Six Stories Page 7

  ‘I asked if you know the Gotham Card on 53rd Street,’ he said, sounding a touch impatient now. ‘Between Madison and Park.’

  ‘No, but I’m sure I can find it.’

  ‘Noon?’

  I thought of telling him to tell Diane to wear the green dress with the little black speckles and the deep slit up the side, then decided that would probably be counterproductive- ‘Noon will be fine,’ I said.

  We said the things that you say when you’re ending a conversation with someone you already don’t like but have to deal with.

  When it was over, I settled back in front of my computer terminal and wondered how I was possibly going to be able to meet Diane again without at least one cigarette beforehand.

  It wasn’t fine with John Ring, none of it.

  ‘He’s setting you up,’ he said. ‘They both are. Under this arrangement, Diane’s lawyer is there by remote control and I’m not in the picture at all. It stinks.’

  Maybe, but you never had her stick her tongue in your month when she feels you start to come, I thought. But since that wasn’t the sort of thing you could say to a lawyer you’d just hired, I only told him I wanted to see her again, see if there was a chance to salvage things.

  He sighed.

  ‘Don’t be a putz. You see him at this restaurant, you see her, you break bread, you drink a little wine, she crosses her legs, you look, you talk nice, she crosses her legs again, you look some more, maybe they talk you into a duplicate of the safe deposit key—‘

  ‘They won’t.’

  ‘—and the next time you see them, you’ll see them in court, and everything damaging you said while you were looking at her legs and thinking about how it was to have them wrapped around you will turn up on the record. And you’re apt to say a lot of damaging stuff, because they’ll come primed with all the right questions. I understand that you want to see her, I’m not insensitive to these things, but this is not the way. You’re nor Donald Trump and she’s nor Ivana, burt this isn’t a no-faulter we got here, either, buddy, and Humboldt knows it. Diane does, too.’

  ‘Nobody’s been served with papers, and if she just wants to talk—‘

  ‘Don’t be dense,’ he said. ‘Once you get to this stage of the party, no one wants to just talk - They either want to fuck or go home.

  The divorce has already happened, Steven. This meeting is a fishing expedition, pure and simple. You have nothing to gain and everything to lose. It’s stupid.’

  ‘Just the same—'

  ‘You’ve done very well for yourself, especially in the last five years—‘

  ‘I know, but—‘

  ‘—and, for thuhree of those years,’ Ring overrode me, now putting on his courtroom voice like an overcoat, ‘Diane Davis was not your wife, not your live-in companion, and not by any stretch of the imagination your helpmate. She was just Diane Coslaw from Pound Ridge, and she did not go before you tossing flower petals or blowing a cornet.’

  ‘No, but I want to see her.’ And what I was thinking would have driven him mad: I wanted to see if she was wearing the green dress with the black speckles, because see knew damned well it was my favorite.

  He sighed again. ‘I can’t have this discussion, or I’m going to end up drinking my lunch instead of eating it.’

  ‘Go and eat your lunch. Diet plate. Cottage cheese.’

  ‘Okay, but first I’m going to make one more effort to get through to you. A meeting like this is like a joust. They’ll show . up in full armor. You’re going to he there dressed in nothing but 1 smile, without even a jock to hold up your balls. And that’s exactly the region of your anatomy they’re apt to go for first.’

  ‘I want to see her,’ I said. ‘I want to see how she is. I'm sorry.’

  He uttered a small, cynical laugh. I'm not going to talk you our of it, am I?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘All right, then I want you to follow certain instructions. If I find out you haven’t, and that you’ve gummed up the works, I may decide it would be simpler to just resign the case. Are you hearing me?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Good. Don’t yell at her, Steven. They may set it up so you really feel like doing that, but don't. Okay?'

  ‘Okay.’ I wasn’t going to yell at her. If I could quit smoking two days after she had walked out - and stick to it - I thought I could get through a hundred minutes and three courses without calling her a bitch.

  ‘Don’t yell at him, that’s number two.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Don’t just say okay. I know you don’t like him, and he doesn’t like you much, either.’

