The High Cost of Living (7 page)

“Bright as a baboon's behind. But evolution works by sexual selection as well as natural selection.” George would pronounce on anything. He had a weakness for biological theories, Ardrey and Wilson. She was off the hook, but he wouldn't forgive a second lapse, for her attention was part of what he was buying. That quality of attention first made him notice her as a student, he had told her. “You'll have to do everything not twice as well but five times as well.” He did not bother to tell her she'd have to be a decent politician to survive. She knew that, but she was not convinced she had the capacity. Maybe she could be seven times as good and they'd accept her.

Honor was wearing a lacy nightdress with a lavender housecoat over it, trailing down to her narrow high-arched bare feet. “I'm afraid I'm catching cold. I feel frayed around the edges. That's why I got into my nightgown when I came home.” She glided off to the room she obviously shared with Cam, one twin bed made up with an old-fashioned prim-faced doll sitting on the pillow—a doll that must have belonged to her mother—the other a tangle of covers and run pantyhose, rumpled bikini underpants. “Do have some of this cough medicine. It's delicious and habit-forming.”

Leslie glowered. “It has codeine in it. Why not just shoot up? A, you don't have a cough yet. B, if you did, the last thing you should do is suppress it! Coughing clears your lungs.”

“Leslie, you're so righteous! What's the difference between drinking wine and drinking this, except it has a lovely cherry flavor?”

“I don't mean to be … righteous. I try to avoid the lesser temptations.”

“I can't even resist a second slice of lemon meringue pie, which isn't my favorite, so I'm sure I could never resist a big juicy temptation, if I had a crack at one.… Paul's the closest to a temptation I've met, and his ugly little dirty jokes turn me off.” She sat on the bench in front of a skirted vanity and motioned Leslie to sit beside her. The frilly dressing table was piled with a dusty havoc of glamour—half-used lipsticks, hand creams, throat creams, cakes of eye shadow, an electric curling set, powders and rouges that Leslie presumed were really Cam's. “Look at this wicked new lipstick. It's mauve.”

She took Honor's wrist, gently. “Please don't put that crap on. You're naturally …” She could not say “beautiful” again. Sometimes it seemed to her every time she looked at Honor she told her how beautiful she was. “… lovely.”

Honor grimaced into the mirror, making a face with one eye strained wide and the other squinted. “If I'm … lovely … as you say … why does everyone hate me?”

“Who hates you? What are you talking about?”

“Nobody in the play likes me. I can tell. I don't know how to talk to people.… And at school, they hate me.”

“Listen, the kids who enjoy high school, they're all assholes, Honorée. Believe me, everybody you'll be friendly with when you go to college, when you ask them about high school they were all miserable.”

Honor put her elbows down hard on the vanity, shoving aside the cosmetics. “Such an ugly thing happened. In the cafeteria. Buck Rogers—his name is Bill but he calls himself Buck, and every time we're in the same class, we have to sit by each other when they do it by alphabet. He plays basketball and he thinks he's sexy.… Ugh, he's so gross!”

“What happened?” This was the cold, she was sure, what was really ailing Honor.

“He said to me in front of the whole line, ‘Hey, Dictionary—'”

“What?”

“Oh, that's what some of them call me. Miss Dictionary. They're such cretins.… Anyhow, he said—very loud—‘Hey, Dictionary, I can't decide what's bigger, your tits or your ass or the words you use, but I'll tell you what. I'll fuck you anyhow, if you'll wear a gag. How about it?'” Honor gave a yank to her own hair. “I felt so stupid, I couldn't think of a come-back. All the conversations that go through my mind all the time, and I always give myself such witty dialogue, and I couldn't think of anything to say. I almost cried! I felt so humiliated.… I'm never going back!”

“He probably really is attracted to you, and he doesn't know how to approach you, so he punished you for it.”

“Sometimes I feel like such an anachronism. I want to be a Great Lady, and whatever will I do with my life?”

“Finish high school and get away from home for a start. It will get better then, believe me.”

“How can I leave Mama? I think she's bred me so I can't. I'll turn into an old maid and age behind drawn blinds playing with cosmetics and dresses.”

