“Look at that stupid bastard, did you see that?” the cabbie said suddenly. He leaned his head toward the window, and shouted, “Make up your mind, you jerk!” and then turned the wheel sharply and almost collided with a moving van that had come up on the right of the taxi. “They shouldn’t be allowed to drive,” he muttered. “They take the car out on Saturdays and Sundays, and louse up the entire city, as if it needs lousing up. Man, you got to be out of your mind to drive a taxicab, I’m telling you. Where’s that broad going, anyway?”
“What broad?”
“The one in the cab up ahead. It’s got to be a broad, don’t it?” The cabbie shrugged. “Otherwise, what are you getting in such a sweat for? I had a blond broad in here the other day, she gets in the cab stoned drunk at two o’clock in the afternoon, she wants me to take her to Oyster Bay. You know where Oyster Bay is? That’s a ritzy section in Long Island, all society people. She’s wearing this black cocktail dress, two o’clock in the afternoon, she smells like the Schenley distillery, she wants me to take her home to Oyster Bay. I say to her where in Oyster Bay, lady, she says, ‘On the water.’ I say where on the water, lady, she says, ‘Do you want me to take your number?’ Right away, they want to take your number. Somebody wrote someplace once that the way to scare all the cabbies in New York City is to tell them you’re gonna take their number. So take my number, I tell her. If you want to take my number just ’cause I’m asking you where in Oyster Bay you want to go, which is an out-of-town call anyway, and which you got to pay special out-of-town rates for, then go ahead and take my number. But if you want to be more sensible about it, lady, why, just sit back and relax like the sign says, and give me your address in Oyster Bay, and then we can all have a nice drive because the traffic shouldn’t be too bad this time of the afternoon. Well, she don’t take my number. Instead, she sits back and relaxes all over the place, though she still don’t give me her address, how the hell am I supposed to know she lives on a big estate with tennis courts and a swimming pool, and the place don’t have an address? No numbers, you know what I mean? Just a mailbox on a road near the water, like she said. But the way she relaxes is she sits way back and relaxes, I mean, man, she relaxes. Then she begins singing very dirty songs like ‘Minnie the Mermaid,’ in this low drunken dirty voice while I keep watching her in the mirror, looking up her dress, I swear to God I almost crashed the cab four times. Man, what an afternoon that was. In this business, I’m telling you, you got to be out of your mind. The payoff is she gets to this swanky estate, on the water, just like she told me, and she goes inside to get some money to pay me, and she comes out, and on a twenty-eight-dollar ride, she gives me a quarter tip. I say to her, lady, I say, you sure you can afford this with them tennis courts and that swimming pool in there, you sure this ain’t going to break you? So she gives me a real sweet sexy-looking smile, with this blond hair hanging down over one eye, and she says, ‘Mister, you never had a ride like that in your life,’ and then she goes marching up the front walk, and just before she goes in the door she turns to me and gives me a bump and a grind like as if she’s in a burley joint in Union City. A quarter. Was it worth it, I’m asking you? Man, this business.”
“They’re turning,” Buddwing said.
“I see they’re turning, relax.”
“Where are we?”
“We’re on Sixty-seventh Street and Central Park West. Will you try to relax, mister?”
“Where are they going?”
“How do I know where they’re going? Is she an out-of-towner? It looks to me like we went all the way from Broadway to Central Park West and now we’re heading toward Broadway again. That’s sure the long way around the mulberry bush. Relax, will you?”
“You’re letting that truck get between us!” Buddwing shouted.
“You want me to fight a truck?”
“I want you to follow that cab!”
“I am following it!”
“You’re going to lose it if they make that light on the corner!”
“I don’t control the traffic lights in this city, mister. You got a complaint, go tell it to Commissioner Barnes, maybe you can help him louse up the works a little more.”
With a heartsick sigh, Buddwing saw that Doris’s taxicab had indeed gone through the green light on the corner, and that the light had now changed to red. The truck stopped, blocking the entire street ahead of Buddwing’s taxi, so that he had to crane his head out the window to try for a glimpse of the other cab, which seemed to be proceeding west on 67th Street.
“Now you’ll lose it,” he said. “I told you not to lose it.”
“I still got my eye on it,” the driver said. “It’s stopping in the middle of the next block.”
“Well, hurry up, will you please?”
“The light’s still red.”
“It’s changing. There! Go ahead!”
“Shall I drive right through the truck? Or under it? Which?”
“Give him the horn.”
“He’s moving.”
“Can you still see them?”
“The girl’s getting out.”
“Then hurry!”
“Hurry, hurry, nobody’s got time to relax in this rotten city.” The cabbie shook his head and waited for the truck to make its turn onto Columbus Avenue. He stepped on the gas then and drove recklessly up 67th Street. Doris’s cab was just pulling away from the curb. Buddwing leaned forward and saw only her black-stockinged legs mounting the front steps of a brownstone. He reached for the money in his pocket. The fare was seventy-five cents. He gave the cabbie a dollar bill, and quickly stepped onto the curb.
“Doris!” he called.
The door of the brownstone closed behind the girl.
“Doris!” he called again, and then quickly ran up the front steps of the building and tried the front door. It was locked. He debated ringing the superintendent’s bell, then wondered what he would say to the man when he came to the door, and decided against it. Sighing, he came down the steps again and stood on the sidewalk next to the garbage cans waiting for pickup.
The city was wide awake; he had not noticed that. He had spent too much time with Eric by the river, and then had become involved in following Doris, so that the city had quietly and secretly come awake all around him. He paused on the sun-washed sidewalk now, and tried to get his bearings, amazed that the city was alive, feeling its breath again with a fierce nostalgic intensity.
The block between Amsterdam and Broadway was a short one and consisted of crumbling brown tenements surrounded by the new construction that had come on the heels of Lincoln Center. The parking lot on the corner of Broadway was called the Philharmonic, and the huge structure behind it was called Lincoln Square Motor Inn. Up the street, running at a ninety-degree angle’ to the tenements, was an apartment building complex named Lincoln Towers. In the midst of all this culturally inspired splendor, the tenements crouched like cockroaches under a shiny new kitchen sink, waiting to be stepped on by urban renewal. But, Buddwing noticed, the people on the street went about their business as though nothing at all was happening around them, nothing was threatening their way of life.
A woman in a bathrobe, a scarf on her head, was walking a poodle on a leash. The superintendent next door was out sweeping his sidewalk. A young girl in a tight short skirt came out of one of the buildings carrying two empty milk bottles and heading for Broadway. There were traffic sounds now, the groan of buses, the fainter purring sound of automobiles, the creaking clatter of a horse-drawn wagon that lumbered past the corner. There was a lazy somnolence to the horse and wagon, and to the day itself. The city was awake and alive, but this was Saturday morning, and there was no rush as yet. The city had rolled out of a warm bed, opened a window wide to a balmy spring breeze that gently lifted curtains, savored the mild air, and then consumed a leisurely lazy breakfast. And now she came forth to greet the day, awake but unhurried, still dressed casually; this was Saturday, tonight would be Saturday night and she would emerge sleek and pleasure-bound, but for now she could sweep her sidewalks and walk her dogs and go to the corner store for the morning milk, and idly watch a horse-drawn wagon, the horse’s brown back gilded with sunlight, make its way in a lazy clatter up the avenue.