Mercy (43 page)

“Great, glad you could make it,” Mancera said, stepping back and tilting her head for Palma to come in. “I was afraid something would come up at the last minute.”

She took Palma’s folded umbrella and put it in a corner with others and walked her into the living room where twenty-five to thirty women were scattered around in groups or couples, drinking and eating hors d’oeuvres. There was music, but it was soft—Antonio Carlos Jobim, she thought—in deference to the main purpose of the evening, which was conversation. It was a major departure from the usual cocktail party, where you stood close so you could yell across your drink, not because you wanted to be close. Here, however, standing close had another purpose.

A quick scan of the room revealed that the ages ranged from women in their early twenties to those in their fifties. Their dress was equally as various, from black evening wear to poolside casual with a good sprinkling of Junior League summer cottons and career woman brand names. Scattered throughout the room, Palma saw several women with their arms laced through a companion’s or simply holding hands or with an affectionate arm around a waist, none of which even would have attracted attention at a heterosexual party. But here, where there were only women, the collective, if minimal, displays of affection had an altogether different feel about them. On the other hand, there was none of the coarse groping or gratuitous deep kissing that she often had seen at male homosexual gatherings. If Palma had been expecting to arrive at a party for a women’s garden club, she wouldn’t have seen anything here that would have made her think she was at the wrong address.

“Our den of iniquity,” Mancera said softly, as they started walking through the living room. “Some of these women have stopped by here—briefly—after an evening out with their husbands or families, others have come just for this, others are on their way somewhere else. Some came as couples…their night out.”

These women were all on the upper end of the male’s ten scale, a fact that struck Palma as remarkable and something that told her as much about the crowd as the price tags on the cars she had seen out in the courtyard. Were there no economically underprivileged or physically plain women in Mancera’s circle of friends? By the time they had slowly made their way through a sea of fragrances and fragments of conversations about movies and restaurants and children and bosses and husbands and other women, past a fortune in jewelry and an equal fortune in health-club figures and tennis-court tans, and gotten through the dining room to the kitchen, where Bessa was standing behind the tile bar mixing drinks, Palma had begun to feel distinctly dowdy.

Bessa asked Palma what she would like to drink and then got busy making it. Like Mancera, she was in a tropical sundress, but for her the overlarge flowers were rendered in fiery reds and oranges that set off her cocoa skin in a manner that could only be called erotic. She flashed her smile as she mixed Palma’s drink and talked to another woman who was helping her. When she handed the drink over the tile counter, she feathered her dusky fingers over Palma’s, a lingering caress that didn’t linger at all, perhaps, except in Palma’s mind because no one seemed to notice. She felt her heart race and turned away without looking again at the dark Jamaican.

“As you can see,” Mancera said as they moved away to themselves, “this is a rather innocuous group of women. They’re solidly women of the mainstream, and they want to keep it like that. Maybe even a little stuffy because of it. It’s the sort of thing, really, that Helena Saulnier would find intolerable. More than half of these women here are living with husbands or boyfriends. This is not their whole life, but it’s an important part of it.”

“And their male partners know nothing of this?”

Mancera shook her head. “Well, let me take that back. You see the woman over there, the one with the red belt talking to the brunette? Her boyfriend knows she has women lovers. She insisted he know when they started living together. If he couldn’t handle that, she wanted to know up front. I’ve never known another woman to do that, but he seems to be handling it. Personally, I can’t see how it can last. That seems to be asking a lot of him. But she’s definitely a minority of one—and he knows nothing about this group.”

She carefully surveyed the room, her eyes darting, sliding, gliding as she sipped her drink and talked. Turning her back to the larger part of the room, she looked at Palma.

“Do you see the two couples over here behind me, talking by the front windows?” Palma nodded. “The pair with their backs to us have been turned down by their fifth adoption agency. They’ve been together eight years and they can’t convince anyone that it’s a permanent relationship or that they can provide a psychologically balanced home for the baby without a man present to serve as a male role model. You can imagine the arguments on both sides. They run the gamut. Well, the woman on your right has recently received her first implant—artificial insemination. The donor is the other woman’s brother. They were turned down by three physicians before they found one who would inseminate her. Again, the same arguments surfaced, apprehension that the children raised by lesbian couples may develop negative attitudes toward men, that without the male-female dyad as exemplars they’ll grow up with a lack of self-esteem.” She shook her head. “I don’t know. I’ve read studies. Both sides of the arguments will cover you up with statistics.”

