The High Cost of Living (6 page)

“Leslie, take some. Don't sit there wishing!” Honor and Bernard were eating as fast as they could.

Reluctantly she broke off half a square. “Sugar is a drug.”

“Absolutely,” Bernard said. “That's why it's such fun.”

Slowly she chewed the fudge, chocolately and full of walnuts. It felt like heroin charging her blood. She was too hungry not to finish her half square but she could not eat more. Their capacity amazed her. Already each had eaten three large squares. At last Bernard sat back with a sigh, licked his fingers in a catlike gesture, and then lit a joint he extracted from his woven belt.

“We're both candy freaks,” Honor said. “I can see you aren't. Or is there a secret candy freak in you struggling to come out?”

“Yes, Leslie, do come out,” he said musically.

She tensed. Well, they each knew where the other stood. Or was it a blind shot? She had to bring the matter up with Honor, she intended to, but not with him there. “No, I'm a hot freak. I eat Mexican peppers while steam issues from my ears, and my sinuses miraculously clear.”

“What kind of hot food? I've hardly had any.” Honor leaned forward, still nibbling fudge.

“Indian curries. Szechwan Chinese. Mexican. There's a lot of Mexican food in Grand Rapids in the ghetto. I heard there's a new Szechwan restaurant here—”

“I liked it,” Bernard said. “A friend took me. We could all go if we could figure out a time Honor wouldn't be caught.”

“Caught eating Chinese food?”

“I couldn't go in the evening because Mama manages to get in a phone call.… We could go in your car. Bernar' has a car, just as tacky as Cam's.”

“It's an old Mustang but it still moves, kind of.” He offered her the joint suddenly. She had not thought he would.

“Go ahead, Leslie, don't let me bother you,” Honor said. “I'm sure Mama would smell it on me somehow. It's not that it's mysterious to me. I tried it first in the sixth grade.”

If she did not share his toke as well as not eating the fudge, she was rejecting too much. It was not that she didn't smoke but that she didn't want to smoke with him. She took it. Was she imagining all kinds of subtle hostility between them? She could have sworn that he was amused at her hesitation and at her acquiescence. She could be making it all up. No, not all. His gray gaze measured her and there was amusement in it.

Her belly growled. She was very empty. “I wonder if there's anything to eat? Like cheese?”

“Poor Leslie,” he crooned. “You aren't used to the house rules. Never mind, you can share my hero. We never eat from the refrigerator because Mama would notice. I'm not supposed to be here very much.”

“She's so … anxious about me, she'd want to know exactly who was here and what we talked about, and she'd want to meet you at once.”

The phone rang. Honor hurried to answer it in the livingroom. Rather than speaking to each other, both looked after her and shut up the better to listen. “Yes, Mama.… No, not yet. I was just about to pop the casserole in the oven.… Low heat, yes. Do you imagine I plan to burn it?… No, Cam has a date, she won't be home till late.… Yes, Mama, it's on again this weekend. It isn't a long run after all!… Just doing my school work, my French.… I was in the kitchen. I told you, I was just about to heat my dinner.… Yes, I put the dress on as soon as I got home from school. You'll see how ravishing it is when you come home, Mama darling.… Yes, I'll show you what Mr. Haggerty wrote on my theme, and all I'll tell you is that it's quite flattering.… I am not! I'm perfectly healthy.… Really, Mama, I'm not as sickly as you like to imagine!… Oh, that was a touch of the sniffles.… Well, sometimes I don't want to go to school. It's boring!… Well, if it wasn't then, it is now.… Yes, Mama, I did already.… Yes, love and kisses. See you at ten!”

Bernard met her gaze and a strange hostile complicity jelled between them. He shrugged one shoulder. “The voice of the dragon in her ear.”

“Have you met Mama?”

He nodded. “You'll have to, if you stick around. It isn't … infinitely avoidable.”

“I suppose then I'll meet her. You survived.”

“Survived what?” Honor glided in.

Leslie fumbled for an explanation but Bernard said smoothly, “High school. But I didn't go through. So I didn't exactly survive it.”

