Call Me a Cab

22

It was the same room. The exit we’d taken from Route 70 had come equipped with a Holiday Inn, and my room was the same one I’d already been given twice. Except I think the non-Utrillos were reversed; wasn’t the one with the sleeping laundry pile on the left last night?

The world was hot and dry, while Katharine and I were hot and muggy. She made the booking arrangements alone again tonight and we went to our rooms with a minimum of conversation, not even making plans for dinner. My room was farther along the hall from hers, and in it the air-conditioning was on but not doing much. I turned it to a more Arctic setting, pulled open the drapes, and found myself facing that monstrous sun. It still hadn’t set. Feeling a morbid fascination on the subject — was this the day the Earth stood still? — I left the drapes open, stripped off most of my clothing, and dropped myself like a piece of lumber onto the bed, where at last I began to read about the family Gritbone.

When the sun finally did go down, hundreds and hundreds of miles to the west across this flat landscape, it went all of a sudden, as though abruptly realizing how late it was. I left the Gritbone farm — drought, at the moment — long enough to watch the sun’s exit, then with all the western sky a fiery red I closed the drapes and went on reading for another half hour or so, until the phone rang.

By now I’d recovered enough to be civil. “Hello. Katharine?”

“Hi, Tom, how are you?” She too had recovered.

“Semi-human. And you?”

“Was I awful in the car?”

“The world was awful. You put up with it very well.”

“At one point there I was ready to start biting things.”

“If you’ll look at the steering wheel, you see toothmarks.”

She laughed, and said, “On a similar topic, I just called the restaurant, and they only serve till ten o’clock.”

“On a Saturday night?”

“That’s what they said.”

“I am a stranger in a strange land. What time is it now?” My watch, as usual, was in the cab.

“Just after nine-thirty.”

“In other words, we ought to go do it.”

“If we want dinner.”

“I’ll call for you in fifteen minutes,” I said, and did, and we headed for the restaurant.

It’s always possible, in these sprawled-out motels, to travel from place to place inside them via endless anonymous narrow corridors, but if the weather’s at all acceptable one tends to go outside and circle the building to one’s destination. That’s what we did this time, going past our by-now very dusty and scruffy cab, and finding the sky a mad psychedelic array of color; purples, mauves, indigos, navy blues, violets, amethysts, garnets, vermilions, all were streaked and swathed and swept across that huge curved canvas as though God had never heard that less is more. All afternoon an incomprehensible feeling had been coming over me, while driving into that glaring golden sun, and now I understood: “We’re on a different planet.”

Katharine said, “Is that what it is? I knew there was something; I felt that time had stopped. Did you ever read Ray Bradbury?”

“Sure.” Then I frowned at her. “Girls don’t read science fiction.”

“There you go again,” she said.

We went on to the restaurant, where the headwaiter, though male, adapted readily to Katharine’s being host. He looked to be a college student with a part-time job, but he was bright and alert and efficient, and after he’d taken our drink orders and departed I said, “Looks as though you won’t save much on the tip tonight.”

“It has its compensations. I once wrote a science fiction story.”

“Oh, come on.”

“It’s true,” she said. “In college. Would you like to hear it?”

“Of course.”

She said, “It was about the Solar System going through a mysterious space cloud, and afterwards the atmosphere on Earth is changed. There’s this new element in it that the scientists don’t understand, but it reacts with women’s bodies so that if a woman wants to get pregnant all she has to do is eat honey. I called it ‘You’re My Honey.’ Now, the thing is, this makes it possible for women to have children without the assistance of men, but the children are all girls. Male children only result from the traditional method. So it’s up to women whether or not they want men in the world anymore, since men aren’t necessary for reproducing the human race but only for reproducing men.”

“Hmmmm,” I said.

“I was very militant then,” she said.

“So it was decided to do without men?”

“Just listen,” she said, as our drinks arrived. She waited till the waitress had served them, and distributed menus, and then she continued: “At first, the men don’t take it seriously, but then the statistics show a higher and higher percentage of female births, and around the world different governments set up commissions to see what’s going on. But of course the commissions are all men, except for a token woman here and there, like in the United States and Great Britain, so they have no idea what’s going on, and they don’t get anywhere. Then the men counterattack. The incidence of rape goes up, as men try to make women pregnant before they can make themselves pregnant. Some countries like Russia outlaw honey and try to wipe out the world’s population of bees, but bees are very hard to get rid of entirely, and very easy to breed surreptitiously, so there’s an ongoing black market in honey.”

“This is a hell of a story.”

She smiled at me, a bit smugly. “The boy I was going with at the time couldn’t stand it. He kept saying it showed I hated him personally.”

