Call Me a Cab

15

I spent a depressed evening thinking about Katharine’s latest decision. Would it all end tomorrow afternoon in Kansas City, of all places? The only ray of light in the gloom was that she hadn’t made it definite. She’d called it a ‘sub-deadline,’ meaning she was already prepared to forgive herself if she didn’t keep it. But what if she did? Drat.

By ten-thirty, the TV set and my own gloomy thoughts drove me to the outer darkness. Like a fool, I hadn’t brought anything along to read, but would there be a magazine stand in the lobby?

There would not. But there would be a couple of paperback racks over near the desk; I brooded at them a while, finally realizing that among the variety of titles and covers I really only had three types of book to choose from. I could read a story in which a John Wayne-type hero saves the world or some portion of it from terrorists. Or I could read a ‘historical’ about a woman who loves a man despite — or because of — his cruelty. Or I could read a saga of four generations of a family; from farm to bank seemed to be the usual progression. I finally chose one of the sagas, primarily because I expected to be reading it in short bits at odd moments, and the saga would be the least likely to have a plot to remember. Also, all the characters in the saga would have the same last name, and I wouldn’t have to wonder who they were every time I picked up the book.

But somehow I couldn’t bring myself to go immediately back to the room and plunge directly into life on the old Gritbone farm. Next to the Hills of Rome restaurant was the Coliseum Cocktail Lounge; tucking my saga into my hip pocket, I drifted in.

There didn’t seem any particular reason to name this place after the Coliseum. In fact, The Minepit was about the only appropriate name I could think of for it. If it hadn’t been for the light on the cash register, I might never have found the bar. The other illumination in the place consisted of six-watt blue bulbs deeply recessed in the dark ceiling. Black vinyl and dark walnut fake wood veneer covered most surfaces. It was brighter in the parking lot.

I climbed up on a massive stool and told the bartender-silhouette I’d like a beer. He mentioned two or three brands, and I mentioned back the one I hadn’t immediately forgotten, and he brought me a small bottle, with a glass, and only charged a thousand dollars. Well, not quite that much.

As my eyes became more accustomed to the black, I became aware of two, or possibly three, other customers: all male, all solitary, all drinking beer. There was one at the end of the bar to my right, another one partway around the curve to my left, and I think there was one at a banquette behind me. There was no conversation, except the occasional murmur of a customer requesting a refill.

Could any family saga be worse than this? I was about to gulp down my beer and depart when someone else came in, stood at the bar to my right, and said, “Okay, Fred, here’s the tabs.”

A female voice. I looked over, and made out the profile of the headwaiter from next door. She handed a stack of checks to the bartender, then turned and saw me, smiled broadly, and said, “Hello, there.”

“How you doing?”

“Long hard day,” she said.

“Care for a drink?” It was the natural response, said prior to calculation.

She hesitated. I could see she’d like to say yes, but there was a question in her mind that first had to be resolved. She asked it: “Where’s your friend?”

“Up in her room.” Then I said, “You know she and I aren’t hanging out together.”

She slid onto the stool next to me. “To tell the truth, I was fascinated by you two.”

“It’s a long story. Sure you won’t have a drink?”

She peered in the dimness at the glass and bottle in front of me. “What’s that? Beer? I can’t drink beer, it goes right to my hips. I have to watch my girlish figure.”

She did have a girlish figure, as a matter of fact, long and rangy, and a long rangy face. She was about my age, maybe a couple years older. She wasn’t a beauty, but she was attractive; rather like the younger women in the family saga in my hip pocket, I supposed. I said, “They’ll serve you anything you want here, it’s a regular joint. Right, Fred?”

“Sure,” said the Fred-silhouette. I still hadn’t seen his face, didn’t know if he ever smiled or frowned or anything, but his voice sounded friendly enough.

“Then I’ll have a Scotch and water,” she said. “My name’s Sue Ann, by the way.”

“Hi, Sue Ann, I’m Tom.” And we shook hands; hers was long-fingered and hard-boned and cool.

Our first topic of conversation was the relationship between Katharine and me, which took a while to describe, with several detours. For instance: “Oh, that’s your taxi out there! I recognized it right away for a New York cab. I lived in New York three years.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“My ex-husband was in construction,” she said. “He worked on the World Trade Center. We had a nice house on Staten Island; off Drumgoole Boulevard, you know that section?”

