INK BY JASON CHATFIELD
We hope that by now you’ve been able to enjoy the offerings of The Metropolitan Review’s Gay Talese Issue, including our in-depth Editors’ Interview with Talese and Alexander Nazaryan’s beautiful review of A Town Without Time. You may have noticed during our interview that Talese made a brief, passing mention of a lone short story published in Mademoiselle that he wrote in 1966, “Getting Even,” his first and last foray into fiction. That detail beguiled our Executive Editor, Lou Bahet, who began to wonder about the fate of this nearly six-decade-old magazine short story.
She started searching for the piece, scouring periodical archives and databases, but found that it was lost to time. There was little public record of its existence, it had never been anthologized, and even the precise issue date of its publication proved elusive. Finally, buried within a web archive of 1960s women’s lifestyle magazines, she found a crude digital scan of “Getting Even” in Mademoiselle’s May 1967 summer beauty issue. She printed it out and read it by candlelight at a lonesome Midtown bar. When she put down the pages after midnight, she felt certain that “Getting Even” was nothing less than a forgotten masterpiece of noirish city writing.
Riveted by Talese’s tale of an embittered taxi driver, Angelo Janiero, and the dramatic lengths he goes through to take revenge on his draconian former high school teacher, Miss Fawcett, after she steps into his yellow cab one day, The Metropolitan Review asked Talese for permission to reprint “Getting Even” decades later. Talese expressed boyish incredulity: My one and only short story? You liked it? To our profound delight, Talese agreed, and even provided us with his own copy, plucked from his famous bunker office, for us to digitize. He divulged that his inspiration for the tale was an English teacher who had menaced him with failing grades in high school. The text is printed here, for the everlasting record, in its original form, alongside a new illustration by Jason Chatfield, The Metropolitan Review’s Cartoon Editor.
We founded The Metropolitan Review to uplift overlooked writing and unsung voices, including forgotten works from the past. Now is the time to shine a light on this lost short fiction gem, which we are honored to also publish in our forthcoming inaugural print issue. Please enjoy “Getting Even” by Gay Talese.
—The Editors
Although the woman stood nearly a block away, he could see that she had spotted him, was waving at him from the corner of Lexington Avenue at Seventy-first Street, and so Angelo Janiero slowed down his taxicab even though, as he did so, he was not sure whether or not he would stop. He might just slow down to let the woman think he would stop, then drive right past her as if he had not seen her, turning the corner quickly before she could get his number.
Angelo Janiero had done this at least three times in recent weeks and had contemplated it on several other occasions; just two days ago he had been fined $25 by the Hack Bureau on a discourtesy charge and warned that if found guilty again, he would be suspended.
He did not care. He had never really wanted this taxi job anyway, having taken it only on a part-time basis eight years ago to help meet his alimony payments while unemployed as an actor. But now his acting career was nonexistent. Even his agent, who had once predicted that he would become a star, had dropped him.
And so, at the age of 37, Angelo Janiero was driving a cab full time and hating it as never before, and he had begun to recognize in himself, where hope had once been, a new depth in despair and a new demonic delight, too, in being rude to people: in passing them by on rainy days, in quickly snapping back when they spoke sharply to him, in refusing to take Negroes up to Harlem or anybody to Brooklyn, in wishing at times that some angry passenger or some drunk or drug addict would take a swing at him or pull a knife so that he, a powerfully built man weighing 225 pounds and standing six feet, could retaliate and in this way perhaps release some of the bottled-up belligerence he felt toward nobody in particular but everybody in general—at least on days like this, days when he often concluded, without alarm, that he might slowly be going out of his mind.
On such days, the slightest thing could provoke him. It might be nothing more than a defective traffic light, a slow-moving bus, or a Con Edison crew blocking a lane. Or it might be the way a passenger looked at him, or talked, or walked. Or, in the case of this woman he was now approaching on Lexington Avenue, the way she waved.
She waved with a limp left wrist, giving a casual flick with her white-gloved hand. She held her arm just high enough to attract his attention, he decided, but not so high as to disturb the line of her suit. She was a tall woman, quite handsome, her blondish hair pulled back and tucked under a brown pillbox hat, and she stood firmly in the street and did not step back as Angelo’s cab got closer.
