The Sweetman Curve

by Graham Masterton

  There was a disturbed rustle and murmuring throughout the hall. Perri, in spite of herself, blushed and felt a sudden urgency to go to the john. Ann Margolies touched her hand comfortingly, though, and whispered. ‘They’ve let us speak, at least. They couldn’t deny us that.’

  Perri said, ‘I don’t feel very confident about carrying enough delegates along with us. They seem so delirious about Hilary. I’ve never seen her get so much applause.’

  ‘Delirium is usually short-lived,’ Ann insisted, ‘and it’s usually the prelude to a rude awakening. Just get out there and give them hell.’

  The discussion on rights for women in rural areas took over an hour, and by the end of it they still hadn’t really worked out a satisfactory code of sexual self-assertion for isolated wives. As one woman from Kansas said, ‘If I say that I’m his equal, he laughs in my face. If I don’t let him make love to me, he beats me black and blue. And there isn’t a soul for sixteen miles to help me.’

  The motion on affiliation with a political party was postponed for further discussion by the league’s political committee. And then, just before the mid-afternoon break, it was Perri’s turn.

  She was dressed today in a light, flowing dress of pastel pinks and blues, and her hair was pinned back with red combs. There was a flush of pink on her cheeks as she left her seat and walked up to the stage, followed by a smattering of applause. Ann Margolies was the only woman to rise to her feet and cheer, and her voice sounded desperately alone and thin in the huge theatre.

  Perri went up to the microphone, and looked out over the rows and rows of intent faces. There was coughing, and an expectant rustle of programmes, because they all knew that Perri was directly challenging Hilary Nestor Hunter, and they all anticipated verbal slaughter.

  ‘Sisters,’ Perri began, ‘my name’s Perri Shaw and I represent one of the seediest, seamiest districts of Los Angeles. The women aren’t physically isolated where I come from, the way they are in rural regions. But they’re culturally isolated from anything that could give them consciousness of their own womanhood and their own birthright. They are as oppressed by their husbands and brothers as black slaves were in the South. They have to work to keep a home, they have to raise children, they have to give their bodies, and if they ever dare to protest, they get hurt.

  ‘Talking of female domination may be an amusing idea in middle-class circles where women are wealthy and bored, and where they already have the fundamental rights of a good education and money of their own. But the women I’m talking about aren’t interested in dominance. They’re only interested in being recognised as people. They’re only interested in being treated as equals.’

  Perri paused, and the auditorium was very hushed. ‘In the slums of Los Angeles,’ she continued, ‘I’ve seen women burned with cigarettes because it amused their husbands to torture them. I’ve seen women beaten almost to death because they dared to express an opinion. I’ve seen women who were forced to share their marriage bed with another girl because their husbands felt like a bit of sexual variety.

  ‘You can’t talk to women like these about dominating their men. And you can’t educate their men to accept the idea that women might be superior. It’s difficult enough getting them to understand that women are human beings, let alone that women might be capable of ordering their lives.

  ‘We have to raise the consciousness of both sexes if we’re going to succeed in liberating women. It’s no use telling a prisoner that freedom is wonderful unless you also convince the jailer to let her out. So far, it seems to me that the Women’s Liberation League hasn’t succeeded in doing very much except frightening working-class husbands into adopting a rigid and uncompromising posture towards it, and it’s the women who are suffering. Right now, we need to come out and say that we’re not not right-wing female dragons. We’re not political harpies. We need to say that we’re sensitive and sympathetic women who can understand the problems of men as well as the oppression of women.’

  Perri spoke for almost twenty minutes. She didn’t look at Hilary Nestor Hunter, who was sitting at the side of the stage with her legs crossed and her face set in a glacial expression of contrived boredom. She looked instead at the women in the audience, because she was beginning to sense that they liked her, and that they liked what she was saying. To hear about the agonies of poverty-stricken wives in downtown Los Angeles startled and thrilled them. It was hard reality, instead of wordy political rhetoric. It made them feel as if they could do something practical to help downtrodden women, instead of devising high-flown schemes at fundraising wine-and-cheese parties.

