“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.”