Lunch at the Gotham Cafe
Lunch at the Gotham Cafe
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 needed some time alone, and that I would hear from her therapist. I sat on the chair at the kitchen end of the table, reading this communication over and over again, not able to believe it. The only clear thought I remember having in the next half hour or so was I didn’t even know you had a therapist, Diane.
After a while I got up, went into the bedroom, and looked around. All her clothes were gone (except for a joke sweatshirt someone had given her, with the words RICH BLOND printed on the front in spangly stuff), and the room had a funny dislocated look, as if she had gone through it, looking for something. I checked my stuff to see if she’d taken anything. My hands felt cold and distant while I did this, as if they had been shot full of some numbing drug. As far as I could tell, everything that was supposed to be there was there. I hadn’t expected anything different, and yet the room had that funny look, as if she had pulled at it, the way she sometimes pulled on the ends of her hair when she felt exasperated.
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 she’d left behind over again. It was the same but looking into the strangely rumpled bedroom and the half-empty 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.
Therapist. My eye kept going back to that word. Therapist. I supposed I should have been glad it wasn’t lawyer, but I wasn’t. You will hear from William Humboldt my therapist.
‘Heat from this, sweetiepie,’ I told the empty room, and squeezed my crotch. It didn’t sound rough and funny, as I’d hoped, and the face I saw in the mirror across the room was as pale as paper.
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 hadn’t seen it coming. I didn’t have a clue. What therapist? When did she see him? What did she talk about? Well, I supposed I knew what she talked about – me. Probably stuff about how I never remembered to put the ring down again after I finished taking a leak, how I wanted oral sex a tiresome amount of the time (how much was tiresome? I didn’t know), how I didn’t take enough interest in her job at the publishing company. Another question: how could she talk about the most intimate aspects of her marriage to a man named ’William Humboldt? He sounded like he should be a physicist at CalTech, or maybe a back-bencher in the House of Lords.
Then there was the Super Bonus Question: Why hadn’t I known something was up? How could I have .walked into it like Sonny Liston into Cassius Clay’s famous phantom uppercut? Was :it stupidity? Insensitivity? As the days passed and I thought about the last six or eight months of our two-year marriage, I decided it 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.