Night work (27 page)

"One of the books she took up was the Bible. But the more she
read, the angrier it made her, what she called 'man's
inhumanity to woman." The story of the man entertaining important
visitors who gives his concubine to a drunken mob to abuse and kill, so
as to save his guests. Or Tamar, the young widow who dresses up as a
prostitute and seduces her own father-in-law to force her
husband's family to undertake their responsibilities toward her.
Jephthah's daughter, nameless even as a sacrifice. And the
Song of Solomon,
where a young girl out looking for her lover falls into the hands of a
group of soldiers, is raped, and then, when she finds her lover again,
is forced by her own needs and by his assumptions to act as if nothing
had happened.

"That is not exactly how the Bible describes it, but as you
probably know, interpretation depends on the eye of the reader, and the
experience of being raped changed Dina's way of looking at the
world. It explains why she wrote the dance the way she did,
exaggerating the abuse of the guards but also giving Beloved the power
to strike back, not only against her attackers, but against the need to
hide her rape from Lover."

The doorbell punctuated his last sentence and Jon started to rise,
but Kate waved him back to his seat. She took a tray of dirty plates to
the kitchen, pausing to switch on the already-filled coffeemaker, then
went to let in Roz, Maj, and Mina. The two adults were carrying
containers, and Mina's arms were wrapped around a bunch of
bananas the size of her chest. Shutting the door, Kate asked,
"Will we need bowls or plates?"

"Bowls," said Maj. "Big ones."

"Everyone's outside on the patio, I think it's
still warm enough. I'll bring some bowls and utensils."

Maj had brought the makings for very high-class banana splits:
homemade ice cream yellow with egg yolk and speckled with vanilla bean,
bitter chocolate sauce, crumbled pralines, and creme anglaise, with
maraschino cherries for the top and delicate, brittle rolled cookies
for the side. This was what Jon referred to as
cuisine amusante,
or gourmet junk food, and it succeeded completely in defeating the
nice, healthy dinner they had eaten. In no time at all, the only things
left were a few cherries and some cookie crumbs. The evening sky had
shifted from blue through rose to dusky lavender and finally to no
color at all, and they sat in easy companionship and admired the
quarter moon riding low against the city. Eventually, it was getting
too cool to sit outside, and they moved in for coffee. Mina asked for
the globe puzzle again, and Lee obediently fetched it for her to
dismantle.

Roz wanted to talk about
Song,
and Sione repeated for her benefit the history of the production.

Roz was thrilled. She sat forward on the edge of her seat as if she
could pull theological and psychological truths out of the dancer by
force.

"Beloved submitting to her lover's expectations and his
lack of sympathy," she declared, "is just like all the
women who fail to report rape, even now. And in a patriarchal society,
when the woman's purity reflects directly on her menfolk, she
wouldn't dare tell him--look at those poor women in Muslim
countries who get murdered by their brothers for daring to shame the
family by getting themselves raped."

Maj offered another interpretation. "You don't think Beloved is simply afraid that
if
she tells Lover she was attacked, he would go after the guards and be
beaten up himself, or killed? That she's protecting him?"

Roz waved away her partner's suggestion impatiently. "
'Tell him I am sick with love," Beloved says. She's
hiding her injuries because she knows that
if
she doesn't, he'll be so put off by her lack of purity that he'll leave her."

"Interesting, isn't it," Lee commented mildly,
"that we call Beloved 'she' and Lover
'he' even though the players were reversed?"

Sione, dressed in khakis, loafers, and a fleece pullover and showing
not the least sign of transvestism or gender bending off the stage,
smiled.

"As it is written, the parts could be played by either sex,
but the director had the two of us at hand, and thought it was more
interesting this way. "A piquant touch," one of the
reviewers said."

"But why Beloved's rage?" Roz demanded. "Why
did Moreli decide to have Beloved come in with the bloody knife and
then settle back into business as usual with Lover? Is that her idea of
happily ever after?"

Maj spoke up. "I'm sure it's your old friend the
warrior-virgin, Roz love. Even if Dina Moreli didn't have that
figure consciously in mind when she wrote the
interpretation--after all, that's what an archetype is, a
powerful upwelling from the unconscious. Women's
shakti,
like those women on the panel called it."

