The High Cost of Living (15 page)

“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 come 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.”

“Not unless you have other friends to see. Monday we'll manage it. Where will you be staying?”

Val was therefore not inviting her to come and stay. And could not see her Sunday. “Are you … actually living with Lena?”

“Yes, of course. Where will you be on Monday?”

“I'll stay with Mary and Liz. I'll ask them, but I'm sure it's okay.”

“Better check. They're a hotel for runaway wives these days. But it's a good choice, Mary and Liz. I'll call you out there Monday.” Valerie hung up.

Monday we'll manage it. Now what did that mean? That Lena was possessive and jealous? That Lena had forbidden Valerie to see her? A good choice, Mary and Liz. What did that mean? Mary and Liz were more her friends than they were Lena's. Liz and Lena had had a fight a couple of years before on whether to form a coalition with a male-dominated Black group on issues of minority and women's hiring, and neither woman had trusted the other since. Liz called Lena a racist, and Lena called Liz a fool. Didn't Valerie's being willing to make the phone call, to create the chance, didn't that prove Val was still wanting Leslie? Hope tormented her in a cloud of biting flies and she twisted her head as she walked. Constantly Honor reproved her for walking too quickly. “We aren't racing to Grand River. Nobody here will give you a gold medal for a fast mile!” Imagine her wanting to throw Honor down on the couch. She had an impulse to confess to Bernie at the first opportunity, but that gave a moment's urge too much weight.

“Why don't you ever come and visit me?” she asked Honor. The words were out before she considered them. “I always come to you. You must get bored with the house.”

“But Mama. You know she calls.”

“How can she mind your visiting me?”

“She'd find something. She'd object to my coming home after dark alone.”

“I'll bring you back. I'll escort you door to door.” She saw herself endlessly trundling across Detroit on the buses and she winced. Why had she offered that, why?

“I am curious. Bernar' insisted your apartment is a nun's cell. I've never seen Bernar's lodgings either. Have you?”

She shook her head no.

“Why don't you? You don't have problems with mamas. Go and give me a report. I love to have each of you talk to me about the other. It's endlessly fascinating to shift perspective.”

“When you say that, you make me feel vulnerable. To think of you together talking about me.”

“Of course we talk about you. Don't you and Bernar' talk about me all the time?”

“Actually, no.”

“Well, then, what on earth do you and Bernie talk about when I'm not there, if it isn't about me?”

“We don't spend that much time together. At first we were sniffing suspiciously. Testing each other. Now we argue a lot about how we experience being gay.”

“Gay—Bernie uses that word too. I hate ‘in' words.”

“The other choice is saying homosexual to cover both. I'm not homosexual. I don't like homos, which sound like men to me. What a long awkward word. ‘Come to me, my homosexual baby,'” Leslie crooned while Honor laughed, looking around.

“What do you find to argue about?” Honor was frowning slightly, peering at her. “That you should like men and he should like women?”

“How we each feel about being gay.”

“Sounds dull. I'm glad you do it together instead of attempting to include me, since I haven't even had a chance to be heterosexual yet. Like the angels, I have no sex life at all.… I do envy you, able to run around and have assignations. You can visit Bernie. He can visit you. You can race around the city to shops and museums and restaurants, while I'm doing my homework.”

Looking sideways at Honor, who was slowly twirling and untwirling a curl, Leslie realized with a chill that Honor was in fact jealous.

At the Cunningham's, Honor brooded on the nail polishes. “I'm trying to decide whether painting my nails is a vice I want to take on.”

“Why bother? It can't be good for your nails. Cam is always daubing at herself, yet I can't see she looks any better for it.”

Honor frowned at her extended right hand. “I don't enjoy my hands. How peasantish they are. I covet Bernie's hands. He has the hands I ought to have. No, you're right, Leslie, I'll pass it by. I don't want to call that much attention to my hands. Now if women polished the tips of their breasts, that'd be another matter.”

As they walked back along Grand River, past the wig shop, two bars, one closed by the police and boarded up, an empty store with a broken window, a dry cleaner's, a liquor store, knots of men stood in front of the bar and again in front of the liquor store. Leslie moved over to pass in between the men and the girl. Past the muttered, the loud comments, the leering, the obscenities, Honor kept quiet. Then when they turned onto her street that went straight for half a mile to her house (and straight for miles after that in both directions in a grid pattern with numbers that rose into the 20,000s), Honor said, “I really do like my breasts. I'm proud of them, I like to look at them and touch them. But when I walk past a group of … louts like that, it's ugly. Maybe I don't want to be touched at all by anyone. To be … used. To be torn open and used.”