“I doubt she ever has.” Then she gave me a keen look, and said, “Do you mind if I ask a snobbish question?”
Putting on my awful imitation Brooklyn accent, I said, “Yuh mean, why deny tawk like uh cabdrivuh?”
Her smile was apologetic. “I’m afraid so, yes.”
“Then I’ll tell you my story.” I sipped gin and tonic, and began: “I am downwardly mobile. My father pushed a hack around New York for twenty-five years so I’d have the advantages he didn’t have. I went to college, I learned to wear ties and suits, I came out and married a tall girl and became an executive trainee with Retrieval Data Corporation. Ever hear of them?”
“No.”
“I was a junior executive there for five years. I hated it. Also I went on being married, and I lived in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Do you know just how horrible New Brunswick, New Jersey is?”
She smiled faintly, as she shook her head. “No, I don’t.”
“You’re lucky. Those who do have experience of New Brunswick, New Jersey are scarred for life. Anyway, Retrieval Data went under three years ago, one of the several thousand computer companies that couldn’t survive the recession. That was just around the time my wife left me, so I—”
“Do you have children?”
I shook my head. “I didn’t want any and she couldn’t have any. The lack of family was one of our strongest bonds. She left me for a widower with four daughters.”
“Oh,” she said.
“So I came back to New York,” I finished, “and got a temporary job for the rest of my life driving my father’s cab days. He won’t let me have it nights. And I’m happy as a clam.”
“How about your father?”
“He would like to be a junior executive. Failing that, he would like me to be a junior executive. Failing that, he would like me not to rack up the cab.”
She was looking concerned for me: “But what’s going to happen to you now?”
“It’s happening. Except for this. Going to California, this is something different, kind of an adventure.”
“But are you really just going to drive a cab the rest of your life?”
“Why not? It’s socially utile, it keeps me in contact with the general public, it affords me a constantly changing milieu, it pays the rent and it’s fun.”
The girl came then with the artichoke and the herring, and we paused in our conversation to eat. The herring was standard fare, but the artichoke was just the heart, chopped up and floating in vinegar and oil. Katharine didn’t seem charmed by it, but she ate it without comment, and as she was finishing the headwaiter showed up, lugging a chinkling ice bucket on a stand. Placing it beside our table, he took from it an unopened bottle of wine and showed me the label.
Jesus, he was a slow learner. “The lady ordered it,” I said.
He had been hoping to have no further dealings with the lady for the rest of his life. With wrinkled mouth and wrinkled moustache he reluctantly turned one hundred eighty degrees, presenting the bottle.
Meantime, Katharine had been frowning at the ice bucket with understandable perplexity, and now she said, “But this is red wine.”
“Isn’t this what you ordered?” He showed her the label.
“Yes, yes.” She gave the label an impatient look and nod. “That’s what I ordered, but you don’t chill red wine.”
He had never known anyone who was so much trouble. “All our wines are chilled,” he said, with condescending pride. “It’s the way it’s done.”
“Well—” I could see her contemplating the conversation that would ensue if she even started to explain things, and I could also see her wisely decide to cut the Gordian knot. She said, “Do you have any wine that hasn’t been chilled?”
“All of our wine is on ice.” So was his manner.
She looked over at me. “Shall we take it anyway?”
I liked that; she was making it a question between equals. I shrugged and said, “We’ll warm it in our palms, like brandy.”
“All right,” she said, and told the headwaiter, “you might as well open it.”
He did so, looking miffed and making less of a production than he might have done, then poured each of our glasses half full without waiting for one of us to taste the wine and accept it, and placed the dripping bottle in the middle of the table, saying, “You won’t be wanting the cooler?”
Katharine said, “The what? Oh, the ice bucket. No, thank you.”
With frozen dignity he picked up the ‘cooler’ and chinklebinked away with it. I tasted the wine, which was very cold indeed, and therefore thin and watery. “Well, it isn’t sour,” I said.
“No, but our friend is.”
Then the girl came with our main courses, which were perfectly fine; except of course that the baked potato wasn’t really a baked potato. It was a steamed potato, inside the aluminum foil. Oh, well; you take the rough with the smooth. By the time we’d finished eating, the wine had warmed considerably, and wasn’t at all bad.
Neither of us wanted coffee or dessert. Katharine ordered the bill, the headwaiter handed it to me, and I handed it back. Neither Katharine nor I said anything, so he put it in the dead center of the table, leaning against the sugar, and departed.
As Katharine studied the bill, I said, “This could get annoying, all the way across the country.”
“I’m used to it,” she said. “I frequently have business lunches with men, where I’m paying. Waiters just can’t adapt to the idea.”
“Sure they can. They don’t want to.”
“A political statement?” She seemed to consider the idea for the first time. “You may be right.”
“Down with the liberated woman.”
With a thin smile she said, “It saves me quite a bit on tips.” Then she signed the bill, with her room number, and added the gratuity; I didn’t see how much, but the writing was small.
We went back upstairs and parted at our rooms, agreeing to meet for breakfast at eight. I phoned the desk and left a seven-thirty call, then kicked off my shoes, switched on the TV, and sprawled on the bed. It wasn’t yet ten-thirty. I lay there watching the colors and thinking about Katharine Scott. Nice lady. Difficult for women to move around in the world, with everybody trying to shove them down behind the nearest man. A lot of men would not have been able to resist the impulse to ‘help’ her tonight, with the desk clerk or the headwaiter; especially the headwaiter. Fortunately, I’m quiescent by nature.
I wondered about Barry, the man in her life, toward whom we were making haste slowly. Would he have ‘handled’ things this evening? Probably. Soon it would be his job anyway; I presumed Katharine would be over her skittishness by the time we reached Los Angeles, and would then marry him and settle down. She’d go on being a landscape architect, of course, and go on having trouble with waiters at business lunches, but the rest of the time Barry would be in charge. Women are like bewitched characters in old legends, sometimes capable of coping with ordinary life and motion, and at other times under a spell that makes it impossible for them to open doors or order a meal. But instead of the prince’s kiss breaking the spell, it finishes the job of locking the spell on for life.
I thought Barry probably wasn’t good enough for her. On the other hand, neither was I.
8
At breakfast, Katharine suddenly broke a silence by saying, “Whatever happened to the girl in the cab?”
Katharine was the girl in the cab; wasn’t she? I said, “What?”
“The one who wanted to commit suicide, but she was afraid of heights. That was a true story, wasn’t it?”
“Of course,” I said. “All my stories are true. She was going to jump out of the cab when it reached sixty.”