Humboldt began unsnapping the clasps, but I quit paying attention at that point. The fact was, I did mind. It wasn’t a matter of caution, either; it was a matter of priorities. I felt an instant’s gratitude that Ring had been called away. It had certainly clarified the issues.
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 328
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even known I’d been holding onto. Instead of answering, she looked past me at Humboldt.
“You said we didn’t have to talk about this!” Her voice was trembling, accusatory. “You said you wouldn’t even let it come up!”
Humboldt looked a little flustered. He shrugged and glanced briefly down at his empty martini glass before looking back up at Diane. I think he was wishing he’d ordered a double. “I didn’t know Mr. Davis would be attending this meeting without his lawyer. You should have called me, Mr. Davis. Since you did not, I feel it necessary to inform you that Diane did not greenlight this meeting with any thoughts of reconciliation in mind. Her decision to seek a divorce is final.”
He glanced at her briefly, seeking confirmation, and got it. She was nodding emphatically. Her cheeks were considerably brighter than they had been when I sat down, and it was not the sort of flush I associate with embarrassment. “You bet it is,” she said, and I saw that furious look on her face again.
“Diane, why?” I hated the plaintive note I heard in my voice, a sound almost like a sheep’s bleat, but there wasn’t a goddamned thing I could do about it. “Why?”
“Oh Jesus,” she said. “Are you telling me you really don’t know?”
“Yes—”
Her cheeks were brighter than ever, the flush now rising almost to her temples. “No, probably you don’t. 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 prevent a scuffle before it gets started, but his eyes were sweeping the rear part of the room, looking for our waiter, or any waiter whose eye he could catch. He was a lot 329
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less interested in us, at that particular moment, than he was in obtaining what the British like to call “the other half.”
“I just want to know—” I began.
“What you want to know doesn’t have anything to do with why we’re here, ” Humboldt said, and for a moment he sounded as sharp and alert as he probably had been when he first strode out of law school with his diploma in his hand.
“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.
“We could try counselling, I’m not against it if maybe—”
She raised her hands to shoulder-level, palms out. “Oh God, Mr.
Macho’s gone 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 client’s soon-to-be ex-husband (it was going to happen, all right; even the slight unreality that comes with not-smoking couldn’t conceal 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 I 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 walked out, 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.
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“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; papers, papers, papers. And probably the only satisfaction I was going to get out of this sorry situation was telling them that I wasn’t going to sign any, or even look at any, on the advice of my lawyer. I glanced at Diane again, but she was looking down at her empty plate and her hair hid her face. I felt a strong urge to grab her by the shoulders and shake her inside her new blue dress like a pebble inside of a gourd. Do you think you’re in this alone? I would shout at her. Do you think you’re in this alone? Well, the Marlboro Man has got news for you, sweetheart—you’re a stubborn, self-indulgent little bi—
“Mr. Davis?” Humboldt asked politely.
I looked around at him.
“There you are,” he said. “I thought we’d lost you again.”
“Not at all,” I said.
“Good. Lovely.”
He had several sheafs of paper in his hands. They were held together by those paperclips that come in different colors—red, blue, yellow, purple. They went well with the Impressionist drawings on the walls of the Gotham Café. It occurred to me that I had come abysmally unprepared for this meeting, and not just because my lawyer was on the twelve-thirty-three to Babylon, either. Diane had her new dress; Humboldt had his Brinks truck of a briefcase, plus documents held together by color-coded paperclips; all I had was a new umbrella on a sunny day. I looked down at where it lay beside my chair (it had never crossed my mind to check it) 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.
“I have here a number of forms which will allow both you and Ms.
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Davis to remain financially mobile while assuring that neither of you will have unfair access to the funds you’ve both worked so hard to accumulate,” Humboldt said. “I also have preliminary court notifi-cations which need to be signed by you, and forms that will allow us to put your bonds and T-bills in an escrow account until your current situation is settled by the court.”
I opened my mouth to tell him I wasn’t going to sign anything, and if that meant the meeting was over so be it, but I didn’t get out so much as a single word. Before I could, I was interrupted by the maître 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 . . . Eeeeee! . . . She says cut your face, 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 in aston-ishment 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. The maître d’s bow-tie had turned a 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.