The High Cost of Living (5 page)

Crosslegged she sat down to think. Sometimes her whole life seemed a votive candle burning slowly its scent and light smoke of loneliness, of desire, of missing. Finally she got up and tore the poster from the wall, folded it neatly, and threw it in the garbage.
That's my last duchess hanging on the wall
, said a voice from high school English, Miss Greening, who had saved her from slow death in Ludington. Now the walls were bare. She had never liked the poster, for the winged woman bothered her. Should a woman lust to fly? Fly away? Part pigeon, part mammal. No, it was stuck to her wall because Valerie made it. History formed you. But history is what you carry inside. Relics do not increase clarity. Valerie lay sleeping in a room nothing like this. A spasm of pain left her doubled over, although she did not really move from her crosslegged straight-backed sitting.

Eight-thirty. Valerie would still be in bed. She knew what the room looked like where Valerie slept. Or did she? Relics do not increase clarity. No, she knew what the room had looked like before Valerie came to it. Many times she had entered the bedroom of Lena Kornhauser to throw her coat on the bed whose headboard was covered with wild female cupids and doves in papier-mâché painted yellow and green and violet. The bed's furry coverlet would be almost hidden under heaped wraps. Lena gave excellent parties for local lesbian society. Valerie and Leslie were invited only to the larger bashes, being of the poorer more uppity element, the feminists not in with Lena. From an old Dutch family (anything that had arrived before 1880 was old), Lena had income from real estate and a department store, but she made money in her own right. She owned two good women's clothing shops in the best malls—no one went downtown in Grand Rapids. Her reputation was as a sculptor in plastic—big sensuous pieces in amberlike resins all soft lumps and female curves.

Lena did a piece or two a year. Leslie, for whom work was a passion, slightly despised her. She was taller than Leslie, blond and blue-eyed and usually tanned. She had to be forty-five but looked ten years younger, most of the time. Lena cultivated an air of luxurious decadence: a Victorian house whose upper floor had been cut into expensive apartments but whose more than ample parlor floor was art nouveau and Grand Rapids Gothic, cocaine and cognac (both brought in from Chicago), velvet draperies and spun glass Venetian knickknacks, the most extreme clothes from her boutiques.

Leslie sat straight-backed and crosslegged and identified the flame in her solar plexus. Yes, she hated Lena. She could not exactly make it come out that Lena had taken Valerie from her, because it had never been clear that Val would follow her to Detroit. Val did not like to say yes or no bluntly. Or perhaps it had been clear, but not to her.

Money.

It was easier by far to think about Lena than to think about Val. Had she destroyed the poster in anger? She did not like to think that. Would Val ask what had happened to the poster, the day Val finally came back with her?

She had a sudden picture of herself sitting on the floor of the almost empty room surrounded by the bleak gray February city in her white baggy costume with her shoulder-length carroty hair pulled back in a rubber band and her face blank with concentration, balanced against the room two hundred miles away with purple draperies and oriental rug, the scent of perfume and incense, music blaring from the speakers. Of course at nine on Sunday morning music would not be filling the house; she was thinking of parties. Valerie's black hair would be fanned over the pillow and she would perhaps just be waking groaning with vexation and wriggling into the covers. She did not think Lena would be bringing Val breakfast in bed, as she had. She had the habit of getting up hours earlier than Val on the weekends. On weekdays they got up together at seven-thirty, she for her classes and Val for work. Breakfast in bed had been her homage to Val's different temperament, to the poverty they had to share, to all the places they could not go together. Finally, what was Lena's fanciful lush interior but a place where women in couples could be together at their ease without pretense or self-consciousness or danger? The rich contentment of being able to take for granted the simplest of connections.

