The High Cost of Living

by Marge Piercy

  “You bet. When I wake up too early because the room’s icy cold and I have to drag my clothes six blocks to the laundromat and get in a fight wih some junkie who tries ineptly to pick my pocket. When my boots wear out and I can’t buy another pair and it’s cold and slushy. When I have a paper overdue and I have to work till midnight at À Votre Plaisir and some drunk gives me a hard time and I owe my landlady rent so I try to sneak in and out … I have trouble writing papers. That’s the worst thing about being a student, aside from the sense of pretending. Of acting out ‘student’ when I’m really a hustler, an adventurer.… I’m glib enough, I can talk my way in or out of almost anything. But not on paper. In French it’s just as awkward. I speak French, by the way, quite as artificially as I speak English; I relearned them both and in no way do I sound like what I am. My old man wouldn’t believe it if he heard me speak French. He’d puke. It’d be exactly as if I spoke with a fake Oxbridge drawl. My French is more affected than my English even.… You still have a Midwestern accent.”

  “Academically, what’s wrong with that? My specialty is American history, nineteenth century.”

  “Your voice amuses me: that it’s high pitched and so Midwestern. Like a little girl’s voice. Do you know that tension raises your voice?”

  “Are you annoyed with me?”

  He slumped further. “Edgy. I’m feeling rejected.”

  “So now you’re telling me I’m not so nice after all.”

  “Nice? Like me you’re much too offensive and defensive to be nice. Burt was nice. If I survive till I’m forty, what fun it’ll be to be nice. Until then I’ll be awful. Years of lying and manipulating and scheming and pretending and politicking.… The Supreme Court of the land has officially ruled we aren’t people. It’s okay to outlaw us, forbid us jobs and housing and education. Bust us. Perhaps it’s okay to refuse to sell us food and okay to hunt us down in the streets again. Perhaps we could be burned alive at state occasions.”

  “Well if you’d managed to penetrate me this afternoon, do you think that would have made you more of a person? In the eyes of the Supreme Court, no doubt.”

  “Les, you can’t honestly believe I was trying to prove something on you? Like trying to hit a bull’s-eye!”

  “Do you honestly believe you weren’t?”

  Turning, he seized her by the shoulders. “You may reject me, you have, but I do not deserve contempt!”

  “Bernie, I was trying to be truthful.”

  “You aren’t going to slug me for touching your shoulders? The shoulders are acceptable? Be careful. The armpit is potentially erogenous. And I’m within a hand’s breadth of what has been officially established as forbidden erotic territory.”

  She grimaced. “You fight dirty.”

  “I fight to win. I told you that. I can’t afford to fight any other way. Sportsmanship belongs to the leisure class.”

  “What’s the it you’ll win?”

  He let go of her shoulders and turned back to the fire, burying his head in his hands. “I wanted it so simply this afternoon, it seemed very clear.”

  “Nothing with us could be simple. It isn’t simple for us to be friends.”

  “That wouldn’t have happened either if I hadn’t been pushy.”

  “Why were you?” She willed him to drop his hands from his face so she could see him.

  He spoke through his fingers. “I don’t know. You were getting all involved with Honor, and in self-defense I had to psyche you out. Honor means a lot to me. I had to protect myself.… Beyond that it’s nothing rational. Don’t you believe we don’t always have clear reasons? Especially people like you and me, who always do have reasons. That some things grab you? Sneak up on you?”

  “Yes, but … not usually friendship, you know.”

  “Everything gets mixed up with me. I must be crazy!” He took his hands away then and she saw that he looked on the verge of tears. She felt an immediate surge of sympathy. She wanted to put her arms around him, but she could not. “It goes back to my childhood. Maybe the rest of my life the only women who’ll ever turn me on are women like my sister, like Ann-Marie. And they’ll never want anything to do with me. Maybe she was the only person who ever loved me. Me as I am. The only one who could!”

  “I do feel close to you, Bernie. But I don’t know if I can want you. Physically. I don’t know if I can.”

