The High Cost of Living: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  “Why didn’t you rap on the window sooner? Were you listening?”

  “Of course.” He sat on her mattress. “I was so intrigued to see you arrive with a man, how could I possibly butt in? I was ravished by curiosity.”

  “You and George. You have a lot in common. You’re both uncommonly nosy.”

  “But I’m smarter than he is, because I know about him and he doesn’t know about me.… He’s younger than I expected and much better looking, with that wicked little mustache. Is he after you?”

  “My god no. George knows I’m gay. And he’s compartmentalized. He’d never lay a hand on Cam either, because she’s his secretary.”

  “Are you so sure? He has a way of looking at you.”

  “He looks at everybody that way, it’s habit,” she said shortly. “Naturally I’m so devastatingly attractive no one can entirely resist me, but George manages.”

  “When did you tell him you’re gay?”

  “Shortly after I became his assistant. I figured he’d find out anyhow.… He’s good about it.”

  “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe in liberalism.”

  “Well, it’s points in a way. Better than having a Black secretary even. Sue is never jealous of me. In some funny way he does get on better with women. Man are competition. I’m his loyal dependent, and as he says, I won’t get pregnant or married in whatever order.”

  He lay back thinking. Then he sat up and leaned forward. “So you saw my light fingers at work in the jewelry store. What did you see?”

  “I saw you take the earrings.”

  “Which?”

  “I did see you, Bernie. I think they were hoops.”

  He thrust his hand into his jacket and brought out the hammered silver hoops on his palm. “These? Come and look.”

  Gingerly she tucked herself onto the far end of her mattress. “They’re pretty. For Honor’s birthday?”

  “The same. How about these?” Again he reached into his jacket and this time he brought out crescent moons in filigree. “You can give her either pair. I know you don’t have much cash.”

  “That wouldn’t be right.”

  “Dog-do. What am I supposed to do with them? Go back and get my ears pierced? I have enough troubles. Come on, tell me which you want to give her.”

  “Either pair. See, I didn’t take much persuading. I’m saving what bread I can to go to Grand Rapids over spring vacation.”

  “You get to give her the hoops, since you caught me in the act. Frankly, I’m surprised. I thought my hand was quicker than anyone’s eye. Now guess what?” Again he stuck his hand inside and this time he brought out two stud earrings. “Last act. For Madame.”

  She kept her hands in her lap. “No.”

  “I know you like this kind, because I’ve seen you wear one. Look, these are little scarabs. It isn’t turquoise like yours. It’s some Mediterranean blue stone, I don’t know what they call it. Scarabs are fancy beetles.” He dropped the tiny studs on her thigh and they rolled off. She would not pick them up.

  “No, really. I don’t … care for presents.”

  “Then take them as mortification for your spirit. Or your flesh. You like to be ascetic and mortified.”

  “No. I like to be serene. That’s different.”

  “Letting me bribe you into liking me better would ruffle your serenity?”

  “I don’t like being given things.”

  “I don’t believe you. At least look at them. They won’t explode.”

  She dug them from under her thigh and dropped them on the blanket between them, rolling them out like tiny blue dice. “It was nice of you to think of it.”

  “We both think it was sly. But not sly enough. You don’t want to be treated like Honor.”

  “You’d think that the fewer things I have the simpler it would be. But it’s like adding objects to this room. Everything takes on significance. If you came tonight and there was suddenly an armchair, you’d stare at it and ask about it—”

  “I’d for sure sit in it. Although I don’t mind sitting on your bed; it makes you so nicely nervous.”

  She felt her cheeks heat. She wanted to go sit against the wall away from him, but that would be obviously a retreat. He was right, it was absurd that she should object to his occupying the mattress when she provided no other place to sit. It was also absurd that she should allow him to embarrass her; he was no prick-waving straight shooter like Hennessy about to harass her.