“I'd forgotten, excuse me,” Leslie said dryly. Yes, he was a good liar. He had scored a point on that exchange.

When Honor brought her tuna and noodle dish to the table, Bernie pulled a hero sandwich from his coat, where it hung on the doorknob. As he went by the sink he picked a knife from a drawer and carefully cut the sandwich in two. Half he put in front of Leslie. “Take, eat, it is my body,” he said lightly.

Once again their gazes snagged while the retorts she could not
yet
make flew barbed through her mind. Honor said, “Really, Bernar', isn't that blasphemous?”

“Only the religious ever blaspheme. Nobody else knows how.”

“How nice to have extra sins,” Leslie said. “However, eating your hero won't be mine. I have to work tonight, so I'd better be on my way.”

“If you wait, Bernar' can give you a ride home. He has his car,” Honor wheedled, playing with the ends of her hair. “You don't have to go yet.”

“Tonight I do.”

“The bus runs so seldom.”

“I still have to work. I'll call.”

Taking his half a hero back, Bernard did not bother to hide his pleasure. The field to himself. She would make sure to see Honor alone next time.

four

Leslie came early to help prepare and lay out the buffet with Sue, who used the time to pump her about people at school. George was upstairs in the family room building a wooden skyscraper with Davey and Louise, and Sue also wanted to tell Leslie about Brenda arriving without warning the weekend before to make a dreadful scene, and how cruel and unfeeling George had been. Sue had had to clear it all up as usual, and send Brenda back to Grand Rapids on the bus after a good cry.

“Really, I don't hardly know
what
she thought she was going to stir up.” Sue paused. She was a big-boned attractive woman with short straight hair of a wonderful color. It was half natural straw blond and half prematurely gray. The result was a beautiful ash color that reminded Leslie of the furniture in her parents' bedroom. Her mother had got it when the hotel closed, where she used to wait tables in the summers, and she called it Hollywood Oak. The veneer was that same ash blond. There were a double bed, a vanity, and a chest of drawers; one of the treats of Leslie's childhood had been to help her mother empty the drawers and line them with shelf paper. Then Leslie was allowed to play with her mother's things, and they were together, the two of them, all afternoon in the room where she was not usually allowed.

“What was she expecting?” Sue paused again. She had a seductive voice, basically Texas overlaid with good Eastern schools. Her drawl expanded and contracted according to mood, how social, how flirtatious or how serious she was feeling. “Shouldn't it have dawned on Brenda if George wanted to see her he'd have shown some sign? Our George is no slowpoke about chasing down pussy.”

“Maybe Brenda wanted the scene so she'd know it was over.” Leslie was slicing a salami.

“Why do they always think it won't be over? Should I make a dip for the chips? I'm bored silly with dips.”

“Don't. They all taste like sour cream with something odd in it.”

“Brenda cried all the way to the bus. Imagine coming to the house that way!… Why do they carry on like scalded cats?”

Leslie raised her brows. “Is that a serious question?”

Sue pouted, sleeking her hair. She had put on a long blue and green Mexican hostess dress. “Do they figure he's about to leave me? That's what makes me spitting mad!”

“You never seem spitting mad.”

“All right, mildly bothered. I don't like it slopping over anywhere near the kids.” She smiled absently, stooping to rummage the lower cupboards for more crackers to put out.

“I suppose you only see the ones who make a fuss.”

“Oh, he's honest. Honest George. He does tell me about all of them. Otherwise I'd poison him, right? Give me a hand up. I've got to lose weight this spring. You're always so neat and trim. How come you never gain an ounce?”

Leslie set Sue on her feet. Sue held on to her arms for a moment. “Maybe I should study karate?” Sue peered into her face. “But I wouldn't, would I, honey? I'd never keep soldiering at it. I'd just go in there twice and pull a muscle I never did hear of before and give up.”

