The Boston Tangler
Chapter Three: Antipasto and ATMs
By Roland Merullo
Less than two weeks ago, Louis Robinson was an ordinary cabdriver - modest, a bit lonely, so far from the city's High Visibility spectrum that, on certain days, only his talkative neighbor Vizelot and his pal Max Twice even seemed aware of his existence. Now, all of a sudden: (a) he had a certified date with the most intriguing woman in the Northeast Corridor, and (b) he'd attracted the attention of the Boston Police Department.
Such is the architecture of life, it seems, a grand design of unpredictability. One minute, we're perfectly healthy - fine wine, a regular tennis schedule, plans for a Caribbean cruise - and the next, an ache, a blood test, a couple of doctor's visits, and ... boom! we're lying in a dusty vacant lot, all rubble and woe. Baby sitters buy lottery tickets and catapult themselves onto the Forbes 500. A promotion at coffee break, a pink slip at lunch, your computer signing off in mid-report. We have two futures: one that we imagine - dependable, upward-slanting - and the other that we live.
Louis Robinson, for example, had worked 13 years at All-Right Cab without having been called in to speak with its owner, one Ellis Rim. Did he not have every right to suppose he would be employed there until retirement without ever having to walk through the door of the Upper Office? Of course he did. Certainly he did.
And yet, on what was arguably the happiest morning of his life (the morning of his date with Luba Neazhidana, which was the name the Fenway Woman had printed on the twenty-dollar) he arrived at the garage at 4:30 a.m. and received this summons from the company clerk in the form of a Post-It note on his locker: "Louie: See Rim first off. Ansel Ack."
Ellis was the latest in a long line of Rims to occupy the Upper Office. A multimillionaire who came to work seven days a week at 4 in the morning, an octogenarian with a 35-year-old wife and a 2-month-old son named Jim, Rim somehow inspired a mixture of terror and awe in his drivers without ever appearing on the main floor. Louis had heard about him, of course, endlessly, but had never actually seen the man.
And so it was somewhat of a shock to be ushered into the Upper Office by a sleepy secretary and come upon Ellis Rim in the flesh, as it were. The first words that rose to Louis's mind were: Shrunken Man. Caffeine-buttressed, he nearly spoke them aloud.
"Coffee?" Mr. Rim pointed to the corner but did not bother to rise. His skull, his neck, the wrists protruding from the cuffs of his cheaply tailored suit - the fearsome Mr. Rim appeared to be built on a skeleton of matchsticks and papier-mache, a Chinese lantern of a man, vulnerable to the slightest shift of air.
Louis poured himself a cup and sat down opposite his boss, petrified.
Mr. Rim twirled the ash of his cigarette against an empty glass in such a way that it was slowly beheaded. "You have a college degree, as I understand it," he began.
"Yes, sir. English literature."
Rim's lips moved into a thin smile. "Useful, eh?"
"Not really, no, but ..."
"Thirteen years you've worked here."
"Yes, sir."
Rim ran his eyes across the stack of papers in front of him, then rolled them up toward Louis like lemons sliding into place on a slot machine at Mohegan Sun. "And never attracted the attention of the authorities until now."
"I didn't ..."
Rim silenced him with one frail palm and took a long pull from his cigarette. "You had a wife who went afoul of the law years ago, did you not?"
"I ... she ... what it was was that Alicia, she had this eye problem, and she'd heard that ..."
Again, the raised hand. Louis had the sense that, if there had been a lamp lit behind Mr. Rim's back, he could have seen fine finger bones in relief beneath the skin.
"Narcotics, wasn't it? Dope."
"Not really. Yes."
"Served time?"
"A few months."
"And her whereabouts now?"
"Unknown to me," Louis said. "And I'd like to keep it that way."
Rim's eyebrows flitted up an eighth of an inch and dropped back.
"My record is clean, sir. Thirteen years of driving, and the only mark against me is one illegal left from Mass. Ave. onto the end of Newbury. Anyone would make that turn. It's set up wrong there. Why is there no left? You ..."
"I know your record. I have here a printout of every cash-in you've ever made, every complaint about a so-called faulty vehicle." Mr. Rim tapped one finger on the stack of pages that reached nearly to the knot on his wide green tie. "As far as I'm concerned, there are two kinds of people - those who obey rules and those who complain about them. You, it seems to me, aside from the suspicious problem with your wife ..."
"Ex-wife, Mr. Rim. Alicia and I ... divorced. I ..."
"Fall into the former category, at least until now. Am I right?"
"Yes, sir. You couldn't be more right."
Rim paused, let his eyes float to one corner of the room and then, in a slow arc, above Louis's head and straight down. "Let's not have the police buzzing around you anymore on the main floor then, clear?"
"As a bell. But I don't even know what they were here for. The big screen went out at Fenway. What did I have to do with that?"
"It's more than that, as I believe you well know."
"I haven't the foggiest clue, Mr. Rim, really."
