Call Me a Cab

3

Pennsylvania. Two P.M., two hundred miles from New York. Route 80, speed 80. Dark green forested mountains massed in brilliant sunshine under a deep blue sky. Weather clear, track fast, passenger asleep.

She’d corked off about five minutes out of New York. She’d been looking around as we’d crossed the bridge, bright and happy, smiling at everything, very up and positive, and all of a sudden she was asleep. Still smiling, but totally unconscious, curled up on the seat with her black cardigan unwrapped from her throat and spread out over her legs.

I knew what that meant; the end of tension. You worry about a problem, and worry and worry, until finally you do something, it doesn’t matter what, right or wrong, sensible or stupid, and the relief that comes from action is so great you just relax right down into sleep.

On the other hand, sooner or later you have to wake up, and I was prepared to bet even money that when Ms. Scott reopened her eyes the first thing she’d say would be, “Take me back to New York!” This cab-to-California idea had been a lunge at decision-making, that’s all, just a temporary way to ease the pressure.

Which from my point of view would be a pity; driving to California was okay with me. Although I’d been to Los Angeles twice, I’d never seen the country in between. And the driving, while there’d be more of it, would be a lot easier than my usual fifteen hundred city miles per four-day week. Driving the Interstates, in my opinion, is mostly like sitting in the front row at a movie theater during a travelogue. Also, I was comfortable in this cab, it had been my office, my den, my studio apartment for nearly three years. Around the driver’s seat, among my father’s knickknacks — the cream-colored ex-Saint Christopher statue glued to the dash, for instance, or his World War Two Purple Heart pinned to the top fabric above the visor — were some knickknacks of my own; a laminated picture of me from my high school paper showing me shooting a basket (actually I missed), a counterfeit ten-dollar bill I’d been stuck with about three years ago, other things like that. It was a congenial environment.

On the other hand, starvation was setting in. This might be a wonderful escapade, but I wanted something to eat. Ever since I was five years old I’ve understood that adventures stop for lunch.

I’d been waiting for my passenger to awaken, but now my stomach had begun to make low growling sounds; any minute it might attack. And up ahead, just beyond that next exit, looking high in the sky on long poles, between similarly tall Exxon and Shell signs, was the familiar giant yellow M of a McDonald’s. Fine. I could pop in there, leaving Ms. Scott asleep in the cab, and grab myself some lunch to go.

No sooner said than done. The exit ramp curved around a shaggy green hill to a two-lane blacktop country road. The giant yellow M was off to my left; heading that way, I found at its base a tiny stand that was very anticlimactic. After that huge sign, you’d expect at least the Taj Mahal.

I parked the cab with the three or four other cars in the lot, climbed out, stretched, and realized the men’s room took priority ever over lunch. The toilets were around to the side; I went there, came back to the front, and entered the stand. Inside was cool and dim after the bright sunlight. I ordered a Big Mac, onion rings on the side, a Coke and another Big Mac (I’d decided I was more than usually hungry), and when I carried it all back to the cab the passenger was gone.

What now? I looked around in the bright sunshine, and failed to see her. The Shell station was to the left, the Exxon across the road; other than that, the countryside was unpopulated hilly green forest. A station wagon driven by a woman in curlers and filled with children and food drove by, heading out; my passenger wasn’t in it. Nor was she in the other cars parked nearby.

I was turning in my third bewildered circle, my hands still encumbered with little white paper bags full of lunch, when the lady herself came around the corner of the building. Of course; rest stop for everybody. I smiled and gestured with my paper bags, and she smiled back, nodding and pointing at the front entrance to the stand. “Right,” I called, and she went inside while I got back behind the wheel.

I could see her through the tinted windows, talking to the high school boy behind the counter. Hmmm. Should I go ahead and eat my lunch, or should I wait for the passenger to come back? What was the etiquette in such a situation?

I decided to wait, and soon enough here she came, with her own collection of white paper bags. I got out and opened the rear door for her, she thanked me, I placed myself behind the wheel again, and she said, “Where are we?”