“Instead of men in general.”

“Well, that too,” she admitted. “But I think the way Danny described it, I was afraid of men in general, but I hated him in particular.”

“Was this the Tupperware fellow?”

“No, before him.”

“Go on with the story,” I said. “As a man, you might say I’m dying to find out how it ends.”

But the waitress was beside us, and Katharine said, “I think we ought to order.”

The waitress, looking apologetic, said, “I don’t want to rush you, but the kitchen’s about to close.”

“Half the human race hangs in the balance,” I said, “and she’s worried about the kitchen. All right, all right.” And I did a quick scan of the menu.

Restaurant menus, away from the major cities, don’t vary that much. There’s six or seven things you recognize, time after time, and you just order one of them, because you know they know how to make it and they know you know what it should taste like. So we placed our dinner orders without too much difficulty, and then I took a quick swallow of my gin and tonic and said, “On with the story. At this point, the male population is killing bees and raping women, while the female population is smuggling honey and having daughters.”

Laughing, she said, “Well, of course, not everybody reacts the same way. There are loving married couples who go on as before, and there are men who try to come to an understanding of the situation, and there are women who try to work out what best to do. And a leader of the moderate women, from the group that believes each individual should follow her own conscience, is elected President of the United States. Naturally.”

“Naturally?”

“Well, there are more women than men, and the disparity is growing every day. As for it being a moderate woman, American voters always tend toward the center. When it becomes clear that women have the final control in the solution of the problem, the men in both major parties put women candidates up for President, and of course one of them wins.”

“Okay,” I said.

“With the American government leading the way,” she continued, “power around the globe gradually shifts from the men to the women. Women take over industry, commerce, everything, and always using the same ultimate threat: ‘If men make us angry, there won’t be any more men.’ ”

“I rate this story very high for suspense,” I said.

“Well, finally there’s a mass meeting. A global meeting, with the American Congress and the UN and the British Parliament and the Japanese Diet and all the other legislatures — and by now they’re all almost completely women — all connected together by TV. And there’s a great debate about the future of mankind. Because by now a lot of women want to ban male births completely, with jail sentences for the mother and — if they can find him — the father. In seventy or eighty years, if they have their way, there won’t be any more men at all, anywhere, and there never will be a man again because it takes a man to make a male child.”

She sipped at her drink, then went on: “And the debate ends with a speech from the American president, who first talks about all the trouble that men have been to women down the ages, oppressing women, enslaving women, making women the villains in all their religions and superstitions. And then all the trouble men have been to one another and to all the other creatures on this planet. And then she says, ‘The reason they’ve been so much trouble to everybody is because they always had to decide. Whether it was hunting a mammoth for food for the family or competing for a better job so they could move the kids to the suburbs, it has almost always been the man who had the responsibility, and too much responsibility makes anybody nervous and erratic. Now we have the responsibility, and those who say we should do away with men are themselves being nervous and erratic. We have one great advantage, in that we can profit by their mistakes. We can be calm. We have the power, and we can’t possibly lose it. So we can stop looking at men out of bitterness and grievance, and we can see they have some good qualities as well. They’re very good at building things. Some of them are fairly useful at fixing things. They have an eagerness for life which has helped them deal with too much responsibility, and which in repose can be rather lovable. They are capable of being excellent companions, and to be practical there is no acceptable substitute in bed. The best man is not, as some have suggested, a dead man, but a retired man, all responsibility finished. A putterer, a permanent boy. It will take men a while to adapt themselves to this new role, but women adapted themselves to subservience for thousands of years and men, too, will find it possible to adjust. So long as there are women, there must go on being men, to be our companions, our helpmates, our better halves, our assistants and auxiliaries. In a word, our wives!’ ”

Having finished this speech with every evidence of relish, Katharine smiled a great beaming smile and drained her drink. Simultaneously our appetizers arrived, and I looked at mine with little appetite. I said, “That’s some story.”

“What do you think of it?”

“Was it published?”

“In 1968?” With a sardonic grin, she shook her head.

“I think it’s — got a certain amount of hostility in it,” I said.

“You don’t think it ends on a positive note?”

Then I realized she was laughing at me. “A very positive note,” I acknowledged. “After all, early retirement is the primary tenet of my whole approach to life.”

Overtly laughing, she said, “You are my post-revolution man, aren’t you?”

“Maybe. Are you still that hostile? Seriously, if you are it could say a lot about your problems in re Barry.”

