Night Work

were more noise than contact.

“What’s this?” she asked a vice detective she had worked with on a couple of cases.

“Decoys. They’re going to troll the parks tonight, see if we can get a bite from the LOPD when he starts slapping her around.”

“Nice,” she said. The woman of the antagonistic couple she now recognized as a patrol officer who had been twice commended for bravery, who had a black belt in some arcane form of martial art, spent her free time producing intricate oil paintings that sold for a small fortune, and loved life on the streets so much she refused to take the exams that she feared would move her up and behind a desk. At the moment, she looked remarkably like a suburban housewife.

“Makes for a change from playing a dealer or a hooker,” the man from vice commented. Kate had to agree.

On the way home, however, she had time to reflect on the assumptions behind the scene she had witnessed. Without a doubt, fear was growing among the men of the city—ironic, that those normally most secure in the streets at night were those who were feeling an unaccustomed discomfort in the hours of darkness. The City’s night life was suffering, its all-important tourist trade threatened, and if the quiet night streets made life easier for those responsible for patrolling them, the economic dip added to the fears felt by half the population meant that the pressure was on. At times like these, Kate was very glad she was not one of the brass.

Kate came through her front door at a trot, shedding equipment and clothing as she went, aware of Lee’s disapproval floating up the stairs and following her into the shower. Kate’s clothes were laid out for her, black silk pants and blouse with an elaborately embroidered vest to go on top. The shoes were as close to heels as she would wear, her hair was too short to worry about, and she even took thirty seconds to swipe some makeup across her eyelids. All terribly civilized, Kate thought, trotting down the stairs again and out to the street, where Lee waited in the passenger seat of Kate’s car, pointedly studying her watch.

“You look delicious,” Kate told her, kissed her, and turned the key in the ignition.

Mollified, either by the compliment or by the speed with which Kate had dressed, Lee’s irritation subsided. They were going out for the evening, and Kate could feel Lee decide that she’d be damned if she would let even her own righteous indignation get in the way of pleasure.

Lee did look delicious in a shimmering gold blouse and loose white crepe pants. Jon wore velvet, Maj looked as majestic as a sailing ship, and Roz, though she swept in late, puffing and apologetic, was dressed in festive formality rather than a power suit and minister’s collar.

The night before, Kate had braved Lee’s study to refresh her memory of the Song of Songs, that Old Testament book attributed to Solomon (he of the many wives) that she remembered as being endearingly erotic, filled with odd descriptions of breasts like gazelles and cheeks like pomegranates. Lee had apparently had the same idea, because the Bible lay open on her desk. Kate sat down to read. Ten minutes later she closed the soft leather covers, vaguely disquieted. Erotic, yes, but some of the passages were also puzzling, others almost troubling. Perhaps, she thought, Roz was right, that more than the words had changed when the Bible was rendered into English. Certainly a reader was left with the distinct impression of various translators along the way tidying up and applying generous quantities of whitewash, and that underneath their quaint images lay a fairly explicit picture of ancient sex.

In Song, the whitewash had been pretty thoroughly scrubbed away.

When the women entered the small theater to take their seats beside Jon, the lights were dim, the buzz of anticipation damped down under the sensation that the performance was already beginning—as indeed it was, for on a platform raised up over the right side of the stage sat three figures dressed in white. They perched there motionless, their heads bent, but the audience was very aware of them and incomers took to their seats with hushed conversation and wary glances upward. Kate looked at the program and saw that the two main characters would be “Lover,” played by someone called Kamsin Neale, and “Beloved,” the part played by Sione Kalefu.

The set, as Maj had said the other night at dinner, was striking. Black dominated, punctuated by draped lengths of intensely colored net fabric, gold and ruby and lapis curtains against the dark. Some were supple, drifting and changing colors with the currents of air. Others were static, rigid as frozen flames leaping up from the stage to disappear into the hidden heights. The small overhead spots picked them out as clouds of sheer color, some of which sparkled as if they had been sprinkled with finely ground rubies and emeralds and sapphires. The set was both stark and sumptuous, empty and powerful.