Rim pressed the ash end of his cigarette against the bottom of the glass, slowly, as if torturing it. A last swirl of smoke curled up around his face. "Robinson," he said, "in case you haven't noticed, there is, at the present time, a vast left-wing conspiracy operating in this nation. A conspiracy of fornicators and calumniators, of shaggy liars and two-bit antibusiness dreamers. These same people tried to ruin the country once before, as you may remember, years ago. Very nearly succeeded. And the police now have some evidence that they're trying again. I don't want my company, my father's company, my grandfather's company, tainted by that, you see. I don't want a whisper of innuendo of involvement. Clear?"
Many years earlier, for one semester of his sophomore year at Boston University, Louis had indulged in what might be called a fling with the American left. This fling consisted of standing opposite the Students for a Democratic Society truck on Commonwealth Avenue for a few lunch hours, listening to the girl on the loudspeaker - with whom he was temporarily infatuated - smoking marijuana three times with her (he never liked it), and skipping his James Joyce class with her once on the anniversary of Karl Marx's birth. It had been only the smallest and most fleeting of forays into the exhilarating world of activism; still, at Mr. Rim's remarks, he felt vaguely offended. His stomach was suddenly giving him trouble - Rim's cheap coffee.
"So, we're clear where we stand with each other?"
"Yes, sir."
"You may take the coffee with you when you go," Mr. Rim said generously, waving a hand, thin as a butterfly's wing, to signal dismissal.
Louis went down to the main floor and signed out his cab. At first, thoughts of the interview oppressed him. But, little by little, the memory of it was supplanted by the approaching reality of his date with Luba Neazhidana. Bracketed by the exceptional, that Saturday proved utterly normal. Utterly normal, that is, except for the fact that, near the end of the shift he answered a radio call for Allston, and there - only a few steps from his apartment - he picked up a man wearing oversized high-top sneakers and a faded brown tuxedo with long tails. The man's hair was an unruly spray of gray around piercing eyes, his very tanned face set in an expression of mock seriousness.
"Lynn, Lynn," the man said, when he was seated. "Never go out the way you came in." Louis started the meter and dutifully headed off, but after a few miles he could no longer suppress his curiosity. "Ever heard of Professor Irwin Corey?"
"Who is he?" the man asked. "Some wannabe wannabe?"
"Only probably the greatest comedian who ever lived." Louis glanced from the mirror to the road and back again. "I used to stay up watching him on Johnny Carson when I was a kid. You're a dead ringer for the guy, even though he would be older than you are now, and you have a little more of an ethnic look, if you don't mind my saying so."
"Nixon's a shmuck," his passenger declared, and this answer chased Louis back into a professional silence. He ferried the Corey look-alike to the Lynn-Nahant line, quite close, as it turned out, to the house where he'd dropped off Luba a few days before. The man paid his fare and added a lavish tip. Louis watched him walk away, head up, shoulders back, tuxedo tails flapping in the pleasant beach breeze. Wasn't city life wonderful?
ufdropp,2Louis skipped his after-work snack with Maxim Maximov and hurried home. He showered again, shaved again, dressed in dark slacks, a short-sleeved shirt, left the Mets cap hanging on its hook. He slipped by his neighbor Vizelot - she was paging through a copy of Bio-Energy Monthly and regaling one of the neighborhood kids with the intricacies of her last dental appointment - and flagged down a taxi on Brighton Avenue.
The taxi dropped him on Hanover Street in the North End, four steps from a restaurant called Pomodoro, a favorite of his. There were eight tables in the place. One of them, a window table for two, was empty, and he commandeered it and informed the waiter that he was expecting a friend.
Two minutes later, Luba Neazhidana walked through the door and sent his way the most natural and wonderful smile he had ever seen. He stood up, resisted the temptation to reach out and shake her hand.
"Nice to see the front of you, for a change," she said, and he laughed and sat down again.
The waiter brought them bread in a basket, extra-virgin olive oil on a plate, and two glasses of the house red wine. Louis offered a toast: "To summer in Boston."
She flashed the smile again - truly it was wonderful - touched her glass to his, and took a sip, all with that dancer's elegance.
No sequins tonight, but Luba was wearing a flowery summer dress that fell from bare, copper-colored shoulders, and earrings made of silver and malachite, and she had her dark hair held back with a barrette. Wide-set green eyes, straight nose, full lips with a tiny scar cutting into the top left side. The wonderful posture, that sense of being perfectly at peace with herself, the direct gaze, the smile - good God, what a woman! They sipped from their glasses, glanced at the walls, the tabletop, out the window. Louis searched for something to say.
"I had a fare to Lynn today," was what he came up with. "Funniest thing. I don't know if you remember, but there used to be a comedian named Irwin Corey. This guy looked almost exactly like him."
For just an instant then, something flickered across Luba's eyes, some alphabet of trouble that Louis could not read. "Of course I remember," she said, in her mysteriously accented English. (Reh-miem-ber was how she pronounced it.) "Irwin Corey was my idol. My brother absolutely adored the man. We used to wet our pants, laughing at him."
