Paint It Yellow

by López, Andrés G.

  The gentleman was holding his worn black leather briefcase on his lap; he looked to Gabriel like a bearded Einstein with his woolen coat buttoned all the way to his chin and his bushy eyebrows and boiling red ears peeping out from beneath his wildish head of hair. If he’s not a professor, Gabriel mused, he’s an important politician, perhaps even a member of parliament. The man leaned toward the open divider.

  “Tell me, Mr. Brosa, just how do you like driving a cab?”

  Gabriel felt like telling him that only a few weeks ago he’d enjoyed driving a cab, but now he felt trapped; being stuck in this job sucked and he’d rather be doing a thousand other things, but he only said, “It’s enjoyable. I get to meet so many people.”

  “And you talk to all your passengers?”

  “No sir. Only some.” Gabriel was not interested in being interrogated any further. He missed Helene. He wanted to say that most of the time he ruminated about how miserable his life was.

  “Did you attend a university, Mr. Brosa?”

  The man was getting closer to breaking Gabriel’s dam. This was a question Gabriel did not feel like answering right then.

  “Yes.”

  “Glad to hear it, my boy! Glad to hear it!” the man exclaimed, as if he’d just received news that his beloved Manchester United had won a championship. “Anyone who reads Byron, or I venture to say, young Wordsworth, or Shelley, will be hooked for life, hooked like a fish on a line!”

  Gabriel realized the man must have seen the books on his front seat — Byron: Poetical Works and Thoreau’s Walden. Though for the past two weeks, Gabriel had read little and thought much, he carried these books with him everywhere as a knight wears his protective armor, and waited for the chance to immerse himself again in the writing of his two favorite geniuses.

  “Though some of this other American Romanticism is pure fantasy and all derivative — an imitation of the real thing.” The man was still talking.

  Gabriel considered defending Thoreau’s work, but decided that Thoreau did not need defenders and anyway, he wasn’t sure he could muster up enough enthusiasm to discuss the subject. He just wanted to get rid of these passengers and sit on a line for a half hour where he could think of Helene and Helene only.

  “Yet I must admit,” the man was saying, “that many of my colleagues back at Cambridge do admire Thoreau’s work, and Emerson’s; they don’t find these American chaps anything like Carlyle, who in my estimation is the originator of all this transcendentalist nonsense. He, and of course, all those other fanatical German thinkers, like Kant and Schopenhauer.”

  Gabriel was impressed. He had never met a professor from Cambridge, but also, he was a little bewildered, wondering how the professor could expect him to follow this conversation. In four years of undergraduate work, Gabriel had only read a few essays by Emerson and one by Carlyle. Though he had painfully studied all of Walden, spending an entire week cooped up in the library, he was only vaguely familiar with Kant and Schopenhauer. Gabriel attempted to bring them all together as the professor had just done, as individual pieces of a larger puzzle he should solve, but he couldn’t.

  “Yes, yes,” the man rambled on, “thirty years I’ve dedicated to the English Romantic poets, and I’m only now realizing how fortunate they were to have died young — in their primes, still radical and full of fire with golden words pouring furiously from their souls like lava from mighty volcanoes. Old age would have diminished them, as it now destroys me.”

  Gabriel glanced at the old man in his rearview.

  “When I was younger,” he continued, “I lamented their early deaths, wondered what Keats, Shelley and Byron would have produced had they lived and continued to write as they got older, like Wordsworth. I thought experience would give them a brighter, more mature vision. But old age dulled Wordsworth’s muse, made him more a politician than poet, cooled the lava that flowed when he sympathized with the French revolutionists; as an old man, he could only look back and reflect — rethink, question, revamp. Dull and duller he became, acquiescing to the nonsense of the time, accepting views that as a youth he would have shunned. But the others were spared such mediocrity; they left us just in time. Keats had it right when he wrote, ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.’ Who can beat that for philosophy? What could be more important than the beauty and fire of youth?”

