CHAPTER THREE


I was in Cambridge with Susan. We were cleaning up the backyard behind the house on Linnaean Street where she lived and worked. Pearl the wonder dog was catching some rays on the top step of the back porch while we worked. Since part of what we were cleaning up was left by Pearl, it seemed only right that she be there.

I had dug a large hole in the recently thawed earth in one corner of the yard and into it I was putting shovelfuls of yard waste which Susan, wearing fingerless leather workout gloves, had raked into a number of small piles. One of the things that made Susan so interesting was the fact that she looked like a Jewish princess and worked like a Bulgarian peasant. As far as I knew she had never been tired. I dumped a shovelful of waste into the hole and shoveled a little dirt over it.

“Reminds me of my profession,” I said.

“Cleaning up after?” Susan said.

“Yeah.”

In addition to her workout gloves, Susan had on black tights, a hip-length yellow jacket, and a black Polo baseball cap. In the spirit of cleanup she had put on designer work boots, black leather with silver eyelets, which looked odd, but good, over the tights.

“It’s a good reminder,” Susan said, “of life’s essential messiness.”

“Or Pearl’s.”

“Same thing,” Susan said.

Pearl raised her head slightly at the mention of her name, and then looked slightly annoyed that it was a false alarm. She sighed noisily as she settled her head back down onto her front paws. The sun was bright, and the earth had thawed, but in the shady corners against the fence and under a couple of evergreen shrubs, granular snow lingered like a dirty secret, and lurking inside the sixty-degree temperature was an edge of cold to remind us that it was too early for planting.

When we were done, and I had shoveled the dirt over the waste hole and tamped it down, Susan and I went and sat on the penultimate step, just below Pearl.

“Are you actually going to investigate that tenure case at the university?” Susan said.

“Yes.”

She smiled.

“What,” I said.

“The thought of you rampaging about in the university tenure committee,” Susan said, “is very engaging.”

“Rampaging?” I said. “I can be delicate as a neurosurgeon when it’s called for.”

“Most university tenure committees call for rampaging, I think.”

“I admit to being more comfortable with that approach,” I said.

Moved by an impulse understandable only by another dog, Pearl raised up and began to lap my face. I hunched up and endured it until she decided I’d had enough and switched to Susan.

“How’d you know about the case?” I said.

She was fending Pearl off, so it took her a while to answer. But finally, Pearl-free and makeup still mostly intact, Susan said, “Hawk discussed it with me, before he asked you.”

“He did?” I said.

“He wanted my view on whether he was asking more of you than he should,” Susan said.

“And you answered?”

“I answered that he had the right to ask you for everything and vice versa.”

“What’d he say?”

Susan smiled.

“He agreed,” she said.

I nodded.

“Is Hawk’s friend gay?” Susan said.

“Don’t know,” I said.

“But wouldn’t raging heterosexuality be a useful defense against the allegation that the graduate student killed himself as the result of an affair with Professor Nevins?”

“I guess it would,” I said.

“Did you ask him?”

“No.”

“I understand why you would not, but isn’t it something that needs to be established?”

“Can it be established?” I said. “In my experience it’s not always so clear-cut.”

Susan leaned her elbows on the top step and pressed her head back against Pearl’s rib cage. She thought about my question for a moment while I observed the way in which her posture made her chest press sort of tight against her jacket.

“Are you looking at my boobs?” Susan said.

“I’m a trained investigator,” I said. “I notice everything.”

“Do you make judgments on what you observe?”

“I try not to, but am sometimes forced to.”

“And the boobs?”

“Top drawer,” I said. “What about the question?”

“It’s a good one,” Susan said, “and much more complicated than is generally thought.”

“Then I’ve come to the right place.”

“Yes.” Susan smiled at me. It was a smile that could easily have launched a thousand ships. “Complications R Us.”

She rubbed the back of her head on Pearl for a moment.

“Sexuality is not as fixed as is commonly thought, and the discussion of it has become so political that if you quoted in public what I’m about to say I’d probably deny I said it.”

“Before or after the cock crowed?” I said.

“I didn’t know it crowed,” Susan said.

“Never mind,” I said. “Talk to me about sexuality.”

Susan smiled but didn’t go for the obvious remark.

Instead, she said, “I have treated people who experienced themselves as homosexual at the beginning of therapy and experienced themselves as heterosexual at the end.” Susan was picking her words carefully, even with me. “I have treated people who experienced themselves as heterosexual at the start of therapy and experienced themselves as homosexual at the end.”

“And if you said that in print?”

“A fire storm of outrage.”

“Because you seem to be saying that sexuality can be altered by therapy?”

“I am recounting my experience,” Susan said. “Obviously I have experienced a self-selecting sample: people whose presence in therapy is probably related to either uncertainty about, or dissatisfaction with, their sexuality. It is not always the presenting syndrome, and it is not always what people thought they wanted. Some people come to be ‘cured’ of their homosexuality, only to embrace it by the end of the therapy.”

I nodded. As she concentrated on what she was saying, Susan had stopped rubbing Pearl’s rib cage with her head, and Pearl leaned over and nudged Susan with her nose. Susan reached up and patted her.

“And in the therapeutic community that would be unacceptably incorrect?” I said.

“I don’t know anywhere, but here, that what I’ve said wouldn’t stir up a ruckus.”

“You’ve never minded a ruckus.”

“No,” Susan said. “Actually, I sometimes like ruckuses, but this ruckus would get in the way of my work, and I like my work better even than a ruckus.”

“How about me,” I said. “Do you like me better than a ruckus?”

“You are a ruckus,” Susan said.

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