Call Me a Cab

46

It was about seventy miles to Las Vegas, where Barry could turn in his car. He led the way down Interstate 15, with Katharine and me in the cab behind him. Katharine sat in back, but on the jump seat so we could talk. She kept telling me how unfair she’d been to Barry. “You can see how he is,” she said. “You can see I’ve been very wrong to him.”

“If you love him you marry him,” I said. “If you don’t love him, leave him alone.”

“I do love him,” she said. “That isn’t the question, it really isn’t.”

I let my silence answer for me.

Las Vegas is from some schlock version of The Wizard of Oz. You know, the Emerald City rising up out of the desert. But this is the Ormolu City, plastic towers rising out of the hot dry sand into the hot dry air, fool’s gold glittering in the clear empty sunshine sharply enough to make you squint behind your sunglasses. Driving in from the northwest, along an endless flat ironing-board desert landscape, you see it ahead of you like some anti-mirage, which for a long time refuses to get any closer, then is suddenly there, held within an acne ring of shacks and sheds and derelict huts.

In the city the streets are wide, the houses in the residential areas seeming lower to the ground than usual, as though all those one-story ranches are sinking inch by inch, year by year, back into the sand. The famous Strip is anxious glitter, clutching your sleeve for attention; a full year’s television viewing concentrated into one frantic image, overloaded, overlit, and over-exposed. If architecture is frozen music, Las Vegas is an album of polka favorites, frozen too late.

The five minutes the cab spent parked on the treeless shadeless blacktop near the car rental office were enough to bake its interior like the inside of a shepherd’s pie. The air was so dry that the sweat evaporated from me almost as rapidly as it oozed to the surface, making my skin feel itchy and dirty. My left arm was in direct sunlight no matter where I put it, and though I was already moderately tanned I could feel the burn.

When Barry got into the cab — Katharine had already transferred to the rear seat — he said, “Wow. You should have gotten one with air-conditioning.”

I glanced in the mirror, but Katharine was absorbed in opening her attaché case, as though she hadn’t heard him. I started the engine and slid out amid the traffic; long low fat cars that would have looked perfect with a cigar clenched in the teeth of their grills. The sun was so bright you couldn’t tell if the traffic lights were red or green; it created a certain amount of suspense as I picked my way back toward Interstate 15.

In back, Katharine was being brisk and businesslike, her lap full of pads of yellow paper. “I’ve done an awful lot of thinking the past week,” she said, “and I wrote some of it down. You can see what you’re thinking sometimes if you put it down on paper.”

“I know,” he said. “I do that myself.”

“I think the best thing,” she told him, “is for you to read at least part of what I wrote.”

“Fine,” he said. “Fine.”

Route 15. Los Angeles, said the sign, 284 miles.