The High Cost of Living (38 page)

“She's mature for her age,” George snarled. “She was the one who pursued it. She's old enough to chase men. She comes on like the marines. They start running around very early nowadays.”

“Up here in the North, maybe. I'm really amazed, George, absolutely stunned how upset you are, I really truly am. I'll bet Leslie is too. I never in my life imagined you'd carry on so about it. I really never thought you cared that much what I did in that line. And especially considering the way you've been handling yourself of late, George. For instance, Friday night. Now I know there's no departmental meeting late Friday night. That's a bad joke to play on your ever-loving wife.”

Georre was chewing his mustache. She had never seen him do that. She could not help enjoying the sight just a little bit. The doorbell rang. “Oh, god!” he groaned. “They're here. Fuck them all.”

“Sugar, you've tried. We'll carry on, don't worry about us. You just go and talk at them the way you always do.” Sue turned her back.

When they were alone in the kitchen running around, Sue took the time to murmur at her ear, “I know that kid isn't in love with me. He's got a pretty young girlfriend who's nuts about him. Why should he need me? He lives with George's secretary. But he has gall, he has guts. You have to give him that. Let's say it right out—he has balls! My, isn't George livid? I was so amazed when the kid propositioned me. I was a little drunk, if you know what I mean. I sobered up like judgment day and all I could do was stare. I thought he'd lost his mind. He doesn't like George, you know that? But he told me he'd been eying me for months and trying to work up the courage! Imagine. I was touched, frankly. But I'd never have done it if George wasn't acting like a ninny about that child. He's going to get into trouble, and I can't tolerate that. It has to be nipped in the bud.”

“You're very worried about it? That he's serious?”

“Serious? Don't be silly. Some high school floozy bold as brass? You know she even called him at home the other day?”

“She isn't a floozy.… I think she was a … virgin, you know.”

“Oh, Leslie, you're naive. So what? So was I. And I didn't chase after him, you better believe it. And I didn't try to take him from his lawful wedded wife. Cherries are still ten for the dollar around campuses, you know that George could care less.… Leslie, he couldn't get up in the morning without me! He wouldn't know what clothes to put on. He wouldn't know where to find his socks!”

Mark did not show up that evening, although every time the door opened George glared at it. He was edgy, irritable. When people were finally leaving and she was picking up, he slapped her somewhat too heavily on the shoulder. “I'll get that punk.” George was still chewing on his mustache. “I'll have his ass barbecued on a pole! I'll kill him academically. He better start learning how to pump gas, because that's all he's going to be doing from now on. Just because I had his assistantship dropped. His punk revenge—can you imagine the nerve? On a pole, I'm telling you, over a slow fire.”

She taught her first class. It went far more slowly than she had imagined. They covered less than a third of what she had anticipated, and she realized she was going to have to rethink her plan. They were working in the basement of the house, covered with what mats they had been able to find and some old carpeting. She had to get more mats. The class was full, twenty women, all she had been willing to take, and there were women waiting in case anyone dropped out. She felt good about that.

She had meant to start teaching them to fall, but instead the first class was all exercises. It moved her, watching the women begin trying to use their bodies in a different way. She looked at them—skinny from dieting, thick around the middle, soft bodied, bulgy, floppy, all the marvelous round shapes of women—and watched them trying to stretch, trying to touch their toes, trying to do sit-ups. She could pick out the ones who had done at least something physical before. It moved her, watching them strain themselves. She had to keep a sharp eye out for those who would not be able to get out of bed in the morning. Grunting, moaning, sweating, they gallumphed around, awkward, earnest. Sometimes she almost felt like crying. They had put themselves in her hands to learn something new about how to be in the world, a new relationship to their bodies, to possibilities. She was to teach them a slim measure of safety and strength.

“We won't stay with the karate ritual that men have developed,” she said suddenly. “At the beginning of the class instead of bowing we'll hold hands in a circle. Would you like that?” She wanted the class to feel warm. She began to remember hating her own body, she began to remember feeling afraid, unable. She wanted each of them, she wanted the weakest, flabbiest, most out of shape woman in the class to be at ease. If she could not love anyone else, maybe she could love her students.

