The Boston Tangler
Chapter Two: Second chance in Lynn
By Roland Merullo
 t first glance, the "big event" at Fenway, the reason the two police officers were interrogating him there in the All-Right Taxi Co. garage, left Louis Robinson rather unimpressed. In a strange way, he'd almost been hoping it had been something big, something shocking: maybe a great player traded to Boston in his prime, for once.
But the source of the officers' concern, it appeared, was a simple electronic malfunction. The center-field video screen at Fenway had gone blank in the top of the second inning and stayed that way for the rest of the afternoon. Big news. So the fans had had to watch the game the old-fashioned way, paying attention - so what? Drug-dealers, car stealers, punks robbing cabbies with knives - Boston's Finest had nothing better to do than investigate a bum TV?
Maybe it was the curious stares of the cabbies coming off the night shift, maybe his ex-wife's contention that he turned into a little boy in the presence of anyone in uniform, or maybe it was merely the thin, racing whistle of caffeine in his system, but Louis couldn't keep a note of irony from his voice when speaking to the very tall Patrolman Small and the not-so-nice Lieutenant Bella. Had he known how much grief this little sarcastic moment would cause him over the course of the summer, he might have kept his lips sealed, but he was in a peculiar mood that morning. "Geez," he said, when they told him what had happened. "Broken video screen, wow. I knew it had to be something serious to get you guys down here at five a.m."
This did not go over very well. In a blink, Officer Small's eyes turned hard. Ms. Bella put a hand on her nightstick. For a moment, they stood frozen in this triptych of suspicion and innocence, then the lieutenant said, "If it was just a TV blackout, do you think we'd be here?" Louis bit down on his answer, apologized, mumbled something about the effects of Jamaican coffee. The two police officers glared at him in tandem, as if memorizing his face, then turned and sauntered out of the building.
The garage's morning routine reasserted itself: drivers cashing out and checking in, Ansel Ackamanian behind the window with his stogie and his crowbar-cane, handing out keys and lease forms to be signed. And Louis Robinson, the most ordinary guy on earth, walking down the stairs, locating his cab, taking it up the ramp and out into the hot July day.
As the work week went on, the memory of his fractious encounter with the law faded, but the memory of the "Fenway Woman," as Louis came to think of her, did not. Hired out the cab for the day! was what he had told his beautiful passenger when she'd offered to take him to the game!!! On the relationship battlefield, people had been shot for less.
As anyone who has ever experienced it knows, long-term loneliness is a kind of hormonal fertilizer, rich in the nutrients necessary for the seedlings of romantic dreams, and Louis, of course, was not immune to this. Over the next few days, he carried the good citizens of the capital across its territories, and carried upon his heart the burden of impossible hope. He was desperate for a second chance - with the mystery woman, with himself. But there were millions of people in Boston on any given day. Hundreds of taxis. Besides, with that strange accent and otherworldly presence, she might not live in Boston at all. The chances of ever seeing her again were next to zero.
Still, he kept his eyes open, scouring the sidewalks as he rolled.
It seemed, at first, unconnected to the trouble at Fenway Park, but in this same time period, there were two other strange disturbances in the city's daily routine. On Wednesday, during the morning rush hour, the computer chip that ran the MBTA's automated announcements must have failed, because all over the city those speakers went dead. Surprisingly, this made absolutely no difference to anyone. Blue Line, Red Line, Orange Line - no one, it turned out, really needed to be told not to step in front of a train.
Perhaps even more bizarre was the story that surfaced on Thursday: Several more or less upstanding citizens - two members of the Legislature and a lawyer on her way to court - claimed to have heard something like vaudeville music piping up from beneath the streets of Government Center. As if, one Boston newspaper joked, the ghosts of Scollay Square were asking, one final time, to be heard in the windy architectural desert beneath which they'd been buried.
