The Dog Collar Murders (14 page)

Their mouths opened and closed silently—they seemed to be having an ordinary chat about work or relationships—while the background noise of panting grew louder and louder. Suddenly one of the women, dark-haired and rather sullen, reached across the narrow table and slowly lifted up the other woman’s sweater. The second woman was a peroxide blonde and wore a black lace bra. The panting went on, a little more subdued. The camera focused for an inordinate amount of time on the woman’s breasts, which were quite large and soft. First one breast, then the other. The panting noises began to build again; unconsciously the audience pressed forward slightly. Still in close-up, a hand pulled one of the black lace cups away from the breast; an enormous nipple slipped out. Long fingers caressed it to a state of erectness. Then the same thing happened with the other nipple. The panting rose and fell and as it rose and fell a pair of lips fastened themselves on the nipple. The breast filled the screen behind the dark head like the backdrop for a surrealistic play.

And so it went, predictable, though not any the less suspenseful for that. The panting rose and fell, and when it fell a new part of the body was revealed for the dark-haired woman to set upon. The women’s faces never came into focus again, nor were there any words exchanged between them. The video ended with a long shot of a glistening clitoris, while the panting ebbed and died.

The second video had slightly more of a plot. Two women were walking along through a woods. Occasionally sunlight dappled their faces; they were talking, but the voice-over seemed to suggest that the inner thoughts were quite different from what was being said aloud.

“… her thighs… It would ruin everything.”

“I might have to deal with the consequences.”

“Maybe Joyce would understand… monogamy is such an outdated concept after all…”

“If only I could… touch her….”

“I want it so much I could….”

They went on like this for about five minutes. Obviously the audience expected them to throw caution, monogamy and commitment to the wind and get it on right there in the forest, because when they didn’t, when they merely parted with kisses on the cheek and rather rueful smiles, the women in the room erupted with surprise and derision.

“Call that a sex video?” someone muttered.

The third video was longer than the others. Miko said it was called “Homage to Luce Irigaray,” adding even more obscurely and helpfully for those of us who didn’t know who or what she was talking about, “The Sex Which Is Not One.”

The text, such as it was, consisted of the words repeated, in various voices and in various tones:
Women have sex organs more or less everywhere.
This rather alarming idea was illustrated by close-ups of parts of many different women’s bodies. It was very lovingly photographed: shots of an elbow bending so forearm and upper arm met were juxtaposed with shots of vaginal lips parting and coming together again. It reminded me a little of Edward Weston’s photography. Still I couldn’t help agreeing after ten minutes with a woman nearby who groaned, scarcely under her breath, “Bor-ing.”

To tell the truth, I hadn’t expected Miko’s videos to be quite so, well, artistic. I had been imagining lesbian orgies and sex romps—not adventures into the meaning of sexuality for women. I was apparently not the only one, because when the lights came up and Miko, wearing a flame-red stretch jumpsuit, said, a little anxiously, “Does anyone want to discuss these?” there was an immediate chorus of, “That wasn’t sexy!”

Hadley grinned at me and whispered, “I think they were expecting
Dyke Does Dallas
.”

I laughed and looked around to see if I recognized anyone and saw Nicky in a black crepe dress and Oak in full leather down in front, among Miko’s loudest detractors.

“We wanted to see real pornography,” Oak complained.

Miko was standing up bravely to the onslaught. “So what wasn’t sexy about them?”

“Too much talking.”

“Not enough talking.”

Miko held out perplexed hands. “Which?”

“Not enough
sexy
talking.”

“So we’ve got a distinction between sexy talking and talking about sex,” said Miko. “Can somebody give me an example of sexy talking?”

“Sexy talking is
You want me to lick your pussy, cunt? Then beg me for it
,” said Oak.

“Yeah!” shouted someone. Others hissed.

“I found the inner dialog in the second video extremely sexy,” said a woman with a burgundy ponytail and harlequin glasses. “The sexual tension between the two women was elaborated by the use of language, which, tentative and fragile though it was, nevertheless served to highlight the ironic structure of the exchange.”

“Well, I think it was just a cunt tease,” said Oak.

