Call Me a Cab

4

Six-thirty P.M. Pennsylvania mountains replaced by Ohio industrial parks. Interstate 80 abandoned for Interstate 76, to get a bit further south. The sun, descending dead ahead toward eye level, gradually becoming a nuisance. The passenger brooding in the back.

After lunch, I’d gassed up at the neighboring Exxon station, then climbed back up onto Route 80 and sailed on into the west. Ms. Scott, after sharing with me the additional order of onion rings, had returned to her previous seat, where she’d opened one of her suitcases and brought out from it a slender vinyl attaché case; the kind carried by State Department clerks, computer salesmen, and executive trainees. This, which she opened on her lap, had proved to contain such serious businesslike material as yellow-lined legal pads, ballpoint pens, graph paper, loose-leaf filler books, a cassette recorder, sharpened yellow pencils, and a slide rule.

(I have always envied people who know what a slide rule is for. It’s not even the question of how you use it, it’s more basic than that; I am convinced there have been moments in my life which would have been made easier if I had been equipped with a handy slide rule and the mastery of its operation, but I’m so ignorant I don’t even know which moments those were. Never have I said, “Oh, if only I had a slide rule!” though surely there have been times when it was the appropriate thing to say.)

But not at the moment for Ms. Scott. She’d taken from the attaché case only one legal pad and one ballpoint pen, then closed the case on her lap, used it as a desktop, and proceeded to write... think... chew the pen... brood at the passing scenery... write some more... cross out part of what she’d written... start a new sheet... sometimes crumple a sheet and throw it to the floor... sometimes brood a long long time without writing... sometimes write very rapidly for ten or fifteen minutes at a stretch — and thus the time flew by.

For myself, in addition to the driving and the scenery, I too had Ms. Scott’s problem to ponder. Granted it was none of my business, I could hardly avoid thinking about it. And something about this fellow Barry was bothering her, that much was plain enough. Was it some flaw not yet mentioned — possibly not even consciously understood or recognized by the lady herself — but which subliminally warned her away? Or was she possibly merely skittish? I’d thought that was supposed to be a male problem, that fidgetiness at the brink of marriage, but could that be the crux of it, after all?

Well, I simply didn’t have enough information. She herself knew the whole story, yet couldn’t resolve the problem. Still, it gave me something to chew on while driving.

Until six-thirty, that is, when all at once she started, nearly dropped the attaché case off her lap, and cried out, “My God! What time is it?”

I keep a watch with an expansion band on the sun visor. Unfortunately, at the moment the visor was down to protect me from the subsiding sun, so I had to flip it up, squint against that yellow glare in my eyes, and finally make out which little hand was where. “Six twenty-five.”

“Oh, good God, I never thought! A phone, we have to find a phone!”

“Check,” I said.

“I never called Barry! He must have met that plane!”

“Ah hah,” I said. “I bet you’re right.”

“A phone! A phone!”

“At the earliest opportunity,” I assured her.

There are no services on the Interstate itself, but they do erect signs telling you what services are available off the highway at each exit, and a few minutes later we came to one of these. “Services Next Exit,” it said. “Gas Food Phone Lodging.”

Ms. Scott leaned forward to thump the seatback near my right ear. “There! There! It says phone!”

“I see it.”

I took the exit, and found the usual cluster of chain operations along the country road; this time, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Chevron and Hess gasolines, and Stuckey’s. A phone booth was out by the road in front of the Chevron station, so I parked the cab next to it.

Ms. Scott had been pawing through her bag, and now she said, “I’m sure I don’t have enough change. Do you have change? I can’t call him collect, not like this.”

“Sure,” I said. I unhooked my change machine from under the dashboard and handed it back. “Just take this with you.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I’ve never operated one of those.”

I could see this phone-call business was making her very nervous, so I said, “I’ll come along, and just hand you change as you need it.”

“Good.”

We got out of the cab, and then I realized this wasn’t an enclosed phone booth, but one of those cockpit-on-a-stick things that offer no privacy. “I’ll just give you a lot of change,” I said, “and let you alone.”

But she wouldn’t hear of it. “No no no, it’s all right, I just want to tell him what happened, that’s all. Stay right here with me, I’m feeling very panicky and stupid, I’d just spill change all over the place.”

