Call Me a Cab

20

All airports make you drive in great circles to get anywhere. You can never just drive in to the airport and then turn around and drive back out again. You have to loop over and under and in and out and through and around, all on a network of roads architecturally based on the concept of the Christmas-present bow, following endless barely comprehensible signs. I had hardly begun this unreeling process when a cop stepped out in front of me and flagged me down. When I came to a stop, he trod over to my window and said, “Didn’t you see the sign back there?”

“I saw about six hundred signs back there. Which one did you have in mind?”

“The one that said no commercial traffic,” he told me. “The one that said taxis to the right. You can’t let off passengers up this way.”

“I don’t intend to,” I said.

He glanced at Katharine, who was once again in the back seat. “You picked a passenger up here?” Clearly, if I’d done so, it had been in a somehow illegal manner.

I said, “No, I didn’t pick her up here.”

“Brother,” he said, “you got to be doing one or the other, either bringing a passenger here or taking a passenger away from here.”

Katharine, leaning forward, said, “Tom? What’s the matter?”

“Just a misunderstanding.” To the cop, I said, “I’m not actually a cab, not the way you think I am.”

“You sure look like a cab.”

“Well, I am. But I’m a New York City cab.”

He beetled his brows at me, then got a little smug smirk on his face and said, “Oh, yeah? Myself, I happen to be from the planet Mars.”

“Really? Is it true those aren’t actually canals?”

“All right, smart guy, pull off on the grass.”

I said, “You wouldn’t happen to have noticed my license plate, would you?”

No, he wouldn’t have. Beginning to wonder just who was kidding who around here, he backed away, frowning massively at me through the windshield until he reached the front of the cab, when he transferred his frown to my license plate. His lips moved. He brooded at the plate. He looked at me some more, through the windshield. He came back to the window and said, “Okay, fella. And just what in holy hell are you doing here?”

“Passing through.”

“Then keep passing,” he said, with a jerking motion of his thumb. “And don’t let me see you here again.”

What is it that makes cops so insecure? “I won’t,” I assured him, and drove on.

“Tom?”

“It was just a mistake,” I said, not bothering to look in the mirror.

“Not that,” she said. “This may surprise you, since it isn’t even three o’clock, but what I was thinking of was lunch.”

“Oh, lunch. Right, lunch.” What with my hangover, and my larger-than-normal breakfast, and the rush to get to Kansas City on time, and the activities since, I’d completely forgotten about lunch, but now that she’d mentioned it I did notice a kind of vacant feeling around my middle. “I’ll stop as soon as I see a place,” I promised.

“Fine.”

There was a diner near the airport. I pointed to it, calling, “Look okay to you?”

Katharine said, “Will they give me food if I cry and beg and scream?”

“Okay,” I said, and pulled in there, and we took a table at a window overlooking the cab. I might almost have been in the Market Diner on Eleventh Avenue, except for the different brand of English being spoken: R’s were being pronounced all over the place, but on the other hand the G of ING was being left silent. Also, the waitress smiled when she took our order; chef salad and iced coffee for Katharine, the shrimp salad platter and iced tea for me. Then I sat looking at my cab until Katharine said, “I wish you’d tell me about it.”

I shook my head at her. “I really don’t have anything to tell. Just a bad mood, that’s all. Probably the hangover.”

“Something happened while we were in that conference room,” she insisted. “Everything was all right when we went in there, but all of a sudden at the end you were in a bad mood.”

Shrugging, I said, “It’s over now, or it’s going away. Does it matter?”

“Yes. I thought we were becoming friends. I thought I could talk with you.”

“You can,” I said irritably. “Listen, everybody has moods, right? So I had a mood, and now I don’t have it anymore.”

“What did I do wrong?” she asked me. “What upset you?”

“You didn’t do anything wrong. How do I know what you did wrong; I’m no landscape architect.”

She frowned at me, thinking it over. The waitress brought our iced tea and coffee, and I busied myself with stirring. You put sugar in iced tea, it means a lot of stirring.

Katharine said, musingly, “It isn’t as simple as that, it isn’t just male envy about me having a good job. You’re not like that, or it would have shown up before.”

“Look, Katharine,” I said, “it wasn’t anything at all. Let it drop, okay?”

“No. It was something. Please, Tom, I just want to understand. What bothered you in there?”

Clink-clink-clink-clink-clink. I watched the long spoon in the iced tea, with the insoluble sugar grains whirling around and around and around. Nobody spoke. I sneaked a look up through my eyebrows, and Katharine was watching me. Clink-clink-clink-clink-clink. I sighed, shook my head, stopped stirring, put both palms on the tabletop, looked over to see if maybe the waitress would rescue me by bringing the food, sighed again and said, while watching another waitress behind the main counter slice a pie, “How come he didn’t sit down?”

“Sit down?” Bewilderment in the tone; I still wasn’t looking at her. “You mean Roy?”

“It wasn’t a master-servant thing,” I said. “I mean, you hired me too, and I was sitting down. We’re eating lunch together, at the same table.”

“I’ve never thought about it,” she said, sounding honestly surprised; when I flashed her a quick glance, I could see she wasn’t offended but interested. She said, “It’s just the normal way, with a secretarial assistant. If you’re giving dictation, the secretary sits on the other side of the desk, but— Oh, I see, of course. If you’re just going over papers together, normal instructions, things like that, it’s necessary for the secretary or messenger or whoever to be on the same side of the desk, so, they can see the papers, understand what’s going on. But it would be cumbersome to have a second chair back there.”

“You weren’t at a desk. You were at a conference table.”

“Habit,” she said. “It didn’t occur to me to ask Roy to sit, and I’m sure it didn’t occur to him.”

