“And,” Kathy said, “you’re a six.”
She had not forgotten his slip. Of course not. He could tell her a million things, and all would be forgotten ten minutes later, except the one real slip. Well, such was the way of the world. He had become used to it in his time; that was part of being his age and not hers.
“What does Domenico mean to you?” Jason said, changing the subject. Crudely, he realized, but he went ahead. “What do you get from him that you don’t get from human beings?”
She frowned, looked thoughtful. “He’s always busy. He always has some project going. Like following a bug. He’s very good with flies; he’s learned how to eat them without their flying away.” She smiled engagingly. “And I don’t have to ask myself about him, Should I turn him in to Mr. McNulty? Mr. McNulty is my pol contact. I give him the analog receivers for the microtransmitters, the dots I showed you—”
“And he pays you.”
She nodded.
“And yet you live like this.”
“I—” she struggled to answer—“I don’t get many customers.”
“Nonsense. You’re good; I watched you work. You’re experienced.”
“A talent.”
“But a trained talent.”
“Okay; it all goes into the apartment uptown. My Major Apartment.” She gritted her teeth, not enjoying being badgered.
“No.” He didn’t believe it.
Kathy said, after a pause, “My husband’s alive. He’s in a forced-labor camp in Alaska. I’m trying to buy his way out by giving information to Mr. McNulty. In another year”—she shrugged, her expression moody now, introverted—“he says Jack can come out. And come back here.”
So you send other people into the camps, he thought, to get your husband out. It sounds like a typical police deal. It’s probably the truth.
“It’s a terrific deal for the police,” he said. “They lose one man and get—how many would you say you’ve bugged for them? Scores? Hundreds?”
Pondering, she said at last, “Maybe a hundred and fifty.”
“It’s evil,” he said.
“Is it?” She glanced at him nervously, clutching Domenico to her flat chest. Then, by degrees, she became angry; it showed on her face and in the way she crushed the cat against her rib cage. “The hell it is,” she said fiercely, shaking her head no. “I love Jack and he loves me. He writes to me all the time.”
Cruelly, he said, “Forged. By some pol employee.”
Tears spilled from her eyes in an amazing quantity; they dimmed her gaze. “You think so? Sometimes I think they are, too. Do you want to look at them? Could you tell?”
“They’re probably not forged. It’s cheaper and simpler to keep him alive and let him write his own letters.” He hoped that would make her feel better, and evidently it did; the tears stopped coming.
“I hadn’t thought of that,” she said, nodding, but still not smiling; she gazed off into the distance, reflexively still rocking the small black and white cat.
“If your husband’s alive,” he said, cautiously this time, “do you believe it to be all right for you to go to bed with other men, such as me?”
“Oh, sure. Jack never objected to that. Even before they got him. And I’m sure he doesn’t object now. As a matter of fact, he wrote me about that. Let’s see; it was maybe six months ago. I think I could find the letter; I have them all on microfilm. Over in the shop.”
“Why?”
Kathy said, “I sometimes lens-screen them for customers. So that later on they’ll understand why I do what I did.”
At this point he frankly did not know what emotion he felt toward her, nor what he ought to feel. She had become, by degrees, over the years, involved in a situation from which she could not now extricate herself. And he saw no way out for her now; it had gone on too long. The formula had become fixed. The seeds of evil had been allowed to grow.
“There’s no turning back for you,” he said, knowing it, knowing that she knew it. “Listen,” he said to her in a gentle voice. He put his hand on her shoulder, but as before she at once shrank away. “Tell them you want him out right now, and you’re not turning in any more people.”
“Would they release him, then, if I said that?”
“Try it.” Certainly it wouldn’t do any harm. But—he could
imagine Mr. McNulty and how he looked to the girl. She could never confront him; the McNultys of the world did not get confronted by anyone. Except when something went strangely wrong.
“Do you know what you are?” Kathy said. “You’re a very good person. Do you understand that?”
He shrugged. Like most truths it was a matter of opinion. Perhaps he was. In this situation, anyhow. Not so in others. But Kathy didn’t know about that.
