The High Cost of Living (37 page)

George had his briefcase packed. He seemed not to want to walk out with them but to send them ahead. Leslie tucked the file she had come for under her arm and walked with Honor to the elevator. As soon as the doors wobbled shut, Honor burst into an aria of self-congratulation. “Aren't you going to ask me millions of questions? Aren't you surprised? I was going to tell you soon as I got the chance.”

“How long has it been going on?”

“The ‘it' would need definition.” Honor tossed her hair back, smoothing her muslin dress. “I'd say in some measure from the first time we met in front of the fireplace in that gloomy house. I always knew a real attraction would be just like that: immediate, overwhelming, unmistakable. Like a thunderclap.”

“George is into the thunderclap business,” Leslie mumbled. They crossed the lobby, where a security guard sat reading a newspaper, looking up to eye Honor's behind long and carefully.

“Oh, he's certainly experienced. I was right about that too. You see, Leslie, I did know what I was looking for in a man.… Things really got going the week Bernie broke my watch. I was trying to find you. You weren't home, so I went to the University. Neither you or Cam was around, but there was George.… I could tell he was waiting for me, looking for me, just the way I'd been looking for him. It was so immediate, Leslie. From the time our gazes crossed that day I knew something was happening at last! He called me into his office and he shut the door, he wasn't hesitant at all, he had that wicked grin on his face.”

“He's always looking, you're right about that.”

“Leslie! You're jealous. How disappointing. I know he's dreadfully attractive and it must be hell to work with him. I'm sure I couldn't. Besides we have such different relationships with him.”

“Damn right. You're in the relationship of being exploited.”

Honor swished her hair in annoyance. “Leslie, you're being absurd. I know what I'm doing. Just what I always said I would. And he's crazy about me. He's told me he loves me. I'm not a fool. I'm still going to college in the fall. I'll go to Ann Arbor and it'll be even easier to see him than it is living at home. Ann Arbor's only half an hour from his house. I'm patient. I only regret I didn't have the courage of my instincts all along. I'm ashamed I ever let Bernie touch me, I'm really ashamed. He isn't a man. It's not as if I expect George to leave his wife tomorrow, after all—”

“You asshole!” Leslie grabbed Honor by the arm and then she slapped her. Immediately she was horrified. She did not slap hard. She pulled the punch as she swung so that as the hand landed she was only tapping the cheek; but the will, the wish, the anger were there, ominous to her.

“Oh!” Honor stopped short. Her hand went to her face. She stared at Leslie and then she began to weep.

“I'm sorry. Forgive me, I'm terribly sorry. Look, I'm worried about you. I know George.”

“No you don't! How could you? You're only his employee.”

“Ah, poor lamb, I do know him. And so will you. I'm sorry I hit you, Honor, I had no right. You're correct saying I'm jealous, but not of George. That academic fucker with a mustache and a rich wife.”

“She bought him, didn't she? Ten years ago he was a handsome dashing young radical, just the sort of thing a rich girl needs to make her life complete. I see more than you think I do. I see he's trapped in a life that frustrates him, with a rich redneck of a wife like a millstone around his neck. I see that you hate me!”

“Honor!” Gently she touched the girl's face. Honor turned away. “I'm sorry I hit you. Say you forgive me.”

“I could say it, but it wouldn't mean I did.” Honor felt her cheek again. “You're right, I mean you were right when you said the time we had that awful scene with Bernie that I wouldn't really like having my face slapped. It isn't anything like my fantasy.”

“Well, one more fantasy down the drain.” She felt as if moment by moment, slow step by step, she was staving off a sleetstorm of images. Maybe she only wanted to believe George was using Honor for a quick affair. This time he could be in love. He seemed to be breaking his own rules: Never in the office, not on weekends, reserved for family. Maybe he was madly in love. After all, she loved Honor; why shouldn't he? Who wouldn't prefer Honor to Sue, when you came down to it? He'd have to be crazy not to. “There's the theater.… Does Cam know about George?”

