"Where is her therapist's office?" she asked. "What's her...."

Krista shook her head. "I don't know. Melanie was very...private about her." She was flushing, and Alison thought, you fought about it. You didn't want her to talk to anyone else about queer problems, and by the time you came around she wouldn't tell you anything.

"How long had she been seeing this woman?"

"About a year." Krista hesitated slightly. That you know about, thought Alison. But she said nothing. It was time to stop, before Krista either broke down or became hostile.

As she pulled her wallet out of her bag she thought of one more question. "How did she pay? Did she have duplicate checks? Would the name be there?"

Krista's mouth tightened. "We had a joint checkbook. But she always paid in cash."

Didn't want you to know how much it cost, thought Alison. She shook the woman's hand, offering condolences again and gave her a business card, knowing that it would probably go right into the trash the moment she had time to rethink.

"Do you know what the killer took?" Krista asked in a voice both bitter and heart-torn. "Her necklace. They left her wallet and her credit cards and took the necklace I gave her, and it didn't even cost twenty dollars."

Mulling over what Krista had said, especially that Melanie was seeing a therapist, Alison was almost late in meeting up for dinner with Stacy.

Alison hadn't been to this particular restaurant since she had broken up with Sandy five years before. It was a little disconcerting to find it exactly as it had been then, like some kind of personal time capsule. Alison looked over the hostess' shoulder, hoping to dispel the odd sensation with a glimpse of Stacy. "Mmm, I'm meeting someone. A woman."

"A couple?" the woman suggested, as if it were something negotiable.

"No, I...," Alison tried to protest, but the hostess swept away, beckoning her to follow. A couple or nothing, take it or leave it.

"Alison!" Stacy, wearing a blue dress, called from a booth, sounding delighted. The hostess smiled smugly, flicking her eyes over to the young man sitting next to Stacy, as if to say, "I told you so."

"Alison, this is Mark."

Alison stuck out her hand, trying to hide her irritation. Call her a pig, but she hadn't expected an extra man on her date. Mark's hand was rough, as though he had been handling brick, or lumber, and so big that it swallowed hers up. She felt an odd sense of disconnection, as if her fingers had actually vanished.

"We're doing a little business. It came up after I asked you to join me. It will only take a couple of minutes." Stacy gave Alison a little wink that said she recognized the flash of jealousy and hoped she could be a good sport for five minutes. She gestured towards the table. The silverware had all been pushed back and the cloth covered with a jumble of photographs.

"My portfolio," Stacy said. "Mark is my photographer."

Alison attempted to drop her hand, but the man did not loosen his grip in response. Disconcerted, she glanced into his face. He was good looking, blond hair cut short on the top and a blue stone in one ear. Maybe ten or twelve years younger than she. When she met his blue eyes he smiled and released his grip immediately as if, having bested her he could now afford to be a good winner. On the table beneath his other hand was a legal-size manila envelope.

"We're working on the display for my show," Stacy continued blithely, unaware of the exchange. "They want to put together this little 'at home with the artist' display." She waved a photo.

Alison took it by the corner. It was an excellent shot of a geometrical piece done all in blues.

"This is the best." The boy's youthful voice confirmed her age estimate, although he was beginning to get a touch of smoker's gravel. The photo he handed Alison was surprisingly good. Stacy, in an old pair of shorts and a loose tank top, stood staring at the bulletin board. Her left hand was folded across her chest-in it she clutched a forgotten pair of shears. Her right hand was up stroking her mouth, which was slightly open in contemplation. She was totally unaware of the camera.

"I hate that one," Stacy protested. "I look like a geek."

"It's the best one," Mark repeated. He met Alison's eyes and smiled, as if they shared a joke about how silly and vain Stacy was. She could not keep from smiling back. As they talked, choosing this photo and that, she sorted through the pile on the table. Unlike other portfolios she had seen, there were at least as many pictures of Stacy as there were art shots. There was Stacy with her headphones on, bent over a piece of red and white fabric. Stacy in a tatty bathrobe, her hair twisted back in a braid that had obviously been slept in, her forehead propped against the sewing machine as if she were about to fall back asleep. Alison wondered about the sense of intimacy inferred by the photos. If Stacy had just gotten up, where did that mean Mark had been?

A bit troubled-Stacy wasn't, please, G.o.d, no, not bi, was she?-Alison put the photo down. Stacy and Mark were arguing fiercely over another photo. Her two cents would probably not be appreciated, especially since once again she agreed with Mark's 'artistry over vanity' approach.

She went through the pile of photos again, picking out, in her mind, the ones she would put on the wall were Stacy her girlfriend. She noticed that Mark, in his agitation, had lifted his hand off the envelope. Without really thinking of it as snooping, but moving stealthily nonetheless, she eased it towards her and snaked two fingers into the envelope.

