The High Cost of Living (23 page)

“In the fall they shoot ducks. Nobody comes here to smoke or drink or fuck. It's too far. There's hundreds of nearer places you can find. The neighborhood's full of little dead ends, clumps of trees and bush, old junkyards where you can crawl into a wrecked car.”

Stiffly she took off her tee shirt, but she could not keep herself from crooking her elbow across her breasts.

“What a day!” he said. “I feel as if the sun is licking me. Isn't that erotic? Burt had a dog named Lucky Pierre. A poodle. But not one of your yappy little dogs. A big dog-sized hairy intelligent poodle. I really loved that dog. I miss him. Burt used to accuse me of loving the dog better than him. But it was easy to love Pierre, he was such a passionate sunny spirit. I've never been able to have a dog since I was a kid. One other thing I can't afford. I don't get meat myself when I'm not eating at the restaurant.”

“What kind of dog was Al Capone?”

“A yellow mutt. But with wonderful speaking eyes. He could beg the life out of you, he could coax your supper off your plate when you were hungrier than he was.… I've tried for years to perfect that look. If I had my old yellow dog's look just right, the world would be my salted peanut.”

“I think you're perfecting it,” she said sourly but relaxed again in the curve of his arm.

“Ann-Marie was the hero and I was the villain. Or else we'd be something like
Star Trek
. I got to be Spock, which is the best part, naturally, secretly lusting after the captain forever. Or explorers or pirates, guerrillas, bank robbers. I was always willing to be the villain when we had villains. I'd kidnap Denise or baby Mike, and Babette would be my sidekick. I didn't mind dying at the end, because I got to be dramatic and evil before. Ann-Marie was the hero type—like you. A striver and strainer, as the Blacks say. They all live across the river, downwind from those belching stacks. We looked down on them, I can't for the life of me imagine why. We all lived in the same dumps and grew up to work in the same mills or collect the same unemployment, and they had more fun. We were convinced of that, deeply convinced, and we hated them for it. Anyhow they looked like they were having more fun.” He cuddled up to her, his cheek against her shoulder. “I still miss Al Capone, I miss my mother, I miss Ann-Marie. I miss her more lately because I let myself remember. You and Honor make me remember. I shut myself up, cold. Sometimes I think all you have to do to be desired, to be an ultimate sex object in this society, is to be cold all the way through. The world will cream a path to your door to impale itself on you if you're only an icicle.”

“You don't seem cold to me.”

“I'm not with you. Or with Honor. Because I'm coming back to life. And I feel safe with both of you. You're all I have of … real connection. I still have the needs of a child. I'm not a child, you know—that makes it harder. There are few kinds of hell I haven't seen from the inside. I could tell you stories that would make Honor grow pale and your eyes melt with that serious glow.”

“Bernie, you haven't a pose that annoys me more than your world-weariness!”

“Dear heart, when you've been rolling in shit you must have something to say for yourself. You have to make the best of it, and the best is to boast that at least you did roll in shit.”

She sighed. “You make sure we never know how literally to take the shit.”

“Listen, once I saw a punk movie in New York playing in a rerun house where I was sleeping. It was about an Italian street urchin who witnesses a crime and blackmails a respectable family to take him in. He's hungry, he's tired of stealing his bread. Well, one thing and another, their influence melts his grubby proletarian heart. And when he can no longer blackmail them and they can hand him over to the cops, they reach out with loving arms to clasp him to their familial bosom. You follow?”

“Follow where? Every poor kid dreams at times that she's really the lost foundling of some rich pig.” She looked away from the intensity of his demanding gaze. His hand, fallen on her rib cage, dug into her flesh for emphasis.

“At the end of this sentimental tearjerker, our filthy street beast stands silhouetted against the waves of an ocean beach. His foster father holds out his arms to him. A moment of stillness. Our beast can't believe they really want him, the crumb-bum, him, the proletarian turd. Then he tears down the beach into his new father's arms to a thousand violins and the crashing of the surf. Here I cried.” He grinned mirthlessly, his hand hard on her rib cage as if to prevent her from rising in revulsion and moving away. “I cried like an old maid at a wedding. And when I recovered from my embarrassment at my own secret taste and maudlin tears, I knew precisely what I wanted. Simple. I want a home. Will you laugh?”

