Grandstanding

The couple at the neighbouring table think I can’t hear them. They assume that because I am peering at my phone, or maybe they don’t notice me at all, but either way they’re wrong.

I can only see her properly - he has his back to me - but she looks hawklike in profile. Her hair seems brittle, and is carefully styled. It’s a combination of colours which doesn’t exist in nature but is often used to conceal those that do. Her clothes are neat, small and carefully chosen. Even the thin horizontal stripes on her tiny cardigan seem mean-spirited.

“What I asked you was -”

I know that choice of wording far too well. It’s what you say when you’re saying something for the second time, to somebody you think should have understood the first time. It’s an interrogation technique, better suited to politicians than partners, but everything about her suggests the weary contempt we usually reserve for the former. The spiteful tone is like a glancing blow, and I don’t hear the rest of the sentence. He probably doesn’t either.

I think instead that I once had a girlfriend who spoke to me that way, many years ago. She didn’t see me as potential, or a work in progress. She would never have said that I had my moments. To her, I was just a long list of alterations she wanted to make. We only really ever had one argument but it lasted, on and off, for the best part of three years. Why won't you learn to drive? Why can't we move to the Midlands to be near my family? Why are you friends with so many girls, now you've got me? When can we have a baby? In turn my unspoken question was this: if she’d changed all the things she didn’t like about me, what would she have found to be miserable about instead? I didn’t know the answer, but I’m sure she would have come up with something.

She always waited until I was with family or friends - a sympathetic audience, or so she thought, before she started. By the end of the relationship, they only had sympathy for me.

“What I specifically said was -”

The woman is speaking again, and again her language makes me wince. There is a place, even in relationships, for being specific. Without it, plans would never be made, dates would never be organised, holidays would never happen and shopping lists would be a disaster. But there’s no place for bringing attention to it. Nobody takes minutes in bed, and no marriage has a stenographer. The whole exchange reeks of cross-examination, and then I realise: this woman enjoys her husband being wrong. She wants him to be wrong. Saddest of all, she needs him to be wrong.

Looking up from my wine I see, but am not surprised by, the final detail I had previously missed. There, on the other side of the table, is a third person, her friend at a guess. The woman is doing what my girlfriend used to do, grandstanding in front of an audience. And her husband is doing what I used to do; sitting there and taking it.

Of course, it wouldn’t be like this if they were alone. If they were alone they wouldn’t be talking at all. They would be, as I once was, looking around at all the conversations at the other tables - sparkling from a distance in a way they surely wouldn’t be up close - and wondering why they had failed. They would be sitting at home in silence on a Saturday afternoon, watching the walls and thinking what I used to think: I know this isn’t right, but it won’t always be like this. One day there will be someone else. When that crosses your mind for the first time you should run like the wind, but it’s easy for me to say that now.

I try to imagine how much they both must have dreaded their children going to university. If I wanted, I could make up a whole life for these two and I might not be too far off the mark, but I decide against it. It’s too easy and besides, it comes unpleasantly close to a life that could have been mine. An unhappy father of two, living somewhere else, driving the boys to football practice every Sunday. A terrible version of myself; grey, jowly, thick-set and slow-moving. A catastrophic collection of compromises, defeated by life somehow.

No, I have better things to do. I finish my wine, pay the bill and head for home. I’m looking forward to being reunited with somebody who makes forever feel like paradise, the way it ought to, and not a punishment.