“What about the women here who have families?” Palma asked. “What do they say about it?”

Mancera smiled and shook her head. “They come down on both sides. Same observations and arguments you’d get from a group of heterosexuals in a room like this. But then, you’ve got to keep in mind who these women are. You get a dinner party together with Saulnier’s friends, and your discussion on this topic is going to sound a heck of a lot different.”

“Which one of these women is Terry?” Palma asked.

Mancera looked embarrassed. “She’s not here. She was here,” she added quickly, “but she had to go.” She held up an open hand. “She is willing to talk to you, though. Here, tomorrow. She wants to meet here for a couple of reasons. She’s living with a man now, thinking of getting married, and she’s scared to death of Gil Reynolds. She doesn’t want to attract attention to her home, afraid that Reynolds is watching her and, at the very least, will talk to the man she’s living with.”

Palma looked at Mancera, trying to read whether Terry had really been here or whether this had been only a ploy to get Palma to come by.

“You know about Louise, I assume,” Palma said. “And Bernadine Mello.”

Mancera nodded. “We’ve already been through this. Earlier this evening those deaths were the only topic of conversation for over an hour. We hashed it out. Everyone got involved, everyone had their say.”

“Their say?”

“Look, we’re all scared by this,” Mancera said. They had stopped by a ficus tree near one of the courtyard windows. She paused to gather her thoughts before going on. “I think—and I know this is going to sound callous to you—but I think it’s everyone’s general feeling that this is not something that concerns us.”

“What?”

“The victims, we think, are all going to be part of Vickie’s ‘crowd.’ This is an S&M situation. Though everyone thinks this is horrible, a sad thing, no one, none of us here, anyway, feel threatened. The victims may be bisexual, but more importantly they’re the pain crowd. You think the key to this thing is bisexuality. It isn’t. It’s about pain and people who don’t want their sex without it.”

“Those are the people you think are going to be the victims?” Palma asked.

“Yes, we do,” Mancera nodded. “They’ve always been victims. Do you know about Kittrie’s background?”

Palma shook her head.

“It’s sordid. She grew up in the deep backwoods bayou country of East Texas. She had a poisoned birth and a poisoned childhood. Her father was her brother. Her mother’s husband, the father of Vickie’s brother-father, sexually abused Vickie from the time she was three. Her mother colluded in this. When she was eleven her brother, who was her father, began having intercourse with her and then she was shared by these two men until she was fifteen, when she was gang-raped by some assortment of relatives—I’ve heard uncles, cousins, whoever—in a two-day ordeal that would make you stop believing in God if I told you about it. It made Vickie stop believing in God. She ran away from home, if that’s what you call a place like that, and came to Houston. You can imagine, with her beauty and background, what kind of a life she found for herself here. Dorothy came across her in one of the gay bars when Vickie was nineteen.”

Mancera sighed. “She took care of her as best she could, but I think Dorothy’s own life was too damaged for her to have provided anything like a protective wing. Vickie’s a woman out of bounds by anyone’s definition. Her life has never gone well, and I don’t see how it ever will.”

“What about Helena Saulnier? She seems to have appointed herself Vickie’s protector as well.”

“I feel sorry for Helena,” Mancera conceded. “She’s in love with Vickie, but she’s refusing to admit it to herself. You’re right, she sees herself as Vickie’s protector, and she has infinite patience with her, much more than Dorothy had. Helena’s lesbianism is much more politicized and militant than Vickie’s, which gives her a kind of moral fierceness, a sense of purpose that’s entirely lacking in Vickie’s kind of sick hedonism. Helena wants to be Vickie’s advocate, someone to speak for her when she can’t speak for herself, to tell her that regardless of what she’s been through that she cares for her and that no amount of sin can change that. With a kind of outdated nobility, Helena wants to fill the void that occupies the center of Vickie’s heart. It’s a magnificent example of tilting at windmills.”

“What about Bernadine Mello?”

“We don’t know her. Everyone saw her picture in the papers, and no one we know recognized her. But then we don’t know all the women Vickie’s involved with, or even the men she’s involved with, for that matter. And then there’re the code names. If she’s new in the group, she’s most likely still using one.”

