Six Stories Page 8

  ‘Mr Davis, I’m Bill Humboldt,’ Diane’s companion said. He held out a large hand that looked reddish and chapped. I shook it briefly. The rest of him was as big as his hand, and his broad face wore the sort of flush habitual drinkers often get after the first one of the day. I put him in his mid-forties, about ten years away from the time when his sagging cheeks would turn into jowls.

  ‘Pleasure,’ I said, not thinking about what I was saying any more than I was thinking about the maitre d’ with the blob on his shirt, only wanting to get the hand-shaking part over so I could turn back to the pretty blonde with the rose and cream complexion, the pale pink lips, and the trim, slim figure. The woman who had, not so long ago, liked to whisper ‘Do me do me do me’ in my ear while she held onto my ass like a saddle with two pommels.

  ‘We’ll get you a drink,’ Humboldt said, looking around for waiter like a man who did it a lot. Her therapist had all the bells and whistles of the incipient alcoholic. Wonderful.

  ‘Perrier and lime is good.’

  ‘For what?’ Humboldt inquired with a big smile. He picked up the half-finished martini in front of him on the table and drained it until the olive with the toothpick in it rested against his lips. He spat it back, then set the glass down and looked at me. ‘WEB, perhaps we’d better get started.’

  I paid no attention. I already had gotten started; I’d done it the instant Diane looked up at me. ‘Hi, Diane,’ I said. It was marvelous, really, how she looked smarter and prettier than previous. More desirable than previous, too. As if she had learned things - yes, even after only two weeks of separation, and while living with Ernie and Dee Dee Coslaw in Pound Ridge - that I could never know.

  ‘How are you, Steve?’ she asked.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. Then, ‘Not so fine, actually. I’ve missed you.’ Only watchful silence from the lady greeted this. Those big blue-green eyes looking at me, no more. Certainly no return serve, no I've missed you, too.

  ‘And I quit smoking. That’s also played hell with my peace of mind.’

  ‘Did you, finally? Good for you.’

  I felt another flash of anger, this time a really ugly one, at her politely dismissive tone. As if I might not be telling the truth, but it didn’t really matter if I was. She’d carped at me about the cigarettes every day for two years, it seemed - how they were going to give me cancer, how they were going to give her cancer, how she wouldn’t even consider getting pregnant until I stopped, so I could just save any breath I might have been planning to waste on that subject - and now all at once it didn’t matter anymore, because I didn’t matter anymore.

  ‘Steve -Mr Davis,’ Humboldt said, ‘I thought we might begin by getting you to look at a list of grievances which Diane has worked out during our sessions - our exhaustive sessions, I might say -

  over the last couple of weeks. Certainly it can serve as a springboard to our main purpose for being here, which is how to order a period of separation that will allow growth on both of your parts.’

  There was a briefcase on the floor beside him. He picked it up with a grunt and set it on the table’s one empty chair. Humboldt began unsnapping the clasps, but I quit paying attention at that point. I wasn’t interested in springboards to separation, whatever that meant. I felt a combination of panic and anger that was, in some ways, the most peculiar emotion I have ever experienced.

  I looked at Diane and said, ‘I want to try again. Can we reconcile?

  Is there any chance of that?’

  The look of absolute horror on her face crashed hopes I hadn’t even known I’d been holding onto. Horror was followed by anger.

  ‘Isn’t that just like you!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘Diane—‘

  ‘Where’s the safe deposit box key, Steven? Where did you hide it?’

  Humboldt looked alarmed. He reached out and touched her arm.

  ‘Diane .. I thought we agreed—‘

  ‘What we agreed is that this son of a bitch will hide everything under the nearest rock and then plead poverty if we let him!’

  ‘You searched the bedroom for it before you left, didn’t you' I asked quietly. ‘Tossed it like a burglar.’

  She flushed at that. I don’t know if it was shame, anger, or both.

  ‘It’s my box as well as yours! My things as well as yours!’

  Humboldt was looking more alarmed than ever. Several diners had glanced around at us. Most of them looked mused, actually. People are surely God’s most bizarre creatures. ‘Please... please, let’s not—‘

  ‘Where did you hide it, Steven?’

