Free A Meaningful Life by L. J. Davis Page A

York for sure.”
    â€œLook up my uncle,” said his ex-roommate. “One hell of a guy.”
    â€œI’ll do that,” said Lowell.
    One by one the familiar lights were going out in his life. He already felt like a stranger. He was no longer anybody he knew; he was somebody who was going to New York.
    â€œI can take it or leave it,” he told everybody. “If I don’t like it, I can always come right back. Nothing to it. Get in the car and start her up.”
    â€œBe sure and go to Roseland,” said the sub-librarian, a faded little man who was cruel to his children. “I was there once, during the war. Roseland Dance City. It was real nice.”
    â€œI might not be there very long,” said Lowell. “I might not like it there.”
    â€œWish I was going,” said the sub-librarian. “All I ever had was a three-day pass. Hell of a place.”
    Lowell was glad that New York was supposed to be a good place to write novels in and that a lot of people had actually done so, because that was what he’d decided to do—write a novel. He wished it didn’t feel like so much of an afterthought, because he’d always wanted to write a novel, he really had. He’d even started a couple of them, but although they were pretty dirty, they weren’t very good and he’d gotten rid of them before somebody accidentally stumbled across them and made fun of them. He wondered what would have happened if, instead of New York, he’d said something like, “Hey, let’s go to Greece. I read where everybody is going there this year.” His wife would probably have told him he was out of his mind.
    â€œI’ll have to go to work,” she told him. Ever since they started getting ready to go to New York, she’d been given to the utterance of sudden, sharp pronouncements, most of them ukases of one sort or another. “In Berkeley we would have had your scholarship, but in New York there’s no other way.”
    â€œYou won’t have to work,” said Lowell. “I’ll get a job somewhere and write at night.”
    â€œNot on your life,” said his wife. “I know all about you. You’ll never write a line if you get a job. You just haven’t got it in you. What kind of a job?”
    â€œI thought maybe I’d drive a cab,” mused Lowell. “Drive a cab and write at night.” He saw himself driving his cab, putting down the flag and asking people where they wanted to go, storing matches in the band of his yellow-cab-driver’s hat.
    â€œGreat,” said his wife. “That’s just great. I can’t tell you how that idea really grabs me. What do you think this is,
The Jackie Gleason Show?
I want you to meet my husband the cab-driver, I met him in college? I think you’ve really gone out of your mind. I think you’ve finally flipped. I have to travel three thousand miles and work my ass off for four years in order to marry a New York cab driver? I don’t think you know how bizarre that really is. I don’t even believe it. I’ve never worn a housedress in my life. At least you could have said you wanted to be a riveter. I might have been able to take that with some kind of grace, not much maybe, but a little. Riveters make good money and there’d be a nice little pension for me if you walked off a beam up there in the sky. I liked it better when you wanted to be a cowboy.”
    Deep down inside, Lowell still wanted to be a cowboy, and he was not only stung but strangely saddened by his wife’s scorn of his most secret places, almost as if she’d attacked him by mentioning one of the really dirty things he wanted to do in bed. “You don’t understand,” he said weakly, knowing that he could never explain the innocence of his purpose, the purity of his motive. “It wasn’t much of a scholarship anyway,” he muttered.
    â€œListen,” said