The Dog Collar Murders (13 page)

“Oy,” she said, holding out her well-shaped, capable hands, as if she wanted to fend me off. “Sometimes I wish the whole subject had never come up. Sometimes I see the history books of the twenty-first century talking about the feminist movement of the seventies and saying it disintegrated due to the pornography issue. And now you’ve got one of the leaders of the anti-porn movement murdered. Aside from it being a great tragedy, I can’t imagine what it’s going to do to the debate.”

“Why do you say it’s a great tragedy?” June asked. “I thought she bugged you.”

“Yeah, she did! But Loie Marsh was a very gifted speaker and writer, a fantastic advocate of her ideas. And even though I increasingly opposed her, she still fascinated me. She was so
good
at her role.”

I decided to jump right in and ask the question I’d hesitated to ask Pauline. “You don’t think that—that Loie could have been involved in sadomasochism, do you?”

“Not in a million years—though I confess I
have
wondered what her sex life was like. She painted such disgusting pictures of adult sexuality that it was hard to imagine whether she had ever had a friendly or loving sexual connection with anyone. You get the impression from her book that she was completely obsessed with sex—she just couldn’t stop talking about it, even though she had to disguise her desire to dwell on it by always describing it in the most lurid and horrific terms.”

“It’s true,” said June. “For a woman who was so down on sex she sure had a lot to say about it.”

“There’s a strange voluptuousness in the writing and speaking of some of the anti-porn women. The voluptuousness of repressed desire, don’t you think, Pam?”

“What? Oh yes!” For some reason I was staring at the light gold chain around her neck, at her throat. The faintly freckled skin was wrinkled a little, as if a breeze had blown over the bay and created a cobwebbed pattern on the water.

“Though the more I look at it,” continued Grade, “the more it seems like a natural development, this focus on sexuality and violence against women. In its earliest stages the feminist movement demanded recognition for women and equality. The idea was that women and men were inherently the same, with the same rights, the same abilities. From the late sixties to the mid-seventies the discussion was very much about rights—legal, economic, social. Then this new theme began to creep into the struggle. It said that women had their own biology, their own sexuality, their own history, their own ways of doing things. They weren’t like men; they weren’t equal to men. They were better than men. They were natural, they were in touch with their emotions, they were nurturing, spiritual, intuitive, life-enhancing and so on. In some ways this new attitude was marvelous—it took many of the qualities that women had that had been put down for centuries and suddenly not only recognized those qualities but saw them as good, as superior.”

“Hey, we are superior,” interrupted June. “I tell Eddy that all the time.”

“It’s true, we’re great,” said Grade, brown eyes smiling at me, “but along with this new superior concept of womanhood came another concept that wasn’t so positive—and that was the idea of woman as victim, especially victim of sexual violence. Starting in the mid-seventies came a whole spate of books, really impressive, well-researched and passionately written books that began to detail the pretty horrible things that men had been doing to women for millennia. At the time it seemed impossible not to agree with the authors—that rape, battery, incest, physical mutilation, even styles in fashion and advertising, weren’t random, isolated acts performed by individual men against individual women, but a series of socially sanctioned acts designed to keep women in an oppressed position. And I still think that the recognition of the pervasiveness of violence against women by men was one of the most crucial realizations to have come out of the women’s movement. Some of the institutions that women developed in response to that recognition, like rape crisis centers, self-defense workshops and the whole domestic violence network of shelters and safe houses are incredibly important contributions to the safety and well-being of women.”

“You wouldn’t believe that Gracie’s writing a book about all this, would you?” June asked with mock-innocence. “It’s called
Enough Already
.”

Grade chuckled. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I’ve been working on the book all day and…”

“No,” I said, “Go on, please. It’s really interesting. What’s your theory about how the split in the women’s movement developed?”