For the moment, however, no one was connecting these events into any kind of pattern, and Louis paid them no mind. During the day, he sweated and drove and looked for his Fenway Woman. After the shift ended, he had his milkshake or sundae or banana split with Max Twice, grabbed a hamburg on the way home, and did what he could to sneak back into the apartment without encountering Vizelot, his neighbor. The Haitian Haranguer, the other occupants of 898 Linden Street called her, the Goddess of Gab.
A challenge in any season, avoiding Vizelot proved next to impossible in the hot weather, when she took to sitting out on the stoop from late afternoon to midnight, reading Modern Psychic magazine and listening to the voice of the imaginary love of her life, Red Sox announcer Joe Castiglione. Vizelot Masjardins was a generous, affectionate, middle-aged woman who made her living as a phone psychic and had one unfortunate habit: She talked constantly.
In generous moods, Louis saw only a bottomless loneliness behind the curtain of Vizelot's loquacity. At other times - when she went off on one of her 20-minute tirades on the spiritual damage inflicted by automated phone systems, for instance - he understood her to be simply a royal pain.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, Vizelot was occupied with a rapt audience when he arrived home, and he managed to slip past her and climb the steps to his apartment unscathed. Thursday, she caught him.
"In weather like this, the hydrogen content of the air increases, and souls are more likely to migrate," she started off by saying. "My husband, Leonid, flew on to his next lifetime on a day just like this - do you remember, Louie? Are you taking care of yourself? Is your blood pressure OK? Is that a small belly I see growing there under your shirt? ("Shart" was the way she said it.) Isn't it a shame the way people don't eat natural, don't live natural anymore? Artificial sweeteners and radiated meat, Louie, do you know what that does to the energy patterns in the body?"
These questions were akin to the questions on Registry or IRS forms: They did not come with enough room for a real answer. Louis nodded, shook his head, raised his eyebrows, managed the very occasional burp of half a sentence, and, after 42 minutes, claimed he was expecting a phone call from the West Coast and was able to slip away. Such was the power of Vizelot's monologue, however, that all he could think about as he climbed the creaking set of steps was whether his blood pressure was, in fact, dangerously high, and whether potential girlfriends would be put off by the very, very small belly he'd been growing beneath his belt since Alicia divorced him.
The next day, he had a chance to find out. Eleven hours into his 12-hour shift, he was on the receiving end of a miracle: He came upon the Fenway Woman in Harvard Square, where he'd gone to do an errand for Max Twice. She was standing at the edge of a crowd of bespectacled academics and fashion eccentrics, watching a bearded man perform magic tricks with golf balls and a length of pipe.
It was rather strange, the way the encounter played itself out. Just as Louis saw her, the Fenway Woman turned away from the performance and looked directly at his cab, right arm already in the air, almost as if she'd been waiting for him. He slammed on the brakes. She stepped down off the curb in a gesture of such fluidness and grace that his breath caught in his throat.
Trapped between the great tidal surge of his excitement and the stony seawall of fear of error, Louis froze for a moment and was battered by the terrible force of his own hopes. He barely glanced at her when she climbed into the back seat. He did not say anything or start the meter or even ask where she was headed. He simply slipped his Mets cap off his head and onto the seat and moved forward into traffic reflexively, looping around the square and back onto Memorial Drive, realizing as he went that the gas needle was a hair above E.
"Do you mind taking me to Lynn?" she asked, through the money-gate. "It means you'll be coming back in rush hour."
"Lynn?" he said, as if Lynn were a new planet in the solar system.
"It's past Revere, sort of squeezed off to the side there, near Saugus."
"Lynn." The gas gauge seemed to be sinking as they spoke.
"Lynn, right. The best way from here is down Memorial to 99 in Charlestown."
"Ninety-nine," he said.
"The route, not the restaurant."
"The restaurant," he said.
"No, no. The route. Ninety-nine."
They'd made it all the way to the MIT boathouse before Louis remembered to start the meter. The Malden Bridge, Bunker Hill Community College, men standing over the Mystic River with fishing rods in their hands. As they were going past Mike's Donuts, she said, "You took me to Fenway Park last week, remember?"
