I saw a couple come into the cafe out of the sun, I have seen them before. One woman has a sour aspect and it is difficult to get her to return a smile. Her smile, when it comes, has a difficult, painful quality as though vouchsafing it hurts her in some way. The other is blonde, plump, pliant and yielding. When the dominant woman sits down, the other goes up immediately to order, turning back to ask or ascertain some aspect of the other’s wishes. “You are always the waitress in your relationship,” I thought, watching the woman pay, collect her change, and sit smilingly down. Her partner, who had already had the opportunity to become absorbed in the paper, and whose choice of cafe, I imagine, this might be, got up to go to the bathroom and it was fascinating to watch the blonder partner change. She lost her smile and drew out her phone and became absorbed in something of her own choice, seeming altogether a more serious person. This is her moment with her feet up once they’ve all been fed. We both heard the bathroom door click and she glanced up quickly, putting her phone guiltily away. As the dourer partner reappeared her beloved was waiting, alert, already producing her wallet and opening it, saying something I couldn’t catch, ready as ever to cater to this grumpy child she has settled for to satisfy her cravings for love for the rest of her life.
Tag: power games
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I wish I drank more
Accidentally went into a restaurant for dinner in which I realized too late all the men were wearing suits. I tore off my two layers of wool, hot from walking, and sat there in very shabby jumper with a t-shirt over it which I sleep in, pressing slices of bread into a bowl of olive oil, reading the menu. I felt so tired and overcome by thoughts I could barely read menuese: a first-world problem. My elbows through the sapped weave of my jumper stood on sharp crumbs on the white cloth.
The waiter was an exhausted but mildly gleaming Woody Allen man with a soft sunken pavlova of hair not quite reaching the centre of his scalp. He brought me wine. I polished the excess oil into my fingernails and admired them by candlelight. At the next table a woman about a decade older than me was unleashing her ribald laugh for the delectation of her companion, even older still. She glanced at me over his shoulder and began to whisper. Her eyes were fixed not on my face but on my peeling jumper, my bony wrists thrust from it like over-plucked hens. “Unglaublich,” she said, “unbelievable.” I am shy and had stood outside the teeming with smiles restaurant for fully five minutes working up the courage to come in. But I let my eyes fix hers to let her know that she’d been understood. She looked away. It was almost fun. I watched her for several minutes while she looked everywhere but at my face. The power one gains by being (sometimes, not always) unafraid to look someone in the eye. The uninterestingness of power except as a kind of parlour trick, or party favour. The banality of parties, at which everyone who’s best dressed can resemble a tricked-out and groomed dog, leashed and booted, with a lampshade on their head.
I wish I were a bulb, tonight. Either a “Glühbirne” or else the kind that grows under the soil. I wish I were a better dressed kind of human, or that I sometimes combed my hair. I wish I were 21 and radiant. I wish I drank more.