Call Me a Cab

16

Somebody was shaking my shoulder. Opening my eyes I saw a breast impending close above me, and heard a knocking in the middle distance at the same time a voice said, “Somebody’s at the door.”

Voice=Sue Ann=memory=explanation of breast. Nice breast. I reached for it, and my shoulder was shaken more roughly, Sue Ann saying more urgently, “Some-body’s knocking at the room door.”

“Yes,” I said, sitting up, trying to simulate alertness. I found the perimeter of the bed — Holiday Inn beds are wonderfully large, large enough for anything — from there reached the floor without too much difficulty, rose on those shillelaghs that once were my legs, tottered across the room, and remembered just before reaching the still knock-knocking door that I was nude. So I stood behind it as I sliced it open a crack, and peered around the edge at Katharine, whose face displayed an intricate balance of annoyance and concern. Knowing at once what the problem was, I of course asked the unnecessary question: “What time is it?”

“Ten after nine.” Now that she’d seen I was still alive and capable of both walking and talking, she was becoming much less concerned and much more annoyed.

“Oh.” I tried to find my brains, so I could cudgel them. A brain without cudgel is like a cake without yeast; nevertheless I attempted to rise to the occasion, saying, “I forgot to leave a call.”

“We have to get to Kansas City,” she reminded me, “by one-thirty.”

“Right. Right. Where are you, in the restaurant?”

“I was.”

“I’ll meet you there, in five minutes.”

While Katharine said something else about the urgency of the situation — she was letting off irritation, and had every right — I glanced back toward the bed, where Sue Ann was grinning foxily at me. Women love to see a man nagged by another woman.

Sexy grin. Sexy woman. Sue Ann looked very very good. So I’d drive faster. “Make it fifteen minutes,” I said, and shut the door.