“Yes, but on whose part?” a woman all in gray said reasonably. “I think Miko was doing something very subtle, especially at the end when the two women walked off. In a certain sense you could say that the women
did
have a sexual exchange. In every way except the physical they were unfaithful to their partners.”

“In every way except the physical!” Nicky burst out. “You make it sound as if we’re living in Victorian times, when women could apparently get off just by writing twenty-page letters to their best friends. Sex in the eighties is about the physical. Yes, the physical! Finally!”

“Not necessarily,” said the woman in gray. “For a lot of people in the eighties physical sex is about fear and disease and death. A great deal of it is going to take place in the mind from now on.”

“Well, I liked the first one best,” someone interrupted. “After a while the panting got a little irritating, but I really liked the suspense before each part of the woman’s body was revealed. To me that’s what the erotic impulse is about—fantasizing about the unknown. So I think tension and suspense are a really important part of lesbian erotica and I thought you did it really well, Miko.”

“Thank you,” Miko said gratefully.

“Do you think of your work as lesbian erotica or as pornography?” Hadley asked.

“Are you kidding?” said Oak. “What we just watched is
not
pornography.”

Miko said, “I don’t really know how to define pornography. If the point of pornography is only to stimulate the genitals, then I’d have to say no, I don’t make pornography. Yet clearly, I am thinking of turning my audience on—but it’s more in order to make them think about what’s turning them on and how. I’m against the term erotica, because I don’t think it means anything different from pornography. It has connotations of soft-focusing and upper-class pretensions, but it’s really the same thing. And as a lesbian video maker
all
my work is considered pornographic and subject to censorship.”

Then a brave person asked who Luce Irigaray was, anyway, and the discussion veered off into pre-linguistic erotic energy, anti-phallocentric language and the morphology of the female body. Even Hadley suddenly started talking about Lacan and Nicky came up with some interesting observations about modernism as a hidden language for Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein. Only two of us remained silent: me, because I was somewhat out of my depth (the last philosophical work I’d read had been Hobbes’s
Leviathan
in graduate school), and Oak, who was sitting, angry and withdrawn, exuding clouds of disappointment. I found her a little frightening, to tell the truth. I wasn’t sure what sadists did, but with forearms like those it didn’t seem like you were likely to get off easy.

Finally the discussion showed signs of sputtering out in semiotic doubletalk, and people began to make their way out of the studio.

Miko came up to Hadley and me and thanked us profusely for coming.

“Wow, Hadley,” she enthused. “I never realized you were such an intellectual. You can shoot the structuralist shit with the best of them.”

“I had a lot of free time last winter,” Hadley said, and took my hand.

For an instance I almost felt like jerking my fingers out of hers, to punish her for even being friendly to Miko in my presence, but fortunately it passed. I wasn’t sure why, but Hadley wasn’t responding to Miko the way she had been. I’d be a fool if I took it that way.

“I thought the videos were interesting, Miko,” I said.

She turned teasingly to me, “But did you find them sexy?”

“Intellectually sexy, maybe.”

“Good!” she said. “I always say, the way to a woman’s body is through her head.” She turned away to flirt with someone else and Hadley and I began to walk towards the door. We ran into Nicky and Oak, who looked as if they were in serious discussion.

“Do you have a minute, Nicky?” I suddenly asked.

“No,” Oak said. “What do you want?”

“I just have a couple of questions.” I didn’t pause to ask if she’d answer them, but went on, “You said you used to know Hanna and Loie. When was that?”

Nicky looked bored. “I don’t remember. Years ago.”

“But when?”

“I’m telling you, I can’t remember. They weren’t close friends.”

“But you said Hanna and Loie hadn’t spoken to you for years—that made it sound as if…”

Oak had her by the arm and was almost jerking her away from me. “If we’re going to do it, let’s, Nicky—come on.”

Nicky gave me a curious, but detached look. “Well, I hadn’t had contact with them recently. So if that’s all…”

“Just one last thing.” I began to follow them in the direction of Miko. “What was Loie’s husband’s name? I know it was David. David what?”

“David Gustafson,” Nicky said.

