“Hello?” she asked tentatively.
“Leslie? Is that you?”
It was Alan.
“Yes,” was all she could manage to say. She’d spent her entire life with him so now the impulse to tell him what had happened to her was strong. But she couldn’t do that. Would she start with how she’d dumped him ten days before the wedding and end with Bambi?
“You sound odd. You aren’t getting sick, are you?”
Had he always been so cut-and-dried? Where was the romance? “No,” she said softly as she held the receiver tightly. She was trying to remember exactly what Alan looked like the year before he graduated from college.
“Well, something’s wrong with you,” he said, sounding annoyed. “I just called to tell you that I’ll pick you up at eight A.M. tomorrow and we’ll drive home together.”
Leslie knew that Alan’s car was going to break down on the way to her college and that he was going to spend the whole week of spring break trying to get the parts to repair it. And she was going to end up alone at school for that week, dancing alone in the studio, eating alone.
“Are you there?” he asked, this time sounding almost angry.
“Yes, I’m here,” Leslie said. “I was just thinking how much I’d like to see you again. What do you want us to do together next week?”
“Together? Are you kidding? With your mother and mine planning our every minute? We have to do those things that have to be done to get ready for a wedding. You know better than I do what they are.”
And at thirty-nine years of age I know what a waste of time they are, she thought. It’s what comes after marriage that’s important. Maybe if she and Alan had spent more time with each other, had talked more, then Leslie wouldn’t have run away to New York and—
“You’re acting very strange,” Alan said. “So I hope you get over it by tomorrow. We have a lot to do this coming week. Mother’s invited some important people to spend next weekend with us, and I think you and I should try to come to some agreement about where we’re going to live.”
Leslie opened her mouth to tell him that they were going to buy the old Belville place, but she closed it. One thing about Alan: He didn’t change. At twenty he was as bossy as he was at forty.
On the desk beside the telephone was an envelope of heavy cream-colored paper. Putting the phone to her shoulder, Leslie opened the envelope. In it was an invitation from Halliwell J. Formund IV to spend the coming spring break with him and his family and their other guests at their estate. If she accepted, a car would pick her up tomorrow morning.
Part of her wanted to tell Alan that she had another invitation for the break, but why burn bridges? Why cause unnecessary hurt?
“I’ll be ready,” Leslie said into the phone, sounding as sweet as she could manage. “But call me if you have any problems.”
“What does that mean?” Alan snapped.
“Nothing. I just meant—Never mind. Forget it. If you call and I’m not here, I’ll be at the studio dancing.”
“Aren’t you always?” he asked.
At that Leslie dropped the phone into the cradle. All these years she’d beaten herself up for running away and leaving poor Alan nearly standing at the altar, but now she remembered why she’d done it: He’d been a prig. A full-of-himself, self-satisfied prig.
But the Alan she’d married was no longer a prig. Bossy, yes. And, yes, maybe even controlling at times. But that Alan had a humility about him . . .
With wide eyes, Leslie stared, unseeing, at the bulletin board behind the desk. Had she changed him? Had her running off to New York shaken the insufferable attitude she’d just seen but had forgotton about over the years?
What irony, she thought. All their years of marriage she’d been burdened by this dreadful, dishonorable thing that she believed she’d done to dear, sweet Alan, and now she was seeing that maybe her jilting him was the best thing she could have done.
“Hmmm,” she said,
smiling as she picked up the phone. If jilting him had made him into a better person, what would spending the week with another boy do?
At that thought she laughed aloud; then she picked up the telephone and dialed the number for the Formund residence and accepted the invitation.
“It’s none of my business, dear, but aren’t you in the wrong department?” The saleswoman had iron gray hair and a suit that wouldn’t have wrinkled if she’d run a train over it.
Leslie had managed to find only one decent pair of trousers in her closet at the dorm, and a single shirt that was too frilly. What to wear had instantly become her number one concern, so now she was in the best department store in town looking through the racks of clothes.
“No, I don’t think I am,” Leslie said, annoyed with the woman for interfering. Leslie had never been extravagant, so most of the money her father sent her every month was in her bank account.