A Grave Talent km-1

by Laurie R. King

  My dear Kate,

  New York was going nowhere. The people in Palo Alto offered again and I accepted. I start immediately, on the 23rd. I won't call you, but if you could bear it, I would be grateful if you would allow me to make you a picnic lunch.

  Lee

  It gave her new address and a telephone number, and Kate reread it until the sour stench of boiling coffee brought her to her senses. She dumped the coffee out into the sink and started again, and pushed the memory of Lee's last sentence away as she left for work. She did not call, and the letter sat in a drawer, waiting.

  It waited until the middle of January. Kate was in a patrol car, her partner driving, just after midnight on a night of cold drizzle, in one of the nastier parts of town. A faint tinkle of breaking glass sent the car accelerating forward into the next block. Two young men sprinted away from the store window pursued by the skidding patrol car, around the block and down an alley. Her partner slammed on the brakes and Kate was out in an instant, shouting for them to stop. One of them slowed and threw his hands up, but the other whirled around with a glinting black ugly thing in his hand that flashed and shot out a window far overhead, and in the same movement he let the gun go skittering across the filthy concrete and his hands went up and he began to shriek not to shoot, not to shoot, not to shoot. Kate lay sprawled with her sights on his chest and her finger aching, needing, lusting to put just that much more pressure on the bit of metal underneath it, and it took all her will to block the rush of desire to end it all, as if she herself were the target rather than this blubbering, shaking boy whose cheap leather jacket filled her vision. It was not until her partner had the cuffs on the kid that the wave began to subside, and as she lowered her suddenly heavy gun she felt herself began to shake, shamefully, uncontrollably. A cup of scalding coffee at the station didn't help, and her partner, an older man she'd worked with before, and liked, told her to go home early.

  A hot bath turned her skin scarlet, but not until she finished the second big gin (a drink she hated, but it was the only alcohol in the house—one of her men had left it) did the shakes turn to occasional shivers. She did not sleep, though. Every time she closed her eyes she saw the dark leather disintegrate in an explosion of blood, so she turned the heat up high and wrapped herself in a blanket, and watched the late/early movies and the farm reports and the morning news with the sound off, and at a more reasonable hour, slightly drunk, called Lee. She answered at the third ring.

  "Cooper." When Kate did not respond, Lee's voice sharpened. "Hello? This is Doctor Cooper's office."

  "Lee?"

  "Yes, this is Lee Cooper."

  "Lee, this is Kate." There was no response, so she added, "Kate Martinelli."

  "You don't have to tell me your last name; there's only one Kate. You did get my letter, then. I rather hoped I hadn't mailed it. I was… not myself… when I wrote it."

  "Can I come and see you?" Kate said abruptly.

  "I would like very much to see you, Kate. When?"

  "Now?"

  "Now? I was just on my way out the door."

  "You're leaving for work?"

  "This is my office number. I'm on my way to the hospital to see a client. I'll be there most of the morning."

  "Can't it wait?" Kate bit back her desperation. "I mean…"

  "I can't put it off till tomorrow. He's dying and may not be there tomorrow. I can be back by eleven o'clock."

  "Give me the address." Lee did so, and Kate wrote it down. "See you at eleven, then."

  "I'm—. Thank you for calling."

  "I love you, Lee."

  The silence at the other end was so complete that eventually Kate thought Lee had hung up, and she said in a question, "Lee?"

  "Yes. Eleven o'clock. Good-bye, Kate." Then the line did go dead.

  And that was it. When Kate walked through the door of Lee's ridiculously oversized office, and Lee looked across the desk at her with hope and fear and doubt jostling one another in her green eyes, all of Kate's prepared speeches fled from her, all her own doubts and demands dropped away, and the two strong, competent professional women stared hopelessly at each other across the room, mouths empty and hands fluttering in aborted little gestures, until Lee rose from her leather chair and picked her way around the large desk as if she were walking a balance beam. She stopped in front of Kate, and Kate took the final step, and they folded into each other's arms like two storm-ravaged sailors coming blessedly into home port.

