A terrible paralysis had gripped Kinnell. He threw it off with an effort and bolted toward the bedroom door, wanting to lock it before the thing could get in here, but he slipped in a puddle of soapy water and this time he did go down, flat on his back on the oak planks, and what he saw as the door clicked open and the motorcycle boots crossed the room toward where he lay, naked and with his hair full of Prell, was the picture hanging on the wall over his bed, the picture of the Road Virus idling in front of his house with the driver’s-side door open.
The driver’s-side bucket seat, he saw, was full of blood. I’m going outside, I think, Kinnell thought, and closed his eyes.
311
Lunch at
the Gotham Café
One day when I was in New York, I walked past a very nice-looking restaurant. Inside, the maître d’ was showing a couple to their table. The couple was arguing. The maître d’ caught my eye and tipped me what may have been the most cynical wink in the universe. I went back to my hotel and wrote this story. For the three days it was in work, I was totally possessed by it. For me what makes it go isn’t the crazy maître d’ but the spooky rela-tionship between the divorcing couple. In their own way, they’re crazier than he is. By far.
One day I came home from the brokerage house where I worked and found a letter—more of a note, actually—from my wife on the dining room table. It said she was leaving me, that she was pursuing a divorce, that I would hear from her lawyer. I sat on the chair at the kitchen end of the table, reading this communication over and over again, not able to believe it. After awhile I got up, went into the bedroom, and looked in the closet. All her clothes were gone except for one pair of sweatpants and a joke sweatshirt someone had given her, with the words RICH BLONDE printed on the front in spangly stuff.
I went back to the dining room table (which was actually at one end of the living room; it was only a four-room apartment) and read the six sentences over again. It was the same, but looking into the 313
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half-empty bedroom closet had started me on the way to believing what it said. It was a chilly piece of work, that note. There was no
“Love” or “Good luck” or even “Best” at the bottom of it. “Take care of yourself ” was as warm as it got. Just below that she had scratched her name, Diane.
I walked into the kitchen, poured myself a glass of orange juice, then knocked it onto the floor when I tried to pick it up. The juice sprayed onto the lower cabinets and the glass broke. I knew I would cut myself if I tried to pick up the glass—my hands were shaking—
but I picked it up anyway, and I cut myself. Two places, neither deep.
I kept thinking that it was a joke, then realizing it wasn’t. Diane wasn’t much of a joker. But the thing was, I didn’t see it coming. I didn’t have a clue. I didn’t know if that made me stupid or insensitive. As the days passed and I thought about the last six or eight months of our two-year marriage, I realized I had been both.
That night I called her folks in Pound Ridge and asked if Diane was there. “She is, and she doesn’t want to talk to you,” her mother said.
“Don’t call back.” The phone went dead in my ear.
Two days later I got a call at work from Diane’s lawyer, who introduced himself as William Humboldt, and, after ascertaining that he was indeed speaking to Steven Davis, began calling me Steve. I suppose that’s a little hard to believe, but it’s what happened. Lawyers are so bizarre.
Humboldt told me I would be receiving “preliminary paperwork”
early the following week, and suggested I prepare “an account overview prefatory to dissolving your domestic corporation.” He also advised me not to make any “sudden fiduciary movements” and suggested that I keep all receipts for items purchased, even the smallest, during this “financially difficult passage.” Last of all, he suggested that I find myself a lawyer.
“Listen a minute, would you?” I asked. I was sitting at my desk with my head down and my left hand curled around my forehead. My eyes were shut so I wouldn’t have to look into the bright gray socket 314
EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL
of my computer screen. I’d been crying a lot, and my eyes felt like they were full of sand.
“Of course,” he said. “Happy to listen, Steve.”
“I’ve got two things for you. First, you mean ‘preparatory to ending your marriage,’ not ‘prefatory to dissolving your domestic corporation’ . . . and if Diane thinks I’m going to try and cheat her out of what’s hers, she’s wrong.”
“Yes,” Humboldt said, not indicating agreement but that he understood my point.
“Second, you’re her lawyer, not mine. I find you calling me by my first name patronizing and insensitive. Do it again on the phone and I’ll hang up on you. Do it to my face and I’ll probably try to punch your lights out.”
“Steve . . . Mr. Davis . . . I hardly think—”
I hung up on him. It was the first thing I’d done that gave me any pleasure since finding that note on the dining room table, with her three apartment keys on top of it to hold it down.
That afternoon I talked to a friend in the legal department, and he recommended a friend of his who did divorce work. The divorce lawyer was John Ring, and I made an appointment with him for the following day. I went home from the office as late as I could, walked back and forth through the apartment for awhile, decided to go out to a movie, couldn’t find anything I wanted to see, tried the television, couldn’t find anything there to look at, either, and did some more walking. And at some point I found myself in the bedroom, standing in front of an open window fourteen floors above the street, and chucking out all my cigarettes, even the stale old pack of Viceroys from the very back of my top desk drawer, a pack that had probably been there for ten years or more—since before I had any idea there was such a creature as Diane Coslaw in the world, in other words.
Although I’d been smoking between twenty and forty cigarettes a day for twenty years, I don’t remember any sudden decision to quit, 315
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nor any dissenting interior opinions—not even a mental suggestion that maybe two days after your wife walks out is not the optimum time to quit smoking. I just stuffed the full carton, the half carton, and the two or three half-used packs I found lying around out the window and into the dark. Then I shut the window (it never once occurred to me that it might have been more efficient to throw the user out instead of the product; it was never that kind of situation), lay down on my bed, and closed my eyes. As I drifted off, it occurred to me that tomorrow was probably going to be one of the worst days of my life.
It further occurred to me that I would probably be smoking again by noon. I was right about the first thing, wrong about the second.
The next ten days—the time during which I was going through the worst of the physical withdrawal from nicotine—were difficult and often unpleasant, but perhaps not as bad as I had thought they would be. And although I was on the verge of smoking dozens—no, hundreds—of times, I never did. There were moments when I thought I would go insane if I didn’t have a cigarette, and when I passed people on the street who were smoking I felt like screaming Give that to me, motherfucker, that’s mine! at them, but I didn’t.
For me, the worst times were late at night. I think (but I’m not sure; all my thought processes from around the time Diane left are very blurry in my mind) I had an idea that I would sleep better if I quit, but I didn’t. I lay awake some mornings until three, hands laced together under my pillow, looking up at the ceiling, listening to sirens and to the rumble of trucks headed downtown. At those times I would think about the twenty-four-hour Korean market almost directly across the street from my building. I would think about the white fluorescent light inside, so bright it was almost like a Kübler-Ross near-death experience, and how it spilled out onto the sidewalk between the displays which, in another hour, two young Korean men in white paper hats would begin to fill with fruit. I would think about the older man behind the counter, also Korean, also in a paper hat, and the formidable racks of cigarettes behind him, as big as the stone tablets Charlton Heston brought down from Mount Sinai in 316