Night Work

which a recent sonogram had revealed was to be another female addition to the all-woman household). She then dutifully turned to the other two places to greet Jon and his companion, a long-ago lover turned friend named Geoff DeRosa.

Kate had lived under the same roof as Jon for almost two years, and was occasionally struck dumb with wonder that in all that time she hadn’t murdered him. Yet. Jon had been a client of Lee’s in her previous life, before they had all become tied together by the bullet that nicked Lee’s spine, and he had expiated his guilt feelings over the minor role he played in leading a killer to her door by turning the tables and becoming, over Kate’s profound misgivings, his therapist’s caregiver. He was strong for his size, a necessary consideration in the early days of Lee’s care, and he worked cheap, an even more necessary factor. And if he drove Kate crazy with his continual presence, his endlessly mercurial relationships, and his deep devotion to bad music, he amused Lee, and in the end that was the most important consideration of all. Kate had grown to tolerate him, as she would have an irritating lapdog snuffling around the rugs; they occasionally even had moments of honest connection. Brief moments.

“I thought you were going to be out tonight,” she said to him, and then hoped she hadn’t sounded too disappointed. Jon took the question at face value.

“Later. Geoff has tickets for the opening of Song.”

“A new play?” she asked around a mouthful of still-warm scalloped potatoes.

“You haven’t heard of it?” Jon sat back in amazement, an emotion every bit as real as the one manufactured by Emily Larsen. Kate chewed politely and waited for the rest. “You will hear about it soon—the Bible bashers are up in arms. It’s bound to be in the paper in the morning. Probably even the TV news.”

“And why is that?” she prompted obligingly.

“Because it’s from the Good Book itself. They’ve taken the Song of Songs and set it to music and dance.”

Light began to dawn. “I suppose it’s X-rated?”

“What else would be the purpose?” Jon answered, fluttering his eyelashes and murmuring in a dramatically throaty voice, “ ‘Oh, comfort me with apples.” “ Geoff giggled in appreciation.

“You know,” Roz broke in, “there’s actually a long tradition of using the Song of Songs for what you might call bawdy purposes. The early rabbis had to pass an injunction against singing it in alehouses. It is pretty dirty.”

“I don’t remember it as being dirty,” Kate objected. Her own childhood Catholicism was long lapsed, but the idea of using the Bible to make a smutty play tweaked some vestigial nerve, leaving her mildly affronted. Roz took her objection as a request for further enlightenment, and went on with her lesson in Bible studies.

“The Song is generally regarded as symbolic of God’s love for His people, but in fact it’s probably an adaptation from a royal marriage-slash-battle ritual. Capture your bride and then screw her.”

“Ooh,” Jon trilled. “Kinky.”

Lee ignored him, and asked Roz, “Are you serious?” It was not always easy to tell with Roz, but the woman shrugged.

“It’s part of what I’m working on in my thesis,” she said, a trifle defensive—as Lee had once commented, Roz tended to hide her academic side like a dirty secret. She had been working on a Ph.D. for the last few years, in addition to being a full-time ordained minister in an alternative church composed mostly of gay and lesbian parishioners and spending long hours as unpaid advocate for a long list of causes. Maj referred to these, half despairingly, as her partner’s Campaigns.

“I have heard that the production is gorgeous,” Maj commented, since the academic discussion seemed to have reached a dead end. Geoff, it seemed, knew one of the costume designers, which was how he got opening- night tickets and an invitation to the party afterward. Roz, hearing this, declared that she had been looking for someone to help out with a church play, and before anyone quite knew how, she had bullied Geoff into bringing his designer friend by the church the next day to talk about some volunteer work, and then Maj stepped in even more firmly and diverted the conversation into a discussion of the various ethnic dance techniques and costumes used in Song, while Kate dedicated herself to her plate; both enterprises ran empty more or less simultaneously.