  ‘He’s never even met me. He’s a . . . a therapist. How can he have an opinion about me one way or another?’

  ‘Don’t be dense,’ he said. ‘He’s being paid to have an opinion, chat’s how. If she tells him you flipped her over and raped her with a corncob, he doesn’t say prove it, he says oh you poor thing and how many times. So say okay like you mean it.’

  ‘Okay like I mean it.’

  ‘Better.’ But he didn’t say it like he really meant it; he said it like a man who wants to ear his lunch and forget the whole thing.

  ‘Don’t get into substantive matters,’ he said. ‘Don’t discuss financial-settlement issues, not even on a "What would you think if I suggested this’ basis. Stick with all the touchy-feely stuff. If they get pissed off and ask why you kept the lunch date if you weren’t going to discuss nuts and bolts, tell them just what you told me, that you wanted to see your wife again.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘And if they leave at that point, can you live with it?’

  ‘Yes.’ I didn’t know if I could or not, but I thought I could, and I strongly sensed that Ring wanted to be done with this conversation.

  ‘As a lawyer - your lawyer - I’m telling you that this is a bull-shit move, and that if it backfires in court, I’ll call a recess just so I can pull you out into the hall and say I told you so. Now, have you got that?’

  ‘Yes. Say hello to that diet plate for me.’

  ‘Fuck the diet plate,’ Ring sold morosely. ‘If I can’t have a double bourbon on the rocks an lunch anymore, I can at least have a double cheeseburger at Brew ‘n Burger.

  ‘Rare,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right, rare.’

  ‘Spoken like a true American-‘

  ‘I hope she stands you up, Steven-‘

  ‘I know you do.’

  He hung up and went out to get his alcohol substitute. When I saw him next, a few days later, there was something between us that didn’t quite bear discussion, although I think we would have talked about it if we had known each other even a little bit better. I saw it in his eyes and I suppose he saw it in mine as well - the knowledge that if Humboldt had been a lawyer instead of a therapist, he, John Ring, would have been in on our luncheon meeting. And in that case he might have wound up as dead as William Humboldt.

  I walked from my office to the Gotham Cafe leaving at 11:15 and arriving across from the restaurant at 11:45.I got there early for my own peace of mind - to make sure the place was where Humboldt had said it was, in other words. That’s the way I am, and pretty much the way I’ve always been. Diane used to call it my obsessive streak’ when we were first married, but I think that by the end she knew better. I don’t trust the competence of others very easily, that’s all. I realize it’s a pain-in-the-ass characteristic, and I know it drove her crazy, but what she never seemed to realize was that I didn’t exactly love it in myself, either. Some things take longer to change than others, though. And some things you can never change, no matter how hard you try.

  The restaurant was right where Humboldt had said it would be, the location marked by a green awning with the words GOTHAM

  CAFE on it. A white city skyline was traced across the plate glass windows. It looked New York trendy. It also looked pretty ordinary, just one of the eight hundred or so pricey restaurants crammed together in Midtown.

  With the meetin
g place located and my mind temporarily set to rest (about that, anyway; I was tense as hell about seeing Diane again and craving a cigarette like mad), I walked up to Madison and browsed in a luggage store for fifteen minutes. Mere window shopping was no good; if Diane and Humboldt came from uptown, they might see me. Diane was liable to recognize me by the set of my shoulders and the hang of my topcoat even from behind, and I didn’t want that. I didn’t want them to know I’d arrived early. I thought it might look needy, even pitiable. So I went inside.

  I bought an umbrella I didn’t need and left the shop at straight up noon by my watch, knowing I could step through the door of the Gotham Cafe at 12:05. My father’s dictum: if you need to be there, show up five minutes early. If they need you to be there, show up five minutes late. I had reached a point where I didn’t know who needed what or why or for how long, but my father’s dictum seemed like the safest course. If it had been just Diane alone, I think I would have arrived dead on time.

  No, that’s probably a lie. I suppose if it had been just Diane, I would have gone in at 12:45, when I first arrived, and waited for her.

