“That’s not very far,” Jason said.
Taking off her plastic coat, Kathy asked, “How far did you get into it?” She hung her coat in a tiny closet, taking his, too.
“I never read it,” Jason said. “But on my program we did a dramatic rendering of a scene . . . I don’t know which. We got a lot of good mail about it, but we never tried it again. Those out things, you have to be careful and not dole out too much. If you do it kills it dead for everybody, all networks, for the rest of the year.” He prowled, crampedly, about the room, examining a book here, a cassette tape, a micromag. She even had a talking toy. Like a kid, he thought; she’s not really an adult.
With curiosity, he turned on the talking toy.
“Hi!” it declared. “I’m Cheerful Charley and I’m definitely tuned in on your wavelength.”
“Nobody named Cheerful Charley is tuned in on my wavelength,” Jason said. He started to shut it off, but it protested. “Sorry,” Jason told it, “but I’m tuning you out, you creepy little bugger.”
“But I love you!” Cheerful Charley complained tinnily.
He paused, thumb on off button. “Prove it,” he said. On his show he had done commercials for junk like this. He hated it and them. Equally. “Give me some money,” he told it.
“I know how you can get back your name, fame, and game,” Cheerful Charley informed him. “Will that do for openers?”
“Sure,” he said.
Cheerful Charley bleated, “Go look up your girl friend.”
“Who do you mean?” he said guardedly.
“Heather Hart,” Cheerful Charley bleeped.
“Hard by,” Jason said, pressing his tongue against his upper incisors. He nodded. “Any more advice?”
“I’ve heard of Heather Hart,” Kathy said as she brought a bottle of orange juice out of the cold-cupboard of the room’s wall. The bottle had already become three-fourths empty; she shook it up, poured foamy instant ersatz orange juice into two jelly glasses. “She’s beautiful. She has all that long red hair. Is she really your girl friend? Is Charley right?”
“Everybody knows,” he said, “that Cheerful Charley is always right.”
“Yes, I guess that’s true.” Kathy poured bad gin (Mountbatten’s Privy Seal Finest) into the orange juice. “Screwdrivers,” she said, proudly.
“No, thanks,” he said. “Not at this hour of the day.” Not even B & L scotch bottled in Scotland, he thought. This damn little room . . . isn’t she making anything out of pol finking and card-forging, whichever it is she does? Is she really a police informer, as she says? he wondered. Strange. Maybe she’s both. Maybe neither.
“Ask me!” Cheerful Charley piped. “I can see you have something on your mind, mister. You good-looking bastard, you.”
He let that pass. “This girl,” he began, but instantly Kathy grabbed Cheerful Charley away from him, stood holding it, her nostrils flaring, her eyes filled with indignation.
“The hell you’re going to ask my Cheerful Charley about me,” she said, one eyebrow raised. Like a wild bird, he thought, going through elaborate motions to protect her nest. He laughed. “What’s funny?” Kathy demanded.
“These talking toys,” he said, “are more nuisance than utilitarian. They ought to be abolished.” He walked away from her, then to a clutter of mail on a TV-stand table. Aimlessly, he sorted among the envelopes, noticing vaguely that none of the bills had been opened.
“Those are mine,” Kathy said defensively, watching him.
“You get a lot of bills,” he said, “for a girl living in a oneroom schmalch. You buy your clothes–or what else?–at Metter’s? Interesting.”
“I–take an odd size.”
He said, “And Sax and Crombie shoes.”
“In my work–” she began, but he cut her off with a convulsive swipe of his hand.
“Don’t give me that,” he grated.
“Look in my closet. You won’t see much there. Nothing out of the ordinary, except that what I do have is good. I’d rather have a little amount of something good . . .” Her words trailed off. “You know,” she said vaguely, “than a lot of junk.”
Jason said, “You have another apartment.”
It registered; her eyes flickered as she looked into herself for an answer. That, for him, constituted plenty.
“Let’s go there,” he said. He had seen enough of this cramped little room.
