Call Me a Cab

9

We were on the road by nine-thirty, and had soon crossed the border into Indiana. It was a clear sunny day, with the kind of crisp air in which other cars’ chrome winks at you from half a mile off. The countryside was green and rolling farmland, with neither Pennsylvania’s tumbled mountains nor Ohio’s industrial slag. Clusters of red barns and herds of grazing cows in the long green folds were sunlit illustrations from a children’s book, serene and timeless. The cab rolled like a yellow marble through the landscape that seemed never to have known war, or want, or even winter.

Katharine was less tense this morning, did less brooding and more sightseeing, but remained silent. As for me, I stayed up front with my steering wheel and my thoughts, such as they were — mostly I thought about how nice it would be to have a radio. The two-way radio in the cab wasn’t the sort to pick up local AM or FM stations.

We reached Indianapolis around eleven-thirty, and picked our way through the tangle of bypass roads. Yesterday we’d done the same with Akron and Columbus, so now I noticed for the third time how the local traffic in and near the cities contains a much higher percentage of old and beat-up cars. And pick-up trucks; you get on a major highway through a large city, you’re going to see an awful lot of grungy pick-up trucks.

Indianapolis was the first place where I really began to attract the attention of the drivers around me. No, let me rephrase that: Indianapolis was the first place where the drivers around me began deliberately to attract my attention. Cars would pull up beside me and honk, and when I’d look over there the driver would be, expressing all kind of humorous astonishment: What on Earth is a New York City taxicab doing in Indianapolis? he would ask, by means of eyebrows, hand gestures, big grins, mouthed words, head shakings, and other expressions of bafflement. Beats me, I would answer, by grinning and shrugging and shaking my head. If the guy persisted — I mean, how was I to answer the question car-to-car at 60 miles an hour even if I wanted to? — I just kept shrugging, waved a friendly bye-bye, and gradually slackened speed until he gave up.

The major cities cut your time, even with the Interstates. Mostly you can do 70 or 80 through the countryside — except for those few states that take the 55-mile-an-hour limit seriously — but the traffic build-up in the cities slows you to 60 or even less. We were nearly half an hour circling Indianapolis, and as we were leaving the city behind — without actually having seen it at all — Katharine moved forward to the jump seat and said, “Is it all right if we talk for a while?”

“Sure. What’s on your mind?”

“Marriage,” she said. I laughed, but she only grinned, and then she said, “Would you tell me about your marriage?”

“We had a wedding,” I said, “and then we had a divorce.”

“How much time in between?”

“Five years.”

Her forearms were spread across the top of the seat, right hand over left, chin resting on the back of her right hand. From what I could see of her face in the mirror, she was looking concerned for me. She said, “Is it painful to talk about?”

“No, it’s just I don’t have anything new to say. Everything everybody has ever said about marriage is true, and I don’t have anything to add.”

“Did you like being married?”

“Like it? You don’t like marriage, you love it and you hate it.” I moved my head to get her image clearly in the mirror. “You’ve never been married?”

“No,” she said.

“I hate to do oneupmanship,” I said, “but I think this really is one of those cases where you have to have been there.”

“Maybe if you just talked about your marriage,” she said, “just anything at all that occurs to you, it might start making sense to me.”

“Okay,” I said, and shifted to a more comfortable position. “Let’s see — I was twenty-two when we got married, and she was twenty. Her name was Lynn — well, it still is, isn’t it? That part doesn’t change. What’s Barry’s last name?”

“Gilbert.”

“Katharine Gilbert,” I said it slowly, savoring the syllables. “That’s not bad.”

“I’ve written it a thousand times,” she told me, “and it’s always looked perfectly fine. On the other hand, I’m so used to being Katharine Scott—” She sat up straighter, shaking her head. “I’ve been it all my life.” Then she shrugged, still looking dubious, and said, “I suppose you adjust.”

“You could do that hyphen thing,” I suggested. “Katharine Scott-Gilbert.”

“But what if I had a daughter? Say I named her — I don’t know — Jane. So she’d grow up Jane Scott-Gilbert, and then she marries a man named Jones, and she hyphenates, and she winds up Jane Scott-Gilbert-Jones.”

“Actually, it’s your granddaughter I feel sorry for,” I said. “Anita Scott-Gilbert-Jones-Marmaduke.”

She reared back to stare at me. “Marmaduke?”

“They make the best husbands.”

She grinned, then leaned forward to rest her chin on her hands again, saying, “And what sort of husband did you make?”

Persistent woman. “C minus,” I told her.

“What did you do wrong?”

“I adapted badly. Or maybe I grew up crooked, I’m still not sure.”

“Tell me about— What was it, Lynn?”

“Lynn Rushton Fletcher.”

“Did she hyphenate?”

“No,” I said. “But that could be another problem with the hyphen: divorce and marriage. By now, Lynn could be Lynn Rushton-Fletcher-Heffernan. And that’s with only one false start.”

“On that basis,” Katharine said, “I know women who’d take five minutes just to tell you who they were.”

“There aren’t enough hyphens in the whole world.”

