She had asked him in a casual manner what he did for a living… the casual manner, he reflected with some resentment, of a person for whom anything so simple as “a living” had never been a problem. I was a rock and roll singer, he told her, slightly amazed at how painless that past tense was. Sing with this band for a while, then that one. Sometimes a studio gig. She had nodded and that was the end of it. He had no urge to tell her about “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?”—that was the past now. The gap between that life and this was so large he hadn’t really comprehended it yet. In that life he had been running away from a cocaine dealer; in this one he could bury a man in Central Park and accept that (more or less) as a matter of course.

He put the eggs on a plate, added a cup of instant coffee with a lot of cream and sugar, the way she liked it (Larry himself subscribed to the trucker’s credo of “if you wanted a cup of cream and sugar, whydja ask for coffee?”), and brought it to the table. She was sitting on a hassock, holding her elbows and facing the stereo. Debussy strained out of the speakers like melted butter.

“Soup’s on,” he called.

She came to the table with a wan smile, looked at the eggs the way a track and field runner might look at a series of hurdles, and began to eat.

“Good,” she said. “You were right. Thank you.”

“You’re more than welcome,” he said. “Now look. What I’m going to suggest is this. We go down Fifth to Thirty-ninth and turn west. Cross to New Jersey by the Lincoln Tunnel. We can follow 495 northwest to Passaic and… those eggs okay? They’re not spoiled?”

She smiled. “They’re fine.” She forked more into her mouth, followed it with a sip of coffee. “Just what I needed. Go ahead, I’m listening.”

“From Passaic we just ankle it west until the roads are clear enough for us to drive. Then I thought we could turn northeast and head up to New England. Make kind of a buttonhook, do you see what I mean? It looks longer, but I think it’ll end up saving us a lot of hassles. Maybe take a house on the ocean in Maine. Kittery, York, Wells, Ogunquit, maybe Scarborough or Boothbay Harbor. How does that sound?”

He had been looking out the window, thinking as he spoke, and now he turned back to her. What he saw frightened him badly for a moment—it was as if she’d gone insane. She was smiling, but it was a rictus of pain and horror. Sweat stood out on her face in big round droplets.

“Rita? Jesus, Rita, what—”

“—sorry—” She scrambled up, knocking her chair over, and fled across the living room. One foot hooked the hassock she had been sitting on and it rolled on its side like an oversized checker. She almost fell herself.

“Rita? ”

Then she was in the bathroom and he could hear the industrial grinding sound of her breakfast coming up. He slammed his hand flat on the table in irritation, then got up and went in after her. God, he hated it when people puked. It always made you feel like puking yourself. The smell of slightly used American cheese in the bathroom made him want to gag. Rita was sitting on the robin’s-egg-blue tile of the floor, her legs folded under her, her head still hanging weakly over the bowl.

She wiped her mouth with a swatch of toilet paper and then looked up at him supplicatingly, her face as pale as paper.

“I’m sorry, I just couldn’t eat it, Larry. Really. I’m so sorry.”

“Well Jesus, if you knew it was going to make you do that, why did you try?”

“Because you wanted me to. And I didn’t want you to be angry with me. But you are, aren’t you? You are angry with me.”

His mind went back to last night. She had made love to him with such frantic energy that for the first time he had found himself thinking of her age and had been a little disgusted. It had been like being caught in one of those exercise machines. He had come quickly, almost in self-defense it seemed, and a long while later she had fallen back, panting and unfulfilled. Later, while he was on the borderline of sleep, she had drawn close to him and once again he had been able to smell her sachet, a more expensive version of scent his mother had always worn when they went out to the movies, and she had murmured the thing that had jerked him back from sleep and had kept him awake for another two hours: You won’t leave me, will you? You won’t leave me alone?

Before that she had been good in bed, so good that he was stunned. She had taken him back to this place after their lunch on the day they had met, and what had happened had happened quite naturally. He remembered an instant of disgust when he saw how her breasts sagged, and how the blue veins were prominent (it made him think of his mother’s varicose veins), but he had forgotten all about that when her legs came up and her thighs pressed against his hips with amazing strength.

Slow, she had laughed. The last shall be first and the first last.

He had been on the verge when she had pushed him off and gotten cigarettes.

What the hell are you doing? he asked, amazed, while old John Thomas waved indignantly in the air, visibly throbbing.

She had smiled. You’ve got a free hand, don’t you? So do I.

So they had done that while they smoked, and she chatted lightly about all manner of things—although the color had come up in her cheeks and after a while her breath had shortened and what she was saying began to drift off, forgotten.

Now, she said, taking his cigarette and her own and crushing them both out. Let’s see if you can finish what you started. If you can’t, I’ll likely tear you apart.

He finished it, quite satisfactorily for both of them, and they had slipped off to sleep. He woke up sometime after four and watched her sleeping, thinking that there was something to be said for experience after all. He had done a lot of screwing in the last ten years or so, but what had happened earlier hadn’t been screwing. It had been something much better than that, if a little decadent.

Well, she’s had lovers, of course.

This had excited him again, and he woke her up.

And so it had been until they had found the monster-shouter, and last night. There had been other things before then, things that troubled him, but which he had accepted. Something like this, he had rationalized it, if it only makes you a little bit psycho, you’re way ahead.

Two nights ago he had awakened sometime after two and had heard her running a glass of water in the bathroom. He knew she was probably taking another sleeping pill. She had the big red-and-yellow gelatine capsules that were known as “yellowjackets” on the West Coast. Big downers. He told himself she’d probably been taking them long before the superflu had happened.

And there was the way she followed him from place to place in the apartment, too, even standing in the bathroom door and talking to him while he was showering or relieving himself. He was a private bathroom person, but he told himself that some weren’t. A lot of it depended on your upbringing. He would have a talk with her… sometime.

But now…

Was he going to have to carry her on his back? Christ, he hoped not. She had seemed stronger than that, at least she had at first. It was one of the reasons she had appealed to him so strongly that day in the park… the main reason, really. There’s no more truth in advertising, he thought bitterly. How the hell was he qualified to take care of her when he couldn’t even watch out for himself? He’d shown that pretty conclusively after the record had broken out. Wayne Stukey hadn’t been shy about pointing it out, either.

“No,” he told her, “I’m not angry. It’s just that… you know, I’m not your boss. If you don’t feel like eating, just say so.”

“I told you… I said I didn’t think I could—”

“The fuck you did,” he snapped, startled and angry.