  Completely, profoundly, body and mind and spirit, Kate fell into love with Lee Cooper—or rather, acknowledged the love that she had so long denied. She was amazed at the ease of the thing, almost like, she thought one day driving home to Lee, getting to the end of a puzzle and finding you'd been given the wrong pieces and then finding the right ones, and it all falls smoothly, naturally into place. With Lee it was, from the first day, so very natural, so right, skipping all the stages of flirting and the fawning erotic tension of new couples and moving easily into the feel of a long-established, successful marriage.

  Life, too, seemed to slip into a remarkably smooth patch, in that way things have sometimes of imitating internal states. Kate transferred sideways into a niche in San Jose, worked her way up the ladder, attended classes, passed exams, shooting hard for promotion into the investigative division. Lee began to make a name for herself; flew to conferences and workshops, with increasing frequency as a guest speaker; discovered in herself the ability to work with terminal patients which, in combination with her training and interest in the arts, steered her straight into the gay community's epidemic. It was emotionally grueling work, and at least once a month Lee let herself into their apartment with swollen eyes and smeared makeup. But it was needed work, and she could do it.

  Then two years ago Lee's mother died. Kate had never met her, and so far as she knew Lee had not seen or talked with the old woman since being thrown out in disgrace at the age of eighteen. Mrs. Cooper did not approve of lesbians. It came therefore as a considerable surprise to everyone when her will revealed that she not only had never actually disinherited her daughter but had gone so far as to leave her the house she had lived in for thirty years, a house, moreover, that was not only valuable in and of itself but was located on perhaps the most desirable acres in San Francisco. Russian Hill overlooks the financial district, the port of San Francisco (the tourist port, not the heavy cargo area), the two bridges, and the sweep of the Bay around the eastern tip of the peninsula. Cable car bells drift up from three sides, fog horns from the fourth. North Beach and Chinatown are an easy walk (downhill, at any rate) and Fisherman's Wharf a slightly longer one. The view alone was worth a million dollars. Real estate agents had fought for the listing, and Lee's future was tinted a nice shade of rose.

  "Don't you want to see the place before it goes on the market?" Lee asked Kate one Saturday morning in April.

  "Lee, I don't want anything to do with your mother or her house. She was an awful woman; she treated you like a dog that piddled on the carpets. I think you deserve every penny you can get out of her estate, but I don't want any more personal contact with her than the dollars in your bank account."

  "She's gone from the house. Completely gone, with the last of her furniture. I think, just as a building, you really should see it. It's an amazing place. There's only a handful like it in the city. It was built by Willis Polk just before the turn of the century. In another fifty years they'll want to make it into a museum. Come with me. Please?"

  It was obviously important to Lee, so Kate packed away her feelings of indignation and went with her, and that afternoon she fell in love for a second time. It was a strong house, solid and honest, not overpowering in the way showy architects strive for but as a capable and supporting friend is strong. Lee showed her through the house, reviewing all the work that needed to be done, bemoaning its state of disrepair, and gradually falling silent, so that when they both drifted across the stripped and bare living room to stand at the panoramic window, no wor
ds had been said for about five minutes. Finally Kate tore her eyes from the view and concentrated on the mockingbird perched in the neighbor's large tree.

  "Damn it, Lee, you did this deliberately. We couldn't possibly afford to live here. Why did you bring me here?"

  "My income would cover the taxes and insurance," she said mildly.

  "And we'd eat off mine? That's a lot of beans and rice, honey."

  "We can change our minds any time. There'll always be a market for this kind of house."

  "And move where? How the hell could you live in an apartment after living here? Be like eating cat food when you were used to caviar."

  "But you'll do it? You don't mind if we try?"

  "It's completely crazy," said Kate despairingly, and Lee kissed her.