“Are you serious? I can't trust her. She'd get excited and flap around terrified about Mama. She wouldn't see how much in control I am. I said I wanted to sit at the back to watch the audience. What reason would she ever have to suspect I met George in the lobby ten minutes after the play started?” Honor laughed, and Leslie knew she was forgiven. On shaky ground. Honor needed a confidant. She needed someone to listen to her talk about her romance. “Really, Leslie, I feel like a heroine in a spy movie, clever and mature and wonderfully cool. It's fun. I always knew life could be like this, if I had half a chance!” Honor slipped into the theater and Leslie set off at a brisk march for her apartment, the file still clutched under her arm. If I ever got drunk, it would be tonight, she thought, their bodies crushed together in her mind. She felt ill. Obscene, that couch in his office! She would never sit on it as long as she lived. Why not get drunk? Always as she entered or left her room, she passed that chocolate stain, suggestive as old blood on the wall of the stairwell.

She bought a bottle of red wine, random red she thought, and set out to drink it lying on the mattress. She waited for it to blot her mind but nothing happened. She did not feel drunk. After she had consumed half the bottle, she trotted into the bathroom and suddenly threw it up and felt better. Then she lay on the mattress trying not to think. She kept seeing them together, George on Honor. She felt battered.

Finally she must have dozed, because she woke from a dream with no sense whether she had been asleep a minute or an hour. Bernie was lying naked in the cultivated earth of a flower bed, a bed of day lilies. Their long grassy leaves bent over him and the orange trumpets nodded above him. She was leaning toward him. Was he asleep or dead? He was beautiful lying there on the brown loamy earth with the orange bells tolling over him and pollen smeared on his chest. She bent closer to him, filled with tenderness that rent her, and when she touched him she woke.

She got up slowly, kneading the muscles of her abdomen which protested having vomited. She stood at the window looking out on the fire escape and the flat asphalt roof and the skyshine beyond, the neon sign blinking on and off in magenta and green. She had to do it. She had to. Pain and love braided irrational and spiky through her. She had to. She dialed his number. She hung up, terrified at what she was doing. But pain freed her, jealousy freed her, everything was tearing loose as if in a storm and floating free. She dialed his number a second time and this time she did not hang up.

“Who?”

“Bernie Guizot.”

“Oh, Bernie. He gone.”

“Gone? Oh, he's out. I'll call back later.” It must be late now. “Tomorrow. I'll call tomorrow.”

“He move out. Gone to California hitchhiking with his thumb stuck out. You a friend of his?”

Leslie had trouble answering. Finally she said, “Yes.”

“Well, he left a lot of books and school stuff here. He says he don't need it where he going. He done with school, I guess, but it seems like a real waste to me. I could give it to the Goodwill, but if you a friend of his, if you want any of it, you can come on over and get it. He paid up to the end of the month, so I didn't clear out his room yet, if you want any of that stuff for school. You a student too?”

She put down the phone, resonating in all her nerves, ringing to her finger ends. Gone. Lost. She had the same scrambled sense of being bottled up, of unfinished business, of connections hanging loose she had had ten days before when Bernie had turned and left the room, the building, their lives. He was crazy, he was a liar, he was devious and desperate and emotionally violent, but they were connected and now the tie was roughly cut. She was bleeding into the air. He had given up on respectability, on academia, on getting ahead, on clambering into the college-educated working class—the degree-bearing home-loving regularly paid medically insured so-called middle class. He was gone, back on the road, on the streets. He had been straight for almost two years and what had it got him? There was plenty of room at the bottom.

It was George's last Thursday night, for he took a summer vacation from them. Although she wasn't feeling social and dreaded standing around and making conversation, she looked forward to getting out of the city, to sprinklers turning on lush lawns in Farmington Hills, where George lived. Green velvet in the twilight. The night hummed electrically. She had done well in her classes, top notch, and in celebration and in recompense for what she would not think about, for what she was blocking from her mind daily to function, to go on working with George, she had given in to herself and she had done it; she had bought a small red bike, a Honda, from a departing student. A little beauty.

