'I can't put it off till tomorrow. He's dying and may not be there tomorrow. I can be back by eleven o'clock.'
'Give me the address.' Lee did so, and Kate wrote it down. 'See you at eleven, then.'
'I'm—. Thank you for calling.'
'I love you, Lee.'
The silence at the other end was so complete that eventually Kate thought Lee had hung up, and she said in a question, 'Lee?'
'Yes. Eleven o'clock. Good-bye, Kate.' Then the line did go dead.
And that was it. When Kate walked through the door of Lee's ridiculously oversized office, and Lee looked across the desk at her with hope and fear and doubt jostling one another in her green eyes, all of Kate's prepared speeches fled from her, all her own doubts and demands dropped away, and the two strong, competent professional women stared hopelessly at each other across the room, mouths empty and hands fluttering in aborted little gestures, until Lee rose from her leather chair and picked her way around the large desk as if she were walking a balance beam. She stopped in front of Kate, and Kate took the final step, and they folded into each other's arms like two storm-ravaged sailors coming blessedly into home port.
Completely, profoundly, body and mind and spirit, Kate fell into love with Lee Cooper—or rather, acknowledged the love that she had so long denied. She was amazed at the ease of the thing, almost like, she thought one day driving home to Lee, getting to the end of a puzzle and finding you'd been given the wrong pieces and then finding the right ones, and it all falls smoothly, naturally into place. With Lee it was, from the first day, so very natural, so right, skipping all the stages of flirting and the fawning erotic tension of new couples and moving easily into the feel of a long-established, successful marriage.
Life, too, seemed to slip into a remarkably smooth patch, in that way things have sometimes of imitating internal states. Kate transferred sideways into a niche in San Jose, worked her way up the ladder, attended classes, passed exams, shooting hard for promotion into the investigative division. Lee began to make a name for herself; flew to conferences and workshops, with increasing frequency as a guest speaker; discovered in herself the ability to work with terminal patients which, in combination with her training and interest in the arts, steered her straight into the gay community's epidemic. It was emotionally grueling work, and at least once a month Lee let herself into their apartment with swollen eyes and smeared makeup. But it was needed work, and she could do it.
Then two years ago Lee's mother died. Kate had never met her, and so far as she knew Lee had not seen or talked with the old woman since being thrown out in disgrace at the age of eighteen. Mrs. Cooper did not approve of lesbians. It came therefore as a considerable surprise to everyone when her will revealed that she not only had never actually disinherited her daughter but had gone so far as to leave her the house she had lived in for thirty years, a house, moreover, that was not only valuable in and of itself but was located on perhaps the most desirable acres in San Francisco. Russian Hill overlooks the financial district, the port of San Francisco (the tourist port, not the heavy cargo area), the two bridges, and the sweep of the Bay around the eastern tip of the peninsula. Cable car bells drift up from three sides, fog horns from the fourth. North Beach and Chinatown are an easy walk (downhill, at any rate) and Fisherman's Wharf a slightly longer one. The view alone was worth a million dollars. Real estate agents had fought for the listing, and Lee's future was tinted a nice shade of rose.
'Don't you want to see the place before it goes on the market?' Lee asked Kate one Saturday morning in April.
'Lee, I don't want anything to do with your mother or her house. She was an awful woman; she treated you like a dog that piddled on the carpets. I think you deserve every penny you can get out of her estate, but I don't want any more personal contact with her than the dollars in your bank account.'
'She's gone from the house. Completely gone, with the last of her furniture. I think, just as a building, you really should see it. It's an amazing place. There's only a handful like it in the city. It was built by Willis Polk just before the turn of the century. In another fifty years they'll want to make it into a museum. Come with me. Please?'
It was obviously important to Lee, so Kate packed away her feelings of indignation and went with her, and that afternoon she fell in love for a second time. It was a strong house, solid and honest, not overpowering in the way showy architects strive for but as a capable and supporting friend is strong. Lee showed her through the house, reviewing all the work that needed to be done, bemoaning its state of disrepair, and gradually falling silent, so that when they both drifted across the stripped and bare living room to stand at the panoramic window, no words had been said for about five minutes. Finally Kate tore her eyes from the view and concentrated on the mockingbird perched in the neighbor's large tree.
'Damn it, Lee, you did this deliberately. We couldn't possibly afford to live here. Why did you bring me here?'
'My income would cover the taxes and insurance,' she said mildly.
'And we'd eat off mine? That's a lot of beans and rice, honey.'
'We can change our minds any time. There'll always be a market for this kind of house.'
'And move where? How the hell could you live in an apartment after living here? Be like eating cat food when you were used to caviar.'
'But you'll do it? You don't mind if we try?'
'It's completely crazy,' said Kate despairingly, and Lee kissed her.
It was crazy, and it was hard—hour upon hour of back-breaking, unfamiliar, filthy labor with hammer and crowbar, Skil saw and belt sander; making heartbreaking mistakes, learning new skills, working long hours of overtime to pay for this mad venture; tedious commutes for Kate, who could not shift jobs as easily as Lee; fights over bills and burst pipes.
The one great blessing, disguised though it was at first, was that it left them neither time nor money for a social life, and the cloud that had threatened from the horizon, that in fact had blackened the skies and thrown several ominous drops on them, had retreated somewhat, become an uneasily ignored factor in their lives.
Kate would not come out. She told Lee the very first day, in Lee's office in Palo Alto, and Lee, flushed and alive with the incomprehensible return to life of a dream that had begun to degenerate into mere fantasy, and believing that in this, too, Kate would change her mind, acquiesced. She had Kate; she would not risk losing her by insisting that they go public. Time would bring it.
Time had not. What had begun as a mild irritation had grown to an open sore, threatening to infect the entire relationship. The month before Lee's mother died it had flared up when Lee invited two of her colleagues home for dinner and over coffee had casually revealed that she and Kate were not just housemates. The guests left an hour later. Kate turned on Lee in a fury.
'How dare you! You promised me, you gave me your word that you wouldn't say anything about us to anybody. You probably brag about it at the clinic, 'how I overcame my lover's scruples.' Lee, how
'Oh, Kate, this isn't 1950, for God's sake. It's not even 1970. Your coming out might be a five-minute wonder in a very small circle, but that's all.'
'No, Lee, that's not all, not by a long shot. We move in different worlds, you and I, and I can't take the risk. I'm a cop, Lee. A woman cop. If we came out, how long do you suppose it'd be before the papers managed to let slip the juicy tidbit that Officer K. C. Martinelli is one of the leather brigade? How long before the looks and remarks start, before I start drawing all the real hard-core shit jobs, before I'm on a call and someone refuses to deal with me because I'm that lez in the department and I might have AIDS? How long before some mama flips out when I try to ask her daughter some questions about the bastard that's raped her, because mama doesn't want that dyke cop feeling up her daughter?'
'You're being ridiculous, Kate. Paranoid. Look, if this were Saudi Arabia, or Texas, or L.A. even, I could understand, but here, in the Bay Area? Now? It's not news that there are gays in the department. Nobody gives a damn.'
'
'You're ashamed of it. You've always felt it shameful, but Kate, you've got to face it, or it'll tear you to —'
'I'm not ashamed of it!' Kate bellowed furiously, and then abruptly, without warning, her fury deflated, and she looked at her lover in a despair that came from the depths of her fatigue. 'I'm not ashamed,' she said quietly.
