Two days later I got a call at work from the famous William Humboldt. After ascertaining that he was indeed speaking to Steven Davis, he promptly began calling me Steve. You may find
that a trifle hard to believe, but it is nevertheless exactly what happened. Humboldt’s voice was soft, small, and intimate. It made me think of a car purring on a silk pillow.
When I asked after Diane, Humboldt told me that she was doing as well as expected,’ and when I asked if I could talk to her, he said he believed that would be ‘counterproductive to her case at: this time.’ Then, even more unbelievably (to my mind, at least) he asked in a grotesquely solicitous voice how I was doing.
I’m in the pink,’ I said. 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 of my computer screen. I’d been crying a lot, and my eyes felt like they were full of sand. ‘Mr Humboldt … it is mister, I take it, and -not doctor?’
‘I use mister, although I have degrees-‘
‘Mr Humboldt, if Diane doesn’t want to come home and doesn’t want to talk to me, what does she want? Why did you call me?’
‘Diane would like access to the safe deposit box,’ he said in his mooch, purry little voice. ‘Your joint safe deposit box.’
I suddenly understood the punched, rumpled look of the bedroom and felt the first bright stirrings of anger. She had been looking for the key to the box, of course. She hadn’t been interested in my little collection of pre-World War II silver dollars or the onyx pinkie ring she’d bought me for our first anniversary (we’d only had two in all) . . . but in the safe deposit box was the diamond necklace I’d given her, and about thirty thousand dollars’ worth of negotiable securities. The key was at our little summer cabin in the Adirondacks, I realized. Not on purpose, but out of simple forgetfulness. I’d left it on top of the bureau, pushed way back amid the dust and the mouse turds.
Pain in my left hand. I looked down and my hand rolled into a right fist, and rolled it open. The nails had cut crescents in the pad of the palm.
‘Steve?’ Humboldt was purring. ‘Steve, are you there?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ve got two things for you. Are you ready?’
‘Of course,’ he said in that parry little voice, and for a moment I had a bizarre vision: William Humboldt blasting through the desert on a Harley-Davidson, surrounded by a pack of Hell’s Angels. On the back of his leather jacket: BORN TO COMFORT.
Pain in my left hand again. It had closed up again on its own, just liken clam. This time when I unrolled it, two of the four little crescents were oozing blood.
‘First,’ I said, ‘that box is going to stay closed unless some divorce court judge orders it opened in the presence of Diane’s attorney and mine. In the meantime, no one is going to loot it, and that’s a promise. Not me, not her.’ I paused. ‘Not you, either.’
‘I think that your hostile attitude is counterproductive,’ he said.
‘And if you examine your last few statements, Steve, you may begin to understand why your wife is so emotionally shattered, so—‘
‘Second,’ I overrode him (it’s something we hostile people are good at), ‘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 you’ll find out just how hostile my attitude can be.’
‘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. I didn’t want a divorce – I was furious at her, but had not the slightest question that I still loved her and wanted her back – but I didn’t like Humboldt. I didn’t like the idea of Humboldt. He made me nervous, him and his purry little voice. I think I would have preferred some hardball shyster who would have called up and said, You give us a copy of that lockbox key before the close of business today, Davis, and maybe my client will relent and decide to leave you with something besides two pairs of underwear and your blood donor’s card-got it?
That I could have understood. Humboldt, on the other hand, felt sneaky.
The divorce lawyer was John Ring, and he listened patiently to my tale of woe. I suspect he’d heard most of it before.
‘If I was entirely sure she wanted a divorce, I think I’d be easier in my mind,’ I finished.
‘Be entirely sure,’ Ring said at once. ‘Humboldt’s a stalking horse, Mr Davis . . . and a potentially damaging witness if this drifts into court. I have no doubt that your wife went to a lawyer first, and when the lawyer found out about the missing lockbox key, he suggested Humboldt. A lawyer couldn’t go right to you; that would be unethical. Come across with that key, my friend, and Humboldt will disappear from the picture. Count on it.’
Most of this went right past me. I was concentrating on what he’d said first.
‘You think she wants a divorce,’ I said.
‘Oh, yes,’ he replied. ‘She wants a divorce. Indeed she does. And she doesn’t intend to walk away from the marriage empty-handed.’
I made an appointment with Ring to sit down and discuss things further the following day. I went home from the office as late as I could, walked back and forth through the apartment for a while, 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, or 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 crossed my mind 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.
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, motherfucher, that’s mine!, 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 Kubler-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 had brought down from Mount Sinai in The Ten Commandments. I would think about getting up, dressing, going over there, getting a pack of cigarettes (or maybe nine or ten of them), and sitting by the window, smoking one Marlboro after another as the sky lightened to the east and the sun came up. I never did, but on many early mornings I went to sleep counting cigarette brands instead of sheep: Winston.. . Winston 100s.. .