Time Will Tell

An Ouroboros in the outer boroughs prompts introspection.

A couple nights ago, a sequence of events unfolded that made me question myself.

The Ouroboros-esque sequence involved me, the girl I’m dating, a host at a bar, and one other person—a man whom the girl I’m dating used to date a few months back.

The girl I’m dating, let’s call her M, sends me a text Friday around 7pm: “urgent question. What are you doing today?” We’d already agreed to meet on Saturday and spend the rest of the weekend together—but here was M texting me on Friday to find out, urgently, if I was free to get drinks. I was. I headed into Brooklyn.

The location of the bar was kitty-corner from the 2/3 train exit at Bergen Street. Ascending into the chilled December night, I looked up and saw M crossing the street, abreast in a puffy iron-green jacket, sporting red lipstick: neither M nor I had to change our strides by even one step for us to meet on time. We hugged and with a kiss on the cheek walked arm in pocket toward the bar.

I was coming from work, I have a part-time job as a lighting designer, so the first thing in the bar I noticed was the lighting: frosted globes about 10” in diameter, stem-hung from the burnished tin-ceiling. Sconces dotted with the walls with dimmed filament bulbs, dark brass armatures, and more cloudy globes. Parque floors and small, squarish wooden tables and cafe chairs sealed the Parisian brasserie-style uniformity of the place.

Now the sequence happens and quickly.

As we unbutton our jackets, the host greets us:
“Good evening…”

The host is the owner, a middle-aged Middle-Eastern man (the place is named for him) with a neatly trimmed beard that tinges white. He asks us to divulge our dining intentions: as I mention that I’m hungry for dinner M dishes that she’s just going to drink. The host, situated between five or six empty tables and a mostly empty bar, decides for us:

“If you’re just going to snack and drink, please sit at the bar,” he says, gesturing to our left.

A sweep of anger runs through me. There are several empty tables. I prefered a table. Why not just tell us: “sit wherever you like”? It feels like a power play, but by the time these thoughts move from my chest to my head, we are sitting down at the metal bar and taking off our winter wear.

I am still mad, but no harm, no foul, I think, and then M presents me with a gift of dried mango, and I start to forget.

The sequence is ordered enough, but there’s something I don’t know yet: a piece of information that changes all of this. This happens all the time of course. You think you understand something, and then another bit of info comes and shatters your previous narrative. Sometimes the events take days or weeks to unfold: a sequence like that is usually too unweildy for concise breakdown. This one happens so quickly it’s like a short phrase, hardly even a sentence. Like so. Later that night M tells me that when we sit down on the aluminum barstools she realizes that the man sitting across the bar, whom I have not noticed, is an ex-lover of hers, someone she’s recently stopped seeing before me.

The two of them had frequented that bar in the past, and the host had served them and chatted with them. According to M, the host recognized her: and knew that her ex was across the bar.

But M did not tell me this until hours later, when we were back at my apartment, and neither did I tell her that I had been bothered by the prickly host’s position on our position. We had stayed silent, secretly seething. Each of us chose to avoid the potential conflict and elide the anger, humiliation, or upset we felt along with it. We chose to eat and drink as if nothing had happened.

For what it’s worth: the orechiette lamb ragu was divine and tender. Other things happened. M showed me something on her phone and on her home screen I noticed she had Tinder installed and this too sent a surge of emotion through me. For a while I forgot all about the host. M insisted on paying the bill and left a large tip—too large, I felt, though did not say. Am I pathologically opposed to confrontation? Maybe M and I are just not that into each other. And maybe we are too similar in our reflexive responses to discomfort. Or is it me: didn’t I allow this man to disrespect me in some small way… and if one man lets another disrespect him in a small way, does he not open himself to disrespect in larger ways, too? What will happen to our little relationship?

The truth is slippery, like saliva riding the snake mouth eating its own tail: flowing, changing, mutating, but never exactly living or dying. It’s just there lubricating the action.

M and I failed to communicate our individual discomforts to one another, which could have led us to a decision: let’s go to another bar. Instead, we chose to eat and drink, and pretend nothing had happened.

Later that night, at my apartment, I bring up my discomfort with the host, and M tells me her side of it and we discuss it all. The conversation upsets me. M asks me why I did nothing and I kind of shrug: “Sometimes you get shoved around. You can’t always respond in force.” She seems at peace with this response. But I don’t know for sure. I’ll be beleaguring the point if I say it again, but whatever, I’ll reiterate: there was something I could have done about it. I could have spoken up about it, at least to M, and we could have decided to leave the bar. Of course, the exact same thing applies to her. Together, we failed a test of communication.

So what?

One is tempted to let sleeping dogs lie. I’ve never had the nature for this. I ruminate hard. In sleep my questions smolder. The unsolvedness spreads out even as it loses potency. What is this teaching me? Nature abhors a vacuum: and my life is nothing if not a river of riddles desperately seeking a keen navigator. I worry that by the time that navigator arrives, it will be too late, and my raft will have already washed up on dry land.

One obvious answer is that I’d be better off to speak up, particularly in the moment that I’m feeling angry. The same probably applies to M. Another might be that M and I are not right for eachother. But I am going to punt on this question—this being my essay. I like M, and she likes me. Maybe this situation is a red flag and death-knell for our nascent relationship, or maybe it’s a bump in the road signalling the need for more trust. (It’s also a tiny slice of it all—there is so much more stuff, stuff that’s probably more telling, which I’m not telling you.)

Time will tell.