Last week I sat in a parked car, down near the edge of this housing project, the car doors closed and the windows rolled up, hot and steamy and dense inside with B.O.; I sat there with three other Communists and a poor guy who was being brought up on charges.

Charges is what we call it when we have a kangaroo court like this one.

This man owns a little drugstore; that makes him a capitalist, a member of the ruling class, like Andrew Mellon. A capitalist, but also a CP member. He gave money, picketed, all that. And last week two thugs invaded his drugstore, tied up him and his wife, probably raped her (we haven't mentioned this; that's what I'm guessing; it goes with the story). They didn't kill the druggist and his wife and by the next morning he got free and called the cops.

That's why we have him here now in this investigation. We're trying him on charges of siding with the oppressor. Of failing to support the true position of the Party. Because the invaders were Negro and thus the Party's allies, and the cops are cops and of course the enemy, and he should not have called them. He gets lectured a whole lot and then gets expelled.

Probably he's glad to be expelled.

I sit there sweating and hating these proceedings, hating them and not saying so. I'm part of the judging committee. Judging this poor guy. What's wrong with us in the Party? What devious, destructive ailment has skewed our ideals, our love of the world, our loyalty to each other? I say nothing and look at the dirt pattern on the greasy car window and decide that this is it. The end. It's been seven years of the deepest personal and religious allegiance, and now it's over.

I haven't told Mel about this session in the car; he and I are in different Party cells and aren't supposed to discuss secrets with each other; that's how paranoid we're getting. Also I haven't told him because he and I don't talk to each other. About anything, any more. Bit by bit, inch by inch, we've painted ourselves into the silent corner where you never say it. Don't talk, keep your distance. Freeze.

Three days later I move out of Albemarle Terrace with our baby. Mel is alternately amazed, furious, stubborn. He loves me and our child, but he also loves and is stalwartly faithful to the Communist Party; he won't see its faults. (There's no indication yet of the Mel who, five years later, will leave the Party and become, like me, "a socialist always, a joiner never again.") "Choose," he signals at me now. And I do. I settle into a new life; I get a job as an office worker and put our child in day care. I file for divorce.

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And now? l985, in Kensington? Here's Mel in my living room; he smiles and fiddles with a wine glass; we have an hour of polite, tentative conversation, a couple of relieved laughs. He doesn't show social fear much, but I still know him well; I can guess what he's been thinking.

Closed, quiet, pulled back, that describes him. Qualities hard to recognize in so big and vigorous a man. And he's larger and more muscular now than he was back then. Back when.

We finish our wine; we start out toward his car. Once on the road, I'm hardly self-conscious at all about the wind blowing my hair and the two of us looking so fine in the white open-top car.

Mel the Mustang driver smiles at me and positions wide hands on the designer steering-wheel. "Have you ever had an accident?" I ask, admiring his skillful negotiation of a complicated Berkeley intersection. "Accident?" he laughs. "Wow. Many, many times."

Yes; there's the Mel I knew; I feel a pull in the pit of my stomach. Doesn't brag, never admits to a special virtue. That sensation in my belly is OK; it feels good. But it bothers me, too. What did I expect from this encounter? This little foray into a distant past? Maybe a few days' relief from the agonies of recent divorce, perhaps a summer camp almost-romance, six days' flirtation with someone who used to like me once?

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