“The great hyphen shortage.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Price going up, stock market going down.”

“If it doesn’t bother you to talk about your marriage,” she said, “why do you keep changing the subject?”

“Do I? I have a short attention span, that was one of our problems. How would you like it if the guy you’re married to wakes up every morning, looks at you, frowns, and then snaps his fingers and says, ‘Oh, yeah, I remember!’?”

She gave me a skeptical look and said, “Do you remember my question?”

“Okay, officer,” I said. “I’ll come quietly.”

“Tell me about Lynn.”

“I met her in college. She was a photography major. After I graduated and got the job with RDC, Lynn quit school in her third year and we got married.”

“Did she get a job?”

“No, she went on with the photography. She specialized in animal pictures; mostly horses and dogs. Domestic animals, not wild.”

“Was she good at it?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. She sold a lot of pictures. Calendars, greeting cards, a couple of magazine features. She even got some portrait commissions, people who had pedigree dogs or racehorses or whatever.”

“So it wasn’t just a hobby.”

“Not a bit of it. She bought a Ford Econoline van, strictly out of her own money, and fixed up the back as a combination bedroom-darkroom. Weekends, we used to drive all over the northeast; dog shows, horse shows, racetracks, things like that.”

“Sounds like fun.”

“It was, sort of. But I never got used to those darkroom smells, the van was full of them. We’d sleep in back on a Friday or Saturday night, and I’d have the weirdest dreams of my life, all from the chemical smells.”

“Were you taking pictures, too?”

“Not me. I don’t have a head for photography. You hand me an Instamatic and I stand directly in front of something and go snap, and the picture is this simple dull factual statement. ‘Flower,’ it says, or ‘Two people on a front lawn.’ With complicated cameras I don’t actually take any pictures at all. I get bogged down with the light meter or the lens opening, and gradually disappear in the quicksand of technology.”

“Did Lynn try to teach you?”

“She offered, a couple times.”

The questions stopped, then, and when I looked in the mirror she was ruminating at my profile, thinking over what she’d learned so far.

I could have told her not to waste the energy. I too used to ponder my marriage, both during and after, and it never made any sense to me, so how could it make sense to anybody else? It was like Katharine telling me that Barry was a plastic surgeon, and then showing me his pictures — two completely different impressions, both of them probably a little bit right and a lot wrong.

I’d described Lynn to people before, and hearing myself I knew I always made her sound like one of those healthy hearty big-assed women whose motto is Can-Do and whose flaw is they can’t actually see any other human beings. I myself know — or to some extent I think I know — how much that image approaches the truth of who Lynn is, but there are so many other elements left out that in fact the impression I’m giving is completely false. And the reason I long ago gave up trying to correct that false impression is there’s no way to do it.

If I had a photo of Lynn I could show it now, and Katharine would see the snub nose and the very curly short black hair and the large sympathetic eyes, and then she could put that face behind the camera taking the picture of the best-of-breed Weimaraner on his dog-show pedestal, and to that extent Lynn would become a bit more human in Katharine’s mind, as Barry had become in mine. But could I describe, to take just one example, Lynn’s relationship with orange juice? That absorbed meticulousness when extracting the frozen concentrate from the can, adding precisely three cans of cold water, stirring, frowning, leaning close to the Lucite jug to peer into the orange depths for still-frozen lumps, the total absorption of the ultimate alchemist making orange gold from frozen lead, culminating in that beautiful sunny smile as in comic triumph she carries the two gleaming orange glasses out ahead of herself to the breakfast table, so that any day that started with the opening of a new orange juice can would be sunny and happy for both of us all the way through — could I describe that repeated morning scene, against all kinds of weather through the kitchen window beyond her rapt head, and my own feelings of tenderness entangled in it? And if I did manage to get some flavor of that moment across, even to the extent that it altered a bit further Katharine’s image of Lynn, what would be the point? She would still be far far far from the truth — even so much of the truth as I happen to know.

In fact, it’s impossible to describe a person to another person; the best you can do is a caricature approximation. Only lovers ever try for more than that, and while I still did love Lynn — you must either love or hate an ex-wife; indifference is not possible — it was not an active or combustible love. It was more like the love between brother and sister who used to fight a lot and who now live in different cities and rarely communicate. All of which means that Katharine was now trying to plumb the depths of a marriage between a cabby she’d just met and an inaccurate caricature in her own mind. Good luck.

While she went on pushing that particular boulder uphill, I concentrated on my driving. Traffic had eased again to a trickle, now that we’d left Indianapolis well behind, and I was traveling between 75 and 80, using my outside mirrors to reassure myself no Smokies were clocking me. Then, after about ten minutes of silence, Katharine spoke again:

“What did you do on those weekends while your wife was taking pictures?”

So she knew she needed more information. “A lot of reading,” I told her.

“You’re not interested in animals?”

“If I see a cat or a dog on the street I say hello. That’s about as far as it goes.”

“You didn’t have pets when you were a boy?”

“We lived in an apartment in Queens. Also, more important, my mother believes animals carry germs that kill people on contact.”

“Did you miss having pets?”

