go on house calls. He’s lazy, too, and that’s a virtue. That is, you see, it can be in the long run. There’s principle involved too.”
    Martha asked, “When you come right down to it, what does constantly mean?”
    Wouldn’t she though? Wouldn’t it be Martha who would practically go off her chair at the opportunity of a semantic hassle? Leslie had a sense that she was betrayed by an inopportune shift of listeners. Dolores Calfert and Dolly Sellers would have had too much tact to quibble.
    â€œThat is, if Dave complains about constant demands I make on—”
    Oh crap, oh dear. Leslie closed her eyes and refused the messages coming in her ears. Knock, knock, not home. Still knocking, Martha? Wait until I change my personality, put on my collegiate horn rims, dahling. Yet, in the concentration on herself (quite like concentrating on the mirror while she got her makeup just right), she admitted that repeating what Ben told her did make her sound trivial.
    No doubt Martha’s third ear (which might be visible if you shaved her dowdy hair) had been registering this triviality all along and would hold it against poor, innocent and nowise trivial Ben unless she was lured off the scent. Better give her the image of a real flip to divert her.
    â€œBen dreamed my parakeet got loose and flew over the stove,” she said. She peered out through the red-brown, limp strands of her hair (getting to be a nuisance length though Ben thought it “womanly”) to see whether Martha’s neck had stretched at the mention of dreams. Martha read a lot of Erich Fromm, and would as soon interpret a dream invented on the spot as the icky ones that no sensible person would ever tell her.
    â€œThe stove?” Martha said. “Great God.”
    Stove must mean something special in Fromm, Leslie thought. Not …? Could it …? Stove …? Mine? Not mine. Hers maybe, and if so, poor David. No wonder he went around with such exaggerated lines between his brows.
    â€œNot only over the stove,” Leslie said grandly, closing her eyes and submitting to the rhythm of heavy hands beating her shoulders, “but right over the flame—” (Flame? Could that mean …? Never mind. Let Martha think as nasty as she liked.) “—so poor old Bill singed himself like a