MATTHEW LOOKS down at his glass. The drink does not quite cover the olive. “I should have ordered another martini,” he says.
“Here, have some of mine,” says Liz.
“I don’t want some of yours. I want one of my own. A full one.”
“You know something, Matthew? You drink too much.”
“This from the woman who passed out on my couch a couple of weeks ago?”
“That was an isolated thing. I was celebrating, and I got carried away.”
“So? I’m celebrating now, and I’m getting carried away. Where’s the waif?”
“She’s on the other side of the room. Just sort of wandering around.”
“Oh, yeah, I love that. The way she walks around, failing to notice that anything needs doing.”
“She’s heading toward the back of the room, and in just a moment, if nothing goes wrong, she’ll turn at the end of the booths and head our way. Get ready. She’s reaching the end. She’s turning. Here she comes.”
Without looking, Matthew holds his glass out in the aisle, blocking the way of the waif as she passes, and says, “Please, ma’am, may I have some more?”
That was nice, he thinks, that little bit of cooperation. We were always good at that. Liz ought to see that we were good at that.
THE WAIF delivers Matthew’s martini, carrying it on a tray this time. On the same tray are two wineglasses and a bottle of Lynch-Bages.
Where is that going? Matthew wonders.
Watching in the mirror, he sees the waif carry it to the beauties. She opens it at their table, clumsily, resting the bottle on the table and fumbling with the corkscrew, giggling at her own ineptitude, while they watch with something like noblesse oblige, making not a single negative comment, raising not an eyebrow.
Who could scold her? She’s so adorable.
The adorably incompetent waif, tugging at the reluctant cork, loses control of the bottle just as the cork pulls loose, spilling about two glasses of really excellent wine on the female beauty, who gasps, half rises, then recovers. She sits again, so composed, or apparently so composed, that she smiles. She laughs. A spilled glass of wine —
Lynch-Bages, moans BW.
— is too trivial to upset this beauty and her beautiful companion.
“Squid-ink pasta?” says a voice.
“Hm? Oh. There,” says Matthew, nodding at Liz.
“And the bouillabaisse stir-fry.”
“Yes, here.”
“I can’t believe you ordered that,” says Liz. “It sounds weird.”
“Smells good,” he says.
“Is this the half portion, do you think?” asks Liz. She stares doubtfully at the mound of pasta. “I wanted the half portion.”
“Well, just eat half.”
“Didn’t I say ‘half portion’?”
“I didn’t notice.”
“Of course not.”
Liz doesn’t begin eating right away. She looks at the plate, and her shoulders drop. Her hands drop into her lap, her face falls. She looks at Matthew for a moment, but he’s distracted by the crisis at the other table, entranced by the beauty in the bordeaux-soaked silks, now clinging to her tiny breasts so that he can see her nipples. Liz looks around the room and says, just as Harold’s wife did at Dolce far Niente, “Everyone here is so young,” but in the voice of someone who has lost a contest. Matthew is scarcely aware that Liz is talking. The soaked beauty conducts the briefest consultation with the male beauty, and he pulls his sweater over his head. He hands it to her and runs his hands back along his hair, smoothing it into place so perfectly that it seems never to have been disturbed. She pulls the sweater on but leaves her arms inside it. She performs some invisible hocus-pocus, and one hand pops out of a sleeve, with a ball of silk, held like a trophy, then the other pops from the other sleeve, and with both hands she wrings the silk into her wineglass. Matthew can’t see whether a drop falls into it, but, oh, how he’d love to drink from that glass.
She stands, all grace, and pulls the sweater down. It comes about halfway down her thighs, but the wine stain on the skirt still shows. She shrugs, and the slightest frown appears on her lips. Then she sits and begins removing the skirt. She reaches under the sweater and unbuttons or unzips it or whatever.
Liz talks on. Matthew’s trying to listen to her, and would listen to her, would at least give her the attention she deserves, but he’s captivated by the performance across the aisle. He’s still turned toward Liz, in an attitude of attention, but his eyes are focused past her, at the reflected image of the beauty, the image of aplomb.
This ability to rise above what’s happened to her. It’s magnificent. No crying over spilled bordeaux. That’s what I like about her.
That may be, says BW, but it’s more likely that you’re just lustful. I know what you’re thinking, you know.
Yes, I know.
The beauty leans across the table and takes her friend’s chin in her hand, pulls him toward her, rises slightly off her chair, leans farther across the table, and kisses him, but at the same time, with her other hand, whisks her skirt down her legs and lets it fall around her ankles. She sits again, raises the skirt on the point of her shoe, takes it in her hand beneath the table, compresses all her silks into a ball, no bigger than a baseball, and thrusts them into her bag. It’s a balletic performance, worthy of applause.
Why can’t I be like that? Why can’t I shrug things off? Matthew wonders, and he frowns.
That frown, that note of regret, alerts Liz. It isn’t quite the appropriate response to what she’s saying at the moment. She notices that he’s paying attention to something, someone, other than her. She looks at his eyes, and a quick, unconscious application of the principle that the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection tells her where he’s looking.
“You know, Matthew,” she says. “That’s another thing I couldn’t stand.”
“Hm?”
“You were always looking at other women.”
She’s got you there, Matthew, says BW. You were. You are.
“Just looking,” says Matthew.
In the past, if Liz had pushed him, he would have said what was true, that he loved her, that he enjoyed looking at other women, even though he loved her, but that his feelings for Liz kept him from pursuing them. That would have been true. It would have been the truth, but it wouldn’t have been the whole truth. There would also have been his timidity to take into account. He always suspected that he’d be rejected if he pursued any of the women who attracted him. It seemed to him that Liz, certainly an attractive woman, found him attractive only because she loved him. When, after so many years together, she told him that she had never loved him, he couldn’t imagine why, in that case, she had ever been attracted to him.
[to be continued]
In Topical Guide 538, Mark Dorset considers Drinking: Wine; and Allusion from this episode.
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🎧 538: Matthew looks . . .