  I stood under the awning for a moment, looking in. The place was bright, and I marked that down in its favor. I have an intense dislike for dark restaurants, where you can’t see what you’re eating or drinking. The walls were white and hung with vibrant impressionist drawings. You couldn’t tell what they were, but that didn’t matter; with their primary colors and broad, exuberant strokes, they hit your eyes like visual caffeine. I looked for Diane and saw a woman that might have been her, seated about halfway down the long room and by the wall. It was hard to say, because her back was turned and I don’t have her knack of recognition under difficult circumstances. But the heavyset, balding man she was sitting with certainly looked like a Humboldt. I took a deep breath, opened the restaurant door, and went in.

  There are two phases of withdrawal from tobacco, and I’m convinced that it’s the second that causes most cases of recidivism.

  The physical withdrawal lasts ten days to two weeks, and then most of the symptoms - sweats, headaches, muscle twitches, pounding eyes, insomnia, irritability - disappear. What follows is a much longer period of mental withdrawal. These symptoms may include mild to moderate depression, mourning, some degree of anhedonia (emotional flatness, in other words), forgetfulness, even a species of transient dyslexia. I know all this stuff because I read up on it. Following what happened at the Gotham Cafe, it seemed very important that I do that. I suppose you’d have to say that my interest in the subject fell somewhere between the Land of Hobbies and the Kingdom of Obsession.

  The most common symptom of phase two withdrawal is a feeling of mild unreality. Nicotine improves synaptic transferral and improves concentration - widens the brain’s information highway, in other words. It’s not a big boost, and not really necessary to successful thinking (although most confirmed cigarette junkies believe differently), but when you take it away, you’re left you with a feeling - a pervasive feeling, in my case - that the world has taken on a decidedly dreamy cast. There were many times when it seemed to me that people and cars and the little sidewalk vignettes I observed were actually passing by me on a moving screen, a thing controlled by hidden stagehands turning enormous cranks and revolving enormous drums. It was also a little like being mildly stoned all the time, because the feeling was accompanied by a sense of helplessness and moral exhaustion, a feeling that things had simply to go on the way they were going, for good or for ill, because you (except of course it’s me I’m talking about) were just too damned busy not-smoking to do much of anything else.

  I’m not sure how much all this bears on what happened, but I know it has some bearing, because I was pretty sure something was wrong with the maitre d’ almost as soon as I saw him, and as soon as he spoke to me, I knew.

  He was tall, maybe forty-five, slim (in his tux, at least; in ordinary clothes he would have been skinny), mustached. He had a leather-bound menu in one hand. He looked like battalions of maitre d’s in battalions of fancy New York restaurants, in other words. Except for his bow tie, which was askew, and something on his shirt, that was. A splotch just above the place where his jacket buttoned. It looked like either gravy or a glob of some dark jelly. Also, several strands of his hair stuck up defiantly in back, making me think of Alfalfa in the old Little Rascals one-reelers. That almost made me burst out laughing - I was very nervous, remember - and I had to bite my lips to keep it in.

  ‘Yes, sir?’ he asked as I approached the desk. It came out sounding like Yais, sair? All maitre d’s in New York City have accents, but it is never one you can positively identify. A girl I dated in the mid-eighties, one who did have a sense of humor (along with a fairly large drug habit, unfortunately), told me once that they all grew up on the same little island and hence all spoke the same language.

  ‘What language is it?’ I asked her.

  ‘Snooti,’ she said, and I cracked up.

  This thought came hack to me as I looked past the desk to the woman I’d seen while outside - I was now almost positive it was Diane - and I had to bite the insides of my lips again. As a result, Humboldt’s name came out of me sounding like a haft-smothered sneeze.

  The maitre d’s high, pale brow contracted in a frown. His eyes bored into mine. I had taken them for brown as I approached the desk, but now they looked black.

