The High Cost of Living: A Novel Read online

  “Why does she want the money?”

  “Mama keeps her on a short allowance. Presents, yes. Money, no. I’m not nuts about George. Between the two of us, he’s such a damn perfectionist. But I do need the money!”

  “Why don’t you leave home, Cam?”

  “Love to. I can’t afford it yet. I don’t do well enough in school for one of those effing scholarships and I can’t pay rent.… Actually, I’m paying off a debt.” Her gaze fixed on Paul with hostility tightening the mouth. “Once I get that paid off, I’m going to take an apartment with Mona—You know, she played Lady Bracknell.”

  She wished she could ask Cam if Paul was the father or if he had done something else. “Is it Paul you owe the money?”

  Cam looked startled. “No, Mona. She’s my best friend, and she doesn’t have it to spare. So I really want to pay her back.”

  Well, Leslie thought, that answers that. But has Honor never guessed? Well, why would she? I wasn’t so smart figuring out other people’s problems when I was seventeen. Oddly then she thought of Bernie: that this was the sort of question she could set him. She tucked the matter away to wait until they talked privately the next time.

  Because of seeing Honor home from the late party, she was short on sleep when she woke. She worked out for a while and was just about to eat breakfast when she became aware of a woman yelling at her from the street. Only Tasha could make that much noise—she had a carrying voice.

  Leslie ran down to let her in. The day was mild, if wet, and Tasha’s jacket was unzipped. Leslie felt a surge of warmth at seeing Tasha, her light brown hair in two long braids, her overalls two sizes too large—aimed at concealing her hips and breasts—her big eyes and big nose and big mouth and bushy brows crowding the small triangular face. Tasha was short for Natasha, which Tasha had named herself, after her own grandmother. Her mother had named her Michele. “Who ever heard of Michele as a Jewish name? If we don’t come from anywhere, how can we go anywhere? All women, we need to understand history!” Tasha was always vehement, even when she was ordering a corned beef sandwich to eat on the hot line.

  “Tasha! It’s wonderful to see you!” Leslie tugged her in, almost embraced her, didn’t quite. Something held her back.

  “So how come you waited so long? Never mind. Listen, I came over this morning because we need help. You got to work the hot line tonight. Half the staff’s out with the flu. It’s ridiculous. Listen, Leslie, I’ll say please if I got to, I’ll get down on my knees. We can’t train a new person before tonight. I’m on tomorrow, I was on last night. I tried to reach you last night. I called until almost midnight. You sleeping someplace else?”

  “I was out.” She could hardly say she’d been keeping an eye on a young woman to make sure she didn’t get laid. “Working,” she lied lamely. “I’m awfully busy with George and the papers and my classes. Haven’t even written my thesis proposal yet.”

  “George should drown in a puddle,” Tasha said. “Are you working tonight? There’s nobody else. And the weather’s mild.”

  “Tasha, tonight I have karate. I can’t work the hot line.”

  “For once you couldn’t skip it? Okay, what time do you get off?”

  “I could get off by nine.”

  “Okay. There’s nobody else. Start when you get there.”

  “Only this once, Tasha. Only tonight. I can’t do it anymore. I don’t want to!” She felt as if Tasha had left her no choice and she burned with resentment.

  “I thought maybe you’d come out and have brunch with me?”

  “I can’t. I’m busy. I have to work now if I can’t work tonight.” Of course she could study on the hot line, she knew it. Tasha left, her head lowered. Leslie was immediately sorry she had not gone with her. But to see a friend for the first time in a month, and all she did was draft you; on the other hand, it was her fault she had not seen Tasha.

  She had known Tasha was interested in her. It was a matter of tiny hints, little flashes of warmth. About personal things Tasha was shy. But Leslie had still been thinking about Val day and night, sure she would bring her back at Christmas. And Tasha was not pretty. Leslie always seemed to fall for women who were—oh, better looking than herself. She had simply pretended not to see those little gestures of affection, and Tasha had understood. Nothing had been said, and nothing ever would be. They would have gone on being friends if Leslie had not quit the hot line and then withdrawn from Tasha.