“Not really.”

“We used to go up to Manhattan all the time. Go to the movies on Broadway, or some nice Italian restaurant in the Village. Do you know Rocco’s, down on Thompson Street?”

“Afraid not.”

“Great Italian food.” And she leaned close, resting her hand on my forearm and speaking confidentially. “Not like this place.” Then she straightened again, saying, “But how come your passenger’s taking a taxi all the way out here?”

“Further than here,” I said, and went on to explain Katharine’s destination and motive. Sue Ann’s reaction was immediate: “Tell her forget it. Anybody plans to get married, my advice is, shoot yourself instead. It’s quicker.”

“You’ve been burned, huh?”

“You know it, brother. How about you?”

“A little scorched around the edges,” I acknowledged.

She studied me, as best she could in the cash register light. “You don’t look married,” she decided.

“I’m not married, not anymore.”

She lifted her glass. “Mazel tov.” She knocked back some more of her drink, then said, “I learned that word in New York.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“It’s Greek. It means ‘congratulations’.”

Correct her? Definitely not. “Then mazel tov, yourself,” I said. “I take it you left your husband on top of the World Trade Center?”

“With that other giant ape,” she said, and broke herself up laughing. She was a good old girl. When the laughing fit eased, she said, “You know what broke the camel’s back?”

“The last straw,” I suggested.

“That’s what I’m gonna tell you.” One of us was getting a little drunk. “Ralph’s car was towed away. You know they do that in New York? Park in the wrong place, they tow your car away.”

“That can be expensive,” I said.

“Sixty-five dollars,” she told me, “just to get your car back. And that doesn’t count the parking ticket. But also you know what they do? They keep records, they check to see are there any unpaid old parking tickets on that car, they don’t let you have the car back until you pay up.”

“Ralph had some old tickets, huh?”

She leaned close again, speaking with slow emphasis. “Four-hun-dred-dol-lars.” Then she grinned sidelong, and added, “You never saw anybody so mad in your in-tie-er life.”

“I bet.”

“It was when I laughed he slugged me. So I went and got Jason’s bat and—”

“Jason?”

“Ralph’s son from a previous marriage. Ralph’s the marrying kind. Jason’s OK, he’s about fourteen now. Anyway, I went and got his baseball bat and snuck up behind Ralph while he was getting a beer out of the refrigerator, and I gave him a shot he’s still feeling.” She laughed again, and tried to drink from her glass, and discovered it was empty.

“We need refills.” I turned to wave at the Fred-silhouette.

“My round,” Sue Ann said, and when Fred came over she told him, “Again, Fred. On my tab. Or, wait a minute.” To me, she said, “You want to stick to beer? It’ll bloat you all up.”

“Well, I don’t know,” I said. “I had gin before dinner, wine with dinner, and now beer. How do you suggest I round it off?”

“With a stinger,” she said. “Definitely.”

“Hey, look, lady. I have to drive tomorrow.”

“Two stingers, Fred,” she said. “And don’t go too heavy with the ice.”

“I gotta close up in a few minutes, Sue Ann.”

“That’s okay, we’ll drink fast.”

“I seem to be getting a stinger,” I said, as the Fred-silhouette went away.

“You know,” she said, “you’re a good guy.”

“I am?”

“For instance, the way you handled yourself at dinner. You didn’t try to take over, and you didn’t make a big fuss about not taking over. You know what burns my ass?”

“No, I don’t.”

“The birthday wives. In comes a couple, it’s her birthday so she doesn’t have to cook, and they shoved the kids off onto Aunt Sadie, and now they’ve got this idea she’ll take him to dinner out of her birthday money. So they sit there, and she blushes and giggles and she’s all helpless, and she about faints when it’s time to taste the wine — half a bottle of Blue Nun, you’d think it was the end of the world. And the husband sits there with this big fat-headed smile on his face, being proud of the little lady. It’s exactly like birthday teenagers, thirteen-year-old kids getting to order their own dinner for the first time, with the grown-ups all smiling at each other, isn’t-it-sweet, how-time-flies, all that malarkey. But here you’ve got the same thing with a forty-five-year-old woman, she’s off the leash for one day in her life. I tell you, Tom, there’s more than once I’ve wished I had Jason’s baseball bat.”

“For the husband, or the wife?”

She thought that over for a few seconds, and then nodded. “You’re right. For both of them.”

