Everything's Eventual (44 page)

I hung up, 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.

a

On the morning of our scheduled lunch, John Ring called and told me he couldn't make it, and that I would have to cancel. It's my mother, he said, sounding harried. She fell down the damned stairs and broke her hip. Out in Babylon. I'm leaving now for Penn Station. I'll have to take the train. He spoke in the tone of a man saying he'll have to go by camel across the Gobi.

I thought for a second, jiggling a fresh toothpick between my fingers. Two used ones lay beside my computer terminal, the ends frayed. I was going to have to watch that; it was all too easy to imagine my stomach filling up with sharp little splinterettes. The replacement of one bad habit with another seems almost inevitable, I've noticed.

Steven? Are you there?

Yes, I said. I'm sorry about your mother, but I'm going to keep the lunch-date.

He sighed, and when he spoke he sounded sympathetic as well as harried. I understand that you want to see her, and that's the reason why you have to be very careful, and make no mistakes. You're not Donald Trump and she's not Ivana, but this isn't a no-faulter we got here, either, where you get your decree by registered mail. You've done very well for yourself, Steven, especially in the last five years.

I know, but

And for thuh-reeof 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 she knew damned well it was my favorite.

He sighed again. I can't have this discussion, or I'm going to miss my train. There isn't another one until one-oh-one.

Go and catch your train.

I will, but first I'm going to make one more effort to get through to you. A meeting like this is like a joust. The lawyers are the knights; the clients are reduced, for the time being, to no more than squires with Sir Barrister's lance in one hand and the reins of his horse in the other. His tone suggested that this was an old image, and well-loved. What you're telling me is that, since I can't be there, you're going to hop on my nag and go galloping at the other guy with no lance, no armor, no faceplate, probably not even a jockstrap.

I want to see her, I said. I want to see how she is. How she looks. Hey, without you there, maybe Humboldt won't even want to talk.

Oh, wouldn't that be nice, he said, and came out with a small, cynical laugh. I'm not going to talk you out 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'm hearing you.

Good. Don't yell at her, Steven. That's big number one. Are you hearingthat?

Yes. 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. How can he have an opinion about me one way or another?

Don't be dense, he said. He's beingpaid to have an opinion, that's how. So say okay like you mean it.

Okay like I mean it.

Better. Buthe didn't say it like he really meant it; he said it like a man who is checking his watch.

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. If he gets pissed off and asks why you kept the lunch-date if you weren't going to discuss nuts and bolts, tell him 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 knew that Ring wanted to catch his train.

As a lawyer yourlawyer I'm telling you that this is a bullshit 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 your mother.

Maybe tonight, Ring said, and now he sounded as if he were rolling his eyes. I won't get a word in until then. I have to run, Steven.

Okay.

I hope she stands you up.

I know you do.

He hung up and went to see his mother, out in Babylon. 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 his mother hadn't fallen down the stairs and broken her hip, he might have wound up as dead as William Humboldt.

a

I walked from my office to the Gotham CafT, leaving at eleven-fifteen and arriving across from the restaurant at eleven-forty-five. 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 wordsGOTHAM CAF+ on it. A white city skyline was traced across the plate-glass windows. It looked New Yorkutrendy. It also looked pretty unamazing, just one of the eight hundred or so pricey restaurants crammed together in midtown.

With the meeting-place located and my mind temporarily set at 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. 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 CafT at twelve-oh-five. My father's dictum: If you need to be there, show up five minutes early. If they needyou 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 just been Diane, I would have gone in at eleven-forty-five, 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 be 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.

a

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 flat-line, 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 CafT, 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 with a feeling apervasive 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 to simply 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 busynot-smoking to do much of anything else.

I'm not sure how much all this bears on what happened, but I know it hassome bearing, because I was pretty sure something was wrong with the maetre 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 probably would have looked skinny), mustached. He had a leather-bound menu in one hand. He looked like battalions of maetre 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 oldLittle 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 likeYais sair? All maetre 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 whodid 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 back 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 half-smothered sneeze.

The maetre 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 likePahdun, sair and looking likeFuck 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 thatdog in here!

He didn't quite shout, but spoke so loudly that several of the 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 seesomebody'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, that perhaps on the Island of the Maetre D's, dog was a slang term for umbrella, especially when carried by a patron on a day when rain did not seem likely.