  Now she was sorry she had turned her away. Maybe Tasha would come by tonight while she was on the hot line. But Sunday night while she sat at the phone nothing happened. For once there were no assaults and Tasha never came by.

  Bernie could get away earlier Mondays than she could, so he would already be there when she rode over on the sad broken-springed bus. An expressway view of Detroit: a cement ravine full of cars lined with a fringe of worn wooden houses. Yet when she hopped down, it was all she could do to hold herself to a sedate trot. She wanted to run, to leap in the air.

  The sky was pale gray and high. Nothing had color. All was the hue of dirty cement: the air, the streets, the sidewalks, the sky. It had rained and it would rain. Tomorrow it would rain some more. The next day they would have some rain too. All the trash, the dogshit, the beer cans of the winter were exposed by the glacial retreat, and where the sidewalks ended the mud began. Yet, yet it was spring. Dogs ran in a pack across the small spongy waterlogged lawns, and she too wanted to run. At a jog she bounded down Honor’s street.

  Suddenly she slowed. Stung, smitten, ravished by longing. She stood still under a half-dead blasted sapling, the end of a branch dripping steadily on her head. Her thighs tightened and she sighed; she sighed heavily and aloud. Her hands clasped and unclasped. She could feel the longing through her whole body. Spring, spring, and she wanted a bike.

  Sweet Jesus, she hadn’t been on a motorcycle since she was sixteen. Yet she could feel the sensations as if it had been the week before. Always her passions came on her and struck her with a thunderbolt: Paul of Tarsus on the highway. She wanted a bike.

  It needn’t be a big hog, not the Harley Davidsons or the oversize Hondas of her wanton youth. No, a middle-sized sensible tidy bike. As if that quibbling mattered. She could not afford such a creature, not in any sense. It was not a strategy for survival; it was a strategy for getting wiped out fast. She could not pay for it; she could not feed it and keep it. The sight of a woman zooming along astride a cycle brought out the killer lust in drivers of automobiles and they would leap barricades to run her down. Large semis would be driven back and forth across her. She was mad.

  She had come to a halt under the sapling that dripped like a leaky faucet right on her bonehead. Oh me, oh me. Did she want to die young and leave a pancake-flat corpse that could be used as a doormat at George’s? She did not want to ride that creepy bus and she could not afford any car, whereas she could do without this and that, what? What could she do without? She could feel the wind tearing at her face and the pavement beating up through the machine into her muscles and the clean feeling of speed, of control, of skill rightly used. The brisk no-nonsense pleasure of scooting through stalled traffic.

  She made herself walk on toward Honor’s broken stair and tilting porch, but each step was a step not relished, disgustingly slow, pokey and uninteresting in the method of ground travel. Perhaps the desire would lessen, perhaps it would release her, this longing that had seized her like a hawk taking a mouse in its talons and borne her aloft.

  Honor let her in as if on the run and swept back to the kitchen. The house smelled of baking, the chocolate chip cookies with which Bernie and Honor were already stuffing themselves at the kitchen table. The conversation her coming had not succeeded in interrupting was about Love. Oh shit, she thought.

  “I think of love as a fencing match. Taste my absolutely habit-forming cookies! You try yourself against the other being. One word of submission too much, one gesture of stiffness, one hint of mockery, and it’s clumsily broken. It’s, a
s Leslie might agree, a martial art.”

  “You confuse love and power, because you’ve never experienced either of them.” Bernie propped his chin on a hand, leaning his elbow on the table.

  “Every child has experienced a lack of power, Bernar’. And when you talk about love, I think of Mama. That’s not the kind of love I had in mind.”

  “How can love not be loving? Love is acceptance—the stronger the love, the more absolute the acceptance.” Casually he scooped up another cookie.

  Leslie drank her tea, bored on the outskirts of the conversation. She considered Bernie’s definition self-serving: that was, indeed, the love he craved from Honor. Adolescents talk about Love. Later you find out there is only loving, only being loved, each individual by individual. She felt weary and dense with experience before them. “Have you ever loved or been loved, I don’t mean by the wayside,” she asked Bernie.

