Beauty Queen

like to have a date with me herself."
    Mary Ellen was torn between falling out of her chair laughing or kicking a chair off the roof with anger. One of the things she loved most about Liv was her naivete. It always took Liv a long time to figure out something that Mary Ellen, hardened from street experience, knew instinctively. Part of the fun of knowing Liv was seeing her pick her way, in her slow wide-eyed manner, toward one of these realizations.
    "I'll bet she envies you," said Mary Ellen.
    "Oh, yes! She envies me because I am so very young and so very beautiful, she says. She is in her forties, and looks like a package of mushrooms that sat very long in the refrigerator. She likes my hair the most. One day it came undone, and she wanted to braid it for me."
    Mary Ellen made a face. "And I suppose you let her do
    it."
    "Oh, no," said Liv. "I went to the women's room and did it myself."
    "Well, you picked a fine time to come out," said Mary Ellen. "With all the rumors running around the department about layoffs, I don't know how long I'll have my job."
    The moon, that celestial victim of assault and battery, was sinking slowly behind the Jersey Palisades. Kikan had come up from the kitchen and washed her face and paws. Now she prowled around the tiny garden, sniffing the flowers, hopping on Liv's lap to check out her cup of cooling Sanka and take a tentative lap at it. Liv petted her cat, but her face had a brooding absent look—the face of the angel who was the only witness to the first crime committed in the Garden of Paradise.
    Looking at her then, Mary Ellen saw her in the context of history.
    Liv was such a devout Lutheran, far more devout in her church than Mary Ellen was in hers. She had somehow fitted her gayness in with the Lutheran doctrine of sin. Today she had imitated Luther, and bravely, very bravely, she had nailed her own personal theses on the cathedral door of America.
    On the morning that the city council was to vote on the homosexual bill, Jeannie waited anxiously in her office. Sidney was going to call her and let her know how the vote went.
    Actually, she wasn't too worried about the vote. Two weeks had passed since the homosexual bill had been introduced, and she had spent that time in a whirlwind of lobbying.
    The 43-member New York city council differed from many other city councils, in that more than half of its members did not work full-time at it. For this, the city council periodically came in for harsh criticism from both the liberal and the conservative press. The council met twice a month, and a bill introduced at one session would be voted on at the next meeting.
    As a longtime political person in New York City, Jeannie knew exactly how the council functioned. You couldn't do anything without having an understanding with the council's Democratic majority leader, who was now Ed Bloomfield. Bloomfield controlled everything—committees, agendas, even (it was said) the number of wastebaskets in meeting rooms.
    So, naturally, her first move had been to meet with Bloomfield.
    A strange meeting that. He, representing the Democratic party, which had always held such total power in New York City. She, representing the Republicans, who forever yearned after power in New York City. In this case, however, Bloomfield's power was balanced by the fact that Jeannie knew something about him that had come out of her file. She knew that Bloomfield's son, a nice-looking college-age boy, hung around a lot at the homosexual bars and discotheques in town.
    During the meeting, she calmly and sweetly told Bloomfield how concerned she was at the possibility that Intro Two might pass. She knew that he knew her as someone who would not rest once she got a campaign going. Without actually saying so, she managed to give the subtle impression that if the bill were passed, she would call for investigation of the city council members who had voted in favor of it. She would expose, she hinted, any conflicts of interest that might have affected their vote—say, a homosexual relative.
    Bloomfield didn't let on that he understood exactly what she was getting at, and he even said that he wanted to just think about it. But she had the feeling that, when he left the meeting with her, he was worried about what she would do.
    She had spent the rest of the two weeks putting the heat on other selected council members.
    One of them, Charles Stratton, made his living in city real estate, so she had gotten to know him