  “I keep having the conviction that I could seduce you. But I don’t know how to seduce a woman, I don’t know quite how to begin. The women I tried to be with, it was their idea. You don’t know if you can? Ha! I’m the one who most likely can’t. I’m the one who should be protecting myself.” He held out his hands, palms up.

  She had the sense that if they did not at least try, they would withdraw from each other. It seemed so complicated, she felt exhausted in advance. Yet she wanted to comfort him. He knew how to wring her of pity and compassion. It could not work out well. She regretted it all, the whole day, everything that had provoked the snarl. She put her hands on top of his. “Your hands are cold. Should I build the fire up?”

  “You know that’s not the problem! Only a little friendly loving would warm me tonight.” Tentatively he took her hands in his, waiting to see if she would pull back.

  She did not, but gently squeezed his hands. She did not speak, because she could think of absolutely nothing to say. She felt as excited as she might in a dentist’s waitingroom.

  He smiled for the first time since he had tasted the game hen. “I don’t know, Les, there are a lot of things I could do with a hand or two. Do you feel quite safe like this?”

  “No.” She smiled too, stiffly.

  “Oh, Les, I wish I could wake up beside you, and we’d been lovers for five years. We wouldn’t even be hot about it. We’d roll into bed automatically and say, You wanna tonight? We’d take each other for granted, and I’d tell you the pretty boys I noticed on the street and you’d tell me about the new woman you have a crush on, and we’d be comfortable as dirty old shoes. God, to have someone to take for granted.… Oh, Les, you’ve terrorized me to the point where I don’t dare move. I can’t read your mind. I don’t dare risk experimenting, because if I guess wrong you might break my jaw.”

  “Bernie, I don’t know. I’m willing to try to be close. But it does feel awkward. I don’t know where or how to begin either. I’m scared of freezing up.”

  “If you do, we’ll stop. It’s soothing to think you might not be able to manage it either. Suppose all we can do is hold each other? That might be comforting. We could be like old Puritan lovers, we’d get in bed with a bundling board and hug each other. Come, lie on the couch beside me.”

  “Take off your sneakers first. The couch is new.” She lay against the back of the couch and Bernie lay on the outside. She felt sunken in down, and lying with one arm around each other’s backs and the other crushed between them in the soft concavity of the couch was not stimulating. They held each other in a serious and unimpassioned grip. His chin dug into her collarbone. After a while her fingers crushed between them began to tingle from bad circulation.

  He moaned. “This is ridiculous. I’m smothering in goose down. My backside is being roasted. Let’s put a screen on your fire and go borrow a bed. We’ll tumble in and if we fall asleep what does it matter? We’ll have a good sleep in George’s fine motel, and in the morning I can make you a delicious breakfast before we have to vacate all this splendor.”

  It was a relief to get up. Surreptitiously she rubbed her numb hand. In some way by agreeing she had defused the whole thing, and probably they would sleep here and nothing more would happen and he would feel neither rejected nor curious. Cheerfully she led the way upstairs. They would wash the sheets with the towels, and everything would be in fine shape for George and Sue.

  “Oh, we’ll have to take Mommy and Daddy’s bed. King-sized. It’s big enough to dance on.” He scampered across it, twirling and hoofing like Fred Astaire, and then sprang down. “Why couldn’t we borrow somebody’
s house every weekend? Think of all the people who travel. We could break in. We wouldn’t steal a thing. Just borrow the facilities, drink a little of the booze, eat a little of the food, sleep a little in the bed. Goldilocks all over.” He kicked off his pants, flicking them with his shirt on a chair, slung back the covers dramatically and hopped into bed. “How can you take all night to get undressed? It’s all those frills and furbelows you wear.”

  She stood flatfooted, unable to move. She felt as if her joints should creak like old wood. Finally she shut off the light, undressed and got into bed. It was so big that she felt quite alone in the dark until his hand encountered her.

  “You feel better in the dark?”

  “Yes,” she said thickly. Her voice did sound high and girlish. Almost scared. “If you don’t mind.”

  “I would rather see you. To be reminded it is you. In the dark we feel even stranger.” Slowly his fingers explored her arm. Cautiously she turned and began to caress his shoulder along the angular collarbone, down the shoulder blade to the sleek skin. They did not kiss, they did not lie against each other, but from a little distance they explored each other slowly and carefully with fingertips and palms. A visit to another country, over the border.

