The High Cost of Living (28 page)

“I can't talk about it.”

“Why not? Bernie can.”

“I'll bet!”

“What is that supposed to imply?”

“That he lies compulsively. Continually. It's a reflex action.”

“And you don't lie by commission. Just by omission. You let silence make the implications you won't stoop to make yourself!” Honor tossed her head back, her eyes glittering. Her face seemed to shine with anger, to become clearer and brighter until it burned on the air.

Leslie had a sense of avalanche, of things starting badly and then gathering a strength of their own momentum and plummeting down gathering trouble. She had the feeling if she could only break from her daze of guilt she could stop Honor. If she could speak firmly, she could abort the scene; but she could not summon the strength. Her guilt seeped like gas through the air, and Honor caught it in her nostrils and was infuriated.

“Beyond your facade of strength is just weakness. Self-pity and mushiness. You're a fake, that's what you are. You're just as silly and weak as Cam!”

“Has she moved away from home? In with Mark?”

“Don't try to change the subject. Yes. Isn't that ridiculous? Mama is furious. Now she's practically chaining me to the wall. She's terrified I'll suddenly elope with the mailman.” Then Honor remembered she was angry. “You appear strong, but inside you're weak and conniving. You're trying to make trouble between Mama and me, between my best friend and me.”

“I don't trust Bernar' any more, you're right, and I fear your mother's possessiveness. I'm concerned for you.”

“I don't believe you. Not after Saturday! I'd looked forward to that all week. You'd just gone on a trip, but you were too piggy selfish to wait for me. Then you took Bernar' back to George's house. Keeping it all to yourself! You lie to me and patronize me and impugn Mama and Bernar'. They're the ones who love me. All right, what's your side of it? What happened so you aren't speaking to each other?”

“Nothing that matters.” She could not even look at Honor.

Honor sensed her guilt and it maddened her. She looked beautiful and cruel, her teeth avid. Leslie could not break free: the scene was a nightmare coming true. Honor blended with Valerie. Both fused into one beautiful woman she loved who would not love her because she was not worthy; she was guilty, ugly, vulnerable, her guts spilling like garbage on the floor. She had ruined things again; she had let the woman down. She had failed her beloved, and now she was to be punished. Her mother shouting, “Get out of my house!” She felt guilty before the woman, unworthy; and self-pitying guilt welled through her, making her weak.

She could not justify to Honor forgetting her existence for three days almost entirely. In no way could she make that pass away from between them. Between them also lay the corpse of the night with Bernie. There were too many questions she could not bear to answer.

“You won't even lie to me! You don't care that much. You disgust me! Stay in your cell. Lock yourself in your little jail. You'll be ashamed to show feeling, but you can have a good cry anyhow. Really, you're a complete fraud. I don't ever want to see you again. Ever!”

Honor gathered her wet raincoat, slipped it on wincing and banged the door wide to leave. She did not bother to shut it but clattered downstairs. After a while Leslie closed it. She had not the energy to cry. She simply went back and sat down stunned against the wall. She felt as if she had been turned inside out. Then she picked up her book and resumed studying. She did not study well but she studied. She could not imagine trying to do anything else at all.

fourteen

It rained for two weeks, every day. She sat in her room working with her jacket on. She went to class, she went to work, she went to George's, she went to the dojo and she went to the bars. Of the two likely bars, she hated the Queen of Hearts less than the Pig's Whistle. She went after karate, regularly, and on Friday and Saturday nights. The smoke gave her a splitting headache and the bartender glared at her while she nursed her one beer. She did not approve of one night stands, thinking them a male mode of sexuality, yet that was all she went to the bars for. She stayed one hour. At the end of that time she had a partner or left. “Your place or mine?” “Yours,” she said. It was easier to get out of a strange apartment than to pry someone from her bed. “I have to go to work,” was her exit line.

