Call Me a Cab

44

What is she going to do?

The unread saga sat atop the TV in my inevitably identical room — the curtain was green in the proxy-Utrillo on the left — but I neither read nor watched, having no patience for anything other than my own troubled feelings. I paced the thick-carpeted floor, asking myself pointless questions and giving myself very few satisfactory answers.

What is she going to do? What is she going to do?

Well, what do I want her to do?

I want her to find happiness and contentment. I want her to be sure of herself. I want her to get unstuck before she comes unglued.

What do I think she should do? I think — though an inane part of me resists this — I think she should marry Barry. He’s strong, and he’s wise, and he’ll leave her sufficient space around herself, and she’ll work out her problems much better after she’s made her decision and knows for sure which set of problems she’ll be dealing with. Unless, of course, she finds herself shrinking next to his great size, which is always a possibility, particularly with women, and which may be one of the unconscious fears she has about him. In which case, she will either get out of the marriage eventually, in some messy or relatively civilized way, or she will crumble like an old adobe wall and become a beige mound where a person had once stood.

And if I were to take her away from all this, on my yellow charger, as the romantic ten-year-old inside me keeps suggesting, where would I take her? And how? And for how long? And would she want to go? I’m not going to ask her to marry me, any more than I’m going to get another job as an executive trainee. I’m who I am, and if I struggle myself into some other posture it can only be for a little while; sooner or later I’ll be forced to relax into who I really am — which is what happened to me in the past — so what’s the point pretending? Katharine and I have worked it out that we can get along very well on a non-sexual basis for five days while riding together in an automobile, but that’s not quite enough to go on with, even if Barry didn’t already exist, which he does. Barry loves her, Barry wants to marry her, Barry really and truly is the perfect guy for her. And she loves Barry, she told me so herself several times in the last few days. I am merely another distraction from the insistent unanswered question.

What is she going to do?

Whose room are they in right now? Are they together? Will they sleep together? Her room or his room?

How did I get myself into this thing? No matter how it ends for her, it can only end miserably for me. I’d have been better off if she’d flagged some other cab last Thursday. Any other cab.

And so would she.

Yeah, that’s the truth. I didn’t help simplify her problem, I complicated it by introducing an irrelevant Other Man.

I thought of Rita for the first time since I’d left her that note about the yogurt back in New York. Rita’s answered Katharine’s question, hasn’t she? At least for the moment. She’s answered it in the same way I have, by limiting the dosage to a non-lethal quantity.

And Sue Ann, too.

Katharine wants to know how much a non-lethal dosage can be. Katharine wants to know if she can walk through the flame and survive. Katharine, if I may be forgiven what sounds like but is not an overstatement, has not given up hope.

What is she going to do? Marriage with Barry will be a vote for hope. So that’s another reason why she ought to do it, because Katharine is one of the people for whom hope is a good thing. And because Katharine still does believe in hope, I think she is going to decide in favor of marriage, which is the decision I think she should make, so this conclusion will please me. Won’t it?

I sat on the side of the bed and dialed my own phone number in the city — there would be some obscure pleasure or satisfaction if Rita was there, sleeping alone in my bed — and listened to the phone ring and ring in the obviously empty apartment. It was three hours later there, one in the morning, and in my mind I could see the dark rooms, the furniture, the walls, the cubical spaces filled with the spasms of telephone bell. I could call Rita at her own apartment, of course, but it wasn’t Rita I wanted, it was the reminder of Rita as having a connection with me. I counted forty rings, enjoying the power to have an effect in that place so far away, and when it occurred to me I was probably driving the neighbors right out of their minds I hung up and was alone again.

Around midnight I went out for a drive, pushing my alien cab up dark broad western streets, where mostly the traffic lights played out their patterns just for me. There was no Sue Ann, no Mr. and Mrs. Chasen, no pregnant woman, no CB maniac; there were no adventures. In every life, however reluctantly, you move at last beyond adventure.