"Oh," Lee broke in, "I meant to tell you how much
I enjoyed that program. I taped it and watched it the other
night."

Roz glanced involuntarily at Kate, looking uncomfortable, and Kate
wondered in amusement which of the statements Roz had made during the
discussion was embarrassing her in hindsight. Roz turned back to Sione.

"But where did that interpretation come from? Did she just pull it out of thin air?"

Sione shrugged apologetically. "I do not really know why Dina
wrote it that way. I am only the dancer, not the person who created it.
But," he added, seeing Roz's impatience, "are
Beloved's actions not, after all, what people do? When driven to
uncharacteristic acts, do not most people then fade back into the
obscurity of their daily lives?"

Roz opened her mouth to argue, caught Maj's eye, and then
threw out her hands with a smile. "I'm sorry, I realize it
isn't your dance. It's just that it's so precisely
what I've been working on for my dissertation, the juxtaposition
of love and rage. And I find it exciting to come across an intelligent
and sympathetic interpretation of a biblical text. So many people
pretty things up and make them so sweet you want to vomit. Or they go
the other direction and dismiss the whole thing as the tool of an
oppressive patriarchy."

"You would see it somewhere in between?" Sione asked
dutifully. Maj made a noise and rolled her eyes, but Roz ignored her
partner.

"Religion
is
passion," the minister of God
declared passionately. "The Bible is our document as well as
theirs, and it holds all the human experience of fear and love and
despair and terror and revenge, of power and the rights of the
powerless. It is a paradigm of human behavior. Its theology is one of
liberation, and not just in the hands of Latin American Marxism."

Sione was starting to look bewildered, Jon bored, and Lee stirred
and objected mildly, "There is a lot of ugly stuff in the Bible,
Roz; you have to admit that."

"Precisely. Because there's a lot of ugly stuff in daily
life, and pretending there isn't doesn't make it so. Life
isn't a fairy tale; the good guys sometimes lose. Hell, even
fairy tales aren't pretty except in twentieth-century America.
The original Grimm tales--have you ever read them? Grim's
the word. Little Red Riding Hood doesn't rescue her granny, she
finds her chopped up, bottled, and hanging in the smokehouse."

"Roz!" Maj protested, looking over to where Mina was
kneeling, concentrating on the thick plastic shapes that Lee was
fitting together for her. Roz started to bristle, but Sione got in
first with a distraction.

"I have always thought that Christianity and left-wing
politics were poor bedfellows, which has been a sorrow to me, because
the church of my childhood was such a place of joy, full of big women
in white hats singing full-throated to the heavens."

Roz was nodding her head before he finished his sentence. "It
is a terrible pity that the right wing has laid exclusive claim to the
Bible, so inextricably that it seems impossible to reject the one
without the other. But to do so only gives them a victory. It's
not their Bible, and the fact that I claim the same Holy Book makes the
Right angrier than anything else I can do. If I rejected their religion
entirely I would simply be another poor lost heathen in need of their
prayers. By declaring myself a Christian, by knowing the Bible better
than most of them do, I became a maddening enigma. And I mean literally
maddening: Twice I've had men try to rip off my collar."

"And she regularly gets threatening letters," Maj told them.

"You never said anything about threats," Kate said sharply. "What kind--"

"Kate," Roz interrupted her, shooting a stern glance
sideways at her partner. "Don't worry about it."

"Why the hell not? You have to take threats seriously these days. There are a lot of nuts out there."

"You think I don't know that? Of course I take them
seriously, but I don't want you to get involved. One of your
colleagues knows all about the problem."

"But--"

"Kate, please. Unless one of them actually carries out his threat, it's not going to be your job."

"For Christ sake, Roz, that's not at all funny."

Lee spoke up as well. "Roz, please don't joke about
this. It isn't fair to the people who care about you."

"Sorry, sorry. Anonymous letters come with the territory, and
although I assure you that I take the nuts seriously, I have to say
that I find the whole subject tedious, and can we please talk about
something else?"

