He grasped his umbrella tightly, in a possibly revealing manner, and they stepped out of her apartment on the seventh floor. She was wearing the slickest of slick slickers, all yellow and red and blue and black and turquoise and maroon and explosion-mirange brownish-white. As they stood like vultures, waiting for the innocent elevator, they fell into conversation.
"Crowded apartment," said Winston, with exagerrated emphasis on the word crowded and the word apartment.
"Yes," Shema answered, cautiously, not sure of where the conversation was headed, but somehow nervous that it would lead to the revelation that she was a lesbian.
"Very crowded," he murmured, in that sarcastic tone of his.
The elevator arrived, and the small ding may have saved Winston's worthless life, for Shema was about to end his life in a burst of paranoia. She would have failed, incidentally. Had Shema began to choke Winston, he would've simply thrown her over his head into the closed elevator doors, breaking her head. At the funeral her lesbian lover would have cried too much, and everyone would have known. In fact, that would've been a headline in the newspaper reading, "SHEMA WAS A LEZ!" even though she was no-one interesting. The reasons are several: Firstly, sex sells, and something so outrageously abnormal as lesbianism really sells. Secondly, I thought it would make her life seem very rotten indeed. I believe I have suceeded.
Putting it simply, Shema kills Winston = bad life, Shema lets him live = good life.
As we have seen Shema allowed Winston to live. When they stepped into the elevator, Winston said to Shema:
"Darling, I have a little surprise for you." "Whatever could it be?" she wondered, helplessly curious.
"Heh heh heh, shut up," he replied. This was the last bad thing to ever happen to Shema, being told to shut up. Just afterwards she would be taken to a secret floor of the apartment which actually turned out to be paradise, where she would be the queen. Winston would die after having pressed the appropriate elevator button.
Unfortunately, SHema tried to kill Winston. She was posthumously disgraced, even raped once by a necrofeliac named Ted.