  Perri finished by telling the story of a woman rescued by Father Leonard, a wife who had been offered by her husband to any stray man he happened to bring home from his night’s drinking. She had been forced to have sex with teenage boys, street-sweepers, derelicts and drunks, while her husband looked on. After months of tedious and often heartbreaking counselling. Father Leonard had at last persuaded the man to understand the grossness of what he was doing to his wife, and had gradually helped them to reconstruct their marriage.

  There was a long silence after Perri had finished speaking. Then, all on her own, Ann Margolies began to clap. She was joined by another woman, and then another, until the whole audience rose to their feet and applauded her. Out of protocol, even Hilary Nestor Hunter had to stand and clap, although her face was as hard and displeased as Perri had ever seen it.

  The women didn’t shriek and whoop as they had when Hilary had appeared on stage. But their earnest, serious applause was more encouraging. It meant that they believed and accepted what Perri said.

  Perri stepped down from the stage, and Hilary Nestor Hunter came up to the microphone. She waited with an indulgent smile until the applause died away, and then she said, ‘That was one of the prettiest little contributions I’ve heard for a long time. I think we should all be proud of sister Perri Shaw.’

  She raised her head, and her pale eyes looked around the audience like the eyes of a witchfinder, daring any of her women to meet her stare with anything but humility.

  ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘we cannot seriously agree with what Perri Shaw has been saying. Her case histories are moving, and her convictions are genuine, but she seems to forget that we are waging a civil war. And a war, a real war, can never be fought successfully if we treat it like social work in a sadly deprived but very small part of Los Angeles.

  ‘We aren’t fighting to mollify a few brutish husbands. We’re fighting for what, after all these centuries of male mismanagement, we’re really entitled to: power, money and influence. We’re fighting to get out from under. We’re fighting the whole world, not just a few shiftless men.

  ‘I know what sister Perri Shaw is trying to say, but sister Perri Shaw is thinking too small. So, while I thank her for her speech in support of the motion, I really think that to vote in favour of equality rather than domination would be to betray everything that we have fought for, and everything that we are fighting for.’ The applause this time was loud and long, and there were whistles of approval. Perri looked worriedly around the auditorium, and knew that Hilary Nestor Hunter’s magnetism had easily outweighed her own persuasiveness. She hissed to Ann Margolies, ‘Can’t we delay the vote? I feel if we could talk to some of the delegates privately, we might be able to convince them that we’re right.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ said Ann, and raised her hand.

  Agnes Frohauer said: ‘Do you have a motion?’

  ‘Yes, sister. I propose we postpone a final vote on the motion of equality until tomorrow morning. I believe it would give us all time to consider and weigh the arguments.’

  ‘Seconded?’ asked Agnes Frohauer.

  A girl from South Carolina put up her hand.

  ‘Let’s have a show of hands, then,’ said Ms. Frohauer, and a thick forest of hands went up.

  ‘In that case, we’ll vote on the motion first thing tomorrow morning. I think it’s time we adjourned for today, in an
y case. Thank you all for your attention. There are Women’s Liberation League buttons on sale in the lobby.’

  Perri met Father Leonard outside. He looked pleased and shy. He held out both his hands, and said, ‘You were wonderful. Even better than I thought you were going to be.’

  ‘Are you going to buy me a celebration cup of coffee?’

  ‘You can even have a celebration drink.’

  ‘A cup of coffee would do. I don’t want you to lose your place in Heaven in too much of a rush.’

  They walked along Figueroa in the purplish light of evening, almost oblivious of the hurrying women delegates who jostled past them on the sidewalk. They went into a snack bar and ordered two cups of coffee, and they sat at their table and hardly ever took their eyes away from each other. It was as if they could watch their affection flowering, second by second, in each other’s face. Father Leonard’s was grey with anxiety, the wrenching doubt and questioning that had plagued him ever since Perri had first spoken to him of her feelings. He couldn’t help himself, and he didn’t know what to do about it.

