“He’s just upset,” she said, sotto voce.
So was I. “Do I go criticize his noses?”
“I’ll talk to you later, Tom.” And into the phone she said, “Barry? Are you there?”
Of course he was there; hanging by his thumbs. So long as he wasn’t insulting my map-reading abilities — or my motivations: see Las Vegas at somebody else’s expense indeed — I could sympathize with what the poor bastard was going through. How long must it have taken him to build up to this ultimatum? Come out and get married right now, or forget the whole thing. Scary. So finally he’d psyched himself up to it, he’d delivered the take-it-or-leave-it challenge, she’d agreed with him and accepted his terms, and what relief he must have felt knowing the suspense was finally over. And now here he was, with nothing resolved and the whole mess lasting an extra week. I too, in his position, might become a bit short-tempered, and might even take it out on an innocent bystander. Contenting myself with these thoughts — and also with the thought that I was not in Barry’s position and not likely to be — I left Katharine stroking his fur in the right direction and returned to my own room and my TV, which was now concerning itself with the local sports scene.
You talk about fascinating.
14
Our route to the restaurant involved going outside again; down the exterior stairs and past our parked cab. A fiftyish couple was standing behind the cab as we went by, staring at it in complete astonishment. The woman was wearing broad-beamed pale green slacks, a pale green blouse with white polka dots, low-heel white shoes and a white cardigan sweater with little enlaced red-and-blue flowers around the neck and wrists. The man was dressed in white patent leather shoes, burgundy slacks, a narrow white patent leather belt, and an open-neck short sleeve shirt in broad vertical white-and-burgundy stripes. Both were short and stocky and big-nosed, and the man had a cigar in the corner of his mouth. As Katharine and I walked past, he took the cigar out of his face, pointed the wet end at the cab, and said to us, “This here is a New York City taxicab.” He had the voice I’d been faking on the phone with Barry.
I said, “Oh?”
“I oughta know,” he said.
He was prepared to tell us his life story — as though his appearance didn’t proclaim it anyway — just because we happened to be passing by. If we admitted it was our New York City taxicab we’d be stuck with him the rest of our lives. “Ah,” I said, therefore, took Katharine firmly by the elbow, and kept on walking.
Katharine glanced back over her shoulders, saying, quietly, “What was that all about?”
“That’s a New York City taxicab driver,” I told her. “On vacation.”
She looked back again. “Are you sure?”
“No question. Visualize him in a cap.”
“I see what you mean,” she said, squinting. “That’s why he said, ‘I oughta know.’ ”
“Exactly.”
We went on to the restaurant, which was called The Hills of Rome, and which was decorated as though we were inside one of them; the usual low-ceilinged broad cavern with heavily shrouded windows. Great fake-bronze bas reliefs of Caesarish individuals stared haughtily over our heads from all the walls, suggesting they’d know better than to eat here. And when we got our menus one section, headed “Roman Fare,” was full of Neapolitan fare: meat and pasta drowned in tomato sauce. Fortunately, the rest of the menu was standard American.
The staff was entirely female, which meant they adapted much more readily to our circumstances. The headwaiter — maitresse d’? — took an absolute relish in going through the wine ritual with Katharine, then kept smiling toward our table from across the room.
Once the food and drink had been ordered, Katharine said, “I’m sorry about the way Barry talked to you.”
“That’s okay. The guy’s under a certain amount of pressure.”
“Thank you — for understanding.”
And for pretending to be a plug-ugly on the phone; which neither of us would mention. “You’re welcome,” I said. “But maybe I shouldn’t have any more chats with Barry.”
“I’ll do my best. Oh, and there’s something else, a slight complication.”
“Mm?”
“The man at the desk says Kansas City is two hundred miles from here. Could we get there by one-thirty tomorrow?”
“Easily. Why?”
“I phoned the office,” she said, “and it turns out there’s some paperwork I simply have to take care of. So they’re flying a messenger to Kansas City in the morning; he’ll be there a little after one, and we’ll meet him at the airport.”
All of which I found very impressive. Her talk about being a landscape architect and having business lunches and doing parks along the Mississippi had all been well and good, but I’d been visualizing it on rather a small scale. I have a cousin in Queens, on my mother’s side, who’s an interior decorator, working through various carpet outlets and furniture stores — when the shop says you can consult with “our trained decorator” they mean my cousin Myrna (born Mary) — so that’s the way I’d been seeing Katharine’s job. But nobody’s going to fly a messenger to Kansas City to bring Myrna up to date on the paperwork; all at once I understood that Katharine wasn’t fooling around. I was hanging out with a big gun. “You want the Kansas City airport at one-thirty,” I told her, “that’s what you’re gonna get.”
“Fine.”
Food came then, and we ate in general silence, each thinking our own thoughts, until we had just the last bit of wine to dawdle over, when Katharine said, “There’s another thing about tomorrow.”
She made it sound ominous. I said, “Oh?”
“I keep thinking,” she said, and paused, and watched her fingers turn the stem of her wineglass around and around and around. Still not looking up, she said, “I’ve been thinking that I don’t absolutely have to use all this extra time. I could come to a decision before we reach Los Angeles.”
“Sure,” I said. “You could make up your mind any time at all.”
“I’ve been going on the assumption I should give myself the whole week or five days or whatever it turns out to be, but when I talked to Frank tonight—”
“Frank?”
“My partner. At the office.”
“Oh, right. He works late,” I commented, because it had to have been eight o’clock New York time when she’d phoned.
“We tend to work late,” she said, with a small smile. “Anyway, when I talked to him, I suddenly saw just how foolish this must look to an outsider. Taking a week out of your life to do nothing but mope about a decision. I make decisions every day.”
“Of a different nature.”
“Of a variety of natures,” she said. “So I’m giving myself an earlier deadline. A kind of sub-deadline.”
“Ah.”
“I want to clear this up by the time we reach Kansas City,” she said. “I want it settled in my mind by then, so if it’s yes I can take a plane from there to Los Angeles, and if it’s no I can take the flight back with the messenger.”
A great depression settled down on me when she said that. I’d been enjoying this trip, enjoying her company. Was it going to end, less than halfway? I said, “If it’s no, why take the plane back? I’ll have to drive back anyway, why not ride along? Tomorrow’s Saturday, you won’t get any work done over the weekend anyway.”
“Of course I will,” she said. “I’m doing an atrium in Minneapolis, I haven’t even done the preliminary sketches yet. Believe me, if I go back to New York tomorrow I’ll have plenty to keep me occupied.”