Out on the Cutting Edge
Page 14

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?"
"Tastes great and less filling."
"Funny man. Tastes great? It tastes like nothing at all. I always liked strong tastes, I've never wanted light anything. I like Teacher's or White Horse, the dark heavy scotches. I like those rich Canadian ales. When I smoked I could never stand anything with a filter on it."
"You used to smoke?"
"Heavily. The party encouraged it. It was a way to bond with the working people- offer a cigarette, accept a cigarette, light up, and smoke your brains out in solidarity and comradeship. Of course once the revolution was accomplished, smoking would wither away like the dictatorship of the proletariat. The corrupt tobacco trust would be smashed and the farmers in the Piedmont would be reeducated to grow something dialectically correct. Mung beans, I suppose. And the working class, free from the stresses of capitalistic oppression, would no longer have the need for periodic whiffs of nicotine."
"You're making this up."
"The hell I am. We had a position on everything. Why not? We had plenty of time for it, we never fucking did anything."
"So you smoked for the good of the revolution."
"Bet your ass. Camels, a couple of packs a day. Or Picayunes, but they were hard to find."
"I never heard of them."
"Oh, they were wonderful," she said. "They made Gauloises taste like nothing at all. They would rip your throat out and turn your toenails brown. You didn't even have to light them. You could get cancer just carrying a pack in your purse."
"When did you quit?"
"In New Mexico, after my marriage broke up. I was so miserable anyway I figured I wouldn't even notice cigarette withdrawal. I was dead wrong about that, as it turned out, but I stuck with it anyway. You don't drink at all?"
"No."
"Did you ever?"
"Oh, yes."
"He said emphatically. You drank, therefore you don't."
"Something like that."
"I sort of figured as much. Somehow you don't remind me of any of the lifelong abstainers I've known. I don't usually get along too well with that type."
She was sitting crosslegged on top of the bed. I was lying on my side, propped up on one arm. I reached out a hand and touched her bare thigh. She rested her hand on top of mine.
"Does it bother you that I don't drink?"
"No. Does it bother you that I do?"
"I don't know yet."
"When you find out, be sure and let me know."
"All right."
She tilted the can, drank a little beer. She said, "Is there anything I can offer you? I can make coffee, such as it is. Do you want some?"
"No."
"I don't have any fruit juice or soft drinks, but it wouldn't take me a minute to run to the corner. What would you like?"
I took the beer can out of her hand and put it on the table next to the bed. "Come here," I said, easing her down onto the mattress. "I'll show you."
Around eight I groped around until I found my shorts. She had dozed off, but she woke up while I was dressing. "I have to go out for a while," I told her.
"What time is it?" She looked at her watch and made a clucking sound with her tongue. "Already," she said. "What a lovely way to while away the hours. You must be starving."
"And you must have a short memory."
Her laugh was richly lewd. "For nourishment. Why don't I make us something to eat."
"I have to be someplace."
"Oh."
"But I'll be done around ten. Can you hold out until then? We'll go out for hamburgers or something. Unless you're too ravenous to wait."
"That sounds good."
"I'll be back around ten-thirty, no later than that."
"Just ring my bell, honey. And, incidentally, you do. Loud and clear."
I went to St. Paul's. I walked down the steps to the basement entrance, and the minute I got inside I felt a sense of relief, as if I'd been holding something in check and could let go of it now.
I remember, years ago, waking up and needing a drink bad. And going downstairs to McGovern's, just next door to the hotel, where they opened early and where the man behind the stick knew what it was like to need a morning drink. I can remember how it felt in my body, the pure physical need for a drink, and how that need was actually slaked before I got the drink down. As soon as it was poured, as soon as I had my hand on the glass, some inner tension relaxed. The simple knowledge that relief was just a swallow away banished half the symptoms.
Funny how it works. I needed a meeting, I needed the company of my fellows, I needed to hear the wise and foolish things that got said at meetings. I needed, too, to talk about my day as a way of releasing it, and thus integrate the experience.
I hadn't done any of this yet, but I was safe now. I was in the room, and it would get done in due course. So I felt better already.
I went over to the coffee urn and drew myself a cup. It wasn't a great deal better than the instant decaf I'd had at Willa's. But I drank it down and went back for more.