Kate cleared the plates, set some coffee to brew, brought in the glistening fruit tarts Lee had made for dessert, laughed at jokes and told one of her own, and began to feel a part of her relax a fraction under the sheer normality of an evening spent among friends. Maybe she wouldn’t ask Roz about Carla Lomax after all.

When the tarts had been reduced to a few crumbs and Jon and Geoff had left for Song, Kate laid a fire in the fireplace. The four women took their cups (herbal tea for Maj) and moved to the sofas. Kate carried Lee’s cup, waited until her lover had settled herself and tucked the cuffed arm crutches out of the way, and then handed Lee the coffee and sat down beside her. Maj eased herself into the overstuffed cushions across from them, and sat back into Roz’s encircling arm, just as Lee was settling back against Kate, giving a little sigh of satisfaction that sent a brief electrical shiver up Kate’s spine that was as powerful as lust, but more cerebral: hope, perhaps.

“Do you mind if I put my feet up on the table?” Maj asked. “I know it’s rude, but my midwife tells me it helps my circulation.”

“Of course not,” Lee said. “Can we get you a pillow or something?”

“No, this is fine.” Maj reached out and turned a magazine facedown before she threaded her bare feet, covered in thick black stockings that reminded Kate of rest homes, out over the low table and onto the magazine. She balanced her cup and saucer on her protruding belly, and grimaced self-consciously. “It’s not all fun,” she commented. Indeed, once Kate focused on her, Maj did not appear her normal collected self. She looked pale, even wan, and had not had her usual appetite at dinner.

“Seven more weeks,” Roz said, rubbing her partner’s arm by way of encouragement; Maj appeared more depressed by the remaining time than encouraged.

“I was very impressed to see the mayor the other night,” Kate told Roz. “Don’t tell me you have him making points?”

“God, no. It’s part of his PR, going to school things. Keeping in touch with the community and all that. Someone suggested this because of the school’s high test scores and great ethnic balance, that’s all.”

Kate could well guess who that someone had been, and she wouldn’t have been surprised if points had indeed entered the mind of that savvy politician. Of both savvy politicians—Roz was well on her way to becoming a force to be reckoned with, and beyond the borders of the city, or even the state. She looked to be the gay equivalent of what Cecil Williams had become for the African-American community, a charismatic voice, reasonable yet devoutly committed, San Francisco’s representative lesbian.

Roz simply had everything going for her. She was articulate, deeply committed, passionate in her causes but capable of choosing reason over rhetoric, communication over in-your-face confrontation. Despite her relatively moderate public stance and her willingness to compromise, there was no doubt whatsoever where she stood. Even the most radical of gay rights advocates admitted her to their fold, and she had been instrumental over the last few years in engineering seemingly impossible agreements between opposing sides. Enormous of heart, possessed of a cutting intelligence, charismatic, articulate, and tireless, Roz was, in a word, compelling, and Kate was no more immune to her charm than anyone else. Including the mayor, who had once called Roz the nicest woman he’d ever been stabbed by.

Kate had only met Roz a year before, in the course of an investigation that took her to Berkeley’s so-called “holy hill,” the site of a number of theological seminaries. Roz had been wearing her clerical collar and her guise as a late-blooming grad student, and only some months later did Kate discover that Roz and Lee had, as they say, history.

Lee had known Rosalyn Hall for years, since grad school at UC Berkeley, in fact, where Roz was doing a master’s degree and Lee a Ph.D., both in psychology. The two had worked together, discovered a shared passion for Eastern religion, and had taken off to India and Nepal for six weeks, during which trip they had been, briefly, lovers. Two such dominant personalities were not a comfortable match, however, and they had parted—as friends, although from what Lee did not say about that parting, and her manner when she did not say it, Kate had the impression that some dark happening lay at the parting’s roots. Roz was not all cleverness and light.

Long years later, when Kate came across the cleric and Lee was still struggling against the bullet’s shattering effects, Kate, thinking only that a minor resumption of Lee’s counseling work might be therapeutic, had all unknowing encouraged Roz to reach out to the injured woman. By the time Lee told her of the old relationship with