“God. Oh, it sure is. What time is it?”
“Ten.”
“Ten what? Oh, ten o’clock; I’m sorry, I’m not waking up.”
“They may stop serving breakfast pretty soon.”
“That’s one good thing.”
“I’ll knock on your door in ten minutes.”
“You’re a vicious person,” she said, but when I knocked on her door ten minutes later she’d reconstructed herself and seemed fine. She was wearing her Ace shirt, and I found myself glad she hadn’t been wearing it last night, because I knew instinctively she would have let the Chasens call her Ace. It still rankled that she wouldn’t permit the same privilege to me.
During breakfast we talked about the car and Dave Smith and what on earth we would do between now and one o’clock. Looking at me doubtfully, she said, “Just how bad a chess player are you?”
“I know which way the horse goes.”
She sighed, but accepted the inevitable, and after breakfast we sat out in the cool sunlight by the swimming pool and Katharine laid out her neat black-and-white traveling chess set with the magnetic pieces. “I’ll bet a quarter Barry gave you this,” I said. “Wait a minute, wait a minute, not for Christmas. Your birthday.”
“Smart aleck. Let’s see how smart you are at chess.”
So we played for a while, just sort of moving the pieces around ineffectually, and then she said, “I couldn’t get to sleep last night. I kept thinking about the Chasens.”
“That was very strange,” I agreed.
“Early on, I said maybe I found them scary. I was right.” She looked away, out over the swimming pool toward the big trucks passing on the Interstate; she was apparently having trouble finding the words for what she wanted to say. “I took it personally,” she said.
“I don’t follow.”
“I connected it with Barry and me.” She looked in my direction, squinting a bit, troubled. “You know what they reminded me of?”
“What?”
“William Powell and Myrna Loy in The Thin Man.” Then she shook her head, saying, “No, that’s not exactly it. All his pretending his wife is this crazed wanton, this nymphomaniac or something, that was more like Thorne Smith. I’m not making any sense, am I?”
“Not that I can tell.”
“It’s a strategy for dealing with intimacy,” she said. “Do you see what I mean? At the time they started out together, the Chasens, back in the twenties and thirties, that was one of the role models you could follow for a relationship. You just stayed on the surface together, being amusing, appreciating one another’s wit and not taking anything seriously. Because marriage, or any real intimacy between people, it can be very frightening.”
“As you well know,” I said.
“As I well know,” she agreed. “Ten years ago, the popular strategy was to stay stoned together, laid back, cool. People are always trying to find the right strategy.”
I said, “And you’re afraid you haven’t found the right strategy for you and Barry.”
“It’s worse than that,” she said. “I’m not even sure I want to get into the strategy thing at all. That’s why they were so scary, they’re stuck in that role, they’ve got no place else to go. And look what they have to make it adapt to; old age, sickness. God knows what their real story is and why they have to be out here, pretending awful Kansas bars are Broadway joints out of Damon Runyon.”
“At one point last night,” I said, “I found myself wondering how they are when alone.”
“Exactly the same,” she said, with utter certainty. “They weren’t doing all that for us, they were doing it for one another. They’re the audience. And they can’t ever break out of it, because once out they’d never get back in, and they’d have nobody to be together. Sooner or later one of them will die, and the other one will make a joke about it.”
“Jesus,” I said. “You do have grim thoughts.”
“I was thinking about Barry. Barry and me.” She looked down at the chessboard, and sighed, and slowly focused her attention on the game. “Mate in three moves,” she said.
“Yeah?” I looked down at the tangle of pieces. “Which of us wins?”
36
George’s shirt today was named Howard. It made him seem more formal, somehow, more a serious person. Being separated from his towtruck also helped. He came out to the Holiday Inn to pick us up about two-thirty, driving another disreputable automobile, this one a Ford station wagon with half the chrome ripped off and a lot of shock absorbers and stray pieces of metal in the back. Around noon I’d told my sob story to the lovers at the front desk, and they’d agreed to keep our luggage behind the counter until we could leave; following which we’d eaten a cardboard lunch and then sat around the pool some more, me semi-immersed in Gritbone woes and Katharine alternately leafing through magazines and snoozing. Neither of us suggested taking a walk; I think we were both afraid we might have an adventure.
Then, a little after two, I was called to the desk for a phone call, and it was Dave Smith: “Well, she’s running, for the moment. Better get here and take her away before she quits. I’m sending George to pick you up.”
And so he did. And it was in the grungy back seat of the Ford, on the way to Smith’s Svce, that Katharine informed me she still wanted to do the detour business we’d talked about yesterday. “It makes just as much sense today as it did then,” she pointed out.
“That’s right,” I said. “And yesterday it made no sense at all.”
“Barry agreed to it.”
“That was before we broke down and lost a day.”
“He agreed,” she insisted. “And you agreed. And I agreed. And I still want a day away from that highway. Just one day, Tom.”
So did I — the memory of Kansas and that afternoon sun was still fresh in my mind — but I felt a certain obligation to our ostensible purpose. “You’ll have to check with Barry,” I said.
She was outraged. “I will not! Tom, that isn’t fair, you’re hiding behind Barry. I talked with him yesterday, and he agreed, and that’s enough.”
I went on arguing until I became aware of George’s amused eyes watching me in the rearview mirror. Plainly, he knew I was beaten and he was wondering when I’d figure it out for myself and lie down. “Oh, very well,” I said, getting grumpy mainly because I felt like an idiot in front of George, which was of course an idiotic reason to feel grumpy, which made me grumpier, “very very well, have it your own way.”
“I intend to.”
“We’ll take an unreliable vehicle that’s already broken down once and we’ll go haring off into the wilderness over a lot of dirt roads and ski trails.”
“That’s right,” she said. The damn woman wouldn’t even fight with me.
Dave Smith was waiting for us out by his gas pumps, wearing a shirt called Al. “Hi, Ace,” he said. “You wearing that shirt on my account?”
“On mine,” she assured him. “I think I look terrific in it.”
“You do.” Turning to me, he said, “Shall we see if my bubble gum repair job still works?”
“I’m looking forward to it.”
He was being laconic, but I could sense that in fact he was quite pleased with himself. Apparently he’d performed some sort of mechanical wizardry with the original starter plus parts from the other one. In any event, we walked together into the garage, where the cab awaited, looking stocky and inappropriately smug, and Dave had me start and stop the engine a dozen times, and it worked fine. His good humor lasted even into the question of payment, when it turned out he recognized no known credit card but would take my personal check on a New York City bank. I stared at him: “You will?”
“Anybody who crosses America in a Checker cab is too dumb to be a thief,” he said. “Make it out to Smith’s Svce.” So I did.