The Dinner (6 page)

As far as that continual topping-up goes, let me say this: I have travelled a bit, I have been to restaurants in many countries, but nowhere – and when I say nowhere I literally mean nowhere – do they top up your wine without you asking for it. They would consider that rude. Only in Holland do they come up to your table all the time; not only do they top up your glass, but they also cast a wistful eye at the bottle when it seems to be getting empty. ‘Isn’t it about time to order another one?’ is what those looks are meant to say.

I know someone, an old friend, who spent a few years working in Dutch ‘top restaurants’. Their tactic, he told me once, is to actually force as much wine as possible down your throat, wine they sell for seven times what the importer charges for it, and that’s why they always wait so long between bringing the appetizer and taking orders for the entrée: people will order more wine out of pure boredom, just to kill time, that’s the way they figure it. The appetizer usually arrives quite quickly, my friend said, because if the appetizer takes too long people start complaining. They start to doubt their choice of restaurant, but after a while, when they’ve had too much drink between appetizer and entrée, they lose track of time. He knew of cases where the entrées had been ready for a long time, but remained on the plates in the kitchen because the people at the table in question weren’t complaining. Only when there was a lull in the conversation and the customers began to look around impatiently were the plates shoved into the microwave.

What had we been talking about before the appetizers came? Not that it really mattered, it couldn’t have been anything important, but that was what made it so irritating. I could remember what we’d said after all the fuss with the cork and the placing of our orders, but I had no idea what had been going on right before our plates arrived.

Babette had joined a new gym, we’d talked about that a bit: about losing weight, the importance of remaining active and which sport was best for which person. Claire was thinking about joining a health club, and Serge had said he couldn’t stand the obtrusive music at most places like that. That’s why he had taken up running, he said, where you could be out on your own in the fresh air, and he acted as though he had come up with the idea all by himself. He conveniently forgot that I had started running years ago, and how he had never missed an opportunity to make snide comments about his ‘little brother out trotting around’.

Yes, that’s what we had talked about at first, for rather too long for my taste, but an innocent subject to be sure, a fairly typical prelude to a standard restaurant evening. But for the rest of the evening? Not if my life depended on it. I looked at Serge, at my wife, and then at Babette. At that moment, Babette jabbed her fork into her vitello tonnato, cut off a slice and raised it to her mouth.

‘But now I’ve completely forgotten,’ she said, the fork poised in the air. ‘Did you say you two have already seen the new Woody Allen, or not?’

When the conversation turns too quickly to films, I see it as a sign of weakness. I mean: films are more something for the end of the evening, when you really don’t have much else to talk about. I don’t know why, but when people start talking about films I always get a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, like when you wake up after a bad night and find that it’s already getting dark outside.

The worst are those people who describe entire films; they get right into it, they have no qualms about taking up fifteen minutes of your time – fifteen minutes per film, that is. They don’t really care whether you haven’t yet seen the film in question, or whether you saw it a long time ago: such considerations don’t bother them, they’re already right in the middle of the opening scene. To be polite you feign interest at first, but soon you bid farewell to courtesy, you yawn openly, stare at the ceiling and squirm around in your chair. You do everything in your power to make the narrator shut up, but nothing helps; they’re too far gone to notice the signals; above all, they’re addicted to themselves and their own crap about films.

I believe it was my brother who started in about the new Woody Allen.

‘A masterpiece,’ he said, without asking whether we – that is, Claire and I – might have seen it already. Babette nodded emphatically at this; they had seen it together last weekend, they were in agreement about something for a change.

‘A masterpiece,’ she said. ‘Really, you two have to go.’

To which Claire said that we had already been. ‘Two months ago,’ I added, which in fact was unnecessary; it was just something I felt like saying, it wasn’t aimed at Babette but at my brother. I wanted to let him know that he was running pretty far behind with his masterpieces.

At that moment an entire bevy of girls in black pinafores arrived with our appetizers, followed by the manager and his pinkie, and we lost track of where we were – until Babette picked up the thread again with her question about whether or not we had already seen it, the new Woody Allen.

