The High Cost of Living (24 page)

“No. You made me angry. You shouldn't jump on people.”

“I did begin very gently, as I recall, then I got too enthusiastic.” He stared at her. “You aren't going to run away from me like you did right afterward. Or are you?”

She shook her head no. “I'm confused by what happened.”

“Euphemisms. What I did.”

“Besides
what you did, things happened. We have to talk. I feel a little … unraveled. I have to sense my way back toward you again. I want to feel open, I want to feel like your friend. I don't want to withdraw. It'd be easy to. It's terribly hard not to. But I'm trying. You have to try too.”

“In spite of such emphatic rejection. What am I to do?”

“Just talk to me, Bernie. Till we understand each other again.”

“Oh, talk!” He threw up his hands. “I'm wonderful at that. I should have stuck to talking this afternoon.”

twelve

Leslie brought George's Cordoba home to its attached garage. She had promised to feed the tropical fish in Davey's room, the hamster in its cage in Louise's, and to water the houseplants. But basically Bernie and she came back to the house because it was other space, less constricted than trying to talk in her room or presumably his, less awkward than talking in a bar or coffee shop. A gay bar on a Saturday night did not seem the right ambience.

“I could make supper,” Bernie said. “I'm a good cook. One of my survival skills: How can you throw me out on the cruel hard streets when I can bring you a prefect omelette for breakfast? I bet there's goodies in their freezer. This strikes me as a well-stocked house.”

“They didn't exactly invite me to move in while they're in Puerto Rico.”

“Any chance they'll come back early? Suddenly appear?”

“No. George has to call, so I can pick them up at the airport.”

“So you really think they counted every last steak in the freezer?”

“I'm sure not. Sue never knows what she has on hand. Every Thursday night we have to run out for things she's forgotten. He has little parties for staff and students on Thursday nights.”

“How cozy.” Bernie looked in the freezer. “Roast beef. Pork loin roast. All those take too long. Wait, what about Cornish game hen? I could defrost it in kind of a hurry under running water in its little plastic bag. What do you say?”

“Why not? Do I have to help?”

“You have to clean up.”

“Fair enough.” She did her George chores and then sat in his chrome and leather swivel armchair and took his copy of
Time on the Cross
which he was using for the methodology seminar and started reading where she had left off in her own copy. She took particular pleasure in observing and in some cases copying George's notes. Bernie was busy in the kitchen for a long time and then she heard him running the water for a bath.

In another half hour he emerged flushed and almost steaming, wrapped in a dark blue velour bathrobe she supposed was George's. “I figure we can wash the towels in that busy laundry apparatus downstairs before we clear out. Cover all traces.” He leaned against the walnut desk combing back his hair with his fingers. It was flattened to his scalp in ringlets. “So much lovely hot wtaer. The heart of luxury. I live in a dreadful roominghouse. My landlady's okay. She's a fat middle-aged Black who grew up in Detroit and she's lived in that house for twenty years. But there's never enough hot water, nothing works right, it's noisy and drafty. When the furnace is turned on, the hot air blows right up into my room through a register in the floor like a desert wind. When the furnace is off, a cold wind blows through the cracks around the windows. I almost never get a bath because there's not enough hot water. And most of the guys are pigs. They never clean the tub. So I have to take lukewarm showers.”

She put down George's book, realizing the truce, the recovery time, was past. “Is it too late for me to take a bath before we eat?” That would put off confrontation. As she ran the bathwater she thought, There is a real connection. We both live in ratty cheap lodgings without enough heat or hot water, and a bath like a good meal is a real treat. Lush towels. Sharing small pleasures like booty stolen from the comfort we're both struggling toward: that's the real part and the confusion this afternoon only passing static.

