Call Me a Cab

7

It was just after nine o’clock, the air-conditioner was on full blast, and I lay naked on the bed watching television commercials and thinking vaguely of food, when the phone rang. I frowned at it, irrationally suspecting a practical joke. Who knew me around here?

Ms. Scott, of course. Her calm voice said, “I’m going down to dinner now. I don’t promise I’ll talk much, but shall we share a table?”

“Give me two minutes.”

“Just knock on my door.”

Which I did, approximately two minutes later. She had changed to a thin cotton sleeveless dress, with a pale shawl over her bare shoulders; for the air-conditioning, I suppose. I myself had switched from my usual work costume of sneakers, dungarees and a T-shirt to black loafers, gray slacks, and a short-sleeve blue patterned shirt. At least we’d look appropriate at the same table.

The sexual frenzy was out of us now. We could meet one another’s eye, we could smile without fear of misinterpretation, and I even automatically took her elbow for a few seconds as we went through a doorway. She was silent on the way downstairs, as she’d promised, but amiable company; as in the cab.

The restaurant was a vast low-ceilinged cavern swathed in patterned drapery and drenched in Muzak. It was hard to believe we weren’t ninety feet or more below the surface of the earth, but if we’d actually struggled our way through the drapes to one of the side windows we would have been looking out at ground level toward the main parking lot.

Of the several hundred tables here, perhaps four were occupied, all in the same distant corner of the room. The head-waiter, a thin short pencil-moustached smiler, a kind of pocket Errol Flynn, tried to cram us in among the rest of his customers, but Ms. Scott — bless her — pointed to a table a sensible distance away and said, “Why not that one?”

Why not, indeed? We were spoiling some mathematically precise plan inside his head, that’s why not, but there was nothing he could do about it short of drawing a pistol and forcing us to sit where he wanted. With very bad grace, he led us to the table Ms. Scott had indicated, and left us there alone for a long time. I detected a few of the other diners looking enviously in our direction, obviously wishing they too had had the courage to tell our friend they didn’t feel like eating en campement tonight; while we waited for the headwaiter to get over his sulk and bring menus, I commented to Ms. Scott: “Too many people allow themselves to get pushed around in restaurants.”

She smiled in agreement, but said, “I hope you didn’t mind my taking charge that way.”

“You’re in charge,” I pointed out. “If I was taking you out, I’d have picked that table over there.”

She frowned over at the table I’d randomly chosen, wondering why it was better than this one; then looked back at me, frowned a second longer, and suddenly smiled, saying, “I see. Thank you.”

“You have enough to think about,” I told her, “without also having to worry if my male ego is being trampled on. It isn’t.”

“I didn’t think it was, but thanks for the reassurance.”

“Can we laugh now about the man with the unstoppable bed?”

She did laugh, but she said, “Maybe,” and at the same time gestured very strongly at the headwaiter, whose unwary eye she had caught with a look of steel.

He came over, then, and said to me, “Sir?”

“I didn’t call you,” I said.

“We’d like menus,” Ms. Scott told him. “And I think drinks. Yes?” That last to me.

“Gin and tonic would be nice,” I acknowledged.

“And vodka and tonic for me.” Ms. Scott smiled coolly at the headwaiter and then, as though he’d already left, said to me, “How many miles did we do today?”

Beneath the headwaiter’s pencil moustache, as he departed, were pursed lips. I said, “Just under six hundred.”

“Isn’t that a lot, in one day?”

“It’s different from Sixth Avenue,” I admitted. “To tell the truth, at first I was enjoying myself, but toward the end I wouldn’t have minded doing something else.”

“Ten hours a day is too much,” she said. “From now on, just do what’s comfortable, and stop when you’re tired.”

I wasn’t sure myself if I wanted to keep on at the same pace. “Thanks for giving me the option.”

“Of course. Um— May I call you Thomas?”

“I wish you wouldn’t,” I said. “Nobody else does. Try Tom.”

“Tom. Fine. And I’m Katharine.”

“Not Kathy or Kate?”

“No,” she said, as though people who called her those names were never heard from again.

I persisted: “Not Kit or Kitty or Kat?”

Finally she laughed. “Now, look, Thomas,” she said.

“Katharine,” I said.

“And Tom.” She extended a slim hand across the table. “How do you do?”

“Fine, thanks,” I said, taking her hand. “And you?”

“Very well.”

The handshake ended as the drinks arrived, brought by a pleasant overweight high school girl who also left us menus the size of garage doors. I counted how often the word “succulent” was used in the menus (8), and when the girl came back I ordered the creamed herring, the Junior Sirloin (I think you’re supposed to feel less than a man if you don’t order the King), the baked potato, no vegetable, and the mixed green salad. Looking at me, she said, “And wine?”

“Certainly.”

There was a tiny folded wine list that lived on the table amid the condiments. Katharine consulted it briefly and said, “The Almaden Pinot Noir.”

The waitress, who’d been efficiently and cheerfully writing everything in her pad, now stumbled to a halt. “The what?”

Katharine said it again, then a third time, then finally pointed to it on the wine list. “Oh!” said the girl, copied it down laboriously from the list, and went away.

I said, “How do you suppose she pronounces it?”

“I doubt she ever has.” Then she gave me a keen look, and said, “Do you mind if I ask a snobbish question?”

Putting on my awful imitation Brooklyn accent, I said, “Yuh mean, why deny tawk like uh cabdrivuh?”

Her smile was apologetic. “I’m afraid so, yes.”

“Then I’ll tell you my story.” I sipped gin and tonic, and began: “I am downwardly mobile. My father pushed a hack around New York for twenty-five years so I’d have the advantages he didn’t have. I went to college, I learned to wear ties and suits, I came out and married a tall girl and became an executive trainee with Retrieval Data Corporation. Ever hear of them?”