She was startled enough by the one picture that she let out a tiny little, "Oh!" which she immediately wished she could recall because it sounded so girlish. The photo was black and white, and it had the grainy look of being shot through a scarf. There was a quilt on the wall in the background (in Stacy's apartment it was hard to get a picture that did not have a quilt in the background) and Stacy was turning away from it, still contemplative. Her hair, which had been pulled back for work in most of the others, swung across her cheek with the turning motion. A dangling earring reflected a tiny point of light in the dark ma.s.s. She was dressed in the same leather outfit Alison had seen her in at the bar. She was wearing the beaded gloves-one hand reached up to brush the hair back.

"I don't think we'll use that one." Mark's voice was without inflection, but his eyes were unsmiling. It was all Alison could do to keep from dropping the photo before his look.

Stacy craned to see. "Guess not," she said, and immediately went back to the quilt pictures. Obviously she had seen it before.

"The other one is better," said Alison in a voice that she fought to keep disinterested. She handed the envelope back as if it were nothing. Mark took it without thanks.

"I've got to go," he said abruptly, sweeping everything into his briefcase. To Alison's great relief Stacy did not urge him to stay.

"Nice to meet you, Alison. I'm sure we'll see one another again." He had turned the charm back on. His smile, as if they had shared a joke, was hard to resist. Alison allowed the corners of her mouth to lift in response.

"Are all the men you know weird?" she asked Stacy after he had gone.

"That's a little redundant, isn't it?" asked Stacy, lifting her head from the menu. '"Weird men?' Anyway, the vibes were because of that last photo, which, incidentally, you were being a little nosy about." Alison smiled her most appealing 'that's-the-way-I-am-love-me-anyway' smile. Stacy returned a smile of forgiveness and continued. "He's been taking my quilt shots forever-he's really good. So last year I got asked to submit some photos for this leather woman calendar, and I couldn't connect with any women whose work I really, really liked, so I thought, what the hey, Mark knows what I do, he can handle it."

Alison opened her mouth. Stacy, catching the look, said, "No, they weren't s.e.x shots and no, I didn't get in it, probably for that reason. They were all kind of like that one-I decided to go the leather girl-with-real-life route. But the point of this long story that is keeping us from getting food, and I'm starved, is that he couldn't handle it, and we had kind of a confrontation about it and had to process, and it was a giant pain in the a.s.s and I don't know why the h.e.l.l he still carries that picture around. I think it's so he can remind me of how wicked I am now and then. Huevos rancheros," she said to the waitress.

"Actually," Alison said, trying to keep her voice matter-of-fact when it wanted to break like a thirteen-year-old boy's, "this kind of brings up some stuff that I wanted to talk about."

"Oh, dear." Stacy, who was wearing her gla.s.ses, pulled them way down on her nose and peered at her worriedly. "Do we have to do this?"

"Yes," answered Alison, much more firmly than she felt. "Because I have to get clear how I feel about this before we-"

"Make mad, pa.s.sionate love?" Stacy interjected in a low, s.e.xy voice, leaning over the table so that her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were dangerously near the candles. For a moment Alison almost forgot herself, and just put her hand across the table to be led away. Then she steeled her resolution.

"Go any further," she said as if Stacy had not spoken, though her heart was pounding. "I mean I-" She stopped abruptly, afraid of feeling like a fool with a schoolgirl crush.

"This is the dating thing, isn't it?" asked Stacy, fidgeting with her fork.

"Yeah! I mean, I have to decide how I feel about what you do. It would be like-well, if I made plutonium triggers up at Rocky Flats or worked as a furrier or something. You'd have to think about that, wouldn't you?"

"Let me ask you something, Alison. Don't you think that there's a certain similarity between what you do and what I do? That maybe I'm having little second thoughts about dealing with your line of work? I mean, at least what I do is consensual."

"No! What are you talking about?"

"You don't think that being a cop is all about power? You don't have any qualms about working in a system that is still incredibly oppressive to women, not just as criminals but as victims, and on the force as well?" Stacy leaned back and folded her arms across her chest, all traces of seduction gone.

"I think that this is just stonewalling. This is just attacking what I do as a way of keeping from being attacked yourself." The waitress had brought by a bowl of chips and salsa, and in her agitation, Alison tore into them. Stress eating was always good.

"If you believe that then you don't understand what I do and you don't think about what you do. S/m play for me is not about tying someone up and beating them b.l.o.o.d.y. It's about power and giving up power. Now, you tell me all about how n.o.body with the police department is in it for the power."

Hmm, definitely time for a new line of attack.

"Don't you think that it's oppressive to other women to play a dominating role? Don't you think it supports stereotypes that we really need to move away from rather than reinforcing?"

