What I need, he said to himself, _is to find someone who already has an apartment. In their name, with their prints_.
And that means another girl.
Where do I find such a one? he asked himself, and had the answer already on his tongue: at a first-rate cocktail lounge. The kind many women go to, with a three-man combo playing fob jazzy, preferably blacks. Well dressed.
Am I well enough dressed, though? he wondered, and took a good look at his silk suit under the steady white-and-red light of a huge AAMCO sign. Not his best but nearly so. . . but wrinkled. Well, in the gloom of a cocktail lounge it wouldn’t show.
He hailed a cab, and presently found himself quibbling toward the more acceptable part of the city to which he was accustomed–accustomed, at least, during the most recent years of his life, his career When he had reached the very top.
A club, he thought, where I’ve appeared. A club I really know. Know the maître d’, the hatcheck girl, the flower girl . . . unless they, like me, are somehow now changed.
But as yet it appeared that nothing but himself had changed. _His_ circumstances. Not theirs.
The Blue Fox Room of the Hayette Hotel in Reno. He had played there a number of times; he knew the layout and the staff backward and forward.
To the cab he said, “Reno.”
Beautifully, the cab peeled off in a great swooping righthand motion; he felt himself going with it, and enjoyed it. The cab picked up speed: they had entered a virtually unused air corridor, and the upper velocity limit was perhaps as high as twelve hundred m.p.h.
“I’d like to use the phone,” Jason said.
The left wall of the cab opened and a picphone slid out, cord twisted in a baroque 1oop.
He knew the number of the Blue Fox Room by heart; he dialed it, waited, heard a click and then a mature male voice saying, “Blue Fox Room, where Freddy Hydrocephalic is appearing in two shows nightly, at eight and at twelve; only thirty dollars’ cover charge and girls provided while you watch. May I help you?”
“Is this good old Jumpy Mike?” Jason said. “Good old Jumpy Mike himself?”
“Yes, this certainly is.” The formality of the voice ebbed. “Who am I speaking to, may I ask?” A warm chuckle.
Taking a deep breath, Jason said, “This is Jason Taverner.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Taverner.” Jumpy Mike sounded puzzled. “Right now at the moment I can’t quite–”
“It’s been a long time,” Jason interrupted. “Can you give me a table toward the front of the room–”
“The Blue Fox Room is completely sold out, Mr. Taverner,” Jumpy Mike rumbled in his fat way. “I’m very sorry.”
“No table at all?” Jason said. “At any price?”
“Sorry, Mr. Taverner, none.” The voice faded in the direction of remoteness. “Try us in two weeks.” Good old Jumpy Mike hung up.
Silence.
Jesus shit Christ, Jason said to himself. “God,” he said aloud. “God damn it.” His teeth ground against one another, sending sheets of pain through his trigeminal nerve.
“New instructions, big fellow?” the cab asked tonelessly.
“Make it Las Vegas,” Jason grated. I’ll try the Nellie Melba Room of the Drake’s Arms, he decided. Not too long ago he had had good luck there, at a time when Heather Hart had been fulfilling an engagement in Sweden. A reasonable number of reasonably high class chicks hung out there, gambling, drinking, listening to the entertainment, getting it on. It was worth a try, if the Blue Fox Room–and the others like it–were closed to him. After all, what could he lose?
Half an hour later the cab deposited him on the roof field of the Drake’s Arms. Shivering in the chill night air, Jason made his way to the royal descent carpet; a moment later he had stepped from it into the warmth-color-light-movement of the Nellie Melba Room.
The time: seven-thirty. The first show would begin soon. He glanced at the notice; Freddy Hydrocephalic was appearing here, too, but doing a lesser tape at lower prices. Maybe he’ll remember me, Jason thought. Probably not. And then, as he thought more deeply on it, he thought, No chance at all.
If Heather Hart didn’t remember him no one would.
He seated himself at the crowded bar–on the only stool left–and, when the bartender at last noticed him, ordered scotch and honey, mulled. A pat of butter floated in it.
“That’ll be three dollars,” the bartender said.
“Put it on my–” Jason began and then gave up. He brpught out a five.
