The Dog Collar Murders (11 page)

“Once Loie had her name on
The Silenced Heart
she was automatically a more valuable person than I was. Once Loie had been on the Phil Donahue Show or asked to be a keynote speaker at the National Women’s Studies Conference she was a star. She was asked again. And again. I became known as Loie’s manager—not her lover, not publicly—while Loie became known as one of the founders of the anti-pornography movement. Once she’d said that everyone would know how much I’d contributed to the book. How the hell were they going to know that? In the beginning, the very beginning, she used to mention me in her interviews and talks and say, ‘I couldn’t have done it without Pauline Corot.’ ‘Pauline Corot’s ideas are an essential part of my book.’ But gradually references to my contribution got fewer and fewer. When the royalties began to slow down and the invitations dried up, suddenly
I
was supposed to get a job to keep up the mortgage payments. She acted as if
she’d
been supporting
me
.”

Pauline’s lips pressed together savagely.

“If you don’t mind my asking, why did you come all the way out here to her memorial service?”

Pauline looked surprised and hurt. “Loie Marsh was my lover for eight years. She was my life.”

But I had begun to wonder if her visit had anything to do with the manuscript Loie had been working on.

“I suppose you had lots of input into the new book too, didn’t you?”

“It was totally based on my research,” said Pauline. “For years I’d been keeping notes on meetings that we went to, and saving clippings. At first it was going to be a joint project—the history of the anti-pornography movement. I was the one who came up with the title—
We Took Back the Night.
But about six months ago Loie took the project over herself. She signed a contract and put the advance into a separate checking account. She refused to talk about it, except when she felt like taunting me with trying to cash in on her success, with being jealous of her. I’m sure she broke up with me just because she felt guilty for stealing all my ideas. And I know she told everyone lies about me too.”

“But surely people didn’t believe what she said. I mean—Loie does have a reputation for being difficult.”

“She can be—could be—completely convincing if that’s what she wanted. And most people
did
know her as the author of
The Silenced Heart
.”

“What was Loie’s relationship to her family?”

Again Pauline pressed her lips together in disgust. “In her speeches she always talked about it being a matriarchy—three generations of women and all that—but in actual fact I don’t think she liked her family all that much. Except for Hanna. She adored Hanna.”

“She did?”

“Oh yes. They were really close as kids. But somewhere along the line they had a falling out about something. I was never sure what, I always assumed it was radical feminist politics versus leftist politics. Hanna is a real peacenik. Loie was always hoping she could convert her.”

“What about Loie’s ex-husband?”

“What do you mean—ex-husband?”

I stumbled under the glare of Pauline’s eyes. “I… I heard she’d been married.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Pauline snapped. “She’s always been a lesbian, she told me.”

“Oh.” I didn’t know what else to say. Pauline looked dangerously angry.

“That would really be the last straw,” she muttered, getting up to leave, looking around for her flight bag.

I tried desperately to think of how I could ask her whether Loie could have been involved in S/M (without implying that Pauline was S or M herself), whether Loie had the kind of enemies in Boston who might have wished her dead or even where I could get hold of Pauline if I needed to. But Pauline was already halfway out the door, still muttering, “Married!”

I watched her stride across the street as if she knew where she was going, then I decided to visit the local bookstore and get a copy of
The Silenced Heart.
But the bookstore didn’t have a copy. As was the case with a number of feminist classics from the seventies the mass market edition had gone out of print. I was advised to try the used bookstore down the street. There I found a hardcover copy, rather dog-eared and embellished with quotes on the back cover from Steinem, Chesler and Dworkin, all more or less saying that this book was going to blow off everybody’s socks.

On the way back to the Espressomat I was struck by an odd thought. I wondered if I should call Loie’s mother and ask if Loie had made a will. I even thought of asking Hanna to keep an eye on Loie’s boxes of research materials and on the manuscript of
We Took Back the Night.

I didn’t call because I didn’t have a quarter on me, and because I thought they might think I was meddling too much.

I suppose things wouldn’t have turned out too much differently if I had.

