The Hidden Keys. Andre Alexis
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4 A Task Accepted
The worst of it, when Willow was younger, was being told how fortunate she was, how thankful she should be, despite the death of her mother. She had been blessed with intelligence and beauty and wealth. She did realize, didn’t she, that she’d been blessed? And she would say ‘yes’ and bow her head and accept the condescending praise she got for her good manners. It was almost a relief to grow up thin, with a mild case of scoliosis that gave her body a slight but noticeably eccentric curve. She moved from the realm of the beautiful to that of the ‘elegant’ – a realm of fashion, education and silence, things she at least aspired to master.
From early childhood, Willow had felt herself judged, held to standards that had nothing to do with her. Her parents warned them that, because they had money, they would be treated differently, that people would have unspoken and, occasionally, strange expectations of them. Her siblings, each in his or her own way, managed to deal with the feeling on their own, but Willow found foreign substances helped best. She began drinking and smoking from the age of twelve. She was discreet, always, where alcohol was concerned. But there was no great need for discretion with cigarettes. Her father smoked and was only dutifully annoyed when he discovered his youngest was a smoker, too.
In those days, Willow’s most persistent habit was discretion. She found ways to hide her drinking and its effects. It was only when she drank heroic amounts that her intoxication was noticeable and, even then, she kept quiet and, mostly, to herself. Drink was not a means of losing her inhibitions. It was another way of being alone. It was joyless, but it did bring her relief from the feeling of being observed and, for the most part, it allowed her to function. She earned three doctorates while a drunk: Philosophy (summa cum laude with congratulations of the jury, École normale supérieure, 1976), Doctor of Letters (University of Tokyo, 1981), Comparative Literature (summa cum laude, Harvard, 1990). She was not alcoholic, not by her own measure. By her own measure, she was only a drunk – that is, someone who drank to pass out.
It was not until much later, back home and in her forties, that she discovered her drug of choice: heroin. This discovery was a surprise. The first time she’d tried it had been at Harvard. She had snorted it at some gathering or other and it had done nothing much for her, although, admittedly, it had not been as annoying as cocaine or meth, both of which tasted like laboratories felt. But the first time she shot it, heroin was like discovering that a legendary panacea actually existed. She’d loved it at once: the euphoria and its afterglow, the clean taste it left in the mind, the liberation from thoughts about looks, station, fears and neurosis. Yes, the things she loved – languages, philosophy – faded, too, but that was to be expected and, besides, it was tolerable to lose something when you gained such a pleasing alternative.
Willow could have remained a stay-at-home user. Her money allowed her that choice. Moreover, the first time she shot up had been with one of her mother’s friends, Mrs. Fraser, a woman in her seventies who only ever used at home.
Strange moment: she had visited Mrs. Fraser and had, as she did when she was being discreet, turned down an old and rare whisky, when Mrs. Fraser brought out a black leather pouch with what looked to be a gold zipper. In the pouch was all the woman’s paraphernalia: rubbing alcohol and cotton batten, sterile needles, a World War II naphtha lighter, a silver plunger, a silver spoon and long silk scarves to tie off an arm or leg. She was old-fashioned. She cooked her shots with citric acid. And she believed that silver, having medicinal properties, was good for her arthritis.
– I’m feeling a little flushed, Mrs. Fraser had said. I apologize for my manners. Would you like to join me?
Willow politely admitted that she had never shot heroin, though she had tried it.
– Oh, it’s not the same when you sniff it, dear, said Mrs. Fraser. Let me show you.
With little more fuss or nerves than if she’d been serving ginger snaps, though with more precision, Mrs. Fraser herself had prepared a shot for Willow, using a disposable needle and plunger she kept for guests.
The afternoon was odd, its pieces not quite consonant: Mrs. Fraser’s makeup – too much rouge, a skin-tone face powder that stopped at her neck so that paleness began at her neckline; the smell of an aggressively floral perfume; the way Mrs. Fraser’s hands shook as she prepared Willow’s needle; the feel of the living room – wall-to-wall white carpet, indigo-and-orange drapery, indigo sofa and armchair; an impression of pink or pinkishness; and then, while she was high, Mrs. Fraser’s talk of redecoration, a subject that seemed to come up again and again, though really, Mrs. Fraser must have mentioned something about wallpaper or throw rugs once or maybe twice and Willow’s mind had taken it in and held it so that, along with the ecstasy, there were thoughts about furniture.
Willow’s introduction to the ritual of shooting up was unusual, but only slightly. There were not many like Mrs. Fraser, it’s true. For one thing, few addicts – wealthy or otherwise – were as old, and very few old women were as open about their habit. Rarer still: those willing to share their paraphernalia and their heroin. It made Willow wonder if Mrs. Fraser had recognized something in her. On the other hand, Rosedale, where she and Mrs. Fraser lived, had at least as many addicts as Parkdale. They were better sequestered, but if you were a member of ‘society,’ as Willow had been, you were bound to know one or two. Though she was grateful for the introduction to junk, Willow no more wanted to shoot up with Mrs. Fraser than she would have wanted to shoot up with her own mother.
For years, she shot up in her Rosedale home, alone and in private. Her habit grew, but her discretion was such that, she imagined, few knew of her addiction. In fact, her family did know she was an addict. What they did not know was the extent of her addiction. She was careful to be herself – an innocuous version of herself – in their company. So, her discretion was at least partially effective. At her father’s death, however, everything changed. Rosedale, her home, became a torment. All of it reminded her of him and she could not bear to be there – not even in her own house – when she was not high.
Which is where Errol Colby came in.
– No, we’re not close in that way, said Willow
answering a question Tancred had not even thought to ask.
Willow had never been much interested in sexual congress of any sort. This was not said as warning to Tancred or as an excuse for what some called her coldness. Her libido had been low long before junk squelched it. She supposed that she was heterosexual. When she was much younger, she had been aroused by men. She was not aroused, in that way, by women. At least, not that she knew of. But, given her lack of interest in sex, the thought of an emotionally hectic union – billing, cooing, pecking – filled her with indifference.
She had never been in love, but this thought in no way saddened her. On the contrary, Willow found it amusing that she had devoted so many years to the study of literature – novel after novel, poem after poem – devoted to the thing she had never known nor much desired: romantic love. This did not stop her from being curious about Tancred’s emotional life. On a couple of occasions, she’d asked if he’d ever been in love.
– I have been, but I’m not in love now, he’d answered.
But Tancred, as a matter of principle, never spoke of such things to anyone but Daniel or Olivier, and even then rarely. His discretion was a way of protecting the one he loved. He supposed it was old-fashioned, but he believed in the sanctity of love. Not only love but also the feeling, ever-different, that exists between two who might fall in love. He did not like to read fiction or poetry for this very reason. He had never found a work that spoke of the feeling with dignity. Most were a desecration of it, save The Divine Comedy – read at the behest of a woman he was seeing – which was sublime but over-the-top. It had been more entertaining, reading Dante, to imagine the circle of Hell he, a thief, would occupy: the eighth, with its snakes, ashes and humiliation. All that for taking toys from grown men!
No, with Nigger, Willow continued, it was all about the pharmaceuticals. Whoever his supplier, Nigger’s junk was – at least in her experience