  The old man stared out the window at the bright-red taillights and exhaust fumes dancing against the cold night air, and Gabriel felt saddened that he had stopped speaking. But he was done, his eyes closed, his head reclined on the back seat.

  Gabriel wanted to hear more of what the professor had to say; he felt hungry for intellectual discussion. There on the Van Wyck Expressway, battling buses and other cabs, he found himself missing his literature professors, even the ones more concerned with local politics than with the novels of Dickens. He remembered peaceful fall afternoons spent reading in various campus libraries where his only worry was deciphering complex allusions in literary works. What he wouldn’t have given as an undergraduate to have been able to chat, even for five minutes, with a Cambridge professor like the one in his midst; Gabriel longed to ask his passenger many questions. But time was running out and the old man continued to nap.

  A quarter mile from their destination, a stalled bus brought everyone to a standstill. Gabriel pumped his brakes, almost slamming into the Checker cab in front of him. The old man awoke. “Are we there?”

  “Don’t worry, professor. Plenty of time to get you there.”

  Gabriel was bullying himself into the next lane, ignoring loud horns from upset motorists. From the center lane he tried to move into the left, but a caravan of buses prevented him and again he had to jam on the brakes. He glanced at his rearview, debated whether to disturb the professor with a question he felt he’d never had fully answered while at college. He cleared his throat.

  “Professor? May I ask you a question … about Lord Byron?”

  “If you promise to get me to my plane on time, I’ll answer any question you’d like.”

  Gabriel smiled. “Do you think Lord Byron gave up on life?”

  “Gave up on life? Byron? Never!” The professor was leaning forward again and Gabriel could feel his emotion. “Why, he was fighting for Greek independence when he died of fever. What greater testament to his love of life than that — helping his fellow men fight for the liberty and dignity denied them by oppressors? ‘Eternal Spirit of the chainless Mind! Brightest in dungeons, Liberty! Thou art …’”

  Gabriel’s heart leaped with excitement and without hesitation the next two lines of that great sonnet came to him: “For there thy habitation is the heart — The heart which love of Thee alone can bind.”

  “Very good. You do know Byron.” The professor sounded amazed at what he had just heard — an American cab driver reciting Byron’s poetry. How bizarre. “Son, you can form your own opinion about the great poets but I’m sure after you’ve read as much as I have, you’ll arrive at a similar conclusion. In the breadth and scope of his poetry and in his genius, Byron has only four equals, despite Carlyle’s admonition to his countrymen in Sartor Resartus: ‘Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe.’”

  Gabriel jumped in eagerly. “Chaucer and Shakespeare certainly.”

  “Yes, but don’t forget Homer and Dante, neither of which you should reread when you’re old and decrepit like me. Take my word for it. Dante especially is frightening. But reading Byron still leaves me feeling young, bewildered with the enigmas of life and of course, restless, as you must be feeling now, doing this ungodly job.”

  Gabriel finally snuck into the left lane between two buses, passing the stalled vehicle clogging everything up, and as the lanes in front of him cleared like the waters before Moses, he swung over to the right and took the exit for British Airways.

  “It is an ungodly job,” he said, “but also one that’s exciting and interesting. Where else could I have met a professor from Cambridge — a
Romantic Literature expert?”

  The professor smiled. “You could have come to my lecture at Columbia University and sat through my talk on Blake’s prophesies. I could have used a few more educated, enthusiastic individuals in my audience.”

  At the terminal, Gabriel helped the airport attendant load the bags onto the trolley. He shook his passengers’ hands and thanked them for the five-dollar tip. Before parting, the professor gave Gabriel a serious look and pointed to him as he dispensed his advice, like a father to his son. “Go back to school. Don’t wait, if for no other reason than that Byron needs you to help disseminate his genius. Share your passion for his work with others. You won’t regret it.”

  “Thank you sir. Have a safe flight home.”