She spent one night apiece with perhaps eight women. Only one of them kept turning up, Debra, a small wistful ex-acidhead with sad blue eyes and an air of feathery vagueness. Debra decided she was in love with Leslie and fastened on her from the time she walked into the Queen of Hearts. She liked Debra but didn't want to sleep with her again. She recognized she was still too involved with Honor and Bernie to care for anyone else. It had stopped, suddenly as a film breaking and with that same sense of coming abruptly out of an anesthetic in a strange glaring room, with pain too, unfamiliar pain everywhere through her, occupying her entirely.

Finally she called Tasha, who invited her over for Sunday brunch. Because of the rape project and meetings, Tasha's social times tended to be mornings and lunches. Tasha lived in a house with four other women on the east side, a few blocks from the river and the waterworks. They lived in a pleasant neighborhood, racially mixed and working class, with good-sized houses that came cheaply and big bosomy trees, all leafed out now. It was strangely lush, the grass tending to be less clipped than in the suburbs, the fat old trees meeting over the streets and shooting up tall and green behind the houses too in the ample yards. The neighborhood had a staid seedy bucolic air. As Leslie climbed the shallow wooden steps of the big front porch, she felt a pang of regret that she had given up coming regularly to the house, with its mellow easy atmosphere, that she had not spent more time with Tasha, who liked her so much.

Music played upstairs; a woman was singing plaintively. Another woman chatted on the phone in the front hall, sitting on the stairs in a yellow terrycloth robe with her hair in a turban, laughing into the receiver and eating a piece of toast with marmalade, while a white and tan dog lay at her feet with its tail thumping and its eyes on the toast going down.

Tasha took her into the diningroom, a big room with a bay window lined with shelves of plants. A big blond in a kimono nursing a baby nodded at her: Sherry, a straight woman she vaguely remembered. Leslie said, “You had your baby.”

“April nineteenth. Look at him, isn't he something?”

“We're not an all-woman house any more.” Tasha was smiling, bringing in from the kitchen a pitcher of café au lait and a fruitnut bread, still warm. “You want some cheese too?”

“If you have some.”

“I remember you're a cheese lover. This is Rae.”

A Black woman with honey brown skin had followed her out of the kitchen. Rae was big, much bigger than Tasha, with square-rimmed reading glasses she tucked now in a pocket of her long dark red and white djellaba. Was Rae the same woman she had seen with Tasha putting up posters in the gay bar that time? Yes, she thought so. A big stately woman with a round smooth face, Rae looked her over slowly and carefully with a not entirely friendly regard. She must be living in the house. “You're living here?”

“No, I live over on John R.” That was all she said.

Tasha came back with the cheese and this time Leslie looked at her more carefully. Tasha was wearing a new-looking blue version of a mechanic's jumpsuit that did not conceal her figure. In fact she looked good in it. “Where did that come from? I've never seen you in anything but overalls.”

“I stole it off the rack in Hudson's,” Rae said before Tasha could phrase an answer, flushing as Rae went on: “But I would have paid for it even, if I had to, worse luck. I don't like going out with a woman who wants to wear a paper bag over herself.”

That little fantasy she had carried over of getting involved with Tasha all conveniently now and assuaging her loneliness went pop like the hot air balloon it was. She was in a mood too to feel assaulted by the image of women coupled off. Rae sure was taking care to inform her she was Tasha's lover. She drove it back and forth like a truck. As if she could read Leslie's mind, she flashed a big smile, her first. “Just making things clear. I like to be real clear, you know?”

Tasha beamed. She was so happy that she did not even push Leslie about coming back to work on the rape project. She was tremendously sympathetic that Leslie had finally altogether broken up with Valerie. Leslie felt a trifle dishonest, because most of her pain had nothing to do with Valerie, and she wasn't about to explain what it had to do with. But the comfort and the homey atmosphere were soothing anyhow. Rae relaxed now that she had made her hegemony clear. Rae was a big woman, but she moved powerfully and well; she strolled across the room centering it on herself.” When she got up to get more coffee or use the telephone, everyone watched her. It would have taken effort not to. Trust Tasha to take on a Black lover, Leslie thought sourly. Any Third World lesbian could have her for a wink. But she felt jealous. Rae would turn anybody on.