“No. I'm in exile. From where I don't want to be and ran away from at the first opportunity. An old maid is a woman who hasn't sold herself in marriage to a man, by the way, Bernie.”

“For most people home is the taken-for-granted. I'm sorry, I won't use the phrase again. It's the place you fight to leave. Afterward you speak of making yourself at home in other houses. But I still wander outside the first shelter.… My life is just a messy interminable game of parchesi. Where the whole object is to get the little wooden idols home and you almost make it and then somebody knocks you all the way back.… You know the whole concept is phony. It's just an empty square where nobody's waiting. But sometimes I think I'm stuck in that kid's game. It's déclassé. Other people get to play adult games like backgammon and twenty-one, poker and chess. Here I am living my life out in a crappy children's game that relies entirely on chance!”

“I had a home once—with Val. And I muffed it. I couldn't have her and a meaningful job, her and a decent income. But I couldn't hold on to her in the long run without job and income.”

“You came back from her shining. Something turned on in you that you haven't managed to smother yet. I keep wanting to touch you. Maybe I think it will rub off … or I don't want you to squash it again.”

“I have to.” For a moment her eyes burned. She was caught by surprise. How close her emotions seemed to the surface today. In a sense she was still on vacation—beyond discipline, away from control, from all the armor that sustained and protected her against the hundred casual and calculated onslaughts and insults of every day.

“No. You don't. We don't have to go on being caught in our own traps always. I don't even have to spend my life caught in an old parchesi game.” His hand slid up very gently over her breast, exploring it with fingertips only.

She tensed under the hand. “Don't.”

“What's the difference between your rib cage and your breast? Because society draws funny lines on the body?”

“I was born in this society. My breasts are personal.… I suppose the touchy-feely scenes make me uncomfortable because where do you draw the line? But there's a real difference between taking my hand and touching my breast.”

Yet he continued his soft tentative caress. “It feels different to me too. If I touch you on the rib cage, on the back, it's like touching myself. Bones, lean meat. If I touch your arm, it's like being with a man who's more athletic than I am. So it's as if
I
had breasts.… The couple of other women I ever touched were all soft and strange, spongy. Except for Ann-Marie. She felt lean and sinewy like you, except for her small breasts that were just starting.”

She gathered herself together, tensed to move. “Don't though. I'm not comfortable. Stop.”

“Am I not being gentle enough?”

“Bernie, to me it is erotic.” She was embarrassed, but she could feel her nipple harden and her breast grow warmer with blood.

“To me too. Isn't that a surprise? I think it's fabulous.”

She started to roll away from him but he anticipated her. The other hand that was behind her pulled her to him. He rubbed his lips against hers as if curiously back and forth. Then he was kissing her mouth not gently but hard.

She was shaken totally awake now and she thought, Oh shit, and cursed herself for stupidity, yet she was scalded with surprise. She could not quite believe what was happening. It was like suddenly arriving in a puddle of hot oil. Why hadn't Honor come? This would never have happened. She lay passive in his arms hoping he would just as suddenly stop. He was kissing her so that she could not speak, and she tensed with astonishment. Almost she expected him to stop momentarily.

But he was not stopping. She bucked quickly for space and tried to wriggle from his grasp. He let her fall onto her back away from him and then he moved over her. She felt a kind of hot shock at the weight of his body on her. He was naked, his body heated by the sun, and she felt his erection against her thigh. She turned her head away from his mouth and spoke into his sharp collarbone. “Bernie, don't! You must stop.”

“I want to, Les, I have to. Hold me, please. It can work this time, I know it. It can work.”

“I don't want it to work. Get off me. If I have to stop you, I'll hurt you, Bernie!”