"Look," said Stacy "if you have a real objection, then go ahead and tell me about it. But don't just give me something you've gleaned from reading back issues of Lesbian Connection because you think that it's the PC thing to do. Because if you're really concerned about perpetuating stereotypes, what the h.e.l.l are we doing here, doing the butch/femme thing?"

Alison looked down at her jeans and T-shirt. "Well," she said in a voice that was just short of a whine.

"Alison," Stacy said, "correct me if I'm wrong, but am I getting a few mixed messages here? I mean, is it really fair to me to be asking me to defend this disgusting s.h.i.t on the one hand, and to be hinting that you'd like to be seduced into it on the other? That feels a little weird. Actually," Stacy corrected herself with a sigh, "it feels a little familiar."

Alison blushed, embarra.s.sed by both her transparency and her confusion. Did the word seduction have to be raised so soon?

"Let's just leave seduction out of it," she protested "and...."

"Oh, baby," Stacy purred, "leaving seduction in is your only chance. I don't do s/m 101 for free anymore. It gets pretty d.a.m.n boring being a continual education display. It's like being the token d.y.k.e at work, you know? You're these people's only role model. If you get a bad haircut are they going to take it as a serious political statement? If you take a Twinkie in your lunch is every straight girl at the office going to go home and tell her family that d.y.k.es have no respect for their bodies? I feel like photocopying a basic stance-sheet and handing it out. This is what I do, this is what I don't do, this is why, incidentally, these ate my other hobbies if you give a s.h.i.t and if it was a choice between kinky s.e.x and reading, I wouldn't be turning in my library card. So now let's talk about something else."

"Well, how I am I supposed to find anything out?" Alison asked with the hint of a pout. It was a bad habit in which she had been encouraged because several of her past lovers had found it attractive.

Stacy, too, smiled at the way her full lips were drawn up.

"I'd love to slap that look off your face," she said conversationally, and then, before Alison could even think of an answer, "Have you tried reading?"

Alison's expression changed to one of horror. "Yes," she answered shortly.

Stacy looked at her. "Oh, dear," she said. "Alison, I need to tell you a basic truth right here. Have you ever heard the expression, 'It's dangerous to give a lesbian a guitar?'"

Alison burst out laughing. "No!"

"Well, that's because I made it up, and it hasn't yet gained popular acceptance. But I don't need to explain its meaning, do I?"

Alison shook her head. "Oh, I was at the music festival," she warbled tunelessly, her fingers picking out the same three cords over and over, "and it filled me with a great joy to see so many women-identified-women that I thought I'd write this song...."

Stacy held up her hand. "You got it. Well, unfortunately, a variation of this disease tends to affect s/m d.y.k.es who pick up pens. I mean, there is some well-written information out there that can be really helpful to a novice. I take it, however, from the look on your face, that you have attempted to delve into the land of fiction."

Alison nodded warily.

"Okay, let me just add a few disclaimers. Not all s/m d.y.k.es are racist. Most s/m d.y.k.es I know take to heart the motto 'Safe, sane, and consensual' and are just as horrified by rape/slash scenes are you are. We do not eat our dead. Someday-and I truly believe this-there is going to be a tremendous uprising of editors in the ranks of the s/m community and there will be an end to the dreadful practice of publishing rough drafts. But until that day...well, don't take it all to heart."

"In other words, I should talk to a good role model," Alison said, rather pleased with herself for having brought the conversation to this point.

"Okay, okay." Stacy threw up her hands in resignation. "Actually, I should quit fighting this and start seeing if I can't get points every time I'm a good role model. You know, the way you used to get extra stars on your sash for selling a record amount of Girl Scout cookies?"

"Aren't 'good role model' and 's/m' kind of oxymoronic?" asked Alison in a bid for humor that won a brief snort.

"So I hear day and night from a good portion of the lesbian community. Oh, well, I guess if we were the kind of girls who could be swayed by public opinion I'd still be a housewife for Jesus and you'd still be-what would you be?"

"Not still, but some nice policeman's wife waiting for the kids to get into junior high so that I could go back to a desk job that wouldn't endanger me as a mother."

"And they say we're sick," laughed Stacy. "Anyway, s/m 101...." She stopped and hit herself in the forehead. "What am I doing? I hate doing this by myself. I can take you to s/m 101." She looked at her watch and then waved for the check. "We've just got time to make this."

Five.

"Where are we going?" asked Alison.

"Peony's." Stacy named the gay coffee house. "We usually meet at the Blue Ryder every other Monday, but they're closed tonight because of the killing. Jenny was shook."

A few blocks later they entered Peony's, famous for its carrot cake which was listed on the menu as 'Better-than-s.e.x.' Alison following Stacy who wended her way past the crowded tables. It was the kind of atmosphere in which one could have the most intimate, private conversation, knowing that everyone else was so busy with theirs that no one else was paying attention.

