“Maybe because S/M is an especially hard issue for black women. When you’ve got a history of slavery in the not so distant past you’re not real thrilled about the idea of pretending to be slave and mistress. It cuts too near the bone to be thinking about wearing leg irons—or even putting leg irons on somebody else.”

  We sat in silence a moment, then June said, “So, are you any closer to figuring out who killed Loie Marsh?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve run through everybody in the panel in my mind. I can’t believe that any of them had a reason to kill her. I see them all so clearly waiting to go on stage, they couldn’t have been out in the bushes with a dog collar. Gracie and Miko were talking, Elizabeth was sitting there with her lover…”

  “What about Sonya?”

  “I guess I didn’t know what she looked like before she came on stage. She could have been late. Nicky was also late, I remember. But we’d seen her and Oak in the restaurant. How would they have had time to kill Loie? That leaves Hanna, Loie’s cousin, who also came in late, but with her father.”

  “Well?”

  “But what would any of their motives be? The only one I can see who had a really obvious motive is Pauline, her ex-lover. Loie had left her and had taken all the research materials for a book they’d worked on together. But Pauline wasn’t in Seattle the night of the murder. She was in Boston because Mrs. Marsh talked to her.”

  “What about people you don’t know?”

  “That’s the trouble, I don’t know any of her friends or enemies from Boston… and she had an ex-husband too. And all of a sudden everyone looks and sounds suspicious to me. For instance, I heard Loie and someone arguing after Loie’s workshop. I don’t know who it was, but it sounded as if Loie was planning to reveal something that the other woman didn’t want her to reveal. I didn’t recognize the voice—it could have been anybody.”

  June stood up and stretched. “I’m supposed to go over and see Gracie tonight,” she said. “Maybe you want to come with me? You could check her out, maybe ask her some questions. But she’ll talk your ear off, I’m warning you.”

  Before going to Gracie’s however, there was something else I thought I should do, and that was stop by a planning meeting for the Loie March, as some people were already calling it. This was to be an enormous Take Back the Night march in honor of Loie and her fight against pornography. All the staunchest anti-porn activists were going to be there and I thought this might be an opportunity to ask a few more questions.

  It was being held at the downtown YWCA. June declined to accompany me and I agreed to pick her up at nine to visit Gracie.

  The room was packed with a combination of long-time activists with many agenda-setting and task-division skills and a crowd of women, many of whom were in tears of fury, rage and abandonment over Loie’s death. They were the women who had read and discussed The Silenced Heart in their Women’s Studies classes; they were the generation who had come out as feminists and lesbian feminists at a time when the Women Against Violence Against Women movement was burgeoning and consciousness about rape, incest and sexual harassment was at its peak. These women didn’t see Loie as human, but as their hero, their martyr. They didn’t just want a march in her honor, they wanted to rename a downtown street for her; they wanted to dedicate a park or a building to her memory; they wanted to pull down the statue of George Washington on campus and put up one of Loie instead.

  “Let’s just start with the march for now,” suggested Elizabeth Ketteridge’s lover, Nan, who was chairing the meeting. “Now, who can make posters?”

  “I think we should occupy the Mayor’s office,” interrupted an earnest woman in jeans and a checked shirt. “Until there’s a full-scale investigation of Loie’s murder. Obviously there’s been a conspiracy and we need to get to the bottom of it.”

  “It’s exactly what Loie always talked about,” someone else said. “Women who resist are murdered.”

  “It’s because she was writing a new book!”

  “That’s right! Where is that book? We’ve got to make sure it’s published before they suppress it.”

  “Or censor it,” someone else said. “The sexual liberals are always screeching about censorship, but they censor us all the time.”

  “They’re just worried about having access to their own little sex fantasies. They don’t care about the voices of real women talking about sexual abuse.”

  “Has anyone actually read her new book?” I put in. “Does anyone know what she was planning to say?”

  There was a silence and then a woman said, almost reverently, “I believe she was planning to go much much further than she had in The Silenced Heart.”

  Several people nodded intensely.

  “Further in what direction?” I persevered.

  “Loie Marsh was writing her history,” the woman said. “And not just her history. Our history.”

  “What history is that?” I inquired, but the discussion was channeled by Nan into a suggestion that a self-appointed task force see if parts of the manuscript could be read at the march.

  I wasn’t a meeting person and I began to lose interest as the tasks were divided. I couldn’t understand it. Not one of these women seemed to see Loie as a real person, with possibly some real pain in her life that had driven her to see pornography as the thing to be fought at all costs. Loie Marsh wasn’t writing history; as far as they were concerned she was history.

  But it was the woman I was interested in, not the symbol. I regretted that I hadn’t approached her at the conference, that I had been too awed to talk to her directly. Maybe if I had, I would have had a better idea of what kind of person she was, what motivated and possessed her.

  “Now, is there someone who knows a printer who would be willing to donate the printing of the poster and flyers?” Nan asked, looking straight at me.

  I nodded involuntarily. How had I managed to forget Meeting Rule Number One? Never go to a gathering of this sort unless you plan to come away on a committee.

