Dinner in Paris
A few years ago in Paris I heard a German man yell at his family in Italian.
Paris 2017
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A few years ago in Paris I heard a German man yell at his family in Italian. Because of this roaring, enraged yell, a cramped restaurant in the 6th arrondissement settled into silence. Trailing behind the yell was that ineffable sensation of turned heads and raised eyebrows which comes whenever a loud room is abruptly hushed. Thus I couldn’t hear any stainless steel knives scrape against porcelain plates, nor could I hear any muffled, lively dinnertime chatter, nor could I hear the heavy footfalls of passing waiters—although, just a moment earlier, I wasn’t even listening to those sounds, as they emerged in my mind only after they ceased, in that distinctive way in which a sudden absence of sound stresses what’s just stopped. But this was still a young evening in a fussy and unimpressed Paris, so the pause was brief, and the door hadn’t even closed behind the fleeing man before the spigot of conversation, once again, began to flow.
When I arrived at the restaurant, the man with thick white hair and a square jaw sat one table to my left, along with what almost certainly was his wife and daughter. And I do remember first noticing a strange contrast to their postures as I reached my table—the man hunched forward with a serpent-like curve to his back, while both of the women remained stiff and upright and still. As I took my seat, with the peculiar family dressed in elegant blacks to my left, curiosity drew my attention closer, though it was too intangible or elusive for me to justify. Yet these were now my temporary neighbors, as only the most slender of the restaurant’s many underage waiters could possibly squeeze in the narrow gap between our tables—and I’m fairly certain that I could have extended my left arm well past the man’s plate.
Underneath the dinnertime chatter of silverware and muffled laughs and glass clinks was an unmistakable crescendo. It was just below the surface of the restaurant’s cacophony, it was an ever-increasing force, at an intensity that was perhaps even clearer to me because I don’t speak German, so my ears were attuned to the nuances of the escalation. Yet this was still a larghetto, a dull, effortful three-way debate, with only the faintest hints of the coming eruption—the sentences to my left growing louder and louder, the drumbeat building minute-by-minute, the words a bit sharper, crisper, until, as confirmation, the younger woman swiveled her head in the undeniable, universal look of someone embarrassed for the behavior of their table. Her eyes and smile offered a meek apology, and a much larger sense of regret.
At my own table, the subject was wine, which is one subject that doesn’t impose any hurry. I have never understood the speed, nor the indifference, with which people order food and select wine. Though it does seem triggered by a desire to move faster, to begin the next step, to reach some elusive finish line, almost as if the moment of selection delays a moment that’s even more vital. And this angst comes even though a restaurant is meant to be savored—it’s not a spot you visit while rushing to the next item on your list. Of course this isn’t to imply that you must be a connoisseur of wine, with your chin high above your nose, or even an epicurean about the food on your plate—it is, instead, to recognize that you shouldn’t hustle past any particular moment for the next moment, especially when you’ve gone out for a night of, I presume, pleasure. To be caught in a loop of space where you’re eternally in the process of ordering wine doesn’t sound like such a bad oblivion, though most people might prefer to be trapped just a few minutes later, once the full glass has finally reached their hand; a rather difficult truth is that, perhaps, there’s little to distinguish those options, that every sensation of permanence is an illusion, that it’s worth savoring both moments.
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Nobody at my table, however, could keep their focus on our meticulous, or even persnickety, task of selecting the right wine, because of the ratcheting tension and strain and acrimony to my left. There’s not a precise moment to capture the threshold that separates loud from too loud, but there’s no mistaking once you’ve left the former and reached the latter. And this threshold also started the cascade of looks from around the room, right as the man stopped his yelling and stood—his movements deliberate, grand, sullen, the scrape of his chair against the wood floor, the slow and theatric folding of his napkin in the air, a flip of that napkin onto the table.
It is worth noting that I watched this scene for one or perhaps two seconds. Nothing more than a glance, an insignificant pause in the conversation, a quick look at the commotion. Every word in all of these sentences comes from the imprint of this glance, and I imagine that’s true for most people in the restaurant, too, despite the vehemence of the man’s coming shout; it is, after all, remarkable how much a glance reveals. How much detail and emotion and story come through the capturing of a single moment. How much precision can be found in the smallest of insights. Such as the discovery that his grimace contained a smirk, that he stood with more than rancor and hostility and frostiness, as there was also a hint of condescension, the kind of sneer that doesn’t surface because of a single argument. While he paused for his moment of contempt, the crowd waited for the scene—an apt word with a double meaning—to end.
The man huffed toward the exit, turned, peered across the restaurant, and took a moment to perfect his timing. Once you have a captive audience, he must have sensed, there’s a bit of obligation to fulfill your role. He many not have understood what the women at his table wanted, but he certainly understood the wants of an audience. And he didn’t falter—delivering one booming final word, a howl for the entire restaurant and most of the street in Italian, hissing Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrivederci, while rather expertly trilling his Rs to the crowd’s secret delight. Pompous, crass, tactless, and a surprising switch of languages for a peroration, but if you absolutely must slam a door, I’ll admit, it’s a good choice.
Now it is difficult to know what wine pairs best with restaurant arguments and oafish behavior, but my table made an admirable effort, slipping, without a single word about the scene, back into the moment, a night in Paris where there’s no rush or worries or desire to wish it all away, where the most intractable of problems are forgotten in the quiet candlelight, and where the most fitting response to a childish, boorish yell comes from a now grinning daughter, who calls over the waiter without a hint of shame and orders two more glasses.
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