She stood in Bernie's old room. It was up under the eaves and faced the next house. He had done his best to make it warm and livable, the ten by twelve feet of it with a bed under the slope of the roof and a desk in the dormer looking out on what light there was. He had tacked up reproductions; from somewhere he had got travel posters and a woven hanging. The bedspread was the inevitable Indian cotton. Half his clothes were still in the closet.

“He just take what he can stuff in that duffel, put it on his shoulders and go off bumming,” his landlady said from the doorway. “If you a friend, you may as well take the books or whatever you want. They just going to haul it away.”

She could find nothing to indicate where he had gone—no note, no map, nothing. No letters summoning him. The room was surprisingly free of personal clutter, things with names on. Some roses withered in a vase with a little stagnant water at the bottom, far below their dead stems. She could not think what to take, yet she felt the need for something. A French dictionary? Not French-English, but French to French. But what would she do with it, except remember him and never use it? She ended by taking a cashmere scarf she remembered him wearing back in the winter. He had not bothered with it, although it was handsome. Burt had given it to him, she remembered. That was her souvenir: her assertion of dumb connection. The landlady was watching her with a pitying expression. Was she so obvious? She thanked her profusely, took the scarf and left quickly. Her bike was chained to a tree outside, and she was glad to roar off down the street.

“I don't understand it! I don't understand! It doesn't make sense. How could he change!” Honor raised her head to speak. Then she let it fall again into Leslie's lap. “Overnight. It can't be real. No! I don't believe it!”

They were in Cam's livingroom. Cam pacing, smoking a filter cigarette, pacing. Leslie sat on the daybed which Cam had hastily closed. A tag end of sheet stuck out from under the cushions. Honor lay half across her crying. She had been crying for perhaps an hour straight. Honor's face was swollen, her lids red and enormous, her nose sore, her hair plastered to her cheeks. It was as if she had been broken and her lifeblood oozed from her eyes in water. Even the daybed was damp by now. Mark had been sent to the library, into exile from female troubles.

“He's so attractive to women,” Cam said. “I never believed those stories he told me at first. I thought he was just trying to impress me. But it's true! They fall all over him.”

Honor clung to Leslie desperately. “Why did he say that? I can't believe it! I can't. He'll change his mind, he has to. He loves me, I know it! He said he loved me, he said it twenty times, I swear it.” Honor wept and wept. Leslie stroked her back. There was nothing sexual in it. She felt only pity and a little boredom, because an hour was a long time to sit on a brown and orange tweed daybed, lumpy and prickly under her, and to listen to the hum of the air conditioner, Cam's worrying and Honor's sobbing.

“I'll tell you how it happened,” Cam said. “She came right up to him, that cow, and she put her hand right on his prick as he was sitting there. Do you believe it?”

No, Leslie thought, I remember that story. But he did go to bed with Sue, somehow. He really did. Nobody else would for seven years, and then he did. Maybe he was as surprised as she was.

“He's dropping out of school, he's lost his assistantship. At least he'll never see her again. He doesn't love her or anything. It was just sex. I could have killed them both, but never mind. I don't know what we'll live on. I have to get a good job.”

“Oh, George won't fire you, don't worry,” Leslie said. “He said you're a good secretary.”

“Won't fire me? Leslie, I quit!” Cam chain-lit another cigarette. “I quit this morning.”

“You quit?” Leslie sat up, automatically adjusting Honor.

“You don't think I'd go on typing that creep's letters after what he did to my sister? Making him coffee. Saying, Yes, sure, of course, all day. I wouldn't give him the satisfaction.”

“Wow,” Leslie said. “I know you need the job.”

“Oh, I don't expect you to quit,” Cam said hastily, trying to make her feel good. “I'm just a secretary. I'll get another job.” She paused by the daybed. “You want me to hold her for a while? Your arm must get tired.”

“No, it's fine,” Leslie said, feeling rotten.

“It's easier for you to comfort her. We've never been physically affectionate. Something in our house keeps us from it.… Poor kid.… At least Mark
says
he's not interested in Sue, if I can believe him. I always thought he was making up those stories!”

