“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 glass, “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. Goddamn 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 gang-banged 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.
“Hell, 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 super-secret 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 God 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 nineteen-year-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 breasts.
“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, sex, 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.