“No.”

“I was a junior executive there for five years. I hated it. Also I went on being married, and I lived in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Do you know just how horrible New Brunswick, New Jersey is?”

She smiled faintly, as she shook her head. “No, I don’t.”

“You’re lucky. Those who do have experience of New Brunswick, New Jersey are scarred for life. Anyway, Retrieval Data went under three years ago, one of the several thousand computer companies that couldn’t survive the recession. That was just around the time my wife left me, so I—”

“Do you have children?”

I shook my head. “I didn’t want any and she couldn’t have any. The lack of family was one of our strongest bonds. She left me for a widower with four daughters.”

“Oh,” she said.

“So I came back to New York,” I finished, “and got a temporary job for the rest of my life driving my father’s cab days. He won’t let me have it nights. And I’m happy as a clam.”

“How about your father?”

“He would like to be a junior executive. Failing that, he would like me to be a junior executive. Failing that, he would like me not to rack up the cab.”

She was looking concerned for me: “But what’s going to happen to you now?”

“It’s happening. Except for this. Going to California, this is something different, kind of an adventure.”

“But are you really just going to drive a cab the rest of your life?”

“Why not? It’s socially utile, it keeps me in contact with the general public, it affords me a constantly changing milieu, it pays the rent and it’s fun.”

The girl came then with the artichoke and the herring, and we paused in our conversation to eat. The herring was standard fare, but the artichoke was just the heart, chopped up and floating in vinegar and oil. Katharine didn’t seem charmed by it, but she ate it without comment, and as she was finishing the headwaiter showed up, lugging a chinkling ice bucket on a stand. Placing it beside our table, he took from it an unopened bottle of wine and showed me the label.

Jesus, he was a slow learner. “The lady ordered it,” I said.

He had been hoping to have no further dealings with the lady for the rest of his life. With wrinkled mouth and wrinkled moustache he reluctantly turned one hundred eighty degrees, presenting the bottle.

Meantime, Katharine had been frowning at the ice bucket with understandable perplexity, and now she said, “But this is red wine.”

“Isn’t this what you ordered?” He showed her the label.

“Yes, yes.” She gave the label an impatient look and nod. “That’s what I ordered, but you don’t chill red wine.”

He had never known anyone who was so much trouble. “All our wines are chilled,” he said, with condescending pride. “It’s the way it’s done.”

“Well—” I could see her contemplating the conversation that would ensue if she even started to explain things, and I could also see her wisely decide to cut the Gordian knot. She said, “Do you have any wine that hasn’t been chilled?”

“All of our wine is on ice.” So was his manner.

She looked over at me. “Shall we take it anyway?”

I liked that; she was making it a question between equals. I shrugged and said, “We’ll warm it in our palms, like brandy.”

“All right,” she said, and told the headwaiter, “you might as well open it.”

He did so, looking miffed and making less of a production than he might have done, then poured each of our glasses half full without waiting for one of us to taste the wine and accept it, and placed the dripping bottle in the middle of the table, saying, “You won’t be wanting the cooler?”

Katharine said, “The what? Oh, the ice bucket. No, thank you.”

With frozen dignity he picked up the ‘cooler’ and chinklebinked away with it. I tasted the wine, which was very cold indeed, and therefore thin and watery. “Well, it isn’t sour,” I said.

“No, but our friend is.”

Then the girl came with our main courses, which were perfectly fine; except of course that the baked potato wasn’t really a baked potato. It was a steamed potato, inside the aluminum foil. Oh, well; you take the rough with the smooth. By the time we’d finished eating, the wine had warmed considerably, and wasn’t at all bad.

Neither of us wanted coffee or dessert. Katharine ordered the bill, the headwaiter handed it to me, and I handed it back. Neither Katharine nor I said anything, so he put it in the dead center of the table, leaning against the sugar, and departed.

As Katharine studied the bill, I said, “This could get annoying, all the way across the country.”

“I’m used to it,” she said. “I frequently have business lunches with men, where I’m paying. Waiters just can’t adapt to the idea.”

“Sure they can. They don’t want to.”

“A political statement?” She seemed to consider the idea for the first time. “You may be right.”

“Down with the liberated woman.”

With a thin smile she said, “It saves me quite a bit on tips.” Then she signed the bill, with her room number, and added the gratuity; I didn’t see how much, but the writing was small.

We went back upstairs and parted at our rooms, agreeing to meet for breakfast at eight. I phoned the desk and left a seven-thirty call, then kicked off my shoes, switched on the TV, and sprawled on the bed. It wasn’t yet ten-thirty. I lay there watching the colors and thinking about Katharine Scott. Nice lady. Difficult for women to move around in the world, with everybody trying to shove them down behind the nearest man. A lot of men would not have been able to resist the impulse to ‘help’ her tonight, with the desk clerk or the headwaiter; especially the headwaiter. Fortunately, I’m quiescent by nature.

I wondered about Barry, the man in her life, toward whom we were making haste slowly. Would he have ‘handled’ things this evening? Probably. Soon it would be his job anyway; I presumed Katharine would be over her skittishness by the time we reached Los Angeles, and would then marry him and settle down. She’d go on being a landscape architect, of course, and go on having trouble with waiters at business lunches, but the rest of the time Barry would be in charge. Women are like bewitched characters in old legends, sometimes capable of coping with ordinary life and motion, and at other times under a spell that makes it impossible for them to open doors or order a meal. But instead of the prince’s kiss breaking the spell, it finishes the job of locking the spell on for life.

I thought Barry probably wasn’t good enough for her. On the other hand, neither was I.