The Party Line

They met on a fall afternoon, a Tuesday, as two voices crossing on the party line. The line was called Gal Pals and like the others you paid a fee to leave your ad and then women could leave you a message. These lines don’t exist anymore, but this was the spring of 1969 and in those days the gals in search of pals on Long Island found each other, for the most part, first by telephone.

It was Eva who dialed for Claudia, even though after that it was always Claudia who made things progress between them. Eva’s recorded ad ran as follows: Hello, I’m Eva and I’m a 28-year-old Italian working girl from Mott Street in New York City. We moved out to Queens when I was in high school and I’m still here, but I do work in the city. I guess I’m just looking for a nice woman to chat with about life. I like reading and going up to Jones Beach on Sundays. Claudia’s ad said: Hello, I’m an enthusiast of flowers and novels. I went to Bryn Mawr and now I live out in Suffolk County, but try to get into the city as often as I can. Please be a mature and cultured woman. Claudia’s ad didn’t use her name.

Eva rang up her mailbox and left her number. She was looking for the kind of woman who could use the word cultured, with all its repugnant class connotations, without self-reproach. The willingness to risk the word mature signaled to her that this woman wouldn’t be matronly. And she was looking for an older woman anyway, she supposed.

She wanted to meet a woman who had already had all the crises relevant to their situation. A woman who, wherever she shoe-horned a girl like Eva into her life, was likely to keep her right there. Eva wanted to stay there in her little space on the periphery of real life, the pounding of lamb chops and bathing of children. She wanted to be someone’s steady stolen moment, an occasional drink in a bar, a cigarette lit across the dark table at the back of the restaurant, handsy stuff in the back seat of a steel-bodied car bought on a husband’s credit. That was enough for her and there was no point hoping for anything more. It was the hoping that hurt, in the end.

Eva was feeling all this guff because the year before she had fallen in—how would you put it?—in passionate comradeship? In intense admiration? Into strange interminable orbit with an East German woman named Katya who had been able to emigrate by some trick of visa shenanigans. Katya had wanted to emigrate because of a Stasi vendetta involving her brother-in-law’s racket in American music. He wasn’t greasing the right palms over there in Berlin. Katya had shown up out of nowhere at a party meeting one of those melting, frigid March nights at the Orchard Street office.

It was during those months when the news from The Soviet Union was pulsing through The States like tidal waves, sweeping people out to sea, stranding the faithful in their twitchy certainty and driving the disillusioned into the deep depths of one bottle after another. The old women for the most part responded with stridency, the old men with drink, the young with silent retreat and absorption in other rebellions. Katya had wanted to address the group concerning the alienation of youth from the Party. The bourgeois press were Pied Pipering too many comrades! The tide needed to be stemmed. She asked if she could come speak at a party meeting on the topic. The men who made those decisions didn’t know her from Adam and this was a particularly paranoid time. But, she had finally convinced them mostly by the force of her anti-Trotskyite line and a vouch from a trusted member of the local Party.

At the meeting Katya stood at the podium, her big-shouldered suit coat...