This thought came back to me as I looked past the desk to the 324
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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 maître 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 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 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 325
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about my umbrella, that perhaps on the Island of the Maître D’s, dog was a slang term for umbrella, especially when carried by a patron on a day when rain did not seem likely.
I looked back at the maître 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 enquiry— 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 maître 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 maître d’ of the Gotham Café 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) 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 with me. And although she hadn’t said a single word, I was already furious at her. Everything on her face and in her eyes was negative; she might as well have been wearing a CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE sign on her forehead. I thought I deserved better.
“Monsieur,” the maître d’ said, pulling out the chair to Diane’s left.
I barely heard him, and certainly any thought of his eccentric behavior and crooked bow-tie had left my head. I think that even 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 with her and still want her so 326
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much it made me ache to look at her. Absence may or may not 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 maître 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.
“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 maître 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.
“Where is Mr. Ring?” Humboldt asked, looking around (a bit theatrically, I thought).
“Mr. Ring is on his way to Long Island. His mother fell downstairs and broke her hip.”
“Oh, wonderful,” Humboldt said. 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. “And I bet I can guess what he told you.”
I heard this but paid no attention. For the time being, Humboldt 327
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was no more important than minor static on a radio program you really want to hear. I looked at Diane instead. It was marvellous, really, how she looked smarter and prettier than previous. 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.
“We have a little business to transact,” Humboldt said. “If you don’t mind, that is.”
There was one of those big, boxy lawyer suitcases on the floor beside him. He picked it up with a grunt and set it on the chair where my lawyer would have been if his mother hadn’t broken her hip.