Harry said, “Please.”
“No, take it,” I said. “I ride a cab every morning, and this is what it costs me, so you might...”
“No, no,” Harry said.
“Look, we agreed to share a taxi. I can’t let you pay...”
“Traveling is my business,” Harry said. “I’ll charge it to the agency.” He smiled under his black mustache. His pale blue eyes crinkled behind his glasses. “It’s deductible, you should know that.”
“Well, I feel kind of funny,” I said, and thrust the money at him again. But he held out his hand, palm downward, and then gently nudged the offer away, as though the money had germs.
“I insist,” he said.
“Well, okay,” I said, and shrugged, and said, “Thank you, have a nice day,” and got out of the cab and ran for the office. It took me a half-hour to get my circulation back.
The next morning, Harry got off at 125th Street again, and again he said, “Care to share a taxi?” so what could I say? Could I say, Listen, my friend, I like to ride alone in the morning, I like to smoke my cigar with the windows closed, you understand, closed very tight against the cold outside, not even open a crack, with cigar smoke floating all around me, reading my newspaper, nothing personal, you understand, no hard feelings, but that’s one of my little luxuries, that’s what I promised myself in Korea many many years ago, could I tell that to the man?
I suppose I could have, but I didn’t.
Instead, I got into the taxi with him, and I lit a cigar for myself; and he immediately opened the window. So I immediately snuffed out the cigar and asked him if he would please close the window.
“How’s the travel business these days?” I asked. I had folded my arms across my chest, because I was in a pretty surly mood. What I usually do, you see, is ration out my cigars, one in the morning in the taxi on the way to work, another one after lunch, another one in the taxi on the way back from work, and the last one after dinner. Four cigars a day, that’s enough. I do twenty pushups each morning, and twenty before I go to bed, to keep the old “bod” in shape, as my daughter calls it. She kills me, that girl. So I was thinking I really didn’t need this guy to ride down with me and deprive me of my cigar, who needed him? But there he was, telling me all about the travel business and about a charter flight they were getting up to Aspen, Colorado (just the thought of Aspen, Colorado, gave me the chills), and had I ever tried skiing?
“No,” I said, “I have never tried skiing. I don’t even like ice skating.”
“That’s too bad, Howard,” he said, “I think you would find skiing a most agreeable sport.”
“Well,” I said, “I’m too old to go out and break a leg. When a man gets set in his ways, he develops certain habits, you know, that he doesn’t like to change,” hoping he would realize I was talking about my morning cigar, which he didn’t.
“That’s true,” he said, “but you seem to be in pretty good shape, and I doubt if you would break a leg.”
“My cousin broke a leg in his own bathtub,” I said.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Harry said. “Did you know they shot The Pawnbroker on this corner?”
“Which pawnbroker?” I asked, not having heard about any shooting on that corner, which was the comer of 116th Street and Park Avenue.
“The movie,” Harry said.
“Oh, the movie. I didn’t see that movie.”
“It was a very good movie,” Harry said. “They shot it right on this corner.”
I was really wanting a cigar very badly by that time. I looked out at the El Radiante bar and visualized Harry being shot on the corner.
“There were a lot of your people in that picture,” Harry said.
“My people?” I said.
“Negroes,” he said.
“Oh,” I said.
“It was a very good picture.”
The cab sped downtown. The overhead tracks came level with the ground, then sank below the pavement and disappeared. When we reached 86th Street, I took out a dollar and a quarter again and thrust it into Harry’s hand, but he turned his hand over quickly and let the money fall onto the seat.
“No sir,” he said, “not on your life. I have to go down this way, anyway.”
“But I have to go down this way, too,” I complained.
“Can you charge it to the business?”
“No, but...”
“Then don’t be silly.” He picked up the money and stuffed it into my coat pocket. “Now go ahead, don’t be silly, Howard.”
“Well, thank you,” I said, “I appreciate it,” and then realzed I didn’t even know his name, I had never heard anyone calling him by name on the train. “Thank you,” I said again, and got out of the cab.
We have a small office, and Concetta, our secretary, has asthma, which means that smoking a cigar and filling the air with deadly fumes would give her coughing fits all day long. So I stood in the corridor outside the men’s room and smoked my morning cigar there. Rafe Goldman came in at nine-thirty. I was still standing there smoking. He fanned the air with both huge hands and said, “Whooosh, you trying to fumigate the place?”
“Well, I know Concetta doesn’t like cigar smoke,” I said.
“You can smell that the minute you get off the elevator,” Rafe said. “What is that, an El Ropo?” he said, and nudged me, and laughed.
“It’s a good cigar,” I said. “Cost me twenty-five cents.”
“We’re going to have complaints from the Fire Department,” Rafe said, and laughed again. “They’ll probably send the commissioner around.”
“Look,” I said, a bit heatedly, “if I can’t smoke it in the office, and if I can’t smoke it here in the corridor outside the men’s room where it isn’t bothering anybody, where the hell can I smoke it?”
“Don’t get excited,” Rafe said, and patted my arm. “Why don’t you go smoke it downstairs?”
Downstairs was a hundred below zero, downstairs was troikas followed by packs of starving gray wolves.
Rafe went into the men’s room. I put out the cigar and went inside to my desk. All that morning, I thought about Harry. You have to understand that whereas I appreciated his having paid my cab fare on two separate occasions, I would have preferred paying my own damn fare so that I could have smoked my cigar in peace without a fresh air fiend in attendance. I stress this point only because Adele later said perhaps I was really a Cheap Charlie who enjoyed having my cab fare paid each morning. This simply was not true, and I told Adele so in very positive terms. For whereas things are sometimes a bit tight in North Stamford, what with Marcia’s tooth alignment and all, I can certainly afford to pay my own cab fare. In fact, as I pointed out, and as Adele well knew, the taxi rides to and from work were luxuries I felt I owed myself, essential elements of the private little party I had been throwing to celebrate the fact that I had not got killed in Korea.
So it seemed to me that Harry Pryor was sharing something more than just a taxi with me, and I decided to tell him flat out come Monday morning that whereas I enjoyed his company immensely, I really preferred riding down to work alone as it gave me a chance for contemplation, an opportunity to ease into the long hard day ahead, which was not exactly true, but which I rehearsed nonetheless all through the weekend. Then I remembered that I didn’t even know his name, so I called Frank Cooperman on Sunday night to ask about it.