  At six-thirty, they parted on the corner of Figueroa and Pico, and Father Leonard took her hand in his and held it tight.

  ‘I have to make up my mind, you know,’ he told her.

  She nodded.

  ‘I thought it would weaken my resolve to serve God, and my ability to do my work, if I had feelings about you. But I think I was wrong. I seem to feel more strength now than I’ve felt in my life. I seem to have even more purpose. I have God, and I also have you.’

  ‘You mustn’t let me influence you. I love you, Leonard, but you mustn’t give up your vocation because of me. Perhaps I’m selfish, but I couldn’t bear the responsibility of that.’

  ‘It’s my responsibility,’ he said. His eyes were dark and sad. ‘It’s between me and God and nobody else.’

  Two

  Perri walked alone to the parking lot, and unlocked her saddle-brown Toyota. She tossed her pocketbook on the seat beside her, and drove home through the rush-hour traffic to her small apartment near Plummer Park in Hollywood. The radio warned of high smog levels tomorrow, and announced that the Hillside Strangler had claimed another victim. Boy scouts had discovered her body in bushes near Griffith Park.

  Perri parked along the wide concrete sidewalk outside her apartment building. It was quiet and cool as she climbed out of the car and walked through the front yard, and the dusty palms rustled in the dusk. Through one of the downstairs windows, she could see Mrs Ramonez cutting up red peppers on her kitchen table, and the sound of Spanish music, like the memory of some gaudy and romantic love affair, twanged all around the yard. She climbed the steps at the side of the building and walked along the balcony that led to her pink-painted apartment door.

  She took out her key, and was about to insert it into the lock when she paused, and listened. It sounded as if music was playing from inside her apartment. She wondered for a moment if she had left the radio on when she went out, but then she remembered that she had been playing a record that morning, and that she had switched off the stereo.

  The music was Odyssey singing: ‘It was de woman behind de man… de woman behind de man…’

  She felt frightened. Supposing she had interrupted a burglary? Almost all of these apartments on Norton Avenue had been broken into at one time or another, mostly by dope addicts looking for score money, although a Mexican woman across the street had been beaten and raped as well as robbed.

  Perri paused for a moment, and then decided to ease the front door open and take a quick glimpse inside.

  She pushed the key slowly and quietly into the lock, and gently turned it. She had never realised before what a loud clicking noise it made. The Spanish music from downstairs mingled with the Odyssey record, and created an oddly unpleasant disharmony. A white cat was sitting at the far end of the balcony, watching her with half-closed eyes.

  She opened the front door about an inch. She could see now that the lamps in the living room were lit, and she could hear the music more clearly. It seemed like a weird kind of burglary. She always thought that burglars just came in and took what they could and left. She didn’t think they sat down and made themselves at home.

  With her heart beating at uncontrollable speed, she called out, ‘Who’s there?’

  She waited. There was no answer. The record ended, and she heard the radio disc-jockey babbling something about a traffic snarl on the San Diego Freeway. Then there was more music. Frank Sinatra singing ‘My Way.’ Perri took one cautious step into the hallway. There was her familiar hall table, with this morning’s mail lying just where she had left it. There was the barometer she had picked up in a secondhand store downtown. There, inside the living room door, was her coffee table, and the same criss-cross yellow wallpaper, and even her coffee cup, undisturbed.

  She called again, ‘Who’s there? Who is that in there?’ There was no answer. She took two more steps into the hallway, glancing nervously into the bathroom on her left to see if anybody was hiding in there. Ever since she saw Psycho on television, she had harboured a niggling fear about bathrooms and showers, and stabbings.

  At last she reached the open living room doorway. Frank Sinatra was still halfway through ‘My Way,’ so it couldn’t have taken her as long as she thought it had. She stood there for a long time, her arms by her sides, her fingers clenching and unclenching, her heart running a dark and frightened steeplechase.

  She entered the room. She gasped in fright.

