Call Me a Cab

47

Now at last we were in a normal cabby-passenger relationship. I sat up front and drove, and they sat in back and argued. He would read a few pages of what she’d written, while she either watched his face or read over his shoulder, and he would stop from time to time to disagree with a part of it, or make a comment, or tell her she had misunderstood something. Then they would discuss it.

They were both very tense, and it seemed to me it would be good for everybody concerned if they’d yell at one another for a while, but they both kept very tight control. Katharine was stiff-lipped and grim, with strain lines over her eyebrows and around her mouth, while Barry determinedly maintained an easygoing calm façade. Looking at him in the mirror, it occurred to me to wonder if his face had been altered. Not by himself, obviously, but perhaps by some other plastic surgeon. Psychiatrists before they can practice are required to go through psychiatric sessions with another psychiatrist, so maybe plastic surgeons have to be made pretty before they can hang out the old shingle. Barry had an outdoor handsomeness, a pleasing unobtrusive western cragginess in a face that was not too deeply tanned. Was it real? If a fake, it was beautifully done; like Katharine’s eight miles of road.

I remembered Katharine’s story about the blank-faced girl: “You brought out the real me.” Was that the real Barry back there, being so patient and calm, like a very good deep-sea fisherman giving Katharine all the slack she wanted? Enough rope. He probably was real, and had learned patience with his patients. Or possibly his calm non-assertive careful capable personality had come first, and had led him to a career where such characteristics were valuable. And to a woman with whom he could make full use of the same traits.

And then I thought: He shouldn’t marry her. This didn’t alter my conviction that it was the right thing for Katharine to marry Barry, that he was the perfect man for her and his presence in her life would calm and soothe her so totally that if I were to see her again in five years I’d barely recognize her; but for Barry, it would be a mistake.

Stupid, of course, but very human; the wrong one had the doubts. She thought marriage with Barry would create problems, whereas it would end all her problems. And he thought his problems would cease if he got her to marry him, but they wouldn’t; in fact they would very slightly intensify, as his sense of responsibility formed a cocoon around her. There would be no respite from perfection in his life, not at work and not at home. Some day one of those blank-faced girls would attract his compassion and strength, and he would find the joy of taking care of someone who doesn’t really need anyone’s concern; the kind of pleasure all cat-lovers know. Calmness, restraint, assurance, strength; he could lavish these on the blank-faced girl with a free hand, secure in the knowledge that she would survive if his attention ever strayed, that he could play at being responsible for her because in fact he couldn’t possibly be responsible for her. The duplicity would finally make him miserable, of course, but it wasn’t his happiness that concerned me, it was Katharine’s. She would remain his true responsibility, and so he would make absolutely sure she never never never found out about the blank-faced girl. I thought I could trust him to do that.

So even in perfection there’s imperfection. But Katharine would come closer than most people; closer by light-years than Lynn and I had ever achieved. Driving out across the charred desert while they argued it out behind me, I finally myself grew calm about Katharine. I had become involved in her life the way you get involved in somebody else’s chess match, until you almost come to think of yourself as a participant; but now we were in the endgame, we were nearing mate, and my status as mere observer was forcing itself on my attention. I was fond of Katharine, and with calmness I could now approve the happy ending I visualized for her.

The desert also forced itself on my attention as I drove along. At Barry’s suggestion, we had prepared ourselves as though this were a serious major desert, and in fact that’s exactly what it was. On the seat beside me was a paper bag of supermarket fruit, while on the floor in skimpy shade were two gray-white plastic gallon jugs of water.

This desert, called Mojave, had been not so much tamed as beguiled by this baking desert-colored road running straight across the empty miles. Tumbled mountains ringed us, and the road slowly rose and fell, as though we were traveling across fossilized waves from some Paleolithic tempest. Police helicopters fluttered and flapped above us, watching for motorists who, unwary or unlucky, had broken down. The temperature out here was over a hundred, and the humidity so low that I drove with a peachpit in my mouth to encourage salivation. On this griddle it was easy for automobiles to boil over, to suffer mechanical malfunctions, to abandon hope and die. There were no towns, there was no water, there was only this tightrope wire suspended in the dusty void between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Between the vultures and the angels.

With police cars patrolling the road and police helicopters floating overhead, I couldn’t travel at my usual high speeds but kept myself firmly under sixty from the time we crossed the state line into California. It was more than two hours after we left Las Vegas before we reached the next settlement of man, a town called Barstow, a small bleached stucco outpost of diners and junkyards in the desert, where I took the exit and found a McDonald’s. Barry treated, and we ate on the move, needing the breeze of our motion to keep us from roasting in this hot-crock cab.

Now the road turned southerly, toward Victorville and San Bernardino and Pasadena, and the couple in the back seat ate their Big Macs and drank their Cokes and took a rest from their discussion. Traffic had been thin all across the Mojave, as though we had been part of an old camel caravan trail on the Sahara, but south of Barstow there were more cars and a returning sense that life was after all possible on this planet. More optimistically Barry and Katharine began to talk again:

“I know it sounds stupid,” she said, “but what I wrote there is true. I’m afraid of demanding too much from you, that my need for independence will itself be a heavy dependency on you, weighing you down.” (Close to what I had been thinking myself, across the desert. Would he understand the hint, would he see the danger?)

No. “Your independence is one of the things I most treasure about you,” he said, fatuously earnest. “That’s why I wouldn’t think of trying to change it, and why it couldn’t possibly hurt me in any way. You must have your own space, your own feelings, your own privacies and selfhood. I’ve always respected that, and of course I’ll go on respecting it after we’re married.”

Of course he would, but what he didn’t understand was that after the marriage the strain on him would be so much greater that it would weigh him down; precisely as Katharine had said. But she didn’t fully understand it either, and was only groping for what troubled her in the darkness of the future, so her answer was merely more words, reiterating without explaining.

And that was the way they went, all day long, four hours of it in the cab as we crossed the desert and descended into the spreading exurbia of Los Angeles. They repeated the same arguments in different words, combined old thoughts in new ways, circled around and around the black dense contra-terrine boulder of Katharine’s doubt. And we came at last to the top of a long descent down a naked mountain slope, ten miles of sweeping broad roadway leading from the barren plateau into — the nether world. The entrance to Los Angeles. Yellow-gray smog covered the valley in a thick cloud, like a dirty smokescreen. Cars far ahead disappeared gradually down into it, while in the northbound lanes other tiny cars, apparently unharmed, emerged from that unmoving yeast at the bottom of the bowl and scampered up the long slope toward sunlight.

We slid down and down, and as we neared the smog it seemed for a while very slightly to recede; but we overtook it, and plunged in, and from the back seat Katharine, surprised out of her argument, cried out, “My God! What’s happened? A forest fire?”

The sky down here on the valley floor was gray, the sun a dime-size white circle with a red rim, the air yellow-tinged. Greenery flanked the roadway, amazingly enough, and here at the bottom were houses, neighborhoods, children on skate-boards breathing and living.

They wonder if man can adapt to other planets. He already has.

Barry said, “It’s smog. This part gets the worst of it, the wind brings it all east to the mountains. We usually don’t have any smog at all in Westwood.”

Katharine laughed — for the first time today — and said, “Barry, I’m not going to decide yes or no on the basis of smog!”