Sometimes she was ordered to talk to fellow workers with the goal of recruiting new members. A few times she'd performed unfathomable acts of industrial sabotage. Often she went someplace to await further instructions, and no instructions came; finally she'd be moved somewhere else, and told to wait some more.
"I can't really convey what it was like," she said. "Maybe I should say that I can't really remember what it was like. The party became your whole life. You were isolated from everything else because you were living a lie, so you never got past the surface stage in relationships outside the party. Friends and neighbors and fellow workers were just part of the scenery, props and stage dressing in the false front you were presenting to the world. Besides, they were just pawns in the great chess game of history. They didn't know what was really going on. That was the heady part, the drug- you got to believe that your life was more significant than other people's."
Five years ago she'd begun to get profoundly disillusioned, but it took a while before she was ready to write off such a big portion of her life. It was like a poker game- you were reluctant to fold a hand when you already had so much invested in it. She fell in love finally with someone who was not in or of the movement, and defied party discipline by marrying him.
They moved to New Mexico, where the marriage fell apart. "I realized the marriage was just a way out of the PCP," she said. "If that's what it took, so be it. You know what they say about ill winds. I got a divorce. I moved here. I became a super because I couldn't figure out how else to get my hands on an apartment. How about you?"
"What about me?"
"How'd you get here? And where is it you've got to?"
I'd been asking myself the same goddamned questions for years.
"I was a cop for a long time," I said.
"How long?"
"Close to fifteen years. I had a wife and kids, I lived in Syosset. That's on Long Island."
"I know where it is."
"I don't know that you could say I got disillusioned. One way or another the life stopped suiting me. I quit the police force and I moved out, got a room on Fifty-seventh Street. I'm still there."
"A rooming house?"
"A little better than that. The Northwestern Hotel."
"You're either rich or rent-controlled."
"I'm not rich."
"You live alone?" I nodded. "Still married?"
"The divorce went through a long time ago."
She leaned forward and put a hand on top of mine. Her breath was richly seasoned with scotch. I wasn't sure I liked smelling it that way, but it was a lot easier to take than the smell in Eddie's apartment.
She said, "Well, what do you think?"
"About what?"
"We looked on death side by side. We told each other the story of our lives. We can't get drunk together because only one of us is drinking. You live alone. Are you involved with anybody?"
I had a sudden sense-memory of sitting on the sofa in Jan's loft on Lispenard Street, with Vivaldi chamber music playing and the smell of coffee brewing.
"No," I said. "I'm not."
Her hand pressed down on mine. "Well, what do you think, Matt? Do you want to fuck?"
I was never a smoker. During the drinking years, every once in a while I would get the urge and buy a pack of cigarettes and smoke three or four of them, one right after the other. Then I would throw the pack away and it would be months before I touched another cigarette.
Jan didn't smoke. Toward the end, when we decided to see other people, I had a couple of dates with a woman who smoked Winston Lights. We never went to bed together, but one night we exchanged a couple of kisses, and it was quite startling to taste tobacco on her mouth. I felt a flicker of revulsion. I felt, too, a brief yearning for a cigarette.
The taste of whiskey on Willa's mouth was far more profound in its effects. This was to be expected; after all, I didn't have to go to meetings every day to keep from picking up a cigarette, and if I did pick one up it wasn't odds-on to put me in a hospital.
We embraced in the kitchen, both of us standing. She was only a couple of inches shorter than I, and we fit well together. I had already been wondering what it would be like to kiss her, before she said what she'd said, before she put her hand on mine.
The whiskey taste was strong. I mostly drank bourbon, scotch only rarely, but it didn't make any difference. It was the alcohol that sang to me, mixing memory with desire.
I felt a dozen feelings, all of them too well interwoven to be sorted out. There was fear, and a deep sadness, and of course there was the longing for a drink. There was excitement, a great rush of excitement, some of it owing to her whiskey mouth, but another greater strain of it issuing directly from the woman herself, the soft firmness of her breasts against my chest, the insistent heat of her loins against my thigh.
I put a hand on her ass and gripped her where her jeans were thin. Her hands dug into my shoulders. I kissed her again.
After a moment she drew away and looked at me. Our eyes locked. Hers were wide open, I could see all the way in.
I said, "Let's go to bed."
"God, yes."
The bedroom was small and dark. With the curtains drawn, hardly any light came through the little window. She switched the bedside lamp on, then switched it off again and took up a book of matches instead. She scratched one into flame and tried to light a candle, but the wick sputtered and the match went out before she could get it going. She tore out another match and I took the match and the candle away from her and set them aside. The dark was light enough.
Her bed was a double. There was no bedstead, just a box spring on the floor with a mattress on it. We stood next to it looking at each other and getting out of our clothes. There was an appendectomy scar on the right side of her abdomen, a dusting of freckles on her full breasts.
We found our way to the bed, and to each other.
Afterward she went into the kitchen and came back with a can of light beer. She popped the top and took a long drink. "I don't know why the hell I bought this," she said.
"I can think of two reasons."
"Oh?"