Crandall, I remembered, was sixty-one. Fifty-six when a man about whom I knew nothing was packed into a deepfreeze with sharks, tuna, doves, and mule deer. Muffin had been past prime for menopause, with its rotten reputation, at the time of the slaughter. Still, she might have been one of the late ones, one of the small, chagrined army of fifty-something women who secretly dread they’ll have to be buried with a feminine hygiene product. I threw rocks at a spindly ocotillo shrub and thought about that until Brontë loped back over the low hill which forms the eastern boundary of the gulch.
To my knowledge, the female chemical transition away from fertility and into wisdom had not been used successfully as the defense strategy in a murder case. Despite the Victorian mystique it still wears in some quarters, I was sure menopause could not cause women to start killing random strangers with paperweights on their way to the freezer. In my experience all it caused them to do was have parties.
As Brontë snuffled and growled at a kangaroo rat hole under a creosote bush, I thought about one of those parties and about the feminist icon, Eden Snow. The mythic author Eden Snow, resplendent on the only occasion that I’d actually seen her. The occasion after which nobody saw her again, or at least that was the story. Eden Snow more than four years ago, already well past sixty but ageless in that way peculiar to celebrity.
She had come to San Diego to give a lecture, to be the big draw for a symposium on Contemporary Feminism sponsored by the Women’s Studies Department of San Diego’s largest university. After the lecture there was a party at somebody’s house. Among Snow’s credentials were an impressive array of degrees, ten increasingly radical books of feminist theory, fluency in five languages, and the respect of women the world over. Despite those credentials I didn’t hear a single word Eden Snow said that night.
I had gone to the lecture and then the party with Misha, whom I knew in her capacity as program director for the Inter-Collegiate Women’s Studies Consortium. That is, I knew she arranged meetings and seemed to be everywhere. She also knew everybody, including everybody on the faculty at San Gabriel University where I was teaching. With her wiry body and strangely compelling eyes, she always made me think of the Little Match Girl. That bathos. Put her in rags on a street corner, and within eight hours she could raise enough money to fund a respectable day care center for a year. Actually, she had been a fund-raiser for some now-defunct runaway kids’ shelter before taking over the consortium directorship. I didn’t trust her.
There was, despite my mistrust, a jittery attraction between us that in her company brought a taste of hot metal to my throat and made it impossible for me to be near common household objects without harming myself or them. That night I had already splintered a chair rung and tripped over a perfectly flat expanse of carpet. Misha had spilled white wine into a toaster. We seemed to be riding some foreordained conclusion about to happen with or without our complicity. And it would happen that night. I did remember that. I do remember that.
By 2 a.m. the party had thinned to drying wheels of cheese, sesame-seed cracker crumbs, and fifteen or twenty women in turtlenecks drinking chardonnay from plastic cups near some pricey speakers. All night the background music had been foreign to me. Unfamiliar women’s movement music Misha explained was from before my time. Misha, ten years my senior, suddenly the only thing I saw in the stale, winey air.
Most of the others made a circle around Eden Snow, who sat in a wingback chair looking exultant as they belted out “Song of the Soul” for the third time. Snow’s wiry gray hair was tied back with a rumpled scarf, and she watched everything from lashless blue eyes that were at once brutally intelligent and too big. I remember that she was wearing beach thongs with a pair of baggy jeans and a silk kimono jacket so exquisitely designed most people would have framed it in an entry hall. From time to time she chewed thoughtfully on the kimono’s sash.
The women surrounding her were tenured professors, authors, attorneys, directors of grant programs pulling two hundred thousand a year in addition to whatever they picked up on the speakers’ circuit. They were remembering dark childhoods in which little girls were forbidden such futures.
One of the lawyers strummed chords on a guitar, and two women I didn’t know ran outside to their car to get balalaikas, they said. The music stopped, and somebody found an oldies station on the radio in time for the opening “sho-dote-en-sho-be-doe” of the Five Satins’ “In the Still of the Night.” The song prompted the second-“most memorable event of the evening. A sing-along with the radio.
Teenagers in the sixties, they remembered, they stood, and they sang. Perfectly. They sang to Eden Snow in four-chord harmony of feminism, of a time beloved and lost, its ghost alive again in that moment among them. A bunch of drunk, middle-aged women singing old doo-wop, or a choir in transcendent celebration of an idea, you choose. I was in tears by the time Misha and I went outside alone. Into the backyard, in the dark.
By then there was nothing else to do, nothing left but the inevitable. I am certain that neither of us would have chosen anything quite as overwhelming if we’d been asked. But we weren’t asked. We were simply drawn toward some huge intention whose purposes demanded a connection between us so deep and fierce that I realized even then, my mouth on Misha’s hungrily on mine, that I might not survive it. I didn’t care.
Later there was some stumbling, urgent progress to a shed. Bags of peat moss and potting soil. A sense of there being no time left to do this. No time at all. The suddenly pointless yet stubborn presence of clothes, buttons, zippers. The impossible necessity of touch, the pounding vortex of orgasm. And all the while, over Misha’s ragged breathing and mine, the sound of balalaikas reaching out into the dark.
Much later, sometime the following morning, it would cross my mind that Misha was a woman and so this sexual cataclysm meant I could safely sneer at all further accusations of affectional ambivalence. I hadn’t been sure what the fuss was about either way. Now I was sure. Totally.
Misha would scarcely make the “A list” of potential romantic partners, but I was unmoved by such distinctions. Prone to disguising a Southern accent under fake “Hahvahd” pronunciations and telling people she grew up in Wellesley, Misha was the object of more than one raised eyebrow. Deland wasn’t her name, but that of a teenage husband long divorced, she said. Her real surname, she told various people at various times, was Carruthers. Or Hancock. Or McAdams. Names noteworthy for nothing so much as their presumed proximity to the Mayflower. Despite her ambiguous identity she wanted nothing so much as to be widely known, preferably admired. Misha never missed a meeting she could chair, and kept on her cell phone a contact list the size of the old Manhattan Yellow Pages. She wasn’t exactly a social climber, needing instead to be known by literally everybody. But none of it mattered to me. It would never matter.
What mattered was Dad’s response when I called to tell him I was really in love at last and with a woman. It had always been an option. Misha was not the first woman I’d made love with, just the first lover I’d been flung to infinity with. Dissolved with. Transformed with. All that.
Dad didn’t bat an eye until I told him about the balalaikas, about the unfathomable intent in me and Misha that seemed to come from somewhere else and have an agenda of its own. Then his voice broke and he whispered, “Oh, my God,” in tones trailing history, and secrets. Because of Misha I would eventually hear the story of my own existence, and be shocked. Later I would begin to know two people named Jake and Elizabeth, who had dealt with balalaikas of their own.
Brontë interrupted this train of thought by getting a half-dozen fire ants up her nose, requiring my immediate attention. I was already hot even though I was wearing nothing but shorts and a pair of ratty tennis shoes. The Muffin Crandall investigation, I decided, would be a test of my ability to return to the real world. The World Before Misha. A world in which people do not run around wracked by dead love affairs and inadequately clothed.
I