“Okay.”

So she made the call, and the operator told her how much money, and I just kept handing over quarters for a while, which she kept putting into the quarter slot — bong bong bong. Then she spoke with the operator again, and said to me, “Fifteen cents more,” so I gave her a dime — bing bing — and a nickel — bing — and at last the call went through.

I suppose they must have turned the volume up on that phone because it was so close to a road; or maybe it was set wrong. Whatever the reason, it turned out I could hear every word, which I found quite embarrassing. Twice I started to tiptoe back toward the cab, but both times Ms. Scott gestured at me strongly to stay where I was. So I stayed, and this is what I heard:

“Hello?” (Ordinary male voice.)

“Hello, sweetheart?”

“Sweet-heart!” (Loud male voice.)

Ms. Scott was looking very agitated and guilty and upset. “Barry,” she said. “It’s me. Katharine.”

“I remember you.” (Annoyed male voice.) “And this time you left me at the airport.”

She shook her head. “I’m sorry.”

“I thought you always keep your promises.”

She was holding the phone in both hands, very intensely. “I do,” she said.

“You promised you’d come to L.A.”

“I am. I’m on my way.”

“On your way? Where are you?”

“Near Akron, Ohio.”

“Akro— How are you coming, by cab?”

Ms. Scott opened her mouth, but no words came, and she looked over at me with such a bewildered, bedeviled — and at the same time comical — expression on her face that I had to put my hand over my own mouth and turn my head away.

The exasperated voice spoke from the phone: “Hello?”

Ms. Scott sighed. “Yes,” she said.

“What?”

“Yes.”

“Yes what?”

“Yes I’m coming by cab.” Then, very emphatically, as though this were an extremely important point she was making and she wanted to be sure he understood its implications, she repeated it: “I am coming by cab.”

“I don’t believe it,” said the voice from the phone. “Or, wait a minute. Yes, I do.”

(This was the first time I started to tiptoe away.)

“Barry,” she said, earnest and intent, at the same time waving at me to stay, “I was on my way to the airport and I just knew I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t make up my mind that fast.”

“Fast!”

“Five hours. Barry, I’ve spent all day sitting in the cab just thinking, and already I’m sure I’m right.”

“About what?”

“About taking the cab. It gives me a chance to think, to be alone, no pressures, no distractions. By the time I get to Los Angeles, I’ll be sure about everything. I’ll know my own mind.”

“How long before you get here?”

“The driver tells me it’ll be about a week,” she said, with a lifted querying eyebrow in my direction. (I nodded.) “Probably next Wednesday.”

“The driver?” (Suspicious male voice.) “A male driver?”

“Yes.” (Innocent female voice.) “Why?”

“What’s he like?”

“He’s just a cabdriver,” Ms. Scott said, waving me back again as for the second time I tried unobtrusively to creep away. “You know what cabdrivers are like.”

In my head appeared the image that I knew was now appearing in Barry’s head, twenty-five hundred miles away: a short, fat, fiftyish, big-nosed cabdriver in a cloth cap, smoking a cigar.

“All right,” said Barry, and why not?

Ms. Scott became intense again: “You don’t want to marry me if I’m not sure, do you?”

A hell of a question. “I suppose not,” said Barry.

“Let me be completely certain in my own mind,” she said, “and then I’ll be ready.”

Barry’s sigh rustled down the phone lines. “Well, honey,” he said, “anybody who’ll take a cab from New York to Los Angeles, I just have to believe you’re serious, you really do need this extra time.”

“I knew you’d understand.”

“I don’t understand. I’m going along with it, but I don’t even begin to understand. But you’ll phone me every day?”

“Oh, of course.”

“And you’re coming directly to Los Angeles. No side trips.”

“Directly.”

“And you’ll be here next Wednesday.”

“No later. I promise. And you know I always keep my promises.”

“Yee-ess.”

“I do love you, Barry.”

“And I must love you, Katharine,” said the long-suffering voice.

“Goodbye, sweetheart. Phone you tomorrow.”

“Right. Right.”

Ms. Scott hung up, sighed a long sigh, and looked over at me. “There,” she said. “Do you see what I mean?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m afraid I do.”