Night work (7 page)

"So you were inside the whole time?" Kate asked, her
voice as casual as if she were asking for the cream. Lee was not
fooled, however, and shot her partner a hard look. Roz looked slightly
uncomfortable, which was a hidden satisfaction to Kate, but she
answered readily.

"No, not inside. We were outside in Amanda's car."

"Did you see anybody leave after the group session?"

Roz saw where the questions were going, and relaxed a degree.
"A couple of people left, sure. Carla Lomax and her secretary,
Phoebe, and a woman named Nikki. There might've been someone
else, I can't remember."

"If you think of anyone, let me know. What about Carla Lomax,
Emily's lawyer? Do you know her? I gather she got Emily into the
shelter in the first place."

"We've worked together from time to time, but I
can't say I know Carla well. Good woman, very committed."

Lee sat forward on the sofa and firmly nudged the conversation away
from Kate's professional interest in Emily and James Larsen.
"What about that Indian girl? Is there anything you can do about
her, unless she's underage? The Indian community tends to be
pretty closed to outsiders, doesn't it?"

"Even more than the Russians, and I thought
they
were
tight-lipped. You're right, I can't do anything direct, but
there are people who can, and it's just a matter of digging them
out and tightening the screws." She looked, for a moment, oddly
fatigued, and her laugh was a bitter one, full of long experience of
hopeless causes. "You wouldn't believe how Machiavellian I
can be if I have to. I listen to the right-wingers and then to the
left, and I agree with all the extremists to their faces. I eat shit
and ask sweetly for the recipe. I even learned how to bat my eyelashes
at men, if you can imagine that."

Kate glanced at Lee, to see what she was making of this, and saw a look of wary compassion on her lover's face.

"And when she has eaten the shit," Maj added in her
slight, precise Scandinavian accent, "she comes home and breaks
the furniture in a rage."

"I do not!" Roz protested.

"Only once," Maj allowed. "And I hated that chair anyway."

"God, it must be exhausting," Lee broke in. "Conflict resolution's the hardest job in the world."

"Isn't it just?" Roz agreed. "You know, more
than once when I've been sitting in a room with two people, each
of whom thinks the other is a monster of depravity, I've found
myself fantasizing about just cracking their skulls together, or
locking the two of them up together until they promised to treat each
other like human beings. They wouldn't even have to agree with
each other, just be polite and listen."

Kate was reminded of the notice that she had read while she was
sitting with the phone under her chin, waiting for Carla Lomax to come
on the line. "Have any of you seen that flyer somebody's
been putting up on phone poles, suggesting that mothers should be
required to insert a poison capsule under their sons' skin at
birth?"

"What?" Lee said, shocked.

"Yeah. The idea is, if the boy gets out of hand as an adult,
society could just trigger the capsule and deal with him. Shut him
down." It was not, she realized belatedly, a topic a pregnant
woman might be eager to discuss. Maj didn't wince, exactly, but
she seemed to retreat slightly into herself. Lee, of course, caught it
and moved to soothe, but before she could knock Kate's comment
out of the air with a remark about the weather, Roz picked up on it.

"God, people are nuts," she was saying. "We have
this friend whose lover left her because the baby she was carrying
turned out to be a boy, and she couldn't take the conflict of
raising a male child. I mean, men are half the human race. Who better
to change the way they do things than lesbian mothers?"

"Nurture overcoming nature," Lee said in agreement.

"The irony is painful, isn't it?" Roz went on.
"In developing countries they're aborting thousands of
fetuses every month because they're girls and amnio followed by
abortion is cheaper than coming up with a dowry, while at the same time
in the West women are aborting babies because they're males and
they don't want to deal with the problem of raising a male
feminist. I mean, I'm all for the right to choose, but not over
something petty. It's... obscene."

"Abortion has to be chosen with care," Lee agreed,
uneasily going along with a topic she was interested in but keeping one
eye on Maj. "There are always consequences. Sometimes it takes
years for them to manifest, but they're there, and it's
irresponsible to pretend they're not."

