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“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 being paid to have an opinion, that’s how. 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 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— your lawyer—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.
I walked from my office to the Gotham Café, leaving at eleven-fifteen and arriving across from the restaurant at eleven-forty-five. I got there 321
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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
CAFÉ on it. A white city skyline was traced across the plate-glass windows. It looked New York–trendy. It also looked pretty una-mazing, 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 Café at twelve-oh-five. 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 just been Diane, I 322
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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.
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 Café, 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), 323
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but when you take it away, you’re left 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 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 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 maître 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 maître 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 maître 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.