“Maybe he was,” Leslie said, who was sure of it.

“How do I know she won't come after him?”

Honor was slowing down. Perhaps she could not cry any more. She blew her nose repeatedly, she filled paper handkerchiefs and gasped for breath. Leslie hoped Honor was almost done crying. She was late for work: for George of course. She imagined slitting his throat with a thin sharp knife. She imagined pushing him out one of the windows of his office, watching him float down in the air, turning over and over. She had a large sharp ax on her shoulder and she was cutting him up like firewood, hacking and hacking. She would never be free of anger or of dependence. How could she have hit Honor? She would never be able to hit George. Even after she got the infernal degree, she would still need him. She would need him for ten years. She couldn't even speak her mind to him.

What could she say to Cam, who had stood up for her sister and quit George? What could she say, that she was too important to do that? What could she say, that her career was too important? That security meant too much to her? That she needed money and respect and prestige and a toehold in the middle class more than Cam did? Some reckoning was coming due. She had to face what she had not been facing.

Honor sat up, blowing her nose. “I love him, Leslie! I do. It can't be over. He can't mean it. She has some hold on him. He doesn't love her, he can't. I know he loves me.”

Me. Who do I love? Nobody. I'm afraid to. I've protected myself too well. Nobody. I wouldn't take a big enough risk to love her, poor heavyhead like a huge baby on my shoulder. I came closest to Bernie, but not that close.

At the window Cam chain-lit another cigarette and fingered the stiff ends of her hair. “I better bleach my hair and take a hard look at my clothes and start reading the want ads. We're going to be short on the green stuff. Honey, Honor I mean, if you want to stay here, I'll call Mama and tell her I'm taking you to something, we'll make up a good story. You can sleep with me and we'll send Mark to a friend's. No! I don't trust him out of my sight, that two-timer. You can use my plaid sleeping bag.”

Honor felt her cheeks as if they were strange to her. Then she stared at her hands. “I don't have anything. Not even a letter. He never wrote me a letter.” Slowly she put out her tongue and licked the salt from her mouth. “I know he loves me!”

“I don't think it has anything to do with love,” Leslie said, working her arm free. Her biceps felt cramped. Funny, you could study self-defense but not self-opening. “I think love's a rarer phenomenon than we're led to expect.”

“Leslie, you're my only friend. Oh, I wish I could talk to Bernie now. Maybe we could call him up. I got so mad at him, but at least he was always my friend.”

“He's left town.”

“What will happen to me? I feel such pain I think I'll die!” Honor pushed her hair back, groped for her purse where it had fallen. “If you don't call it love, what do you call it?”

“Pain. I call it pain.” Leslie got Honor's purse for her. She watched while Honor wiped her face, combed her hair, dabbed at her rumpled dress. “Do you want to stay here with Cam?”

Honor shook her head no.

“Do you want me to give you a ride home on my bike?”

“No!” Honor snorted. “Can you hear what Mama would say? I'll go home on the bus. I'll sit way at the back so if I cry nobody will see.”

“Are you sure you don't want to stay, honey?” Cam asked, sitting down with the newspaper and a marking pen.

“I have to go home,” Honor found a small square of mirror in her purse and squinted into it. She stared at herself with a blank resignation, as if looking through her face to something else. “Tomorrow I'm supposed to start work as a receptionist for my doctor—the one who gives me the notes letting me out of gym.”

“Nine to five?” Leslie asked her, to make her keep talking.

“Yes, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and then Saturday morning. He's given me the job for the summer.… I have to make money for school, if I want to go away.… It won't be bad, he has a crush on me.”

“Okay, then. I'll leave you. I'm late for work.” And George, always George, the lord who'd given her a job, her powerful protector and friend. Her owner. What did he offer her besides security, a well-paying job eventually, work she wanted to do? That's what it came down to. She was not ready to give him up. She wanted what he had too badly. She had to stop wanting that, and she could not stop. Not yet. She wanted to live in Tasha's world only in her spare time. She got on her lovable small secondhand Honda, that ate up her extra pennies and made her feel good, and headed for George.