She must be in her 40s, maybe pushing 50, Angelo thought, and pushing it beautifully, too, he added, noticing how her trimly-tailored green suit accentuated the flat stomach and fine hips and breasts; yes, everything about her was appealing, nothing about her irritating except that wrist flicking casually, too casually, too devoid of any doubt. Angelo Janiero smiled to himself now as he gripped the steering wheel harder and watched her through the corners of his eyes so he could enjoy her reaction as he breezed past, turned the corner.
But just as he was about to press the gas pedal, two things happened almost simultaneously that made him stop. A police patrol car pulled up at the intersection close to where the woman stood, and Angelo knew immediately that it would be impossible to get away with his little trick this time. Also, while he was getting what he thought to be the final look at her face, the impassiveness around her eyes and mouth, he suddenly felt a cool chill shooting up within him and he knew, yes, he knew, he was sure of it, yes, he had certainly seen this face before—she was no stranger.
Angelo, now no longer vengeful, merely confused and disturbed, did not turn as she quickly opened the door and stepped in, sliding across the seat until she was nearly in the middle. He was not sure who this woman was, but he was convinced that they had met, and he also had the feeling that it had all been very unpleasant.
“La Guardia Airport,” she said in a voice that was somewhat deep and dramatic, causing Angelo to suspect that he might have known her from the theatre. “And I must, simply must be there in 25 minutes.”
Angelo did not answer. He knew he could make it in that time with little difficulty, but he did not want to commit himself.
“You’ll surely be there in 25 minutes, won’t you?” she asked, leaning forward.
“I’ll try, lady,” Angelo said softly, driving away from the curb, clicking down the meter handle. “I’ll try, but sometimes traffic can—”
“Well, please try!” she insisted, cutting him off.
Angelo swore to himself. He wanted so desperately to slam on his brakes, to throw her out of the cab, but he was still confused, not unlike a prizefighter caught by a surprise blow, waiting for his head to clear. He tried, without entirely convincing himself, to justify his inaction and sudden timidity on the grounds that it is one thing to talk tough to a stranger, but it is something else when you know damned well that the other person is not a stranger, and probably has something on you; in fact, maybe he already had thrown this woman out of his cab, he quickly thought, maybe that is why she had seemed so familiar and disturbing to him when he picked her up on Seventy-first Street. But no, Angelo decided on second thought, remembering the women involved in the other incidents. No, it was somewhere else, something else; it was not in a taxicab, probably not even in the theatre, but it was somewhere else.
Angelo Janiero continued to drive with uncharacteristic caution down Lexington Avenue, but his mind was spinning wildly in reverse, preoccupying itself with his past, racing with the reflections of all the women he would hate to see again—the embittered mother of the teen-aged girl he’d had an affair with during that last season of summer stock in the Catskills; the angry landlady on Columbus Avenue to whom he still owed rent from three years ago; the insatiable stenographer he’d once known at Fort Benning and who had written him last month to say she would soon be transferred to New York. There were more, too, many more, but none of them resembled in the least this woman who now sat nervously tapping her foot behind him and who had said, “Please try,” in a tone that suggested she knew Angelo would normally not try unless first goaded by a pushy “please.” He could not get a good second look at her now through his rearview mirror because the traffic was moving too swiftly down Lexington Avenue with the staggered lights. But on Fifty-ninth Street, as he passed Bloomingdale’s and was about to cut crosstown toward the Queensboro Bridge, a light turned red. He stopped. He had his chance.
The woman was flipping through a magazine but her face was not obscured by it, and Angelo Janiero had only to move sideways an inch or two and gaze up into the mirror to get a full reflection.
Now, suddenly, he recognized her. And, just as suddenly, he turned away. He pulled his black leather cap down over his eyes, not wanting her to recognize him if she hadn’t already. He felt his palms moisten and within himself heard again the demanding voice—“Please try”—except now he was hearing it not as he had moments before in the taxicab, but rather as he had heard it in a classroom more than 20 years ago. Her classroom in Camden. And there had never been a teacher that he had hated more than this one who now sat in the back, still breathing down his neck after all these years, still urging, in that exasperated way of hers, please try.
Angelo Janiero was sweating more heavily now as he waited for the traffic light to change. He wondered what he should say, what he should do, how he should handle himself with this woman, this Miss Fawcett, yes that’s it, yes this bitch who had flunked him twice and had not only predicted his failure years ago but had, he always felt, made it almost inevitable. If she hadn’t taken such an immediate dislike to him during his senior year, if she hadn’t blamed only him for stealing those midterm exams, he would not, he had often told himself, have been expelled, he would have been able to accept that football scholarship to Penn State, he would have avoided the Army, the hospital, the recall to Korea, he would never have married that tramp who was still bleeding him with alimony and the support of a child who was probably not his, and he would not have ended up driving a New York cab and going through life from one traffic jam to another, finally hitting the bottom on this particular afternoon by picking up the woman who helped put him there. Now she was sitting three feet behind him, there to see her predictions come true—if and when she ever figured out who the hell he was.