“What if she has nothing to do with Vickie?”

Mancera’s face seemed to drain of any expression. “Are you telling me she doesn’t?”

“I’m telling you we think she doesn’t,” Palma said, not altogether honestly.

Mancera studied Palma’s face, her eyes looking into Pal-ma’s as if she were trying to read tea leaves or divine the future in the lines of her face.

“I don’t know,” Mancera said. “I really don’t.”

Suddenly but smoothly, she smiled and slipped her arm through Palma’s. “We’re getting some sidelong glances,” she said. “You’ve been here too long without being introduced to a few people at least. We’ve huddled to ourselves too long.” And she deftly turned Palma toward the living room and casually eased into the crowd.

In this way, pulled close to Linda Mancera’s side and feeling the cushion of her breasts through the fine material of her tropical dress, Palma met the elite of Dorothy Samenov’s “group.” They could have been any women anywhere, and in fact, they were. Palma was genuinely interested in meeting them, and even though she was given first names only, she was able to gather enough from overheard conversations to know that being bisexual for these women had in no way precluded their concerns in the larger world. Their concerns were the concerns of women everywhere in their economic class, for it seemed to Palma that social, rather than sexual, distinctions held more importance for many of them. They were the true bourgeoise, in almost every respect. Palma remembered what Mancera had said about her sexual preference for women. It did not define her, she had said. It was only a part of her, like her race or her religion or her occupation.

And yet as Linda Mancera led her around the room of women, introducing her, allowing her to meet and see for herself what manner of women they were, she could not help but feel as though their glances were more than woman’s curiosity about another woman. Women, she knew, were harsh judges of another woman’s appearance, appraising their peers from a distance, looking them over from head to toe, measuring them with the delicate calipers of taste of their own manufacture. Women, she was aware, were masters of the artful seduction just as surely as she was aware of Mancera’s breasts against her arm and the way Mancera occasionally arched her back to press them hard against Palma, unobserved by anyone but themselves, as surely as she was aware of Mancera’s slightly massaging grip of their interlaced fingers, as surely as she was aware of the now-and-then manner in which Mancera brought the back of Palma’s hand in touch with Mancera’s inner thigh as she bent to speak to someone sitting or turned in the crowd to look for someone else. They might be the bourgeoise, these women lovers of women, but even the bourgeoise had passions that could drive them out of their comfortable self-satisfaction; even the bourgeoise could sometimes lose control of those passions; and even the bourgeoise—perhaps especially the bourgeoise—could have secrets they would rather die than reveal.

Palma walked down the curving sidewalk from Mancera’s front door oblivious of the wet privet hedge that was brushing against her dress, soaking her hem and peppering her stockinged legs. She didn’t even think to put up her umbrella against the heavy fog that was moving like a warm, moist breath across the city, beading in her hair and casting halos around the streetlamps. Her heart was hammering, banging away against her chest. The room full of women followed her out into the mist, milled about her as she crossed the courtyard, spoke softly and touched softly as she unlocked the car and quickly got inside and slammed the door. She started the car and turned the air conditioner on high and stuck her face in front of one of the vents. She unbuttoned the top four buttons of her dress, pulled it open, and directed another vent to her chest. Jesus God, she thought.

As the air began to cool the perspiration, she tried to put the memory of the feel of Linda Mancera’s inner thigh into perspective. Something happened; she had to admit that, for Christ’s sake. She had been caught off guard by it, allowing herself to be caught up in Mancera’s charade even though, had she been given any warning, she would have maneuvered to avoid it. But Mancera had simply grabbed her and they were off, working the room, smiling, meeting, pretending…pretending…It would not have happened, she thought, if Mancera had simply taken her hand and continued to hold it, walking from group to group. But she hadn’t done that. Instead, she would release Palma’s hand and touch her back during one introduction, put her arm around her for another, take her hand again for yet another, each time bringing Palma in touch with another portion of her anatomy, the soft give of her breast here, the strong inner muscle of her thigh there, and each time the renewed contact with her warmed flesh vividly re-created a sense of what Mancera must be like. Or more accurately, it created a heightened curiosity, a desire to know…or maybe…simply…a desire.