Pretty Leslie Read Online Free Page A

chicken. I’ve never singed a chicken, have you? I wonder how I know how a chicken is singed. From a childhood trauma? It looked so naked over the fire, huh? That kind of jazz? Anyway Bill was just a mess from his adventure. And Ben picked him up, with rubber gloves, and the point of the dream was that Ben wasn’t concerned about the bird.”
    â€œThat may have been the point of the dream,” Martha said significantly.
    â€œOr may not, huh? Well, you know how deep Ben can be. Levels under levels under levels. But he said it was the point—you know, that he was more concerned about how I’d take it than what happened to the creature. He wondered how he could ever tell me. Wasn’t that sweet of him?”
    â€œThat is sweet,” Martha said. She was evidently doing a Frommian sum in her head. She’ll think she’s really got an old insight on me now, Leslie thought. I don’t care if she has. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but insights run off like cold (?) water off a duck’s back. “Oh, what are you putting on me?”
    â€œOil,” the masseuse said.
    Martha’s calculating eyes were fixed on the masseuse, so much like a towering matron in her kitchen, kneading the dough for a loaf of bread or maybe a sugar cake.
    â€œNo, it’s appalling,” Leslie said drowsily. “For one thing it’s so horribly true to character. Poor, took-advantage-of Ben Daniels, devoted in word, thought, and deed. Still … I can’t see anything really wrong with a devoted husband. Is it a bad sign, Martha? Do you know, Martha, we haven’t spent more than a night or two apart since we got married? Four years, and I’m a doctor’s wife. That’s batting almost a thousand, I guess. But appalling the way it suggests I dominate him emotionally.” There, Leslie thought, that’s exactly the insight dear Martha was going to have about me, and now she knows I have it too. “I don’t care about the damn bird. He’s just, you know, costume. I pretend I’m one of these silly frigid bitches that focus their emotions on some pet. That is, now and then I pretend that. Not very often. But I’d make a pâté alouette out of Bill without batting my pretty eyelashes. Ben knows this. I think the appalling thing is that in his dream Ben would think I cared, when he knows consciously I truly wouldn’t. Don’t you?”
    â€œI’m bored with dreams,” Martha said. She was watching the masseuse pour oil into her cupped palms in preparation for slapping it onto Leslie’s back. “What kind of oil is that?”
    â€œI mix it myself,” the woman said without a smile. “Good for the skin.”
    â€œNo doubt,” Martha said, arching her eyebrows and grinning at the rebuff. She lit a cigarette and crossed her legs. She looked at the three-inch scar on Leslie’s back and wondered why it never showed at the beach. It would be hard to find a bathing suit cut high enough to cover it. “I suppose you and Ben are psychoanalytically oriented, and if you are, you are. Ben hates the lousy bird. So what? Does he have to dream to know that?”
    Leslie laughed and swung her long legs from the table. In three quick, shy strides she reached the dressing room where she had left her clothes. She left the door slightly ajar so she could talk to Martha while she dressed. She felt great, as she always did after a massage. She felt herself. How odd and wonderful it was to be reminded that the person who grumped to work in the mornings and caught cold so easily in the bad months, who went to pieces like an overworked mop on the first day of her periods and suffered annual hay fever, was not the real, the true Leslie Skinner Daniels. Along with everything else, she was hungry now, with a keen, clean appetite, and for a moment she supposed that the hunger would be visible on her face when she and Martha went out onto