“I hate leftovers.”
“Oh.”
“I didn’t originally, but I do now. I have ever since. Our refrigerator was full of leftovers. But Andy wasn’t neat like his mother, he didn’t put labels on things, he just put them all in the refrigerator, saying he’d ‘remember.’ And a true Tupperware person, you know, never takes anything out of a Tupperware container, that defeats the whole purpose. After a while, I just hated to even think about the refrigerator.”
“It got full, huh?”
“It got scary. The things I could identify — like half a slice of toast, and I’m not kidding — those were bad enough, but the real killers were the things you couldn’t recognize at all. Every once in a while I’d go through what I called an Anonymous Reject Day. I’d pick a time when Andy was in class, and I’d take six or seven of the oldest and most anonymous Tupperwares out of the refrigerator and throw them away.”
“Wouldn’t he notice the empties?”
“You don’t understand me,” she said. “Do you think I was going to open those things, touch what was inside? When I say I threw them away, I mean I threw them away.”
“Ah hah.”
“It was the only way to leave enough room for milk and eggs.”
“And Andy never caught on.”
“Never.”
“But when he asked you to marry him and go live in Virginia—”
“All I could see was that refrigerator, for the rest of my life. I couldn’t face it.”
“Absolutely understandable.”
“And the thing is,” she said, half turning toward me, being very solemn and serious, “the thing is, in every other way Andy was terrific. He was very bright, and he had a good sense of humor, and he respected my individuality, and... um. I don’t know how to say this.”
“He was good in bed.”
She sighed. “If you mention sex in front of a man, he thinks you’re offering some.”
“Exception noted.”
“Not that I have any desire to go into the gory details,” she assured me. “But, yes, Andy was the first guy I ever slept with that I had a really wonderful time. I’d had some sexual experiences before — not many — but it had been fun and that’s all. You know? Like dancing.”
“Got it.”
“I learned a lot from Andy.” Grinning in lascivious reminiscence, she said, “We learned a lot from one another.”
“If you keep leering like that,” I said, “I’ll tell you about my experiences.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I’m being provocative.”
“Somebody is. Anyway, with Andy, Tupperware was stronger than sex.”
“Absolutely.”
“It seems to me,” I said thoughtfully, “just from that one experience you already have a pretty good idea what marriage is.”
“I think you’re being cynical,” she said.
“You said Andy was every other way perfect.”
“I said terrific; that’s not quite perfect.”
“Okay, terrific. But you had to live with the guy, in a marital kind of situation, to know what he was really like for you. So it’s the same thing with Barry, isn’t it?”
“Hardly,” she said. “Barry and I have slept together, you know.”
“I guessed.”
“We’ve lived together, too, on and off.”
“How much on, how much off?”
“What?”
Had she thought that a sexual reference? “How much time in the last two years,” I rephrased it, “have you spent living together?”
“Oh. I don’t know exactly. A week or two here, a week or two there. Last year I spent six weeks in California on a job, and I lived with Barry almost the entire time. And he’s lived with me in New York, and we’ve shared hotel rooms in different places. There aren’t any Tupperware surprises ahead of me with Barry, if that’s what you mean.”
“Okay. Then the question is, what’s holding you back?”
She looked at me with troubled eyes. “That’s the question, all right,” she said.
19
There are two Kansas Citys, and therefore there are two Kansas City airports. The one in Kansas City, Kansas is called Fairfax Municipal Airport, and the one in Kansas City, Missouri is called Kansas City Municipal Airport. They are diagonally across the Missouri River from one another, and neither of them was the one we wanted.
Which we learned when we pulled in at Kansas City Municipal Airport in Kansas City, Missouri. It seems there was another airport, called Kansas City International Airport, over on the Kansas side, about twelve or fifteen miles north of all the Kansas Citys, along Interstate Route 29. (We’d already passed an East Kansas City and a North Kansas City on our way into town; you could get pretty sick of that name after a while. “If I ever see The Wizard of Oz again,” I told Katharine, “I’m going to root for the tornado.”)
Since it was already after one o’clock when we reached the wrong airport, Katharine phoned ahead to the right one, leaving the messenger a message; then we picked our way through the supermarkets and used-car lots and machine-parts shops in overgrown clapboard garages out onto Interstate 29 and ran north to something called Ferrelview. Not knowing what a ferrel is, I can’t say whether or not we viewed it, but that was also the exit for the airport, a sprawling sunbaked assemblage of stucco and asphalt, where the plane from the east had long since landed and no one had given the messenger the message.
And now I saw Katharine the executive at work. When her first enquiry at the Information counter got her nothing but smiling bewilderment from the friendly mindless girl on duty there, Katharine smiled coldly back and said, “Your supervisor, please.”
“Ma’am, I’ve been on duty here the last three hours, and there hasn’t been any such message.”
“Since I’m the one who phoned it in,” Katharine said, “I do know it exists. Your supervisor, please.”
The girl, not delighted, went away. Katharine stood fuming, passing her attaché case from hand to hand. Trying to relax her, I said, “Things never do run smoothly.”
“Oh, yes, they do,” she said.
In about three minutes the girl herself came back, with an envelope. “It hadn’t been sent down,” she said, rather snippily, and handed the envelope to Katharine.
Looking over Katharine’s shoulder, I saw it was some sort of standard message form, and that it was addressed to Katharine Scott. “Arriving soon, reserve office. Messenger, Willson, Garfield & Co.” I stepped a pace to one side, wanting a clear view of the explosion.
But she didn’t explode. Refolding the message, she said, more quietly than ever, “Your supervisor, please.”
“Well, that’s the message, isn’t it?”
“Your super-visor, please.”
The girl’s attention had been belatedly caught. Looking a bit worried, she said, “If you’ll tell me what’s wrong, Madam, I’m certain we can—”
“Are you refusing to call your supervisor?”
The girl thought about that one for maybe six seconds, then her face closed down into a total defensive stolidity and she picked up a phone from under her counter. She spoke briefly, then hung up and pointedly turned to the person on line behind us, who wanted to know about direct flights to Nashville. Nashville? When you’re in Kansas City, what’s the point in going to Nashville?
The supervisor arrived promptly, and was a mid-fortyish stocky woman with a thick black skirt and a no-nonsense manner. “Is there something you don’t understand, Madam?”