Call Me a Cab

35

It had been a long exhausting night. I left no call, and didn’t wake up till nearly ten o’clock. My first act was to phone Smith’s Svce, where Dave Smith answered with his usual greeting: “More trouble.”

“No, the same old trouble, actually,” I told him. “This is Tom Fletcher, the cabby.”

“The ex-cabby.”

“Don’t talk like that,” I said. “My stomach just dropped.”

“Well,” he said, “I’ve got a line on a Marathon starter, over in Limon. It’s probably gonna be a little different from yours, but maybe we can cobble them together, come up with some cockamamie thing. At least get you off my hands and over the county line.”

“That sounds good.”

“Give me a call about one o’clock,” he suggested.

I said, “Checkout here is twelve noon.”

“Tell them a sob story.”

“It just happens I have one, as a matter of fact.”

He chuckled, and we stopped talking to one another, and I phoned Katharine’s room, thus learning what she sounded like when first awake; warm and nice, but brain-damaged. “Wo,” she said. “Zat?”

“It’s the morning after.”

“God. Oh, it sure is. What time is it?”

“Ten.”

“Ten what? Oh, ten o’clock; I’m sorry, I’m not waking up.”

“They may stop serving breakfast pretty soon.”

“That’s one good thing.”

“I’ll knock on your door in ten minutes.”

“You’re a vicious person,” she said, but when I knocked on her door ten minutes later she’d reconstructed herself and seemed fine. She was wearing her Ace shirt, and I found myself glad she hadn’t been wearing it last night, because I knew instinctively she would have let the Chasens call her Ace. It still rankled that she wouldn’t permit the same privilege to me.

During breakfast we talked about the car and Dave Smith and what on earth we would do between now and one o’clock. Looking at me doubtfully, she said, “Just how bad a chess player are you?”

“I know which way the horse goes.”

She sighed, but accepted the inevitable, and after breakfast we sat out in the cool sunlight by the swimming pool and Katharine laid out her neat black-and-white traveling chess set with the magnetic pieces. “I’ll bet a quarter Barry gave you this,” I said. “Wait a minute, wait a minute, not for Christmas. Your birthday.”

“Smart aleck. Let’s see how smart you are at chess.”

So we played for a while, just sort of moving the pieces around ineffectually, and then she said, “I couldn’t get to sleep last night. I kept thinking about the Chasens.”

“That was very strange,” I agreed.

“Early on, I said maybe I found them scary. I was right.” She looked away, out over the swimming pool toward the big trucks passing on the Interstate; she was apparently having trouble finding the words for what she wanted to say. “I took it personally,” she said.

“I don’t follow.”

“I connected it with Barry and me.” She looked in my direction, squinting a bit, troubled. “You know what they reminded me of?”

“What?”

“William Powell and Myrna Loy in The Thin Man.” Then she shook her head, saying, “No, that’s not exactly it. All his pretending his wife is this crazed wanton, this nymphomaniac or something, that was more like Thorne Smith. I’m not making any sense, am I?”

“Not that I can tell.”

“It’s a strategy for dealing with intimacy,” she said. “Do you see what I mean? At the time they started out together, the Chasens, back in the twenties and thirties, that was one of the role models you could follow for a relationship. You just stayed on the surface together, being amusing, appreciating one another’s wit and not taking anything seriously. Because marriage, or any real intimacy between people, it can be very frightening.”

“As you well know,” I said.

“As I well know,” she agreed. “Ten years ago, the popular strategy was to stay stoned together, laid back, cool. People are always trying to find the right strategy.”

I said, “And you’re afraid you haven’t found the right strategy for you and Barry.”

“It’s worse than that,” she said. “I’m not even sure I want to get into the strategy thing at all. That’s why they were so scary, they’re stuck in that role, they’ve got no place else to go. And look what they have to make it adapt to; old age, sickness. God knows what their real story is and why they have to be out here, pretending awful Kansas bars are Broadway joints out of Damon Runyon.”

“At one point last night,” I said, “I found myself wondering how they are when alone.”

“Exactly the same,” she said, with utter certainty. “They weren’t doing all that for us, they were doing it for one another. They’re the audience. And they can’t ever break out of it, because once out they’d never get back in, and they’d have nobody to be together. Sooner or later one of them will die, and the other one will make a joke about it.”

“Jesus,” I said. “You do have grim thoughts.”

“I was thinking about Barry. Barry and me.” She looked down at the chessboard, and sighed, and slowly focused her attention on the game. “Mate in three moves,” she said.

“Yeah?” I looked down at the tangle of pieces. “Which of us wins?”