I
SPENT THE LATE
afternoon and early evening reading
The Silenced Heart.
Hadley had said she wouldn’t be home for dinner, that she was going out to a movie. Since our conversation a couple of days ago about living together and monogamy—or rather, non-monogamy—explaining what we were doing and who we were going to do it with had become an area of some tension. “I’m going out with a friend,” Hadley had said on the phone. Instead of casually asking who or challenging her or even acted wounded, I merely replied, “See you later.”

I sat out on the floating dock and watched the twin towers of the Montlake drawbridge, the ones that looked a little like European castles, until it got too cold. Then I went inside and lay on the sofa. Soon I was engrossed in Loie’s book, in her righteous indignation, in her (or Pauline’s) vivid and furious prose. No doubt about it, women were much angrier a while back, with an anger that didn’t allow for complexities, that burned away all the scrub—and many of the trees—and left you looking at a world you’d never seen before.

Men hated women. Always had. Always would. There was absolutely no other way to explain history, no other way to explain why men had triumphed and women had failed, why men’s accomplishments were plastered everywhere and women’s were swept under the rug. Men hated women—who knew why—and this was nowhere more apparent than in the field of sexuality. In fact, the way men enforced their domination over women was through sexuality, through sexual violence.

This was all in Loie’s introduction. The succeeding chapters hammered the message home with details; from footbinding to rape to marriage to pornography, history was a horrific war waged by men against women.

There had been other writers, before and since Loie, who had discussed many of these problems, writers by the carload who had variously laid the oppression of women by men down to psychological, biological or economic causes. Anthropologists, poets and politicians had all put in their two cents at one time or another. But nobody I’d ever read came quite as close as Loie did to capturing men’s rage against women and to setting up a counter-rage: of despair, anger, militancy.

I couldn’t finish the book, though it wasn’t a long one. My teeth were almost chattering with fury by the end of Chapter Three. I was experiencing a new kind of respect for Loie. The wonder wasn’t that she’d been killed, but that she hadn’t been killed before this.

I got up, did my sit-ups and push-ups and wished I had the punching bag from the gym right here. I did some kicks and turns and made some fierce noises. Then I rooted around for my address book and called Elizabeth Ketteridge. I got the answering machine.

Frustrated, I said, more vehemently than necessary, “Elizabeth this is Pam Nilsen. I really
need
to talk to you,” and then was taken aback when her smoothly modulated voice came on the line, “Hello Pam.”

“Oh, hi,” I said. “Listen, can I possibly come over?”

“I’m just finishing some things at the office,” Elizabeth hesitated. “I really shouldn’t be home late. Couldn’t we possibly make an early appointment for, say… sometime the beginning of October?”

“It’s not about me,” I said, though that wasn’t really true. “It’s about Loie. There are some things I want to know about her.”

Maybe Elizabeth wanted, or needed, to talk about Loie too. She appeared to be thinking. Finally she said, “I’ll call Nan and tell her I’ll be late. But I can only spare a half hour or so.”

“I’ll be right over.”

Elizabeth’s office was in Wallingford, across the University Bridge and not far from the houseboat. I hadn’t been there since the end of last May when I’d stopped seeing her. It was starting to rain a little when I pulled up in front of the house that had been turned into various offices. I remembered how I used to climb these stairs every week last spring. At first it had been with a kind of dread in my stomach that I was going to have to talk about
it
and how I couldn’t seem to get over
it
and about how I’d had another dream about
it.
Afterwards I’d walk down the stairs, sometimes crying and shaking. As the weeks went on things got easier to talk about. The nicest time with Elizabeth was right before the end, when we used to sit and have a cup of tea and talk about my blossoming affair with Hadley, my sister’s pregnancy.

Now, only four months later, the bloom seemed to be fading on the relationship with Hadley, Antonia had been born and I felt excluded from my sister’s life, and I was walking up the stairs, after having read Loie’s book, with some of the same sensations of murderous rage I’d experienced in the middle of my course of therapy.

