“Are you always afraid of strangers?” he asked her.
“I guess so.” Again she nodded; this time she hung her head as if he had admonished her. And in a fashion he had.
“Fear,” Jason said, “can make you do more wrong than hate or jealousy. If you’re afraid you don’t commit yourself to life completely; fear makes you always, always hold something back.”
“I think I know what you mean,” Mary Anne Dominic said. “One day about a year ago there was this dreadful pounding on my door, and I ran into the bathroom and locked myself in and pretended I wasn’t there, because I thought somebody was trying to break in … and then later I found out that the woman upstairs had got her hand caught in the drain of her sink—she has one of those Disposall things—and a knife had gotten down into it and she reached her hand down to get it and got caught. And it was her little boy at the door—”
“So you do understand what I mean,” Jason interrupted.
“Yes. I wish I wasn’t that way. I really do. But I still am.”
Jason said, “How old are you?”
“Thirty—two.”
That surprised him; she seemed much younger. Evidently she had not ever really grown up. He felt sympathy for her; how hard it must have been for her to let him take over her ffipflap. And her fears had been correct in one respect: he had not been asking for help for the reason he claimed.
He said to her, “You’re a very nice person.”
“Thank you,” she said dutifully. Humbly.
“See that coffee shop over there?” he said, pointing to a modern, well-patronized cafe. “Let’s go over there. I want to talk to you.” I have to talk to someone, anyone, he thought, or six or not I am going to lose my mind.
“But,” she protested anxiously, “I have to get my packages into the post office before two so they’ll get the midafternoon pickup for the Bay Area.”
“We’ll do that first, then,” he said. Reaching for the ignition switch, he pulled out the key, handed it back to Mary Anne Dominic. “You drive. As slowly as you want.”
“Mr.—Taverner,” she said. “I just want to be let alone.”
“No,” he said. “You shouldn’t be alone. It’s killing you; it’s undermining you. All the time, every day, you should be somewhere with people.”
Silence. And then Mary Anne said, “The post office is at Fbrty-ninth and Fulton. Could you drive? I’m sort of nervous.”
It seemed to him a great moral victory; he felt pleased. He took back the key, and shortly, they were on their way to Forty-ninth and Fulton.
22
Later, they sat in a booth at a coffee shop, a clean and attractive place with young waitresses and a reasonably loose patronage. The jukebox drummed out Louis Panda’s “Memory of Your Nose.” Jason ordered coffee only; Miss Dominic had a fruit salad and iced tea.
“What are those two records you’re carrying?” she asked.
He handed them to her.
“Why, they’re by you. If you’re Jason Taverner. Are you?”
“Yes.” He was certain of that, at least.
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard you sing,” Mary Anne Dominic said. “I’d love to, but I don’t usually like pop music; I like those great old-time folk singers out of the past, like Buffy St. Marie. There’s nobody now who could sing like Buffy.”
“I agree,” he said somberly, his mind still returning to the house, the bathroom, the escape from the frantic brown-uniformed private cop. It wasn’t the mescaline, he told himself once again. Because the cop saw it, too.
Or saw something.
“Maybe he didn’t see what I saw,” he said aloud. “Maybe he just saw her lying there. Maybe she fell. Maybe—” He thought, Maybe I should go back.
“Who didn’t see what?” Mary Anne Dominic asked, and then flushed bright scarlet. “I didn’t mean to poke into your life; you said you’re in trouble and I can see you have something weighty and heavy on your mind that’s obsessing you.”
“I have to be sure,” he said, “what actually happened. Everything is there in that house.” And on these records, he thought.
Alys Buckman knew about my TV program. She knew about my records. She knew which one was the big hit; she owned it. But—.
There had been no music on the records. Broken stylus, hell—some kind of sound, distorted perhaps, should have come out. He had handled records too long and phonographs too long not to know that.
“You’re a moody person,” Mary Anne Dominic said. From her small cloth purse she had brought a pair of glasses; she now laboriously read the bio material on the back of the record jackets.
“What’s happened to me,” Jason said briefly, “has made me moody.”
“It says here that you have a TV program.”
“Right.” He nodded. “At nine on Tuesday night. On NBC.”
“Then you’re really famous. I’m sitting here talking to a famous person that I ought to know about. How does it make you feel—I mean, my not recognizing who you are when you told me your name?”
He shrugged. And felt ironically amused.
“Would the jukebox have any songs by you?” She pointed to the multicolored Babylonian Gothic structure in the far corner.
“Maybe,” he said. It was a good question.
“I’ll go look.” Miss Dominic fished a half quinque from her pocket, slid from the booth, and crossed the coffee shop to stare down at the titles and artists of the jukebox’s listing.
When she gets back she is going to be less impressed by me, Jason mused. He knew the effect of one ellipsis: unless he manifested himself everywhere, from every radio and phonograph, jukebox and sheet-music shop, TV screen, in the universe, the magic spell collapsed.
She returned smiling.” ‘Nowhere Nuthin’ Fuck-up,’ “she said, reseating herself. He saw then that the half quinque was gone. “It should play next.”
Instantly he was on his feet and across the coffee shop to the jukebox.
She was right. Selection B4. His most recent hit, “Nowhere Nuthin’ Fuck-up,” a sentimental number. And already the mechanism of the jukebox had begun to process the disc.
A moment later his voice, mellowed by quad sound points and echo chambers, filled the coffee shop.
Dazed, he returned to the booth.
“You sound superwonderful,” Mary Anne said, politely, perhaps, given her taste, when the disc had ended.
“Thanks.” It had been him, all right. The grooves on that record hadn’t been blank.
“You’re really far out,” Mary Anne said enthusiastically, all smiles and twinkly glasses.
Jason said simply, “I’ve been at it a long time.” She had sounded as if she meant it.
“Do you feel bad that I hadn’t heard of you?”
“No.” He shook his head, still dazed. Certainly she was not alone in that, as the events of the past two days—two days? had it only been that?—had shown.
“Can—I order something more?” Mary Anne asked. She hesitated. “I spent all my money on stamps; I—”
“I’m picking up the tab,” Jason said.
“How do you think the strawberry cheesecake would be?”
“Outstanding,” he said, momentarily amused by her. The woman’s earnestness, her anxieties … does she have any boy friends of any kind? he wondered. Probably not … she lived in a world of pots, clay, brown wrapping paper, troubles with her little old Ford Greyhound, and, in the background, the stereo-only voices of the old-time greats: Judy Collins and Joan Baez.
“Ever listened to Heather Hart?” he asked. Gently.
Her forehead wrinkled. “I—don’t recall for sure. Is she a folk singer or—” Her voice trailed off; she looked sad. As if she sensed that she was failing to be what she ought to be, failing to know what every reasonable person knew. He felt sympathy for her.
“Ballads,” Jason said. “Like what I do.”
“Could we hear your record again?”
He obligingly returned to the jukebox, scheduled it for replay.
This time Mary Anne did not seem to enjoy it.