Dreams of Jeannie and Other Stories

by Catherine Dain

  "Easy, Lynn," he said. "Somebody's coming."

  She pulled back and looked at him.

  There was a faint resemblance to Ross, especially around the deep-set eyes, the same ones Buddy had inherited. Ed's eyes were bright blue, though, and there was no anger in them. The suit he was wearing looked like one Ross might have worn, Italian silk, tailored to fit. Ed was shorter and heavier than Ross. But Ross would have envied his thick, dark hair.

  "I've been called Marilyn for the past year," she told him. "Would you have a problem calling me Marilyn in­stead of Lynn?"

  "Not a problem, but you might have to remind me a couple of times," he answered. "Everyone in L.A. changes something. You might as well change your name."

  She smiled at him.

  Another knock at the door made her lose the smile. But Ed had said he was expecting someone.

  Ed opened the door to display a young man with a pony-tail and too many earrings holding a tray with a champagne icer and two glasses.

  "Come right in," Ed said.

  The young man set the tray on a table between two chairs.

  "Do you want me to open it?" he said.

  "I'll take care of it. Here you go." Ed handed him a folded bill.

  The young man glanced at it.

  "Thank you, sir. Anything more, just give us a call."

  He slipped discreetly out the door.

  Ed twisted the cork from the champagne, poured two glasses, carefully letting the foam settle, and handed one to Marilyn.

  "Happy birthday," he said.

  "To freedom," she responded. "And to us."

  He clinked her glass and took a sip. "To us. It's been a hell of a long year, but I haven't forgotten. And you haven't either, or you wouldn't be here. You'd be celebrating with Annie and Karl and your kids instead."

  Marilyn opened her mouth to tell him that they hadn't wanted her, but she decided that could wait. They could talk about Debbie and Buddy in the morning. She took a sip of the champagne.

  "I want to be with you," she said.

  "Come here." Ed put his glass down. "Let's start the cel­ebration now."

  Marilyn took another sip of the champagne. The wine was cool and bittersweet and the bubbles made her nose itch. But she wanted more, she wanted more of everything. She held up her hand to hold him off so that she could drain the glass. Then she put it down next to his and held out her arms.

  "Now," she whispered.

  Ed took off his jacket and dropped it on the chair. Mar­ilyn was tugging at his tie, then the buttons on his soft white shirt.

  "Slow, kid," he said, laughing lightly. "I'll meet you on the bed."

  Marilyn stepped back long enough to get rid of her own clothes, tossing them so that they mixed with Ed's on the chair. She reached the bed before he did, and when he sat down to get rid of his shoes and socks she began kissing the back of his neck.

  "I've waited so long," she whispered.

  He stood up to get rid of his trousers. Then he was on top of her, kissing her with that wonderful rough mouth, kissing her face, her eyes, her neck, lingering on her breasts, sliding down over her stomach, and the blood was flowing in her veins and arteries so that she could barely contain herself, forcing herself to slow down, not wanting to spend too much too soon, but giving in to the surging waves of pleasure almost at once.

  He worked his way just as slowly back up her body.

  "I'll get us more champagne," he said.

  "You don't have to stop," Marilyn said. "Please don't stop now. I want more."

  "We'll do more. But let's take a break."

  It was only then that she realized that he wasn't aroused.

  She pulled her knees up to her chest.

  "I've gotten ugly," she said. "You don't want me."

  "Lynn, honey, it isn't that. I do want you." He poured two more glasses and brought them back to the bed. He sat down next to her and handed her one. "But I'm not as young as I used to be."

  Someone else had said that to her, those same words.

  Ross. And the words had always meant that he was having an affair, had slept with another woman the night before.

  "Who is she?" Marilyn asked.

  "What?"

  "The woman you're sleeping with. Who is she?" She brought the glass inside her knees, so that she could hide her body and drink at the same time.

  "A friend. Someone I've been seeing. She's not impor­tant." His voice was tight, though, and she didn't believe him.

