Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said Part 10

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 b.u.t.ter 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 h.e.l.l 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 gla.s.ses, 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 s.e.xual misdeeds in weird, small, but apparently normal Midwestern towns?

That was one factor about Ruth Rae: her obsession with s.e.x. 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 s.e.xy 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 const.i.tuted 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. l.u.s.t 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 s.e.xual opportunity than Ruth.

"Hi," he said.

Foggily--because she did not have on her gla.s.ses--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 b.o.o.bs.

"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."

Jason said cautiously, "I have been in TV. A little."

"Oh, like the _Phantom Baller Show_." She nodded. "Well, let's face it; neither of us made it."

"I'll drink to that," he said, ironically amused; he sipped at his mulled scotch and honey. The pat of b.u.t.ter had melted.

"I believe I do remember you," Ruth Rae said. "Didn't you have some blueprints for a house out on the Pacific, a thousand miles away from Australia? Was that you?"

"That was me," he said, lying.

"And you drove a Rolls-Royce flyship."

"Yes," he said. That part was true.

Ruth Rae said, smiling, "Do you know what I'm doing here? Do you have any idea? I'm trying to get to see, to meet, Freddy Hydrocephalic. I'm in love with him." She laughed the throaty laugh he remembered from the old days. "I keep sending him notes reading 'I love you,' and he writes _typed_ notes back saying 'I don't want to get involved; I have personal problems.' " She laughed again, and finished her drink.

"Another?" Jason said, rising.

"No." Ruth Rae shook her head. "I don't drink anymore. There was a period"--she paused, her face troubled--"I wonder if anything like that has ever happened to you. I wouldn't think so, to look at you."

"What happened?"

Ruth Rae said, fooling with her empty gla.s.s, "I drank all the time. Starting at nine o'clock in the morning. And you know what it did for me? It made me look older. I looked fifty. G.o.dd.a.m.n booze. Whatever you fear will happen to you, booze will make it happen. In my opinion booze is the great enemy of life. Do you agree?"

"I'm not sure," Jason said. "I think life has worse enemies than booze."

"I guess so. Like the forced-labor camps. Do you know they tried to send me to one last year? I really had a terrible time; I had no money--I hadn't met Bob Gomen yet--and I worked for a savings-and-loan company. One day a deposit in cash came in . . . fifty-dollar-bill stuff, three or four of them." She introspected for a time. "Anyhow, I took them and put the deposit slip and envelope into the shredder. But they caught me. Entrapment--a setup."

"Oh," he said.

"But--see, I had a thing going with my boss. The pols wanted to drag me off to a forced-labor camp--one in Georgia--where I'd be g.a.n.g.b.a.n.ged to death by rednecks, but he protected me. I still don't know how he did it, but they let me go. I owe that man a lot, and I never see him anymore. You never see the ones who really love you and help you; you're always involved with strangers."

"Do you consider me a stranger?" Jason asked. He thought to himself, I remember one more thing about you, Ruth Rae. She always maintained an impressively expensive apartment. No matter who she happened to be married to: she always lived well.

Ruth Rae eyed him questioningly. "No. I consider you a friend."

"Thanks." Reaching, he took hold of her dry hand and held it a second, letting go at exactly the right time.

9

Ruth Rae's apartment appalled Jason Taverner with its luxury. It must cost her, he reasoned, at least four hundred dollars a day. Bob Gomen must be in good financial shape, he decided. Or anyhow was.

"You didn't have to buy that fifth of Vat 69," Ruth said as she took his coat, carrying it and her own to a self-opening closet. "I have Cutty Sark and Hiram Walker's bourbon--"

She had learned a great deal since he had last slept with her: it was true. Emptied, he lay naked on the blankets of the waterbed, rubbing a broken-out spot at the rim of his nose. Ruth Rae, or rather Mrs. Ruth Gomen now, sat on the carpeted floor, smoking a Pall Mall. Neither of them had spoken for some time; the room had become quiet. And, he thought, as drained as I am. Isn't there some principle of thermodynamics, he thought, that says heat can't be destroyed, it can only be transferred? But there's also entropy.

I feel the weight of entropy on me now, he decided. I have discharged myself into a vacuum, and I will never get back what I have given out. I goes only one way. Yes, he thought, I'm sure that is one of the fundamental laws of thermodynamics.

"Do you have an encyclopedia machine?" he asked the woman.

"h.e.l.l, no." Worry appeared on her prunelike face. Prunelike--he withdrew the image; it did not seem fair. Her weathered face, he decided. That was more like it.

"What are you thinking?" he asked her.

"No, you tell me what you're thinking," Ruth said. "What's on that big alpha-consciousness-type supersecret brain of yours?"

"Do you remember a girl named Monica Buff?" Jason asked.

"'Remember' her! Monica Buff was my sister-in-law for six years. In all that time she never washed her hair once. Tangled, messy, dark-brown ooze of dog fur hanging around her pasty face and dirty short neck."

"I didn't realize you disliked her."

"Jason, she used to steal. If you left your purse around she'd rip you off; not just the paper scrip but all the coins as well. She had the brain of a magpie and the voice of a crow, when she talked, which thank G.o.d wasn't often. Do you know that that chick used to go six or seven--sometimes, one time in particular--eight days without saying a word? Just huddled up in a corner like a fractured spider strumming on that five-dollar guitar she owned and never learned the chords for. Okay, she did look pretty in an unkempt messy sort of way. I'll concede that. If you like gross tail."