  Gabriel found his way to the huge holding pen for cabs hoping to get fares back to the city, but instead of getting out and joining one of the groups of cabbies smoking and telling amusing stories, he sat back in his cab, cranked his heater on full blast for a few minutes before cutting the engine, then opened his copy of Byron: Poetical Works. He began rereading Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, determined to finish the entire poem. The first time he’d attempted it, he’d gotten through only the first canto before putting the book down and going out for ice cream with Jennifer. This time, however, he felt motivated to get through all four cantos. But he wasn’t going to stop there; he was going to devour all seventeen cantos of Don Juan and if he didn’t lose focus, some of Byron’s other tales, maybe The Bride of Abydos and The Corsair.

  A few stanzas into Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, however, Gabriel’s mind wandered to Helene; he wished he could help her. For a little while, he entertained the thought of applying to graduate school at the University of Minnesota. In the meantime, he could look for a job there, as a high school counselor or maybe even an English teacher. If that didn’t work, perhaps he could drive a cab in the city. It wouldn’t take him long to learn the roads. And it would only be till he could go back to school. What would Helene think of that? He knew Paul would be thrilled, though his father, he was sure, would be skeptical. It was perhaps too big a risk to take, but what risks had Gabriel taken in his young life? None. He’d always played everything safe, like his father, yet deep inside he longed to be more like his mother, the great adventurer, and let his heart take him where it may — to Helene. That’s where his heart wished to be.

  CHAPTER 27

  Gabriel got a fare back to New York City within fifteen minutes — a young well-dressed couple, no doubt stockbrokers (from the moment they entered his cab till they dozed off, all they discussed were stock prices and the challenges of working on Wall Street), headed to 73rd Street and Central Park West. Gabriel was happy that this was a quiet ride because his mind was churning with thoughts of his future, wondering how this or that plan would work, but primarily debating whether, after such a short romance, Helene would find it presumptuous of him to follow her to Minnesota.

  Despite his doubts about many things, Gabriel was now sure that graduate school was in his immediate future, maybe even back at the Brook if he could stomach being in a place that held painful memories of Jennifer. Paul’s lecture about the dangers of cab driving, Sister Martin’s disappointment in him, and being near Helene while she studied for finals had made him yearn to cram his head full of ideas rather than his pockets with dollars. But it was that brief encounter with the Cambridge scholar that had left an indelible mark and reawakened his desire for intellectual discussion and a need to fill his mind with genius.

  Sal would probably ridicule the whole notion of returning to college. One, Gabriel already knew enough; two, all the really useful knowledge wasn’t in books but on the streets; and three, you go where the money’s flowing. Though Sal often mocked booklovers, Gabriel knew that he read all kinds of magazines from Popular Mechanics to Playboy, yet if one asked him about the articles, he’d say he’d only bought them to look at the pictures. Gabriel wasn’t sure that Sal had a genuine love of money either. He was one of the most generous people Gabriel knew and preferred being home taking it easy to killing himself hustling for the bucks. Thinking about Sal brought a smile to Gabriel’s face and reminded him that he needed to visit soon. And he wanted to get to the bottom of the mystery — had Sal been downtown earlier that morning in his Caddy?

  As his passengers slept, Gabriel flew down FDR Drive and exited at 96th Street. It was close to midnight; only six more hours and he could be back in the apartment sleeping, dreaming of a brighter future, of Helene, of becoming a professor and disseminating Byron’s genius to the next generation. He snaked through the crosstown street and Central Park at lightning speed, dropped off his passengers and collected a nice tip for an uneventful ride.

  Minutes later, he approached the Dakota’s gothic gates in the early morning darkness. Gabriel turned onto 72nd and parked his cab about forty feet beyond the Dakota’s front gate. He shut the engine and locked his doors, leaned back and closed his eyes, then replayed meeting Helene, every little detail vivid — the way she was dressed, the way she walked, the sound of her voice and those funny dark glasses. Gabriel had always believed that things happen for a reason and that great things happen when least expected, but sadness filled him as an unwanted thought came and lingered — he couldn’t shake the sensation that Helene’s future did not include him, that she would spend her life with someone else, someone better suited for fatherhood. Gabriel felt too young, impulsive and inexperienced to play such a role. And the thought that hurt him the most was that Helene deserved to find someone who could provide stability immediately, not in a year’s time — someone well-established, who could give her the love her late husband would’ve given her.