“Sit down,” he said, “pet your cat, drink your screwdriver. Don’t think about anything; just be. Can you do that? Empty your mind for a little while? Try it.” He brought her a chair; she dutifully seated herself on it.
“I do it all the time,” she said emptily, dully.
Jason said, “But not negatively. Do it positively.”
“How? What do you mean?”
“Do it for a real purpose, not just to avoid facing unfortunate verities. Do it because you love your husband and you want him back. You want everything to be as it was before.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “But now I’ve met you.”
“Meaning what?” He proceeded cautiously; her response puzzled him.
Kathy said, “You’re more magnetic than Jack. He’s magnetic, but you’re so much, much more. Maybe after meeting you I couldn’t really love him again. Or do you think a person can love two people equally, but in different ways? My therapy group says no, that I have to choose. They say that’s one of the basic aspects of life. See, this has come up before; I’ve met several men more magnetic than Jack…but none of them as magnetic as you. Now I really don’t know what to do. It’s very difficult to decide such things because there’s no one you can talk to: no one understands. You have to go through it alone, and sometimes you choose wrong. Like, what if I choose you over Jack and then he comes back and I don’t give a shit about him; what then? How is he going to feel? That’s important, but it’s also important how I feel. If I like you or someone like you better than him, then I have to act it out, as our therapy group puts it. Did you know I was in a psychiatric hospital for eight weeks? Morningside Mental Hygiene Relations in Atherton. My folks paid for it. It cost a fortune because for some reason we weren’t eligible for community or federal aid. Anyhow, I learned a lot about myself and I made a whole lot of friends, there. Most of the people I truly know I met at Morningside. Of course, when I originally met them back then I had the delusion that they were famous people like Mickey Quinn and Arlene Howe. You know—celebrities. Like you.”
He said, “I know both Quinn and Howe, and you haven’t missed anything.”
Scrutinizing him, she said, “Maybe you’re not a celebrity; maybe I’ve reverted back to my delusional period. They said I probably would, sometime. Sooner or later. Maybe it’s later now.”
“That,” he pointed out, “would make me a hallucination of yours. Try harder; I don’t feel completely real.”
She laughed. But her mood remained somber. “Wouldn’t that be strange if I made you up, like you just said? That if I fully recovered you’d disappear?”
“I wouldn’t disappear. But I’d cease to be a celebrity.”
“You already have.” She raised her head, confronted him steadily. “Maybe that’s it. Why you’re a celebrity that no one’s ever heard of. I made you up, you’re a product of my delusional mind, and now I’m becoming sane again.”
“A solipsistic view of the universe—”
“Don’t do that. You know I haven’t any idea what words like that mean. What kind of person do you think I am? I’m not famous and powerful like you; I’m just a person doing a terrible, awful job that puts people in prison, because I love Jack more than all
the rest of humanity. Listen.” Her tone became firm and crisp. “The only thing that got me back to sanity was that I loved Jack more than Mickey Quinn. See, I thought this boy named David was really Mickey Quinn, and it was a big secret that Mickey Quinn had lost his mind and he had gone to this mental hospital to get himself back in shape, and no one was supposed to know about it because it would ruin his image. So he pretended his name was David. But I knew. Or rather, I thought I knew. And Dr. Scott said I had to chose between Jack and David, or Jack and Mickey Quinn, which I thought it was. And I chose Jack. So I came out of it. Maybe”—she wavered, her chin trembling—“maybe now you can see why I have to believe Jack is more important than anything or anybody, or a lot of anybodys, else. See?”
He saw. He nodded.
“Even men like you,” Kathy said, “who’re more magnetic than him, even you can’t take me away from Jack.”
“I don’t want to.” It seemed a good idea to make that point.
“Yes—you do. On some level you do. It’s a competition.”
Jason said, “To me you’re just one small girl in one small room in one small building. For me the whole world is mine, and everybody in it.”
“Not if you’re in a forced-labor camp.”