  ‘I didn’t hide it. I never hid it. I left it up at the cabin by accident, that’s all.’

  She smiled knowingly. ‘Oh, yes. By accident. Uh-huh.’ I said nothing, and the knowing smile slipped away. ‘I want it,’ she said, then amended hastily: ‘I want a copy.’

  People in hell want icewater, I thought. Out loud I said, 'There's nothing more to be done about it, is there?'

  She hesitated, maybe hearing something in my voice she didn't actually want to hear, or to acknowledge. 'No,' she said. 'The next time you see me, it will be with my lawyer. I'm divorcing you.'

  'Why?' What I heard in my voice now was a plaintive note like a sheep's bleat. I didn't like it, but there wasn't a goddamned thing I could do about it. 'Why?'

  ‘Oh, I Jesus. Do you expect me to believe you’re really that dense?’

  ‘I just can’t—'

  Her cheeks were brighter than ever, the flush now rising almost her temples. ‘Yes, probably you expect me to believe just that very thing. Isn’t that typical’ She picked up her water and spilled the top two inches on the tablecloth because her hand was trembling. I flashed back at once - I mean kapow - to the day she’d left, remembering how I’d knocked the glass of orange juice onto the floor and how I’d cautioned myself not to try picking up the broken pieces of glass until my hands had settled down, and how I’d gone ahead anyway and cut myself for my pains.

  ‘Stop it, this is counterproductive,’ Humboldt said. He sounded like a playground monitor trying to stop a scuffle before it gets started, but he seemed to have forgotten all about Diane’s shit-list; his eyes were sweeping the rear part of the room, looking out for our waiter, or any waiter whose eye he could catch. He was lot less interested in therapy, at that particular moment, than he was in obtaining what the British like to call the other half.

  ‘I only want to know—‘ I began.

  ‘What you want to know doesn’t have anything to do with why Humboldt said, and for a moment he actually sounded alert.

  ‘Yes, right, finally,’ Diane said. She spoke in a brittle, urgent voice. ‘Finally it’s not about what you want, what you need.’

  ‘I don’t know what that means, but I’m willing to listen,’ I said. 'If you wanted to try joint counselling instead of... uh... therapy...

  whatever it is Humboldt does... I’m not against it if—‘

  She raised her hands to shoulder level, palms out. ‘Oh, God, Joe Camel goes New Age,’ she said, then dropped her hands back into her lap. ‘After all the days you rode off into the sunset, tall in the saddle. Say it ain’t so, Joe.’

  ‘Stop it', Humboldt told her. He looked from his client to his clients soon-to-be ex-husband (it was going to happen, all right; even the slight unreality that comes with not-smoking couldn’t conceil that self-evident truth from me by that point). ‘One more word from either of you and I’m going to declare this luncheon at an end.' He gave us a small smile, one so obviously manufactured that I found it perversely endearing. 'And we haven't even heard the specials yet.'

  That - the first mention of food since I'd joined them - was just before the bad things started to happen, and I remember smelling salmon from one of the nearby tables. In the two weeks since I'd quit smoking, my sense of smell had become incredibly sharp, but I do not count that as much of a blessing, especially when it comes to salmon. I used to like it, but now can't abide the smell of it, let alone the taste. To me
it smells of pain and fear and blood and death.

  'He started it,' Diane said sulkily.

  You started it, you were the one who tossed the joint and then walked out when you couldn't find what you wanted, I thought, but I kept it to myself. Humboldt clearly meant what he said; he would take Diane by the hand and walk her out of the restaurant if we started that schoolyard no-I-didn't, yes-you-did shit. Not even the prospect of another drink would hold him here.

  'Okay,' I said mildly .. and I had to work hard to achieve that mild tone, believe me. 'I started it. What's next?' I knew, of course: the grievances. Diane's shit-list, in other words. And a lot more about the key to the lockbox. Probably the only satisfaction I was going to get out of this sorry situation was telling them that neither of them was going to see a copy of that key until an officer of the court presented me with a paper ordering me to turn one over. I hadn't touched the stuff in the box since Diane booked on out of my life, and I didn't intend to touch any of it in the immediate future.. but she wasn't going to touch it, either. Let her chew crackers and try to whistle, as my grandmother used to say.

