The High Cost of Living: A Novel Read online

  She had realized it right afterward, before she got to the corner. She had paused in the street, shrugged, and gone on. Cam could easily return it. If Honor really wanted to see her, her scarf would be held for ransom.

  She sat in the bumpy lurching back of a filthy DSR bus making its endless way across Detroit. First she was regretting not having enough money to own a car. That was a sin. To be car-poor. Second she mistrusted herself. She did not want Honor, she did not want to make love to the girl. What did she want? To soften the outer edges of the loneliness that occupied her, frozen hard like a ball of ice impacted with soot and grime. To have someone in the city who wanted her to come, who served as an afternoon’s target, was maybe enough. Snow was beginning thickly, softly. The bus went slower. She could visit Tasha of course, but not without experiencing pressure. Why had she withdrawn? Was she doing anything for women? Damn Tasha. She had left school, she had time for that sort of thing.

  When she got off, Honor was standing in the doorway of a laundromat, and Leslie was moved that anyone would come out in the snow for her.

  “I thought you might not remember the house. Besides, the snow looked inviting and I thought I’d like to get out at least briefly.”

  “Weren’t you out earlier? To school?”

  “I couldn’t go today. My nerves were ringing this morning like a thousand alarm clocks. I felt so down.”

  Leslie smiled at her exaggeration. “There’s a performance tonight?”

  “I’m neither stage-struck nor stage-shy. I’m only sorry it palled so quickly.” A cold wind burned Honor’s face above a bright blue scarf. She spoke of tedium buoyantly. “Mind the broken front step.”

  The house was a small frame bungalow that stood side by side with mostly two- and four-family frame houses with just room between to squeeze in a driveway. They had little front yards and little back yards. The stumps of dead elms thrust up along the street, with a few young saplings perishing by the curb. All the yards backed on a row of small factories, tool and die shops, a box manufacturer. On Honor’s house the old white paint had blistered and begun to peel. From the porch ceiling on rusty chains a settee swing hung that no one had bothered to take down for the winter. Honor was struggling with her key in the lock. “Stupid door! It won’t lock from the inside or open from the outside. It drives me crazy!” Finally she kicked it open.

  Leslie followed her into the small stuffy overstuffed livingroom. At once loud howls and fierce barking came from beneath their feet. “Bottom! Samson! Shut up! Oh, shut up, you noisy rotten beasts!” Honor stamped her boots on the floor. The howling sank into growls, lower but persistent and accompanied by the clanking of metal on metal.

  “You have dogs?” They sounded more like a wolf pack.

  Honor shook off her coat, yanking at the door of the hall closet.

  “This doesn’t open either,” she said through gritted teeth. “Oh, the dogs. German shepherds somebody gave Daddy to settle a debt. He’s always being taken. He was supposed to breed German shepherds and make a million. That was between the edible ice cream carton and the burglar alarm that did something like bark. They stay in the basement howling. Sometimes we put them in the yard to eat small children. Daddy takes them for walks. At least no one will dare attack him. We’ve never been robbed or broken into, but maybe that’s because all the neighborhood junkies know there isn’t ten cents in the house at a time.”

  The bottle green velvet gown of the party, the careful accent in the mellow voice were born out of twenty-five-year-old flowered slipcovers washed gray and old linoleum imitating old brick on the floor of the kitchen, the room to which they immediately gravitated. Honor said, “Please, would you do me a favor and call me Honorée? I know it’s affected, but so am I—that’s how I survive high school—and I’m in a French period. Honor is so drab, like Faith and Prudence or Chastity. While Honorée sounds like a king’s mistress.”

  “I find king’s mistresses even duller than Puritans, but sure, I’ll call you Honorée.” The girl was affected, but placed in the house she became more interesting, like an orchid growing out of a rack in the sidewalk. No fancy school, no set of mannered friends, no nouveau riche milieu produced her. Honor had made herself eccentric, old fashioned, flamboyant, as another girl would diet herself bone thin as a model. Leslie felt equally bothered and intrigued.

  “What can I offer you? Orange-spice tea? Hot Vernors?” Honor was balancing on one toe in front of the refrigerator.

  “Hot what?” Vernors was the local spicy ginger ale. Something in Honor’s pose made Leslie ask, “Do you dance?”