He had to nod in agreement to that, too. Kathy had an annoying habit of spiking the guns of rhetoric.
“You understand a little now,” she said, “don’t you? About me and Jack, and why I can go to bed with you without wronging Jack? I went to bed with David when we were at Morningside, but Jack understood; he knew I had to do it. Would you have understood?”
“If you were psychotic—”
“No, not because of that. Because it was my destiny to go to bed with Mickey Quinn. It had to be done; I was fulfilling my cosmic role. Do you see?”
“Okay,” he said, gently.
“I think I’m drunk.” Kathy examined her screwdriver. “You’re right; it’s too early to drink one of these.” She set the half-empty glass down. “Jack saw. Or anyhow he said he saw. Would he lie? So as not to lose me? Because if I had had to chose between him and Mickey Quinn”—she paused—“but I chose Jack. I always would. But still I had to go to bed with David. With Mickey Quinn, I mean.”
I have gotten myself mixed up with a complicated, peculiar, malfunctioning creature, Jason Taverner said to himself. As bad as—worse than—Heather Hart. As bad as I’ve yet encountered in forty-two years. But how do I get away from her without Mr. McNulty hearing all about it? Christ, he thought dismally. Maybe I don’t. Maybe she plays with me until she’s bored, and then she calls in the pols. And that’s it for me.
“Wouldn’t you think,” he said aloud, “that in four decades plus, I could have learned the answer to this?”
“To me?” she said. Acutely.
He nodded.
“You think after you go to bed with me I’ll turn you in.”
At this point he had not boiled it down to precisely that. But the general idea was there. So, carefully, he said, “I think you’ve learned in your artless, innocent, nineteen-year-old way, to use people. Which I think is very bad. And once you begin you can’t stop. You don’t even know you’re doing it.”
“I would never turn you in. I love you.”
“You’ve known me perhaps five hours. Not even that.”
“But I can always tell.” Her tone, her expression, both were firm. And deeply solemn.
“You’re not even sure who I am!”
Kathy said, “I’m never sure who anybody is.”
That, evidently, had to be granted. He tried, therefore, another tack. “Look. You’re an odd combination of the innocent romantic, and a”—he paused; the word “treacherous” had come to mind, but he discarded it swiftly—“and a calculating, subtle manipulator.” You are, he thought, a prostitute of the mind. And it’s your mind that is prostituting itself, before and beyond anyone else’s. Although you yourself would never recognize it. And, if you did, you’d say you were forced into it. Yes; forced into it, but by whom? By Jack? By David? By yourself, he thought. By wanting two men at the same time—and getting to have both.
Poor Jack, he thought. You poor goddamn bastard. Shoveling shit at the forced-labor camp in Alaska, waiting for this elaborately convoluted waif to save you. Don’t hold your breath.
That evening, without conviction, he had dinner with Kathy at an Italian-type restaurant a block from her room. She seemed to know the owner and the waiters, in some dim fashion; anyhow, they greeted her and she responded absentmindedly, as if only half hearing them. Or, he thought, only half aware of where she was.
Little girl, he thought, where is the rest of your mind?
“The lasagna is very good,” Kathy said, without looking at the menu; she seemed a great distance away now. Receding further and further. With each passing moment. He sensed an approaching crisis. But he did not know her well enough; he had no idea what form it would take. And he did not like that.
“When you blep away,” he said abruptly, trying to catch her off guard, “how do you do it?”
“Oh,” she said tonelessly. “I throw myself down on the floor and scream. Or else I kick. Anyone who tries to stop me. Who interferes with my freedom.”
“Do you feel like doing that now?”
She glanced up. “Yes.” Her face, he saw, had become a mask, both twisted and agonized. But her eyes remained totally dry. This time no tears would be involved. “I haven’t been taking my medication. I’m supposed to take twenty milligrams of Actozine per diem.”
“Why don’t you take it?” They never did; he had run across that anomaly several times.
“It dulls my mind,” she answered, touching her nose with her forefinger, as if involved in a complex ritual that had to be done absolutely correctly.