  “You have such a ravishing blush. You light up like a red neon sign. You also have such a fetching air of intact chastity—you really act much more virginal than our certified Honor—that I think you underestimate the ordinary male’s reaction. Why are you sure George isn’t interested? I had the opposite impression.”

  “Stop it, Bernie! Don’t tease me that particular way. I work with him. Make me paranoid and I won’t be able to. George’s sex life is very regulated and gratifying: he has babies with his wife and he has a string of young girlfriends his wife knows about.”

  “I don’t think you like George after all.”

  “Why would I possibly like the sex life of any straight male? It’s so easy for him, it’s as if he has a license to hunt his pleasure and come home to Mommy.… But he’s bright, he’s effective politically in the department, he looks out for me. In fact I admire him, workwise.”

  “Un sot trouve toujours un plus sot qui l’admire. That’s Boileau. To the effect that the biggest fool can always find a woman to look up to him.”

  “I understand French and it didn’t say anything about women.”

  “Maybe I’m just pursuing my favorite pastime, feeling sorry for myself. Maybe I’m jealous.”

  She laughed sharply. “So hire me as your research assistant and give me my Ph.D.”

  “Even little brothers get jealous. My ego blisters. I don’t like the way he makes himself at home. You won’t even take my little bugs for your ears, which I stole at risk of jail, literally risking my precious ass to win your heart and mind. Your heart and mind being all of you I can reasonably use, but c’est la guerre.… The afternoon bummed me out. I’m sure Honor will blame us because she didn’t enjoy it—which I told her beforehand, and that’s worse and makes me more in the wrong. Now she’ll get an infection, watch, and it’ll be as if we’d given her the clap.”

  “You’re more comfortable with sexual analogies than I am. And they annoy Honor.”

  “Annoy and titillate—my function in life. I’m feeling blatantly sorry for myself tonight.”

  “Not just because of this afternoon?”

  “No, my smart friend. See, when you pay attention to me, you become smart. You’re only stupid when you squander first class attention on academic hit men.”

  “Or an expert interpretation of number seven position of not answering a question.”

  “Yes. ‘Why I Am Depressed,’ by Bernard Guizot. Okay, as I was being my simpering waiterly best tonight in À Votre Plaisir, in comes my former lover Burt, not alone. He has another young man, not so good-looking as myself, I might add, but then I’m not being wined and dined. I’m serving them. Humiliating, no? A turn or two of the screw.… Now you might expect I’d not be all that unhappy to see Burt with somebody else, since I left him and since it was Burt who loved and I who was loved—”

  “He’s the person you mentioned so delicately by that tong-shaped word, who loved you and you wished you’d loved.”

  “That doesn’t mean I wasn’t fond of him and capable of being jealous. I’m naturally jealous, I’m always being jealous of someone or something. It does not add to my … serenity. It’s a vicious habit, like eating small children.”

  Her vivid brooding on Lena and Val. “We were in the restaurant,” she prompted him.

  “Where I was serving overdone duck with a too sweet sauce made from frozen orange juice. The food is lousy there, by the way.… I was hurt he’d come in. And the injustice, bringing that smirking young thing.”

  “Why di
d you leave him?” She could not imagine leaving anyone who loved her if she was going to go on in the same place. It seemed spoiled arrogance to relinquish anyone who would actually claim to love you. How would you know you would ever again encounter someone crazy enough to approach, to give, to accept?

  “We were fighting. Burt’s more together than I am. I say that admiringly. He’s involved in the whole gay political scene, the committees to protest this firing or that lack of hiring, to petition the city council, to picket a bar or a movie.” Bernie lay back on one elbow, his eyes fixed on her, not unseeing as he got into the flow of his story but carefully watching. “He can’t be shut up in the usual way of being fired from schoolteaching or advertising, because he inherited real estate. Up around Petoskey they’re building a resort complex, a ski run on an artificial mountain put up out of industrial garbage.… Burt’s solidly built, athletic. He plays tennis and squash, he skis, he’s a good swimmer. He hangs around bars only to socialize, to keep his eye on the community, or when he’s between what he’d consider real things. He’s thirty-four. He makes enough to live what he calls comfortable—which seemed to me like baronial splendor. Burt really is good. He doesn’t go around picking bums out of the gutter and handing them five-dollar bills. But he has clear principles, clear politics, and he lives that way. He’s responsible for getting me into college. He paid for my first year. It was his idea.”

