I opened my mouth to tell him I had a trust issue, too, that I didn’t trust Diane not to take the whole works and then sit on it. Before I could say anything, however, I was interrupted by the maitre 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.. . Eeeeeee!.. . She says cut youf fave, 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 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. No amusement on the surrounding faces now; only astonishment. The maitre d’s bow tie had turned 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.
It was me he was looking at, me he was approaching. I stared at him, feeling almost hypnotized – it was like one of those dreams where you discover that you haven’t studied for the bar exam you’re supposed to take or that you’re attending a White House
dinner in your honor with no clothes on – and I might have stayed that way if Humboldt hadn’t moved.
I heard his chair scrape back and glanced at him. He was standing up, his napkin held loosely in one hand. He looked surprised, but he also looked furious. I suddenly realized two things: that he was drunk, quite drunk, in fact, and that he saw this as a smirch on both his hospitality and his competence. He had chosen the restaurant, after all, and now look – the masteter of ceremonies had gone bonkers.
‘Eeeeee.!. . . I teach you! For the last time I teach you…’
‘Oh, my God, he’s wet his pants,’ a woman at a nearby table murmured. Her voice was low. but perfectly audible in the silence as the maitre d’ drew in a fresh breath with which to scream, and I saw she was right. The crotch of the skinny man’s dress pants was soaked.
‘See here, you idiot,’ Humboldt said, turning to face him, and the maitre d’ brought his left hand out from behind his back. In it was the largest butcher knife I have ever seen. It had to have been two feet long, with the top part of its cutting edge slightly belled, .like a cutlass in an old pirate movie.
‘Look out!’ I yelled at Humboldt, and at one of the tables against the wall, a skinny man in rimless spectacles screamed, ejecting a mouthful of chewed brown fragments of food onto the tablecloth in front of him.
Humboldt seemed to hear neither my yell nor the other man’s scream. He was frowning thunderously at the maitre d’. ‘You don’t need to expect to see me in here again if this is the way -‘
Humboldt began.
‘Eeeeee! EEEEEEEEE!’ the maitre d’ screamed, and swung the butcher knife fiat through the air. It made a kind of whickering sound, like a whispered sentence. The period was the sound of the
blade burying itself in William Humboldt’s right cheek. Blood exploded out of the wound in a furious spray of tiny droplets. They decorated the tablecloth in a fan-shaped stipplework, and I clearly saw (I will never forget it) one bright red drop fall into my water glass and then dive for the bottom with a pinkish filament like a tail stretching out behind it. It looked like a bloody tadpole.
Humboldt’s cheek snapped open, revealing his teeth, and as he clapped his hand to the gouting wound, I saw something pinkish-white lying on the shoulder of his charcoal gray suitcoat. It wasn’t until the whole thing was over that I realized it must have been his earlobe.
‘Tell this in your ears! the maitre d’ screamed furiously at Diane’s bleeding therapist, who stood there with one hand clapped to his cheek. Except for the blood pouring over and between his fingers, Humboldt looked weirdly like Jack Benny doing one of his famous double-takes. ‘Call this to your hateful tattle-tale friends of the street. . . you misery. . . Eeeeee! . . . DOG LOVER!’
Now other people were screaming, mostly at the sight of the blood, I think. Humboldt was a big man, and he was bleeding like a stuck pig. I could hear it pattering on the floor like water from a broken pipe, and the front of his white shirt was now red. His tie, which had been red to start with, was now black.
‘Steve?’ Diane said. ‘Steven?’
A man and a woman had been having lunch at the table behind her and slightly to her left. Now the man – about thirty and handsome in the way George Hamilton used to be – bolted to his feet and ran toward the front of the restaurant.
‘Troy, don’t go without me!’ his date screamed, but Troy never looked hack. He’d forgotten all about a library book he was supposed to return, it seemed, or maybe about how he’d promised to wax the car.
If there had been a paralysis in the room – I can’t actually say if there was or not, although I seem to have seen a great deal, and to remember it all – that broke it. There were more screams and other people got up. Several tables were overturned. Glasses and china shattered on the floor. I saw a man with his arm around the waist of his female companion hurry past behind the maitre d’; her hand was clamped into his shoulder like a claw. For a moment her eyes met mine, and they were as empty as the eyes of a Greek bust. Her face was dead pale, haglike with horror.
All of this might have happened in ten seconds, or maybe twenty. I remember it like a series of photographs or filmstrips, but it has no timeline. Time ceased to exist for me at the moment Alfalfa the maitre d’ brought his left hand out from behind his back and I saw the butcher knife. During that time the man in the tuxedo continued to spew out a confusion of words in his special maitre d’s language, the one that old girlfriend had called Snooti. Some of it really was in a foreign language, some of it was English but completely without sense, and some of it was striking . . . almost haunting.
Have you ever read any of Dutch Schutz’s long, confused deathbed statement? It was like that. Much of it I can’t remember- What I can remember I suppose I’ll never forget.
Humboldt staggered backward, still holding his lacerated cheek.
The backs of his knees struck the seat of his chair, and he sat down heavily on it. He looks like someone who’s just been told he’s got cancer, I thought. He started to turn toward Diane and me, his eyes wide and shocked. I had time to see there were tears spilling out of them, and then the maitre d’ wrapped both hands around the handle of the butcher knife and buried it in the top of Humboldt’s head. It made a sound like someone whacking a pile of towels with a cane.
‘Boot!’ Humboldt cried. I’m quite sure that’s what his last words on planet Earth was – ‘boot.’ Then his weeping eyes rolled up to whites and he slumped forward onto his plate, sweeping his own glassware off the table and onto the floor with one outflung hand.
As this happened, the maitre d’ – all his hair was sticking up in back now, not just some of it – pried the long knife out of his head.
Blood sprayed out of the head wound in a kind of vertical curtain, and splashed the front of Diane’s dress. She raised her hands to her shoulders with the palms turned out once again, but this time it was in horror rather than exasperation. She shrieked and then clapped her blood-spattered hands to her face, over her eyes. The maitre d’
paid no attention to her. Instead, he turned to me.
‘That dog of yours,’ he said, speaking in an almost conversational tone. He registered absolutely no interest in or even knowledge of the screaming, terrified people stampeding behind him toward the doors. His eyes were very large, very dark. They looked brown to me again, but there seemed to be black circles around the irises.