Meantime, the bar’s other customers had drifted on out of the joint, our stingers had been delivered and tasted — deceptively gentle and cool little devils — and now Fred started ringing up all the tabs on his cash register. You know the way they do: ba-bring-a, bring-a, bring-a, on each and every check covering each and every transaction of that business day. The noise is loud, repetitive, interminable, and intolerable. “Jesus,” I said. “What a racket.”

“He’s got to do it, Tom,” Sue Ann told me. Her loyalty was, after all, on Fred’s side of the bar. “He can’t go home until he’s rung them all up.”

“Well, I can. Why don’t we finish these drinks in the lobby?”

“You might be able to get away with that,” she said, “but I wouldn’t. Remember, I work here.”

“Then come up to my room. We can borrow the glasses, can’t we?”

“Sure we can.” But she hesitated, looking at me with a slightly crooked grin, before finally giving an abrupt nod and saying, “Yeah, let’s get out of here, it’s too loud.” She yelled a good night to Fred over the clanging of his cash register, and we left the Coliseum forever.

The evening air, as we walked from the lobby around to the side stairs, was cool and crisp, but it didn’t do much for the mush that seemed to have gotten into my brain. I was thinking clearly enough — for instance, I knew damn well that Sue Ann and I were on our way to bed together — but my normal activities, such as walking and talking, were all a bit slurred and shambly. I hoped not all my abilities had been impaired by drink.

Upstairs, I had an oddly uncomfortable feeling about Katharine’s door; it seemed to disapprove of me, though there was no reason why it should. There was nothing between Katharine and me. If I was going behind anybody’s back it was Rita’s, my occasional roommate back in New York, and she couldn’t have cared less. Nevertheless, I hunched my shoulders against the imagined emanations from Katharine’s door as I unlocked my own.

Once inside my room, all that nonsense disappeared without trace. Sue Ann said, “Christ, all these rooms look alike, don’t they?” In response, I took her drink out of her hand, placed both glasses atop the low dresser, put my arms around her and kissed her.

Nice. Nice soft moving mouth, nice tongue, good lean rangy body slender and muscular beneath my hands. It had been a while, by golly. “Bed,” I murmured, against her lips.

“Mm, yes.”

Lovely. Sex is so nice, exploring that other body, rolling together, the terrific physical sensations, the wonderful things that can be done with mouths, hands, fingers — with all sorts of body parts, combining in so many soft sweet ways. And my abilities had not been impaired; that was also nice.

Afterwards, we lay side by side on the sheets and sipped our stingers. Sue Ann was a smoker, so she had the ritual cigarette. Puffing on it, squinting through the smoke, she said, “That was the one nice thing about marriage. The regular fucking. I did like that.”

A smell of darkroom chemicals seemed to waft past my nose, competing with Sue Ann’s low-tar fumes. “Sometimes even that was a mixed blessing,” I said.

She gave me a sympathetic knowing smile. “You bet your life. Lemme tell you a joke.”

“Sure.”

“The point isn’t so much the joke,” she said, “as the guy who told it and how the other guys took it.”

“Fire away.”

“I was working in a diner, before I got the job here, and every morning we’d get these salesmen in, same bunch of boys, come in for an hour from maybe nine to ten. Supposed to be out making sales, they’d come in and kill some time together instead. Told a lot of jokes. They loved jokes, those boys, and they’d laugh and roll around and spill their coffee and have a great old time. Except this one joke. Seems this couple went to the zoo, they went to see the big gorilla, and the wife started teasing the gorilla, sticking her tongue out at him, and wiggling her behind at him and all that stuff. And the husband kept saying, ‘Myrtle, don’t do that, you’re getting the gorilla all upset.’ But she kept on anyway, and the gorilla was getting upset, and all at once the gorilla yanked those bars apart and jumped through and grabbed Myrtle up and ran off with her. And naturally Myrtle was screaming, and her husband ran along after them, and he shouted, ‘Myrtle! Tell him you’ve got a headache!’ ”

“Ah,” I said.

“Right.” She had a very fetching, very sexy crooked grin. “None of those salesmen actually laughed at that joke. They more growled at it. They all said, ‘Yeaa-uh.’ And that, mister, is all I know about marriage.”

I said, “You don’t have a headache now, do you?”

“What? Well, look at you,” she said.