A Grave Talent (25 page)

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Kate had first set eyes on Leonora Cooper nine years before in a vast lecture hall at the University of California, Berkeley. Kate was nineteen, beginning her sophomore year, closed into this inadequately ventilated space with several hundred other budding psychologists on a drowsy October afternoon, the fourth lecture of the term. A new figure walked up to the lectern, a tall, slim young woman with an unruly mop of yellow hair, awkward knees, and an air of quiet confidence as she stood beneath the cynical gaze of nearly a thousand eyes, eyes that had long since learned to view T.A.'s with misgiving.

This one, however, was something different. For two hours she held those hundreds of sleepy freshmen and sophomores--made them laugh, respond, made them like her. She even made them learn something. She was less than five years from them in age--three years older than Kate-- but she possessed a maturity and scope of vision most of them would never know. She took three more lectures during the quarter, and each time it was the same: the back rows of sleepers sat up, newspapers were put away, the constant undercurrent of whispers and coughs died down. Her passion for the workings of the human mind ruled them.

In the winter quarter Kate arranged to be in the section led by Lee Cooper, by the simple expedient of bribing the graduate student who was responsible for assigning students to T.A.' s. It was the best ten dollars Kate had ever spent.

The first week of the spring quarter came, a quarter in which Kate had no psychology course, and on a brilliant April morning she tapped on the door of the tiny cubicle that was Lee's office and asked if her former instructor would like to join her for a picnic up above campus. She would, and they did, and by June they were friends.

During Kate's junior year their friendship deepened, and for the first time in her life Kate found herself telling someone about her problems, her questions, her life. In the course of the year Kate had three tumultuous relationships with men, and Lee listened as the affairs first blossomed, and then became rocky, and finally fell apart in rage and pain. In the miserable cold of a wet January, Kate's kid sister was killed by a drunk driver, and when Kate returned after the funeral, stunned and unseeing, Lee talked gently and fed her tea and toast and walked with her to lectures.

Kate's senior year was also Lee's last year in her Ph.D. program. They were both extremely busy, Kate sweating her finals and Lee writing her dissertation. Over the Christmas break Kate told her family that she had decided to join the police force and spent the next days devising snappy answers to the questions repeated by person after person. Why do you want to be a cop? To see if I can clean up some of the dirt in the world. But isn't it dangerous? No more so than driving on a rainy January afternoon. At the end of it she escaped to Berkeley and went to tell Lee she'd made her decision. Lee simply nodded and said she thought it a good idea, and what did Kate think of the Bergman film down on University Avenue tonight?

During those last months the relationship between the two women developed some odd areas of tension and restraint, though Kate was not sure why. She thought it might be that the end was near, when the sheltered world of the university would throw them in separate directions, and they were preparing themselves for the wrench. Kate also had a relatively stable relationship with a man and for the first time began to think about living together, even marriage. She wondered occasionally about Lee, who had a hundred friends for every one of Kate's, who hugged and touched men and women alike, but who never, as far as Kate knew, had a lover. She even asked Lee about it once, late one candle-lit night, but Lee had smiled easily, shrugged, and said that she was just too busy.

Graduation was in June. The following day Kate was in her room in the house she shared with five others, putting her last bits and pieces into cardboard boxes, when a single tap came on the closed door. She opened it, and there stood Lee, hair wilder than ever, shirt wrinkled, face tight, her pupils dilated hugely.

"Lee! Or should I say, Dr. Cooper? I'm glad you came by. I was going to hunt you down later to say good-bye. Sit down. Are you okay? You want some coffee or something? There's still pans and food in the kitchen. Sit down."

"No, I won't. I'm leaving tonight for New York. I decided to take that residency."

"Oh. Two years." Kate looked dumbly at the book in her hand, and she turned to arrange it with great precision inside a box of others. "I'm happy for you. I thought--I admit I was hoping you'd take the job in Palo Alto." Her hands felt cold and sweaty, and she wiped them along the sides of her jeans, then straightened and turned back to Lee. "So. I guess it's good-bye."

Lee's green eyes were nearly black and seemed only inches from Kate's. "I hope not," she said finally, and then, shockingly, she took a step towards Kate, seized Kate's head between her hands, and kissed her hard, full on the lips. When she loosed her hands, Kate jerked back a step as if she'd been held by an electrical current, and Lee turned and disappeared rapidly in a clatter of feet on the uncarpeted stairs and a slam of the front door. Kate made no move to follow her but stood for several minutes staring blindly at the open door before mechanically reaching for the remainder of her undergraduate life and packing it away into its boxes.

