BELINDA RETURNS to the table, the waiter arrives with the drinks, and, in a moment, the redhead returns to her table. All this traffic in a small space occasions some confusion, jostling, stepping aside, shuffling of chairs, asking to be excused. The waiter stands to one side, holding his tray, aloof from the fray, frowning through a thin smile. Belinda seems upset. She’s trying to smile, but her forehead’s furrowed, and her smile slips, now and then, down to a frown.
“Is anything wrong?” Matthew asks.
“Oh, no, no,” she says. She looks up at him and smiles, but she rolls her eyes in the direction of the three women in black. Matthew can’t tell what that roll of the eyes means. He notices that Belinda has done something to her hair. Most of it is on one side, with just a few wisps dangling on the other. He thinks she looks wonderfully sexy, in an out-of-date way, like the bad girl in an old movie. He gives her a roguish look — a smirk, a raised eyebrow, a wink — like the gigolo in the same movie. He raises his glass, she hers. They clink. They drink. For a while they chat, but then the salad arrives, the meal has begun, and Matthew turns his attention exclusively to the food.
He prefers not to talk while eating. When he and Liz ate at home, he liked to watch television during dinner because television permitted him to be alone with his food and his thoughts. Unlike living human dinner companions, television doesn’t insist that you actually pay attention to it, and Matthew feels that the surroundings in which one eats are best when, like television, they permit one to ignore them. Interesting surroundings and an engaging companion are fine, even welcome, while he’s having a cocktail, but when the food arrives, that’s all he cares to pay attention to. In this, he and B. W. Beath are in complete agreement; here’s BW on the subject:
When the food arrives, shut up, everyone, please. Dim the lights. Drift off, companions. Vanish, waiters. Return when we have finished, or when we need you, not before. Don’t intrude. Please, please, don’t come back to ask, “Is everything okay?”
Matthew has never managed to complain about that is-everything-okay intrusion or to respond to it with a snappy retort because the waiters always ask the question when his mouth is full, perhaps deliberately, to ensure that he can’t complain or deliver a snappy retort, only smile or nod or say “Mmmmm,” but he has thought of several snappy retorts after the fact and, disguised as BW, claimed to have made one:
We paused with our fork, our full fork, before our mouth. We turned upon our waitperson a hangdog look. “Is everything okay?” we repeated. We set our fork down. “Well, no. My wife is leaving me because, after fourteen years of marriage, she claims to have discovered that she has never loved me. What do you think of that? She said, ‘I just don’t love you. I feel sorry for you. I know you’re going through a rough time.’ That was certainly an understatement. My mother had just died. That was the time my wife chose to leave me. How do you like that? ‘I know you’re going through a rough time,’ she said, ‘but I’ve decided that I don’t love you, I’ve never loved you, and there is little likelihood that I will ever come to love you. I don’t want to live the rest of my life with someone I don’t love, so I’m catching the next flight to anywhere. I hope you understand. Have a nice day.’” Here we shrugged and said, “But, heck, that’s my problem. How’s everything with you?”
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🎧 423: Belinda returns . . .