“Driver,” Miss Fawcett called.
Angelo’s head snapped up.
“Driver!” she repeated, louder, “the light is green.”
Angelo heard horns honking behind him, and heard other cab drivers, their heads poking out of their opened side windows, yelling at him, cursing him. Immediately he slammed his foot on the pedal and the vehicle bolted forward, wheels spinning, and then he cut sharply around the corner past Bloomingdale’s, barely missing some pedestrians, everything tipping, jerking, jostling, and Miss Fawcett was thrown back hard against the seat.
“DRIVER!” she cried.
“Sorry,” Angelo said, softly. But under his breath he said, “Screw you, Miss Fawcett.”
“Lord,” she cried, “you’re driving like some sort of madman!”
“Sorry,” he repeated. Bitch.
Miss Fawcett muttered a few more things, but Angelo Janiero said nothing, keeping his hat pulled down and concentrating only on crossing Third Avenue, then Second Avenue, then driving up the approach ramp onto the Queensboro Bridge.
Traffic was fairly heavy on the bridge but cars were moving without interruption, and Angelo thought that it was probably a good thing, at least for the present, that she had not recognized him. It would have been too embarrassing for him, too satisfying for her. And yet at the same time he was amazed, if not a little irritated, that she had so completely forgotten him, amazed because his name was right in front of her nose, printed across the hack license above the glove compartment—“Angelo Janiero No. 45872”—and his photograph was there, too.
But teachers forget, he decided. Yes, they get you when you’re young, they promote you or flunk you, they leave scars that last a lifetime, then they forget. But you never forget them, he thought, especially those who give you a hard time. At least he didn’t forget. Nor did he forgive. It was not in his character to forget or forgive anyone who had shafted him or humiliated him. And in this way he assumed he took after his Sicilian father, an old mustacchio in whom emotions ran pretty deep. Yes, either of them could have done all right with the mob if there had been more action around Camden then. And Angelo remembered how his first wife, an Irish girl he’d met at a dance hall one summer weekend in Wildwood, N.J., had made a big thing about this once, criticizing him for being so sensitive to slurs and slights, so good at hating and the vendetta game, and she had said it was no wonder that neither himself nor his father had gotten very far in America with that attitude. Oh, yes, she had all the easy answers, that one. She was really what he needed, complaining all the time, then letting herself get fat, and then all of a sudden wanting to go back to the Church and those Irish priests—God, he had no idea why he’d ever married her. Well, anyway, she was causing him no trouble now, living in their old apartment with her mother in Queens. Jamaica, Queens. “Change at Jamaica,” the Long Island Rail Road conductors always say. Angelo had changed wives at Jamaica.
He was now halfway across the bridge. He noticed a large black-and-white oil tanker moving down the East River, its smokestacks puffing up gray clouds that slowly floated through the steel girders of the bridge and up toward the towers. It was always dim and dreary driving across the lower deck of this bridge because the upper deck blocked the sun from streaming through. So Angelo Janiero took advantage of the semidarkness to sneak a quick peek into the mirror again and see how Miss Fawcett was doing back there. She was looking out the window. Still a good profile, he thought; yes, that woman knew how to take care of herself, and he remembered how carefully groomed and neat she used to be in class in Camden, and how she could be writing at the blackboard all day and still never get any chalk marks on her clothing or even on her fingers.
And briefly now, very briefly, Angelo was tempted to stop playing the mystery guest in this taxicab and introduce himself to Miss Fawcett. How to begin? Excuse me, Miss, but didn’t you once teach senior English back in Camden? Excuse me, but aren’t you Miss Fawcett? Pardon me, but I think I used to be in your class in Camden. Is it still Miss Fawcett? Well, hello Miss Fawcett, you bitch. Yes, that’s more like it. And anyway, she might not even remember him if he did introduce himself. The hell she wouldn’t. Well, how come she hasn’t recognized him so far even with his name and photograph right in front of her? Nobody would recognize him from that photograph, Angelo thought. Yes, he had changed a lot in 20 years, had aged a lot less gracefully than she had, he was sorry to say. He had gotten jowly, was losing his hair, was probably 30 pounds heavier now than when he used to play football for Camden, a time when sportswriters were calling him “Jocko” Janiero. Oh, he had liked that. Jocko. Jocko Janiero!