“I’m sure there are lots of theories and I’ve held different ones at different times, but here’s one possibility. First of all, the indignation and anger that developed in recognition of men’s violence towards women were
reactive
, and the institutions that women developed in response were
protective.
No matter that when women got to the shelters they often went on to job training or education—the reasons that shelters were opened was specifically to protect women from violent men.

“So—and this is a little tricky—an increasingly powerful and vocal group of women activists began from the premise that if some women are raped, then all can be raped; if some women are molested, all can be molested. They formed their analysis of society around women as an oppressed class, on the basis of what has happened to some women. You don’t want to say that huge numbers of women aren’t raped and molested, or that we’re not all
potentially
victim material, but the truth of the matter is that all women are
not
raped or molested. Yet that was proclaimed as the great unifying factor among women, rather than the fact that
most
women make far less than men and
most
women have to work much harder in lower-status jobs than men.”

“It is a little contradictory,” I managed to insert. I couldn’t tell if I was more dazed by Gracie’s flow of words or by the steady warmth of her eyes on me. June had unashamedly begun to read the front page of
The New York Times.

“Of course all along women had been fighting this ideology of superior woman as sexual victim,” Gracie went on eagerly, “whether it was proclaimed by the moral majority or the anti-pornography movement. After all, part of what had fueled the women’s liberation movement in the beginning was the desire to reclaim women’s sexuality. It was a desire that had passed through a number of phases, but it had never entirely gone away. It erupted again in the early eighties when women began to ask themselves and each other what had happened to exploration, experimentation and honesty when it came to sexuality. A lot of these women felt as if the anti-pornography and anti-violence against women movement had taken over sexuality and defined it as something men did, usually with evil intent, to women. Some of these women question-askers were lesbian, some heterosexual and some—horror of horrors—were a relatively new breed: lesbian sadomasochists. In reality the S/Mers were a relatively small proportion of those who were questioning the definitions, but they got a lot of attention and publicity. It suited the purposes of the anti-porn leaders to tag everyone who confessed to being interested in sexual freedom as a sadomasochist. The anti-porn women could then refer to the most extreme S/M practices as if they were common among all women who advocated freedom of sexual expression.”

Gracie paused and I said the first thing that came into my mind, “Did you know that Loie—and her ex-lover Pauline—were writing a book about this same subject? It’s called
We Took Back the Night
.”

“Really?” said Gracie. “I’d love to get my hands on a copy. Just to see how Loie describes the period. I think we’re living in a fascinating time.”

“Fascinating and dangerous,” June put in. “You better watch it, Gracie. You go around spouting off like this, you could be next.”

Gracie looked at her sharply, then laughed. “Oh, I’ve always talked too much. But nobody’s going to bump me off. I’m just a harmless professor.”

“And Loie was a leader, is that it? Do you think that’s why she was murdered? For her ideas?”

“As long as a leader is alive she has adherents,” Gracie said. “She can continue to write books, to give speeches, to exert an enormous influence. Wasn’t that why Stalin pursued Trotsky, why political leaders have always locked up the opposition, why other leaders have been assassinated? It’s a common belief that ideas have a life of their own, that important ideas live on no matter how many people die. But the reality is that ideas are often only as strong as the person who espouses them. Kill the person, you often kill the idea.”

“Well then,” said June, putting down the paper and standing up to go. “You better be careful you don’t have too many
ideas
.”

Grade followed us to the door and pressed my hand as she said good-bye. “I’m just a harmless professor,” she repeated.

“S
O, YOU LIKED GRACIE THEN?
” Hadley said. It was Thursday night and Hadley had met me after work at Best to suggest we go to a Japanese restaurant. Now we sat at a black lacquered table surrounded by yuppies knowledgeably ordering plates of sushi and sashimi and discussing the architectural transformation of Seattle from a provincial but original city to a clone of San Francisco. What with the building of the convention center over the freeway, the excavation under major shopping streets for the bus tunnel and the wholesale knocking down of entire blocks in order to put up new skyscrapers, the downtown center of Seattle had become a sort of black hole. A favorite topic of conversation these days consisted of wondering what the city would look like when it was all over, whether in fact we could still be said to be living in Seattle. An interesting metaphysical conceit, I thought, though the yuppies weren’t doing it justice.