  The girl swung back to stare. “How did you know? I’ve always longed to be a ballet dancer—that’s the source of all my frustrations! But it’s too late. It’s been too late ever since I can remember. How perceptive of you, Leslie! Did you want to be a dancer too?”

  “I don’t think I want anything but permission to be myself.”

  “You mean a gulf between what you want to be and what you are?”

  “Nope. I’m working on what I want to be, but nobody can stand it.” Oh, come one. Just walk in and start: Hi! I’m a dyke! Image of a stupidly grinning face and outstretched hand. “Tea, please. What were you upset about this morning? That made you not go to school?”

  “Oh, I had a fight with Cam about flirting with Paul. Then I told Bernie—he’s my best friend—and he wasn’t sympathetic. In fact, he was even more disgusting than my know-it-all sister.”

  While Honor fussed at the stove, Leslie looked around. Linoleum with a pattern of bricks worn through to backing in front of the stove and the sink where a faucet dripped, all the appliances a generation old. Nothing was entirely clean or thoroughly dirty. Obviously they soldiered along, but the absent Mama Rogers was not first a housewife. Honor, who never seemed to wear pants, had on a long pink dress that brought out the bloom of her skin. It was the only new thing in the room. The little edging of lace at the cuffs and throat had not begun to fray.

  Honor brought the steaming brew in small teacups. “Aren’t they luxurious? We found them at a yard sale. There’s only two, and one’s mended, but I pretend not to notice the crack.”

  The cups were paper thin. She felt elephantine handling hers. No, she didn’t think they were luxurious; she thought they were bothersome.

  “Leslie!” Honor shook her head, smiling. “That’s Rosenthal bone china. It’s quite strong. It won’t crumble in your hands.”

  “I’m not convinced. How do you know whatever it is?”

  “Mama knows everything like that.”

  “Did she use to have money?”

  “Mama? As a matter of fact, her father ran away when she was eleven and her mother began going in and out of mental institutions. She lived in foster homes till she was old enough to work. Mama’s brave, a real fighter. I’m not that way at all. I don’t have to be—she does everything for me. But isn’t that a romantic and terribly sor’id background?”

  Honor pronounced the word oddly and Leslie puzzled a moment. “Isn’t there a ‘d’? Sordid?”

  “No.” Honor frowned slightly. “There is but you don’t pronounce it.”

  “I think you have ‘forehead’ in mind or ‘toward.’”

  “No, it’s ‘sorid.’ I never mispronounce—it’s sloppy.”

  She hesitated, then let it go. They had both learned most of their vocabulary from reading, only Honor was bolder using the more literary words out loud. Leslie heard herself giving a presentation in her first seminar back in Grand Rapids and making awkward circumlocutions to avoid saying “hegemony” because she discovered when she opened her mouth that she had no idea how to say it. She experienced a shiver of identification with the girl. “My family lives in a house not so different from this. It’s on an eroding hill of sand. A not quite stabilized dune.”

  “Is it on the lake?”

  Leslie snorted. “No ordinary people like my parents can afford that! Only summer people and people with money. No, they live ten bl
ocks in. It’s a house that wasn’t meant to be year-round, then somebody stuck a half basement under, jacked it up and put in a furnace. The wind howls through the cracks. There’s sand in everything—in the beds, in the rugs, in the corners.” Vividly she remembered a typical gesture—running her hand through her hair with the nails digging hard into her scalp when she was nervous and worrying, and bringing out her hand with sand hard packed under the nails. Sand at the roots of her carroty hair. “In season—the summer—my mother waits tables. The rest of the year she doesn’t work. I mean outside. There were four of us kids and in fact she always worked hard. My father was a fisherman, but you know the fishing has pretty much run out, the lake’s dying. He used to work seasonal in a canning factory, apple picking, house painting. They should have left years ago, but they grew up there.”

  “My father’s an X-ray technician at Mount Carmel. He fought in Korea, and after he came home he studied on the GI bill. He and Mama met while he was still in uniform.” Honor insisted she come to the little livingroom to look at a photograph, which showed a skinny young anyface with crew cut squinting into the sun in an Army uniform, in front of a picket fence lined with hollyhocks. The uniform looked too big and he held his cap in his hands as if asking for something. His neck was very long, the only feature she could identify with Honor, and he did look tall.

