Linda shoves her way over to the stereo and Kenneth. “Don’t introduce me to any more writers,” she says.
“Didn’t you like Ben?” Kenneth asks. “Fred, let Linda pick out a record.” Fred Zukini is just about to put the Association on. It is a lucky thing Linda came along. She asks for Big Pink. She wants to hear “The Weight.”
Kenneth turns the music up. He has one arm draped around Margaret; he kisses her on the neck. He smiles at Linda, but it is definitely a get-lost kind of smile. Linda responds, spotting an empty chair in a corner and retreating to it.
She sees Dave again, sitting under the Rembrandt, talking with Dudley Petersen. She cannot quite hear their words, though the young man with the high voice who disliked the Beatles is still clearly audible. “No, no, no,” he is saying. “We’re talking about the complete failure of the dialectic.”
Suzette has found Dave again, too, and in the sudden silence between “Tears of Rage” and “To Kingdom Come,” Linda hears Suzette ask Dave if she can sit on his lap. Well! Linda can’t help feeling this is somehow lacking in subtlety. Her father told her, advice she has never needed, not once, that boys do not like to be chased and he was a boy himself and should know, but there Suzette is, settling herself in, laughing like Simone Signoret, and this appears to be just one more area in which Linda has been sadly misled. The situation is hopeless. Linda looks at her shoes and wonders how early she can go home. In fact, Linda likes Suzette for being so brazenly weird. Gretchen likes her, Julie likes her, Lauren likes her — add them together and it should have been enough to prevent such popularity.
Linda leans back and closes her eyes, listening to the conversations close to her. To her right, two women are laughing. “So he doesn’t have a condom,” one says. “‘I figured you’d be on the pill,’ he tells me and I say, ‘Listen, bucko, we have a saying among my people — the person who plans the party should bring the beer.’ ‘Your people?’ he asks and I say, ‘Yeah, my people. You know. Women.’” The second woman’s voice is soft and throaty. “Probably just never heard women called people before,” she offers.
Farther from her, Linda hears someone suggesting a party game. Everyone is to lie down with their heads on someone else’s stomach and then all laugh simultaneously. Score another one for Gretchen.
She hears Frank Zukini asking some woman what her major is. Penetrating question, Linda thinks. “Drama,” the woman answers. “I’m a thespian.” There is a long pause, and Frank’s voice when he responds betrays shock. “Whatever’s right,” he says, at last.
And then Suzette’s voice, close to Linda’s ear, indicates that Dave’s lap is unoccupied again. “I have a message for you,” Suzette tells her.
Linda sits up and opens her eyes. “For me?”
“Yes. From the Venusians. They’re very interested in you, Linda. They ask about you a lot.”
“How flattering,” says Linda. “Extraterrestrial attention. What’s the message?”
Suzette’s hair is the color of the knight’s helmet and surrounds her face like an aura. “They said not to do anything they wouldn’t do.”
“Suzette,” says Linda, smiling at her, “tell them to relax. I never do anything.”
Dudley Petersen passes. Linda knows he sees her, but he goes in another direction. Still brooding about his ferns. But Mrs. Kirk joins her, carrying her beer in a pewter mug with a hinged lid and a glass bottom. “Marvelous party,” says Mrs. Kirk. “No hippies. Just a lot of nice young people enjoying themselves.”
“I’m not enjoying myself,” Linda tells her. “I’m having a terrible time.”
“It’s because you’re not drinking. Kenny! Kenny!” Mrs. Kirk waves a plump hand and her bracelets ring out commandingly. “Linda needs a beer!”
Kenneth supplies one, giving her an empty glass wrapped in a paper towel at the same time. “The glass is a gift from Dave,” he informs her. “And Dave says not to handle it too much. Would you like to tell me what’s going on?”
Linda takes the glass and her spirits lift ridiculously. But briefly. “It’s evidence,” she says. She watches Kenneth weave his way back to Dave. Kenneth wants to invite the police department, any off-duty officers and anyone they are willing to let out of jail. He argues with Dave about it. Dave is holding the phone clamped tightly together and refusing to release it.
“Hey, Linda.” It’s Fred Zukini. “You still haven’t seen my car. You want to? I got a tape deck, now, and I put a lock on the gas cap and I put sheepskin on the seats.”
Linda takes a long drink of her beer and then sets it and the empty glass back under the seat where they’ll be safe until she can retrieve them. She follows Fred to the elevator, passing through a nasty, acrid smell by the couch where Ben Bryant is smoking a pipe. With tobacco in it.
Fred doesn’t seem the sort to seduce her in the basement. Too much risk to the car, for one thing, and Linda doesn’t like him so she is relaxed and calm, picking her way through the couples who have opted for romantic subterranean lighting. Fred stops at a polished red VW bug and runs his hand over the curves of the trunk. “I got extra locks on the doors, too,” he says. “Because of the tape deck. I’m going to get leather for the steering wheel.”
Linda leans over, peering into the car’s interior. Above the soft and snowy sheepskin, next to the steering column, a set of keys dangles. “You’ve left your keys in it,” Linda tells Fred. “Anyone could take it.”
Fred pushes her roughly aside, pressing his forehead against the window. “It’s locked.” His voice breaks. “It’s all locked up. The keys are locked inside.”
“Oh,” says Linda. She thinks for a moment. “Maybe you could get in with a coat hanger. I’ve seen that done.”
“Linda, the windows are closed. And it’s got special locks.”
“Oh.” Linda thinks again. “I guess you’ll have to break a window.”
Fred runs a hand through his hair, but it is too short to be disarranged. His face is anguished. “Could you let me think this through?” he requests. “God, Linda, could you be quiet and leave me alone for a bit?”
Linda makes her way back to the elevator, the heels of her shoes snapping on the cement floor. A white-faced cadet stumbles across her path. He moans once, a pathetic, suffocated sound. “Oh, no,” he says. He falls against the first of the washing machines, claws it open, and throws up into it. He looks at Linda and throws up again.
There is a message here, Linda decides. A message from the Venusians. The message is to go home. Go home to her roommates who were so right when she was so wrong, and Linda feels that all she will ever ask for the whole rest of her life is not to forget and wash her clothes in the first machine or spend another second with anyone named Fred or Frank or Kenneth or—
The elevator opens slowly, suspensefully, and Dave is inside. “I thought you might need rescuing,” he says. “Mrs. Kirk gave me the keys to the penthouse. She says you can see all of San Francisco from there. Want to come?”
“Why not?” Linda answers coldly. “As long as I’m in the elevator anyway.” She joins him. They face front. No one’s shoulder touches anyone else’s. The elevator does not move. Linda jabs the topmost button. And again. The elevator gives a startled lurch upward. About the third floor, Linda asks where Suzette is. Maximum aplomb. A casual, uninterested question. She is merely making conversation.
“Sitting on Frank’s lap. Apparently he’s a very old soul. A teacher. A guru, would you believe it? He has a yellow aura. Suzette just about died when she saw it.”
“Too bad for you,” says Linda. The elevator has stopped, but its door is sticking. Linda has to wedge her foot in to force it open.