Still, her naked body wavering in the baby blue tub discomforted her. She had only a shower, like Bernie, and no full-length mirror; she hardly ever saw herself naked. Image: Valerie and herself standing nude side by side with arm around shoulders, leaning together in front of a big mirror with a carved mohogany frame. Somewhere they had spent the night. Unmade bed behind them, a big fourposter rumpled with their lovemaking. It was the house Lena had before she bought the Victorian mansion in town, a farmhouse near Lake Michigan she had filled with antiques and semi-antiques bought at the auctions she attended weekly, although she always implied that the finest pieces had been handed down in her family. Yes, Lena had given a party for the summer solstice with a live women's band brought in from Chicago. Not only had she and Valerie been invited, which wasn't unusual for an enormous party, but invited also to stay over for the night and share a special outdoor breakfast Sunday. That was odd because they were not in Lena's crowd of lesbian couples with university and professional jobs. She sighed, realizing Lena had already been interested in Val, but Leslie had been too lost in herself to notice—her assistantship, George, her degree, stacking plans on plans.

Skeptically, she squinted at her body looking vast and pink underwater. Why had he wanted to do that, to try to have sex with her? Yet she had partially responded. If it had not happened so quickly, what would she have done? He had made it easy for her to grow angry and reject him violently. She was relieved but confused, and she felt open to him still.

She did not want to lose him. He was the only person she talked to openly and honestly about her life. Honor had to have more independence, more sense of options and choices before they could communicate fully. With Tasha she had often hung back, sheltering herself from judgment. Not really wanting to describe the work she did with George, the Simpson papers, the history of capital development, sure that Tasha would be critical. Would find political objections. Would manage to threaten her position, her security.

She tried to imagine Bernie as a woman, but she failed. He only came out in drag. She could hang the paraphernalia of conversational womanhood on him, but that made him more gay. She was glad he was not a transvestite, because they made her uncomfortable; she disliked men taking on the attributes of the enslaved woman as an aesthetic ego trip. She felt awkward enough around Honor sometimes. Bernie was not a woman but not a straight man either. In no way did he remind her of the boys she had been involved with so many years before.

Somehow it would sort itself out. She grimaced at her body and rose dripping to wrap it in a thick towel twice the size of the much laundered three towels she had at home. Carefully she cleaned the bathroom after herself. Then she discovered why Bernie had put on George's bathrobe. She was hot and damp from bathing and she seemed to have swollen. She could not fit into her pants.

Stubbornly she went and sat on the floor with her legs crossed until she had cooled enough to force her clothes on. She had washed her hair and now she toweled it part dry, leaving it loose to dry itself while she ate. She hoped supper would be ready.

Bernie too had his pants and shirt back on. She felt relieved. It was going to be easy after all. They would talk and everything would simplify. He was dashing around the kitchen from stove to chopping board to refrigerator. “Good. You can set the table.”

She did. “Do we have wine?”

“The best I could find is a Paul Masson chablis. I've got it in a pan with ice water. Tell George to purchase a proper ice bucket.”

He had used orange juice on the skin and filled the hen with pine nuts and kumquats. It was succulent. It was delicious. They sat at right angles eating fervently with their fingers. He had also made a rice pilaf and broccoli with lemon butter. “It's all wonderful,” she said, but not until twenty minutes later when she had eaten all she could.

“It is awfully good, isn't it? Did Valerie cook for you?”

“When we bothered. A lot of times we just ate on the run, a can of tuna fish. Or we'd make a big spaghetti or rice and beans and eat it for days.”

“I just have a hotplate. Doesn't make for gourmet splendor. I try to eat enough at the restaurant to carry me the rest of the week on eggs.… I do love to cook. It's a way of flattering someone. Are you flattered?”

“I'm satisfied.”

“Now make me a fire. It's turned cool.”

When she had lit the fire, they sat on the soft couch facing it with their feet on the coffee table, where he had set out coffee and Metaxa he had found in the liquor cabinet. He said, “How quickly we get used to being George. You have a surprising taste for luxury.”

“But I couldn't be George. Even for a good meal and all the comforts of this house.”

“How come? I thought that's what you were working for. I thought you simply admired him to the stars above.”

“I couldn't take the kind of … arrangement he has—the roles, the distance, the maneuverings. I mean, there are things I like about him and things I don't. In some ways he is ruthless. Not to me. But toward others It's not my business.”