Yes, they might remember him, the sportswriters; and Fenton, the coach, he might remember. Fenton damned well should remember. Jocko Janiero used to break his damned neck every Saturday for Fenton, and what did it get him? A kick in the ass when the season was over. But that expulsion from school really had nothing to do with Fenton, Angelo conceded, now almost across the Queensboro Bridge. Fenton had tried to talk her out of it, but this Miss Fawcett, this bitch, was not long out of teachers’ college then, not yet corruptible—four or five years away from corruptibility, she being maybe 24 or 25 years old then. And yet Fenton’s approach might have been wrong. Fenton might have tried that father-to-daughter approach with her. Or he might have tried to sweet-talk her. Or, worse, might have gotten caught looking too long at those lovely breasts of hers. That would have killed it faster than anything, Angelo knew, now driving his cab down the ramp from the Queensboro Bridge and seeing a big sign overhead that read:
WELCOME TO QUEENS.
THE FASTEST GROWING BORO!
MARIO J. CARIELLO, BORO PRES.
Well, Angelo thought, at least some of us are making it. He turned right at the sign, circling around past the Plaza Diner and Doherty’s Bar, then cut left onto Northern Boulevard toward a sign with an arrow: “La Guardia Airport.” Fiorello La Guardia had certainly made it, Angelo thought. Yes, but he was half Jewish.
Driving along Northern Boulevard, Angelo Janiero now felt some warmth toward Fenton and was sure that the coach had done all he could to get the bitch to change her mind. It was just no dice. Just bad timing. Angelo had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. If he were in school today, Angelo thought, they would never have expelled him; no, the schools today are run by a bunch of patsies and progressives who do not expel or flunk anybody. Today they shove everybody through, nobody flunks, everybody is happy, school is the Fair Shake Athletic Club. You don’t dare call any student stupid today, Angelo thought. They’d have pickets and boycotts for months. No, today if you’re stupid, they just say you’re “culturally deprived.” He smiled. He’d read that expression in the newspapers a few days ago and liked it. Culturally deprived.
But when he was in school, Angelo recalled, nobody gave a damn how culturally deprived you were; no, it was mostly hell back then, particularly after the sudden arrival of pretty Miss Brigit Fawcett, Miss Frigid Fawcett, as she was called behind her back, Miss Ice Cubes of 1945. She had been hired to replace old Mr. Smathers, who’d had a heart attack two months after the term began. Smathers had been a kindly, meek little man with white hair and a slight stammer, the only soft touch in the school, really, and in 30 years of teaching English, he had flunked nobody, including football players—a fact that guaranteed him free tickets to all the games and a lifetime of big hellos in the locker room. Of course, there had been some complaints from parents now and then about Smathers’ inability to teach English—though certainly none from Angelo’s parents, who did not even speak English—but Smathers had been an old college buddy of the school board’s president, and so Smathers hung on until his heart attack.
Then this Miss Fawcett arrived in the classroom one morning with that long-legged stride, her pretty head high, her fine body poured down into that tight little suit; and seconds after she walked in, the classroom came alive with whistles and wows. Suddenly she had stopped, glaring at the class, her face very red. Then slowly and defiantly, she had said, “If I ever, ever catch anyone in this classroom whistling again, it will mean instant expulsion!”
There had been absolute silence.
“Do you hear?”
Still silence.
“Now then,” Miss Fawcett had said, “I want everyone to realize that this is a classroom and the party that has apparently been in progress here all these years is now finally over.”
And it was, particularly for Angelo Janiero. Whether she was singling him out because he was a football player, or because he was Italian—he never eliminated that possibility—or because of some other reason, he did not know. He knew only that hardly a day passed without her calling on him to answer a question. And when he remained silent or admitted he did not know the answer, she would demand to know why he did not know it; and then while he stood in the aisle, the girls giggling, Miss Fawcett would continue to taunt him with “Try, try to answer it. You may surprise us, who knows? Please try!”
