Unable to sleep, he waited for her in the hollow center of their double bed, sobs coming from the bathroom, rising and falling. Her cries — Peter listened fitfully — seemed to go on for an endless time, choking, drowning sounds. He felt their tremors as if they were his own, which, for all he knew, maybe they were. He awoke in the morning, convinced that he hadn’t slept at all, surprised to find Lois curled under the covers next to him as if nothing had happened. There was no mention of the bag during breakfast, and Peter was almost willing to believe that he had dreamed what he had dreamed. Then, ready for school, Lois took her purse from the bottom drawer and said good-bye.
Sclaratti had warned Peter never to let a passenger out of his sight. But Peter was trusting, and though he took Sclaratti seriously, liked first of all to keep his eye on the road. And second of alclass="underline" he worried; that is, he anticipated the possibilities of disaster. In the dark eye of his imagination, he saw Lois and the boy in the photo betraying him in a variety of postures, to pay him back for his suspicions, and finally, inevitably — he could imagine nothing worse — he saw Lois leaving him, his failure, his loss. And when he thought of it, pushing his way through New York City traffic, water rushed to his eyes, and though he wouldn’t cry — refused on manful principle to cry — his windshield seemed to cloud over despite him, and he had the sensation of staring out at the world from within a fish bowl. Sometimes he even had to purse his lips to breathe. And still he coveted, in his lust’s eye, Gloria, and looked forward to his daily meetings with the fair Delilah, his only nymph, his most regular passenger.
Delilah, in her way, became more and more demanding.
“Driver,” she said in her mock-imperious voice, “take me for a ride in the country and don’t spare the horses. And don’t spare the pedestrians.” (This was the day after Peter’s discovery of the photo.)
“This taxi only goes to Sutton Place, lady,” he said, too full of Lois, thinking perhaps he should call her, perhaps he shouldn’t, to pay much attention to Delilah.
“Who’s paying for this ride?” she wanted to know. “Please,” she cajoled. “Take me to the park, Peter. I’ll be a good girl, I promise. Pleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseplease …”
“No,” he grumbled, unable to shake his depression, and drove absently toward the park. Forsythia were in bloom. And so, he noticed, looking golden in his mirror, was Delilah.
“Can we stop?” she asked as they entered the park. “You can leave the meter running if you like.” “What for?”
“What for?” she mimicked him. “For the love of it. That’s what for.” She sulked at his insensitivity.
“Where do you get all your money?” he asked.
“Where do you get all your money?”
“From you,” he said, and she giggled.
“If I tell you,” she said, leaning over the seat to whisper it in his ear, “will you stop and park?”
He was thinking about it when he noticed a cop car coming up behind him, closing the distance between them. Guilty as always — but what had he been caught doing? — he resentfully awaited the justice of his punishment.
“My father gives me a handsome allowance,” she said. “It’s called child support, if you must know.”
The police car pulled up alongside and then, as Peter alerted his foot to the brake, sped by him, spewing exhaust fumes through his unrolled window. He marveled at his luck.
“I can afford it,” she said, “if that’s what’s worrying you.”
He kept going, wondering why the cop had passed him and why, in passing, he had looked at him in that jaundiced way.
“My father’s a very nice man,” she said contentiously, as if she expected an argument. “He is. Though he won’t tell this to anyone, he’s not even sure that he’s my father, if you know what I mean, because my mother, you certainly know who she is, she’s a woman of questionable moral character. A who-er. He loves me anyway, and gives me lots and lots of money because, as you can see, I’m a great prize. A great bee-you-ty!” She crossed her eyes in illustration. “Don’t you think so? You don’t have to, because it’s a livid fact, a livid, livid fact. … Do you think I’m pretty?”
“Pretty noisy,” he said. On sudden impulse he pulled off the road, parking the cab under a tree.
From inside his fish bowl, he watched leafless trees, birth-ridden, recoiling in the wind, and beyond the trees he could see to a semicircle of benches, old men with Daily Newses also swaying in the breeze, and still beyond them, surrounded by clover and winter weeds, a boy and girl were embracing in the grass, inextricably entangled, oblivious of being watched. He painted them in his mind on a beach of white sand, no longer seeing them.
“What are you, Mr. Cabdriver, some kind of nut or something?” she said. When he looked up, Delilah was in the seat next to him, the sun in her hair, the sun itself.
“What are you looking at?” she said softly, as if aware of his mood.
He shrugged. When he looked again beyond the flight of trees, it was gone. They — the couple in the picture — had moved on.
“Do you know,” she said, “that next to my father you’re the saddest-looking man I’ve ever seen?”
He forced a smile and choked on it.
“The absolutely saddest-looking man,” she crooned. “Absolutely saddest I ever saw.”
“Cut it out,” he said, a sob escaping from his throat.
“Maybe we’d better go,” she said, sucking on a strand of hair, her mouth disappointed at the taste.
For some reason he remembered his father taking him to the movies, and his surprise when during a sentimental scene — he had been too young to understand its implications — he realized that his father was crying. They had to leave before the end.
Feeling pasted together — the trees moving off as in a dream — he climbed out of the cab with exceeding care.
He ran, heavy-legged, too tired to walk …
The current against him, turning him back. Swimming, unable to swim. Too much grief. Too much … Tide washing over him, leaving its debris of dead fish and sea shells, hair nets and algae on white sand. Face down in the grass, he cried out his grief. A grown man, he cried. The wind soughed among the trees. And somewhere: somewhere …
When timeless minutes later he returned to his cab, Delilah was gone. He looked around, not knowing where to look, exhausted, calling to her: Delilah, Delilah, for God’s sake, his voice boomeranging in the wind. On the trails of instinct, a dreamwalker, he wandered off to look for her among the benches of studious old men.
“Did you see a girl in a greenish coat, with long straight blond hair, go by?” he asked one of the men who, though he had a mustache and was mostly bald, faintly resembled Peter’s father.
“A girl? What kind of girlie?” the man said in a heavy Yiddish accent.
Peter described Delilah again. The old man scratched his head with the New York Post. “I can’t say I have,” he said, winking, “but I wouldn’t mind, ha ha.”
“I seen a little girl,” a man on the next bench said, “a sweet little thing — ten, eleven years old. Blond as an angel.”
Peter was interested.
“She was walking with a lady, her mother,” the man added.
Peter walked back to his cab in time to see a cop, the one who had passed him on the road, hang a ticket like a necklace on his windshield wiper.
“Hey …”
“It’s already written out,” the cop explained half apologetically. “You should a caught me before I started writing, huh?” He waited for an argument, but finding none, got into his car and drove off, leaving behind a few parting words of advice: “Be more careful next time, buddy.”