Night Work

Jephthah’s daughter, nameless even as a sacrifice. And the Song of Solomon, where a young girl out looking for her lover falls into the hands of a group of soldiers, is raped, and then, when she finds her lover again, is forced by her own needs and by his assumptions to act as if nothing had happened.

“That is not exactly how the Bible describes it, but as you probably know, interpretation depends on the eye of the reader, and the experience of being raped changed Dina’s way of looking at the world. It explains why she wrote the dance the way she did, exaggerating the abuse of the guards but also giving Beloved the power to strike back, not only against her attackers, but against the need to hide her rape from Lover.”

The doorbell punctuated his last sentence and Jon started to rise, but Kate waved him back to his seat. She took a tray of dirty plates to the kitchen, pausing to switch on the already-filled coffeemaker, then went to let in Roz, Maj, and Mina. The two adults were carrying containers, and Mina’s arms were wrapped around a bunch of bananas the size of her chest. Shutting the door, Kate asked, “Will we need bowls or plates?”

“Bowls,” said Maj. “Big ones.”

“Everyone’s outside on the patio, I think it’s still warm enough. I’ll bring some bowls and utensils.”

Maj had brought the makings for very high-class banana splits: homemade ice cream yellow with egg yolk and speckled with vanilla bean, bitter chocolate sauce, crumbled pralines, and creme anglaise, with maraschino cherries for the top and delicate, brittle rolled cookies for the side. This was what Jon referred to as cuisine amusante, or gourmet junk food, and it succeeded completely in defeating the nice, healthy dinner they had eaten. In no time at all, the only things left were a few cherries and some cookie crumbs. The evening sky had shifted from blue through rose to dusky lavender and finally to no color at all, and they sat in easy companionship and admired the quarter moon riding low against the city. Eventually, it was getting too cool to sit outside, and they moved in for coffee. Mina asked for the globe puzzle again, and Lee obediently fetched it for her to dismantle.

Roz wanted to talk about Song, and Sione repeated for her benefit the history of the production.

Roz was thrilled. She sat forward on the edge of her seat as if she could pull theological and psychological truths out of the dancer by force.

“Beloved submitting to her lover’s expectations and his lack of sympathy,” she declared, “is just like all the women who fail to report rape, even now. And in a patriarchal society, when the woman’s purity reflects directly on her menfolk, she wouldn’t dare tell him—look at those poor women in Muslim countries who get murdered by their brothers for daring to shame the family by getting themselves raped.”

Maj offered another interpretation. “You don’t think Beloved is simply afraid that if she tells Lover she was attacked, he would go after the guards and be beaten up himself, or killed? That she’s protecting him?”

Roz waved away her partner’s suggestion impatiently. “ ‘Tell him I am sick with love,” Beloved says. She’s hiding her injuries because she knows that if she doesn’t, he’ll be so put off by her lack of purity that he’ll leave her.“

“Interesting, isn’t it,” Lee commented mildly, “that we call Beloved ‘she’ and Lover ‘he’ even though the players were reversed?”

Sione, dressed in khakis, loafers, and a fleece pullover and showing not the least sign of transvestism or gender bending off the stage, smiled.

“As it is written, the parts could be played by either sex, but the director had the two of us at hand, and thought it was more interesting this way. ”A piquant touch,“ one of the reviewers said.”

“But why Beloved’s rage?” Roz demanded. “Why did Moreli decide to have Beloved come in with the bloody knife and then settle back into business as usual with Lover? Is that her idea of happily ever after?”

Maj spoke up. “I’m sure it’s your old friend the warrior-virgin, Roz love. Even if Dina Moreli didn’t have that figure consciously in mind when she wrote the interpretation—after all, that’s what an archetype is, a powerful upwelling from the unconscious. Women’s shakti, like those women on the panel called it.”

“Oh,” Lee broke in, “I meant to tell you how much I enjoyed that program. I taped it and watched it the other night.”

