Cruel Thin Gruel

"Let's not make a scene," I said.

This happened episodically, but normally at home or in the car, tactical and private; this was strategic and raw, laid bare before the jury of our peers.

My wife did a Shonda Rhimes. “I can’t stand this marriage anymore. We have nothing in common. I don’t care about your frigging book, and I’m fed up listening to you bleat on about your writing. You’ve become a selfish bore and I want you to leave.”

The restaurant shrunk around us, the light dimmed. My wife sat opposite me at the secluded two-top but seemed a long way away, as if at the bottom of well.

I looked forward to the shrimp risotto, but now my appetite was ruined, and so was the Restaurant and so was another genre of cuisine.

Why, I wondered, couldn’t this happen at McDonalds? A place from which self-exile would cost me nothing.

“Now? Here?” I said, looking around at the crowded restaurant, one of the best in our small town. I recognized several of the patrons, pillars of the community. Bridges were about to burn.

“Yes, now and here,” said my wife. “I need a fresh start. I need space. I need freedom.” She lowered her voice to a growl. “I cannot stand being around you anymore.”

It was a steak knife to the heart. So visceral, so personal; not the kind of thing that gets resolved in couple’s therapy. It was like bad breath, an insurmountable impediment to intimacy.

There was a flush to her face and a fever in her eyes that was more than just the expression of anguish. She’d been drinking, I realized, earlier when she met up with friends at the bar. Rehearsing this conversation and ginned up like an adult.

“I do give you space!”

“It’s not yours to give. It’s mine to take!”

Ginned up like an adult, like someone who'd already been through this life once and was performing with the benefit of the dress rehearsal.

Thin gruel, this childless marriage, just bones in a broth.

I pushed the arugula salad around the small plate. The dressing was tangy with citrus, and roasted sesame seeds gave the dish a pleasing dimensionality that I would have liked to discuss with her, but we have nothing in common, apparently.

“Can we leave here?” My stomach was clenched, and my limbs were filled with sand. “This isn’t the time and place for a drama.”

“And avoid the conversation?” said my wife, challenging me with one of those meaningful glares that feel like soul-seeking missiles aimed at the heart. “Avoid intimacy?”

Space or intimacy, which? Women do this; they confuse and accuse.

“Okay,” I suggested.

“Okay what?”

Must every word be mindful and meaningful?

“Okay, can we postpone the conversation until after dinner?”

She flushed red.

“No. We’re not leaving here until we’ve agreed to a separation.”

I would get the tab for food that didn’t even make it to the table. How, I wondered, are you supposed to tip the waitress?

“What if I don’t agree to separate?”

Things nasty and unsaid had been growing for months in the gathering fog. There was a de-militarized zone of non-interference down the center of the conjugal mattress. When was the last time we kissed, mouth to mouth?

We forked at our food in silence.

My wife wore dark red lipstick, applied to her cupids like a Geisha. She wore eyeliner, her ‘Fuck-Me” choker, and diamond-drop earrings that she’d bought herself. She was classy, above my pay grade. I should have shaved and dressed up in a shirt for dinner.

“What if I make more of an effort?” I said, sitting upright, drawing in my stomach, broadening my shoulders. I clean up well.

“It’s too late for that. How many times have we had this conversation?”

Never. She remembered things that had never happened.

She poked a crab-cake, I pecked at the arugula. The crumbled feta offset the tart citrus, reminding me of an alfresco meal at sunset on a beach in Italy.

We’d been swimming in the bulging blue Mediterranean sea, laughing beneath a golden sun, fish beneath our feet darting across the sandy bottom.

I pointed at the empty plate. “Reminded me of our trip to Italy,” I said. Perhaps we could pull ourselves to shore by this thread.

“What?” Her face was pinched like I’d caused her pain.

“You remember. The beach near Portofino.”

“I’ve never been to Portofino.”

“Do you intentionally forget the good times?”

Was this how she created space for herself, I wondered? Remembering things that didn’t happen, forgetting those that did?

My wife’s face went blank, her eyes narrowed and she was no longer curious about the contents of my soul. She was looking inwards now.

“We remember different things,” she said, wiping her mouth with a napkin.

“You remember things differently.”

She stood, abruptly, causing the table to scrape the floor. “I’m going to the bathroom.”

We were attracting attention. People spoke low, in furtive tones. I felt like I was being judged.

Her crab-cake lay on the appetizer plate, expensive, untouched

“Shall I clear the plates and bring the entrée?” said the waitress moving brusquely, she lifted my wife’s crab-cake from the table before I could protest.

Maybe I should just up and leave, bumping over a few chairs on my way out of the restaurant and stick the bill to my wife? A marriage should end with drama.

“Yes, please, and bring the check.”

The waitress frowned. “Is everything OK?”

The waitress was slender and lovely, and thirty years younger than me.

My wife returned from the bathroom. “I need you to move out,” she said, probing at her steaming Chicken Cacciatore.

“Why me? How about you move out?” I said, dividing my shrimp risotto into two unequal parts as I considered the implications of a separation and how it differed from a divorce.

“Ok,” she said.

“Okay what?”

“Okay, if you don’t move out I will!” she said. “You can have it all”.

How could I have caused this woman so much pain?

“You don’t mean that,” I said. “What about the plants?” I didn’t see why her plants should be victims here. I would take one for the team and go see America, a hobo on a freight train going West.

“Miss!” I said, waving to the waitress, who swooped.

“Yes, Sir!”

“Can you bring us two doggie bags?”

“Just one. I have no appetite,” said my wife, pushing the probed chicken dish toward the center of the table.

“Two doggie bags please,” I said. “And the check.”

The waitress reached into her apron pocket. “I have the check ready, Sir.”

“Actually, not it's not 'Sir'. I self-identify as victim.”

“Pardon?”

“Ignore him,” said my wife. “He thinks it’s funny and he’s not.”

“What should I tip?” I said, pen poised over the check.

“I don’t care.” My wife stood, grabbed her coat. “You are going to do something stupid, aren’t you? I can see it in your eyes. You’re cooking something up”

“This is the end of the conversation? We've decided?"

“I've decided."

She wove diva-like through the restaurant, bumping shoulders, kicking chairs, guided along by men who dine in crisply ironed collared shirts and have full heads of hair, and know how to treat a good-looking woman.

I stood. “What do I do now?” I shouted.

"Write a story," she said without looking around. The maître d’ opened the door for her, bowed and my wife was gone. She had friends.

"What do I do now?" I looked around the restaurant but found no sympathy. I was spoiling a pleasant night out.

“Sit down please Sir,” said a man whose shaved head was muscled like a pickled walnut. “We don’t want to make a scene, do we?”

We don’t want to be man-handled out the back door of the restaurant and thrown into the dark alleyway outside, collapsing on the soiled concrete next to the dumpster, bumping our head against the brick wall. We don’t want a doggie bag pitched at our head, nor threats ringing in our ears as we stumble from the alley and down late-night Main Street heading toward the railyard on the wrong side of town where the graffitied freight-cars idle sidelined, bleached colorless in the brighter-than- white glare cast by the high-mast security lights. Where the coyotes scratch at the dirt, and engine oil drips into the creosote-wood rail-ties. We don’t want to climb onto a flat-deck cattle car, crawl into the corner and settle in for a long rattling and rumbling ride westward across the prairies, past grazing bison and majestic mountains.

I sat down as instructed. "No, Sir. We don't want to make a scene," I said, contemplating the customer receipt. "How big a tip should I leave?"