  After a while in the dark she smiled because sometimes his touch tickled her till she clenched her teeth and sometimes it felt exquisite. His chest was odd, flat, hard. Nipples without hills. He was too skinny to have even slight breasts. His belly was oddly flat too with a puckered scar. She could not bring her hand lower than the middle of his abdomen. It was as if she hit a barrier. She fled to his back, where nothing disturbed her, not even the high firm buttocks. Near the cleft he had a thick growth of wiry hair, thicker than on his chest, where the hair grew only down the middle, a river of hair with a little lake on the upper belly.

  Gradually they moved closer, still stroking each other. It would be much easier just to talk. “Do you wish you were in love?” she asked him. “Are you really sorry you didn’t love Burt?”

  “Sorry because of how it worked out. Like I failed him. Didn’t meet his needs. No, being in love is a disaster. It’s the same game people pull on me, wanting the unattainable because it’s withheld. When I’ve fallen in love, it’s been some tepid beautiful stud. Even blonder, more beautiful and middle class at least and lucky besides. I’m thinking now of the worst time, in Chicago before I met Burt.… Les, I can’t get it up. Nothing’s happening.”

  She worked to keep relief out of her voice. “Should I touch you?”

  “It won’t help. Just hold me.”

  Facing, they embraced, less awkwardly. He chuckled. “Instead of a love that dare not speak its name, we have here a love that doesn’t know what to call itself. It looks straight but it’s even kinkier.”

  She relaxed against him, smiling in the dark, her body cuddling into the angular planes of his. His penis was limp and small against her belly, unthreatening, undemanding, gentle and soft as a breast. For the first time, very tentatively, she brushed her palm against it. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe it is kind of relaxing to come together this way and hold each other. It feels good to me.… It was so open and relaxed out on the water. In the sun. Now I feel almost as loose. As if we’re floating.”

  “Suppose we did live together. And Honor. The three of us could make a home for each other.”

  She snorted, “Honor has a home. I don’t think domesticity has the same exotic pull for her.”

  “But it wouldn’t seem domestic to her. It would be freedom to her and domesticity to us.… I’d try to be less sloppy. To please your austere compulsive neatness. We could have a real apartment. Could you give up your cell?”

  She curled into him, her cheek against him, the skin sleek but the minute prickles standing out like lopped-off wires where the razor had passed over. “I don’t know.… Yes. I could. I haven’t always lived like that. It’s been a paring-down time. A way of making visible what’s been happening in my life, in losing Val.” Suddenly she heard herself and it became real. That this week it had finished, irrevocably, and Val was lost. She remembered Val against her, the right feeling of the right body, and tears gushed out as if bursting from her. Tears ran from her eyes over his face and she said in a choked voice, “Losing.” Then the tears stopped as suddenly as they had begun.

  “Lost, yes, all lost,” he said half ironically, with lips and tongue following the tracks of her tears to her eyes, moving his mouth and tongue over her closed lids. Then they kissed for the first time, the first time she was kissing him back. Tongue kissing always excited her, it felt so interconnected and wet and intertwined. He seemed to like to kiss almost as much as women did. She had always thought of men kissing as something they did to get you excited and then they started what was the real stuff to them. Kissing was close to an end in itself for her, and for a long time they kissed each other. Her body began to feel larger, as if the blood were pushing out against the skin, arching her buttocks, thrusting the tips of her breasts out, billowing through her thighs. Without thinking, she moved against him, that half-circular rocking action of her hips. As his hand slid between her thighs she realized she was already warm and open. Carefully and slowly he explored her, but when she began to move against his hand, he took it away and slid his erect prick against her instead. They were still side by side and it would not go in, “Farther back,” she said and reached to help him, when it shrank suddenly limp against her.

  “Jesus,” he said between clenched teeth. “Useless hanging thing! God damn it.”

