another boring evening

On the way back from the dojo, Victor and I stopped by Chancellor's for tacos and a couple of beers. At 10:30PM on a Wednesday night, Chancellor's isn't exactly crowded, and, in fact, the only people at the bar were the regulars. Victor and I took our usual booth (being regulars ourselves) and nodded to Celia, our usual signal for our usual Wednesday dinner.

At the bar, Cheeky Charlie was again talking about his ex-wife. Cheekie Charlie didn't talk about much else, in fact, and by now, Victor, I, and the rest of the regulars know more about Cheekie Charlie's ex than the ex knows about herself, if we are to believe any of the stories. She left him for a Hungarian football star, the story goes, after meeting him at the Post Office while the Hungarian football team was in town for a vacation visit to Sea World. He was in the Post Office to mail a postcard to his mother in law and, being somewhat mystified by the varied assortment of postages available, not to mention his bewilderment at the operation of a stamp-dispensing vending machine, he enlisted the aid of Cheeky Charlie's wife. Something about the way the footballer pronounced his consonants, said Cheeky Charlie, again, caught the ex-wife's attention, and, before the month was out, Cheeky Charlie found himself divorced.

There wasn't much else to know about Cheeky Charlie, or at least, Cheeky Charlie didn't seem to think so, since he never spoke of anything else.

Celia came back to the table to tell us that the kitchen was out of sour cream. So much for our tacos. We had to ask for a menu, in that case, since, though we'd been coming to Chancellor's every Wednesday night for two years, we'd never ordered anything other than the tacos. Celia brought us menus.

"Hey," said Victor. "This isn't a Mexican restaurant after all."

"No kidding," I said, "Evidently it's a Korean restaurant. Named Chancellor's. With tacos and beer."

"Huh," agreed Victor.

So we changed our order to BBQ pork and rice, which we correctly assumed would not put a strain on Chancellor's kitchen's supply of sour cream. I could tell from the look on Victor's face that he was dying to tell me something. With Victor it's best just to wait. Prodding will only cause him to change the subject.

"I broke up with Tiffany," said Victor.

"Finally?" I asked. Tiffany had been plagueing Victor for the better part of a decade, and though I generally refrain from giving any kind of advice, much less relationship advice, I had on many occasions opined that it was time for Victor to move on. He'd always had some excuse for keeping her around, though. She was a good cook, for one, which was certainly true. I'd been to their home twice before, for dinner, and both times I was impressed with Tiffany's skills in the kitchen. Her father had been a baker before they'd come to the States, and she'd spent hours in her youth rolling dough and frosting pastries. Where she picked up such a flair for sauces nobody was ever quite able to explain, least of all Tiffany, but as exquisite as her rolls and the key-lime pie were, it was the raspberry truffle sauce that carried both evenings. If I could afford to buy truffles, I'd ask for the recipe, though the sort of justice I'd be able to do the recipe would be less akin to what the fungi deserved and more akin to the sort of justice one would expect to find afforded to Eichmann in an Israeli court.

But I digress.

Victor always had some reason he hadn't dumped the perpetually unemployed Tiffany, and while occasionally he'd come up with a reason that satisfied, mostly his reasons were simply shit. Naturally, cooling myself in the shadow of the decade high mountain of Victor's justifications, I was eager to find out his reasons for finally cutting himself free.

"She smelled," he said.

"She what?"

"She smelled." Victor gazed at me, calmly, and his expression made it quite clear that this was as far as he would explain in the absence of further encouragement. In Victor's mind I understood all the ramifications and meanings of his statement and could not possibly need further clarification. That was Victor, all right. He expected everyone to know mounds upon mounds of backstory whenever he let fly with one of his simplistic summations.

I had never noticed any particular smell about Tiffany, and I told him so.

"You never noticed?" he asked me.

"No, I never noticed." Then I realized where this might be heading. "Wait," I said, "do I want to know about this smell?"

Celia returned to the table. She wasn't carrying anything but a nervous frown. Bad news.

"We're out of pork," said Celia.

"You've got to be fucking joking," said Victor. Victor really has no sense of proportion. The slightest things will set him off into a rage, and yet the most egregious outrages will slide by him, coolly, like a slug on iceskates. While it's no secret that Victor and I lead the sort of lives that tend not to organically encounter many true outrages, we try to make do with what we've got. Victor told me sometime last month about the culmination of his previous half-year's work. He'd spent long nights and multiple weekends preparing a demo for the CEO of his company. He had explained to me the topic of the presentation, in his usual terse, context-free style, and I had realized right away that even were he to explain the context, I wouldn't have had much chance of understanding the subject, and even had I some chance of understanding the subject, I certainly wouldn't have been interested by it. So I didn't press. In any case, Victor had worked hard on his demo only to have the presentation usurped by his boss 15 minutes before the meeting with the CEO. Victor's boss had passed the demo off as his own and taken all the accolades.

