Call Me a Cab

29

“Talk to you some time tomorrow, Tom,” Dave said, as we and our luggage got out of his car. “Take it easy, Ace.”

“Oh, I will,” Katharine said, smiling at him, and he rattled away in his beat-up old Pontiac.

I said, “Do you want to be called Ace from now on?”

“Not by you,” she said. “I like Dave to call me Ace because he really means it, but if you did you’d just be patronizing me.”

How little people know one another. She couldn’t have been more wrong just then, but if I tried to tell her the real attitude I’d have if I called her Ace I would get myself into very deep water indeed. So I just shrugged and said, “Katharine’s a grand old name,” and picked up my suitcase and one of hers, and she picked up her other suitcase, and we went into the Holiday Inn.

The young couple on duty at the desk in his-and-hers yellow blazers were having an affair; they were practically having it in our presence. They kept contriving to pass one another in the fairly narrow space behind the counter, rubbing against one another on the way by, giggling a little behind their hands, flashing one another conspiratorial, warning, forgiving looks. But they were efficient, I’ll say that much for them; probably because the sooner they finished with us the sooner they’d be alone again. Also, their interest in one another was so total that it left them no awareness with which to become intrigued or baffled by our own fairly unusual relationship. We got our keys and our directions with no trouble, and found this time we’d been given adjoining but not connecting rooms.

And here it was again; the same room. I was getting so I could find my way around this room blindfolded, I felt I knew it by now better than my own apartment back in New York. In a way it was becoming a sort of reassuring presence, this same room no matter where I went, but if I were going to be living in it very much longer I’d have to speak to the management about those non-Utrillos.

At the moment, however, my main problem was not highway art but time. It wasn’t even three o’clock in the afternoon, and what on earth was I to do with myself? The day was sunny and the motel had a pool, but the air was too chilly for swimming. Without wheels, I couldn’t go tour the sights of the neighborhood even presuming the neighborhood came equipped with sights. The hours between now and whenever tomorrow the cab would be fixed — oh, let it be tomorrow! — stretched ahead of me like a desert without oases. And all I had with which to defend myself was daytime TV and the four generations of the Gritbone family.

Political differences over the Spanish American War were pitting Gritbone brother against Gritbone brother when the phone rang. I looked at my watch, saw that the last twenty hours had used up barely fifteen minutes of real-world time, and knew this couldn’t possibly be Dave with a reprieve. So it had to be Katharine.

It was. “I’m going crazy,” she said.

I was in a grumpy enough mood to be ungracious: “Peace and quiet,” I said. “It’s very conducive to decision-making.”

“Now, don’t be mean.”

I was immediately contrite: “Sorry, I guess I must be going crazy, too. Want to teach me chess?”

“Not a bit,” she said. “I hate games with people who play worse than I do.”

“Don’t you like to win?”

“Of course, but only against real competition. Let’s go for a walk.”

“A what?”

“A walk,” she repeated. “It’s what we do with our feet when we go to dinner.”

“I know what walk means. What I meant was, walk where?”

“Away from the motel. North maybe, or possibly south.”

“Aha,” I said. “I see what you mean.”

“Glories of nature,” she said.

“Take one’s constitutional,” I suggested. “Go for a hike.”

“Stretch the legs. Get a lungful of fresh air.”

“I’ll knock on your door in one minute.”

“I’ll jog until you get here,” she said.