  It was crazy, and it was hard—hour upon hour of back-breaking, unfamiliar, filthy labor with hammer and crowbar, Skil saw and belt sander; making heartbreaking mistakes, learning new skills, working long hours of overtime to pay for this mad venture; tedious commutes for Kate, who could not shift jobs as easily as Lee; fights over bills and burst pipes.

  The one great blessing, disguised though it was at first, was that it left them neither time nor money for a social life, and the cloud that had threatened from the horizon, that in fact had blackened the skies and thrown several ominous drops on them, had retreated somewhat, become an uneasily ignored factor in their lives.

  Kate would not come out. She told Lee the very first day, in Lee's office in Palo Alto, and Lee, flushed and alive with the incomprehensible return to life of a dream that had begun to degenerate into mere fantasy, and believing that in this, too, Kate would change her mind, acquiesced. She had Kate; she would not risk losing her by insisting that they go public. Time would bring it.

  Time had not. What had begun as a mild irritation had grown to an open sore, threatening to infect the entire relationship. The month before Lee's mother died it had flared up when Lee invited two of her colleagues home for dinner and over coffee had casually revealed that she and Kate were not just housemates. The guests left an hour later. Kate turned on Lee in a fury.

  "How dare you! You promised me, you gave me your word that you wouldn't say anything about us to anybody. You probably brag about it at the clinic, 'how I overcame my lover's scruples.' Lee, how could you!"

  "Oh, Kate, this isn't 1950, for God's sake. It's not even 1970. Your coming out might be a five-minute wonder in a very small circle, but that's all."

  "No, Lee, that's not all, not by a long shot. We move in different worlds, you and I, and I can't take the risk. I'm a cop, Lee. A woman cop. If we came out, how long do you suppose it'd be before the papers managed to let slip the juicy tidbit that Officer K. C. Martinelli is one of the leather brigade? How long before the looks and remarks start, before I start drawing all the real hard-core shit jobs, before I'm on a call and someone refuses to deal with me because I'm that lez in the department and I might have AIDS? How long before some mama flips out when I try to ask her daughter some questions about the bastard that's raped her, because mama doesn't want that dyke cop feeling up her daughter?"

  "You're being ridiculous, Kate. Paranoid. Look, if this were Saudi Arabia, or Texas, or L.A. even, I could understand, but here, in the Bay Area? Now? It's not news that there are gays in the department. Nobody gives a damn."

  "I give a damn," Kate shouted. "It's none of their goddamn business if I'm straight or bent or twisted in a circle."

  "You're ashamed of it. You've always felt it shameful, but Kate, you've got to face it, or it'll tear you to—"

  "I'm not ashamed of it!" Kate bellowed furiously, and then abruptly, without warning, her fury deflated, and she looked at her lover in a despair that came from the depths of her fatigue. "I'm not ashamed," she said quietly. "It's just too precious, Lee, to allow strangers to poke their fingers into it. Yes, I'd love to go to your club with you, go to the coffeehouses, kiss you in public, but I just can't risk it. You tell me that my refusal to breathe the fresh air is stifling us both, but I know, as sure as I'm sitting here, that coming out would be the end of it. I'm not strong enough, Lee. I'm just not strong enough."

  Lee let it go that night, angry at herself for handling the confrontation so badly. It was out in the open now, though, and Lee knew that Kate's refusal fully to accept herself chipped at the foundations of their relationship and cut them off from the very community where they might find strength. She could not let it lie, and two days later, on a Friday night before two days off for them both, she approached the problem again, Kate was ready for her, and blew up.

  The battle lasted until Sunday night, when Kate packed a bag and left the house, saying that she had to sleep or she would be dangerous on duty. She stayed away all week. Lee went through the motions of therapy with her clients for two days, and halfway through Wednesday realized that it was impossible. She went home to think.

  It took her three days before she could see the truth, three days and nights before she was sure of her facts and could analyze the situation as she would a case. By Saturday night she had to admit it: Kate's mania for privacy, her phobia of self-revelation, would have to be the basic premise of any future life together.

