Last night at my favourite Vietnamese restaurant I indulged myself in the surrounding patrons. An older man (55?) wooing a Chinese woman over dinner. They were clearly a couple, though I think their relationship was still fairly new. She did things like store the newspaper he was reading before dinner behind her on her chair when the food arrived. He was talking about China a lot; how he hadn’t been his whole life and now he had been twice in as many years. At one point he said, “A woman like you is worth a couple cows, some goats, lots of chickens.”
There was also a teenage couple. Still in high school, their awkwardness was palpable, yet as I watched, they seemed much more at ease with themselves (and each other) than I ever felt I was at that age. The boy was predictably quiet except for some well-timed grunts of acknowledgement. He was put together as if he slept in a washing machine: his hair and clothes a tangle of nonchalant cool and cluelessness. She sipped rootbeer out of a straw and had fingernails painted metallic red.
And then there was another lone diner: a man with a permanent look of intensity on his face. He came in from the cold and I thought it was the temperature and the fact his glasses were fogged over that gave him that look, but then he looked that way at the menu, at the book he read while waiting for dinner, at his dinner when it arrived, and around the restaurant at the other patrons. It begged me to ask the question: what was so intense?
I burnt the roof of my mouth on my spring rolls.
