The waiter opened up the table and began to lay out the supper. I leaned against the wall by the window and watched him. When he was through, Rachel Wallace signed the bill, added in a tip, and gave it back to him. He smiled—smiled at me—and went out.
Rachel looked at the table. There were flowers in the center.
“You can go for tonight, Spenser,” she said. “We’ll eat and go to bed. Be here at eight tomorrow.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Where we going first?”
“We’re going out to Channel Four and do a talk show.”
Julie Wells came out of the bathroom. She had a small towel wrapped around her head and a large one wrapped around her body. It covered her but not by much. She said, “Hi, Spenser,” and smiled at me. Everyone smiled at me. Lovable. A real pussycat.
“Hello.” I didn’t belong there. There was something powerfully non-male in the room, and I felt its pressure. “Okay, Rachel. I’ll say good night. Don’t open the door. Don’t even open it to push that cart into the hall. I’ll be here at eight.”
They both smiled. Neither of them said anything. I went to the door at a normal pace. I did not run. “Don’t forget the chain,” I said. “And the deadbolt from inside.”
They both smiled at me and nodded. Julie Wells’s towel seemed to be shrinking. My mouth felt a little dry. “I’ll stay outside until I hear the bolt turn.”
Smile. Nod.
“Good night,” I said, and went out and closed the door. I heard the bolt slide and the chain go in. I went down in the elevator and out onto Arlington Street with my mouth still dry, feeling a bit unlovely.
11
I leaned against the cinder-block wall of studio two at Channel Four and watched Rachel Wallace prepare to promote her book and her cause. Off camera a half-dozen technician types in jeans and beards and sneakers hustled about doing technical things.
Rachel sat in a director’s chair at a low table. The interviewer was on the other side and on the table between them was a copy of Tyranny, standing upright and visible on a small display stand. Rachel sat calmly looking at the camera. The interviewer, a Styrofoam blonde with huge false eyelashes, was smoking a kingsized filter-tipped mentholated Salem cigarette as if they were about to tie her to the post and put on the blindfold. A technician pinned a small microphone to the lapel of Rachel’s gray flannel jacket and stepped out of the way. Another technician with a clipboard crouched beneath one of the cameras a foot and a half from the interviewer. He wore earphones.
“Ten seconds, Shirley,” he said. The interviewer nodded and snuffed her cigarette out in an ashtray on the floor behind her chair. A man next to me shifted in his folding chair and said, “Jesus Christ, I’m nervous.” He was scheduled to talk about raising quail after Rachel had finished. The technician squatting under the front camera pointed at the interviewer.
She smiled. “Hi,” she said to the camera. “I’m Shirley. And this is Contact. We have with us today feminist and lesbian activist Rachel Wallace. Rachel has written a new book, Tyranny, which takes the lid off of some of the ways government and business exploit women and especially gay women. We’ll be back to talk with Rachel about her book and these issues after this word.” A commercial for hair coloring came on the monitor overhead.
The guy with the earphones crouching beneath the camera said, “Good, Shirl.” Shirl took another cigarette from a box on the table behind Rachel’s book and lit up. She was able to suck in almost half of it before the guy under the camera said, “Ten seconds.” She snuffed this one out, leaned forward slightly, and when the picture came on the monitor, it caught her profile looking seriously at Rachel.
“Rachel,” she said, “do you think lesbians ought to be allowed to teach at a girls’ school?”
“Quite the largest percentage,” Rachel said, “of child molestations are committed by heterosexual men. As I pointed out in my book, the incidence of child molestation by lesbians is so small as to be statistically meaningless.”
“But what kind of role model would a lesbian provide?”
“Whatever kind she was. We don’t ask other teachers about their sexual habits. We don’t prevent so-called frigid women from teaching children, or impotent men. Children do not, it seems to me, have much chance in public school to emulate the sexual habits of their teachers. And if the teacher’s sexual preference is so persuasive to his or her students, why aren’t gays made straight by exposure to heterosexual teachers?”
“But might not the gay teacher subtly persuade his or her students toward a homosexual preference?”
Rachel said, “I just answered that, Shirley.”
Shirley smiled brilliantly. “In your book you allege frequent violations of civil rights in employment both by the government and the private sector. Many of the offenders are here in Massachusetts. Would you care to name some of them?”
Rachel was beginning to look annoyed. “I named all of them in my book,” she said.
“But,” Shirley said, “not all of our viewers have read it.”
“Have you?” Rachel said.
“I haven’t finished it yet,” Shirley said. “I’m sorry to say.” The guy crouching below the camera lens made a gesture with his hand, and Shirley said, “We’ll be right back with more interesting revelations from Rachel Wallace after this message.”
I whispered to Linda Smith, who stood in neat tweeds beside me, “Shirley doesn’t listen to the answers.”
“A lot of them don’t,” Linda said. “They’re busy looking ahead to the next question.”
“And she hasn’t read the book.”
Linda smiled and shook her head. “Almost none of them ever do. You can’t blame them. Sometimes you get several authors a week plus all the other stuff.”
“The pressure must be fearful,” I said. “To spend your working life never knowing what you’re talking about.”
“Lots of people do that,” Linda said. “I only hope Rachel doesn’t let her annoyance show. She’s a good interview, but she gets mad too easy.”
“That’s because if she had been doing the interview, she’d have read the book first.”
“Maybe,” Linda said, “but Shirley North has a lot of fans in the metropolitan area, and she can sell us some books. The bridge club types love her.”
A commercial for pantyhose concluded with a model holding out the crotch to show the ventilated panel, then Shirley came back on.
“In your book, Rachel, you characterize lesbianism as an alternative way of loving. Should everyone try it?”
“Everyone should do what she wants to do,” Rachel said. “Obviously people to whom the idea is not attractive should stay straight. My argument is, and has been, that those who do find that alternative desirable should not be victimized for that preference. It does no one any harm at all.”
“Is it against God’s law?”
“It would be arrogant of me to tell you God’s law. I’ll leave that to the people who think they have God’s ear. All I can say is that I’ve had no sign that He disapproves.”
“How about the argument that it is unnatural?”
“Same answer. That really implies a law of nature that exists immutably. I’m not in a position to know about that. Sartre said that perhaps existence precedes essence, and maybe we are in the process of making the laws of nature as we live.”
“Yes, certainly. Do you advocate lesbian marriage?”
“Shirley,” Rachel said. “I have documented corruption on several levels of local and state government, in several of the major corporations in the country, and you’ve asked me only about titillating things. In essence you’ve asked only about sex. That seems unbalanced to me.”
Shirley’s smile glowed. Her splendiferous eyelashes fluttered. “Isn’t that an interesting thought, Rachel? I wish we could spend more time, but I know you have to rush.” She picked up Tyranny. “Get Rachel’s book, Tyranny, published by Hamilton Black. You’ll love it, as I did. Thanks a million, Rachel. Come back again.”