‘I thought it was a great film,’ Claire said as she dipped a sun-dried tomato in the olive oil on her plate and raised it to her lips. ‘Even Paul liked it. Didn’t you, Paul?’

Claire does that all the time: draw me into things in a way that I can’t back out. Now the others already knew that I had liked it, and ‘even Paul’ meant something along the lines of ‘even Paul, who usually doesn’t like any film, especially something by Woody Allen’.

Serge looked at me, a morsel of appetizer still in his mouth, he was chewing on it, but that didn’t stop him from addressing himself to me. ‘A masterpiece, right? No, really, fantastic.’ He went on chewing and then gulped. ‘And that Scarlett Johansson, I wouldn’t kick her out of bed for eating crackers. Good Lord, what a beauty!’

Hearing your older brother refer to a film you yourself think is pretty good as a ‘masterpiece’ is kind of like having to wear that brother’s old clothes: the hand-me-downs that have become too small for him, but which in your eyes are above all
old
. My options were limited: admitting that Woody Allen’s film was a masterpiece would be like wriggling into those old clothes, and therefore out of the question; there was no superlative for ‘masterpiece’, so the most I could do was try to prove that Serge hadn’t understood the film, that he considered it a masterpiece for all the wrong reasons, but that would involve a lot of effort; it would be laying it on rather thick for Claire, and probably for Babette as well.

In fact, there was only one option left, and that was to run Woody Allen’s film into the ground. It wouldn’t be too hard: there were enough weaknesses I could point out, weaknesses that don’t really matter when you like a film but that you can make use of in an emergency, in order to dislike the same film. Claire would raise her eyebrows at first, then hopefully realize what I was doing: that my betrayal of our shared appreciation for the film was in the service of the struggle against spineless, show-offy crap about films in general.

I reached for my glass of Chablis, intending first to take a thoughtful sip before carrying out this latter strategy, when suddenly I saw another way out. What was it my idiot brother had said, anyway? About Scarlett Johansson? ‘Kick her out of bed for eating crackers … a beauty’ – I didn’t know what Babette thought of that kind of crass macho talk, but Claire always got up on her hind legs when men started on about ‘sweet asses’ and ‘nice tits’. I’d been looking at my brother when he said that about the crackers, and had missed her reaction, but that wasn’t really even necessary.

Sometimes, recently, I had had the impression that he was starting to lose touch with reality, that he seriously thought the Scarlett Johanssons of this world would like nothing more than to eat crackers in his bed. I suspected him of viewing women in more or less the same way that he viewed food, his daily hot meal in particular. That was how he used to be, and to be honest it’s never really changed.

‘I need to eat something,’ Serge says when he’s hungry. He’ll say that when you’re out hiking somewhere in a national park, far from civilization, or driving down the highway, between two exits.

‘Sure,’ I say then, ‘but right now we don’t have anything to eat.’

‘But I’m hungry right now,’ Serge will say. ‘I need to eat now.’

There was something pitiful about it, this dumb resolve that would make him forget everything else – his surroundings, the people he was with – and focus on only one objective: sating his own hunger. At moments like this he reminded me of an animal that encounters an obstacle in its path: a bird that doesn’t understand that the glass in the windowpane is made of solid matter and flies into it again and again.

And when we would finally find a place to eat, it was never a pretty sight. He would eat the way one fills the tank with petrol: he would devour his cheese sandwich with white bread or his almond cake quickly and efficiently, to make sure the fuel reached his stomach as soon as possible; without fuel there was no way you could go on. The real fine dining came much later, like his knowledge of wine; at a certain point he decided it was necessary, but the speed and efficiency remained: even these days, he was always the first to empty his plate.

I would have paid a fortune to see and hear just once how things went in the bedroom between him and Babette. On the other hand, there is a part of me that would actually resist that with every fibre of my being, that would pay an equally great fortune never to have to find out.

‘I need to fuck.’ And then Babette saying she has a headache, that she’s having her period or that this evening she doesn’t even want to think about it, about his body, his arms and legs, his head, his smell. ‘But I need to fuck right now.’ I bet my brother fucks the way he eats, that he stuffs himself into a woman in the same way he stuffs a beef croquette into his mouth – and that his hunger is then stilled.