“You're never at ease anyplace!” That was Val's voice, high, woodwind. Truthfully, she had never been at ease at Lena's. Whatever she touched she felt might smear on her hands like butter cream frosting: the flocked wallpaper, the plush of the loveseat, the velvet of the draperies, the vases of glass flowers, the spotlights discreetly commenting on the rounded amber sculptures. She drank too much out of discomfort. Once she had nervously during a political confrontation disguised as chit-chat eaten a whole plate of little cakes—petits fours, Lena called them—out of that nervousness. She had immediately gone and vomited neatly in the toilet, flushed it away, washed her face and come back. Still she had felt guilty. At the least it was wasteful, although she could not think of any purpose to which the small pink and green cakes should have been put, except perhaps fed to her older brother's children, her nephews and nieces, to make them, too, sick.

Abruptly she rose and began exercising—her blows, her kicks, her forms—until she was drenched with sweat under the loose costume. At eleven she lay on her mattress hot and relaxed and aching, happy. Now she would eat breakfast. Yogurt with a little honey, apple juice with two heaping tablespoons of nutritional yeast, Red Zinger tea. As she rolled to her feet she took off the Brunhilde bra with its hard protective cones she wore only for karate—because she was a little too full not to bounce around and could easily be injured—and stuffed it in the laundry bag, entirely wet. Right after breakfast if there was hot water she would bathe; if there was none she would shower. Then she would look at her notes and computer correlations on the bank archives from the Simpson papers and type up a preliminary report for George. Finally, in the early evening, she would go to karate.

“You're crazy, I mean it. You work as if you loved it!” Val's voice again, high and timbred like a clarinet.

It was true, she did love her work. She felt privileged to be allowed into the stacks of the library, she loved her desk in George's anteroom, her books and papers. It was orderly. It went somewhere. It built and made sense. It was different from blood on the floor and diapers in the pail and the smell of spoiled fish. She had always had to pretend she hated doing homework so that her brothers, her friends, later her roommates would not despise her. Books retained a special power: tickets to elsewhere. She had grown up in a house without books, without magazines except for an occasional Sunday paper or comic book, and they had proved to be doors to a different life, to respect and dignity. Social mobility, sure, but more.

Late Monday afternoon found her in the back of the shabby jouncing bus headed to Honor. As she walked past the laundromat, the liquor store, to turn at Honor's street, the late sun flashed out between spongy mountains of cloud. When the sun has been gone for days, it comes like an annunciation, she thought, wanting suddenly to be on skates. She could feel herself gliding, the cold air sawing at her face, the blades skimming, digging in as she swirled in a rush of ice particles. For a while in high school she had been serious about speed skating. But there was no one to coach a girl, no one really to skate with or against. She could beat everyone who would race her at the local pond, but it wasn't popular, tearing down the ice as if she was crazed, running long-legged and loping on skates. Speed skating had helped build her thighs, and that was useful in karate. For a thin woman she had strong thighs.

Already she could see the little white house crouched behind its rickety porch. The walk had not been shoveled, just a rut gouged through the snowbanks not quite to cement but down to ice. Gingerly she picked her way up the slippery walk and the salted steps to ring the bell. Then guessing it too might not work, she banged on the door for good measure. The dogs heard her and barked furiously, clanking their chains.

Honor came gliding in a long dress of the blue paisley corduroy her mother had been sewing. Her face was flushed and she was playing with a cameo at her throat and still calling something over her shoulder Leslie could not hear for the dogs. “You're here! Wonderful! Come in, hurry. Isn't it nasty out? Bernar' has come already—he met me at school—and we're waiting for the fudge to cool. Why are you walking like that?”

“I pulled a muscle last night. It'll be all right in a day or two.”

“It must be dreadfully painful! Would you like my heating pad? I always use it when I have the curse.”

“It's not a curse. If you take a calcium-magnesium supplement, it prevents cramps. Also, masturbating helps.”

“Shhh! Bernar' will hear you. It may not be a curse for you, but it certainly is for me! Let's not be sor'id.… Come, tell me how much you like my new dress and I'll introduce you to Bernar'.”

“If I don't, you won't?” Wan hope. “All your dresses are fine, if you like dresses.”

“No, no, you're supposed to tell me how pretty I am in the dress! To compliment me, not the dress. Come, smell the fudge.”

“What I said about periods is true,” Leslie said stubbornly and was towed into the kitchen.