  She lay a moment recovering herself. It was so strange to stop suddenly in lovemaking, right in the middle, to stop cold. It felt like falling on your face. Then she curled close to him again. “When it rises again, as seems inevitable, would you consider this? Could we maybe have oral sex? I think it might be easier.… Or would that … freak you?”

  “To eat you? I’m not sure I’d be efficient. I wouldn’t guess it’s exactly the same. But with some instruction, why not?”

  “Because we’re different. Some men might … I mean, I feel timid about it myself, and at least I did blow my boyfriend a lot.”

  “Tell me about him,” he ordered and his hands began to move over her again.

  Billy or Cliff? “You mean Cliff?” She selected him instinctively. “He didn’t talk much. He didn’t trust words, he thought they were how people pushed each other around if they were too smart to have to slug you. His father had worked for the railroad—”

  “Physically. What did he look like?”

  “He was on the short side but built like a boxer. Compact, broad shoulders, slim hips but good thighs. He used to run in the dunes. I’d run with him. At first I did it because I was crazy about him, but then I did it because I came to like running. Even after everything else was crummy and mean, I still liked running with him. It’s good for your leg muscles to run in sand, it takes twice as much effort …”

  His hands on her were no longer light and tentative. “Describe his face.”

  “Brown eyes, a big sharp nose, thick brows, broad cheekbones. Medium brown hair thick and wild halfway down his back. I mean, it was longer than mine and much thicker. He walked with a rolling gait, a sort of exaggerated swagger. Winter or summer he never wore anything but old jeans and a tee shirt and a leather jacket. Not like yours. Studded and heavier.”

  “Describe his prick.”

  She laughed. “I couldn’t! Bernie, I can’t make that many comparisons. It seemed big to me. Oh, yes, and purplish. I remember thinking once that when he was excited it was the color of a rutabaga, you know?”

  He laughed then. “I bet that would have taken the stuffing out of him, to know to you he had nothing in front but a Swedish turnip! Did he fuck you a lot?”

  “It seemed like a lot. I wasn’t into it that much. It was something I did because we were supposed to and I was hung up on him.”

  “Did he eat you?”

  “No. I only blew him when I had my period.”

&n
bsp; “Show me,” he said coaxingly, putting her hand on his penis. It was hard again. Always going up or coming down, like some demented elevator, like a balloon with a will of its own. How odd men were.

  They shifted about in the bed, settling into a side-by-side reversed tangle. Running her fingers the length of his shaft, she felt quite nervous, as if the thing might suddenly go off wetly or shrivel again, but it just stayed there with a little vein ticking near the head. She opened her mouth quite wide, afraid she might bite him, and tried to remember how she had used to do it. All she could remember was getting sand in her hair and her jaw muscles aching with fatigue when Cliff took too long to come. “Hold it at the bottom,” he said. “Is this right for you? Is that your clitoris?”

  With rueful politeness they gave each other directions. It could not be called easy; it did not feel natural. She imagined it was making love with a dog who spoke English, it felt so odd and lumpy. Yet she did respond. Even with interruptions and corrections and adjustments, her body was ready, and once he actually settled into a rhythm of tongue and fingers she came before he did. When he actually began to come she panicked and held him spurting against her lips rather than inside her mouth, from a quick fear of choking. “Should I have kept you inside?” she asked him when they were settled back afterward.

  “It feels better if you do,” he said mildly, yawning. “How amazing. We did bring that off.”

  Loosened and glad, she felt easy. She leaned over, kissing him lightly. George had not come back from Puerto Rico, materializing as they were making love. The idea that he might had been floating like a submerged image in her head, like the buzz of nervous energy in the jewelry store when she had observed Bernie shoplifting, part anxiety, part subliminal excitement. Incapable of wantonly taking a chance herself, she wondered if she did not enjoy being forced into danger. Perhaps I get people I am close to to manipulate me into doing the things I secretly am curious about. She saw herself with Val, who also liked to be naughty, stealing a whole Camembert cheese from one of Lena’s parties, to eat for supper the next two days. Had Val ever confessed that to Lena? It had been awkward to make love with Bernie, but she felt closer for it. Her muscles one by one sighed and floated. She lolled in the tepid dark.