  He frowned. “I loved one person who loved me—not at all by the wayside. And one person loved me I wish I could have loved.”

  She admired the skillful, apparently casual avoidance of the pronoun. She often had to do the same herself.

  “Who was the one you mentioned first? The girl who loved you and you loved her?” Honor reached absently for a cookie.

  “Ann-Marie, the sister who was less than a year older than me.”

  “Oh!” Honor tossed her head scornfully. “We aren’t talking about sisters. You’re cheating. That’s not passionate.”

  “How do you know?” He raised his head from his cupped chin to give Honor a level stare.

  “Oh, if we’re talking about incest. But we aren’t, are we? Nothing so interesting,” Honor said.

  “Again, how do you know? How can I talk to you if you think you know what I mean before I speak, and then you don’t hear what I’m really saying?”

  Leslie simply did not believe him. “We’re dealing with a point of fact. Did you sleep with your sister?” She was still bored. The kitchen felt close, she had to blink hard to keep her eyes open. The radiator burbled and clanked; the oven still sent out waves of dry heat, although the last cookies were on a sheet cooling. How could she afford to study karate if she bought even a small used lightweight bike?

  “For years. There were four of us and only two bedrooms.”

  “You’re playing word games.” Honor tossed her head.

  Bernie leaned toward her. “You use your hair like one of those large exotic fantastically silky Persians use their tails. You punctuate with it. A swish of your hair, a lashing to and fro.” His voice was silky too.

  “Heavens, a tail!” Honor tossed her hair again, as if trying to see herself. “Meow! I had a cat once.” She sighed. “A Persian kitten like you mean. But a chow caught it out in front and ripped it open. Mama brought it in. It was dying and it crawled toward me, up to my feet. I wanted to stroke it, to comfort it. It was crying so piteously! All I could feel was disgust. Its fur all matted and oozing blood. I couldn’t make myself touch it.… I felt so guilty!”

  Bernie as usual had committed himself neither one way nor the other but laid down a complicated trail. However, he had changed the subject. Better dead cats than Love. She said, “I don’t understand how any woman can be genuinely revolted by blood. Menstruation makes us used to blood. Our own. I’m serious, Honorée. Don’t make faces at me. To be repelled by blood is to reject your own body.”

  Bernie looked at her from under his lashes, his hand stroking the sides of the delicate china cup. “Can’t you understand rejecting your own body?”

  “No. I am my body.”

  “You don’t believe in a soul?”

  “No, and I can’t ever forget my body—this society won’t let me. Then in affirming it, I affirm being animal, mammal, functioning woman—”

  “That’s too abstract for me,” Honor said scornfully. “Leslie, you’re forever making up rules and then following them. Like kids who force themselves to walk only on the cracks or never on the cracks. If something’s disgusting, it’s disgusting. There’s no use arguing.”

  “The trouble with that is, it presumes everything that goes through your mind is honest.” Bernie put his cup down. “Suppose you have a toothache and hate the whole world.”

  “If I had a toothache, I’d have sense enough to know it.” Honor carried off the empty plate to refill from the cookies cooling. Looking after her, Leslie noticed that Honor was wearing pants—gray wool slacks and a dark gold wool sweater. She looked fine in pants, although another pound or two and she would not. She was just within the border where voluptuous passes over to plump.

  “But in a relationship, truth doesn’t lie on either side,” Bernie said carefully. “You can’t be honest by yourself.”

  A tactual quality in the talk puzzled her. Serious, yes, they talked as if talking mattered enormously. In a way it was very young and yet that summed up nothing, because youth culture did not encourage intense, rather intellectual verbalizing. To her they seemed to be talking at times about something undefined, closed and half secret, which they brought out before her in tentative display. “I’ve just figured something out. What we have in common. We all believe in words. We get satisfaction from discussing. As if it changed anything. We’re nuts to put everything into words and feel the pressure of another mind turning over.”

  Honor smiled almost sadly. “I’m sure if I had to pick only one thing to do through eternity, I’d pick talking.… Please don’t patronize me by saying I haven’t tried everything yet.”