The truth was Sue was lazy and never studied anything past a couple of lessons, whether it was trancendental meditation or conversational Russian. She read an enormous amount, far more than George, who stuck to journals and books in his own field. She read serious novels and books about genetics, books about education and art and the Etruscans and medieval icons, biographies of Freud and Helen Traubel. As compulsively as some women ate, she read. Sue had enjoyed a good education in the English department at Bryn Mawr, but she never seemed to have sheltered any ambitions Leslie could discover. Leslie could not understand such a large amorphous curiosity, a morass into which all that information and literature sank. Yet it was characteristic of Sue that no matter what book anyone might mention, she would have read it or would have acquired it and be about to. Reading seemed to be Sue's profession. If she could be inveigled into real conversation, frequently her ideas were interesting. But nothing led to anything else. Maybe it was because she had never had to work, Leslie thought, puzzling over Sue.

Once the students arrived, Leslie detached herself from Sue. The livingroom of George's house reminded her of a failed church, high and gloomy with shadows clustering like bats in spite of the Design Research furniture. The livingroom stretched a full two stories, facing the cold gray north for a supposed view, a weak slope to the trees still standing in a thin band between this house and the next, and it looked like a room the sun never entered. Sue collected art. The livingroom was arranged to show off the prints, the hard-edge paintings, the welded metal sculpture, rather than to facilitate sitting or talking. As a result, George's students ended up in two huddles. The first was centered on George, who usually sat by the fireplace in a leather sling chair, while at his feet the nervous masses huddled yearning to be noticed. Those were the students who kept their minds buzzing on number one goal, impressing George. The lazier, more confident, the hungrier, hornier students clustered in the kitchen near the food and the drink.

Leslie wandered back and forth, a little bit the maid emptying ashtrays, collecting empty beer cans and glasses abandoned where they could be broken, putting out more chips or ice—a little bit the ersatz daughter of the house, called over by Sue or George to hear some point or tell some anecdote: the only female Sue trusted. His newer students tended to resent her ambiguous role, not comprehending it was all just part of her job.

Who would George take up with? He always had something going, carefully casual and limited affairs with young women. They were pretty, uncommonly so, and quite young. Sometimes they were students, sometimes secretaries, and sometimes somebody's girlfriend or sister. Valerie and she had once invented a murder starring George as corpse in which ever so many characters had motives for offing him. They had such fun they listed twenty-seven suspects, including Sue of course, his students, his colleagues, his ex-affairs, young men whose girlfriends or sisters he had briefly enjoyed. He never had an affair with a married woman or anyone belonging to a peer. He had been murdered by having the stem of his pipe coated with strychnine: he chewed his pipe more than he smoked it.

She smiled at the memory and then saw Hennessy trying to catch her eye. Cam was not here; the play had two more weeks to run. In one of those loud buffalo plaid shirts he liked to wear, he looked like a hunter and she felt like a hunted deer. Pivoting, she dived into the pool of listeners at George's feet. Actually it typified these gatherings that nobody ever listened to anyone except George and the voice of their own anxiety. They never heard what anyone said, even the person just beside them. But Hennessy wedged himself in next to her, his thigh heavy against hers. Hugging her knees, she ordered herself to be elsewhere; she would review her sensei's admonitions for the last two weeks and think how best to apply them.

Her new sensei, Parker, was the only man she could remember that she considered beautiful, as beautiful as a woman, although she did not desire him. She had never had a male sensei before, but Parker was good at instructing women. He was of medium height, his skin was copper-black, he was graceful and very, very strong. He looked sarcasm oftener than he spoke it. He had ways of glancing at her when she was clumsy that made her shrivel. She liked him immensely but could not tell from his vast fairness whether he liked her. Perhaps he perceived his students only in terms of their karate accomplishments and problems; she would like that.

She jumped, realizing George had addressed her and probably repeated whatever he had said, because everyone was staring. She felt herself blush as if she had been dipped in boiling water. Hennessy said, “Hey, now I know why George calls you Red. Not just from your hair.” He patted her head as if she were a spaniel, grinning down at her.

“What were you dreaming about?” George stroked his mustache peevishly.

“Why the papers, master, only the papers.”

“Then you must've found something more interesting than I have, to blush like that.”

“It's a reflex.… Can you figure what possible survival value it could ever have had for my ancestors to suddenly turn beet red? Fitting into a predominantly red landscape?”