I told her, “This is a choice I’m making, Alison. I’m making it right now, without manipulation or coercion. I want to do this. If you refuse, I’ll do whatever I can on my own.”
She shook her head. “I don’t refuse,” she said.
We started kissing again. I moved my fingertips down her back, between her shoulder-blades. When I reached the innermost part of the curve at the base of her spine I pressed sharply, and her body arched as she gasped. She looked at me in surprise and then began kissing me all over my face, very fast at first, then slowly, spending a long time moving her lips along my eyebrows and around the edges of my cheeks before finally returning to my mouth.
Once more, I pushed her away. “There’s something else,” I said. “No deals. No letting them off the hook.”
She grunted, shook her head. “Did anyone ever tell you,” she said, “that you’re one hell of a tough negotiator?”
I laughed. “I mean it, Alison. No backroom arrangements.”
She took in a deep breath, let it out explosively. “Give me a moment,” she said. She bent her head down with her eyes closed and pressed her hands against her thighs. At first I thought she was angry, but then I realized she was separating herself from me, making sure that the answer she gave didn’t come from desire. I was wondering if I should put my glasses back on when she looked up. “All right,” she said. “No deals. Whatever we find we do our best to expose. You should know, Ellen, that we might not get very far. Arthur Channing is a serious man and there are even more serious men behind him.”
I said, “I understand that.”
“I’m not entirely sure what we can do. To be honest, I’m not sure how long we’ll last. I hope that I have enough dirt on enough people in enough safe places to keep us alive and out of prison. But if we make enough trouble we might just tip the balance against us.”
“At least we’re going to try.”
“At least that.”
I said, “And at least we’re not hiding from each other.”
She smiled. “I feel like we should recite the Blessing of the Saved.”
“Later,” I told her.
She held out her hands, palms up. I went past them, into her arms. If I’d had my glasses on, I would have tossed them away.
4
How do you start a love affair with someone you’ve been in love with for most of your life? How do you begin when you didn’t even meet her for the first five years you loved her, when for another four you couldn’t admit that such a feeling could live in you, and then for the next ten you tried to drive it out entirely? What do you say, what do you do, when you find out that she’s in love with you! Do you forget all this history and pretend you’ve just met? Do you thank—someone (we couldn’t thank the Benign Ones, not any more, so whom?) for twisting the world to grant your life’s yearning? Do you wonder if she’s tricked you, if she set this whole thing up, all those years ago? Do you wonder if you’ve set her up? If you don’t know who to thank, who do you blame?
I realized, that first night Alison and I spent together, that I actually knew almost nothing about her. I could still run down a list of her most famous cases, at least the ones up until thirteen years ago. And I knew the shape of her face, the curl of her hair, the movement of her hands, her shoulders, her head as she spoke, the way she leaned forward when excited, or rocked back slightly when thinking, or especially calculating. But I didn’t know about her growing up, or what she did when she was hanging out with her friends, or who those friends were, if she went to professional parties with lawyers or played softball with a group of women she’d known from her high school menstrual initiation classes.
The crescent initiation scar on her left wrist—I remembered seeing it years ago, but I didn’t know how she got it. She had a tattoo as well, on her left hip, a blindfolded woman dancing on a purple flower. Where did she get it? Why? How long had she had it? Did it come from her bar enactment when she became a lawyer? Or something I knew nothing about? Maybe she’d gone skiing once and got caught in an avalanche, and after the dogs found her and the mountain crews nursed her back to health she inscribed the tattoo in a ceremony of recognition. I could have asked her; she would have told me, I’m sure. But I didn’t want to ask. I wanted to know.
I didn’t even know if she’d always been a lesbian, if she’d been a lesbian when I first met her. I didn’t know when and how she’d come out, if she’d run away from home when she was seventeen to be initiated in a Women’s World community outside Columbus, Ohio (I knew where she’d grown up, where she’d gone to school), or if she dated men, a few or a lot, gotten married, maybe had children (the idea of children horrified me; an ex-husband I could handle, but not children), and one day left with a fellow lawyer, the two of them going on pilgrimage to a woman’s beach where they washed themselves free of their former lives.
At one point, in the middle of licking her thigh actually, I suddenly thought of her friend Jack. What did it mean when she said they “lived together for a while” (see, I remembered her exact words, I would have been a good lawyer after all)? Did she mean lived together or just shared an apartment? I wanted to stop, put her thigh on hold, and ask all about Jack. But even apart from the issue of stopping, how could I ask about Jack who got himself killed? Who had brought us together, the way Paul had brought us together?
And I didn’t want to stop. I didn’t want to stop ever. I wanted to lick her thighs, her hips, the creases of her legs meeting her groin, the folds of her lips, her clitoris, her wonderful shy clitoris and the never-ending wetness inside her. I wanted to do everything I’d never allowed myself to think about, not with Alison Birkett, the hero-villain of my childhood. I wanted to go on and on, to have her kiss my face, my neck, my shoulders and down to my breasts, with her hand deep inside me the whole time, gently rocking, the fingers moving in waves. I didn’t want to think that she had longed for these things as much as I had, that she had thought about them, wondering what I looked like, how I had “turned out”, who I’d become, did I even like girls, and what would she have done if I hadn’t? (In the middle of all these thoughts I realized that I trusted her, I never questioned it when she said that she had kept away from me all those ten years, hadn’t checked up on me.) And I didn’t want to think that maybe she’d even planned for all of this, meticulous ethical behaviour or not. Planned how I didn’t know, but I didn’t want even to look at the idea.
We did stop of course, time and again, to talk, to ask each other about our lives, to laugh—at one point I said something to her about her casual elegance and she threw back her head, laughing really loudly, then told me how the first time she’d gone out looking for me she’d tried on five or six outfits before settling on the “casual” combination I’d finally seen. We stopped to eat (I called out for vegetable dumplings and shrimp in black bean sauce, and then Alison took the phone and talked the restaurant owner into having his delivery boy stop at a liquor store for a bottle of champagne). We stopped for Alison to look at some of my work and for me to ask about some of her cases.
We didn’t talk about what had brought us together. About Lisa Black Dust Tunnel Light, or Senator Channing, or the men and women in the tubular masks.
The hours got confused, speeding up or slowing down of their own accord. But it was nearly midnight and we had stopped once again to drink orange juice, when I knew it was time to get us past some of the traps that could bite us at any moment. I knew it was time because Alison had said something about pouring a stream of juice down my body and licking it up and I found myself shocked. Just a little, but enough to know I had to make a jump and she had to make it with me.