Free Pretty Leslie by R. V. Cassill

shoulders, of the superlative mammary bundle she swung like searchlights) was as mottled as her hair. Its chief tone was white—the white of a corpse or a toadstool. Around her elbows, dished in the dimples of fat like lilypads in pools, were veritable planetariums of freckles. (Red, white, and blue, Ben thought, surrendering, his dull clutch on reality in the presence of such incarnate fantasy.) He had seen Dolores before. Once he had shared a coffee break with her and Leslie between his morning calls. He had simply never seen her dressed up.
    â€œDon’t introduce me,” she said breathlessly, over her shoulder to him. He thought it would have been sheer impertinence to try. One way or another, his friends would recognize her as she made her triumphant way down the steps and straight across to the bar.
    He went ahead of her and came up to the other side of the formica counter as she landed both elbows like twin, erotic blimps on its damp surface. Without lowering his gaze from her smile, he tried to count the rings on her dimpled hands. He counted eight, three of them engagement rings of a size that had disappeared with the stock market crash. “Honey, make me something that will catch me up,” she said. He noticed the pallor of her gums inside the crashing scarlet of her lips.
    Then Leslie was on her, hugging the huge, old mottled shoulders above the leopard-skin silk of her overfilled summer dress. An orphan pink pig on the great sow of the world.
    â€œYou’ve got some good heads here tonight,” Dolores rumbled. “Don’t you introduce me to anyone , sweetheart. Now, let me take my time now and look around .”
    Leslie slipped onto the bar stool beside her. “They’re all talking about emphysemas and psittacosises now,” she said conspiratorially. “Some of them are. Our parties always start dull. But you wait.”
    â€œWait? What are you talking about? I just got here. Don’t be in such a hurry, love.”
    â€œNo. But I want to be sure.”
    â€œThat I have a good time?” What a vain worry. Dolores shrugged. She had come to have a good time, hadn’t she?
    â€œLeslie wants you to have had a good time,” Ben said. “The party will only be real to her tomorrow when she remembers it.”
    All at once, for the first time Dolores had ever seen the self-assurance wilt, Leslie looked like a child caught in social error. She sagged toward Ben. “Ah, am I really like that?”
    â€œOf course not,” he said. “You’re Leslie.”
    â€œI’m me, all right,” she said, disposing of that grief like garbage on a paper plate and instantly brightening on a new tack. “Dolores, there are all sorts here. You’ll find someone to amuse you. A minute ago Sue Wilder was telling the stupidest story. Really. About a female chimpanzee who tried to seduce the keeper in her zoo.”
    Dolores bellowed happily.
    â€œNo, no,” Leslie insisted, putting her fingers in the soft crook of a fat elbow, “it wasn’t a joke. That’s what was so funny about it. She insisted she’d read it ‘in a book.’ You know how some people will say they’ve read something in a book to make it seem authoritative. Well, this female chimpanzee would look very mournful whenever the keeper got in the cage. That didn’t work. So she began to tug at his hand. Then she’d lie down and point .”
    â€œNot so loud,” Ben said.
    â€œYou think Sue’d be offended? But it’s about a chimpanzee.”
    The way she inflected her protest made it perfectly clear that she suspected Sue of disguised autobiography. Husband and wife trembled delicately with the same laughter. Like acrobats balancing on opposite ends of a bamboo pole, up on a very high wire.
    â€œWhat I don’t like about the story,” Dolores said, “is it’s clear that the damn zoo keeper must have been the one who told.