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 brought 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 women 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. Feather-plastic 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 time period.” 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 super-carefully 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 butter 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 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.”