"But you'll do it? You don't mind if we try?"
"It's completely crazy," said Kate despairingly, and Lee kissed her.
It was crazy, and it was hard—hour upon hour of back-breaking, unfamiliar, filthy labor with hammer and crowbar, Skil saw and belt sander; making heartbreaking mistakes, learning new skills, working long hours of overtime to pay for this mad venture; tedious commutes for Kate, who could not shift jobs as easily as Lee; fights over bills and burst pipes.
The one great blessing, disguised though it was at first, was that it left them neither time nor money for a social life, and the cloud that had threatened from the horizon, that in fact had blackened the skies and thrown several ominous drops on them, had retreated somewhat, become an uneasily ignored factor in their lives.
Kate would not come out. She told Lee the very first day, in Lee's office in Palo Alto, and Lee, flushed and alive with the incomprehensible return to life of a dream that had begun to degenerate into mere fantasy, and believing that in this, too, Kate would change her mind, acquiesced. She had Kate; she would not risk losing her by insisting that they go public. Time would bring it.
Time had not. What had begun as a mild irritation had grown to an open sore, threatening to infect the entire relationship. The month before Lee's mother died it had flared up when Lee invited two of her colleagues home for dinner and over coffee had casually revealed that she and Kate were not just housemates. The guests left an hour later. Kate turned on Lee in a fury.
"How dare you! You promised me, you gave me your word that you wouldn't say anything about us to anybody. You probably brag about it at the clinic, 'how I overcame my lover's scruples.' Lee, how could you!"
"Oh, Kate, this isn't 1950, for God's sake. It's not even 1970. Your coming out might be a five-minute wonder in a very small circle, but that's all."
"No, Lee, that's not all, not by a long shot. We move in different worlds, you and I, and I can't take the risk. I'm a cop, Lee. A woman cop. If we came out, how long do you suppose it'd be before the papers managed to let slip the juicy tidbit that Officer K. C. Martinelli is one of the leather brigade? How long before the looks and remarks start, before I start drawing all the real hard-core shit jobs, before I'm on a call and someone refuses to deal with me because I'm that lez in the department and I might have AIDS? How long before some mama flips out when I try to ask her daughter some questions about the bastard that's raped her, because mama doesn't want that dyke cop feeling up her daughter?"
"You're being ridiculous, Kate. Paranoid. Look, if this were Saudi Arabia, or Texas, or L.A. even, I could understand, but here, in the Bay Area? Now? It's not news that there are gays in the department. Nobody gives a damn."
"I give a damn," Kate shouted. "It's none of their goddamn business if I'm straight or bent or twisted in a circle."
"You're ashamed of it. You've always felt it shameful, but Kate, you've got to face it, or it'll tear you to—"
"I'm not ashamed of it!" Kate bellowed furiously, and then abruptly, without warning, her fury deflated, and she looked at her lover in a despair that came from the depths of her fatigue. "I'm not ashamed," she said quietly. "It's just too precious, Lee, to allow strangers to poke their fingers into it. Yes, I'd love to go to your club with you, go to the coffeehouses, kiss you in public, but I just can't risk it. You tell me that my refusal to breathe the fresh air is stifling us both, but I know, as sure as I'm sitting here, that coming out would be the end of it. I'm not strong enough, Lee. I'm just not strong enough."
Lee let it go that night, angry at herself for handling the confrontation so badly. It was out in the open now, though, and Lee knew that Kate's refusal fully to accept herself chipped at the foundations of their relationship and cut them off from the very community where they might find strength. She could not let it lie, and two days later, on a Friday night before two days off for them both, she approached the problem again, Kate was ready for her, and blew up.
The battle lasted until Sunday night, when Kate packed a bag and left the house, saying that she had to sleep or she would be dangerous on duty. She stayed away all week. Lee went through the motions of therapy with her clients for two days, and halfway through Wednesday realized that it was impossible. She went home to think.
It took her three days before she could see the truth, three days and nights before she was sure of her facts and could analyze the situation as she would a case. By Saturday night she had to admit it: Kate's mania for privacy, her phobia of self-revelation, would have to be the basic premise of any future life together.
Subject's job, she told herself as if dictating a case history, Subject's job is one which brings Subject into constant proximity with the worst in humanity: pimps who sell children as prostitutes; men who sell drugs to melt brains; large and angry men with various weapons; drunks who stink and vomit on their rescuers; bodies dead a week in August, smelling so awful the wagon men wait outside. Subject puts her body and her mind on the line daily, in exchange for which she is allowed to be a part of one of the most powerful brotherhoods there is, men and a few women who are united in the inhuman demands made on them, a secret society in which superiority is recognized and rewarded, where the bickering and back-biting inherent in any family structure does not weaken the mystique that—give it credit—had sustained Subject for two years until she had been brought up short by the ugly, inevitable end product of distancing herself from the rest of humanity. It is the most public and visible of jobs, with the most stringently demanding code for its members. Is it not understandable that Subject refuses to risk an action that threatens to leave her without support, leave her outside the fraternity? Further, is it not understandable that Subject, to avoid being completely consumed by the demands of her job and the unwritten demands of her brothers and sisters on the force (a telling appellation), guards her true self, her private life, with such ferocity?
So. If Kate remains a cop, she will continue to guard herself, by giving herself a nickname, by not socializing with other cops, by keeping her home life a hermetically sealed secret. The question was, then, could Lee survive in a vacuum?
Another day alone, and she had decided that living with Kate was worth the suffocation. It might not always be, and Kate would change, given time, but for now, it would have to do.
She telephoned Kate at her hotel, they had a brief conversation, and Kate was home in forty minutes. Patiently, Lee set out to change Kate. Stubbornly, Kate would be moved a fraction of a pace at a time. The house came to them then, took up all their time and most of their energy, and despite the shakiness of that one cornerstone in their lives, a strength grew in them, supported them, drew them on.
They were happy. Against all odds, two troubled people had found their place and worked hard to preserve it.
They had never had an overnight guest before. Kate's job, the more vulnerable, had never intruded before. Outsiders had never entered the heart of the home. And now, they were being invaded.
THREE
THE CITY
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At birth our death is sealed, and our end is consequent
—Marcus Manilus, Astronomies
Nobody ever notices postmen somehow . . ; yet they have passions
like other men, and even carry large bags
where a small corpse can be stowed quite easily.