"The threats to your immortal soul are much more
worrying," Maj commented, sounding considerably more amused than
worried. She explained, "Roz seems to be a regular sermon topic
at that grotesque church that tries to quote 'heal' gays
and dykes."

Roz laughed aloud. "The last one was in retaliation for an
article I'd written and they had obviously not bothered to read,
about Hitler claiming to have been a Christian."

"Did he?" Jon asked, interested.

"I have no doubt that he thought of himself as a good Christian leader."

"Like those maniacs who bomb abortion clinics, killing to save
lives," Jon agreed. "They're mostly right-wing
Christians. The guy who runs that Web site giving the names and
addresses of abortionists that's little more than a hit
list--he calls himself a man of God."

"We humans have a deep need to justify our behavior,
especially the more extreme acts," Lee commented, pausing in
fitting the boot of Italy into the Mediterranean. "We drag God in
to stand at our side, even if we have to bend reality to do it."

"Poor old God," Jon said. "Must be frustrating
having everyone claim your support. Like Albert Einstein being dragged
in to advertise everything from Coke to computers."

"God definitely needs a press agent," Lee said. Sione was looking ever more puzzled.

"Issuing statements to clarify policy," Roz agreed.

"Headline: God says, "I do not support Pat Robertson," " Lee joked.

"God announces: 'Only gay feminists of color admitted to heaven," " Maj suggested.

"God unveils heavenly affirmative action plan: One percent
Christian Right to be admitted, qualified or not," Roz
contributed.

The jokes escalated, the intellectual content plummeted, and a
couple of minutes later Lee, seeing Sione looking worried and Mina
positively alarmed at this incomprehensible adult descent into
hilarity, leaned over and spoke to Kate.

"How about some more coffee, hon? Kate?" Lee reached out
and put her hand on Kate's knee, bringing her back to the present
from some far-off place.

"Huh?" Kate said, blinking.

"Could you put on another pot of coffee?"

"Sure," she said, and went off to do it.

Her mind was not on the chore, however. In fact, she had heard
nothing of the discussion and joking, nothing after Jon's mention
of the abortion clinic murders, an offhand remark that had sent a small
tingle rising up in the back of Kate's mind, the kind of
sensation that carries the phrase, "Listen to me."

Hit list. Web site. Maniac.
Listen.

Kate listened, and speculated in a state of distraction while the
coffee was made and drunk, and the dishes were cleaned, and Jon and
Sione left to feed Sione's recently adopted Siamese kitten. She
helped gather up Maj's empty containers and walked with them out
to Roz's car. The night sky was still clear, a rarity in the city
of fog, and mild enough that none of them wore a jacket. Maj opened the
Jeep's rear door and took the bowls from Kate, who leaned against
the passenger door and addressed herself to Roz's backside,
emerging from the back of the car while she buckled Mina into the car
seat.

"There were three women with picket signs in front of Peter
Mehta's house yesterday morning. You know anything about
that?"

"I know that they've moved on to his place of business.
Much more visible. Can you scoot back a bit, honey?" Roz asked,
which Kate assumed was addressed to the child in the car seat.

"It's an interesting question, isn't it, how much
we allow immigrants to keep the customs of their birth country,"
Kate noted. "When we have laws to the contrary. Like the
conservative groups who refuse to send their kids to public
schools."

"Customs or not, marrying off children is wrong."

"So is allowing half the kids in the country to go without
medical care. So is spending a million dollars for a missile to drop on
civilians."

Roz pulled her head out of the car and grinned at Kate.
"Martinelli, we're going to make a flaming liberal of you
yet."

"Roz, who did you tell about Pramilla Mehta's death?"

Roz shut Mina's door and stepped back so Maj could approach the passenger door. Kate too stepped away from the car.

"Why do you ask this, Kate?" Maj's voice asked, but it was Roz's gaze Kate held as she answered.

"Someone may have known that Laxman was being investigated for
his wife's death, and decided not to wait for the police. If we
can narrow down the people who had that information, it might help us
find his murderer. Roz knew of Laxman's violence against his
wife. Roz and Amanda Bonner."