“I see what you mean,” I said. “Okay. Sure.”

She gave me a keen look. “But that wasn’t the whole point,” she said. “There’s still something stuck in your craw.”

“Well, it isn’t lunch,” I said, looking away toward the counter. “Where is that girl?”

“It’s the male-female thing,” Katharine insisted. “Otherwise, it wouldn’t bother you this way. You’re very straightforward about things, but now you’re just ducking and hiding.”

“Am I?” I looked at her straight, and tried to think about it. “It just bothered me. I think it was more age than sex. I mean, if he’d been some kid straight out of college it wouldn’t have been anything at all.”

“His age? What difference does it make what age he is? He’s not exactly doddering.”

“He’s not exactly a world-beater either,” I said. “The guy’s maybe fifty, the suit’s a little seedy...” I shrugged, not knowing how to express it.

“You’ve spent the last two days,” Katharine said, “giving me your philosophy about consciously not being a world-beater. What is this sudden change?”

“I felt sorry for the guy. My philosophy isn’t necessarily his philosophy. I mean, look at the suit; he’s still trying to put on that façade, right? And he’s missed the boat, he’s never going to make it, and he’s having his nose rubbed in it.”

“His nose rubbed in it? How?”

“Standing there, having some—”

Silence. Bright-eyed, Katharine watched me. She wouldn’t even ask me to finish the sentence, damn her.

Now that it was too late, the cavalry arrived, with the chef salad and the shrimp salad platter. Neither of us noticed her putting the plates in the wrong places; after she left, I looked down — for something to do with my eyes — and found myself staring at chef salad. “She mixed them up,” I said, and made something of a production out of switching them. Then I looked up again, and Katharine was still watching me. “Okay,” I said.

“Some—”

I nodded. “You’re right. Thank you; I didn’t know that was in there. Here’s this guy, old enough to be my father, all of his failed hopes and ambitions written all over his suit and his face and the way he combs his hair, and it seems like a worse indignity than usual that he has to be bossed around by some woman half his age. That’s right, that’s what I thought. Let the bastard sit down and you’ll be like equals and I won’t mind it, I won’t feel sorry for him anymore.”

“If I were a man,” she asked, “and he was still the same person, and still standing there?”

“If you were a man his age, then it’s the fall of the dice. Men are in competition with one another. Peers are in competition with one another. Here’s a winner, there’s a loser, that’s okay, it’s the way of the world. If on the other hand you were a man your age, and Roy’s boss, I’d start to feel sorry for the guy. With you a woman, I feel more sorry.”

“And if I were a woman his age?”

I thought about it. “Slight pity, very slight. But the generation thing, that’s important. The rules have changed in the last generation. If that guy is secretary to a woman his own age, they were all operating under the same rules, and she had to work damn hard to be where she is instead of where he is. But the new women coming along have it easier, they don’t have to work anywhere near as hard.”

“Not much harder than men, in fact,” Katharine said, with a small smile.

“Exactly. And whatever people say on the surface, there’s this underground feeling that there’s something unfair about it.”

“Unfair about equality?”

“That’s right. The rules used to be, it’s tougher for women. So if a man finds a woman above him, he knows she really has to be better than he is, and he doesn’t have to worry about it. But now he can look at a woman, she’s in the first place a woman, and in the second place younger than him, and she’s his boss, and she didn’t have to try any harder. Because the root idea is, women aren’t supposed to have ambitions or a need for success, except the exceptional few, and they don’t count. But now there’s women all over the place. You’re maybe the generation that gained the equality, but Roy’s the generation that lost the privileges.” With an attempt at an ironic smile, I said, “Male supremacy, the double standard, all that stuff, there were some people they were good for.”

“Not really,” she said. “Studies show that men aren’t truly happy in that relationship with women.”

“Studies also can be full of shit. You can do all the reading you want in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, you’ll find men complaining about this and that and the other, but you won’t find them objecting to their male prerogatives.”

“They didn’t understand the problem.” Then she shook her head and said, “And you aren’t any nineteenth century man, or at least you haven’t been. Or is this the real you coming out?”

“Maybe,” I said. “What I was feeling about Roy — and if you stop and think about it I don’t actually have that much sense of kinship with Roy — but what I was feeling wasn’t the result of a thought-out approach to life. It came out of irrational prejudices I wasn’t even thinking about. So you started pulling on the end of the string, and this is what’s emerging.”

“And what do you think of it all?”

“I think it’s silly. If we’re talking about rational thought, I think Roy’s life has nothing to do with your life. His existence has nothing to do with whether you’re good at your job. I’m a little surprised to see I had this stuff inside me, and all I can say is, it was left over.”

She suddenly laughed; more from relief, I think, than anything else. “You were arguing so forcefully,” she said, “I really thought you meant it all.”

“Well, of course I mean it all, only I didn’t know it. If you’d asked me about the subject ahead of time, given me some hypothetical example, I would have answered you from the rational top of my head and thought I was telling the truth.”

“And now?”

I shrugged. “We always have a few surprises left for ourselves. Considering my marriage, considering my relationships with women the last few years, it’s very likely I have a few surprises more tucked away inside my head.”

“Like me, with Barry.”

I gave her a sharp look. “Meaning what?”

“Well, I suppose some male-female thing down in my subconscious could be what’s giving me trouble,” she said. “Keeping me from total commitment.”

“Such as what?”

But she laughed again, and shook her head. “It isn’t that easy, Tom. You got surprised into it.”

“Some time between here and Los Angeles,” I promised, “I’ll sneak up behind you and say Boo.”

“Good,” she said. “But in the meantime, may we please eat?”

So we ate.