I stood under the awning for a moment, looking in. The place was bright, and I marked that down in its favor. I have an intense dislike for dark restaurants, where you can’t see what you’re eating or drinking. The walls were white and hung with vibrant impressionist drawings. You couldn’t tell what they were, but that didn’t matter; with their primary colors and broad, exuberant strokes, they hit your eyes like visual caffeine. I looked for Diane and saw a woman that might have been her, seated about halfway down the long room and by the wall. It was hard to say, because her back was turned and I don’t have her knack of recognition under difficult circumstances. But the heavyset, balding man she was sitting with certainly looked like a Humboldt. I took a deep breath, opened the restaurant door, and went in.
There are two phases of withdrawal from tobacco, and I’m convinced that it’s the second that causes most cases of recidivism.
The physical withdrawal lasts ten days to two weeks, and then most of the symptoms - sweats, headaches, muscle twitches, pounding eyes, insomnia, irritability - disappear. What follows is a much longer period of mental withdrawal. These symptoms may include mild to moderate depression, mourning, some degree of anhedonia (emotional flatness, in other words), forgetfulness, even a species of transient dyslexia. I know all this stuff because I read up on it. Following what happened at the Gotham Cafe, it seemed very important that I do that. I suppose you’d have to say that my interest in the subject fell somewhere between the Land of Hobbies and the Kingdom of Obsession.
The most common symptom of phase two withdrawal is a feeling of mild unreality. Nicotine improves synaptic transferral and improves concentration - widens the brain’s information highway, in other words. It’s not a big boost, and not really necessary to successful thinking (although most confirmed cigarette junkies believe differently), but when you take it away, you’re left you with a feeling - a pervasive feeling, in my case - that the world has taken on a decidedly dreamy cast. There were many times when it seemed to me that people and cars and the little sidewalk vignettes I observed were actually passing by me on a moving screen, a thing controlled by hidden stagehands turning enormous cranks and revolving enormous drums. It was also a little like being mildly stoned all the time, because the feeling was accompanied by a sense of helplessness and moral exhaustion, a feeling that things had simply to go on the way they were going, for good or for ill, because you (except of course it’s me I’m talking about) were just too damned busy not-smoking to do much of anything else.
I’m not sure how much all this bears on what happened, but I know it has some bearing, because I was pretty sure something was wrong with the maitre d’ almost as soon as I saw him, and as soon as he spoke to me, I knew.
He was tall, maybe forty-five, slim (in his tux, at least; in ordinary clothes he would have been skinny), mustached. He had a leather-bound menu in one hand. He looked like battalions of maitre d’s in battalions of fancy New York restaurants, in other words. Except for his bow tie, which was askew, and something on his shirt, that was. A splotch just above the place where his jacket buttoned. It looked like either gravy or a glob of some dark jelly. Also, several strands of his hair stuck up defiantly in back, making me think of Alfalfa in the old Little Rascals one-reelers. That almost made me burst out laughing - I was very nervous, remember - and I had to bite my lips to keep it in.
‘Yes, sir?’ he asked as I approached the desk. It came out sounding like Yais, sair? All maitre d’s in New York City have accents, but it is never one you can positively identify. A girl I dated in the mid-eighties, one who did have a sense of humor (along with a fairly large drug habit, unfortunately), told me once that they all grew up on the same little island and hence all spoke the same language.
‘What language is it?’ I asked her.
‘Snooti,’ she said, and I cracked up.
This thought came hack to me as I looked past the desk to the woman I’d seen while outside - I was now almost positive it was Diane - and I had to bite the insides of my lips again. As a result, Humboldt’s name came out of me sounding like a haft-smothered sneeze.
The maitre d’s high, pale brow contracted in a frown. His eyes bored into mine. I had taken them for brown as I approached the desk, but now they looked black.
‘Pardon, sir?’ he asked. It came out sounding like Pahdun, sair and looking like Fuck you, Jack. His long fingers, as pale as his brow - concert pianist’s fingers, they looked like - tapped nervously on the cover of the menu. The tassel sticking out of it like some sort of half-assed bookmark swung back and forth.
‘Humboldt,’ I said. ‘Party of three.’ I found I couldn’t take my eyes off his bow tie, so crooked that the left side of it was almost brushing the shelf under his chin, and that blob on his snowy white dress shirt. Now that I was closer, it didn’t look like either gravy or jelly; it looked like partially dried blood.
He was looking down at his reservations book, the rogue tuft at the back of his head waving back and forth over the rest of his slicked-down hair. I could see his scalp through the grooves his comb had laid down, and a speckle of dandruff on the shoulders of his tux. It occurred to me that a good headwaiter might have fired an underling put together in such sloppy fashion.
‘Ah, yes, monsieur.’ (Ah yais, messoo.) He had found the name. ‘Your party is—‘ He was starting to look up. He stopped abruptly, and his eyes sharpened even more, if that was possible, as he looked past me and down. ‘You cannot bring that dog in here,’ he said sharply. ‘How many times have I told you you can’t bring that dog in here!’
He didn’t quite shout, but spoke so loudly that diners closest to his pulpit-like desk stopped eating and looked around curiously.
I looked around myself. He had been so emphatic I expected to see somebody’s dog, but there was no one behind me and most certainly no dog. It occurred to me then, I don’t know why, that he was talking about my umbrella, which I had forgotten to check. Perhaps on the Island of the maitre d’s, dog was a slang for umbrella, especially when carried by a patron on a day when rain did not look likely.
I looked back at the maitre d’ and saw that he had already started away from his desk, holding my menu in his hands. He must have sensed that I wasn’t following, because he looked back over his shoulder, eyebrows slightly raised. There was nothing on his face now but polite inquiry - Are you coming, messoo? - and I came. I knew something was wrong with him, but I came. I could not take the time or effort to try to decide what might be wrong with the maitre d’ of a restaurant where I had never been before today and where I would probably never be again; I had Humboldt and Diane to deal with, I had to do it without smoking, and the maitre d’ of the Gotham Cafe would have to take care of his own problems, dog included.
Diane turned around and at first I saw nothing in her face and in her eyes but a kind of frozen politeness. Then, just below it, I saw anger... or thought I did. We’d done a lot of arguing during our last three or four months together, but I couldn’t recall ever seeing the sort of concealed anger I sensed in her now, anger that was meant to be hidden by the makeup and the new dress (blue, no Speckles, no slit up the side, deep or otherwise) and the new :hairdo; The heavyset man she was with was saying something, :and she reached out and touched his arm. As he