  I escaped before I could agree to anything else.

  Gracie London lived in Madrona, a neighborhood of big old houses near Lake Washington. Her house was set back from the street and surrounded by tall evergreens dripping with rain. The sunny day had vanished in stormclouds during the afternoon.

  We walked into a living room so filled with bookshelves that it was like looking at woven rugs, all color and pattern, lining the walls. This seemed to be Gracie’s study too; a computer terminal stuck its head out of a book-and-paper-piled desk like a groundhog in spring. Next to the desk were two file cabinets and stacks of clippings and copies to be filed.

  “I need a secretary,” groaned Gracie. “Or to be less interested in world events. Sometimes I get my daughter to do it.”

  It surprised me again what an attractive woman she was. From my seat in the audience she’d looked brilliant but remote and professional. Now in the lamplight her crisp salt and pepper hair shone and her face was warm and welcoming. She was wearing black wool pants and a purple light wool shirt, with gold jewelry. She was just my height.

  “So what do you want to know?” she asked me after she and June had discussed their business and we’d all had some tea. “June said she brought you along for some reason.

  I didn’t really lie. I said I was making some inquiries into Loie Marsh’s death. Purely as a friend of Hanna’s. I’d come to Gracie because I felt that she, more than most people, had a grasp of the pornography debate and the passions that fueled it.

  “Oy,” she said, holding out her well-shaped, capable hands, as if she wanted to fend me off. “Sometimes I wish the whole subject had never come up. Sometimes I see the history books of the twenty-first century talking about the feminist movement of the seventies and saying it disintegrated due to the pornography issue. And now you’ve got one of the leaders of the anti-porn movement murdered. Aside from it being a great tragedy, I can’t imagine what it’s going to do to the debate.”

  “Why do you say it’s a great tragedy?” June asked. “I thought she bugged you.”

  “Yeah, she did! But Loie Marsh was a very gifted speaker and writer, a fantastic advocate of her ideas. And even though I increasingly opposed her, she still fascinated me. She was so good at her role.”

  I decided to jump right in and ask the question I’d hesitated to ask Pauline. “You don’t think that—that Loie could have been involved in sadomasochism, do you?”

  “Not in a million years—though I confess I have wondered what her sex life was like. She painted such disgusting pictures of adult sexuality that it was hard to imagine whether she had ever had a friendly or loving sexual connection with anyone. You get the impression from her book that she was completely obsessed with sex—she just couldn’t stop talking about it, even though she had to disguise her desire to dwell on it by always describing it in the most lurid and horrific terms.”

  “It’s true,” said June. “For a woman who was so down on sex she sure had a lot to say about it.”

  “There’s a strange voluptuousness in the writing and speaking of some of the anti-porn women. The voluptuousness of repressed desire, don’t you think, Pam?”

  “What? Oh yes!” For some reason I was staring at the light gold chain around her neck, at her throat. The faintly freckled skin was wrinkled a little, as if a breeze had blown over the bay and created a cobwebbed pattern on the water.

  “Though the more I look at it,” continued Grade, “the more it seems like a natural development, this focus on sexuality and violence against women. In its earliest stages the feminist movement demanded recognition for women and equality. The idea was that women and men were inherently the same, with the same rights, the same abilities. From the late sixties to the mid-seventies the discussion was very much about rights—legal, economic, social. Then this new theme began to creep into the struggle. It said that women had their own biology, their own sexuality, their own history, their own ways of doing things. They weren’t like men; they weren’t equal to men. They were better than men. They were natural, they were in touch with their emotions, they were nurturing, spiritual, intuitive, life-enhancing and so on. In some ways this new attitude was marvelous—it took many of the qualities that women had that had been put down for centuries and suddenly not only recognized those qualities but saw them as good, as superior.”

  “Hey, we are superior,” interrupted June. “I tell Eddy that all the time.”

  “It’s true, we’re great,” said Grade, brown eyes smiling at me, “but along with this new superior concept of womanhood came another concept that wasn’t so positive—and that was the idea of woman as victim, especially victim of sexual violence. Starting in the mid-seventies came a whole spate of books, really impressive, well-researched and passionately written books that began to detail the pretty horrible things that men had been doing to women for millennia. At the time it seemed impossible not to agree with the authors—that rape, battery, incest, physical mutilation, even styles in fashion and advertising, weren’t random, isolated acts performed by individual men against individual women, but a series of socially sanctioned acts designed to keep women in an oppressed position. And I still think that the recognition of the pervasiveness of violence against women by men was one of the most crucial realizations to have come out of the women’s movement. Some of the institutions that women developed in response to that recognition, like rape crisis centers, self-defense workshops and the whole domestic violence network of shelters and safe houses are incredibly important contributions to the safety and well-being of women.”

  “You wouldn’t believe that Gracie’s writing a book about all this, would you?” June asked with mock-innocence. “It’s called Enough Already.”

  Grade chuckled. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I’ve been working on the book all day and…”

  “No,” I said, “Go on, please. It’s really interesting. What’s your theory about how the split in the women’s movement developed?”