“You can’t miss what you’ve never had,” I said. “Also, friends of mine had pets, and nothing in those relationships ever made me envious. Also I was an only child, which meant I was a pet.”

She gave me a keen look, as though I’d just revealed a very important fact. But that’s okay; people always give you a keen look when you say you’re an only child. There’s general agreement that it’s a very important clue, like bedwetting, but I don’t think anybody’s sure what the clue means. It’s just a clue, like the footprint outside the library window.

Katharine absorbed this clue for a minute or so, then went back to her general line of questioning. “So your whole part in these weekends,” she said, “was just the van. Driving it and fixing it up.”

“Just driving it. Lynn fixed it up, it was her baby.”

“Her baby or her baby?”

I sighed. “Well,” I said, “the evil that Freud did certainly lives after him.”

She had the grace to look embarrassed, saying, “You’re right. Sorry.”

But I wanted to make sure she understood. “Lynn lives now with five kids — they adopted one — plus dogs, plus cats, and she’s still an animal photographer. Last time I saw her she’d switched from the van up to a big Winnebago, fixed it up inside all by herself. With the kids’ help.”

“So the point is,” Katharine said, “they aren’t just substitutes.”

“That’s right. She was really interested in photography and animals and the van.”

“And you were strictly the chauffeur.”

“You can take the cabby out of the cab, but...” I shrugged. “As I keep trying to explain to my father.”

“Oh, that’s right, your father,” she said. “That was the same time you had the job you didn’t like. During the week you tried to please your father, and on weekends you tried to please your wife. That doesn’t leave much for you.”

“Well, I didn’t need much. I’m not saying I was downtrodden or anything. My father and Lynn both have definite ideas about life, that’s all. If I had definite ideas I’d make a fuss about them, the way they do. But I don’t, so I just go along.”

“Up to a point. You are driving this cab.”

“Temporarily.”

“Temporarily for the rest of your life. That’s what you said.”

“Well, anyway, it’s only because RDC folded. If it hadn’t I’d still be there.”

“What about the marriage?”

“She left me. She said we didn’t have an actual marriage, we had a teenage romance that we were the wrong age for. She said I wasn’t serious. As a matter of fact, I’m not serious. I mean, if we suddenly had a blowout here in the cab, left front tire, I’d be very serious, I’d struggle with the wheel and bring us to a safe stop and all, I wouldn’t be a Harpo Marx at the controls here, but as long as things are going smoothly I’m not a serious person at all.”

All of which she was finding very distressing. “But sooner or later,” she said, “you have to be serious.”

“Why?”

“Your wife was right, you have to grow up, you can’t be a thirty-year-old man with a temporary job.”

“A lot of thirty-year-old men have temporary jobs. The difference is, I know it.”

She was getting annoyed with me. “Well, if you’re just going to say that nothing matters...”

I stood my ground; or sat my cab. “As a matter of fact,” I said, “most things don’t matter. Never put off till tomorrow what you can put off till next week is the best approach to life I know of.”

“But that’s what I’ve been doing,” she said, “for the last two years, and if there’s one thing I know, it’s that I’ve been immature. It’s very immature to avoid grown-up decisions.”

“Indecision is the key to flexibility.”

She stared at me. “What?”

“Indecision,” I repeated, “is the key to flexibility.”

“But what does that mean?”

“Take your problem with Barry,” I said. “You have to decide between ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ and the assumption is there’s a right answer. So the other assumption is, there’s a wrong answer. You don’t know which is which, so for two years you haven’t made any decision at all, and the result is, for two years you haven’t made a mistake.”

“Oh, come on. Now you’re making a virtue of copping out.”

“Of course I am. Two years of not making a mistake — that’s a pretty good record for a human being.”

“Well, now I have to decide. I can’t stall any longer.”

“Unfortunately,” I agreed, “there are the moments like that. A part of the game plan for a successful life is to try to avoid as many of those moments as possible. For instance, that’s why this job is only temporary. If I decided it was permanent I’d have a fight with my father. Also, to be perfectly honest, with myself, because I’m not sure I want to drive a cab the rest of my life. I might want to be a fireman instead, or run for Congress, or be an insurance company claims examiner. I’m indecisive.”

She laughed, losing her irritation with me. That was one of her best qualities; she could always be jollied out of too much seriousness. But, having laughed, she nevertheless said, “Well, I can’t be indecisive. Not anymore.”

“You’re doing your best, though,” I pointed out. “You got an extra five, six days just by taking this cab instead of the plane.”

“That’s right.” She surprised me by seeming surprised. “That’s why I’m doing this, isn’t it? Still stalling.”

“You hadn’t noticed?”

“But when we get to Los Angeles,” she said firmly, “then it’s final. I can’t stall anymore, and I won’t stall anymore. You make immaturity sound very good, Tom, you argue the case beautifully, but the fact is, if you’re going to get anywhere in life you have to make decisions.”

“Where do you want to get, in life?”

She wouldn’t rise to the bait. “To Los Angeles,” she said.

“Okay, lady,” I said. “You’re the customer.”