“No, I don’t think so,” she said, more somberly. “I went through college just at the beginning of the women’s movement, and my consciousness was raised just in time to see the incredible difference in reasonable expectation between me and the boys I knew, a lot of whom were very much dumber than me.”

“We’re opposites,” I said. “Too much was expected from me, so I stopped pushing. Too little was expected from you, so you started pushing.”

“That’s rather glib,” she suggested.

“But it makes an interesting point, maybe. And you know what they say about opposites.”

“Birds of a feather flock together?”

“Not exactly. Shall we eat our appetizers?”

We ate for a while, during which I pondered Katharine’s story. Between the appetizer and the entrée I said, “You know, with so much bad history and grievances between the sexes, it’s amazing any couples ever get together at all.”

“Getting together is easy,” she said. “Biology takes care of that. It’s the staying together that’s tough. A couple begins in love and happiness, and then they spiral down through bad experiences and misunderstandings and mutual cruelties until they either split or they find an accommodation in which they live together without having anything to do with one another. Everybody I know is on that spiral. That’s one of the things that bothers me when I think about Barry. I do love Barry, Tom, I really do. I love him too much to get on that spiral with him. But is there any other way?”

“There must be happy couples around,” I said.

“Name six.”

“Maybe it’s just a phase this society is going through. Didn’t there used to be happy couples?”

“Because the divorce rate was lower? Divorce was less acceptable then, that’s all. Catholic couples today don’t divorce; are all Catholic marriages happy?”

“You’re extremely negative,” I said.

“You should talk. The first time I mentioned marriage to you, you made a face.”

“Because it wasn’t any good for me. But it’s got to be good for some people. Like my parents.” Then I thought about my parents and said, “No, cancel that. My parents are happy, but not with each other. They can’t count as a couple.”

“Marriage is a serious step,” Katharine said.

“Just like those pamphlets in the back of the church used to say.”

Smiling, she said, “I think everybody, before they get married, should take a cab across the country and think it over.”

“There’s already too much traffic. Let them take bicycles to Asbury Park.”

On that note we left it, because the wine arrived, immediately followed by the main course. The discussion didn’t pick up again until we’d finished the food and were on the last of the wine, when Katharine said, “As a matter of fact, I’m not that hostile anymore. That was a very youthful thing, and full of brand new shock and outrage.”

“It’s a strong story,” I said. “If it was told well, it could be very effective.”

“When Ms. magazine came along, I thought of rewriting it and sending it there. That was after the Reich book, so I was going to change the honey to green beans and call it ‘The Green Beaning of America.’ ”

“That’s awful.”

“True. Anyway, I got the story out and looked at it again, and I just didn’t feel that way anymore. Or at least not enough to retype the whole story. Also, the writing wasn’t very good. Besides, by then I knew I really liked men. I like men who don’t feel they have to stand on top of me in order to be tall. Such as Barry. Or you.”

“Thank you.”

“I do like you, Tom,” she said, and either it was the lighting or the wine but her face seemed softer, the bone structure less obvious. She was beautiful under all circumstances.

“It’s mutual,” was all I felt secure enough to say.

Katharine signaled for the check, signed it, and we left. The sky now was diamonds on black velvet, with a great gibbous moon rising from the direction of New York. The moon looked like a polished semi-circular piece of milk glass, with a powerful light shining through it. The parked cars we walked past were hulked sleeping beasts, moonlight glittering from the chrome of their fenders and swimming in the depths of their windows. We stopped near the cab, by mutual consent, and stood gazing up at the sky. Then I looked at her raised profile, and put my hand on her shoulder: “Katharine.”

Gently but immediately she slid away from the hand. “We already talked about that, Tom.”

“In the abstract. What you’re looking at now is concrete.”

“Tom, don’t confuse the issue.”

“Why should the issue be better off than I am?”

“Tom—” She hesitated, frowning at me in a troubled way, then glanced around as if for help, then frowned at me once more. Gently, sympathetically, she said, “Tom. Read your cab.” And she turned and walked quickly away toward the stairs.

Read my cab? Of course that was just a distraction, to keep me from following her at once, but what had she meant? The cab was clearly visible in the gray-white moonlight; from here I could see the rear deck and part of the left side. I could just barely make out the rates posted on the outside of the driver’s door. Stenciled on the passenger’s door was my father’s company name: “Harflet Livery Service Co.” On the trunk lid were several items: the large decal from Speediphone Cab, giving the company name and phone number; the decal from LOMTO, the League of Metered Taxicab Owners; the black number 27, being this cab’s call-number with Speediphone; and—

Oh.

Spread across the trunk lid, in firm black letters, was the standard notice to tailgaters:

“Keep Your Distance.”