The doorbell rang. Professor Whitlaw glanced at her wrist in surprise, thumbed through two or three more sheets of paper in the file, and then snapped it shut and handed it to Kate along with the other two folders.
“I don’t have photocopies of the loose material,” she said, “and it would be very inconvenient if you lost it. But if one cannot trust a policewoman, whom can one trust? Give me a ring when you’ve had a chance to formulate some questions. The next two nights are good for me.”
The professor remembered the chain this time. Kate changed places on the doorstep with an anemic young man wearing a skullcap and went to do her assignment.
♦
“What are you doing home?” demanded Jon. “Did you get fired?”
“The teacher gave me homework. Ooh, love your outfit, Jonnie.” It was quite fetching—a lacy apron over his Balinese sarong and nothing else—as he leaned on the table, making a pie crust on the marble pastry board, the rolling pin in his hand and a smudge of flour on one cheekbone. It always surprised Kate to see how muscular Jon was, for all his languid act. She wiggled her fingers at him and went looking for Lee.
Her voice answered Kate from upstairs, and Kate followed it to the room they used as a study. Lee was in her upstairs wheelchair at the computer terminal. A scattering of notepads and a long-dry coffee cup bore witness to a lengthy session.
“Hi there,” Lee said. “I didn’t expect to see you so soon.”
“I’m obviously getting too predictable in my old age,” complained Kate. “You and Jon can plan your orgies around my absences. I had some reading to do and it’s too noisy at work,” she explained, waving the folders. “Look, I don’t know if you want to go on with your search. Dr. Whitlaw—Professor Whit-law—is a real find, and if you’re getting tired…”
“Oh, I’m not working on your stuff. This is something else.” Feeling both piqued and amused at her sensation of being abandoned, Kate went to look over Lee’s shoulder at the screen, which was displaying a graph.
“What is it?”
“I had an interesting visit this morning from a woman I worked with on a project two or three years ago,- she said she’d seen you in Berkeley recently.”
“Rosalyn something?” Kate tossed the folders onto a table and sat down.
“Hall. She’s putting together a grant proposal for a mental-health program targeting homeless women, wondered if I might help with it. Remember that paper I gave at the Glide conference? She wants me to update it so she can use it as an appendix. I was just reviewing it, seeing how much I’d have to rewrite the thing. I don’t know, though,- my brain seems to have forgotten how to think.”
“You and me both, babe. It looks like you’ve been at it for quite a while.”
Lee picked up on the question behind the statement. “I did most of this earlier. I had a long session with Petra,- she thinks the tone in my right leg is improving. And then I had a rest, so I thought I’d work for a while longer.”
They talked for a while about gluteus and abdominal and trapezius muscles, about spasms and recovery and tone, the things that until a month ago had formed their entire lives, until Lee had seemed to make a deliberate choice to push back all the necessary fixations and passions of her recovery in order to allow a small space for the life that had been hers a year ago. Kate respected Lee’s decision and tried hard not to push for every detail of a muscle gradually regained, a weight lifted, in the same way that she had respected Lee’s choice of a caregiver, Lee’s decision to come directly home from the hospital with full-time attendants rather than enter a rehabilitation clinic, and Lee’s determination to keep some of the details of her care from her lover. Privacy is a precious commodity to anyone, but to a woman emerging from paraplegia, it was a gift of life.
So all Kate said was, mildly, “Well, don’t overdo it.”
“Of course not. What have you got?”
“Couple of articles by the expert on Fools. I was looking at one of them on the way here, and I swear it isn’t written in English.”
“Would you rather do my appendix to the grant application?”
“Tempting, but I think there’s going to be a quiz on this.”
Kate picked up the folder and Lee turned back to the terminal, and for the next hour the rusty gears of two minds independently ground and meshed. Kate looked over her two articles, decided to skip for the moment the one that used exegetical and synthesis in the first sentence, and began to read the other, a transcript of a talk given to some religious organization with an impressive name but an apparently generic audience.
HOLY FOOLISHNESS REBORN
The modern Fools movement began, as far as can be determined, in 1969 in southern England. Its earliest manifestation was on a clear, warm morning in early June, when three Fools appeared (with an appreciation for paradox that was at the movement’s core from the very beginning) at the entrance to the Tower of London, that massive and anachronistic fortress which forms the symbolic heart of the British Empire. And, lest anyone miss the point, they arrived there from the morning service at St. Bartholemew-the-Great, a church founded by Rahere, Henry I’s jester.
Had any of London’s natives been watching, the behaviour of the taxi driver would have alerted him to the extraordinary nature of what was arriving, for the cabby, unflappable son of a phlegmatic people, stared at his departing passengers with open-mouthed befuddlement. Interviews with that driver and with the American tour which witnessed the appearance of Foolishness were more or less in agreement: One of the trio, the tallest, turned to pay the driver, adding as a tip a five-pound note and a red rosebud plucked from thin air. The three passengers walked a short distance away, dropped the small canvas bags they each carried, joined hands in a long moment of (apparently) prayer, and set about their performance. The cab driver shook himself like a setter emerging from a pond, put the taxi into gear, and drove off. The red rose he tucked into the side of his taximeter, where it gradually dried and blackened, remaining tightly furled but fragrant, until he plucked it off and threw it out the window over the Westminster Bridge nearly three weeks later.
He did not see his three passengers again, although as the summer passed he saw others like them. The original three, having bowed their heads and muttered in unison some chant barely audible even to the women who emerged from the toilets ten feet away, turned to face the Tower (and its tourists) full-face.
And an arresting trio of faces it was, too, glossy black on the right side, stark white on the left, hair sleeked back, and a row of earrings down the length of each left ear. Black trousers and shoes, white blouses and gloves, harlequin diamonds black and white on the waistcoats. The tall one alone had a spot of color: One of the diamonds on his waistcoat was purple.
What followed was a busking act such as even London rarely saw, street performance as one of the high arts. Part magic show, part political satire, part sermon, it seemed more of a dance done for their own pleasure, or a meditation, than a performance aimed at the audience—though audience there was, and quickly. The act of the three Fools was peculiarly compelling, faintly disturbing, wistful and wild in turns, austere and scatological, the exhortations of gentle fanatics, anarchists with a sense of humour, three raucous saints who were immensely professional in their direct simplicity. The bobby who eventually moved them on had never seen anything quite like it. He had also never seen buskers who didn’t pass the hat.