"Alison, you remember Liz, right?"

Liz, waving a sandwich dangerously in one hand, scattering sprouts right and left, gave one short nod, continuing her heated discussion with the woman beside her. She jabbed her hand at a photocopied paper on the table to make a point, leaving a smear of mayo on it.

"And Diane." Stacy gestured towards the woman across the table who was a serious lipstick d.y.k.e, the kind that Alison didn't know how to relate to, so tended to put in a 'dumb blonde' category and dismiss.

"I hate this," said Diane without preliminary. "You guys always make me do outreach and novice groups and I hate it."

"It's because you're so nonthreatening," soothed Stacy. "You don't scare anybody."

"Like Liz does, right?" Diane lifted a skeptical eyebrow.

"It's because you're so pretty, Diane. Women want to come just to look at you," said yet another woman to whom Liz had been orating, and who was the only one at the table in serious leather. She had created the opening in the conversation to speak by taking Liz's elbow and directing her sandwich abruptly into her mouth.

"And Ruth," Stacy said with a nod of introduction.

"That's bulls.h.i.t. It's all bulls.h.i.t. You make me do it because you're too lazy. You're all liars, and the next time that I'm in top s.p.a.ce I'm going to punish everyone severely. And you have to help me with my visual aids." Diane heaved a briefcase up onto the table, and ignoring indignant squeaks from Liz who still had her mouth full, created a s.p.a.ce to lay down an oversized sheet of paper by rearranging everyone's dishes.

"I wanted to do a bell curve at first," Diane explained, "because I always end up talking about how we fit on a bell curve. You know? I was going to have women who do real intense near-death scenes here," she pointed to the right side of the paper, "and women who do really light fantasy over here. But then I decided that I couldn't because I didn't have the statistics to make it accurate, and if I put it on as a joke, even if I told everyone it was a joke someone would freak out and use it in an article, so..." she drew a long breath and gestured, "...it's just going to be a list."

Alison, who had been staring at Diane's fingernails with a mixture of horror and awe, responded to a sharp elbow from Stacy and looked at the paper.

S/M d.y.k.eS it was headed. Below was a list written in red magic marker: d.y.k.es whose only kink is a leather fetish d.y.k.es who do gender bending d.y.k.es who do piercing d.y.k.es who do power fantasies d.y.k.es who like to get spanked d.y.k.es who use a lot of s.e.x toys and call what they do s/m even though no pain is exchanged d.y.k.es who have full-time slaves d.y.k.es who are full-time slaves d.y.k.es who connect with other leatherd.y.k.es and play only once or twice a year d.y.k.es whose only hobby is s/m d.y.k.es who play only with a monogamous partner d.y.k.es who do cutting d.y.k.es who only top d.y.k.es who only bottom d.y.k.es who switch d.y.k.es who switch but don't admit it d.y.k.es who like rough s.e.x d.y.k.es who don't have s.e.x while playing d.y.k.es who play with men, but only have s.e.x with women d.y.k.es who do only bondage d.y.k.es who do heavy beating scenes d.y.k.es who practice s/m activities but don't label it s/m "Well, that's a good start," commented Ruth. Having been distracted from the nails, Alison was now trying to read all of the b.u.t.tons on her leather vest without appearing to be staring. Besides the jacket, she was wearing a pair of leather pants which were laced ornamentally up the side.

"Put down Soccer players who are going to the gay games" suggested Liz, "because n.o.body has bottomed the way Stacy and I have to that d.a.m.n Trudy. It's just been one big humiliation scene spanning a year."

"Only consensual activities listed," said Diane. "That soccer s.h.i.t is just plain abusive. If I want to count mental abuse I'd have to put down half of the vanilla relationships in town. That does explain why you've been so toppy lately, though. Don't ask me to dress up in a soccer uniform, okay?"

"So, you must have turned out to be kinky after all, huh?"

Alison, who had been trying to imagine Diane in Stacy's purple and black uniform, didn't realize for a moment that Liz's bright question was directed towards her. Another nudge from Stacy was required to refocus her.

"No! I mean, yeah, I mean..." She looked to Stacy for help.

"Just curious. You are all being used as visual aids. Try and provide a good role model." Stacy waved at the waitress.

Liz rubbed her hands together in a gloating way. "Another innocent sacrifice to the G.o.ddess of perversion. Another vanilla d.y.k.e to be lead along the primrose path. Another-"

"Oh, stop it," said Diane, reaching across the table to rap Liz on the knuckles. "You're going to scare her. You can be so obnoxious-If you don't eat, you're all freaked out because you're low blood sugar, and if you do eat you're hyper." She picked up her marker and wrote in 'd.y.k.es with s/m fantasies who never act any of them out.'

"Liz treats the scene just like she does soccer," explained Stacy. "Everyone is a potential recruit."