The Solitary Diner

‘You have to understand. Men don’t love children, dem love you. So once you stop sexing dem, dem stop giving you money.’

Her name was Jean. She was serious, pretty and plump, she wore her hair in upswept copper braids, she was manageress, waitress and cashier, all in one, and she was talking about the vagaries of child support.

He liked her for that ‘dem love you.’ And though the potato salad was mushy, the stewed pork mostly bone, and the ash tray—a small, fluted gourd—was crammed after two butts, it was okay. It was past seven on a weekday night, in a decayed and noisy coastal town, and he was in a mood to be grateful for small mercies. Her returning to the unlit balcony after bringing his order, to sit at his table and contemplate him wordlessly, with a look at once dubious and expectant, was one such. He had expected to be eating alone.

Behind them, at a corner table in the flatly-lit dining room (plastic chairs and tablecloths, scuffed tiles, fluorescent ceiling tubes) a solitary client, a bespectacled, gaunt mulatto in his early 70s, with skin like blemished parchment, was joylessly reducing, by about a forkful a minute, a plateful of curried mutton and white rice. On a stand above the formica bar, a pale and misty television, its volume set much too loud, was crackling out some spectral sitcom.

‘An American writer called John Updike said something like that about women,’ he told Jean. ‘He said women live with men but only really love their children.’

She considered this seriously. Then: ‘That’s not true,’ she said. ‘Me love men. But men, once you make baby for dem, dem start to stray. You understand?’

At 30 she had two daughters. The father of the older one was dead. (‘Him was involve in drugs; dem kill him in Miami.’) The father of the 5-year-old had ‘strayed.’

‘Den, now, time pass and dem mebbe want to come back. But dem two men cause me so much grief, me make up me mind; me say, No more.’

‘But you are with a man now.’

She drew back and looked at him. ‘Why you say that?’

‘Because I know.’

‘Why you say you know?’

‘I just know.’

‘Well…yes. But dis one nah give me no trouble.’

‘He knows you badder than him, right?’

She threw back her head and laughed. It transformed her. Her round cheeks shone with glee and her eyes (which remained on his) slitted with intelligent delight.

A little later:

‘You are alone here?’

‘Yes.’

‘Married?’

‘No.’

‘Children?’

‘Two. Grown up.’

‘What it is you do?’

He had seldom, he reflected, had such a choice of answers. ‘I teach,’ he said.

She looked at him keenly. ‘Den how come you out here in the middle of the week? School not in vacation.’

‘No, but university is.’

This was imprecise. But he was getting tired, and he didn’t bother to explain.

It lasted only a couple seconds, but he saw when her gaze dropped from his eyes to his chest, and an odd expression—dull, slack, almost arrogant—passed across her face.

A little later:

‘Next time you pass a bookstore in Kingston,’ she confided, leaning forward now, hugging her elbows on the table, her face close to his. ‘I want you to get me a book. It call’—here she extracted a slip of paper from her blue manageress’s jacket pocket and read—’The Power of Positive Thinking.’ By Norman Vincent Peale.’ She pronounced it ‘Pele.’

In the Falklands War, the British navy coded its messages by compressing thousands of words into a blip. Like that now, all the pathos of West Indian history seemed abruptly to come to him, encoded in her request.

And yet, he saw, she was likeable; in a certain light, even admirable. And he thought, Why not? Why not—anything? And he made a mental note to get her her book.

‘You will be eating here tomorrow?’

‘I don’t know.’ Then: ‘Yes, probably. Tomorrow night.’

‘Den I will see you den.’ But she made no move to rise.

He reached across and lightly hefted the underside of her thigh. She slapped his hand away grinning, as he’d known she would.

So, the next night, I went back. The flat-lit dining room was again empty save for—again—the taciturn old parchment-skin’d gentleman. He’d exchanged his drab plaid of the previous evening for a short-sleeved shirt of faded cream, and he was methodically dissecting a slab of baked chicken in a thick red sauce. But he sat at the same corner table, in the same chair against the wall; and the terrifying thought occurred to me that every evening, at the dying of the light, he came here to dine like this. Slowly. In silence. Alone.