And then he noticed her.
Seated several seats down. She had been his mistress years ago; he had not seen her in a hell of a while. But she still has a good figure, he observed, even though she’s gotten a lot older. Ruth Rae. Of all people.
One thing about Ruth Rae: she was smart enough not to let her skin become too tanned. Nothing aged a woman’s skin faster than tanning, and few somen seemed to know it. For a woman Ruth’s age–he guessed she was now thirtyeight or -nine–tanning would have turned her skin into wrinkled leather.
And, too, she dressed well. She showed off her excellent figure. If only time had avoided its constant series of appointments with her face . . . anyhow, Ruth still had beautiful black hair, all coiled in an upsweep at the back of her head. Featherplastic eyelashes, brilliant purple streaks across her cheek, as if she had been seared by psychedelic tiger claws.
Dressed in a colorful sari, barefoot–as usual she had kicked off her high-heeled shoes somewhere–and not wearing her glasses, she did not strike him as bad-looking. Ruth Rae, he mused. Sews her own clothes. Bifocals which she never wears when anyone’s around . . . excluding me. Does she still read the Book-of-the-Month selection? Does she still get off reading those endless dull novels about sexual misdeeds in weird, small, but apparently normal Midwestern towns?
That was one factor about Ruth Rae: her obsession with sex. One year that he recalled she had laid sixty men, not including him: he had entered and left earlier, when the stats were not so high.
And she had always liked his music. Ruth Rae liked sexy vocalists, pop ballads and sweet–sickeningly sweet–strings. In her New York apartment at one time she had set up a huge quad system and more or less lived inside it, eating dietetic sandwiches and drinking fake frosty slime drinks made out of nothing. Listening forty-eight hours at a stretch to disc after disc by the Purple People Strings, which he abominated.
Because her general taste appalled him, it annoyed him that he himself constituted one of her favorites. It was an anomaly which he had never been able to take apart.
What else did he remember about her? Tablespoons of oily yellow fluid every morning: vitamin E. Strangely enough it did not seem to be a shuck in her case; her erotic stamina increased with each spoonful. Lust virtually leaked out of her.
And as he recalled she hated animals. This made him think about Kathy and her cat Domenico. Ruth and Kathy would never groove, he said to himself. But that doesn’t matter; they’ll never meet.
Sliding from his stool he carried his drink down the bar until he stood before Ruth Rae. He did not expect her to know him, but, at one time, she had found him unable to avoid. . . why wouldn’t that be true now? No one was a better judge of sexual opportunity than Ruth.
“Hi,” he said.
Foggily–because she did not have on her glasses–Ruth Rae lifted her head, scrutinized him. “Hi,” she rasped in her bourbon-bounded voice. “Who are you?”
Jason said, “We met a few years ago in New York. I was doing a walk-on in an episode of _The Phantom Baller_. . . as I recall it, you had charge of costumes.”
“The episode,” Ruth Rae rasped, “where the Phantom Baller was set upon by pirate queers from another timeperiod.” She laughed, smiled up at him. “What’s your name?” she inquired, jiggling her wire-supported exposed boobs.
“Jason Taverner,” he said.
“Do you remember my name?”
“Oh yes,” he said. “Ruth Rae.”
“It’s Ruth Gomen now,” she rasped. “Sit down.” She glanced around her, saw no vacant stools. “Table over there.” She stepped supercarefully from her stool and careened in the direction of a vacant table; he took her arm, guided her along. Presently, after a moment of difficult navigation, he had her seated, with himself close beside her.
“You look every bit as beautiful–” he began, but she cut him off brusquely.
“I’m old,” she rasped. “I’m thirty-nine.”
“That’s not old,” Jason said. “I’m forty-two.”
“It’s all right for a man. Not for a woman.” Blearily she stared into her half-raised martini. “Do you know what Bob does? Bob Gomen? He raises dogs. Big, loud, pushy dogs with long hair. It gets into the refrigerator.” She sipped moodily at her martini; then, all at once, her face glowed with animation; she turned toward him and said, “You don’t look forty-two. You look all _right!_ Do you know what I think? You ought to be in TV or the movies.”