  Honor picked a bolt of material and a pincushion off the sagging davenport. “Mama is making a delicious dress for me—a thick soft corduroy with a paisley pattern. I can even wear it to school, though anything I wear is wasted.” Honor looked down, biting her lower lip. “I sit in class and part of me waves my hand and answers questions. But most of me is living elaborate novels in my head. They go on for months. When somebody speaks to me—some jerky boy, even Mama—I feel as if they’re invading my real life and what they want is unreal. I sound schizophrenic, don’t I? I’ll regret confessing this to you.”

  “Why? You’ll leave home soon and things will start to happen. Then books won’t be more interesting than the people you meet, people you have something in common with.”

  Honor stood before her clasping her hands. “You don’t think I’m weird?”

  She shook her head, realizing that Honor had the same big full body as Cam. With the long neck and Botticelli face, she had automatically equipped Honor with a slender sylph’s body; but Honor was wide hipped and moderately busty, pear shaped. I don’t desire her, it’s the truth, she isn’t even my type. I like her, she moves me, stifling in a narrow existence, full of energy and dreams. But what strange claptrap romantic dreams. “What do you usually read?” she started to ask, when Honor interrupted her.

  “Look!” Honor pulled back the cuff of her left sleeve, showing a long raw cut on her arm. “I did it with the potato peeler.”

  “For shit sake, why?” It couldn’t be a suicide attempt, for the cut was only skin deep, but there was no way it could be an accident.

  “To punish Bernar’. For saying nasty things because I like to flirt with Paul. I wanted to show him how much he was hurting me. I wanted to make the pain visible so he’d stop.”

  “And did he?”

  “Of course! He kept saying I’d get tetanus. It cowed him completely. You’d think he’d be tougher than that, with the life he’s led.”

  “But why did you cut yourself up? Does Paul mean that much?”

  “Paul? Of course not. I did it for me. To prove I could. And to show Bernar’ he can’t turn his sarcasm on me.… I felt proud of myself. I thought he’d fall off his chair!”

  “Exactly who is this guy?”

  “My sort of adopted brother. Where to start?” Honor cast herself down in a swirl of skirt.

  “Is he in his French phase too?”

  “He calls himself Bernie, but he truly is French. French-Canadian, anyhow. You must meet him—”

  “Why must I?”

  “He’s between us in age—How old are you Leslie, exactly?”

  “I’m twenty-three, inexactly. What do you mean exactly?”

  “It sounded nice balanced on the end of the question. I suppose you could have been awful and answered me, ‘Four-thirty in the afternoon with Scorpio in Uranus.’ Bernar’s twenty-one, but a sophomore. He only just decided to go to college. He’s quite mature. And terribly bright and fascinating.” Honor paused to make sure she had Leslie’s attention.

  “Are you in love with him?”

  “No, I like older men. Bernar’—he’s the brother I didn’t have, instead of my competitive sisters. I adore him, but he isn’t romantic at all. I can’t imagine him making a pass. Not even like the crude proles do at school: ‘Hi, how ya doing, foxy, ya wanna fuck?’” Honor burst into giggles. “You think I’m exaggerating! Last week I was standing in line in the lunchroom—Oh never mind. Everything those animals do is too boring to repeat. They swagger around, but Bernar’ was genuinely tough. He was a real street kid. He knifed a boy when he was fifteen and got sent to a reformatory. He had to take exams to get into college, because he never finished high school.”

  “I see,” Leslie said, conjuring different known jerks. “For a while in high school I rode with a gang of bikers, but I don’t think that entitles me to special consideration. After all, it was fun.” In a way. The riding was great, the sense of community had warmed her, the speed, the energy; but the sex had been mean. Finally she had fallen in love with another biker’s old lady. At first she had not been able to figure out what had come down on her like a landslide of soft warm sand. Like a paralyzing case of flu she could not shake, she had endured the love as if it had been the disease it felt like.

  “But, Leslie, he’s had a hard life. His family was dreadfully poor. His mother died when he was thirteen. He’s been knocked around and he’s had several ugly homosexual experiences. That’s one more thing he must struggle to overcome.”

  “Why? Maybe he likes men.”

  “But it’s against his religion. He’s a devout Catholic.”

  “In case of contradiction, something goes. Goodbye the church, I’d think.”

  “Don’t be so cynical, Leslie!”