  "Does she know about us?"

  "No. No one knows about us. We agreed."

  "We agreed to wait."

  "Come on, Lynn, you didn't think that meant I'd be cel­ibate, did you?"

  "I thought you'd wait." She had to stop herself from screaming at him. "How are we going to look for a place to live tomorrow morning when you have a girlfriend who doesn't know about us?"

  "A place to live?" He moved away from her. "I think it's a little soon for that, isn't it? I thought we were going to wait."

  "I did wait. I did my time. And now I want to get on with my life. If you don't want to be with me, get out."

  "Get out? You don't mean that."

  "I mean it. I changed my mind. I don't want you after all." She began to sob as she realized it was true. "I killed Ross for you, oh God, I killed Ross for you. And now you can't even get it up for me. I mean it. Get out."

  "Not so fast." Ed's voice was cold, unloving. "I'm not ready to leave. You killed Ross for you, not for us. Although I won't say I haven't benefited. But don't forget that I'm the one who brokered that plea bargain, so you only did a year. Let's not quite say you owe me. Still, I've looked for­ward to tonight, and I'll be really disappointed if you send me away too soon."

  Ed's face had changed. His eyes had become icy with anger. He grabbed Marilyn's arm, holding on too tightly. And his anger was arousing him. Like Ross.

  Her heart was pounding, no longer from joy, though, and she couldn't think of anything to say to him.

  His grip was bruising her as he pulled her closer.

  She forced a smile, stopping him long enough to place her glass on the table. She looked at the champagne bottle, but she wasn't certain it was heavy enough. The lamp on the bedside table was a Tiffany replica with an iron base. The lamp might be better.

  It would mean another plea bargain and another year be­fore she was truly free. Surely she could negotiate the sen­tence herself this time.

  "Whatever you want, dear," she murmured in Ed's ear.

  She felt him relax just a little as they began to kiss. She pulled him close, allowed him to slide into the warm, moist place between her legs.

  "Oh, yes," she whispered, as his thrusts became urgent.

  Her right hand closed around the lamp.

  Sense and Sensibility

  Female PIs in the Nineties

  From the time the first of the Freddie O 'Neal books was published, I would talk to anyone who would listen—mostly at places like Bouchercon and Left Coast Crime—about taking a Woman Warrior on the Hero's Journey, using mythic images in a female PI series. Thus, when Bob Randisi asked me for a contribution to a book, Writing the Private Eye Novel, I knew what I wanted to say. And I remain grateful for the opportunity to get it in print.

  During the years when my desk faced a wall, instead of a window as it does now, I had a corkboard at eye level where I could tack notes, cartoons, quotations, and anything else that struck me as at least momentarily inspirational. The ar­rangement was random, subject to the whim of the morning. Few thoughts remained tacked to the wall for long.

  One of my favorites, one I have kept on the original three-by-five card with a tack hole through it, is from an essay by Natalie Shainess on Antigone, heroine of a Greek tragedy. The daughter of Oedipus, Antigone accepted a death sentence from her uncle Creon rather than agree to a blasphemous but politically expedient act.

  "Antigone is not the average woman," Shainess wrote. "But she is what the average woman might become: a per
son of autonomy, high principle, not narcissistically self-involved, and not defensively suffering, but willing to take risks to live authentically."

  I can't come up with a better description of a contempo­rary female private eye than the one Shainess has given a character from the 2,500-year-old Greek myth.

  I wanted to start with that thought because more atten­tion has been given to the female PI's debt of character to her male counterpart than to her place as a direct descen­dant in a long line of heroic fictional women.

  All in the Family

  The family resemblance between male and female PIs is real, of course. The private eye is one of the two distinctly American heroic archetypes (the other is the cowboy), and the only one that could easily accommodate a gender switch when twentieth-century American women began to break out of traditional roles. Or when, as Gloria Steinem put it, we became the men we wanted to marry.

  The male private eyes we read about and admired were fearless loners, without friends or family. The Continental Op didn't even have a name. But each of them had a code of honor, a commitment to seeing justice done.