“Are you aging at—What age are you?”

“Seventeen.”

“You're not getting social security yet,” Leslie said mockingly, but she shivered. Was never leaving a possibility? Was that why Cam had brought her sister to the theater? Nervously she picked up a small metal box from the dresser and fiddled with it. Suddenly it began to tinkle out music. “What?”

“Mama and I found that at a garage sale. We search them out sometimes on weekends. Dad never goes. He doesn't like to do anything Mama does. He likes to hang out with what Mama calls his cronies—two friends he plays penny-a-point pinochle with every Friday night. They must be the last pinochle players in the world.” Honor took the music box from her. “I bet you didn't notice what's inside?”

“Some earrings.”

“Those are real garnets. They belonged to my father's mother. But I can't wear them, they're for pierced ears. Mama won't let me get my ears pierced. She talks about infection. It makes me furious! I'm trying to get Bernar' to go with me to have it done. I'd have the nerve then. Once it's done, what can she do? I don't suppose your ears are pierced?”

“Wrong. I had it done when I was fourteen. I used to wear big gold hoops.”

“I should think silver would look better with your hair?”

“I used to be partial to a shade of red-gold I thought matched it. Now gold's so expensive it's ludicrous that when I was fourteen and a biker's old lady I used to wear gold in my ears.”

“I've never seen you wear any jewelry but your man's watch.” Honor lifted the loop of Leslie's hair that covered her ear, on its way to the rubber band that confined it. “You do have a little stud—but just on one side. Did you lose the other?”

“Val—Valerie and I—used to buy a pair of post earrings together. We'd split the pair and each would wear one. Val has the mate to this turquoise stud.”

“Valerie. I thought you didn't have a sister.”

“No, we lived together for three years.”

“I don't know if I'd like to live with another woman. I've had it with sisters.”

I've got to do better than this, she thought. “We were lovers, Honor, Honorée.”

“And when you were fourteen you really slept with a boy? Is that what you mean by the phrase you were a biker's old lady?”

Leslie laughed with relief. Honor wasn't going to faint or scream. “I don't think I was ever a virgin. I probably had sex some time up in the sand dunes when I was nine. I suppose before fourteen it doesn't count. Yeah, I was involved with first one guy, Billy, and then Cliff. I was involved with Cliff from, let's see, around Christmas just before I turned fifteen until halfway through my sixteenth year. It was practically like a two-year marriage. Cliff was my first marriage and Val my second.”

“It's amazing to imagine having sex for years by the time you were my age. Just think, you'd already broken up with Cliff! Oh, there must be something wrong with me!”

She blinked. Honor had taken it like a sugar pill. Or had she? Had she just somehow not listened? She could hardly say, Hey, never mind the early heterosexual stuff, you have to focus on what matters to me. “It was my first try at breaking out of the house. Not a smart way. It's lucky I didn't get pregnant and stuck for good. But the gang seemed high on energy, style, speed. That's what drew me. Except I liked books. They were escape too. I always liked to read from the time I discovered that. They were someplace else, like the gang.”

“How did you happen to go to college?”

“I had a high school teacher who decided I was a diamond in the rough. Miss Greening.” She had loved to talk to Miss Greening, Miss Greening loved to talk to her. Both of them were perishing of loneliness. Because she had already been in love with a woman, although nothing passed between them, she felt more sophisticated and more corrupt than Miss Greening, who did not know what the attraction between them was. She knew. She was grateful, but knowing made her fierce and bumbling, awkward and lumpy. Miss Greening helped her, gave to her, shared with her, and she was deeply, passionately grateful. Even though she was not physically attracted to the dumpy gray-haired woman, she wanted to make love to her out of love itself. But they remained Miss G. and Leslie, and all that was ever given to the affection was a peck on the cheek at final parting.

“Every time I turn on the stupid TV, I see some man I could have a passionate affair with,” Honor mourned, holding her hair on top of her head and turning to and fro to eye herself. “Why don't I meet any in real life? Maybe they all left Detroit.… I had a fantastic dream about Paul. I do have the best dreams! If I could film them, I'd make a fortune! They're like ten-course dinners. I dreamed I was married to him. He was, how shall I say? playful but affectionate.”