  Gabriel opened his eyes, started his engine and glanced at the time — 12:50 a.m. He felt like calling it a night and heading home to sleep but decided to stick it out a few more hours. Since he’d started working nights, he’d developed new strategies and habits; most of them were precautionary, like waiting on hotel lines in the early morning hours. Gabriel decided to try something different this morning, so instead of heading to the Waldorf or the Plaza, he drove straight on 72nd, hooked right on Broadway and headed uptown.

  Broadway was well lit at all hours. More streetlights were out the further you drove uptown, but several brightly lit eating establishments were still open at this early hour and it was such a wide stretch of road that visibility was never a problem. Many homeless people were tucked in sheltered bus stops or sleeping on benches on the narrow green islands separating the north- and southbound lanes. Others cuddled on cardboard atop warm subway grates, their shopping carts nearby packed with loot from gutters and garbage cans — scraps of food, old pots and pans, stacks of newspapers, soiled blankets, and trinkets of all kinds.

  On 135th and Broadway, Gabriel saw several people huddling for warmth around a burning garbage can, the flames fed with old newspapers and lighter fluid, a big radio blasting out Spanish songs, several youngsters dancing nearby, unhindered by their heavy coats and hoods. Since it was almost Christmas, perhaps the police were a bit more lenient. Yet to Gabriel, who rarely came this far uptown, the whole scene seemed out of place in Manhattan, like something you would find only in the surrounding boroughs, the poorer neighborhoods. At 143rd and Broadway, Gabriel turned around and headed back.

  Finally, at about one fifteen, he picked up a young woman in the vicinity of Columbia University. Sixteen minutes later, she gave him a dollar tip and rushed up the front steps of a brownstone. Gabriel waited for her to be safely inside before pulling away. He filled in his arrival time on the trip sheet —1:35 a.m.

  He swung over to Second Avenue and headed downtown where numerous cabs were already picking the avenue clean. Gabriel could have sped up and vied for the lead in this hunt but chose not to. On 23rd and Madison he picked up an elderly executive dressed in an expensive cashmere coat and drove him to his elegant residence at 70th and Park. At the corner of 74th, a doorman flagged him down and ushered a young woman into the
cab. She wore a black leather jacket over her short blue dress and reeked of perfume. She couldn’t have been older than seventeen, but had enough makeup on for a masquerade. Gabriel recalled his adventure with the Plaza man the previous morning and presumed who this girl might be and what she might be doing at this place and time of the morning. She was headed to Riverside Drive and 136th Street, not an affluent area.

  “Okay if I smoke?”

  Gabriel disliked when people smoked in his cab. “Yeah.”

  “Anything interesting happen this morning, Mr. Cabby?”

  “Just your typical slow Monday morning. How ‘bout you?”

  “Nah. Just visiting grandpa. Figured I’d leave early enough to catch a movie but he wanted me to stay and read more to him.”

  “Oh.” This was not what Gabriel had been expecting. “What’d you read to him?”

  “The Great Gatsby. It’s his favorite book in the whole world.”

  “A sad, romantic story. The past can be very haunting.”

  “My grandpa thinks it is. Says it’s like Fitzgerald was writing about his life. But he never tells me the details. So I tell him he shouldn’t bring it up then. But then he says he hates what his life’s turned into. He hates being sick. Wonders why things couldn’t have worked out better. The man’s a millionaire and he’s miserable.”

  She took a long drag on her cigarette. “If I had that much cash, I’d have a great time. The past’s over. If he’s not going to spend some of that money on a good time, wish he’d give some of it over to me and Mom … we could move out of the hell hole we live in.”

  Gabriel was getting an earful, more than he was ready for this early in the morning. “So I gather you don’t enjoy Fitzgerald?”

  “Not for the fourth time!”

  Gabriel chuckled. “Well, even classics can get boring.”