  “I’m sure there are lots of theories and I’ve held different ones at different times, but here’s one possibility. First of all, the indignation and anger that developed in recognition of men’s violence towards women were reactive, and the institutions that women developed in response were protective. No matter that when women got to the shelters they often went on to job training or education—the reasons that shelters were opened was specifically to protect women from violent men.

  “So—and this is a little tricky—an increasingly powerful and vocal group of women activists began from the premise that if some women are raped, then all can be raped; if some women are molested, all can be molested. They formed their analysis of society around women as an oppressed class, on the basis of what has happened to some women. You don’t want to say that huge numbers of women aren’t raped and molested, or that we’re not all potentially victim material, but the truth of the matter is that all women are not raped or molested. Yet that was proclaimed as the great unifying factor among women, rather than the fact that most women make far less than men and most women have to work much harder in lower-status jobs than men.”

  “It is a little contradictory,” I managed to insert. I couldn’t tell if I was more dazed by Gracie’s flow of words or by the steady warmth of her eyes on me. June had unashamedly begun to read the front page of The New York Times.

  “Of course all along women had been fighting this ideology of superior woman as sexual victim,” Gracie went on eagerly, “whether it was proclaimed by the moral majority or the anti-pornography movement. After all, part of what had fueled the women’s liberation movement in the beginning was the desire to reclaim women’s sexuality. It was a desire that had passed through a number of phases, but it had never entirely gone away. It erupted again in the early eighties when women began to ask themselves and each other what had happened to exploration, experimentation and honesty when it came to sexuality. A lot of these women felt as if the anti-pornography and anti-violence against women movement had taken over sexuality and defined it as something men did, usually with evil intent, to women. Some of these women question-askers were lesbian, some heterosexual and some—horror of horrors—were a relatively new breed: lesbian sadomasochists. In reality the S/Mers were a relatively small proportion of those who were questioning the definitions, but they got a lot of attention and publicity. It suited the purposes of the anti-porn leaders to tag everyone who confessed to being interested in sexual freedom as a sadomasochist. The anti-porn women could then refer to the most extreme S/M practices as if they were common among all women who advocated freedom of sexual expression.”

  Gracie paused and I said the first thing that came into my mind, “Did you know that Loie—and her ex-lover Pauline—were writing a book about this same subject? It’s called We Took Back the Night.”

  “Really?” said Gracie. “I’d love to get my hands on a copy. Just to see how Loie describes the period. I think we’re living in a fascinating time.”

  “Fascinating and dangerous,” June put in. “You better watch it, Gracie. You go around spouting off like this, you could be next.”

  Gracie looked at her sharply, then laughed. “Oh, I’ve always talked too much. But nobody’s going to bump me off. I’m just a harmless professor.”

  “And Loie was a leader, is that it? Do you think that’s why she was murdered? For her ideas?”

  “As long as a leader is alive she has adherents,” Gracie said. “She can continue to write books, to give speeches, to exert an enormous influence. Wasn’t that why Stalin pursued Trotsky, why political leaders have always locked up the opposition, why other leaders have been assassinated? It’s a common belief that ideas have a life of their own, that important ideas live on no matter how many people die. But the reality is that ideas are often only as strong as the person who espouses them. Kill the person, you often kill the idea.”

  “Well then,” said June, putting down the paper and standing up to go. “You better be careful you don’t have too many ideas.”

  Grade followed us to the door and pressed my hand as she said good-bye. “I’m just a harmless professor,” she repeated.

  12

  “SO, YOU LIKED GRACIE THEN?” Hadley said. It was Thursday night and Hadley had met me after work at Best to suggest we go to a Japanese restaurant. Now we sat at a black lacquered table surrounded by yuppies knowledgeably ordering plates of sushi and sashimi and discussing the architectural transformation of Seattle from a provincial but original city to a clone of San Francisco. What with the building of the convention center over the freeway, the excavation under major shopping streets for the bus tunnel and the wholesale knocking down of entire blocks in order to put up new skyscrapers, the downtown center of Seattle had become a sort of black hole. A favorite topic of conversation these days consisted of wondering what the city would look like when it was all over, whether in fact we could still be said to be living in Seattle. An interesting metaphysical conceit, I thought, though the yuppies weren’t doing it justice.

  “Oh yes,” I said, spearing a piece of tempura sweet potato, “She was very—stimulating.”

  Hadley nodded and finished off the shrimp. “Remember last week you said you’d be willing to talk about living situations this week?”

  “Oh dear, is this the day?”

  “Well, have you been thinking about it?”

  “Yes. I’ve decided to move to New Zealand.”

  “What?”

  “Just kidding. No, I haven’t thought about it. I’ve had too much else to think about.”

  “You know, Penny and Ray are ready to buy you out of that house whenever you want. You could use the money to make a down payment on something else.”

  “On a house for myself? And what would you do—buy a house for yourself?”

  “The market’s good right now.”

  “Hadley—you’ve been looking for a house?” Without thinking I swallowed a too-large bit of wasabi, straight, and my throat burned with the fire of the horseradish paste.

 

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