The High Cost of Living by Marge Piercy Page A

of her job.
    Who would George take up with? He always had something going, carefully casual and limited affairs with young women. They were pretty, uncommonly so, and quite young. Sometimes they were students, sometimes secretaries, and sometimes somebody’s girlfriend or sister. Valerie and she had once invented a murder starring George as corpse in which ever so many characters had motives for offing him. They had such fun they listed twenty-seven suspects, including Sue of course, his students, his colleagues, his ex-affairs, young men whose girlfriends or sisters he had briefly enjoyed. He never had an affair with a married woman or anyone belonging to a peer. He had been murdered by having the stem of his pipe coated with strychnine: he chewed his pipe more than he smoked it.
    She smiled at the memory and then saw Hennessy trying to catch her eye. Cam was not here; the play had two more weeks to run. In one of those loud buffalo plaid shirts he liked to wear, he looked like a hunter and she felt like a hunted deer. Pivoting, she dived into the pool of listeners at George’s feet. Actually it typified these gatherings that nobody ever listened to anyone except George and the voice of their own anxiety. They never heard what anyone said, even the person just beside them. But Hennessy wedged himself in next to her, his thigh heavy against hers. Hugging her knees, she ordered herself to be elsewhere; she would review her sensei’s admonitions for the last two weeks and think how best to apply them.
    Her new sensei, Parker, was the only man she could remember that she considered beautiful, as beautiful as a woman, although she did not desire him. She had never had a male sensei before, but Parker was good at instructing women. He was of medium height, his skin was copper-black, he was graceful and very, very strong. He looked sarcasm oftener than he spoke it. He had ways of glancing at her when she was clumsy that made her shrivel. She liked him immensely but could not tell from his vast fairness whether he liked her. Perhaps he perceived his students only in terms of their karate accomplishments and problems; she would like that.
    She jumped, realizing George had addressed her and probably repeated whatever he had said, because everyone was staring. She felt herself blush as if she had been dipped in boiling water. Hennessy said, “Hey, now I know why George calls you Red. Not just from your hair.” He patted her head as if she were a spaniel, grinning down at her.
    â€œWhat were you dreaming about?” George stroked his mustache peevishly.
    â€œWhy the papers, master, only the papers.”
    â€œThen you must’ve found something more interesting than I have, to blush like that.”
    â€œIt’s a reflex.… Can you figure what possible survival value it could ever have had for my ancestors to suddenly turn beet red? Fitting into a predominantly red landscape?”
    â€œBright 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