Roz glanced involuntarily at Kate, looking uncomfortable, and Kate wondered in amusement which of the statements Roz had made during the discussion was embarrassing her in hindsight. Roz turned back to Sione.

“But where did that interpretation come from? Did she just pull it out of thin air?”

Sione shrugged apologetically. “I do not really know why Dina wrote it that way. I am only the dancer, not the person who created it. But,” he added, seeing Roz’s impatience, “are Beloved’s actions not, after all, what people do? When driven to uncharacteristic acts, do not most people then fade back into the obscurity of their daily lives?”

Roz opened her mouth to argue, caught Maj’s eye, and then threw out her hands with a smile. “I’m sorry, I realize it isn’t your dance. It’s just that it’s so precisely what I’ve been working on for my dissertation, the juxtaposition of love and rage. And I find it exciting to come across an intelligent and sympathetic interpretation of a biblical text. So many people pretty things up and make them so sweet you want to vomit. Or they go the other direction and dismiss the whole thing as the tool of an oppressive patriarchy.”

“You would see it somewhere in between?” Sione asked dutifully. Maj made a noise and rolled her eyes, but Roz ignored her partner.

“Religion is passion,” the minister of God declared passionately. “The Bible is our document as well as theirs, and it holds all the human experience of fear and love and despair and terror and revenge, of power and the rights of the powerless. It is a paradigm of human behavior. Its theology is one of liberation, and not just in the hands of Latin American Marxism.”

Sione was starting to look bewildered, Jon bored, and Lee stirred and objected mildly, “There is a lot of ugly stuff in the Bible, Roz; you have to admit that.”

“Precisely. Because there’s a lot of ugly stuff in daily life, and pretending there isn’t doesn’t make it so. Life isn’t a fairy tale; the good guys sometimes lose. Hell, even fairy tales aren’t pretty except in twentieth-century America. The original Grimm tales—have you ever read them? Grim’s the word. Little Red Riding Hood doesn’t rescue her granny, she finds her chopped up, bottled, and hanging in the smokehouse.”

“Roz!” Maj protested, looking over to where Mina was kneeling, concentrating on the thick plastic shapes that Lee was fitting together for her. Roz started to bristle, but Sione got in first with a distraction.

“I have always thought that Christianity and left-wing politics were poor bedfellows, which has been a sorrow to me, because the church of my childhood was such a place of joy, full of big women in white hats singing full- throated to the heavens.”

Roz was nodding her head before he finished his sentence. “It is a terrible pity that the right wing has laid exclusive claim to the Bible, so inextricably that it seems impossible to reject the one without the other. But to do so only gives them a victory. It’s not their Bible, and the fact that I claim the same Holy Book makes the Right angrier than anything else I can do. If I rejected their religion entirely I would simply be another poor lost heathen in need of their prayers. By declaring myself a Christian, by knowing the Bible better than most of them do, I became a maddening enigma. And I mean literally maddening: Twice I’ve had men try to rip off my collar.”

“And she regularly gets threatening letters,” Maj told them.

“You never said anything about threats,” Kate said sharply. “What kind—”

“Kate,” Roz interrupted her, shooting a stern glance sideways at her partner. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Why the hell not? You have to take threats seriously these days. There are a lot of nuts out there.”

“You think I don’t know that? Of course I take them seriously, but I don’t want you to get involved. One of your colleagues knows all about the problem.”

“But—”

“Kate, please. Unless one of them actually carries out his threat, it’s not going to be your job.”

“For Christ sake, Roz, that’s not at all funny.”

Lee spoke up as well. “Roz, please don’t joke about this. It isn’t fair to the people who care about you.”

“Sorry, sorry. Anonymous letters come with the territory, and although I assure you that I take the nuts seriously, I have to say that I find the whole subject tedious, and can we please talk about something else?”

“The threats to your immortal soul are much more worrying,” Maj commented, sounding considerably more amused than worried. She explained, “Roz seems to be a regular sermon topic at that grotesque church that tries