  Sitting on her white vinyl settee was a young girl with long chestnut-coloured hair. She was sprawled there quite casually, as if it was her own home, and Perri was a visitor. She had been reading a TV Guide, and as Perri came in, she looked up and blandly said, ‘Hi.’

  Perri slowly put down her pocketbook, staring at the girl in disbelief. She wasn’t more than sixteen or seventeen, with a pretty, snubnosed face, and tiny gold earrings. She was wearing a frayed denim vest and frayed denim shorts, and her thin arms and legs were very tan. She looked as if she had only just shaken the sand out of her shoes and come back into town from a day’s sunbathing. The shorts had been cut from a pair of Levis, so brief that as she sat there with her thighs spread carelessly apart, she was covered by nothing more than a ragged string of blue cotton.

  Perri said, ‘Hi yourself. Is it too much to ask what the hell you’re doing here?’

  The girl’s calm, innocent expression didn’t alter. ‘I was waiting for you.’

  ‘Waiting for me? You don’t even know me.’

  ‘Oh, I do. I saw you at the women’s conference today.’

  ‘You mean you’re a delegate?’ asked Perri.

  The girl shrugged. ‘Not exactly. But I was there.’ Perri approached her. ‘Listen,’ she said patiently, ‘I don’t know who you are, or what you’re doing here, but I suggest you get the hell out.’

  ‘My name’s Star,’ said the girl, as if that answered everything.

  ‘Star? Star who?’

  ‘Just Star. That’s what my friends call me.’

  ‘I’m surprised you’ve got any friends if this is the way you treat other people’s apartments. Breaking in like a burglar.’

  Star smiled. An immediate, and somehow threatening smile. ‘You left your bathroom window an eensy-teensy way open,’ she said.

  Perri looked her up and down. Star made no attempt to get up and go, nor to close her wide-apart thighs. Perri was disturbed and strangely frightened, not least by Star’s overwhelming self-assurance.

  She said, ‘You’re going to have to leave. I have a great deal of work to do.’

  Star smiled again. ‘You’re very beautiful,’ she told Perri. ‘That’s why I came here.’

  ‘Don’t talk such garbage.’

  ‘I’m not. It’s true. You were like Joan of Arc out there today.’

  ‘Listen, Star, whether I’m like Joan of Arc or Cloris Leachman, you’re still going to have to leave.’

  Star got up off the settee. She was
very petite, even smaller than Perri, and almost too attractive for her own good. She was wearing one of those musky perfumes that only smells good on young girls.

  ‘I think I love you,’ she told Perri, in a simple, sincere voice. ‘I saw you at the conference and I fell for you. You were so beautiful, and so proud, and you stood up for what you believed in. I found out where you lived, and came here straight away.’

  Perri went nervously to the bureau and took a cigarette out of a half-empty pack. She lit it, and quickly puffed out smoke.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but I’m straight.’

  Star’s eyes were wide and dreamy. ‘That doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘I still love you just as much, if not more.’

  ‘Maybe you do, but I’d really appreciate it if you left.’

  Star smiled. ‘You can’t be completely blind to women. Isn’t that why you joined the Women’s Liberation League, because you thought that women were so beautiful?’

  ‘Of course women are beautiful. But I could never have a sexual relationship with a woman. Now, please leave, because I have to shower and change and get to work.’

  Star came up close. Her moist lips glistened in the lamplight. ‘Couldn’t I stay and watch you?’ she said.

  ‘Watch me? Of course you can’t watch me. Just leave, that’s all. I don’t want you here.’

  Star frowned. ‘Don’t you think I’m pretty?’

  ‘Will you please leave? I simply want to be alone.’

  ‘I won’t say a word. I’ll just watch.’

  Perri crushed out her cigarette. ‘How many times do I have to tell you? I’m straight. I’m in love with a wonderful guy. I have nothing against lesbians, and I’m sure what you feel about me is genuine. You’re very pretty and very sexy. But I don’t want you to watch me, and I don’t need your love, and I think the best thing you can do is put your shoes on and get the hell out.’ Star blinked. ‘I never wear shoes. Just like I never wear panties.’