Louis risked a look in the mirror. Skin the color of coffee with lots of cream in it. Eyes like pieces of Atlantic ocean, green, steady, deep. Sequins, it seemed. It seemed she'd dusted her cheeks with tiny sequins, sparkling now in the hot light. With those beautiful eyes and the regal tilt of her head, she ...
"Watch it!"
He managed, by jamming on the brakes and twisting the wheel just so, to avoid crashing into the protruding rear end of the dump truck in front of him. Over the sound of the screeching tires, he heard her press her hand against the plastic barrier to keep from being thrown forward. He mumbled an apology, righted himself, and, then, trying to compensate for his blunder and appear casually sexy, he said, no, not really, he didn't think he remembered her.
For a few seconds, then, he knew he'd made a terrible mistake. The casually sexy persona was just not him. You're Louie Robinson, he told himself, not Sting, not Springsteen. He peeked in the mirror. That affectionate smirk again, the penetrating eyes.
"It's better to go with the truth and not try to be cool," she said, in a bemused tone. And, at that, a piece of rusty armor seemed to fall away from Louis, just break off and fall away. It was as if an ocean breeze blew through the stale air of the cab, carrying off with it the thousand tiny artificialities that cloaked his tender soul - bits of mindless chatter, smiles he didn't really mean, all the flotsam and jetsam of the modern American doing business. He headed the cab smoothly down onto Revere Beach Parkway, and said, for once, what the heart of him wanted to say: "I've been doing nothing but remembering you from the minute you walked away. I've been looking for you all week."
A small symphony of heartbeats. Nothing from the back seat. And then: "Me, too. I was hoping I'd see you."
The word "Why?" flew out of Louis's mouth before he could catch it, and his passenger laughed a trilling, lilting laugh and said: "Are you fishing for compliments? You're kind of nice-looking, if you must know."
There was a great deal of traffic in Revere at that hour - no surprise. For the first time in his 13-year career as a driver, it seemed to Louis that the meter charge was inexcusably high - 16 dollars already. On impulse, he switched it off.
They crossed into Lynn, and she directed him toward an address near the beach. But as he navigated the stop-and-go traffic with the dispatcher babbling at his knee, the tiredness of the long day in his eyes and arms, he felt as if some vengeful hand were squeezing him in its grasp. Without warning, all the turmoil of his last few months with Alicia seemed to press upon him from all sides. All the wrenching pain of her arrest, the divorce, the things she had said about him: that he was disloyal, treacherous - accusations that lacked the tiniest basis in truth.
Why, at this moment, with such a friendly, elegant woman sitting in his taxi, had the wasp of old failure decided to sink its stinger so deeply into him again? Was there no statute of limitations on the pain of divorce?
He did not know. In the end, through some gift from the gods, he managed to slip free of those awful memories and take refuge in the truth. "I'd like to see you again," he said, pulling up in front of a sort of dilapidated mansion across the street from Lynn Beach. He turned to look her in the eyes. "I'd like it if you and I could have dinner."
A breath. Two breaths. Seventy-four heartbeats. The Fenway Woman seemed to study his soul through the plastic, through his skin, for an unendurably long time before she said, "OK, sure. That would be nice," scribbled her name and phone number on the 20-dollar bill she gave him, then slipped off through the shimmering beachside air and into the mansion's side yard, leaving Louis to float back to the garage on vapor.
Which would have made for a very nice end to the afternoon. Except that, over their usual five p.m. snack, Max Twice asked him: "What the heck you do to bring cops at company garage, Louie?"
"Nothing. They were asking about my trip sheet. I got a little sarcastic."
Max shook his head. "You, maybe they are asking about trip sheet. Me, they are asking about you."
"When?"
"Later on. They come back after you leave."
"Me! I'm the most harmless guy in the city."
"That's what Maximov telling them," Max said. "But they don't believe. Maybe not such a good idea, the little sarcasm with police, Louie. Maybe means trouble for you now."
Look for Chapter Three of The Boston Tangler in next Sunday's Globe Magazine.
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