Oh, he had hated her for this, but he had come to hate her for something else, too, something that he did not completely understand then. It had merely confused him. But years later, perhaps while in the Army where he’d had lots of time to think and read, he had concluded that he was perhaps too excited by her as a woman to take her seriously as a teacher, and maybe she had sensed this and realized that if she were ever to gain control of the class, she had better break him then and there. And yet he knew, as a Camden schoolboy, that he had desperately wanted to please her, or rather to impress her, and he recalled that he used to dream of her often. In those adolescent dreams, he usually was a brilliant boy who really knew the answers but was merely playing dumb.
He dreamed also of Miss Fawcett’s unexpected appearances at football practice—just in time to see him make a long, spectacular run. Once he dreamed that he had discovered Miss Fawcett alone on a dark road standing next to her automobile that had a flat tire. He fixed the flat and then she invited him to her apartment, made him a drink, then took him to bed with her and later expressed great satisfaction with his performance.
Oh, he was a wild dreamer in those days, Angelo conceded, his taxicab now stopped for a red light on Northern Boulevard, ten minutes away from La Guardia Airport. Yes, a wild dreamer. But she had cured him of that. He recalled one particular morning in class, one in which Miss Fawcett had spent a good deal of time striding back and forth in a tight black skirt and frilly silk blouse, her hips moving, her body stretching and reaching to write high across the blackboard. He remembered how he couldn’t take his eyes off her, and how excited he became as he watched her move, and suddenly she seemed to sense the effect she was having on him and, without warning, she turned toward him and shot him a question, demanding that he answer it standing up. That had been a dirty trick, Angelo thought. A very dirty goddamned trick. But that’s the cold sort of bitch she was in those days.
Now the traffic light on Northern Boulevard turned green. Angelo Janiero got his cab moving this time before she could scream, “Driver!” But he did not start with a rush, did not send her slamming against the back seat this time. No, he wanted to keep her quiet for a few moments while he reviewed a little scheme that had been on his mind.
The idea had probably been with him, subconsciously, ever since Miss Fawcett had gotten into the cab. But he was perhaps not fully aware of it until crossing the bridge and driving onto Northern Boulevard he realized that he had taken the slowest possible route to La Guardia Airport. Northern Boulevard was an old road with automobiles parked on both sides, with traffic lights on nearly every corner, with people crossing everywhere and children playing on the curb—a road seemingly designed for the benefit of cab drivers wishing to make their passengers miss airplanes. Any conscientious cab driver would have taken a less congested road after crossing the bridge, or might even have entered Queens via the Midtown Tunnel or the Triboro Bridge, both of which, while longer in distance to the airport, would nonetheless be faster. Furthermore, Northern Boulevard had construction work going on a mile or so ahead, and Angelo realized that he had known this, too.
He smiled to himself, marveling at how his vengeance had operated purely on instinct, and he felt a perversely pleasurable sense of excitement at the prospect of Miss Fawcett missing her plane. He could hear her saying again and again, “Please try,” and he heard himself replying, “I am trying, Miss Fawcett,” and the more he thought about it, the more ridiculous the whole idea seemed, and the more he liked it. Miss Fawcett misses the plane. Good. Wonderful. Tardy teacher. You should have gotten an earlier start, Miss Fawcett. Sorry, but I’ll have to mark you late.
Yes, Angelo thought, this parting gesture to Miss Fawcett would bring a sweet secret pleasure to his soft Sicilian heart, but it was a shame that she would not share the secret. The revenge would be so much sweeter if only she knew. But you couldn’t have everything, Angelo thought, you must get it where you can—after all, how many shots in life do you get at these birds? Usually they get away. They crap all over you, then get away. And usually, with time, you forget. Everybody gets older, everybody forgets. Live and let live, society says, forgive and forget. Sure, forgive and forget, so these sly, smooth finks can get away with it and con you again.
Angelo pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket. He lit one, half expecting Miss Fawcett to tell him to put it out, no smoking in class. But she remained quiet. In fact, she’s been very quiet back there, he thought. Not a peep out of her in at least ten minutes. He looked up into the rearview mirror.
Her eyes were on him now, very wide. She was looking directly at him, intent and alert. Then, seeing his eyes, she immediately looked away. So did he. How long had she been looking at him, Angelo wondered, feeling a new chill of excitement now, and why? The four eyes in the mirror had exchanged only one glance, so sudden as to reveal nothing. And yet Angelo sensed her anxiety, sensed that she no longer felt in control. This might all be merely wishful thinking on his part, he conceded, but he was confident that now, finally, he had cracked that cocky exterior, and was sure that within seconds she would say or do something that would reveal her thoughts and confirm his.