The stable relationship died a bitter death, and Lee was not there. Kate did not write to her about it but answered Lee's letters briefly. She graduated from the academy, made her first arrests, began painfully to construct the essential armor of distance that looks like callous indifference but which enables the cop to preserve a humanity in the face of dead bodies and abused children and the bestial inhumanity of greed.

The only problem was that the armor began to prove more and more difficult to shed. She slept with a number of men but found it difficult to rouse much interest in the proceedings unless they'd both been drinking and edged into argument. At odd moments, in bed before sleep, on patrol, doing paperwork, she would taste Lee's mouth on hers, and it never failed to bring a brief spasm of ache and a flood of repugnance. She took to running long miles that fall, and it helped. She settled in for the long haul.

Thirty months after graduation two things happened to tumble Kate from the tenuous security she had built. The first was a letter from Lee. The second was the night when she nearly murdered a man.

The letter arrived a few days before Christmas, just before Kate left for night shift. It was Lee's first letter in months. Kate looked at the familiar scrawl and the New York cancellation, and put it unopened on the table next to the front door. It was still there when she came in early the next morning, and there waiting when she woke up at noon. She made coffee and sat in her bathrobe at the tiny table in her incongruously cheery kitchen and pulled it open. In its entirety, it read:

My dear Kate,

New York was going nowhere. The people in Palo Alto offered again and I accepted. I start immediately, on the 23rd. I won't call you, but if you could bear it, I would be grateful if you would allow me to make you a picnic lunch.

Lee

It gave her new address and a telephone number, and Kate reread it until the sour stench of boiling coffee brought her to her senses. She dumped the coffee out into the sink and started again, and pushed the memory of Lee's last sentence away as she left for work. She did not call, and the letter sat in a drawer, waiting.

It waited until the middle of January. Kate was in a patrol car, her partner driving, just after midnight on a night of cold drizzle, in one of the nastier parts of town. A faint tinkle of breaking glass sent the car accelerating forward into the next block. Two young men sprinted away from the store window pursued by the skidding patrol car, around the block and down an alley. Her partner slammed on the brakes and Kate was out in an instant, shouting for them to stop. One of them slowed and threw his hands up, but the other whirled around with a glinting black ugly thing in his hand that flashed and shot out a window far overhead, and in the same movement he let the gun go skittering across the filthy concrete and his hands went up and he began to shriek not to shoot, not to shoot, not to shoot. Kate lay sprawled with her sights on his chest and her finger aching, needing, lusting to put just that much more pressure on the bit of metal underneath it, and it took all her will to block the rush of desire to end it all, as if she herself were the target rather than this blubbering, shaking boy whose cheap leather jacket filled her vision. It was not until her partner had the cuffs on the kid that the wave began to subside, and as she lowered her suddenly heavy gun she felt herself began to shake, shamefully, uncontrollably. A cup of scalding coffee at the station didn't help, and her partner, an older man she'd worked with before, and liked, told her to go home early.

A hot bath turned her skin scarlet, but not until she finished the second big gin (a drink she hated, but it was the only alcohol in the house--one of her men had left it) did the shakes turn to occasional shivers. She did not sleep, though. Every time she closed her eyes she saw the dark leather disintegrate in an explosion of blood, so she turned the heat up high and wrapped herself in a blanket, and watched the late/early movies and the farm reports and the morning news with the sound off, and at a more reasonable hour, slightly drunk, called Lee. She answered at the third ring.

"Cooper." When Kate did not respond, Lee's voice sharpened. "Hello? This is Doctor Cooper's office."

"Lee?"

"Yes, this is Lee Cooper."

"Lee, this is Kate." There was no response, so she added, "Kate Martinelli."

"You don't have to tell me your last name; there's only one Kate. You did get my letter, then. I rather hoped I hadn't mailed it. I was... not myself... when I wrote it."

"Can I come and see you?" Kate said abruptly.

"I would like very much to see you, Kate. When?"

"Now?"

"Now? I was just on my way out the door."

"You're leaving for work?"

"This is my office number. I'm on my way to the hospital to see a client. I'll be there most of the morning."

"Can't it wait?" Kate bit back her desperation. "I mean..."

"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.