I stopped following them. “Not the Christian…”

“The very same,” Nicky called back with what sounded like a chortle. “The very same.”

“This gets more and more interesting,” I told Hadley on the way home. “Loie married to Sonya Gustafson’s husband. Mrs. Christians Against Pornography. And they were going to be on the same panel.”

“They were,” agreed Hadley.

“What do you mean?”

“Just what I said. They were.”

I
DECIDED THAT I WANTED
to meet Mr. and Mrs. Gustafson, but I couldn’t figure out what excuse I should use. After work on Friday I went to the downtown library and looked through microfiches of
The Seattle Times
for references to them and their group. There were quite a few. I also found out that David had written a small pamphlet called
Strategies Against Smut.
Thus armed I gave them a call Saturday afternoon to say I was a housewife who volunteered for a small Christian newsletter in Southern California—Orange County. I was just up in Seattle to visit a friend and I’d heard of their fine work against pornography and wondered if they would consent to being interviewed for the newsletter.

They would consent. With pleasure. On Sunday afternoon, after church.

I went over to my sister’s Saturday evening to ransack her closet for something to wear to the interview. Unlike me, Penny had kept clothes from all stages of her life and there was always something useful somewhere in her wardrobe.

I found her and Ray at home, spending the evening in, with the VCR and Antonia.

“This isn’t like you two,” I said. “Don’t you have a benefit for Central America to go to? A mailing? A meeting? What’s happened to my two favorite politicos on the go?

“It’s harder to haul around a baby than you might imagine,” said Penny, somewhat defensively. She had already changed into her bathrobe, and so had Ray. Both of them looked about ten years older than they had yesterday at the print shop. “They cry at the wrong times, they need to have their diapers changed… It always used to look like fun—babies in backpacks—but it seems to be a lot of work.”

“We took Toni over to some friends last night for dinner,” said Ray. “And she was fussy and kept crying the whole time. You can’t have a reasonable conversation when that’s happening. We had to leave right after the meal, and then she kept us up all night.”

“This morning she was fine. She was fine until I tried to take a nap, in fact,” said Penny blearily. “Then she screamed non-stop for two hours. It’s like torture. It really is.”

“Look at her,” said Ray, gesturing to the little angel asleep on the couch next to him. “Out like a light, but at one o’clock this morning I bet she starts in again.”

Her parents looked at my niece as if she were a bomb wrapped up in tissue paper.

“You should let me baby-sit for you sometime,” I offered. As the words came out of my mouth I realized it was the first time in Antonia’s short life that I’d mentioned taking her. I added hesitantly, “for a few hours sometime or something.”

I suppose I expected Penny to snap, “You—take care of
my
baby! What if something happened??” But instead she said, quite gratefully, “Oh, would you sometime, Pam? That would be great.”

The Gustafsons lived on an unremarkable street in a middle-class area of Bellevue, the city across Lake Washington that had grown from a suburb of Seattle to something mysteriously large, with skyscrapers, shopping malls and an identity crisis.

I smoothed down my skirt and jacket nervously after I rang the bell and hoped they wouldn’t think my black tights were too bohemian. Still, it was better than hairy legs.

When Sonya opened the door and invited me inside her attractive home, I felt as if my television set had sprung a door and let me into a commercial for a furniture showroom. Everything was good quality; nothing was original. It was strange how you relied on people’s tacky and/or idiosyncratic tastes in decorating to give you a sense of their personality. This house had no such items; it could have been rented.

Sonya was a little like that too. Although she hadn’t been able to construct her own body, she made the most of what she had. She was, in a rather spectacular way, what used to be called in home economics classes “well-groomed.”

“Remember the little things—they’re what make the difference,” our teacher used to say (while some of us reprobates snorted). Sonya remembered the little things. Her blue pumps were the exact shade of her dress; the gold and blue scarf at her neck picked up the gold of her button earrings. Her nails were manicured and their polish matched her lipstick. Noticing the perfection of the little things made it harder to see the larger picture—which was that Sonya was actually somewhat ugly, with a large nose, heavy jaw and eyes set close together. But what was ugliness anyway? My home ec teacher would have said that no girl can be unattractive if she is well-groomed.