Ignored, the misty pale screen above the bar was scratchily declaiming—something or other. I went out onto the shadowy balcony and lit a cigarette.

Jean appeared presently. This time, though, there was someone with her: another young woman of the town. And she was taller, slimmer, paler and younger than Jean.

Comprehension came swiftly; and with it, something like woe. I rose.

‘Me a’bring a friend to meet you,’ Jean said. ‘This is Carol. Carol, Mr Brown.’

(How it stung, that unexpected, in-all-ways-distancing ‘Mr Brown’!)

‘Wayne,’ I said, looking from one to the other.

Jean gaze softened.

‘Me wasn’t sure.’ Then, to the girl: ‘This is Wayne me was telling you about.’

‘Hi Wayne!’

I sometimes wonder about women who do what Jean, so misconstruing me, was doing. Produce a surrogate, say in effect: ‘I am taken, but I like you. So here, take this one in my stead.’

What is that, selflessness or self-defence? A kindness, or a dismissal—or a vicarious thing? Something they do with amusement? with pain? as casually as they might shake your hand?

I suppose it depends on how and how much they like you. But what do I know?

Now, though, I had the distinct sensation that Jean—serious, pretty and plump Jean, whom I knew to be likeable, indeed, to be admirable—was saying to me: ‘Take this one. And nat to worry. You will see, it will still be me.’

And, thinking that, I seemed to intuit something of the eternal, bewildered patience of women—women beset by men all the days of their childbearing lives, yet still moved, at some level, to accommodate each one, to take him in (because, O, the pity of it! that this one too, beating on my door for entry like a moth on a lampshade, he too will be dead one day.) And I thought: ‘Maybe there is a place where every woman in her time is all the women that have ever lived.’

And then: ‘If that’s true, it must mean—’

But something else in me stopped the thought dead in its tracks—something that said, with finality, ‘No,’ and left me feeling proud and relieved and like myself, and knowing myself to be alone.

True courtesy derives from freedom. And it was from that place—of perfect circumscription, and therefore of perfect freedom—that I took the new one’s hand, saying (not too formally): ‘Hi, Carol.’

She was long-legged and slimmish and 26, and her face was small and oval and her eyes were bright, and there was enough of what showed above the square cut of her dress to subject the flesh there, whenever she moved even a little, to those syncopated, dark-gleaming, small undulations, and she asked a lot of questions and said O-kay, O-kay!, as if in surprised admiration, to pretty much every answer I gave her, and her bright eyes said plainly what Jean’s, the night before, had only once (covertly, briefly) allowed. In short, in most any circumstances she could have been a contender; and, precisely for that reason, wasn’t. I became aware of the shouted exchanges of the taximen in the little square below; of the sere and damaged disc of an old moon standing vacantly above the black chapel; of the industrial, stale smell of the sea.

I couldn’t protect her from the moment of uncertainty, with its initial mix of self-doubt and pique (mercifully for us both, the latter won) when she saw the shape the evening was taking. But that, too, passed. Soon we were merely chatting.

Jean was peeved.

‘Me never know sey you was a proud man,’ she said, in the flat-lit dining room with its lone client, when I went in to pay and leave.

It was a serious accusation. ‘Proud’ meant stuck up. It meant to be a smug prisoner of one’s class, a moral nonentity.

‘I am not proud.’

‘Den how come you don’t like my friend?’

I cast about with difficulty for something to say.

‘Because she isn’t you.’

It was a fluke, but it was the right answer. The shining cheeks, the intelligent, slitted eyes.

The solitary diner placed his fork and knife at 20 to 4 on the white clockface of his plate and stared at us.

I know your pain, I said to him silently. And I salute your courage.

With an angry look he deflected my intrusion, as I’d known he would.

 

 

The Solitary Diner
© Wayne Brown