She smiled and said, “Good.”
I told the waitress, “Number three, please, over easy. Grapefruit juice.”
Katharine said, “There’s something else, though. I was thinking about it, last night and this morning, and I should talk with Barry before I say yes or no. Before we reach Los Angeles.”
Which sounded like a reversal of what she’d just said. “So?”
“You can see it makes sense to discuss it with him, can’t you?”
“Sure. But I don’t get the point.”
“I want him to ride along in the cab.”
Immediately I said, “I can’t pick up fares outside the five boroughs.”
“Please, Tom, be serious with me.”
Did she think I wasn’t being serious? I said, “What about his rental car?”
“He can turn it in. Tom, it’s the right place for the discussion, in the back of that cab. You know it is. It’s my turf.”
“If only he’d stayed in— Where’s he live?”
“Westwood.”
“Sounds tacky.”
“It isn’t,” she said, with a little smile. “It’s Bel Air, really, but south of Sunset Boulevard. Nor far from UCLA. I redid the grounds.”
“Here he comes,” I said, looking around the waitress, who was delivering my breakfast.
“Tom, say it’s all right.”
“It’s all right,” I lied. The waitress went away, Barry arrived, I got to my feet and we shared another good handshake, a few conventional words were spoken, we all sat down, and I filled my mouth with ham and eggs while Katharine made the suggestion: “Barry, ride to Los Angeles with me.”
He was delighted, of course, but cautious, saying, “Are you sure?”
“We’ll talk. I think it’s a good idea.”
“But why make Tom drive all those extra miles, when I’ve got my own car?”
“No,” she said. “You’d be distracted by driving. And it would be your car. In the cab, we can just concentrate on the subject.”
Barry gave the waitress his order and drank some of the coffee she’d poured him. Then he said, “Katharine, I’m delighted.”
“Good,” she said. She glanced over at me and I stuffed some toast in my mouth.
46
It was about seventy miles to Las Vegas, where Barry could turn in his car. He led the way down Interstate 15, with Katharine and me in the cab behind him. Katharine sat in back, but on the jump seat so we could talk. She kept telling me how unfair she’d been to Barry. “You can see how he is,” she said. “You can see I’ve been very wrong to him.”
“If you love him you marry him,” I said. “If you don’t love him, leave him alone.”
“I do love him,” she said. “That isn’t the question, it really isn’t.”
I let my silence answer for me.
Las Vegas is from some schlock version of The Wizard of Oz. You know, the Emerald City rising up out of the desert. But this is the Ormolu City, plastic towers rising out of the hot dry sand into the hot dry air, fool’s gold glittering in the clear empty sunshine sharply enough to make you squint behind your sunglasses. Driving in from the northwest, along an endless flat ironing-board desert landscape, you see it ahead of you like some anti-mirage, which for a long time refuses to get any closer, then is suddenly there, held within an acne ring of shacks and sheds and derelict huts.
In the city the streets are wide, the houses in the residential areas seeming lower to the ground than usual, as though all those one-story ranches are sinking inch by inch, year by year, back into the sand. The famous Strip is anxious glitter, clutching your sleeve for attention; a full year’s television viewing concentrated into one frantic image, overloaded, overlit, and over-exposed. If architecture is frozen music, Las Vegas is an album of polka favorites, frozen too late.
The five minutes the cab spent parked on the treeless shadeless blacktop near the car rental office were enough to bake its interior like the inside of a shepherd’s pie. The air was so dry that the sweat evaporated from me almost as rapidly as it oozed to the surface, making my skin feel itchy and dirty. My left arm was in direct sunlight no matter where I put it, and though I was already moderately tanned I could feel the burn.
When Barry got into the cab — Katharine had already transferred to the rear seat — he said, “Wow. You should have gotten one with air-conditioning.”
I glanced in the mirror, but Katharine was absorbed in opening her attaché case, as though she hadn’t heard him. I started the engine and slid out amid the traffic; long low fat cars that would have looked perfect with a cigar clenched in the teeth of their grills. The sun was so bright you couldn’t tell if the traffic lights were red or green; it created a certain amount of suspense as I picked my way back toward Interstate 15.
In back, Katharine was being brisk and businesslike, her lap full of pads of yellow paper. “I’ve done an awful lot of thinking the past week,” she said, “and I wrote some of it down. You can see what you’re thinking sometimes if you put it down on paper.”
“I know,” he said. “I do that myself.”
“I think the best thing,” she told him, “is for you to read at least part of what I wrote.”
“Fine,” he said. “Fine.”
Route 15. Los Angeles, said the sign, 284 miles.
47
Now at last we were in a normal cabby-passenger relationship. I sat up front and drove, and they sat in back and argued. He would read a few pages of what she’d written, while she either watched his face or read over his shoulder, and he would stop from time to time to disagree with a part of it, or make a comment, or tell her she had misunderstood something. Then they would discuss it.
They were both very tense, and it seemed to me it would be good for everybody concerned if they’d yell at one another for a while, but they both kept very tight control. Katharine was stiff-lipped and grim, with strain lines over her eyebrows and around her mouth, while Barry determinedly maintained an easygoing calm façade. Looking at him in the mirror, it occurred to me to wonder if his face had been altered. Not by himself, obviously, but perhaps by some other plastic surgeon. Psychiatrists before they can practice are required to go through psychiatric sessions with another psychiatrist, so maybe plastic surgeons have to be made pretty before they can hang out the old shingle. Barry had an outdoor handsomeness, a pleasing unobtrusive western cragginess in a face that was not too deeply tanned. Was it real? If a fake, it was beautifully done; like Katharine’s eight miles of road.
I remembered Katharine’s story about the blank-faced girclass="underline" “You brought out the real me.” Was that the real Barry back there, being so patient and calm, like a very good deep-sea fisherman giving Katharine all the slack she wanted? Enough rope. He probably was real, and had learned patience with his patients. Or possibly his calm non-assertive careful capable personality had come first, and had led him to a career where such characteristics were valuable. And to a woman with whom he could make full use of the same traits.
And then I thought: He shouldn’t marry her. This didn’t alter my conviction that it was the right thing for Katharine to marry Barry, that he was the perfect man for her and his presence in her life would calm and soothe her so totally that if I were to see her again in five years I’d barely recognize her; but for Barry, it would be a mistake.
Stupid, of course, but very human; the wrong one had the doubts. She thought marriage with Barry would create problems, whereas it would end all her problems. And he thought his problems would cease if he got her to marry him, but they wouldn’t; in fact they would very slightly intensify, as his sense of responsibility formed a cocoon around her. There would be no respite from perfection in his life, not at work and not at home. Some day one of those blank-faced girls would attract his compassion and strength, and he would find the joy of taking care of someone who doesn’t really need anyone’s concern; the kind of pleasure all cat-lovers know. Calmness, restraint, assurance, strength; he could lavish these on the blank-faced girl with a free hand, secure in the knowledge that she would survive if his attention ever strayed, that he could play at being responsible for her because in fact he couldn’t possibly be responsible for her. The duplicity would finally make him miserable, of course, but it wasn’t his happiness that concerned me, it was Katharine’s. She would remain his true responsibility, and so he would make absolutely sure she never never never found out about the blank-faced girl. I thought I could trust him to do that.