  Bernie looked at his hands on the table. “Nothing in my life has felt like I’d want it to go on.… Maybe a moment or two when I felt accepted.… Once or twice at mass when I felt something touch me.”

  “How about you, Leslie?” Honor asked.

  “I can think of times with Valerie.… I can think of times too when I’ve felt an intense serenity. A white space—”

  “You sound like the TM folks,” Bernie said.

  “Not meditation, though obviously there’s stillness in being still. But there’s also a stillness at the center of motion—”

  “We are being mystical today,” Honor said crossly. “Just as there’s a chocolate chip at the center of this cookie?”

  “When I’m doing something well and not thinking about how I’m doing. When I don’t cloud it with worries or motives—like last night at the dojo, when everything flowed through me just right—”

  “You mean to say when you’re leaping around in baggy pajamas hitting each other and making noises like a cat whose tail has just been trodden on, that you feel serene?” Honor turned up her gaze theatrically.

  Bernie leaned way back in his chair. “Leslie, you’re a jock.”

  “I guess.” She felt suddenly depressed: she saw herself as strange, outcast, twisted, peculiar, one of a kind and that kind not worth making twice. That sense since early adolescence. “Maybe I am crazy.” A rare pang of the confessional urge pricked her. “Maybe something’s bizarre in me. That wants to be John Wayne. I have this insane desire to have a bike—a motorcycle. I really do.”

  Honor stared and then went into a fit of giggles. Bernie shrugged. “From a practical point of view, it’s hard to live in this city without wheels. And it costs less to operate a bike than my greedy baby buggy.”

  “Sure,” Leslie said glumly.

  “But that isn’t the point of the passion, is it?”

  “It bothers me, it bothers me. I say, Come on, do you want to be a man? But I don’t. I don’t even like men, present company excluded and maybe my boss George.”

  “Who’s he?” Bernie asked suspiciously, sitting up.

  “Cam’s boss too. I haven’t met him yet.” Honor nibbled a cookie. “I’m dreadfully curious. But he’s married.”

  “On the other hand, why buy that? It isn’t because it’s macho I want a bike, it’s because it’s fun—a hell of a lot more fun than putting your hair up in rollers and knitting argyle socks. I like to go fast. I like the control, the sense of being on th
e road, out in the air, in the wind, the weather. It feels alive. That’s joy! Not a machine that shuts you off the way a car does, a metal box around you. No, it’s a metal horse!”

  “A metal horse! My, my. Leslie, you’re finally romantic about something. A greasy machine that makes as much noise as it can. It’s like developing a passion for a riding mower.” Honor grimaced. “I can see myself explaining to Mama, No Mama, I haven’t taken up with Hells Angels, really. It’s only Leslie, the one-woman motorcycle gang. Resist! Buy an electric can opener instead and sublimate!”

  “You haven’t seen her room yet,” Bernie said. “She’ll buy an electric hair shirt first.”

  “When did you see it, hmmmm?” Honor arched her neck in mock jealousy.

  “Why should everything beautiful be defined as masculine? How come freedom and skill should only belong to men?”

  “How can you call a smelly noisy puttering motorcycle beautiful? I think that’s perverse.” Honor rose. “I must put on my supper. I’m so stuffed with cookies I don’t want it, but if I don’t eat, Mama will be convinced I’m perishing and frail, her consumptive darling.”

  “I can see it as beautiful inside that Kenneth Anger leather S-M death’s-head cult,” Bernie said. “But where do you fit in?”

  “Look, if I was nuts about horses, you wouldn’t think I was craving to join the cavalry and shoot Indians, so why assume I can’t honestly want to be on top of a bike? It feels good, damn it. Sometimes I feel like I’m shriveling up in school. The rest of me. What isn’t required by classes and seminars and George.”

  “What does George require?” Bernie asked. He had seized on that name. He broke out his hero sandwich as Honor ate spaghetti warmed over and Leslie brought out her container of yogurt.

  “Only complete fidelity.” She laughed. “Only my life.”

  “Leslie, Cam is going out with a creep who also works for mysterious George. Mark, I think he’s called.”