“But if it—”
Kathy said sharply, “They can’t fuck with my mind. I’m not letting any MFs get to me. Do you know what a MF is?”
“You just said.” He spoke quietly and slowly, keeping his attention firmly fixed on her…as if trying to hold her there, to keep her mind together.
The food came. It was terrible.
“Isn’t this wonderfully authentically Italian?” Kathy said, deftly winding spaghetti on her fork.
“Yes,” he agreed, aimlessly.
“You think I’m going to blep away. And you don’t want to be involved with it.”
Jason said, “That’s right.”
“Then leave.”
“I”—he hesitated—“I like you. I want to make sure you’re all right.” A benign lie, of the kind he approved. It seemed better than saying, Because if I walk out of here you will be on the phone to Mr. McNulty in twenty seconds. Which, in fact, was the way he saw it.
“I’ll be all right. They’ll take me home.” She vaguely indicated the restaurant around them, the customers, waiters, cashier. Cook steaming away in the overheated, underventilated kitchen. Drunk at the bar, fiddling with his glass of Olympia beer.
He said, calculating carefully, fairly, reasonably sure that he was doing the right thing, “You’re not taking responsibility.”
“For who? I’m not taking responsibility for your life, if that’s what you mean. That’s your job. Don’t burden me with it.”
“Responsibility,” he said, “for the consequences to others of your acts. You’re morally, ethically drifting. Hitting out here and there, then submerging again. As if nothing happened. Leaving it to everyone else to pick up the sweltering moons.”
Raising her head she confronted him and said, “Have I hurt you? I saved you from the pols; that’s what I did for you. Was that the wrong thing to do? Was it?” Her voice increased in volume; she started at him pitilessly, unblinkingly, still holding her forkful of spaghetti.
He sighed. It was hopeless. “No,” he said, “it wasn’t the wrong thing to do. Thanks. I appreciate it.” And, as he said it, he felt unwavering hatred toward her. For enmeshing him this way. One puny nineteen-year-old ordinary, netting a
full-grown six like this—it was so improbable that it seemed absurd; he felt on one level like laughing. But on the other levels he did not.
“Are you responding to my warmth?” she inquired.
“Yes.”
“You do feel my love reaching out to you, don’t you? Listen. You can almost hear it.” She listened intently. “My love is growing, and it’s a tender vine.”
Jason signaled the waiter. “What have you got here?” he asked the waiter brusquely. “Just beer and wine?”
“And pot, sir. The best-grade Acapulco Gold. And hash, grade A.”
“But no hard liquor.”
“No, sir.”
Gesturing, he dismissed the waiter.
“You treated him like a servant,” Kathy said.
“Yeah,” he said, and groaned aloud. He shut his eyes and massaged the bridge of his nose. Might as well go the whole way now; he had managed, after all, to inflame her ire. “He’s a lousy waiter,” he said, “and this is a lousy restaurant. Let’s get out of here.”
Kathy said bitterly, “So that’s what it means to be a celebrity. I understand.” She quietly put down her fork.
“What do you think you understand?” he said, letting it all hang out; his conciliatory role was gone for good now. Never to be gotten back. He rose to his feet, reached for his coat. “I’m leaving,” he told her. And put on his coat.
“Oh, God,” Kathy said, shutting her eyes; her mouth, bent out of shape, hung open. “Oh, God. No. What have you done? Do you know what you’ve done? Do you understand fully? Do you grasp it at all?” And then, eyes shut, fists clenched, she ducked her head and began to scream. He had never heard screams like it before, and he stood paralyzed as the sound—and the sight of her constricted, broken face—dinned at him, numbing him. These are psychotic screams, he said to himself. From the racial unconscious. Not from a person but from a deeper level; from a collective entity.
Knowing that did not help.
The owner and two waiters hustled over, still clutching menus; Jason saw and marked details, oddly; it seemed as if everything, at her screams, had frozen over. Become fixed. Customers raising forks, lowering spoons, chewing…everything stopped and there remained only the terrible, ugly noise.