This hadn't bothered Victor much more than a stubbed toe would bother me: immediate irritation that will fade as soon as a new interest comes by. The outrage of the situation had been lost on Victor. But right there, at Chancellor's, a (who knew?) Korean restaurant that happened, at 10:45 on a Wednesday night, to be out of not only sour cream but also pork, Victor was about to lose it. Victor is only midly tolerable at the best of times, but after having lost it, well... he's less tolerable.

Someone who didn't know Victor very well but who had heard that he'd recently dumped his girlfriend of a decade might expect that the impending explosion was directly related to recent events in his lovelife. That would be someone who didn't know Victor very well. The two events were absolutely separated from each other. I was fairly certain, as I observed Victor's face reddening at the prospect of having to alter his order for a second time, that Tiffany was, in fact, nowhere at all in his thoughts at the moment. As with asking Victor about his thoughts, so with attempting to prevent an outburst: it was best to stay well enough away and let the essential Victor unfold at its own pace. There was no way to prevent what was to come.

Except that in this case, there was.

Chancellor's front door opened and in stepped, I shit you not, Tiffany. Victor and I had been coming to Chancellor's every Wednesday night for two years, but Tiffany certainly didn't know that. Of this I was certain, since Victor had told me so, and Victor rarely lies, at least not to me. I don't know why he never told her about it but I've got a good guess. Victor kept secrets from Tiffany. Never big ones. Victor's favorite beer, for example, was some weird smokey brew from Alaska or some such place, and everyone at his office knew it, and I knew it, and the clerks at Majorca's certainly all know it, but Tiffany doesn't. Victor likes to wear hats. Any hat. He'll wear them whenever he's out with friends, but never if Tiffany's around. She has no idea he likes hats. Just weird, random secrets, he'd keep from her for no apparent reason. She knew he went to Aikido every Wednesday and Friday night, and she knows me well enough, but Victor won't tell her where we go afterwards. I think it's some kind of weird power thing with him. He doesn't want people to know too much about him. He likes to be mysterious, I guess. God knows what he's keeping from me.

So there was Tiffany, the door closing behind her, light from the street casting a weird greenish glow on her blonde hair. She looked around the restaurant but didn't see us, even though, as would be expected at this hour, Chancellor's was not particularly crowded. Her eyes settled on Cheeky Charlie and she walked over to the bar and took the seat next to him.

Cheeky Charlie hadn't noticed Tiffany come in. He had been too busy relating another story about his ex-wife to anybody who'd listen, which, as usual, was nobody. His beer rarely protested that it had heard enough about his ex, and since nobody else paid him any attention at all, other than to bring him more beer, Cheeky Charlie never got the notion that everybody was entirely disinterested in his story. Victor's attention was now fixed on the backside of his former girlfriend, and the excess blood drained from his face returning his skin tone to its usual shade of pallid. Even Celia was distracted, as she turned her attention toward Cheeky Charlie, who had never been seen to attract any companionship at all to his side at the bar, much less female companionship. The other regulars directed their gazes toward the bar, for the same reasons as Celia. Not much ever happened in Chancellor's, and it seemed that something interesting -- though only Victor and I could have guessed how interesting -- was about to happen.

Cheeky Charlie finally noticed that Tiffany was beside him. He turned to her and spoke. He only said two words, one of which might be unfamiliar to the average man-on-the-street but which was eminently familiar to everyone in the bar.

Said Cheeky Charlie, plainly, "Where's Gergely?"

Victor's jaw dropped. My jaw dropped. I could see the anger returning to Victor's briefly placid visage, and was forced to consider the possiblity that for a change, Victor might end up getting angry about something worth getting angry about. But. In the long run, especially considering what was undoubtedly about to be revealed, it was best -- in the strongest possible sense of the word "best" -- that Tiffany was out of Victor's life, and I felt personally responsible at that moment for keeping her and her revelations as far from him as possible. It dawned on me then that as we had not actually received any food, much less successfully placed an order, we were in no way yet beholden to the restaurant. Celia was still entranced by the scene, pregnant with implications, which was preparing to unfold. I slid myself against Victor, indicating wordlessly that we should evacuate the booth. Victor, also wordlessly, indicated with quite the frown that he didn't plan to.

Victor and I don't need to talk. That's how it is when you've known someone as long as I've known Victor. There's a fair amount of communication that can be achieved nonverbally even between people who haven't known each other long, but that is quite dwarfed by the range of silent conversation that is available to people with decades of friendship under their belts. Employing all my skills as a nonverbalist, I made it quite clear to Victor that we were leaving immediately, or else. And furthermore, the "or else" part would be so unimaginably horrific that, well, it couldn't be imagined, much less nonverbally communicated. And finally, and most importantly, I told my good friend Victor without moving my lips, we weren't just leaving, we were sneaking out, not because we were risking the ire of an unpaid restauranteur, but because we wanted to avoid the attention of both Cheeky Charlie and Tiffany. Victor got me, especially the "or else" part, and complied with my nudge. We slid out of the booth, out of Chancellor's, and, if we're lucky, forevermore out of Tiffany's evidently quite voluminous sphere of influence.

And so it was, another boring evening with Victor.