The High Cost of Living: A Novel Read online

  “Oh, we’re Presbyterians. We don’t go in for that sort of thing,” Mama said reprovingly.

  Bernie sank down again. But they were all gently herded toward the kitchen for cake and ice cream. When they arrived, pieces of the toaster were spread over the kitchen table. “Cal! I had the plates laid out.” They were stacked in the sink. “It’s time for cake. For Honor’s birthday.”

  That look. Like her father. Where did all you strangers come from as I’m getting off here in my own free space? Leslie turned away in that mixture of anger and complicity her own father aroused in her, because they were in some ways too much alike. She looked like her old man—red-haired, short and stocky, neatly built, turned-up nose and brown eyes and freckles. Her old man wasn’t old, her boyish, frolicking, whining daddy. She focused with difficulty on the entirely other man who did not drink and space out, but spaced out diddling with a toaster. He was immovable. Words did not penetrate. He said, “Eat whatever you want in the front room. I’m working on the toaster here. Broken appliances are dangerous.”

  Close to her ear Cam giggled breathily. “Isn’t he great? Nothing bugs him. He just coasts along. She can jump up and down and yell and he just says, Mmmm. Oh!” she said louder as she realized Mark was peering in the window from the porch, rapping on the glass. “Forgot to tell him about the doorbell!”

  It must be raining much harder than when she had arrived, because Mark came in dripping from his mackinaw and his boots and his plastered-down hair. Even his ears dripped. Everyone—except Mr. Rogers—lined up at the window to stare at the force of the rain. Biting her lip with annoyance, Mama moved the cake and ice cream into the livingroom. Cam took Mark’s arm, beefy in red and black plaid. “I’m all ready. Don’t want to keep you waiting.”

  But Mama invited him to dessert. “After all, it’s your sister’s birthday. Why leave before we’ve had our celebration?”

  Mark showed no signs of impatience to re-enter the gale. “Ice cream and cake, sure. Happy birthday.” He looked around trying to figure out whose it was, then he saw Honor in the long blue dress. His gaze fixed on her breasts. “Wow. So this is your little sister. She’s not so little, huh?”

  Bernie, who was carrying plates along his arm at his waiterly best, put down his load and narrowed his eyes at Mark. Facing away from Mama, drawing himself up stiffly, he stood taller than Mark. “Bernard Guizot.”

  “Huh? I’m Mark—friend of Cam’s. Hi, Leslie.” He smirked at her. Something wrong. It was not the old ogling or the more recent sullenness. She felt a prickling of unease. “Funny place to see you,” he went on. “What are you doing here?”

  “Attending Honorée’s birthday party.” Leslie tried not to read more into his question than she should. “How are you?” Perhaps dying of leukemia or advanced congenital syphilis?

  “In the pink. You still taking that karate stuff and throwing men around?”

  “What’s that you’re talking about?” Mama’s eyebrows rose.

  She had to explain. It was dull as usual. Mark was wolfing down chocolate cake and Neapolitan ice cream, but she knew it was too much to hope that he would suddenly choke to death. Mrs. Rogers was daintily shocked. “It’s hard for me to imagine any”—her tongue hesitated before finding a noncommittal enough noun—“a woman hopping around that way. It looks peculiar enough when young men do it. I think it’s the effect of all the violence on television and in the movies, although I haven’t gone to the movies in years. Don’t you think it’s a passing fad?”

  “Mrs. Rogers, you know what the streets are like. Rape is the commonest violent crime. Don’t you think it’s a good idea for a woman to be able to defend herself?” Speech number two in a taped loop. Why couldn’t she just say she liked to have muscles as well as fat, and she liked being healthy.

  “… and I’m always telling Honor the same thing, it’s not safe to go out. If Cam wasn’t running around every night of the week, I wouldn’t have to worry so. I don’t even care for Honor being here alone in the evenings.”

  “It’s turned into a popular sport.” Bernie was trying to take the heat off her. “It does make more sense for a woman living in the city than swinging a racquet or running around dribbling a basketball.”

