Looking for Rachel Wallace

“So I hear. I hear he’s as tough as there is in this town.”

“Top three,” I said. “Who else?”

“Guy named Hawk,” I said. “He ever shows up in your hotel, don’t try to take him with a roll of dimes.”

“Who’s the third?”

I smiled at him and ducked my head. “Aw, hell,” I said.

He did his big friendly smile again. “Well, good we don’t have to find that out,” he said. His voice was steady. He seemed able to repress his terror. “Not tonight anyway.” He nodded at me. “Have a good day,” he said, and moved off placidly down the corridor. I must have frightened him to death.

I went back to my Johnny Mercer lyrics. I was on the third verse of “Midnight Sun” when a room service waiter came off the elevator pushing a table. He stopped at Rachel’s door and knocked. He smiled at me as he waited. The door opened on the chain and a small vertical plane of Rachel Wallace’s face appeared.

I said, “It’s okay, Rachel. I’m here.” The waiter smiled at me again, as if I’d said something clever. The door closed and in a moment re-opened. The waiter went in, and I came in behind him. Rachel was in a dark-brown full- length robe with white piping. She wore no make-up. Julie Wells wasn’t in the room. The bathroom door was closed, and I could hear the shower going. Both beds were a little rumpled but still made.

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?”