He continued to drive down Northern Boulevard, very calm now, waiting. But she remained silent. Still a cool bitch, he thought, angrily. Yes, she always gives you a run for your money. Then Angelo noticed, a block away, the construction workers blocking the road. He saw yellow bulldozers and a crane moving over mounds of rubble and through clouds of dust, and he saw a fat little man standing up ahead in the middle of the road waving a red flag and pointing to a detour sign, and Angelo smiled now as he heard the voice from the back saying softly, slowly, almost with a high, “Oh, what luck . . . what luck. . . .”
“They never stop tearing up this town,” Angelo said lightly, his cab slowing down a bit.
“Do you think we can still make it?”
“I’ll try,” he said, his lips tightening to suppress the wild inner hilarity these words evoked—I’ll try, oh beautiful, beautiful, beautifully delivered, he thought. Just the right touch of sincerity mixed with irony; yes, he was a fine actor, no doubt about it, and why the hell didn’t that phony agent see it, him and that faggoty director? Yes, how could they both fail to perceive this sure and searing sense of tragic comedy, this raw yet superb talent that was now so captivating to this audience of one in the back seat, now so skillful in setting up a final scene to be enacted along a bumpy, dusty detour road five minutes away from La Guardia and the airplane whose departure Miss Fawcett would soon watch from the ground.
“Please try,” came the voice from the back again, the words so familiar, the tone so strange, so soft, and Angelo repeated, “I’ll try.” But now his eyes had a hard, distant look as he turned his taxicab right at the detour sign and drove quickly down the road imagining, gleefully, every move ahead, wrong moves at great speeds—yes, Wrong-way Corrigan was back in action, he thought. It would all be like a game, freezing the ball, eating up the clock, giving Miss Fawcett the long count as he raced down to the end of the detour road and then, instead of taking a left toward La Guardia, taking a right that would lead to an expressway bound for Manhattan. Then he would circle onto an approachway, loop off it, and after another wrong turn, would finally come racing down the stretch toward La Guardia in a photo finish for last place.
Miss Fawcett said nothing as he did all this. She kept her right hand firmly clutched around the chrome handle near the window to maintain her balance, but she gave no indication that she knew Angelo was going the wrong way.
This bitch doesn’t know one road from another, Angelo finally thought, frustrated. She’s probably never left Camden and probably thinks that all this racing around is an attempt to help her catch her goddamned plane. Well, she’ll never catch that plane. Yes, he’d fixed that for her. But now, getting his taxicab back onto a road headed toward La Guardia, Angelo Janiero was far from satisfied. His anger was spent, but his curiosity was not. Once again he was tempted to introduce himself to her. He wanted to get some response from her. He imagined that she might be very cordial toward him now. Maybe she would be very surprised to see him again and a bit apologetic, too, about all the anguish she’d caused him. He might even talk her into making a night plane, and they could have a few drinks together at the La Guardia lounge. They might get along very well over the drinks. They might even end up in an airport motel, Angelo thought, and he’d have a chance to get a little of it back after all these years; yes, now that they were both older and she was no longer trying to teach him anything, he might even be able to get a little of it back.
Angelo continued to drive quickly, and soon, too soon, he was driving up the ramp into La Guardia, and a minute later he was slowing down as he approached the main entrance and saw a porter stepping forward at the curb to open the door of the cab. Too late, Angelo thought, too late and the hell with it.
The porter opened the door and Angelo flipped the meter handle forward. He turned slightly in his seat, but did not look at her while waiting for his money.
Her hands shook as she picked the bills and a tip from her purse. Her hands continued to shake as she adjusted her hat. She was thankful that she had allowed herself an extra 20 minutes in anticipation of a taxi driver’s dalliance. But she was now very tense and it was with some difficulty that she edged her way out of the cab, intending to say nothing until Angelo called out, “Sorry you missed the plane, lady.” Then walking away, she turned and said softly, so softly that he could not even hear her, “Are you happy, Jocko?”
Gay Talese is one of the most storied figures in American journalism. He is credited as a pioneer of the New Journalism movement and is the author of 14 books including Thy Neighbor’s Wife, Honor Thy Father, and The Kingdom and the Power. He is a former reporter for the New York Times.
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Pure delight! Somewhere between Salinger and Cheever, but also firmly on its own turf. What a gift for literary culture to have this gem back in circulation.
I loved the ending. Great illustration of character, and I wish he had written more stories. On the other hand, Mr Talese still has time if he wants to pen more short stories.