  “Gee, I thought you would’ve gone in for … basketball.” Mark spoke with heavy emphasis, giving Bernie the same smirk. Oh, he’d been doing his homework.

  “I’m not a good sport,” Bernie said. “When I’m forced to fight, I fight dirty and I fight to win.… Would anyone like some more delicious cake? Can I cut anyone another piece?”

  As Mark finished his plate, Cam grabbed it. “Now that we’ve eaten, I guess we should run along.” She pried him out still looking back at the cake and at Honor.

  “Really!” Honor said when the door had opened to the wind and the water and shut again with a slam. “Where does she find them?”

  Mrs. Rogers only smiled.

  Soon afterwards Bernie and Leslie escaped. His left rear tire had gone flat and he had to pump it up while they both got soaked. Then they huddled in the car cold and wet and furious, with the rain drumming on the metal roof like a personal attack. “Like to get him to take a poke at me, that asshole,” Bernie groused. “I could lay him out.”

  Leslie looked doubtful. “He’s solidly built. Why bother?”

  “Because that’s the only kind of strength he’d understand. You judge too much by broad shoulders. I know how to fight at least as well as you do and a lot dirtier, I bet.”

  “You’re taking over his macho code. You think knocking him down proves you’re a better man.”

  “It’s an impossible bind. The old story of the images in other people’s heads. But don’t you ever intend to use all that training in mayhem?”

  “It’s the relationship it gives me to my body I value, not fantasies about breaking somebody’s head because they’re nasty to me.… I think he’s heard something.”

  Bernie finally got the car engine to turn over. “I have to go to work at five. Let’s get a drink. There’s a gay bar where nobody’ll pester us. Come on. Have a drink with me and I’ll drop you home before I turn myself in to À Votre Plaisir.”

  “For once I feel like a gay bar. That woman!”

  “When will Honorée go through a normal adolescent rebellion? When will she tell Mama to soak her head in a bucket of piss?”

  “I suppose we’re her rebellion.”

  “Poor Honorée!” Bernie chuckled. He started rolling a joint with one hand while driving through the flooded streets till nervously she took the makings from him and rolled it herself. Handed it back lit. “Ah, service. Know what’s better than service with a smile? Service with a whimper.… I don’t mean to imply you deal from less than a position of strength, I’m chattering. If the dope doesn’t cool me out a little my head will fly off.”

  From the car they ran from the neon-rimmed door, pelted by the hammering surf of the rain coming horizontally, lashing their faces. They staggered into the dim reddish interior, almost empty, not even smoky yet. The bartender gave them a look of vacant hostility, then recognized Bernie. “You’re crazy to come out today. If I didn’t have to work, I’d stay in bed in this crazy weather.”

  “That’s where I should have stayed, in bed, but I’m too wet to care. An Irish coffee.”

  “The coffee sounds good.” Leslie shivered. “Black and a shot of that Remy Martin there on the side.”

  Bernie’s teeth were actually chattering. They hung their sopping jackets over a couple of chairs and sat in a booth. The pulsating wail from the jukebox did not bother her. She warmed her hands against the mug. “Instead of coming here, you should have gone home and changed before work. You really are cold.”

  “Frozen.” His teeth were chattering wildly, but as he sipped the Irish coffee gradually the shaking stopped. She took his hand between hers artificially warmed from the mug, and began chafing it. He said, “Yes, take care of me a little. I’m feeling ever so sorry for myself.”
/>   “You want to know what the worst thing for me was?”

  “That dude’s entry all smirking with knowledge of exactly what labels to apply.”

  “That’ll make trouble,” she said slowly. “But, no, actually. When I found out Honor is only seventeen now.”

  “Oh!” He laughed. “She’s such a baggage. She said fifty times she was seventeen already. She makes complete fools of us both. But Mama’s not only a nuisance but evil.”

  “She’s our opponent at tug-of-war. Honor means everything to her, which is a bad idea all the way around, but what else has she got? She’s bound to lose. Honor is seventeen anyhow, not seven. She’ll leave home.”