  Humboldt took out a sheaf of papers. They were held by one of those designer paper clips - the ones that come in different colors.

  It occurred to me that I had arrived abysmally unprepared for this meeting, and not just because my lawyer was jaw-deep in a cheeseburger somewhere, either. Diane had her new dress; Humboldt had his designer briefcase, plus Diane's shit-list held together by a color-coded designer paper clip; all I had was a new umbrella on a sunny day. I looked down at where it lay beside my chair and saw there was still a price tag dangling from the handle.

  All at once I felt like Minnie Pearl.

  The room smelled wonderful, as most restaurants do since they banned Smoking in them - of flowers and wine and fresh coffee and chocolate and pastry - but what I smelled most clearly was salmon. I remember thinking that it smelled very good, and that I would probably order some. I also remember thinking that if I could eat at a meeting like this, I could probably eat anywhere.

  ' The major problems your wife has articulated - so far, at least -

  are insensitivity on your part regarding her job, and an inability to trust in personal affairs,' Humboldt said. 'In regard to the second, I'd say your unwillingness to give Diane fair access to the safe deposit box you maintain in common pretty well sums up the trust issue.'

  I opened my mouth to tell him I had a trust issue, too, that I didn't trust Diane not to take the whole works and then sit on it. Before I could say anything, however, I was interrupted by the maitre d'. He was screaming as well as talking, and I've tried to indicate that. but a bunch of e's strung together can't really convey the quality of that sound. It was as if he had a bellyful of steam and a teakettle whistle caught in his throat.

  'That dog... Eeeeeee! . . . I told you time and again about that dog .

  . Eeeeeee!... All that time I can't sleep.. . Eeeeeee!.. . She says cut youf fave, that cunt... Eeeeeee! . . . How you tease me!... Eeeeeee! .

  . . And now you bring that dog in here... Eeeeeee!'

  The room fell silent at once, of course, diners looking up from their meals or their conversations as the thin, pale, black-clad figure came stalking across the room with its face outthrust and its long storklike legs scissoring. No amusement on the surrounding faces now; only astonishment. The maitre d's bow tie had turned full ninety degrees from its normal position, so it now looked like the hands of a clock indicating the hour of six. His hands were clasped behind his back as he walked, and bent forward slightly from the waist as he was, he made me think of a drawing in my sixth-grade literature book, an illustration of Washington Irving's unfortunate schoolteacher, Ichabod Crane.

  It was me he was looking at, me he was approaching. I stared at him, feeling almost hypnotized - it was like one of those dreams where you discover that you haven't studied for the bar exam you're supposed to take or that you're attending a White House dinner in your honor with no clothes on - and I might have stayed that way if Humboldt hadn't moved.

  I heard his chair scrape back and glanced at him. He was standing up, his napkin held loosely in one hand. He looked surprised, but he also looked furious. I suddenly realized two things: that he was drunk, quite drunk, in fact, and that he saw this as a smirch on both his hospitality and his competence. He had chosen the restaurant, after all, and now look - the masteter of ceremonies had gone bonkers.

  'Eeeeee.!. . . I teach you! For the last time I teach you...'

  'Oh, my God, he's wet his pants,' a woman at a nearby table murmured. Her voice was low. but perfectly audible in the silence as the maitre d' drew in a fresh breath with which to scream, and I saw she was right. The crotch of the skinny man's dress pants was soaked.

  'See here, you idiot,' Humboldt said, turning to face him, and the maitre d' brought his left hand out from behind his back. In it was the largest butcher knife I have ever seen. It had to have been two feet long, with the top part of its cutting edge slightly belled, .like a cutlass in an old pirate movie.

  'Look out!' I yelled at Humboldt, and at one of the tables against the wall, a skinny man in rimless spectacles screamed, ejecting a mouthful of chewed brown fragments of food onto the tablecloth in front of him.

  Humboldt seemed to hear neither my yell nor the other man's scream. He was frowning thunderously at the maitre d'. 'You don't need to expect to see me in here again if this is the way -'

  Humboldt began.