  The female private eyes kept the fearlessness, the code of honor, and the basic idea of autonomy. But autonomy didn't necessarily mean disconnection and alienation, the way it did for the men. As often as not, these women have risked their fictional lives not for strangers, because they have nothing to lose, but for friends, because they care.

  And this has been true virtually from the beginning, in 1977. Marcia Muller's Sharon McCone is considered the first of the modern female private eyes. The name of Sharon McCone's agency—All Souls—is a clue that things are dif­ferent. Maxine O'Callaghan's first Delilah West novel was published in 1980. In that book, Diamonds Are Forever, Delilah solves the murder of her husband.

  So for female private eyes, autonomy isn't quite the given that it is for men. Instead, it is a quality of character to be carefully protected. And through the tension between autonomy and connectedness, the female private eyes of the nineties are beginning to explore the question: What hap­pens to the story of the hero's journey when the warrior taking the trip is a woman?

  Heroine with a Thousand Faces

  According to Joseph Campbell, the myth of the hero's journey occurs in some form in every culture. There are echoes of the myth in every quest plot, every story of a search for a Holy Grail. But the young warrior enduring the perils of the adventure is almost invariably male.

  In this culture, however, in the last fifteen years, as women have become police officers and firefighters and at­torneys general in life, fictional women warriors in great numbers have been taking the trip—in the form of female private eyes. The new PIs call forth echoes of classical fig­ures such as Antigone, who gave her life rather than allow her brother's corpse to be desecrated, or the Sumerian god­dess Inana, who went to the depths of hell to rescue her lost lover.

  So what does this mean to someone who wants to write her own private eye series? It means that in the best series fiction, the central character is slightly larger than life—not the average woman, but what the average woman might be­come—facing ethical dilemmas and physical danger with equal courage, and developing wisdom through the course of the books.

  Do I think reading Greek myths before you start is nec­essary? No, but I think it helps. One of the truisms of writing is that you write what you read. Thus, all creative writing teachers urge beginning writers to read good books. Walter Van Tilburg Clark, who wrote The Ox-Bow Incident, urged students to read a thousand words for every one they wrote. Clark only wrote three novels, though, and I'm sure Charles Dickens would have argued with him.

  I read more when I wrote less. Other writers can do both at the same time, a talent I admire.

  You can learn from reading bad books, too. But reading good books gives a writer something to strive for. So read mysteries, good and bad, to get a sense of what is going on. You're surely a fan, or you wouldn't be contemplating writing your own. Thus, you've read Sara Paretsky and Sue Grafton and Marcia Muller, and probably some of the lesser-known figures. (Maybe even Catherine Dain.) But you should also read fiction that has lasted across time and culture to get depth and breadth and bring something new to your character.

  You may or may not have read something by Amanda Cross, who writes the Kate Fansler series. If you like hardboiled private eyes, this won't be your taste. But if you haven't read Writing a Woman's Life, the book written by Amanda Cross's alter ego, Carolyn Heilbrun, run right out and get it. Now. You will receive valuable insight into the character of the nontraditional woman.

  You will also learn why we have tended to view the quest plot as male territory and the romance plot as female.

  Heilbrun explains that young men have been encouraged to see themselves as the centers of their own story, as striving and ambitious, while young women have been encouraged to see themselves as the princesses waiting to be rescued by the Other, who is the true heroic center of the tale. She ar­gues persuasively for more women to take the quest, as writers and their fictional protagonists.

  Hear Her Roar

  But you do want to start with character, not plot. Writers tell the same stories over and over, whether framed as quest or romance. Erie Stanley Gardner said that he never worried about plot because all his plots were the same—A murders B and C gets blamed for it. I've used that plot a couple of times, and I'll probably use it again. Readers knew they weren't going to get any surprises in Gardner's books. But they kept coming back for a beloved character, Perry Mason.

