notes on last night's dinner

Charlie sat in front of the Mario Arbuckle painting in the Smithsonian Museum of American Wonders as the scene from the night before played in his mind. His girlfriend had left him at the restaurant where he’d taken her to celebrate her promotion, which she had beat out seventeen other junior associates to win. The promotion came with a $20,000 bonus, even. She had worked relentlessly for the last eight months, rising at five most mornings so she could squeeze in a run before showering, slip into one of a dozen of her dark suits, pour a big cup of coffee, and walk to her office a mile from their apartment. At the office, she researched case law and drafted motions to defend doctors from their former patients. Who, the former patients alleged, the very professionals with whom they had entrusted their health and welfare had managed, sometimes even intentionally and maliciously designed, to exploit that trust and to actually even further complicate and damage the already tenuous physical states of the patients they had been charged to care for and heal. Allegedly, of course, she always added. The doctors had taken oaths, the allegations always intoned, and had broken them, tumbling from their pedestals, now crumbled pillars of the community.

Charlie’s girlfriend once remarked that nowadays people never take oaths seriously unless they’re claiming that someone has broken one in a way that hurts them.

At dinner the night before, Charlie had told his girlfriend that he was proud of her for getting promoted, that he was happy for her, even though for the last eight months, he had only been able to spend quality time with her on Sunday afternoons, and even then, only on the Sundays when she didn’t have to help a partner prepare for a trial the following Monday. Anyway, he said, he could barely believe how happy she had made him and how lucky he was to be with someone so beautiful and brilliant and hardworking and good. He said this and looked at her admiringly. She took a bite of her salad. She looked for a waiter because she was running out of water and hadn’t been able to find the time that day to refill her water bottle at work even though she had run an extra long distance that morning because she was privately planning to run a half marathon in six weeks. Also, she thought as she glanced at Charlie guiltily, she felt a trifle selfish about it. Taking extra time to run further and further every week was cutting into the precious minutes they got to enjoy one another in bed each morning. She missed Charlie, actually, even though they shared an apartment and slept in the same bed every night, even though he was sitting right across from her. Thank you, honey, she smiled. Where is the waiter?

Charlie thought that the Arbuckle, bursting with greens on a canvas just barely whiter than the museum’s walls, might be hung a little crookedly. He ran his eyes around the perimeter of the painting, on alert for any sign of a slant. He sketched a few lines in the small black notebook that lay open on his lap.

She absentmindedly tapped her fingers on the table as the waiter filled her glass. Charlie wanted to take her on vacation now that these eight grueling months were over. Pick anywhere, he said, you deserve it. Let’s go. She gazed up and above his right shoulder, trying to decide if they would be more content in a foreign city or on a foreign beach. She briefly entertained an extended stay in foreign wine country. This made her feel guilty, too, but she realized that none of these options was appealing. Slowly, she looked back down at Charlie’s eyes, which were still fixed pleasantly on her face, and said that she couldn’t possibly leave work now, just when she’d been promoted and had to prove that she could handle all of her new responsibilities. She said that she was sorry but that she probably wouldn’t be able to go anywhere until Christmas, at least. Besides, she thought, she had to keep training for her half-marathon.

Charlie had sat in front of this painting many times on weekday afternoons and the colors had at some times struck him as infectiously vibrant now seemed lurid.

His girlfriend looked at him over her salad, smiled wistfully, and walked out of the restaurant just as their entrees arrived.