"You know," Maj said, going back to Kate's
original remark to show that it did not bother her fragile, hormonally
ravaged pregnant self, "the whole anti-male paranoia just gets to
me. I wouldn't mind if this baby were a boy. You can't just
say that men are violent, period. It isn't their sex that
condemns men to brutality, it's their history."

"It's not men I mind," Lee noted. "It's mankind I can't stand."

"Hey," Kate objected, straight-faced. "Some of my best friends are males."

Their laughter was interrupted by the doorbell, and Kate went to let
in Mina, being dropped off by the neighboring friend's mother.
While the mothers chatted briefly, Lee got out an antique globe puzzle
that had belonged to a great-aunt and showed Mina how it worked. When
the mother left and with Mina in the room, the evening's talk
slid on to less loaded matters than abortions and the iniquity of men.

Before long, however, Mina abandoned her attempt at reassembling the
various layers of the globe. She wandered over to sit on the sofa
beside Maj, who put out an arm and drew the child in to her. Almost
instantly, Mina's eyelids began to droop, and her thumb went
briefly into her mouth before she remembered that she was too old to
suck her thumb.

"You tired, sweet thing?" Maj asked her. Mina's
head nodded against her adoptive mother's shoulder. "Me
too," Maj said. "Can you help your fatty ma up?" With
Mina pulling (and Roz behind her adding an affectionate but only
half-joking shove), Maj maneuvered herself upright and waddled off to
use the toilet for the fourth time that evening. Roz bent down and
picked up Mina, who snuggled happily into her other mother's arms
and fitted the top of her head into the hollow of Roz's chin.
Roz's arms went around the child with fierce affection, and by
the time Maj came out of the bathroom, Mina's legs were limp in
sleep. Lee watched the family leave with envy in her eyes.

Chapter 4

LEE LOCKED UP BEHIND their guests and came back to the living room,
moving in the careful rhythm of footsteps alternating with the tap of
the rubber crutch ends that was such a contrast to her brisk, firm step
of two years before. Kate was already seated at the dining table,
pulling folders out of her briefcase, and Lee hesitated.

"Will it bother you if I watch the tape of that TV program Roz
was on? I didn't get a chance to see it earlier."

" 'Course not. This is just paperwork, to keep me from
getting too far behind. Was there any coffee left?" she asked,
pushing back her chair.

"I think so. You want me to--?"

"You sit. You must be tired from cooking. Can I put that in
for you?" Kate gestured to the tape sitting on top of the
television set. At Lee's thanks, she fed it into the player,
carried the controls across to Lee, and stooped down to gather up the
scattered pieces of the globe puzzle that Mina had abandoned, putting
them on the low table in front of the sofa. When she came back from the
kitchen with her coffee, Lee was on the sofa putting the world together
and Roz was on the television preparing to set it aright.

The program was a panel discussion on, according to the sign in
front of the moderator, women and religion in the 21st century. Kate
had missed the introductions of the first two women, a nun with
Hispanic features and light blue habit followed by a tall woman with
long blond dreadlocks and a patchwork blouse. Roz was the third (Roz in
a navy jacket and green shirt, with the white square of her
pastor's collar dominating her image). The fourth was a black
Lutheran pastor, also in a collar, and the last panelist was described
as a "neopagan follower of the goddess."

"Any particular goddess?" Kate asked.

"All of them," Lee explained.

"Who is the second woman?"

"A practitioner of wicca."

"What's that?"

"She's a witch."

"Oh. Right." Kate watched for a minute, then settled
down determinedly at the table with those two staples of a cop's
life, coffee and paperwork. She listened with half an ear to the
far-ranging discussion, which ran the gamut from child care to radical
feminist theology and from counseling a congregation's menfolk to
raising the inner Feminine. This last exercise seemed to be the prime
interest of the witch and the goddess worshiper, and their descriptions
of the empowering energies-- which they called "raising
shakti"
--by
chanting the name of Kali or Durga during the act of sex had Roz
looking interested, the nun looking fastidious, and the poor Lutheran
minister looking as if she might stand up and flee. Lee chortled at the
moderator's attempts to keep the subject a little closer to the
audience's sense of reality, until finally Roz took pity on the
woman and stepped in to bring the topic back to a more manageable track.