  Subject's job, she told herself as if dictating a case history, Subject's job is one which brings Subject into constant proximity with the worst in humanity: pimps who sell children as prostitutes; men who sell drugs to melt brains; large and angry men with various weapons; drunks who stink and vomit on their rescuers; bodies dead a week in August, smelling so awful the wagon men wait outside. Subject puts her body and her mind on the line daily, in exchange for which she is allowed to be a part of one of the most powerful brotherhoods there is, men and a few women who are united in the inhuman demands made on them, a secret society in which superiority is recognized and rewarded, where the bickering and back-biting inherent in any family structure does not weaken the mystique that—give it credit—had sustained Subject for two years until she had been brought up short by the ugly, inevitable end product of distancing herself from the rest of humanity. It is the most public and visible of jobs, with the most stringently demanding code for its members. Is it not understandable that Subject refuses to risk an action that threatens to leave her without support, leave her outside the fraternity? Further, is it not understandable that Subject, to avoid being completely consumed by the demands of her job and the unwritten demands of her brothers and sisters on the force (a telling appellation), guards her true self, her private life, with such ferocity?

  So. If Kate remains a cop, she will continue to guard herself, by giving herself a nickname, by not socializing with other cops, by keeping her home life a hermetically sealed secret. The question was, then, could Lee survive in a vacuum?

  Another day alone, and she had decided that living with Kate was worth the suffocation. It might not always be, and Kate would change, given time, but for now, it would have to do.

  She telephoned Kate at her hotel, they had a brief conversation, and Kate was home in forty minutes. Patiently, Lee set out to change Kate. Stubbornly, Kate would be moved a fraction of a pace at a time. The house came to them then, took up all their time and most of their energy, and despite the shakiness of that one cornerstone in their lives, a strength grew in them, supported them, drew them on.

  They were happy. Against all odds, two troubled people had found their place and worked hard to preserve it.

  They had never had an overnight guest before. Kate's job, the more vulnerable, had never intruded before. Outsiders had never entered the heart of the home. And now, they were being invaded.

  THREE

  THE CITY

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  At birth our death is sealed, and our end is consequent

  —Marcus Manilus, Astronomies

  Nobody ever notices postmen somehow . . ; yet they have passions

  like other men, and even carry large bags

  where a small corpse can be stowed quite easily.r />
  —G. K. Chesterton, "The Invisible Man"

  26

  Contents - Prev/Next

  At five minutes before four o'clock Monday morning Kate's car reached the top of Russian Hill and rounded the last corner before home. With considerable relief she poked her finger at the button for the garage door opener and saw the light spill into the darkness as the door rose slowly to accept them. Her passenger's eyes flew open with the sharp turn and the abrupt drop from street level, and when the door had rumbled shut she slowly sat up and looked around in the sudden, still silence.

  "Home." Kate smiled at her. "You wait here for a minute." Kate got out and did a quick check of the garage—in the storage closet, in the back of Lee's sleek almost-new convertible, under the stairs. She then slid home the bolt on the garage door and went to open Vaun's side.

  "We'll get you settled and I'll come back for your things."

  "I can carry one," Vaun protested.

  "Best not." Kate, hands empty, led the way up the stairs. She punched the code into the alarm panel at the top, opened the lock with her key, and reached up immediately to still the little bell the door set to ringing as it opened. She bolted the door behind them, flipped the inside alarm switch back on, and turned to Vaun.

  "I'll introduce you to the alarm system tomorrow. Can I get you anything to eat or drink?"

  "I'd like a glass of water."

  Kate led her down the short hallway to the kitchen. Lights were on all over the house, as she'd told Lee to leave them, and she went across and filled a glass with spring water and added two ice cubes before she realized that Vaun was not behind her. She walked rapidly into the living room and found Vaun with the curtains pushed back, the magical sweep of the north Bay spread out in front of her. The night was clear, and every point of light from Sausalito to Berkeley sparkled. Alcatraz looked like a child's toy at their feet, but Kate pulled the curtains together in Vaun's face.