Because of Debra's quiet persecution, she quit going to the Queen of Hearts and tried the Pig's Whistle instead. She disliked it. There were more men, more straight couples slumming, more johns cruising, and heavier old fashioned sex roles, the butches and femmes of yesteryear. Every time she talked to a woman, somebody was ready to slug her. She could not take it. She stopped going to the bars as abruptly as she had started and settled into celibacy again. She caught up on her sleep and worked even harder.

Her sensei, Parker, said she was improving and that she must try for her black belt in a month.

“That soon?”

“You can make yourself ready, if you work the way you've been doing these past couple of weeks. Instead of the sloppy way you were doing in April.”

She had a new kata to learn. It was the most beautiful she had studied and she did it for pleasure as well as the coming test. One particular set of kicks and blocks she loved, for it was a stately swift dance.

Late Monday night she was working on the Simpson papers. When she took a break and was practicing her new kata in the women's room, she caught sight of herself in a mirror and her mouth opened in astonishment. How graceful, how strong, how good she looked! In spite of her quick success in the bars, she had been feeling so ugly that her reflection attracted her gaze as a stranger glimpsed dancing in a crowd might. Under fluorescent light her hair was dulled, but her body moved like a big cat in swift dignity. She thought of Rae. She was pleased. She bowed to herself and blushed. At that moment she began to forgive herself. At least her body was trying to live up to her standards; her body was good the way a good bird dog was good (her old dog Satan, a part-Labrador retriever), the way a good race horse was good, good as a nursing baby. She, that querulous conversation within, she must try to be worthy too.

Tuesday when she packed her rucksack with books and papers and got ready to leave, Cam was loitering in her raincoat at the door.

“You left home, you moved out, um?” Leslie said, slowing her stride to Cam's and simultaneously worrying about the time. She had to catch the Woodward bus.

“Oh, Mark's been after me to live with him.… His parents send him money and he's got a really nice apartment in a high rise. It's a studio but it's air conditioned. That seems silly now …” She put up her umbrella and motioned Leslie to come under it. “But in a month it will be too hot here to live, you know. Oh, I guess you don't. Mark says you come from a little town on Lake Michigan?”

“Mark seems to think he knows a lot about me.”

Cam fiddled with her scarf. They walked down the block together. Cam seemed nervous. “Is something wrong?” Leslie asked finally.

“I've been worrying.… Honor is such a baby. She doesn't know a thing yet, believe me. It's all talk and pretend. She imagines she's sophisticated because she read
The New Yorker
for a year when she was fifteen. Honest to God, she used to read it cover to cover. She got me to give her a subscription for Christmas. She'd read the listings of what's going on about town—New York, in Detroit yet! As if just reading about all that stuff was magic.” Cam brought herself up short and tugged at her scarf.

“She just doesn't like being patronized. She doesn't like older people coming on as if we know everything just because we're older, especially just a couple of years older.” Was Cam an intermediary? She felt a stir of hope. Honor had asked Cam to speak to her. That was why Cam was so awkward. She would provide an opening. “I guess I've annoyed her that way myself.”

“But she is young! She's just seventeen. I know she told you she was a year older. I hope you didn't believe her? She really hasn't had any experience at all.”

“We've all had experiences,” Leslie said slowly. “Even in sense deprivation, you have experiences.”

“Don't try to misunderstand me,” Cam said shortly.

“I'm not. And I am not understanding.” She felt her defenses hinge down. She stood straighter, she took longer strides. “I know Honor is young. I couldn't hardly miss that. She's in high school, after all.”

“You know what I'm talking about.”

“No, I don't.” Leslie's face froze. Her back was hardening concrete.

“Honor is very innocent, and if anything happened to her, it would be just terrible. It wouldn't be fair! She doesn't have any experience even dating boys!”

“Are you worried about Paul?”

“You must think I'm stupid or something. Mark had to tell me you're a homosexual.”

“If Mark had to tell you, it can't be very important to your understanding of me, can it? Do you imagine Honor doesn't know?”

“Well, I hoped she didn't!”