  'Eeeeee! EEEEEEEEE!' the maitre d' screamed, and swung the butcher knife fiat through the air. It made a kind of whickering sound, like a whispered sentence. The period was the sound of the blade burying itself in William Humboldt's right cheek. Blood exploded out of the wound in a furious spray of tiny droplets. They decorated the tablecloth in a fan-shaped stipplework, and I clearly saw (I will never forget it) one bright red drop fall into my water glass and then dive for the bottom with a pinkish filament like a tail stretching out behind it. It looked like a bloody tadpole.

  Humboldt's cheek snapped open, revealing his teeth, and as he clapped his hand to the gouting wound, I saw something pinkish-white lying on the shoulder of his charcoal gray suitcoat. It wasn't until the whole thing was over that I realized it must have been his earlobe.

  'Tell this in your ears! the maitre d' screamed furiously at Diane's bleeding therapist, who stood there with one hand clapped to his cheek. Except for the blood pouring over and between his fingers, Humboldt looked weirdly like Jack Benny doing one of his famous double-takes. 'Call this to your hateful tattle-tale friends of the street. . . you misery. . . Eeeeee! . . . DOG LOVER!'

  Now other people were screaming, mostly at the sight of the blood, I think. Humboldt was a big man, and he was bleeding like a stuck pig. I could hear it pattering on the floor like water from a broken pipe, and the front of his white shirt was now red. His tie, which had been red to start with, was now black.

  'Steve?' Diane said. 'Steven?'

  A man and a woman had been having lunch at the table behind her and slightly to her left. Now the man - about thirty and handsome in the way George Hamilton used to be - bolted to his feet and ran toward the front of the restaurant.

  'Troy, don't go without me!' his date screamed, but Troy never looked hack. He'd forgotten all about a library book he was supposed to return, it seemed, or maybe about how he'd promised to wax the car.

  If there had been a paralysis in the room - I can't actually say if there was or not, although I seem to have seen a great deal, and to remember it all - that broke it. There were more screams and other people got up. Several tables were overturned. Glasses and china shattered on the floor. I saw a man with his arm around the waist of his female companion hurry past behind the maitre d'; her hand was clamped into his shoulder like a claw. For a moment her eyes met mine, and they were as empty as the eyes of a Greek bust. Her face was dead pale, haglike with horror.

  All of this might have happened in ten seconds, or maybe twenty. I reme
mber it like a series of photographs or filmstrips, but it has no timeline. Time ceased to exist for me at the moment Alfalfa the maitre d' brought his left hand out from behind his back and I saw the butcher knife. During that time the man in the tuxedo continued to spew out a confusion of words in his special maitre d's language, the one that old girlfriend had called Snooti. Some of it really was in a foreign language, some of it was English but completely without sense, and some of it was striking . . . almost haunting.

  Have you ever read any of Dutch Schutz's long, confused deathbed statement? It was like that. Much of it I can't remember- What I can remember I suppose I'll never forget.

  Humboldt staggered backward, still holding his lacerated cheek.

  The backs of his knees struck the seat of his chair, and he sat down heavily on it. He looks like someone who's just been told he's got cancer, I thought. He started to turn toward Diane and me, his eyes wide and shocked. I had time to see there were tears spilling out of them, and then the maitre d' wrapped both hands around the handle of the butcher knife and buried it in the top of Humboldt's head. It made a sound like someone whacking a pile of towels with a cane.

  'Boot!' Humboldt cried. I'm quite sure that's what his last words on planet Earth was - 'boot.' Then his weeping eyes rolled up to whites and he slumped forward onto his plate, sweeping his own glassware off the table and onto the floor with one outflung hand.

  As this happened, the maitre d' - all his hair was sticking up in back now, not just some of it - pried the long knife out of his head.

  Blood sprayed out of the head wound in a kind of vertical curtain, and splashed the front of Diane's dress. She raised her hands to her shoulders with the palms turned out once again, but this time it was in horror rather than exasperation. She shrieked and then clapped her blood-spattered hands to her face, over her eyes. The maitre d'

  paid no attention to her. Instead, he turned to me.