  “I hope so. Sweet Mother of Mary. But I wonder. Does Rapunzel get away from the witch? It’s a fight to the death.” His hand between hers turned and firmly squeezed the topmost of hers. Immediately she took her hands away and put them around her empty mug. “Why won’t you let me be affectionate sometimes, Les? When I feel affection. If I was a woman friend, you wouldn’t be offended. Is it a kind of strong physical repulsion?”

  “I’m sorry. Maybe it’s habit. I’m not used to being touched.”

  “I wonder how you manage in matches?”

  She smiled. “But that’s the point: not to be touched.”

  “You’re quibbling.”

  “I’ll tell you something funny. There’s a whole school of karate where you work entirely without contact. You never actually land a blow. In any kind of karate you’re always supposed to be able to pull your punches. To do that.” Abruptly she launched a straight-knuckled punch at Bernie’s glass, stopping short just before she grazed it. He jumped and she smiled again. “But they fight without touching.… For me a lot of the benefit was ceasing to be afraid of pain. The sky won’t fall if I make a fist, and I can survive blows hard enough to knock me off my feet.… When I’ve been matched in tournaments between schools with people trained in no-contact—and of course with them you have to fight no-contact—I always lose. Because when I feel a blow isn’t really going to land, instinctively I don’t really try to block. Nothing lands, but they get the point.”

  “Is there a parable in all that?”

  “I’ll try to think about not bearing to be touched. I am sorry. In the gay women’s community back home everyone was always kissing hello and hugging. I’ve got out of the habit here.”

  “But I’m not talking about that in-group ‘Oh Hello Dahling’ pecking. I mean the simple expression of affection.”

  “I think it has to do with Val. Rejecting not being with her. I don’t believe it yet. I pretend I do, but I don’t. I know she’s mine, really, if I can just get to her. And except for George I haven’t been close to a man for years. Get us another round. We’ll just have time before you have to go to work.”

  The place was beginning to fill up, men in couples, men alone mostly. He waited at the bar, chatting, while she counted on her hands the days till spring vacation. She had given up hoping for a reply to her letter, but she was most of the way to convincing herself to go anyhow. Bring Val back. She saw herself as marking time with Honor and Bernie, friendship, company. If she really got involved with another woman, something in her believed that she would therefore lose Val. As long as she was still faithful to Val, Val would somehow belong to her. Could be gotten back. She sighed, banging her fist on the table.

  When he brought the drinks back, she leaned against the booth wall flexing her fingers behind her nape, elbows poked out. “You deny you feel comfortable with a gay identity, Bernie, yet when you feel upset, look where you go. Your own turf.”

  “That’s like saying a poor kid wants to be poor because he knows the streets of his own home slum. How comfortable for him to be poor then on the crummy ratty murderous streets he’s familiar with.”

  “All right. It may not be fun to be Black, but now at least often Blacks can pull some strength from that identity. We’ve all seen people call themselves Black and talk about Black is beautiful whose skin is no darker than ours. Why should they pass when their identity can encompass self-love now?”

  “Les, you won’t see, will you? Except for Burt, with nine tenths of my gay experiences I had as much choice as a public urinal. I’m not sure how much choice I had with Burt. It was a better turn of luck. If he’d been a captain of the Mafia instead of gay liberation, I’d have followed him anyhow, I was broke and in trouble, in real trouble. I never had it easy, one of those callboys who lie at home in comfort and handle a few choice clients who lavish favors and gifts on them. I could imagine getting into that. Maybe I’d be good at it. I’d sure feel different about myself.… But when I was fifteen I had fucking bloody hemorrhoids. Can you imagine that at fifteen, from doing too many johns and not knowing how to protect myself? How can you expect me to salvage a lively pride out of that?”

  “Living with Burt was a real relationship, right?”

  He raked at his hair. “Sometimes I think I’m basically destructive. All the way through.… It’s funny being in this area again. Since I left home—since my mother died, since my home broke up, I mean—I hadn’t ever come back. I met Burt in Chicago and he brought me here. I grew up downriver on Lake Erie. Les, I have this totally mad idea for spring vacation. It’s only a week away. I want to drive downriver some afternoon with Honor and you and see where I grew up. I really want to do it.”

