“No,” I said, in some surprise.
“It’s the worst solution to my problem,” she said. “The way to deal with the question by making it obsolete.”
“I see what you mean.” And I did; she hadn’t meant she’d thought about having an affair with me, she meant she’d thought about having an affair, period. With anybody, just to cop out on the Barry decision. And she was too smart to let it happen that way.
I finished my breakfast and we separated, her to pay the bill, me to get the luggage from both rooms and stash it all in the cab. Sue Ann was gone from the room, leaving in her wake the mingled aromas of sex, cigarette smoke, and shower steam; I gave the bed a grateful smile on the way by.
The family saga that had brought us together was on the floor. I shoved it into my suitcase, got Katharine’s things from across the way — what a neat person she was — put everything in the trunk of the cab, and drove around front. When I went in to leave the keys at the desk, Katharine was just finishing, and we started out together. Katharine said, deadpan, out of the corner of her mouth, “The headwaiter wants you.”
I looked over at the restaurant entrance, and there was Sue Ann, looking demure and foxy. She gave me a grin and a tiny nod of the head and a one-finger wave from down at her side.
I must stop off here on the way back. I returned her smile, and Katharine and I went out to the cab. As I held the rear door for her, she gave me a sidelong look and said, “I’m glad I gave her a good tip.”
18
Noon, and we were still eighty miles from Kansas City. Our late start had been complicated by my hangover, which made me slightly jittery and awkward, so that I drove more slowly than usual. But the protein Katharine had insisted I shovel in was beginning to take effect, and time itself was engaged in its legendary healing process, so I was steadily feeling more human.
As for Katharine, my occasional glances in the rearview mirror showed her suffering the deadline whim-whams once more. Talking to herself, looking agitated, brushing her hands back through her hair; all the symptoms I remembered from that first day on the way to Kennedy airport were once again in evidence, and getting stronger. It was on the way to being a total relapse.
The countryside was flatter here than it had been east of the Mississippi. Square or rectangular fields of corn and wheat and other growing things — I’m no farmer, I wouldn’t know a rutabaga from a rapscallion — were spread in undulating neatness in all directions, under a sun so high and clear it was like a growing-lamp hung in the sky by the Department of Agriculture. The sky itself was a cloudless pale blue, rising to a deeper blue at the horizon. I’m sorry, but the sky was like a bowl and the green-and-tan land was like a checkerboard. Some of those archetypal descriptions just can’t be bettered.
Gas was getting low. The trademarks for Chevron and Mobil were red-white-and-blue kites anchored in the sky far ahead; I eased into the right lane, took the exit, and chose one of them. “And check the oil,” I told the kid in the Kansas City Chiefs sweatshirt.
He gawped at me. “This here’s a New York City taxicab, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is.”
“You’re sure a long way from home.”
“You bet.”
He went off, shaking his head, to fill the tank and check the oil, and I turned around to say, “Katharine.”
She looked at me in an impatient distracted way; I was keeping her from poking at the sore tooth. “What?”
“Come sit up front.”
“Why?”
“We’ll talk.”
At first, this suggestion seemed only to annoy her. She shook her head irritably, turning away to frown out her window at the gas pumps, then looked back with a quizzical expression, studied my face, thought it over, and said, “Thank you, Tom. You’re right.”
While she was transferring I cleared the front seat of roadmaps — some went on the dash, some got stuck down between seat and door — and when she slid in next to me she already looked less upset, though she had nothing to say.
Fewer gas stations are on credit cards — other than their own — since the Arab oil crunch. Once again Katharine had to pay cash, and when the boy brought back the change he said to me, “How far you goin?”
“Los Angeles.”
“Started in New York?”
“Sure.”
“You’re gonna be awful mad if I tell you,” he said. He was smirking, looking very amused about something.
Wasn’t Los Angeles there anymore? Perhaps it had finally fallen into the sea, during an earthquake, while a great Voice spake from Heaven, and It cryeth: “Enough! No more tacky!” I said, “Go ahead, tell me.”
He leaned close through the window; it was time he changed his sweatshirt. Confidential, keeping his voice too low for the passenger to hear, he said, “You forgot to turn your meter on.”
“Well, son of a gun,” I said, looking at the meter in question. Then I shrugged and said, “The heck with it. Too late now. Thanks, though.” As I drove away, the boy’s smirk was just beginning to turn puzzled.
Well, Katharine was up front with me, but she didn’t immediately turn into a chatterbox. We got back onto Route 70, eased gradually up to seventy-five miles an hour, and I said, “Penny for your thoughts.”
“I wish I was married,” she said.
I glanced at her profile, which was very very gloomy. “You mean already married, decisions over and done with?”
“No. I wish I’d been married before, like you. So I’d know more about it now.”
“You could have been married ten times before,” I pointed out, “and you still wouldn’t know what marriage with Barry would be like.”
“Still.”
Which pretty well short-circuited the conversation for a few minutes, until I asked her a question that had been in my mind several times the last couple of days: “How come you haven’t been married?”
“What? Well — it just never happened.”
“Phooey. What are you, twenty-eight?”
“Thirty,” she said, with a little smile.
“People have asked you to marry them,” I said. “Before Barry.”
“Actually, not so much,” she said. “I don’t know how things were in the old days, but in my case men mostly asked me to move in with them.” She was relaxing a bit more, now that she was talking; scrunching down in the seat, she said, “My sophomore year in college I lived with a boy. His name was Andy.”
“Did he ask you to marry him?”
“Yes. At the end of the year. He was a senior, and he was graduating and going to the University of Virginia for his Master’s. He wanted me to go with him, and he said why don’t we get married?”
“And you said?”
“I said I don’t want to get married.”
“You wanted to finish college.”
“Well, partly.” Then she giggled, a surprising sound, and said, “Can I tell you something silly?”
“I’m sure you can.”
“It was the refrigerator,” she said.
“The refrigerator.”
“Andy’s mother,” she explained, “was one of those crazy Tupperware ladies, everything in her life inside a plastic Tupperware container with the lid on it and a label glued to it, and stuck in the refrigerator. And Andy was the same way. She used to mail him Tupperware. Empty Tupperware containers, for his own use. The Parcel Post man would come with a package, and we’d open it up, and here’s this Tupperware. And inside it there’s another one, and another one inside that. And the last one empty.”
“I can see where this isn’t particularly romantic,” I said, “but I don’t get the connection with why you didn’t want to marry him.”