  “I still don’t understand why you left him. The more you say, the less it makes sense.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t make sense to me.” He frowned, the corners of his long mouth turning under. Unconsciously he picked up the earrings and started to play with them, then dropped them when he grew aware. “He put pressure on me.”

  “To love him back?”

  “I was fond of him. But you can’t make yourself be passionately attracted to somebody just because you ought to be.… In fact that makes it worse, that you ought to be. It’s like eating wheat germ. I know it’s good for me, but I can’t make myself lust after wheat germ the way I do for a double chocolate cake with chocolate frosting.… But he put political pressure on me. He wanted me to be proud of being gay.”

  “He was right,” Leslie said. “Do you want a drink?”

  “Enormously. I thought you’d never ask.”

  “I’m not sure I have anything, which is why I didn’t. I usually get the leavings from George’s Thursday night, but there wasn’t one this week.” She poked in the small refrigerator. “I don’t. We’ll drink the Benedictine.”

  “Pour me some. Then you’ll have to accept the earrings, it’s only fair.”

  “We might as well kill the bottle. I think your friend Burt was right. All those sad old types who thought they were sick or evil, isn’t it pathetic? How can you let this society make you feel ashamed that you don’t get your pleasure from raping women in hallways or buying them on streetcorners or marrying one and keeping her in a box and going pump, pump, pump on top of her the correct two point four times a week?”

  “The point four must be premature ejaculation.” He laughed. “You make it sound wondrously appealing. Have you ever made love with a man?”

  “I don’t know that I’d call it love. I made a baby with one once.”

  “Really? Did you have a child?”

  “I lost it. Before I realized I was pregnant. I was fifteen and on the pill and I just went on taking it, not up on the situation. It was a bloody mess.” She was standing in the girls’ lavatory at school with blood running down her legs, running down as if from the faucet left wide open, and she was in terror and mortified at the same time because she was getting blood on the floor and she kept mopping at herself with little pieces of toilet paper that would only come out one at a time, little harsh sandpapery squares in the room that always smelled of tobacco and dope from the girls coming in to smoke there. “But as a matter of record, I’ve slept with two men. Not since I was sixteen and knew myself have I known a man,” she finished with a self-mocking smile. “How many men have you slept with?”

  “You’re kidding. How the hell would I know? I suppose several hundred. I’d have to sit down and do an annual average.”

  “One, two, three, many? As a quantitative historian, I’d have to disallow your evidence. If you can’t count, you don’t count.”

  “Do you count hiccups? When I was with Burt, only him.”

  “You were faithful!”

  “Don’t bitch. It’s not your style, not becoming. You have to look with big serious brown eyes and count my sins.”

  “Which even you can’t count. You were hustling?”

  He nodded. “I didn’t have any other useful skill. I was kicked out of high school, and I didn’t have the class to get off the streets into a regular sugar daddy. I was a mean young punk. But not half as mean as what was about to happen to me.”

  “Which you’ll drop hints about forever to Honor, but make damned sure you never describe.”

  “I’ll describe it to you, my bus station johns, my chicken hawks. Tell me what you want to know in how much detail.”

  She grimaced. “Why am I so lucky?”

  “Aren’t you going to ask me how many women I’ve been with, for your quantitative history?”

  “I didn’t think you had. I suppose I’d rather you haven’t.”

  “I’m not sure whether I actaully have or not.” He laughed at himself, shortly. “I wasn’t lying about Ann-Marie. We did sleep in the same room and we were very, very close. We were born in the same year. She was only eleven months older. My mother thought she couldn’t get pregnant again when she was nursing. We were almost twins. Ann-Marie was another me. She was as big as me, as tall, as tough, as fast. She could run, she could fight, she could throw rocks and snowballs straight as any boy. If I got in a fight, she’d pitch in. She was skinny and hard as wood.”

