“I know you can’t.”
“It isn’t that I won’t ask you again.
It’s that I can’t ask again.”
“I know that, too. But if you did ask again, I finally know what the answer would be.”
He turned his head at that and looked at her, for a long silent time. Then he nodded slightly, saying, “Yes, I see.”
“I’m sorry I was so stupid for so long,” she said.
“No.” A kind of ironic bitterness came into his voice, and he said, “You were hard to get. Hard to catch. You weren’t easy to capture, and I was determined to make you mine. I guess I do know what you’re talking about, though I don’t agree with the conclusion. And I do love you.” He touched her cheek with the tips of his fingers. “Goodbye.”
“Barry.” Which was her form of goodbye.
He opened his door, then gave me a little half-amused smile. “Nice to meet you, Tom.”
“And you.”
He got out of the car and walked away, back toward Wilshire.
I looked at Katharine and she said to me, “I’m right. I’m finally right.”
“I believe you are. And what would you like to do next?”
She glanced around. “Would that restaurant have a bar, do you suppose?”
“It very well might,” I said.
49
It did. The bar was tricked up to look like a monastery’s wine cellar, but fortunately the only light in the joint came from stubby candles on the tables, so we couldn’t see most of the décor. Katharine had used up her decision-making powers for today, and couldn’t even think about what sort of drink she might want, so I ordered Bloody Marys for two. “It’s food,” I explained to her, and when they arrived they were even more food than I’d anticipated; being California Bloody Marys, they’d arrived complete with a long stalk of celery each, for a swizzle stick.
We munched and drank in companionable silence for a while and then I said, “What do you do now?”
She shrugged; she wasn’t anxious about anything anymore. “Go back to New York. Get caught up on that pile of work waiting for me. Live my life.”
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“Just as a point of information,” I said, “would you consider marrying me?”
She stared at me. “You?”
“Just a hypothetical question,” I assured her.
“Now, don’t you start,” she said, pointing her celery at me. “Barry was Mister Right, and if I said no to him, why would I say yes to you? You’re the worst offer I’ve had since the Tupperware boy.”
“Aw, I’m not that bad.”
“At least he was going to graduate school.”
“Anyway,” I said, “it was just to get it straight, clear the air, have no misunderstandings, give us something to go forward from. I tell you what, I’ll quit the cab, I’ll be your chauffeur.”
“I don’t need a car in New York,” she said.
“Oh. Okay. Then I’ll be your younger brother.”
She stared at me in the candlelight. “What do you mean, brother? What do you mean, younger?”
“I want to hang out with you,” I explained. “I’m just trying to work out the relationship.”
“We can discuss it,” she said, “on the way back.”
The discussion continues.
Afterword
The story goes that Donald Westlake once wrestled with the question, What would a caper novel be without any crime in it? The result was his novel Brothers Keepers, about a group of monks in New York City fighting to keep their centuries-old monastery from being demolished to make room for a high-rise. It’s a wonderful novel and we reprinted it in Hard Case Crime a couple of years back. There’s a tiny bit of crime in the book, but only a tiny bit: a stolen lease, a fire set to cover the thief’s tracks, a punch or two thrown that might count as assault if you squint. Don was originally planning to title the book The Felonious Monks, which is a great title, but he couldn’t, because the monks in the story turned out not to be felonious. Sometimes that’s what happens. Your characters surprise you, and if you’re a great writer, you go with it, you let them lead the way. From an email Don wrote to a friend: “I have to tell you a teeny thing about the genesis of Brothers Keepers... I started it and introduced the [monks] and realized I liked them too much to lead them into a life of crime. So, to begin with, there went the title. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘let’s see what a caper novel looks like without the caper.’ Turned out to be a love story; who knew.”
Also turns out that wasn’t Don’s first experiment along these lines.
Who knows what story he thought he was going to tell when he first got Katharine Scott into Tom Fletcher’s taxi one day in the late 1970s. Maybe he thought they’d encounter gangsters or bank robbers on their journey west to Los Angeles; maybe he was imagining a Bonnie-and-Clyde crime spree. But what happened instead was, they fell in love. Who knew?
So: there’s no crime in this book. (That one speeding incident hardly counts. Even if the police put in a cameo appearance.) But just as Brothers Keepers is a caper novel in spite of its minimal criminal content, this one is a suspense novel through and through. Don, ever the ingenious experimenter with form, found an answer to the question, Can you have a suspense novel without any crime in it? And the answer is a resounding yes. We’re on the edge of our seats the whole ride, as the miles tick down and Katharine’s moment of decision comes into focus. Will she or won’t she? What will she decide and how will she decide, and will these two kids, who clearly deserve happiness and deserve each other, manage to not get torn apart by the inexorable pull of matrimony and respectability and doing what’s expected?
Don’s first stab at Call Me a Cab was 215 pages long in type-script and ended pretty much the way you just read, but it started differently:
This isn’t my story. The actual hero of this story is a twenty-nine year old terrific woman named Katharine Scott. I was just along for the ride.
Ironically, opening with the narrator saying it’s not his story put the focus more on him than if he’d just shut up and let Katharine take center stage from the start. So somewhere along the way, on a subsequent trip the manuscript took through his typewriter, Don made that change. He also added something like 50 more pages to the book. The entire sequence where the cab breaks down and Tom and Katharine meet the Chasens — some of the very best stuff in the book — wasn’t in the book to begin with.
It also wasn’t in the abridged novelette-length version of the book that ran as a feature in Redbook magazine, which is the only place any portion of this book has ever appeared before. But a lot of things were missing from the Redbook version. Every few pages lost a paragraph or two, every few paragraphs lost a sentence or two, every few sentences lost a word or two — it’s what happens when you compress a book down into a magazine piece. Still, Tom and Katharine had their debut, even if abridged too far, and you’d think their full-length adventure would have followed. But no. The manuscript sat on a shelf for the next four decades, waiting for someone to give it a chance.
Part of the reason may have been that in his later revisions Don experimented with alternate paths to the destination: in one draft, he had Katharine and Tom fall into bed together at the Hilyerds and wake up regretting it. It may have been a consummation devoutly to be wished, but it changed the book’s climax (you’ll pardon the expression) in ways that weren’t entirely satisfying. He also experimented with Barry not making an appearance in the book at all — we drive all the way to L.A., but the book ends outside Barry’s house, without the man showing his handsome face and without giving Katharine the opportunity to speak her piece to him.