He was standing at the window with one hand raised against the cracked sash. Posing, she thought. There's nothing to see except the house six feet away, the aluminum siding and the grade door. After a count of ten he turned, tall, skinny, at least as tall as George and even skinnier. His face was thin too. His hair was a lighter brown than Honor's and kinky; his nose was long and straight, as was his mouth, and he would be called good-looking.

Honor was introducing them and neither was listening. He caught her gaze and then she was damned if she would be stared down. His eyes were gray. Cold, very cold. Then abruptly he dropped his eyelids in disdain and his hand inscribed a gesture of Take it. If you care for such petty victories.

“And you have such a lot in common,” Honor was finishing hopefully.

They could not help quickly glancing at each other, almost in complicity. It was like introducing Bonnie and Pierpont Morgan and saying, You've got loads in common to chat about, you both take such an interest in banking matters. Still she was delighted that he wanted to meet her as little as she wanted to meet him. That was a good start because it implied no further development. She never felt much in common with gay men; it was like telling her she ought to feel empathy with child molesters because they were both defined by the law as sexual deviants. She was only at ease with gay women, really, and she was less ill at ease with straight women than with the gayest of men. After all, they were still men. What was he doing hanging around Honor anyhow?

Leslie unfortunately had to cross the kitchen to a chair, and she could not suppress her limp. She hated limping. It was a loss of control. She was paying for having pushed too hard, fighting a little outclassed. “I'm not usually a cripple,” she said sourly.

“Leslie hurt herself doing judo.”

“Karate.”

“Isn't that a lot of hassle?” Bernard came slowly to the table and sat on the other side of Honor. “I don't see the point. I mean someone with a knife could cut down a karate expert as easily as your helpless grandma.”

Attack disguised as defense. She was supposed to say something indicating she remembered he had knifed a boy, thus making Honor feel protective. “Of course. And if someone threw a hand grenade at me or lobbed a mortar. One armed warhead and the whole city would go up. But people hardly ever attack you with a machine gun or even a straight razor compared to the number of times you might have to show simply you do mean to defend yourself. Every woman has the experience of attempted rape—attempted, if she's lucky.”

“Do you think you could actually fight off a man?” Honor asked.

“Sure. It was a man I was fighting last night, in kumite. I'm in a mixed class. It's harder”—she grimaced at her sore leg—“but more useful. I've never been attacked by a woman.” Actually that wasn't true. She got in a fight in a bar her very first month in Detroit when a woman had swung on her with a bottle. But that had been over in two minutes and nobody hurt. She would not admit that here. Honor would think she went arount like a comic book bull dyke picking fights in bars. She did not like bars. They were smoky and hurt her sinuses and gave her headaches, and there was nothing to do in them but drink and get into trouble.

Honor was making a monkey face. “I just can't imagine you actually … fighting with a man. I can't picture it!”

“It's not wrestling,” she said dryly. “The only body contact is blows. You fight the same way whether you're fighting a woman or a man.… You wouldn't think it weird if I went to Rouge Park and played tennis with a man.”

“Would you enjoy that the same way?” Bernard asked innocently. His voice was deep and silky. Everything about him reeked of practice.

“I'm no good at tennis. What are you good at?”

“Want to challenge me? Not much. What am I good at? Loving and lying, I suppose.”

“Well, the second might get you into the government. The first, onto the streets.”

“I have been on the streets.”

A moment of pure malice passed between them bright as a beam of light. Honor blinked, her eyes darting from one to the other. Then she stood with a toss of her hair and a flip of her gown. Both their gazes followed her. She stood a moment in dramatic silence and then laughed that heavy sensual laugh that had caught Leslie's attention at the party. “Let's see if the fudge has cooled enough to eat.”

She did not think Honor had understood what he had just said and for a moment she was tempted to explain. His eyes waited on her like hungry pikes. Perhaps Honor would romanticize hustling. She was naive enough. Leslie said nothing. Outside it was getting dark. She had not asked if she was being invited to supper and she was beginning to feel empty. She hoped that Honor did not intend the fudge in place of a meal. It was a little after five. Briefly she felt like an ancient among adolescents.