“I can’t take you there,” Kathy said, “because I share it with two other girls and the way we’ve divided up the use, this time is–”
“Evidently you weren’t trying to impress me.” It amused him. But also it irritated him; he felt downgraded, nebulously.
“I would have taken you there if today were my day,” Kathy said. “That’s why I have to keep this little place going; I’ve got to have _someplace_ to go when it’s not my day. My day, my next one, is Friday. From noon on.” Her tone had become earnest. As if she wished very much to convince him. Probably, he mused, it was true. But the whole thing irked him. Her and her whole life. He felt, now, as if he had been snared by something dragging him down into depths he had never known about before, even in the early, bad days. And he did not like it.
He yearned all at once to be out of here. The animal at bay was himself.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Kathy said, sipping her screwdriver.
To himself, but aloud, he said, “You have bumped the door of life open with your big, dense head. And now it can’t be closed.”
“What’s that from?” Kathy asked.
“From my life.”
“But it’s like poetry.”
“If you watched my show,” he said, “you’d know I come up with sparklers like that every so often.”
Appraising him calmly, Kathy said, “I’m going to look in the TV log and see if you’re listed. ” She set down her screwdriver, fished among discarded newspapers piled at the base of the wicker table.
“I wasn’t even born,” he said. “I checked on that.”
“And your show isn’t listed,” Kathy said, folding the newsprint page back and studying the log.
“That’s right,” he said. “So now you have all the answers about me.” He tapped his vest pocket of forged ID cards. “Including these. With their microtransmitters, if that much is true.”
“Give them back to me,” Kathy said, “and I’ll erad the microtransmitters. It’ll only take a second.” She held out her hand.
He returned them to her.
“Don’t you care if I take them off?” Kathy inquired.
Candidly, he answered, “No, I really don’t. I’ve lost the ability to tell what’s good or bad, true or not true, anymore. If you want to take the dots off, do it. If it pleases you.”
A moment later she returned the cards, smiling her sixteenyear-old hazy smile.
Observing her youth, her automatic radiance, he said,” ‘I feel as old as yonder elm.’
“From _Finnegans Wake_,” Kathy said happily. “When the old washerwomen at dusk are merging into trees and rocks.”
“You’ve read _Finnegans Wake?_” he asked, surprised.
“I saw the film. Four times. I like Hazeltine; I think he’s the best director alive.”
“I had him on my show,” Jason said. “Do you want to know what he’s like in real life?”
“No,” Kathy said.
“Maybe you ought to know.”
“No,” she repeated, shaking her head; her voice had risen. “And don’t try to tell me–okay? I’ll believe what I want to believe, and you believe what you believe. All right?”
“Sure,” he said. He felt sympathetic. The truth, he had often reflected, was overrated as a virtue. In most cases a sympathetic lie did better and more mercifully. Especially between men and women; in fact, whenever a woman was involved.
This, of course, was not, properly speaking, a woman, but a girl. And therefore, he decided the kind lie was even more of a necessity.
“He’s a scholar and an artist,” he said.
“Really?” She regarded him hopefully.
“Yes.”
At that she sighed in relief.
“Then you believe,” he said, pouncing, “that I have met Michael Hazeltine, the finest living film director, as you said yourself. So you do believe that I am a six–” He broke off; that had not been what he intended to say.
“‘A six,’ ” Kathy echoed, her brow furrowing, as if she were trying to remember. “I read about them in Time. Aren’t they all dead now? Didn’t the government have them all rounded up and shot, after that one, their leader–what was his name?–Teagarden; yes, that’s his name. Willard Teagarden. He tried to–how do you say it?–pull off a coup against the federal flats? He tried to get them disbanded as an illegal parimutuel–”
“Paramilitary,” Jason said.
“You don’t give a damn about what I’m saying.”
Sincerely, he said, “I sure do.” He waited. The girl did not continue. “Christ,” he spat out. “Finish what you were saying!”
“I think,” Kathy said at last, “that the sevens made the coup not come off.”