Leslie laughed. “Sounds like a Saint Bernard puppy.”

“Sunday I told him I'd dreamed about him, and he forgave me for our tiff Saturday and got all enchanted up again.”

“Are you really interested in him?”

“He's fun to practice on. I can't help it if I'm feeling fine. I'm not going to act dull and dreary on his account,” Honor said loftily.

“You don't even like him, do you?”

“What has liking to do with it?”

“I wouldn't want to … touch someone I didn't like a lot.”

“Pooh. I don't think sexual magnetism has much to do with liking. I like Bernar' more than anyone—except possibly yourself, Leslie, and I've known him longer—but there's no electricity. I can't imagine him sweeping me up in his arms and throwing me on the bed.”

“Gay men seldom do that sort of thing,” Leslie muttered. “But why do you want to be raped?”

“I don't want to be raped! I don't even like having my hair pulled when Mama's trimming it. But I want a masterly sort of man. If I were tremendously experienced and sophisticated, like yourself, Leslie,” she added wickedly, “I'd know just what to do, and then I wouldn't need to imagine the man taking charge. All I know is how to flirt, and I'm still learning that. How else will anything ever manage to happen?”

Tuesday she was coming home just after ten in good spirits. She had made a breakthrough, she had done very well in karate class. Her instructor had given her a nod and said, “Like that, watch,” to another student. Afterward she had showered at the dojo and rubbed out her bruises and changed and even hung around socializing in the glow of the thing well done. As she passed the dark shoestore with its heavy metal grates pulled over the windows and approached the street door that opened on her stairway, she saw someone in the doorway lounging, and at once she crouched into a ready position, letting her gear drop.

“Really, do I look like a ravening menace? You're much more dangerous than I am on a dark street.”

She recognized Bernard's voice before she picked up her gear and moved close enough to see him slouched outside the locked door.

“Are you waiting for me, or do you just like to piss in hallways?” Leslie unlocked the door and started up the straight steep flight. “That bell downstairs doesn't work by the way.” Her adrenaline slowly subsided and she felt annoyed.

“Yes, someone's been using it for a pissoir. But as you guessed, I'm waiting for you. Don't look quite so gloomy about it, it's time we tried to talk instead of throwing darts over Honor's head.”

“I don't know. I thought we could manage to avoid each other.” She stood aside for him.

As she flicked on the overhead light and followed him in, he prowled about looking and then he whistled. “I have never seen a barer, more ascetic pad. I mean, the solitary cells at Saint Boniface were fancy by comparison. Saint Boniface was my alma mater, a home for uncurably delinquent boys. At least we had graffiti. What do you do here? Do you eat, do you sleep like an ordinary mortal, or do you go into hibernation? Maybe you walk in and turn yourself off like a robot?”

“I don't care for a distracting environment,” she said with a little amusement, hanging her pea jacket on a nail. She put her gear on its shelf and sat down crosslegged on the floor. “Do have a seat.”

“I could go sit on the toilet. I assume you haven't removed it? Or I could sit on your bed—your mattress. If you wouldn't mind? I have a feeling you would.”

“No more than I mind your sitting anywhere else. Do make yourself … less uncomfortable.”

Sprawling then, arranging himself gracefully on her mattress covered with the only spot of color, an old but satisfying Indian blanket, he dug in his pocket and pulled out a flash of Old Goat Blended Whiskey. “What a relief, your mattress is foam rubber. I was worried it might be nails.… I thought this might make things go easier.”

“Do you usually drink that?”

“No. But I was weighing how much alcohol power I could buy for my money. We could drink that.” He pointed to a bottle of Benedictine she had been drinking a little at a time before bed.

“I'm not going to get drunk with you. And I don't like whiskey.” She got up and took an opened bottle of California chablis from the refrigerator, left over from George's Thursday night. Sue tended to load her with whatever was left.

“You're not offering me the Benedictine?”