Going to George's was a pleasure. She felt happier than she had in months, since that day on the water she held herself rigidly straight not to remember. She did not want to arrive at George's, ever. She could keep going. Past George's. The mythical male open road past the filling station and the pile of wrecks in the junkyard, into the oil slick sunset. Even if all her human relations had combusted, that was bullshit. No, her life was here. In fact she arrived early to help Sue in the kitchen.

She walked into a fight. The children had been given supper already and were stashed upstairs in the family room in front of the television set with the puppy. Suddenly in the last week Sue had changed her mind and given in to Davey and Louise's perennial clamor for a dog. A clumsy Great Dane puppy, rawboned and bigeyed, was peeing on the family room rug upstairs. On the phone Sue told her, “He'll be a protection. You know how unsafe it is.”

The children and the guard puppy were upstairs, but Sue and George were having it out in the kitchen. They had a habit of fighting in the kitchen ever since she had known them, arguing in tense unnaturally soft voices so the children would not hear. The children were watching reruns of
The FBI
and wouldn't have heard them if they had shot each other. She wanted to go upstairs with the kids and Hoover's blood-wet dreams until peace had come, but both Sue and George with different excuses drew her in.

“We have to get ready. All those students will be coming any minute.” Sue made as if to begin cutting cheese.

“But you like students so much. Suddenly.” George sounded sour. He was whining. “I think Sue needs help, Leslie. I think she needs help badly, but she won't do anything about it.”

“You mean in addition to the cleaning lady?”

“Psychiatric help,” George snarled. “She needs a doctor.”

She was having trouble looking at George. She did not want to see him. It would pass, it would go away. She kept her eyes on Sue instead.

“He thinks I'm crazy,” Sue said airly, chopping the cheese into big crooked yellow hunks. “What's sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose, sugar.”

“When you put on that fake drawl, it drives me ape.”

“I come from Texas, sugar. Did you forget that? I wouldn't if I were you. We have an open marriage. Wide open. That wasn't my idea. Ever. It sure as … heck wasn't my idea. Here I am bringing up two children, keeping house for you and entertaining—”

“Leslie does most of that and you know it.”

“I do not! I just follow directions on Thursday nights.” Leslie was getting very nervous. She edged toward the door. Upstairs the puppy was barking.

“I thought you'd straightened out since we moved here. It's a step in the right direction, a better position, and you got all that old grant money you were crying for. I think you'd be too busy, the way other women's husbands are. But no, I thought you'd straightened yourself out and quit that funny business. I mean, how old do you have to be? Sixty-five? You have two children. I'd think you'd leave tom-catting around.”

“How can you stand there and say that to me after what you've done? You're the one disregarding the children. The mother has a responsibility!”

“I got a sitter.” Sue smirked.

“You're home with them, you have to take care. I do a lot for them. I spend more time with my kids than ninety-nine percent of men do.”

“Sugar, if your thing doesn't bother the children, I don't see why my thing does. So there! Sauce for the goose!”

“If you don't quit using that inane expression—”

“You'll what? Are you going to threaten me? Leslie, I'm sure this is a real riot for you to listen to, because I'm sure you know as well as I do he's carrying on again, this time with a … a nymphet. Did you ever read
Lolita?
She's a high school student, a child. Do you believe it?”

Nervously in narrowing circles Leslie arranged sesame crackers on a plate. “You've lived this way a long time. Why are you disagreeing now?” He was in love with Honor, that must be it. He was really in love this time. He would leave Sue.

George whined, “She's taken up with one of my students. My
student
, do you believe it? Really, even if you weren't my wife I'd be embarrassed. Embarrassed for you.”

“I think Mark's quite attractive. And I surely do think it's unbecoming to you to be so jealous of me.” Sue laughed flirtatiously.

Leslie realized that Sue was enjoying herself covertly. For the first time in one of their fights Sue felt herself to be in a winning position.

“Jealous!” George sputtered. “I'm humiliated!”

“The difference in our ages, of which you are making such a silly fuss,” Sue went on languidly, “is much less than the difference between you and your new young high school sweetheart.”