  “Believe me, that’s not what I’m being.… Maybe I’m not pure enough in heart to meet him.”

  “Don’t be silly. No, you must. I have to arrange it!”

  “Honor, Honorée I mean, people you like will not always like each other.”

  “Leslie, you haven’t even seen Bernar’ and already you’re explaining to me that you won’t get along. You’re really prejudiced!”

  three

  Sunday morning Leslie rose early to work out. Her room was over a shoestore, forcing her to practice falls when they were closed. Tonight at the dojo she must do better; this last week she had been embarrassed by her clumsiness. Muddied in spirit. Doing her warm-up, she found her gaze seemed to catch on the poster, catch and stick.

  Crosslegged she sat down to think. Sometimes her whole life seemed a votive candle burning slowly its scent and light smoke of loneliness, of desire, of missing. Finally she got up and tore the poster from the wall, folded it neatly, and threw it in the garbage. That’s my last duchess hanging on the wall, said a voice from high school English, Miss Greening, who had saved her from slow death in Ludington. Now the walls were bare. She had never liked the poster, for the winged woman bothered her. Should a woman lust to fly? Fly away? Part pigeon, part mammal. No, it was stuck to her wall because Valerie made it. History formed you. But history is what you carry inside. Relics do not increase clarity. Valerie lay sleeping in a room nothing like this. A spasm of pain left her doubled over, although she did not really move from her crosslegged straight-backed sitting.

  Eight-thirty. Valerie would still be in bed. She knew what the room looked like where Valerie slept. Or did she? Relics do not increase clarity. No, she knew what the room had looked like before Valerie came to it. Many times she had entered the bedroom of Lena Kornhauser to throw her coat on the bed whose headboard was covered with wild female cupids and doves in pa
pier-mâché painted yellow and green and violet. The bed’s furry coverlet would be almost hidden under heaped wraps. Lena gave excellent parties for local lesbian society. Valerie and Leslie were invited only to the larger bashes, being of the poorer more uppity element, the feminists not in with Lena. From an old Dutch family (anything that had arrived before 1880 was old), Lena had income from real estate and a department store, but she made money in her own right. She owned two good women’s clothing shops in the best malls—no one went downtown in Grand Rapids. Her reputation was as a sculptor in plastic—big sensuous pieces in amberlike resins all soft lumps and female curves.

  Lena did a piece or two a year. Leslie, for whom work was a passion, slightly despised her. She was taller than Leslie, blond and blue-eyed and usually tanned. She had to be forty-five but looked ten years younger, most of the time. Lena cultivated an air of luxurious decadence: a Victorian house whose upper floor had been cut into expensive apartments but whose more than ample parlor floor was art nouveau and Grand Rapids Gothic, cocaine and cognac (both brought in from Chicago), velvet draperies and spun glass Venetian knickknacks, the most extreme clothes from her boutiques.

  Leslie sat straight-backed and crosslegged and identified the flame in her solar plexus. Yes, she hated Lena. She could not exactly make it come out that Lena had taken Valerie from her, because it had never been clear that Val would follow her to Detroit. Val did not like to say yes or no bluntly. Or perhaps it had been clear, but not to her.

  Money.

  It was easier by far to think about Lena than to think about Val. Had she destroyed the poster in anger? She did not like to think that. Would Val ask what had happened to the poster, the day Val finally came back with her?

  She had a sudden picture of herself sitting on the floor of the almost empty room surrounded by the bleak gray February city in her white baggy costume with her shoulder-length carroty hair pulled back in a rubber band and her face blank with concentration, balanced against the room two hundred miles away with purple draperies and oriental rug, the scent of perfume and incense, music blaring from the speakers. Of course at nine on Sunday morning music would not be filling the house; she was thinking of parties. Valerie’s black hair would be fanned over the pillow and she would perhaps just be waking groaning with vexation and wriggling into the covers. She did not think Lena would be bringing Val breakfast in bed, as she had. She had the habit of getting up hours earlier than Val on the weekends. On weekdays they got up together at seven-thirty, she for her classes and Val for work. Breakfast in bed had been her homage to Val’s different temperament, to the poverty they had to share, to all the places they could not go together. Finally, what was Lena’s fanciful lush interior but a place where women in couples could be together at their ease without pretense or self-consciousness or danger? The rich contentment of being able to take for granted the simplest of connections.