Dec 8, 2002
Loving Me Not – the Story
One night in mid-February 1992, when I sat in Pagliacci’s restaurant at the heart of downtown Victoria, waiting for someone to show up, and hurting.
We were friends, good friends, and I had an eighteen-year-old-girl crush on him, which never amounted to anything. We’d made an arrangement the night before, or at least, I thought we had. Over coffee on the balcony of the common room, over looking the sea, he’d mentioned going into the city the next night, and I’d murmered that I had similar plans. He said something about maybe getting some food, and I, being eighteen and blinkered, took that as meaning “See you in Pagliacci’s, our favourite restaurant, for a romantic dinner at eight, then”.
Neither of us realised the significance of the date.
Pag’s was (probably still is) a popular place, with great food and an amazing atmosphere. I used to go to all the time when I was studying over there. Used to love the anticipation, queuing down the block – there was always a big line-up. Used to enjoy getting there early enough to get a good seat for the jazz later, sitting elbow to elbow with complete strangers, gorging myself on Caesar Salad, Manhattan Transfer with real walnuts and real New York Cheesecake, so good it made everyone shut up when savouring it, so rich I might as well have rubbed it directly on my thighs. Used to love trying to get served beer (and usually failing), and settling instead for frothy cappuccino with soy milk, before I even knew what soy milk really was. Used to enjoy the repleteness of an enormous dinner, more filling and satisfying than anything the college cafeteria could ever have dreamed up, the company of friends (or not) in the city, the guilty pleasure of a meal we couldn’t afford, the slow wander back to the bus to take us back out to the boonies.
The night after our conversation, I showed up at the restaurant at a quarter to eight. As always, there was a long queue outside to get in, made up mostly of couples. The women clutched Valentines roses in their pale hands; the men clutched their women. The queue inched forward, and when I got to the front of the line, I told the waiter that I was expecting a friend. He seated me at a table for two in the window, and I waited.
When half eight came, the waiter asked if I would like to go ahead and order – so I asked for salad, which came and went, though I barely touched it. At nine, pasta, dipped with crusty garlic bread, and by quarter to ten, dessert – chocolate cheesecake, rich and smooth, like the other customers in the restaurant. Throughout the evening, I asked the waiter if he wouldn’t mind sticking his head out the door and checking in the queue outside to see if my friend was waiting there, trying to get in. The waiter would peek outside, and then shake his head and shrug as he came back inside. There was no-one outside waiting for me, and I was waiting inside for no-one. During dessert, they took away the chair where my friend would have sat, because they needed it for another table. He wasn’t going to come.
I had nothing else to do while waiting – no book to read, no walkman, nothing, which is very unlike me. No-one likes to sit and look lonely, so early in the evening I borrowed a pen from the waiter and wrote tiny words on the fronts, backs and insides of four Piet Mondriaan cards I’d bought to send to friends back home. A letter of frustration. A letter about waiting in a busy restaurant. A letter about coming to an uncomfortable realisation. I still have it – sellotaped into an old diary, printed on the front with the words “the Pagliacci Notes”.
By ten o’clock, I was out of excuses. He hadn’t missed the bus, he wasn’t lost, he wasn’t just running late: he wasn’t coming. The waiter asked if he should bring me the bill, and I nodded silently. He disappeared into the back of the restaurant, and appeared a few minutes later, empty handed.
He couldn’t do it, he said. I looked too sad to pay. No-one should wait on their own in a restaurant on Valentine’s night, he said. He’d paid for my dinner out of his tips for the evening. He told me that the guy I was waiting for was obviously a moron, and that if I wanted to go out for dinner sometime soon, he’d be happy to take me. He scrawled his number on a napkin, and told me to call.
I left the busy restaurant, smiling through the nearly-tears.
Poem, written at the table, waiting: Loving Me Not
[Post-script about the waiter:
His name was Scott, and we met a week later for coffee. He was a sweet guy, and probably perfect for someone - but not me, at that point.
I was smarting from the realisation that nothing was every going to happen between me and my friend, and I couldn't focus enough to be involved with someone else, even someone as kind as the waiter.
He was also a classic closet case.
We kept in touch for a few months, meeting for coffee every few weeks (I think we may even have been to a Grapes of Wrath concert together) but nothing ever happened between us except friendship, of which I was very thankful.]
[Post-script about the friend: we lost touch for nine years, and met again in January 2001. Nearly a decade after that night of waiting in Pagliaccis. I told him I'd waited, and he confessed he hadn't even known we'd agreed anything, and had ended up playing pool with a friend in some bar.]
