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 stared 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 fullgrown 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.
And she was saying words. Crude words, as if read off some back fence. Short, destructive words that tore at everyone in the restaurant, including himself. Especially himself.
The owner, his mustache twitching, nodded to the two waiters, and they lifted Kathy bodily from her chair; they raised her by her shoulders, held her, then, at the owner’s curt nod, dragged her from the booth, across the restaurant and out onto the street.
He paid the bill, hurried after them.
At the entrance, however, the owner stopped him. Holding out his hand. “Three hundred dollars,” the owner said.
“For what?” he demanded. “For dragging her outside?”
The owner said, “For not calling the pols.”
Grimly, he paid.
The waiters had set her down on the pavement, at the curb’s edge. She sat silent now, fingers pressed to her eyes, rocking back and forth, her mouth making soundless images. The waiters surveyed her, apparently essaying whether or not she would make any more trouble, and then, their joint decision made, they hurried back into the restaurant. Leaving him and Kathy there on the sidewalk, under the red-andwhite neon sign, together.
Kneeling by her, he put his hand on her shoulder. This time she did not try to pull away. “I’m sorry,” he said. And he meant it. “For pushing you.” I called your bluff, he said to himself, and it was not a bluff. Okay; you won. I give up. From now on it’s whatever you want. Name it. He thought, Just make it brief, for God’s sake. Let me out of this as quickly as you possibly can.
He had an intuition that it would not be soon.
5
Together, hand in hand, they strolled along the evening sidewalk, past the competing, flashing, winking, flooding pools of color created by the rotating, pulsating, jiggling, lit-up signs. This kind of neighborhood did not please him; he had seen it a million times, duplicated throughout the face of earth. It had been from such as this that he had fled, early in his life, to use his sixness as a method of getting out. And now he had come back.
He did not object to the people: he saw them as trapped here, the ordinaries, who through no fault of their own had to remain. They had not invented it; they did not like it; they endured it, as he had not had to. In fact, he felt guilty, seeing their grim faces, their turned-down mouths. Jagged, unhappy mouths.
“Yes,” Kathy said at last, “I think I really am falling in love with you. But it’s your fault; it’s your powerful magnetic field that you radiate. Did you know I can see it?”
“Gee,” he said mechanically.
“It’s dark velvet purple,” Kathy said, grasping his hand tightly with her surprisingly strong fingers. “Very intense. Can you see mine? My magnetic aura?”
“No,” he said.
“I’m surprised. I would have thought you could.” She seemed calm, now; the explosive screaming episode had left, trailing after it, relative stability. An almost pseudoepileptoid personality structure, he conjectured. That works up day after day to– “My aura,” she broke into his thoughts, “is bright red. The color of passion.”
“I’m glad for you,” Jason said.
Halting, she turned to peer into his face. To decipher his expression. He hoped it was appropriately opaque. “Are you mad because I lost my temper?” she inquired.
“No,” he said
“You sound mad. I think you are mad. Well, I guess only Jack understands. And Mickey.”
“Mickey Quinn,” he said reflexively.
“Isn’t he a remarkable person?” Kathy said.
“Very.” He could have told her a lot, but it was pointless. She did not really want to know; she believed she understood already.
What else do you believe, little girl? he wondered. For example, what do you believe you know about me? As little as you know about Mickey Quinn and Arlene Howe and all the rest of them who, for you, do not in reality exist? Think what I could tell you if, for a moment, you were able to listen. But you can’t listen. It would frighten you, what you might hear. And anyhow, you know everything already.
“How does it feel,” he asked, “to have slept with so many famous people?”
At that she stopped short. “Do you think I slept with them because they were famous? Do you think I’m a CF, a celebrity fucker? Is that your real opinion of me?”
Like flypaper, he thought. She enmeshed him by every word he said. He could not win.
“I think,” he said, “you’ve led an interesting life. You’re an interesting person.”
“And important,” Kathy added.
“Yes,” he said. “Important, too. In some ways the most important person I’ve ever encountered. It’s a thrilling experience.”
“Do you mean that?”
“Yes,” he said emphatically. And in a peculiar, assbackward way, it was true. No one, not even Heather, had ever tied him up so completely as this. He could not endure what he found himself going through, and he could not get away. It seemed to him as if he sat behind the tiller of his custommade unique quibble, facing a red light, green light, amber light all at once; no rational response was possible. Her irrationality made it so. The terrible power, he thought, of illogic. Of the archetypes. Operating out of the drear depths of the collective unconscious which joined him and her–and everyone else–together. In a knot which never could be undone, as long as they lived.
No wonder, he thought, some people, many people, long for death.
“You want to go watch a captain kirk?” Kathy asked.
“Whatever,” he said, briefly.
“There’s a good one on at Cinema Twelve. It’s set on a planet in the Betelgeuse System, a lot like Tarberg’s Planet– you know, in the Proxima System. Only in the captain kirk it’s inhabited by minions of an invisible–”
“I saw it,” he said. As a matter of fact, a year ago they had had Jeff Pomeroy, who played the captain kirk in the picture, on his show; they had even run a short scene: the usual flick-plugging, you-visit-us deal with Pomeroy’s studio. He had not liked it then and he doubted if he would like it now. And he detested Jeff Pomeroy, both on and off the screen. And that, as far as he was concerned, was that.