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.”
10
Lunch from a McDonald’s near Terre Haute, then across another state line and our first new time zone: Illinois; Central Time. Katharine had returned to her brooding after our long talk, and following lunch she brought out the pencil and legal pad and did a lot of writing. As for me, I wondered if my glib praise of juvenility had had any effect on her. I hoped not; I’d only talked that way to pass the time. Not that I disagreed with myself; passivity was certainly the best game plan I’d ever found for my own situation. On the other hand, I knew it was wrong for most people, and at the moment useless for Katharine Scott. She had to make a decision, whether she wanted to or not. Her real difficulty wasn’t in solving the problem but in facing it, and she’d have to know that before she could break through.
I was pondering this magazine-psychology-article wisdom when I noticed, some distance ahead, a car parked at the side of the road, and a fellow actually standing in the road, running back and forth from lane to lane and urgently waving his arms crosswise above his head. Tapping my brakes, I said over my shoulder, “Something.”
Katharine peered past me at the road. “What is it?”
“Beats me.”
As I pulled off on the shoulder and came to a stop behind the other car, I saw that steam was pouring from its radiator and that it contained at least one passenger. Meanwhile, the man came hurrying over to my window and cried, “You have to take us to town!”
“Sorry, Mac,” I said. “I’ve already got a fare.”
“It’s my wife!”
Was that a woman in the other car? I said, “If you want, I’ll stop at the next gas station, have them come—”
“No time! No time! We have to get to the hospital!”
“Hospital?” And then I knew, and I thought, Oh, no.
“My wife!” he cried, and said the dreadful words: “She’s about to have a baby!”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” I said.
Katharine said, “A baby?”
“We were rushing to the hospital, the car broke down, I’ve got to—” And he broke off to yell at the car, “Myra! Come on, darling!”
Before I could say anything, before I could figure out some semi-decent way out of this, Katharine had leaped from the cab and was running over to the other car, where an extremely pregnant woman was now ponderously emerging. Her husband dashed over to help, and he and Katharine walked the woman to the cab and helped her into the back. “Thank God you came by!” the man cried.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said.
“Bless you,” said the woman. Her forehead was pebble-grained with perspiration. “Bless you for this.”
“Sure,” I said.
The couple got settled in back, Katharine slid into the front next to me — knocking all my roadmaps on the floor — and off we went, scattering gravel in our wake. I kept the accelerator pressed right down on the floor, and behind me the man yelled, “It’s the next exit, about five miles down the road! Then take the left toward town!”
“Right, right.”
“We’ll make it, darling,” he told his wife.
“We damn well better,” I muttered.
Beside me, Katharine was all excited and bright-eyed, her head first turning back to look at the woman and then forward to watch the rapidly unreeling highway. “Do you think we will make it?” she asked.
“You better hope we do.”
“Well, it has happened before,” she told me. “The Daily News constantly runs stories about women having babies in taxicabs.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but what the Daily News doesn’t run is what happens next. You ever been around childbirth?”
“No,” she said, looking doubtful. “Why? What’s wrong?”
“It’s a mess, that’s what’s wrong. The human body is a wonderful thing, so long as everything that’s inside stays inside. Once the inside stuff starts coming out, what you’ve got is a mess. A cabby I know had it happen to him, a woman giving birth in the back of the cab, and not only did it cost him an arm and a leg to get the cab cleaned it also took two days to air the thing out before he could use it again. Two days out of business. Romance is romance, but real life is real life, and believe me, Katharine, you do not want to travel to Los Angeles in a cab in which somebody has just given birth.”