‘So you were mostly sitting there looking at Scarlett Johansson’s tits,’ I say, much more crudely than I’d planned. ‘Or do you mean something else when you say “a masterpiece”?’

A miraculous kind of silence fell then, the kind you hear only in restaurants: a sudden, raised awareness of the presence of others, the buzzing and the click of cutlery on plates at thirty other tables, the one or two becalmed seconds when background noises become foreground noises.

The first thing to break the silence was Babette’s laughter; I glanced up at my wife, who was staring at me in dismay, and then back at Serge; he was trying to laugh too, but his heart wasn’t in it – what’s more, he still had food in his mouth.

‘Come, come, Paul, not so holier-than-thou!’ he said. ‘She just happens to be a babe, a man has eyes in his head, doesn’t he?’

‘A babe,’ Claire wouldn’t like that one either, I knew that. She would always say ‘a good-looking man’, never ‘tasty’, let alone ‘nice ass’. ‘All that fashionable talk about “nice asses”, it’s too contrived for me, when women start talking like that,’ she’d said once. ‘It’s like when women suddenly start smoking pipes or spitting on the ground.’

Through and through, Serge had remained a yokel, a boorish lout: the same boorish lout who used to get sent from the table for farting.

‘I also think Scarlett Johansson is a very attractive woman,’ I said. ‘But it sounded sort of like you thought that was the most significant thing about the film. Do correct me if I’m wrong.’

‘Well, things go completely wrong with that, what’s his name, that Englishman, the tennis teacher, because he can’t get her off his mind. He even has to shoot her just to get what he wants.’

‘Hey!’ Babette said. ‘Don’t say that, that ruins it if you haven’t seen it yet!’ Another brief silence descended, during which Babette looked from Claire to me. ‘Oh shit, I think I must have been asleep, you two
did
see it already!’

We all laughed, all four of us, a moment of release – but too much release was not good, one had to remain on one’s toes. The simple truth was that Serge Lohman had a nice ass himself, you heard women say it often enough. He was all too aware that they found him attractive, and there was nothing wrong with that; he was photogenic, he possessed a certain – again, loutish – attractiveness: a bit too in your face and a bit too much rough timber, if you asked me, but of course there are women who prefer plain furnishings, tables or chairs made from ‘authentic materials’: scrap wood from old stall doors in northern Spain or Piedmont.

Serge’s girlfriends had usually given up on him after a few months; there was a boring, matter-of-fact side to that attractiveness, so they soon tired of his ‘pretty face’. Babette was the only one who had stuck longer with him, about eighteen years now, which in itself was something of a miracle – they had been squabbling for eighteen years; it was pretty clear that they didn’t really suit each other at all, but you often see that: couples for whom constant friction is the real engine of their marriage, every fight the foreplay to the moment when they can make up in bed.

But sometimes I couldn’t help think that it was all much simpler than that, that Babette had merely signed up for something, for a life at the side of a successful politician, and that it would have been a waste of all the time she’d invested to stop now: the way you don’t put aside a bad book when you’re halfway through it, you finish it reluctantly; that’s the way she’d stayed with Serge – perhaps the ending would make up for some of it.

They had two children of their own: Rick, who was Michel’s age, and Valerie, a slightly autistic thirteen-year-old with an almost translucent, mermaid-like beauty. And then there was Beau, exact age unknown, but probably somewhere between fourteen and seventeen. Beau came from Burkina Faso and had ended up with Serge and Babette via a ‘development project’: one of those where you support schoolchildren in the Third World by buying them books and other necessities, and then ‘adopt’ them: at a distance to start with, by means of letters and photographs and postcards, but later in real life as well. The chosen child then lives with the Dutch foster family for a while, and if that goes well, they are allowed to stay. A sort of hire purchase agreement, in other words. Or like a cat you bring home from the animal shelter; if the cat scratches the sofa to bits or pisses all over the house, you take it back.