  As you think about your own character, remember that you'll have to live with her for a long time if the series is a hit. Many writers start with an idealized version of them­selves. I didn't do that because I couldn't see my real self—and certainly not an idealized self—dealing with the kind of physical danger I had put Freddie O'Neal in. So for Freddie O'Neal, I started with something close to what I would want my daughter to be. It was easier to imagine a fearless daughter figure than a fearless ideal self.

  Fearlessness is important. Female private eyes have to be even braver than their male counterparts. A number of male private eyes have what Dick Lochte has called a "sociopathic stooge" for a sidekick, someone to call on for extra muscle when the going gets tough and the odds are bad.

  But if she asks for help, a reader may wince. In the first of the Freddie O'Neal books, Lay It on the Line, I thought it was enough that Freddie had the wits to make a telephone call for assistance without her captors realizing that was in fact what she was doing. A fan told me how disappointed she was that Freddie was helped out by a man—and that was even though the man was an aging African-American security guard, far from the traditional knight in shining armor (and far from the "sociopathic stooge"). I've had her ask for help since then—balancing her autonomy with connectedness—but I'm always careful to make certain her competence isn't in question.

  So your female private eye must be capable of handling danger by herself. And she will be in danger—your editor will surely insist on it. Or at least mine has. And other women writers have said that their editors have taken the same stance. Antigone must still be threatened with the tomb for taking on the forces of evil. Only now she has to fight her way out to come back in the next book.

  What About Love

  When you add fearlessness to autonomy, doesn't it be­come all the harder for her to have any kind of romantic at­tachment? Certainly. I think that's why so many female sleuths become involved with cops. There are advantages to the idea. The PI has access to police information that way, for one thing. For another, the police officer has a nonromantic reason to be there. No extraneous subplots necessary to deal with the relationship.

  But the most interesting advantage has to do with a built-in tension between them. Here is a man who wants to save her from trouble—whose job it is to save people from trouble—and she has to maintain identity and au­tonomy against that pressure. It saves the author from worrying about a happily-
ever-after book in which he be­comes the center of her world, otherwise known as the ro­mance plot.

  Janet Dawson makes it clear in the Jeri Howard series that the cop and the PI can't live happily ever after. Jeri's ex-husband is a cop.

  I've gone in a different direction with Freddie O'Neal's romantic attachments, but that has to do with my personal interest in reversing gender roles in the hero's story. As I mentioned earlier, the goddess Inana went through hell searching for her lost lover. This is a traditional heroic theme—Orpheus and Eurydice are only the most famous pair.

  In Lament for a Dead Cowboy, Freddie O'Neal had to go through hell to save a lover falsely accused of murder. I used an Elko, Nevada, jail cell in a blizzard as my version of hell. An interesting thing happens when she finds a way to free him, however. He can't quite throw himself into her arms as they ride away into the sunset.

  That left her free in the next book to become involved with a university professor who isn't stuck with traditional conceptions of gender roles in relationships. The mythic counterpart to that is the hero's dalliance with a nymph—Odysseus and Calypso, for example. (If a university pro­fessor who is open to nontraditional romantic relationships isn't your idea of a nymph, don't write to tell me. Write your own book.)

  I didn't expect the relationship to last through a second book. It almost survived a third.

  Other PI writers handle the tension between autonomy and connectedness in various ways. I mentioned that Delilah West started out as a grieving widow who had to solve her husband's murder in 1980. Half a dozen books and a decade or so later, Delilah has recovered. But her ro­mantic attachment to a real estate developer whose values are very different from her own assures the reader that Delilah isn't likely to remarry.

  Of course, there's no law against a married PI. Some classical male heroes were married (Odysseus, again), a very few male private eyes have been as well (just last year Earl Emerson's PI was added to their ranks), and a number of contemporary amateur sleuths have sworn to love, honor, and cherish, if not obey. Nancy Pickard, Anne Perry, and Sharan Newman have all negotiated that curve successfully with heroines Jenny Cain, Charlotte Pitt, and Catherine LeVendeur.