"I think what my colleagues are saying is that women have an
immense source of inner power, a strength and energy we rarely tap
into, because from childhood we are taught to keep it closed inside,
even to deny its very existence." This was not at all what her
colleagues had been saying, and Roz knew it, but she ruthlessly
overrode their attempts to interrupt; Roz had the ball now, and she
intended to run with it. "Because the energy--the
shakti
--is
so tightly repressed, when it does find an outlet, it tends to blow, to
erupt as rage. Come to think of it, that's exactly what happens
in the Indian stories about the goddess Durga--or Kali, who
personifies Durga's wrath: she gets drunk on battle, goes insane
when she is finally released to shed blood. Which should, as myths are
meant to do, make us stop and think: If we as women ever decided to
stop being patient and forgiving and nurturing, to decide that
it's time to begin with a clean slate, it might well feel to men
as if Kali had been loosed. It's been said that if womankind ever
truly sets her mind to freeing the
shakti
within, the blast of accumulated rage will scorch the earth."

She was good, Kate had to admit, mixing together lessons in
women's psychology and Eastern theology but in a tone of light
conversation, and managing to subtly correct the goddess worshiper at
the same time. "Do you suppose that last remark of hers was
actually a quote?" she wondered aloud.

Lee shook her head. "Not for a minute. That's a patented
Roz Hall trademark, issuing a pronouncement as if it's some
sage's wisdom. You've got to love the woman."

The moderator certainly did, and the Lutheran pastor. The nun
stepped smoothly in when Roz paused for breath and made a remark about
pacifism and Christian forgiveness, and the discussion rapidly shot off
onto the question of whether a feminist could be a Christian, and vice
versa.

Kate pulled her attention away from Roz Hall's passionate
espousal of the cause of feminist churchgoers and stuck her nose back
into her reports, and although the tape ended before her work did, she
had enough of her paperwork out of the way to feel justified in putting
it back into her briefcase and turning off the lights as soon as
Lee's going-to-bed noises had died away in a last gurgle of water
through the old pipes.

But the evening stayed with her, and behind the televised discussion
of women's rage lay that look Roz had given her, a look that said
none of them were all that far from being an Emily Larsen.

Not even Kate.

THE NEXT MORNING KATE was in the kitchen with the morning
Chronicle
gathering crumbs beneath her plate, bent over a review of
Song
that was tied (as Jon had predicted) to a front-page report on the
right-wing Christian protest outside the theater, when she heard the
sound of a key in the front door, and looked up to see Jon breezing
through. He was singing, some cheery and inane song of an early sixties
girl group, and Kate's heart sank. The door to his basement
apartment closed on his chirpy lyrics, and Lee came in, her eyebrows up
into her hair.

"Was that what I thought it was?"

"I'm afraid so," Kate answered.

Jon was in love again.

Every three or four months during the entire time he had lived with
them, Jon would meet The One. For a couple of weeks he would drive his
housemates crazy with golden-oldie love songs, long murmuring telephone
conversations rising from his rooms in the basement, and a return to
girlish giggles and dramatic bouts of despair over his appearance, his
clothes, and his lack of a future. More than once Kate had longed to
shoot him.

The aftermath of these great passions would almost have been a
relief, had he not been so pathetic and their guilt over feeling
relieved so strong. He faded before their eyes into a small man with a
brave mustache, who dove back into his increasingly unnecessary labors
for Lee, cooking elaborate meals, urging his charge out so he could
drive her all over creation, redoubling his efforts in the men's
choir and the gym and the volunteer work in the hospice.

No, all in all, Jon Samson singing love songs was not a sound guaranteed to gladden the hearts of his housemates.

Kate kept her mouth firmly shut. Lee was the one who bore the brunt
of Jon's moods, since she was around him all day and Kate was
not. And Lee was the one who had to decide if and when she was ready to
do without his services, not Kate. So Kate said nothing, just stuck her
coffee mug in the dishwasher, kissed Lee goodbye, and strapped on her
gun to go to work.