“We could be together, I know it. Hold me. Don't fight. Let it happen. Please, Les, I'll make it all come out. It'll work.” He tried to cover her mouth with his again. His hand was fumbling now with her pants. He got the zipper open and his hand moved down her belly that felt cool against the heat of his touch. She felt at once an aching twinge of desire as his hand covered her mons, and a stronger bolt of anger, the confident cock shoving like a club against her thigh, him and his hand trying to breach her. She fought free with her left elbow till she had enough space to drive her right fist into his solar plexus. He groaned and went limp and she thrust free of his weight, rolling off to the side and coming up on her feet.

Grabbing her shirt, she ran from him over the broken concrete to the trees, zipping her pants. When she turned at the wood's edge, looking for the path and staring back over her shoulder to see if she was pursued, he lay curled up on the pavement where she had left him. She paused to pull her shirt over her head. Then she ran up the slight rise and down the other side. She followed the dim path past the duck blind humming with wasps and then back through the bushes and willows to the sedge where the boat was moored. There she stopped.

How could she get in the boat, row off and leave him on the island? How would he get back? Even if he had gone out of his mind and attacked her, he was still Bernie. She simply could not go off without consideration of how he was going to get home. Reluctantly, making faces at herself, she trudged slowly back.

When she emerged on the apron again, he was still lying where she had left him; for a moment she was afraid she had killed him. But in that constricted space she could not have hit him hard. He lay with his eyes closed, clutching his stomach with both hands. As she watched him on the ground, he was too familiar for her to stay back. Tentatively she took a few steps. “Bernie?” He opened his eyes and looked at her without expression she could discern. “Are you all right?”

“Not noticeably.”

She came closer until she stood over him. “Are you hurt?”

“Entirely! Les, I'm sorry.” He sat up. “I kind of wish I was dead.”

She reached down then to help him up.

“You don't mind touching me?” He raised an eyebrow. “You're not afraid?”

“I'm not afraid of you. How could I be?” She clutched her arms around herself as if she was cold. “How do things get so messy?”

“Yes, you can handle me. Alas. I wasn't cut out for a rapist.”

“Bernie, don't misuse words. It wasn't rape.”

“Well, attempted.” Moving gingerly, he stepped into his pants.

“You knew I could stop you.”

“But you're not angry with me now. I can tell.” He looked at her closely and shrewdly.

“I'm confused.” She did not move off from him.

“You couldn't pretend it never happened?”

She shook her head. “No. In a hundred small ways. Like now when you put on your pants, I'm aware there's nothing under them.”

“Except me.” He laughed thinly. “Am I nothing?”

She shook her hair roughly, pulling it into the familiar club on her nape. “I'm aware now you aren't. I mean … that it's all sticky, as if we and every word and everything for miles has been covered with a film of hot taffy. I'm aware of you physically now. I'm confused, I mean it. Do you think that just sort of happened by accident?”

“I wish it had. No. I think somewhere in my spine—I must think with my spine like an extinct dinosaur because I certainly don't seem to use what brain I have upstairs—I knew I was bringing you here to try to … be with you. To try. I was so caught up in the fact that I could, I overlooked whether you could or would.”

“You startled me.”

“Maybe deep down I'm convinced you're really Ann-Marie. Now she could never refuse me, she could never say no to me when it came to the crunch. Maybe I was convinced I could have you too because I think you're really Ann-Marie and therefore you're really mine anyhow. So I have some ancient right, you see.”

“The only brother I feel related to lives in Seattle and I never get to see him any more. But a peck on the cheek is a big display.” She picked up their jackets and handed him his shirt.

“Well, I'm perverted in all sorts of ways, we know that,” he said sourly. “Actually I didn't think you'd leave me here. I had a cold moment and then I felt sure you would, responsibly, trot back to fetch me. You'll have to row us home.”

“My pleasure.” She led the way over the ridge. “Don't limp so. I didn't do a thing to your leg.”

“The idiotic things you get pleasure from. A rowboat rather than me.” He stopped limping. He kept quiet until they had pushed the boat off. Then he sat facing her as she rowed, giving her directions through the maze of reeds. “Are you sorry you hit me?”