Call Me a Cab

14

Our route to the restaurant involved going outside again; down the exterior stairs and past our parked cab. A fiftyish couple was standing behind the cab as we went by, staring at it in complete astonishment. The woman was wearing broad-beamed pale green slacks, a pale green blouse with white polka dots, low-heel white shoes and a white cardigan sweater with little enlaced red-and-blue flowers around the neck and wrists. The man was dressed in white patent leather shoes, burgundy slacks, a narrow white patent leather belt, and an open-neck short sleeve shirt in broad vertical white-and-burgundy stripes. Both were short and stocky and big-nosed, and the man had a cigar in the corner of his mouth. As Katharine and I walked past, he took the cigar out of his face, pointed the wet end at the cab, and said to us, “This here is a New York City taxicab.” He had the voice I’d been faking on the phone with Barry.

I said, “Oh?”

“I oughta know,” he said.

He was prepared to tell us his life story — as though his appearance didn’t proclaim it anyway — just because we happened to be passing by. If we admitted it was our New York City taxicab we’d be stuck with him the rest of our lives. “Ah,” I said, therefore, took Katharine firmly by the elbow, and kept on walking.

Katharine glanced back over her shoulders, saying, quietly, “What was that all about?”

“That’s a New York City taxicab driver,” I told her. “On vacation.”

She looked back again. “Are you sure?”

“No question. Visualize him in a cap.”

“I see what you mean,” she said, squinting. “That’s why he said, ‘I oughta know.’ ”

“Exactly.”

We went on to the restaurant, which was called The Hills of Rome, and which was decorated as though we were inside one of them; the usual low-ceilinged broad cavern with heavily shrouded windows. Great fake-bronze bas reliefs of Caesarish individuals stared haughtily over our heads from all the walls, suggesting they’d know better than to eat here. And when we got our menus one section, headed “Roman Fare,” was full of Neapolitan fare: meat and pasta drowned in tomato sauce. Fortunately, the rest of the menu was standard American.

The staff was entirely female, which meant they adapted much more readily to our circumstances. The headwaiter — maitresse d’? — took an absolute relish in going through the wine ritual with Katharine, then kept smiling toward our table from across the room.

Once the food and drink had been ordered, Katharine said, “I’m sorry about the way Barry talked to you.”

“That’s okay. The guy’s under a certain amount of pressure.”

“Thank you — for understanding.”

And for pretending to be a plug-ugly on the phone; which neither of us would mention. “You’re welcome,” I said. “But maybe I shouldn’t have any more chats with Barry.”

“I’ll do my best. Oh, and there’s something else, a slight complication.”

“Mm?”

“The man at the desk says Kansas City is two hundred miles from here. Could we get there by one-thirty tomorrow?”

“Easily. Why?”

“I phoned the office,” she said, “and it turns out there’s some paperwork I simply have to take care of. So they’re flying a messenger to Kansas City in the morning; he’ll be there a little after one, and we’ll meet him at the airport.”

All of which I found very impressive. Her talk about being a landscape architect and having business lunches and doing parks along the Mississippi had all been well and good, but I’d been visualizing it on rather a small scale. I have a cousin in Queens, on my mother’s side, who’s an interior decorator, working through various carpet outlets and furniture stores — when the shop says you can consult with “our trained decorator” they mean my cousin Myrna (born Mary) — so that’s the way I’d been seeing Katharine’s job. But nobody’s going to fly a messenger to Kansas City to bring Myrna up to date on the paperwork; all at once I understood that Katharine wasn’t fooling around. I was hanging out with a big gun. “You want the Kansas City airport at one-thirty,” I told her, “that’s what you’re gonna get.”

“Fine.”

Food came then, and we ate in general silence, each thinking our own thoughts, until we had just the last bit of wine to dawdle over, when Katharine said, “There’s another thing about tomorrow.”

She made it sound ominous. I said, “Oh?”

“I keep thinking,” she said, and paused, and watched her fingers turn the stem of her wineglass around and around and around. Still not looking up, she said, “I’ve been thinking that I don’t absolutely have to use all this extra time. I could come to a decision before we reach Los Angeles.”

“Sure,” I said. “You could make up your mind any time at all.”

“I’ve been going on the assumption I should give myself the whole week or five days or whatever it turns out to be, but when I talked to Frank tonight—”

“Frank?”

“My partner. At the office.”

“Oh, right. He works late,” I commented, because it had to have been eight o’clock New York time when she’d phoned.

“We tend to work late,” she said, with a small smile. “Anyway, when I talked to him, I suddenly saw just how foolish this must look to an outsider. Taking a week out of your life to do nothing but mope about a decision. I make decisions every day.”

“Of a different nature.”

“Of a variety of natures,” she said. “So I’m giving myself an earlier deadline. A kind of sub-deadline.”

“Ah.”

“I want to clear this up by the time we reach Kansas City,” she said. “I want it settled in my mind by then, so if it’s yes I can take a plane from there to Los Angeles, and if it’s no I can take the flight back with the messenger.”

A great depression settled down on me when she said that. I’d been enjoying this trip, enjoying her company. Was it going to end, less than halfway? I said, “If it’s no, why take the plane back? I’ll have to drive back anyway, why not ride along? Tomorrow’s Saturday, you won’t get any work done over the weekend anyway.”

“Of course I will,” she said. “I’m doing an atrium in Minneapolis, I haven’t even done the preliminary sketches yet. Believe me, if I go back to New York tomorrow I’ll have plenty to keep me occupied.”

“Then that’s the reason not to go.”

Laughing, she said, “You’re still recommending inaction, aren’t you?”

“Nothing is usually the best thing to do.”

“Not this time.”

I very nearly said I’d miss her, but that wouldn’t have been appropriate, would it? We’d become chummier over the last two days, but we were still nevertheless only employer and employee. Come to think of it, no matter what happened I would never know how the story came out; whatever plane she took tomorrow from Kansas City, the story surely wouldn’t end there. Wouldn’t she have more second thoughts in midflight, and land facing the opposite direction again? Obviously it all had to end sometime, if only because Barry was clearly not going to be able to play his role in the farce forever, but what the ending would be, and what would happen after the ending — because in life, of course, unlike stories, the only real ending is death — none of that would I ever learn. I was like a transient in a town, who goes to the local movie and sees Chapter Seven of a serial; I could dope out some of what had gone before, and I could make guesses about what would happen in later chapters, but Chapter Seven would remain the only part I actually knew.

While I brooded about all this, Katharine paid the check — her handwriting was large tonight when she added the tip — and we got up to go. I steered us slightly out of our way to bring us past the table at which the couple who’d been staring at the cab were now eating their desserts; banana split for him, butterscotch sundae for her. His cigar smoldered in the ashtray, ready to his left hand. His clothing was still all burgundy and white, with white patent leather shoes. As we went by, I leaned down and said to him, “You wear that outfit in the Belmore Cafeteria, they’ll think you’re the soup of the day.”

He looked up, startled, just beginning to get it as I quickly led Katharine on out of the restaurant. Outside, still looking back in a puzzled way, she said, “And what was that all about?”

“A local joke,” I told her, and we walked back to our rooms.