“Somewhere in wildest Pennsylvania.” While talking I was opening my first Big Mac. “According to the speedometer, a little more than two hundred miles from the bridge.”

“What bridge?”

“George Washington. When we left New York.”

“Oh, of course, I’m sorry. I guess I’m not really awake yet.”

I didn’t answer until I’d finished chewing and swallowing a great big bite of Big Mac, washing it down with Coke. Then I said, “You had a good sleep, huh?”

“Wonderful. Best I’ve had in weeks.”

I had to know the answer to the main question, so I asked it: “You still want to go forward?”

“Of course,” she said. “Don’t you?”

“We are here to serve.”

“Besides,” she said, “I paid the money.”

“Oh, we could work something out on that. You pay my time and gas, and we give you back the rest.”

She frowned, thinking it over — I was sitting sideways in the seat, looking at her directly instead of through the mirror — but then she shook her head, made a determined face, and said, “No. It’s the right way to do it. I couldn’t go back now, catch another plane, call Barry again, I just couldn’t go through all that. I’ve made this decision, I’ll stick by it.”

“Fine,” I said.

“So that’s settled. What do I owe you for lunch?”

“Lunch?” I stared at my white paper bags.

“Expenses, remember?” She was being very brisk and businesslike, shoulder bag open in her lap.

“I eat lunch in New York,” I pointed out. “Every day.”

She seemed doubtful. “Food is an expense.”

“Then it’s my treat.”

“I tell you what,” she said. “You can buy your own lunch, but I’ll buy you dinner. That’s more expensive when you eat out.”

“It’s a deal,” I said, and popped an onion ring in my mouth.

“Oh! You’ve got onion rings!”

“I bought em in the McDonald’s there.”

“I love onion rings. It didn’t even occur to me. I tell you what,” she said. “I’ll trade you, a couple onion rings for a couple french fries.”

“I’ll go get you some onion rings,” I offered.

“No, no, don’t do that. We’ll just trade a couple, okay?”

Then I understood that this was an important moment. If I was standoffish and strict, if I insisted on going back into the stand and buying another package of onion rings, we would be formal with one another the whole trip, whereas what she really wanted was company.

Well, so did I. “Fine,” I said, and put my little cardboard barge of onion rings on top of the seat back.

She moved forward then to the bucket seat, put her french fries next to my onion rings, ate an onion ring, said it was super, and we ate companionably for a while. Then she said, “Do you mind if I talk to you about Barry?”

“That’s the guy in Los Angeles?”

“It might clear my mind,” she said.

“All I know about him so far,” I said, “is that he’s got a hell of a lot of patience.”

“And that it’s running out.”

“That, too. What’s he do for a living?”

“He’s, well...” She seemed oddly hesitant, as though she didn’t want me to know, or was afraid I might laugh. “He’s a surgeon,” she said.

“Oh, yeah? That’s terrific.”

“A plastic surgeon.”

“Oh,” I said. A vision rose up in my mind: A phony, in a paisley ascot. Deep chahming baritone, overly manly handshake, a little too ruggedly handsome to be true.

The smile she gave me was rueful. “I know,” she said. “People always think it’s some sort of joke.”

So apparently the vision in my mind had showed on my face. “Not at all,” I said. “There are plastic surgeons and plastic surgeons. Some of them do wonderful humanitarian work, rebuilding people after terrible accidents and so on.”

“And some of them,” she said, “do unnecessary cosmetic surgery on idle rich people, making them pretty and charging them a lot of money.”

The irony in her voice led me to suspect the worst. I said, “That’s your guy, huh?”

“Barry is a cosmetic plastic surgeon,” she said, the same way a mother might announce her oldest boy is a hopeless alcoholic; and then she went on just the way the mother would, looking on the bright side: “But he’s very sweet, and very honest. He’s very very talented, he’s done amazing things with big noses and low foreheads and baggy eyes and—”

“Not while I’m eating.”

“The point is,” she said, “Barry is a truly wonderful, gentle human being, which is why I love him.”

There was a question I wanted to ask, but I didn’t know how. Also, I was afraid of the answer. Holding an onion ring, I sort of gestured vaguely toward her face, saying, “Did he, uhhh...?”

