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As an assistant professor she'd sat on four committees. Scheduling and Room Allocation, Graduate Student Orientation, Animal-Subject Safety- the kind of drudgery I knew well- then, six months before her death, she'd chaired something called Interpersonal Conduct that I'd never heard of.
Something to do with sexual harassment? Exploitation of students by faculty? That was something with hostility potential. I placed a check next to the notation and moved on to
The book jacket was matte red with embossed gold letters and a small black graphic between author and title: silhouettes of the eponymous animals.
The wolf's mouth was crammed with fangs and its claws reached out for the undersized sheep. On the back was Hope Devane's color photo. She had an oval face and sweet features, wore a beige cashmere suit and pearls and sat very straight in a brown suede chair backed by shelves of books in soft focus. MontBlanc pen in hand, sterling inkwell within reach. Long fingers, pink-polished nails. Honey-blond hair swept back from fine bones, the cheeks accentuated by blush. Light brown eyes clear and wide and direct, soft without being weak. A confident, possibly ironic smile on nacreous lips.
The pages were dog-eared and Milo 's yellow underlining and pen scrawl were all over the margins. I read the book, drove two miles down Beverly Glen and over to the University, where I played with the Biomed library computers for a while.
Interesting results. I returned home, watched the talk-show tapes.
Four shows, four sets of noisy, giddy audiences, a quartet of smarmy, pseudosensitive, and altogether interchangeable hosts.
Hope Devane tolerating the metal-grind rhetoric of an antifeminist woman who preached the virtues of Bible study, cosmetics, and greeting one's husband at the door in a see-through raincoat over nothing else.
Hope Devane engaged in debate with a male anthropologist/ant specialist who believed all sex differences were inborn and unchangeable and that men and women should simply learn to live with one another. Hope trying to be reasonable, but the end result falling just short of shallow.
Hope Devane in a roundtable discussion with three other authors: a woman linguist who pooh-poohed psychology and recommended that men and women learn to interpret language correctly, a New York-based syndicated columnist on women's issues who had nothing to say but said it polysyllabically, and a depressed-looking man who claimed to have been a battered husband and had stretched the account of his torment to three hundred pages.
Same old noise…
Hope Devane debating the self-styled head of a men's-rights organization I'd never heard of who went after her with misogynistic lust.
This one different- the hostility level ratcheted up several notches. I rewound and watched it again.
The misogynist was named Karl Neese. Thirty or so, lean and outwardly hip in all black and a stylish haircut but Neanderthal in his point of view, hogging the airtime and layering insults relentlessly- psychodrama parmigiana.
His target never fought back, never interrupted, never raised her voice even when Neese's comments drew applause from louts in the audience.
MAYHEW: Okay, Mr. Neese, now let's ask the doctor-
NEESE: Doctor? I don't see any stethoscope.
MAYHEW: She happens to be a Ph.D.-
NEESE: Am I supposed to be impressed by that? What does
MAYHEW [
NEESE: Tell us why feminists keep harping on about their problems- nag, nag, nag. But it's okay to abort on demand because babies are inconvenient-
MAYHEW:- your theory of why women fall prey so often to unscrupulous-
NEESE: Because they
[
HOPE DEVANE: You may actually have something there.
NEESE: Oh, I do, baby. I do. [
DEVANE: Sometimes we do fall into dangerous patterns. The crux, I believe, is in the lessons we learn as children.
NEESE: Show me yours, I'll show you mine?
MAYHEW: [
DEVANE: The role models we learn from. The behaviors we're taught to emulate-
Twenty more minutes of his double entendres and her reasoned statements. Each time he got the crowd hooting, she waited until things quieted before offering brief, precise replies that had nothing to do with him. Sticking to her own agenda. By the end of the show, people were listening and Neese was looking off-balance.
I watched it again, concentrating on Hope and what made her effective. She made eye contact in a fearless way that established intimacy, projected an unflappability that made the obvious seem profound.
Charisma. Calm charisma.
If the medium was the message, she was a brilliant courier and I couldn't help thinking of what she might have accomplished had she lived.
When the segment ended, the camera caught a close-up of Neese's face. No more wise-guy grin.
Serious. Angry?
It was a crazy idea, but could he have held on to the anger?
Why not, the case was cold and Milo had asked me to “hypothesize away.” I wrote down Neese's name and reached for the homicide file.
Words, pictures. Always pictures…
It was close to five when I called Milo at West L.A. Detectives and told him I'd finished everything, including the book.
“That was fast.”
“Easy read, she had a good style. Conversational. As if she's sitting in your living room, sharing her knowledge.”
“What'd you think of the contents?”
“A lot of what's in there is hard to argue with- stick up for your rights, take care of yourself, choose your goals realistically so you can succeed and enhance your self-esteem. But when it comes to the more radical stuff she doesn't present facts to back it up. The part about testosterone and sadistic psychopathy is a pretty big stretch.”
“All men are sex killers.”
“All men have the
