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 some-thing 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.. . Virginia Slims . . . Doral . . . Merit . . . Merit 100s . . . Camels . . . Camel Filters . . . Camel Lights.
Later - around the time I was starting to see the last three or four months of our marriage in a clearer light, as a matter of fact I began to understand that my decision to quit smoking when I had was perhaps not so unconsidered as it at first seemed, and a very long way from ill-considered. I’m not a brilliant man, not a brave one, either, but that decision might have been both. It’s certainly possible; sometimes we rise above ourselves. In any case, it gave my mind something concrete to pitch upon in the days after Diane left; it gave my misery a vocabulary it would not otherwise have had, if you see what I mean. Very likely you don’t, but I can’t think of any other way to put it.
Have I speculated that quitting when I did may have played a part in what happened at the Gotham Cafe that day? Of course I have. . . but I haven’t lost any sleep over it. None of us can predict the final outcomes of our actions, after all, and few even try; most of us just do what we do to prolong a moment’s pleasure or to stop the pain for a while. And even when we act for the noblest reasons, the last link of the chain all too often drips with someone’s blood.
Humboldt called me again two weeks after the evening when I’d bombed West 83rd Street with my cigarettes, and this time he stuck with Mr Davis as a form of address. He asked me how I was doing, and I cold him I was doing fine. With that amenity our of the way, he told me that he had called on Diane’s behalf. Diane, he said, wanted to sit down with me and discuss ‘certain aspects' of the marriage- I suspected that ‘certain aspects’ meant the key to the safe deposit box - not to mention various other financial issues Diane might want to investigate before hauling her lawyer onstage - but what my head knew and what my body was doing were completely different things. I could feel my skin flush and my heart speed up; I could feel a pulse tapping away in the wrist of the hand holding the phone. You have to remember that I hadn’t seen her since the morning of the day she’d left, and even then I hadn’t really seen her; she’d been sleeping with her face buried in her pillow.