Elizabeth came to the door, looking fragile and bulbous, like an onion or an iris. She motioned me to sit down and said in a professional voice, “Now, what about Loie can I help you with?”

“I’ve just been reading her book,” I began. “I never read it before.”

“Ah!”

“Yes, some of it is upsetting to me. But it’s also made me start thinking about Loie’s death in a different way.”

Elizabeth placed her fingertips together. “What way?”

“I think I’ve—most of us—have been operating under the assumption that Loie’s killer is someone from Seattle, someone who killed her for so far unknown reasons specifically at the conference. To either make a point or to cause a scandal. Maybe to implicate Loie in S/M. Maybe to stop her from speaking on the panel. But what if the murderer was someone who’d hated Loie for a long time and just used this opportunity to make it look as if it were connected with the conference?”

“It’s possible,” said Elizabeth. Her large eyes looked at me uneasily.

“What I’m wondering,” I said, “is how long you’ve known Loie and if you knew her in Seattle before she went to Boston?”

“I
did
know her then,” said Elizabeth hesitantly. “It was at a time when I was just getting involved in the whole issue of rape and violence against women. Up to then I’d been approaching rape and sexual abuse on a very piecemeal basis. I was finishing my degree in clinical psychology—my subject was depression in women, and I knew that some depressed women had been sexually molested. Then I went to the slide show that Loie organized. I started reading—Susan Brownmiller, Andrea Dworkin, Phyllis Chesler, Susan Griffin. Overnight my life changed. I stopped being interested in treating depression medically and got interested in treating it politically. A lot of things happened that year. I got involved with Rape Relief where I met Nan. I became a lesbian. I began to redefine myself as a feminist therapist.”

I was touched that she was opening up to me. I hadn’t known any of this when I’d been seeing her.

“So then Loie was a friend of yours?”

Elizabeth shook her head. “Not exactly. I suppose I was a little in awe of her at first. And then she left.”

“Do you know who her friends were?”

“She was always close to Hanna….” Elizabeth hesitated again, and for some reason the thought flashed through my mind that she was protecting Loie somehow. Loie couldn’t have been a client of hers, could she? “Loie was always a little bit of mystery. My sense of her is that she was probably a tormented person inside.”

“Tormented?” I asked. “By what?”

Elizabeth stared at the church of her fingers again. “It didn’t have an obvious cause, at least not one she ever talked about. But she could well have been a survivor or a witness of some form of sexual abuse. Clearly pornography was deeply upsetting to her. You do have to wonder if there was anything in particular that triggered it.”

“Her father’s dead, I think. I met her mother and her grandmother at the memorial service and they seemed very conventional. And her uncle, Hanna’s father, seemed pretty harmless.”

“I don’t think we can psychoanalyze her on the basis of relatives who
seem
nice.” Elizabeth smiled for the first time.

“I noticed that she talked about being betrayed a lot,” I said. “By the sexual liberals mostly, but it felt like it went deeper.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t read too much into that,” said Elizabeth. “It’s the times. Everyone is so polarized about pornography, you can hardly help but take sides.”

“But you don’t seem so violently on the anti-porn side,” I said.

“It’s not my nature to show my feelings in the same way as Loie, perhaps. But I feel very strongly that pornography does have a causal relationship to violence against women. I agree in fact with Andrea Dworkin that porn
is
violence against women, it’s not something separate that causes it. It’s all part of the same social system. As women we
are
terrorized by the proliferation of porn. I know sex offenders and I know the way they think. It’s frankly quite scary to think of all the men out there looking at violent videos, poring over magazines and thinking about ways they could act out the things they see and read. It’s not about being a prude—I like my body, I love sex—it’s about being scared. And I’m angry that I have to live my life scared.”

I looked at Elizabeth and the feeling of trusting her more than anyone else on earth came over me again.

“I’m angry that it just goes on and on, that pornography proliferates and that nobody knows how to stop it. Because I have to deal with the consequences. That’s my work, listening to women who’ve been attacked and molested by men who believe they have the right to do it. Well, you know, Pam. You know.”