Jim Courter The Connoisseur

 

Will and Claire reached for their wine glasses for a toast, but before they could raise them and clink, a woman, not their waitress, appeared next to their table and stood there without speaking, her arms crossed over her chest. She was tall and wore a severe countenance that was almost a scowl.

Neither Will nor Claire looked at her; rather, they looked at each other, their brows wrinkled in puzzlement, each silently asking the other, Do you know this person? When it became clear that the woman had no intention of going away, Claire looked up at her and said, “Can I help you?”

“No,” the woman said, “but I can help you.”

Claire waited with a wary, expectant look but didn’t respond

“You should know,” the woman said, “that your companion here”—she shot a disdainful glance down at Will—“has been checking me out since you came in. If you haven’t noticed it’s because like so many of his kind he has mastered the art of disguising his roving eye from the one he’s with. But not from me. I’m guessing from the rings on your fingers that you’re married. I’ll spare you my speech on marriage as a form of slavery and prostitution. But I’ll be damned if I’ll sit and be ogled by your husband and let him get away with it. And if you don’t realize that I’m doing you a favor, you need to have your consciousness raised.”

Claire looked up at the woman and said, “You should know that this man is my brother and that today we buried our mother, and that he’s an honorable guy, with no ill or inappropriate intentions toward the opposite sex, or anyone for that matter.”

The woman seemed flustered, as if she had no ready defense against the charge that she had assumed wrongly about the relationship between them and that her timing was abhorrent. She tried to recover by putting on a defensive look.

“Well . . . I . . . I’m sorry about your mother,” she said, “but that doesn’t exonerate him. Apparently mourning hasn’t dampened his appetite. I don’t stand for being leered at by slobbering males.”

Claire looked at Will with a bemused smile. “Slobbering?”

Will cringed. “Can’t take me anywhere, can you. I was slobbering over this fettuccine alfredo in front of me, which is getting cold thanks to this”—he gave a sideways nod toward the woman—“interruption.”

The woman cast a withering look at Will, shook her head at Claire as if in pity at her being joined to such a one, then stalked off back to her table to join her female companions.

Will smiled across at Claire and said, “Thanks. You handled that beautifully. For a minute there I thought she was going to tip this plate of fettuccine into my lap.”

“She was back on her heels, wasn’t she,’ Claire said. “She may have wondered if I was telling the truth. But think about it—on the chance that I was, she wouldn’t dare challenge me. By the way, did you recognize her?”

"No. Should I have?”

“She’s the new chair of the Women’s Studies Department on campus. An arch radical feminist. Sarah was on the committee that did the search and showed me her vita. It would make your hair stand on end. It almost made mine, and I’m much more liberated than you.”

“She accomplished that just now without the vita. I’m tempted to go over and share with her my definition of radical feminism.”

“And that is?”

“The gnawing fear that, somewhere, a man and a woman are happily married.”

Claire shook her head. “Let’s just enjoy our meal. I’m curious though, were you checking her out?”

“Yes,” he said, “but not in the way she seemed to think. When we walked in I immediately noticed the scolding look on her face as she held forth to her table mates. It was as if the entire room was organized around that look, like that jar in Tennessee in Wallace Stevens’s poem. I should have sat where you are so I couldn’t see her. Did you believe her? Did you think I was checking her out?”

“Not really,” Claire said. “Definitely not for the reason she accused you of. But I couldn’t be sure. You seemed to like our waitress. I can’t help but think your indecision over what to order was so she could make and extra trip to our table. She’s . . . You’re the connoisseur, fill in the blank for me.”

“Somewhere between a cutie and a beauty. I’m still trying to decide.”

Will had no sooner spoken than the waitress appeared next to their table to ask if they needed anything. Claire deferred to Will, who smiled up at her and assured her that all was fine.

When she left, Claire said, “You could have cut the irony with a knife just now. I wonder if she noticed.”

“She did a good job of hiding it if she did.”

“I’ll be watching how much you tip her.”

“I tip based on the service,” Will said. “What was that you called me, a connoisseur?”

“Yes. Do you remember that night at John and Sylvia’s, when we were sitting around after dinner and the talk turned to beauty?”

“I do. The subject was films, and Blade Runner came up. John was oohing and ahhing over Sean Young and . . .”

“To Sylvia’s obvious discomfort. You two were on a roll, and I was struck at the time by how much thought you had obviously given to the subject. I was hearing an entire lexicon that I didn’t know you possessed, all the ways a woman can be attractive. Cute, which you said was trite. Then there was pretty, beautiful, lovely, gorgeous, drop-dead gorgeous, striking, comely. I’m sure I’ve forgotten some.”

“You left out winsome.”

“Then you turned from adjectives to nouns:  knockout, head-turner, stunner.”

“I especially like that last one,” Will said. “It’s from the Pre-Raphaelites.”

“At which point you introduced the distinction between simple beauty and complex beauty, and said you often find the latter more intriguing. But if you said why, I missed it. By that time Syl was bending my ear, wondering if there was any hope for you two.”

“It has to do with the difference between symmetry and asymmetry. Do you want examples?”

Claire waved a hand. “That’s okay.”

“I don’t know about John,” Will said, “but I was just having fun. I might have had too much wine.”

Claire suddenly brightened. “Speaking of which, we forgot our toast.”

They lifted their glasses and clinked across the table.

“Happy anniversary,” he said.

“Happy anniversary, My Love. And here’s to many more.”

“And to the way you handled that woman. Brother and sister? Burying our mother? That was inspired.”

Claire smiled and sipped wine. “Thanks. You should know that in spite of her and all the ‘me too’ stuff you hear these days, not every woman bristles at being appreciated.”

“Good. And you should know that my connoisseur’s eye tells me that almost wherever we go in public, you’re the most beautiful woman present.”

Claire put on an ironic pout. “`Almost`?”

“It’s never failed to be the case, but I have to allow for all theoretical possibilities. Does that bother you?”

Claire smiled. “Not as long as they’re theoretical.”

Will looked past her and said, “Aha, a test. Here comes our waitress.”

Claire kicked him under the table. DSS

 

Jim Courter, of Macomb, IL.,  is a retired writing instructor at Western Illinois University. He won an Illinois Arts Council award for short fiction in 2002 and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His mystery novel Rhymes With Fool, was published in 2018 with a sequel forthcoming. His website is: Jimcourter.com

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