“Burt lived this well. Not a big house. He had an apartment. But superior in the line of the food and the drink and the tailoring. Do you appreciate what I gave up in the name of some obscure principle of honesty or free choice or whatever you want to call it—if you want to call it anything. Fido, perhaps?”

“Are you sorry you left him?”

“You bet. When I wake up too early because the room's icy cold and I have to drag my clothes six blocks to the laundromat and get in a fight wih some junkie who tries ineptly to pick my pocket. When my boots wear out and I can't buy another pair and it's cold and slushy. When I have a paper overdue and I have to work till midnight at À Votre Plaisir and some drunk gives me a hard time and I owe my landlady rent so I try to sneak in and out … I have trouble writing papers. That's the worst thing about being a student, aside from the sense of pretending. Of acting out ‘student' when I'm really a hustler, an adventurer.… I'm glib enough, I can talk my way in or out of almost anything. But not on paper. In French it's just as awkward. I speak French, by the way, quite as artificially as I speak English; I relearned them both and in no way do I sound like what I am. My old man wouldn't believe it if he heard me speak French. He'd puke. It'd be exactly as if I spoke with a fake Oxbridge drawl. My French is more affected than my English even.…
You
still have a Midwestern accent.”

“Academically, what's wrong with that? My specialty is American history, nineteenth century.”

“Your voice amuses me: that it's high pitched and so Midwestern. Like a little girl's voice. Do you know that tension raises your voice?”

“Are you annoyed with me?”

He slumped further. “Edgy. I'm feeling rejected.”

“So now you're telling me I'm not so nice after all.”

“
Nice?
Like me you're much too offensive and defensive to be nice. Burt was nice. If I survive till I'm forty, what fun it'll be to be nice. Until then I'll be awful. Years of lying and manipulating and scheming and pretending and politicking.… The Supreme Court of the land has officially ruled we aren't people. It's okay to outlaw us, forbid us jobs and housing and education. Bust us. Perhaps it's okay to refuse to sell us food and okay to hunt us down in the streets again. Perhaps we could be burned alive at state occasions.”

“Well if you'd managed to penetrate me this afternoon, do you think that would have made you more of a person? In the eyes of the Supreme Court, no doubt.”

“Les, you can't honestly believe I was trying to prove something on you? Like trying to hit a bull's-eye!”

“Do you honestly believe you weren't?”

Turning, he seized her by the shoulders. “You may reject me, you have, but I do not deserve contempt!”

“Bernie, I was trying to be truthful.”

“You aren't going to slug me for touching your shoulders? The shoulders are acceptable? Be careful. The armpit is potentially erogenous. And I'm within a hand's breadth of what has been officially established as forbidden erotic territory.”

She grimaced. “You fight dirty.”

“I fight to win. I told you that. I can't afford to fight any other way. Sportsmanship belongs to the leisure class.”

“What's the
it
you'll win?”

He let go of her shoulders and turned back to the fire, burying his head in his hands. “I wanted it so simply this afternoon, it seemed very clear.”

“Nothing with us could be simple. It isn't simple for us to be friends.”

“That wouldn't have happened either if I hadn't been pushy.”

“Why were you?” She willed him to drop his hands from his face so she could see him.

He spoke through his fingers. “I don't know. You were getting all involved with Honor, and in self-defense I had to psyche you out. Honor means a lot to me. I had to protect myself.… Beyond that it's nothing rational. Don't you believe we don't always have clear reasons? Especially people like you and me, who always do have reasons. That some things grab you? Sneak up on you?”

“Yes, but … not usually friendship, you know.”

“Everything gets mixed up with me. I must be crazy!” He took his hands away then and she saw that he looked on the verge of tears. She felt an immediate surge of sympathy. She wanted to put her arms around him, but she could not. “It goes back to my childhood. Maybe the rest of my life the only women who'll ever turn me on are women like my sister, like Ann-Marie. And they'll never want anything to do with me. Maybe she was the only person who ever loved me. Me as I am. The only one who could!”