  “Maybe right at the beginning or the end.… I’m going to see Val. I have to talk to her. I’m going to bring her back here with me.”

  “Do you really believe she’ll come?”

  Leslie bowed her-head. “I don’t want to think. To create strategies and try to be clever. I’ll go, I’ll see her, and I’ll know. As you say, it’s only a week away.”

  Tentatively she put out her hand and he took it. Two cold hands touched gently among empty cups and glasses. She heard a loud voice then arguing with the bartender and turned her head.

  Tasha, dripping from a waterlogged poncho, was hauling a poster for a women’s dance out of a plastic bag. She got the bartender to let her put it up, and a Black woman with her was sticking in thumbtacks. Tasha turned then and realized someone was staring at her, looked puzzled and then recognized Leslie. “Hi!” she bellowed. “Leslie!” Then she saw Leslie holding hands with Bernie and she did not come over. Jesus, Leslie thought, and it was all she could do not to jerk her hand away. I’ll have to explain it to her. Why? It’s none of her business. But Leslie remained embarrassed.

  eight

  Although the temperature was in the forties, the day felt balmy because of the first sunshine in two weeks. Leslie wanted to rise into the air, to flutter up like a dirty pigeon and beat to and fro. She walked instead into an overheated house. Honor met her in a dressing gown. “I just got home. I was at a stupid meeting of Service Society students from all over the city. I do those dreary extracurricular tasks that are just unpaid slave labor—library staff, hall guard, lunchroom monitor—because it looks good on college applications.… I was just trying to decide what I should put on?”

  The dressing gown was flimsy and peach colored. As Honor stood against the light, Leslie could see right through the material. She was galvanized by an urge to grab Honor, to kiss her finally, to hold her and swing her in the air, big as she was, to hug her. To draw her down on the dingy slipcovered couch and unbutton the wispy silly dressing gown and make love to her, starting with her long neck, the full breasts, the swell of belly. She took a step toward Honor and gently held her hand.

  “What should I put on? It’s unfair we have our vacations at different times! Such a waste. Bernar’ and you and I could do a thousand exciting things. The school is under Mama’s secret direction, don’t you think so?” Honor chattered, oblivious to her touch.

  Leslie sighed and let go. Even the sharp access of desire had nothing to do with Honor, but was instead a great thaw occasioned less by the sun and the peach flimsiness than by Val having finally called her last night. “Put on slacks and a sweater and co
me out with me. The day’s beautiful. We have an hour of sunshine left—let’s use it.”

  “Walking bores me. I mean, we have to have a goal. I know what, I need some creme rinse for my hair and we can look at nail polish. I’m trying to decide if I want to get into polish.” Honor allowed herself to be bullied into dressing and putting on a jacket. “It is lovely today—robin’s egg blue.… I was so annoyed at the hypocrisy.… I’m sure prime ministers and secretaries of state don’t take themselves nearly as seriously as officers of high school honor societies.”

  As they walked to Grand River, Leslie allowed the fascinating conversation to play in her head a mere five or six times. She kept a tight rein on herself and was careful that she seemed to listen to some of what Honor was saying. The phone had rung at eleven. She had gone to bed, although she was not sleeping. Rather she was reading a long paper, dense in words and bad mathematics but thin in content, from the Journal of American History. She could see her arm reaching for her phone as it glowered on the floor beside her mattress like a white toad. Again and again her arm moved in a jerky arc of irritation. Who the hell is calling me now, this late? And heard that high sweet voice.

  She had been so excited she could not remember the exact words of the first exchanges. Through the phone she could hear music in the background and voices. Valerie spoke softly, cupping the receiver.

  “Yes, I’m glad you’re coming,” Val said, quite as if they had discussed her vacation at length and agreed. She could remember those precise words and the lift of her heart.

  “So am I glad, oh, Val, very glad. Should I come Saturday? I can take a morning bus.”