No matter how much I try to ignore it, everything comes back to the elevator. Before I do anything, I ask, “Is it really worth it?” Even memories come within its context. “Oh, so that’s what it means, ” I’ll catch myself saying.
For example, we were at this French restaurant in Hawaii. It was actually better than you’d think. Service was kind of North American French slow which has a lot to learn from the French French idea of service. I didn’t have to stack plates ever higher to get the waiter’s attention, nor had I fallen asleep at the table. More important in keeping me from getting surly, though, was the couple next to us. The man was sixtyish. His partner was early thirties. It’s not that I generally have any problems with the May-December thing and maybe sometimes it is true love. In this case, though, it obviously wasn’t. First of all, he was clearly well known in the restaurant and he was introducing his date to his long-term friends for the first time. It was clearly pretty awkward, given the looks we were seeing. Finally, she was definitely foreign, which got me thinking early on of the mail-order possibility. Finally, it was clear, this was the First Night, not first night as in date; it was as in the first night of the rest of their lives together. They were going home and then staying together “till death did them part.” That would have been okay too, if this relationship hadn’t been so clearly doomed.
The conversation wasn’t gushy lovey-dovey stuff you’d expect on the first night. It was more like geezer golf talk. Around the time we were finished our main course and were waiting for dessert, he asked her, “What time of the morning do you like to wake up? I like to wake up at about 7: 30.”
There was a long pause, a pause I now understand. She had had a revelation. For it was more than a long pause, it was one of those moments, a moment with no beginning and with no end, just pregnant with middle, just one of those pure “Oh, crap” moments, a moment where she had been observed and the rest of her life had just become a denouement.
“I don’t know. 7: 30 is fine.”
“Well, we should set our alarm so we both wake up at the same time.”
Again, a certain amount of processing time during which she must be thinking this wasn’t exactly the type of simultaneous event she’d been hoping for, and as she already adopts the fake enthusiasm that would define the parameters of their life together, she responded, “I guess we could program your cell phone.”
“You can program your cell phone to wake you up?” he asks, causing her newfound state of manufactured enthusiasm to wilt for perhaps the last time. This guy is such a geezer that he doesn’t even know that his cell phone does anything else besides take calls. They spent the rest of the honeymoon meal with her showing him how to set the alarm on his cell phone.
As though I am her Red Flower, I watch her life unfold, a sad smile on my face.