“What shall I do?” she said to me. “I don’t know anyone else to ask.”
“You know where Rachel is?”
“No, of course not. How would I? We were friends, lovers if you’d rather, but we weren’t in love or anything. And if people—”
“You don’t want people to know that you’re a lesbian.”
She made a little shiver. “God, I hate the word. It’s so … clinical, like classifying an odd plant.”
“But you still don’t want it known?”
“Well, I’m not ashamed. You put it so baldly. I have made a life choice that’s not like yours, or some others, and I have no reason to be ashamed. It’s as natural as anyone else.”
“So why not talk with the cops? Don’t you want to find Rachel Wallace?”
She clasped her hands together and pressed the knuckles against her mouth. Tears formed again. “Oh, God, poor Rachel. Do you think she’s alive?”
The waitress brought my toast and coffee.
When she left, I said, “I don’t have any way to know. I have to assume she is, because to assume she isn’t leaves me nothing to do.”
“And you’re looking for her?”
“I’m looking for her.”
“If I knew anything that would help, I’d say so. But what good will it do Rachel to have my name smeared in the papers? To have the people at the model agency—”
“I don’t know what good,” I said. “I don’t know what you know. I don’t know why someone is following you, or was—I assume you’ve lost him.”
She nodded. “I got away from him on the subway.”
“So who would he be? Why would he follow you? It’s an awful big coincidence that Rachel is taken and then someone follows you.”
“I don’t know, I don’t know anything. What if they want to kidnap me? I don’t know what to do.” She stared out the window at the empty snow-covered street.
“Why not stay with your mother and brother?” I said.
She looked back at me slowly. I ate a triangle of toast.
“What do you know about my mother and brother?”
“I know their names and I know their politics and I know their attitude toward Rachel Wallace, and I can guess their attitude toward you if they knew that you and Rachel were lovers.”
“Have you been … did you … you don’t have the right to … ”
“I haven’t mentioned you to them. I did mention you to the cops, but only when I had to, quite recently.”
“Why did you have to?”
“Because I’m looking for Rachel, and I’ll do anything I have to to find her. When I figured out that you were Lawrence English’s sister, I thought it might be a clue. It might help them find her. They’re looking, too.”
“You think my brother—”
“I think he’s in this somewhere. His chauffeur hired two guys to run me and Rachel off the road one night in Lynn. Your brother organized a picket line when she spoke in Belmont. Your brother has said she’s an ungodly corruption or some such. And he’s the head of an organization of Ritz crackers that would be capable of such things.”
“I didn’t used to know I was gay,” she said. “I just thought I was not very affectionate. I got married. I felt guilty about being cold. I even did therapy. It didn’t work. I was not a loving person. We were divorced. He said I was like a wax apple. I looked wonderful, but there was nothing inside—no nourishment. I went to a support group meeting for people recently divorced, and I met a woman and cared for her, and we developed a relationship, and I found out I wasn’t empty. I could love. I could feel passion. It was maybe the moment in my life. We made love and I felt. I”—she looked out the window again, and I ate another piece of toast—“I reached orgasm. It was as if, as if … I don’t know what it was as if.”
“As if a guilty verdict had been overturned.”
She nodded. “Yes. Yes. I wasn’t bad. I wasn’t cold. I had been trying to love the wrong things.”
“But Mom and brother?”
“You’ve met them?”
“Brother,” I said. “Not yet Momma.”
“They could never understand. They could never accept it. It would be just the worst thing that could be for them. I wish for them—maybe for me, too—I wish it could have been different, but it can’t, and it’s better to be what I am than to be failing at what I am not. But they mustn’t ever know. That’s why I can’t go to the police. I can’t let them know. I don’t mind the rest of the world. It’s them. They can’t know. I don’t know what they would do.”
“Maybe they’d kidnap Rachel,” I said.