  ‘Pardon, sir?’ he asked. It came out sounding like Pahdun, sair and looking like Fuck you, Jack. His long fingers, as pale as his brow -

  concert pianist’s fingers, they looked like - tapped nervously on the cover of the menu. The tassel sticking out of it like some sort of half-assed bookmark swung back and forth.

  ‘Humboldt,’ I said. ‘Party of three.’ I found I couldn’t take my eyes off his bow tie, so crooked that the left side of it was almost brushing the shelf under his chin, and that blob on his snowy white dress shirt. Now that I was closer, it didn’t look like either gravy or jelly; it looked like partially dried blood.

  He was looking down at his reservations book, the rogue tuft at the back of his head waving back and forth over the rest of his slicked-down hair. I could see his scalp through the grooves his comb had laid down, and a speckle of dandruff on the shoulders of his tux. It occurred to me that a good headwaiter might have fired an underling put together in such sloppy fashion.

  ‘Ah, yes, monsieur.’ (Ah yais, messoo.) He had found the name.

  ‘Your party is—‘ He was starting to look up. He stopped abruptly, and his eyes sharpened even more, if that was possible, as he looked past me and down. ‘You cannot bring that dog in here,’ he said sharply. ‘How many times have I told you you can’t bring that dog in here!’

  He didn’t quite shout, but spoke so loudly that diners closest to his pulpit-like desk stopped eating and looked around curiously.

  I looked around myself. He had been so emphatic I expected to see somebody’s dog, but there was no one behind me and most certainly no dog. It occurred to me then, I don’t know why, that he was talking about my umbrella, which I had forgotten to check.

  Perhaps on the Island of the maitre d’s, dog was a slang for umbrella, especially when carried by a patron on a day when rain did not look likely.

  I looked back at the maitre d’ and saw that he had already started away from his desk, holding my menu in his hands. He must have sensed that I wasn’t following, because he looked back over his shoulder, eyebrows slightly raised. There was nothing on his face now but polite inquiry - Are you coming, messoo? - and I came. I knew something was wrong with him, but I came. I could not take the time or effort to try to decide what might be wrong with the maitre d’ of a restaurant where I had never been before today and where I would probably never be again; I had Humboldt and Diane to deal with, I had to do it without smoking, and the maitre d’ of the Gotham Cafe would have to take care of his own problems, dog included.

  Diane turned around and at first I saw nothing in her face and in her eyes but a kind of
frozen politeness. Then, just below it, I saw anger... or thought I did. We’d done a lot of arguing during our last three or four months together, but I couldn’t recall ever seeing the sort of concealed anger I sensed in her now, anger that was meant to be hidden by the makeup and the new dress (blue, no Speckles, no slit up the side, deep or otherwise) and the new :hairdo; The heavyset man she was with was saying something, :and she reached out and touched his arm. As he turned toward me, beginning to get to his feet, I saw something else in her face.

  She was afraid of me as well as angry at me. And although she hadn’t said a single word, I was already furious at her. The expression in her eyes was a dead negative; she might as well have been a CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE sign on her forehead between them. I thought I deserved better. Of course, that may just be a way of saying I'm human.

  ‘Monsieur,’ the maitre d’ said, pulling out the chair to Diane’s left.

  I barely heard him, and certainly any thought of his eccentric behaviours and crooked bow tie had left my head. I think that the subject of tobacco had briefly vacated my head for the first time since I’d quit smoking. I could only consider the careful composure of her face and marvel at how I could be angry at her and still want her so much it made me ache to look at her. Absence may or may nor make the heart grow fonder, but it certainly freshens the eye.

  I also found time to wonder if I had really seen all I’d surmised.

  Anger? Yes, that was possible, even likely. If she hadn’t been angry with me to at least some degree, she never would have left in the first place, I supposed. But afraid? Why in God’s name.’ would Diane be afraid of me? I’d never laid a single finger on her. Yes, I suppose I had raised my voice during some of our arguments, but so had she.

  ‘Enjoy your lunch, monsieur,’ the maitre d’ said from some other universe - the one where service people usually stay, only poking their heads into ours when we call them, either because we need something or to complain.