"Me, too," Louis said, although this was not technically true.
"You took him to Lynn?"
"Not far from your house - where I dropped you off the other day."
"Oh, my parents live there, not me. I have a place in the South End. But Irwin Corey lives near my parents? How wonderful!"
"A carbon copy," Louis said. "Except that he was of sort of ..." He paused. Mixed heritage was the term that had come to his mind. Obviously of mixed heritage herself, he wasn't sure how Luba would take the fact that he paid attention to such things.
The arrival of the antipasto saved him. Hypnotized by her bare shoulders and wondrous voice, Louis felt there was something intimate about serving themselves from the same dish. Ringlets of squid, a caramelized onion, white beans, arugula, braised artichokes - she seemed to enjoy it every bit as much as he did. She was an Irwin Corey fan, lived in town, liked great food - already they had so much in common.
Luba ordered the salmon in tomato sauce, he chose the linguini with cherrystones, and the main-course conversation flowed with perfect naturalness. Luba, it turned out, was a computer systems administrator and believed it to be an utterly meaningless profession. "Driving a taxi is work," she told him frankly. "It does some actual physical good in the world. I play with little bits of electricity. I ruin the modern mind."
At the word "physical" on her lips, Louis suffered a spasm in his upper back. He did his best to hide it. Did his best, too, to defend the world of computer systems administering, something he knew absolutely nothing about. "It's the future," he said, rather lamely.
"I guess I'm more of a past-type person," Luba told him.
At this, just the tiniest dust mote of suspicion floated across Louis's mind. The remark made him think of the Fenway Park incident, for some reason, which harked back to the days without video screens and idiotic taped cheers. And the Fenway incident made him think of the police, then of Mr. Rim. Searching for something to end this run of sour cogitation, he said: "The past, for me, is connected with divorce, I guess" and realized instantly that he'd made a grievous error. One of the cardinal rules of the modern first date is never to mention prior relationships. Any idiot knew that.
But Luba smiled and said, "Yes, for me, too." There was a pause, and then both of them blurted out: "But let's not talk about that tonight." And laughed, and finished the meal in a sort of magical air.
The evening's only peculiar moment came with the presentation of the check. Not that there was any argument about who should pay. He'd invited her, and he insisted. She could pay next time if she wanted. She agreed, she smiled, she said: "Then I'll pick some place very expensive and hopefully as good." And he had another spasm, one vertebra lower.
No, the problem came, indirectly, because Pomodoro did not take credit cards. Having eaten there many times, Louis knew this and had come prepared. Taking out his wad of cash, he said: "Thank God for ATMs," and, at that harmless sentence, the mood between them seemed to change.
"Are you serious?" she asked.
"What? About what? What did I say?"
"You like ATMs?"
"Like them? Who likes them? What's to like? No, I meant, if it wasn't for them, I would have been caught short tonight, that's all. It's hard for me to get to a bank during regular hours. I never, hardly ever, use them. They're offensive to me, put the tellers out of work and so on."
Luba nodded, finished her last sip of wine, but she seemed to watch him more carefully after that.
They went across the street for cappuccino and biscotti, and there the easy mood returned. A little talk about the All-Star game and about baseball in general (because Luba loved them so much, Louis pretended to be slightly more of a faithful Red Sox fan than he technically was), an anecdote or two from their places of work. Afterward, he offered to walk her to her car. The nearest parking space she'd been able to find, it turned out, was in Government Center, so they headed in that direction in the fine July air, walking close but not touching, laughing at this and that, at peace.
As easily as if it had all been written in a script beforehand, Louis turned to her when they reached the car and kissed her once. Quickly, but not too quickly. Intimately, but not overly seriously, one hand on her shoulder, the briefest touch of tongues. He tasted coffee - a plus for him, a bonus.
Luba put three fingers to her lips. "My God, did you see that flash?
"I felt it."
"My God, a nice end to a very nice evening."
"I'll call you soon," Louis told her, and, spasmodic spine notwithstanding, he tried to walk away cool, casual. A De Niro walk-away, a Johnny Depp, a Harrison Ford. He flagged down an All-Right cab and rode home in a full-bodied ecstasy, his mind flooded with happy visions.
As she sometimes did, Vizelot had abandoned her post on the front porch and was listening to opera on the radio in her apartment. Louis took off his clothes, lay down with a baggie of ice cubes against his upper back, and floated, for half an hour or so, on a sea of the most sublime narcotic of all: human connection.
This feeling remained with him into the next morning. Sunday was his day off, and he was dusting his apartment with the radio on, humming to himself, when the announcer said something about ATMs. Louis stood still and listened more closely. It turned out that every last ATM in Boston had stopped working for exactly 34 minutes, beginning at 10:45 the previous night. Which, as he figured it, with an increasing sense of unease, was just about the time he and Luba had been sharing their first sweet kiss.
Look for Chapter Four of The Boston Tangler in next Sunday's Globe Magazine.
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