She didn’t get it. “Did he what?”

“You, um...”

“Oh! My face? No, he always says my face is one of the few times God did better work than he could.”

“A very fancy man with a compliment.” It was amazing how much I didn’t like Barry.

“Let me show you his picture,” she said, and opened the locket dangling on her chest. It turned out to be not exactly a locket after all, but a watch, with a photograph inside the lid. She leaned forward, extending the photo over the seatback, and dumped the onion rings and french fries in my lap. “Oh! I’m terribly sorry.”

“No problem.” There were fewer onion rings left than french fries, I noticed. I quick ate an onion ring, put everything else back in the barges and the barges back on top of the seat, then leaned forward to look at this paragon among men.

Well. It’s very annoying when your prejudices aren’t confirmed. The guy smiling in the picture — it was just his head, and a blurred section of what might have been bookcase behind him — looked to be my age (31) or a couple of years older, and seemed a very decent sort of chap indeed. She’d used the word ‘gentle’ and that was exactly what he looked like. Mild-mannered, easygoing, certainly trustworthy; a solid, likable, everyday nice guy. I’d known a whole lot of them in college. I’d even tried to be one myself for a while. “This guy shouldn’t be a plastic surgeon,” I said. “He should be a vet.”

She understood my meaning at once. “He’s very tender,” she agreed. “He’s very sympathetic to the humiliation people feel when they think they have a blemish.”

“Okay,” I said. I understood that at a level below consciousness I’d been in competition with Barry — an attractive woman creates male competition simply by existing — and now I saw that in any competition at any level Barry would have to come in first. He’d probably even spell better than me. Worst of all, if I ever met him, as I most likely would at the other end of this trip, I’d undoubtedly like him.

“You see what I mean,” she said, and turned the picture around to look at it herself. Smiling fondly at the picture, she said, “He’s such a wonderful guy. Why do I keep backing away from him?”

“He’s got a flaw somewhere.”

“He really doesn’t. He’s Mister Right.”

“Then take the plane.”

She sighed, shook her head, and closed the locket. Popping an onion ring into her mouth — when was she going to eat some of her french fries? — she said, “We met four years ago, in Houston. I was doing a shopping mall, and he—”

“A what?”

“A shopping mall. I’m a landscape architect.”

“Ah,” I said.

“You know what that is, don’t you?”

“You decide where the trees go.”

She gave me the condescending smile of the professional toward the layman. “Something like that. Anyway, I’m attached to a New York firm, but my work is all around the country.”

“What’s Barry doing in Los Angeles?”

“That’s where he lives.”

“And after you’re married?”

“I’ll switch to a West Coast firm.” Was there something slightly defiant about the way she said that?

I nodded. “You’re the one has to move, huh? Because you’re the woman? Whither thou goest, all that?”

“Not at all. Barry is the least sexist of men.”

I’d always thought I was. “Uh huh,” I said.

“It’s better for both our careers, that’s all,” she explained. “There’s at least as much work for a landscape architect on the West Coast as the East, and I’ve always traveled and worked all over the country anyway, so I can just as easily be based in Los Angeles as anywhere else. And that’s where most of Barry’s patients are, so it’s better for him. He says New Yorkers don’t care what they look like.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Are we out of onion rings?”

“There’s still french fries,” I suggested. “Or I could go get another order.”

“No, I suppose we ought to push on.” She sounded reluctant, though there really wasn’t much in this McDonald’s lot to hold us. Then she said, “How far do you want to drive at a time? How should we work that?”

“I’ll give you a ten-hour day,” I said, “same as I work in the city, which includes lunchtime. I started at ten this morning, so I’ll drive till eight tonight, and then we’ll stop.”

“A ten-hour day — isn’t that a lot?”

“It’s what I’m used to. Ready?”

“Just a second,” she said. “Let me just go get one more order of onion rings. For the road.” And she hopped out of the cab and loped away. I watched her go, then spent a minute cleaning up all the paper bags and cardboard barges from the seat beside me.

I liked her.