  “When we were eleven they, the old folks, decided we couldn’t share a room. I was given Mike to share my room with, a squalling baby, while Ann-Marie was stuck in with the little girls. We were pissed. We knew it had something to do with sex. Also, in confession the priest was starting to ask questions about sex. He was Irish, we didn’t trust him. It made us more curious. I don’t know exactly what we did. I know we fooled around a lot, but how can I tell whether we committed literal incest or stopped short.… It sounds funny, but I’d give a lot to know. I have the feeling I could remember if I let myself.… Because after Ann-Marie was killed—”

  “Killed? How?”

  “We used to hang on with our sleds to the back of cars to get a free ride. She was just thirteen and I wasn’t thirteen yet. She was hanging on a laundry truck and she went under the wheels. Her head cracked … like an egg. A bloody egg.”

  “You were there?”

  He nodded. “I was sick the rest of the winter. I was sure what we’d done killed her. That the Church was right and she’d died of our sins and gone to hell.”

  Her palms sweated around the earrings she found herself clutching. She had to say something. She couldn’t just sit there. But she could not think of anything to say that was not ridiculous in the face of his story.

  “It happened so fast that I kept screaming at her. Then I started punching the driver. He was cursing. He hit me back and knocked me down. I didn’t feel a thing. I think for a year it was like I was asleep. I wouldn’t talk about her. I wouldn’t even go to the cemetery with my folks. I’ve never seen her grave.”

  Her eyes burned and two fat drops ran down her face. Embarrassed, she scrubbed her cheek with the back of her knuckles.

  “But of course it’s useful too, isn’t it, to have such a neat childhood trauma to blame everything on. Sometimes I don’t know how I’d get through life without good old Ann-Marie’s death to haul out as a convenient excuse for why I’m such a pervert-monster-callous-cold blooded-thieving whatever it is I’ve done lately.”

  “Bernie, you’re never satisfied. You want me to pity you. When I do, you mock both of us.”

 
; “All true and many more.” He settled back with her pillow between his head and the wall. “To finish up my fabulous sexual history, I’ve been to bed with two women since and not been able. Including the woman I traveled all over Europe with for half a summer. Except once when we were phenomenally stoned on very good hash and opium at once in Amsterdam when something happened. It’s so unreal—I remember caves and waterfalls and rainbows more than anything concrete—but she was sure I’d balled her not once but half the night. I’ll never know. I never had trouble performing with men. Except once when some john held a knife to me. And once or twice when Burt was really putting the pressure on. But ninety-nine times out of ninety-nine point four—that’s where the point four belongs—I’m weatherproof.”

  “It’s exotic. I’ve always wondered why men make such a fuss. Afer all, if you’re impotent with a woman, you could please her anyhow and maybe better.”

  “But it’s not under voluntary control. That’s the rub.”

  “Your … prick may not be. But your hands are. Your mouth is. Your elbows and your feet for that matter. You couldn’t come, but you could give pleasure perfectly well.”

  “It’s strange to think that way. Of course, rationally you’re right—”

  “In what way am I wrong? Only in some weird male point-counting.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “Not only. Because it’s weird for one to give pleasure and one to get it. A lot of gay sex has been set up that way. One of the things that’s good is the growing tendency for things to be more mutual.”

  “I’ve never known women who didn’t make love … mutually.”

  “I’ve known many men who don’t.”

  Leslie sighed. “Sometimes I think we’d all be better with more jogging and less sex.”

  “Do you find all the working out you do reduces your desire for sex?” Bernie leaned on one elbow.

  “We’ve finished the Benedictine. Maybe I’ll make up some frozen juice. I’m feeling dry.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  She stood at the sink running the water. “I thought it was impertinent. But I almost never experience general sexual desire.”