"How'd she stay alive?" Jason asked. He had known Monica Buff only briefly, and by way of Ruth. But during that time he and she had had a short, mind-blowing affair.

"Shoplifting," Ruth Rae said. "She had that big wicker bag she got in Baja California . . . she used to stuff stuff into that and then go cruising out of the store big as life."

"Why didn't she get caught?"

"She did. They fined her and her brother came up with the bread, so there she was again, out on the street, strolling along barefoot--I mean it!--down Shrewsbury Avenue in Boston, tweaking all the peaches in the grocery-store produce sections. She used to spend ten hours a day in what she called shopping." Glaring at him, Ruth said, "You know what she did that she never got caught at?" Ruth lowered her voice. "She used to feed escaped students."

"And they never busted her for that?" Feeding or sheltering an escaped student meant two years in an FLC--the first time. The second time the sentence was five years.

"No, they never busted her. If she thought a pol team was about to run a spot check she'd quickly phone Pol Central and say a man was trying to break into her house. And then she'd maneuver the student outside and then lock him out, and the pols would come and there he'd be, beating on the door exactly as she said. So they'd cart him off and leave her free." Ruth chuckled, "I heard her make one of those phone calls to Pol Central once. The way she told it, the man--"

Jason said, "Monica was my old lady for three weeks. Five years ago, roughly."

"Did you ever see her wash her hair during that time?"

"No," he admitted.

"And she didn't wear underpants," Ruth said. "Why would a good-looking man like you want to have an affair with a dirty, stringy, mangy freak like Monica Buff? You couldn't have been able to take her anywhere; she smelled. She never bathed."

"Hebephrenia," Jason said.

"Yes." Ruth nodded. "That was the diagnosis. I don't know if you know this but finally she just wandered off, during one of her shopping trips, and never came back; we never saw her again. By now she's probably dead. Still clutching that wicker shopping bag she got in Baja. That was the big moment in her life, that trip to Mexico. She bathed for the occasion, and I fixed up her hair--after I washed it half a dozen times. What did you ever see in her? How could you stand her?"

Jason said, "I liked her sense of humor."

It's unfair, he thought, comparing Ruth with a nineteenyear-old girl. Or even with Monica Buff. But--the comparison remained there, in his mind. Making it impossible for him to feel attraction toward Ruth Rae. As good--as experienced, anyhow--as she was in bed.

I am using her, he thought. As Kathy used me. As McNulty used Kathy.

McNulty. Isn't there a microtrans on me somewhere?

Rapidly, Jason Taverner grabbed up his clothing, swiftly carried it to the bathroom. There, seated on the edge of the tub, he began to inspect each article.

It took him half an hour. But he did, at last, locate it. Small as it was. He flushed it down the toilet; shaken, he made his way back into the bedroom. So they know where I am after all, he realized. I can't stay here after all.

And I've jeopardized Ruth Rae's life for nothing.

"Wait," he said aloud.

"Yes?" Ruth said, leaning wearily against the wall of the bathroom, arms folded under her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

"Microtransmitters," Jason said slowly, "only give approximate locations. Unless something actually tracks back to them locked on their signal." Until then-- He could not be sure. After all, McNulty had been waiting in Kathy's apartment. But had McNulty come there in response to the microtransmitter, or because he knew that Kathy lived there? Befuddled by too much anxiety, s.e.x, and scotch, he could not remember; he sat on the tub edge rubbing his forehead, straining to think, to recall exactly what had been said when he and Kathy entered her room to find McNulty waiting for them.

_Ed_, he thought. They said that Ed planted the microtrans on me. So it did locate me. But-- Still, maybe it only told them the general area. And they a.s.sumed, correctly, that it would be Kathy's pad.

To Ruth Rae he said, his voice breaking, "G.o.d d.a.m.n it, I hope I haven't got the pols oinking their a.s.ses after you; that would be too much, too G.o.dd.a.m.n much." He shook his head, trying to clear it. "Do you have any coffee that's super-hot?"

"I'll go punch the stove-console." Ruth Rae skittered barefoot, wearing only a box bangle, from the bathroom into the kitchen. A moment later she returned with a big plastic mug of coffee, marked KEEP ON TRUCKIN'. He accepted it, drank down the steaming coffee.

"I can't stay," he said, "any longer. And anyhow, you're too old."

She stared at him, ludicrously, like a warped, stomped doll. And then she ran off into the kitchen. Why did I say that? he asked himself. The pressure; my fears. He started after her.

In the kitchen doorway Ruth appeared, holding up a stoneware platter marked SOUVENIR OF KNOITS BERRY FARM. She ran blindly at him and brought it down on his head, her mouth twisting like newborn things just now alive. At that last instant he managed to lift his left elbow and take the blow there; the stoneware platter broke into three jagged pieces, and, down his elbow, blood spurted. He gazed at the blood, the shattered pieces of platter on the carpet, then at her.

"I'm sorry," she said, whispering it faintly. Barely forming the words. The newborn snakes twisted continually, in apology.

Jason said, "I'm sorry."

"I'll put a Band-Aid on it." She started for the bathroom. "No," he said, "I'm leaving. It's a clean cut; it won't get infected."

"Why did you say that to me?" Ruth said hoa.r.s.ely.

"Because," he said, "of my own fears of age. Because they're wearing me down, what's left of me. I virtually have no energy left. Even for an o.r.g.a.s.m."

"You did really well."