“Oh yes,” I said, spearing a piece of tempura sweet potato, “She was very—stimulating.”

Hadley nodded and finished off the shrimp. “Remember last week you said you’d be willing to talk about living situations this week?”

“Oh dear, is this the day?”

“Well, have you been thinking about it?”

“Yes. I’ve decided to move to New Zealand.”

“What?”

“Just kidding. No, I haven’t thought about it. I’ve had too much else to think about.”

“You know, Penny and Ray are ready to buy you out of that house whenever you want. You could use the money to make a down payment on something else.”

“On a house for myself? And what would you do—buy a house for yourself?”

“The market’s good right now.”

“Hadley—you’ve been looking for a
house
?” Without thinking I swallowed a too-large bit of wasabi, straight, and my throat burned with the fire of the horseradish paste.

“My eye sometimes wanders through the real estate ads,” she admitted.

“Couldn’t we live together in your house then? You could get a big one. Four stories—twenty rooms? We could each have a wing and meet for dinner twice a week?”

“Oh Pam,” she said, smiling. “This isn’t easy.”

“What are you so afraid of anyway,” I asked. “Aside from you bumping your head on the ceiling we seem to be doing okay living together. We both like the same foods, we’re both relatively neat and considerate. Yet we have separate interests and friends. We’re the model couple really. What would be so awful and different if we made it permanent?”

“That’s just it.” Hadley’s blue-green eyes darkened as she fastened on this word. “Permanency. Routine. The death of spontaneity. Lesbian marriage. The end of being able to come and go freely. The end of adventure. Entropy.”

“I get the picture,” I said. “But just when are you so into spontaneity and coming and going? You came back to Seattle partly to be with me and now you’re running this business which takes all your time. Where do you think you’re going? Living together isn’t death. It’s just saying to the world that we’re a couple, that we choose each other.”

“I don’t want to say anything to the world,” said Hadley. “I’m only interested in talking to you.”

That was my sore point, that I did care what people thought of me. I did want to make a statement to the world—and maybe to my sister most of all—that I was part of a successful couple, just a normal person, really, in spite of being a lesbian. To show I didn’t mind, I said, “Oh well, no big deal. I’ll start asking around to see if anyone knows of a place….”

I said it a little pathetically, if the truth be told, to give Hadley a chance to reconsider, but she just nodded and downed the last of her tea. “Yes, both of us need to be looking now.”

We left the restaurant and started walking through the International District, crowded with people doing their shopping and going out for dinner. The evening was a clear black one, with a snap in the air, and all of a sudden I didn’t feel too bad. We had our lives before us, it was probably better not to rush into things, and besides, it wasn’t as if Hadley had said anything about
leaving
me.

“Since we’re in the neighborhood,” she said casually, “and it’s Thursday night, why don’t we stop by Miko’s to see her videos? There’s sure to be a crowd of people there who were at the conference. Maybe you could learn something.”

“Maybe I could,” I said, trying to keep my fists from balling up in the pockets of my jacket and the suspicion out of my mind that Hadley had engineered our tempura in order to put us in the neighborhood. “I really would love to pin something on Miko.”

Miko lived and worked in an upstairs studio off Jackson Street, above a Chinese herbalist whose windows were full of mysterious black roots and fungi. The door to her place wasn’t easy to find; it was in an alley and hidden by piles of used boxes with Chinese words stenciled on them. When we finally arrived, the videos had already begun. The room was dark and it was impossible to see exactly who was there. I thought there might be ten or twelve women. Hadley and I stood in back, peering at a not very big TV screen placed on a table. The sound of panting filled the room suddenly; it wasn’t coming from any of the audience, nor from the two figures on the screen who were, I could see now, sitting rather demurely across from each other at a kitchen table.