The seats gradually filled, the anticipatory hush intensified, and the three figures crouched on the raised platform might have been statues. Finally came movement, as five black-clad men and women filed across the stage from the right, came down the short flight of steps on the left that led to the orchestra pit, and took up a peculiar variety of instruments: oboe, viola, drums and an assortment of bells and percussion objects, an electronic keyboard, and a sitar. They spent a few minutes tuning this unlikely chamber orchestra, the weird atonality of the notes mingling slowly until a sort of music came out, and then the instruments fell silent, and the audience slowly became aware that at some point the actors had entered the stage.

Song was a story, much more of a narrative than what Kate had read in Lee’s black Bible. The two main characters, who in the original had been heterosexual lovers, were in this production both profoundly androgynous, to the extent that it took Kate a good twenty minutes to decide that Lover, the big muscular one dressed in reds and oranges, was played by the woman Kamsin, while the slim, dark, pursued character in blue— Beloved—was actually Jon’s new friend Sione.

The viola began, to be joined a short time later by a throaty voice from the seated trio above, reciting the words of the Song of Solomon. “O that you would kiss me with the kisses of your mouth,” the voice murmured, and the two dancers began to move slowly around each other, becoming acquainted, flirting, moving apart, glancing back at each other, until finally they came together in an exploratory embrace. Lee’s fingers crept into Kate’s in the dark, caressing palm and wrist, playing under the silken cuff of Kate’s blouse. Kate shivered at the scrape of Lee’s nail, and could feel Lee beside her smiling into the dark.

Other dancers swirled onstage and off: Beloved’s disapproving brothers, Lover’s friends, but each time the pair shook the others loose and returned to their increasingly passionate self-absorption. “Black am I, and beautiful,” chanted the three narrators. “Sustain me with raisin cakes, strengthen me with apples, for I am faint with love.” Beloved’s brothers stormed in, angrily trying to separate them, but the two lovers slipped behind a cloud of glowing red voile, and were safely lost in each other again.

The dancing grew more intense, the music wilder. To a quickening beat, the pair on the stage caught up lengths of crimson and cobalt gauze that swirled about them, first concealing, then revealing (and going far to explain the production’s X rating). The flurry of colors came to a climax in a rush of atonal music, and then breathlessly subsided. The spotlights dimmed on the entwined figures, the voices grew to drowsy murmurs. (“When the day breathes out and the shadows grow, turn to me, my love, like a buck, like a young stag on the mountains.”)

The lights fell further, until the stage was dark and utterly silent. The silence held for a dozen or more heartbeats, broken only by a cough from the audience, and then a faint light flickered and grew off to the right, a beam that illuminated a section of wall and a single figure, lying alone in a heap: Beloved. Sione stirred, stretched languorously, and then rose, looking around with growing agitation for Lover. The distraught figure snatched up a small lamp, using it to search the room, and then burst through an opening in the prop wall and directly into the arms of a troop of uniformed guards. The voices identified them as “guards of the city, armed and trained against the terrors of night,” but instead of protecting (and indeed, though clothed in khaki, one of them bore a startling resemblance to the burly cop Kate had seen at the Hall of Justice, preparing to “beat” his “wife” as bait for the night’s avenging Ladies), the guards seized Beloved, began to laugh and pluck at the diaphanous blue garments. The voices for Beloved pleaded with the guards, asking them to say if they had seen Lover, but the guards merely laughed, and reached out, until Beloved twisted away from them and escaped.

Immediately, Lover appeared from offstage. Beloved flung “herself” at the strong figure, who wrapped strong arms around Beloved and snatched “her” away into a room. The two lovers embraced, but the note of the oboe, which had dominated the scene with the guards, remained, quiet and disquieting, in the background of the scenes that followed.

The reunited lovers, surrounding themselves with armed and uniformed soldiers of their own, retreated in safety and triumph to an enclosed garden, a womblike bower of shimmering green where they sang and danced and