The Waiter

by Matias Faldbakken

  EYEBALLS

  WHAT DO YOU KNOW: HERE she comes, in the same morning light, across the mosaic tiles, in relaxed, low shoes. The young woman the Pig and his company were waiting for the other day. This early? Is it breakfast she wants? Now, I may be in disarray, but it feels like some kind of “bidding round” takes place every time she comes in. Isn’t it called a Giffen good, a product which paradoxically becomes more in demand as its price rises? It’s like the young woman has a similar quality. I don’t know.

  She sits down and glances over to me as I stand here, blossoming in my waiter’s uniform. Or “blossoming” isn’t the word: I’m standing still; I stand here year after year, getting older, more like moss. She moves her head back almost imperceptibly. What do you call a nod that goes backwards? Raising the chin. She raises her chin to me, and what a chin. I react quickly and go over with two menus beneath my arm.

  “Are you expecting company?”

  “No.”

  “Coffee?”

  “Yes, please.”

  For a moment I think about asking whether she got hold of the Pig, Graham, but I bat that away, slightly shocked that I’m even considering it. It’s way beyond my job description to press and question the guests. Suddenly you end up putting your foot in it. She could be a grandchild; she could be a business contact or an erotic liaison, for all I know. The guests shouldn’t have to explain themselves in here. But you do think about things. She must be some kind of asset, otherwise she wouldn’t be in circulation. A resource for the Pig. Credit. What does the Bar Manager know about her? Very little, it seems. She stands there with her intelligent face looking like a question mark.

  It seems unfair that we always have to describe appearance first when describing girls, but what can I do? It’s all I have. When you look up at a clear sky, focus plays no part. What would you focus on? It’s the same with this girl, I think: you can clearly see her, she’s clear, but she’s never in focus. I don’t really know. The impression she gives is absorbing. I hand her one of the menus, clutching the other to my ribs. I stand there for a bit too long; she’s reading, and I’m staring straight at the top of her head—her crown, I suppose it’s called. A not-quite-straight part in her hair runs from this crown down to her left temple, where her fringe is pushed to the right and then falls over her face. She is leaning forward, studying the menu.

  Edgar had an affair with a girl once. She drove him crazy. Even though she always showed complete affection, Edgar said, and showered him with the sense that he was supreme in a way he had never experienced with any other partner—he had believed her and her shower of compliments completely—he was also eaten up by the suspicion that he wasn’t the only one being given that treatment.

  “Could I have a little milk in my coffee?” the girl says with some kind of smile.

  Edgar never managed to prove anything. He never caught her flirting or cheating in any way, but the fact that her radiance had had such a magical effect on him from the very outset could only mean, Edgar argued, that it also had a similar effect on others. And the thought that she, that person, that being, who had made him feel so unique, perhaps for the very first time, might not actually have been exclusively his, made him boil over. The fact that she struck him in that special way, and might potentially strike all the others in the same way, made him short-circuit. The greediest, most egotistical, and unkind sides of Edgar came out then, he has said, and grew uncontrollably, like weeds, like wheatgrass, with their long, creeping, and far-reaching roots. He related to her the way a capitalist relates to his money pot, he said. Like a hawker. Stingy. I never met her, but I’ve developed an image of her in my mind—from the hours I spent listening to Edgar’s woes at the time—and that image materializes in the young woman sitting before me here at The Hills. She’s just how I imagined her. A generator for jealousy. The girl looks up at me, and I realize that she’s wondering what happened to the coffee, because now she hands me the menu and asks for the cereal with linden honey and goat yogurt.

  “And the coffee, too.”

  I hurry out to the kitchen, my back straight. It might sound funny, but that’s exactly what I do: I hurry across the floor. I hurry through the swinging doors and out into the kitchen, grab one of the coffeepots, and immediately return with it in one hand and a petite steel milk jug in the other. The jug is so small that I have to hold the handle between my thumb and index finger. I rush over to the young lady and pour the coffee. Then I subtly lift the milk jug while I look at her and raise my eyebrow almost imperceptibly, as though to suggest the question Would you like a drop of milk in your coffee?

  “Yes, please,” she replies to that gestural question, and I pour an amount of milk which couldn’t be described as anything but a dash. I give her another questioning look and she says, “A little more,” and I, standing with my back angled, with my little finger pointing upwards and out because of the tiny jug, pour another dash.

  “One moment, and I’ll fetch you the day’s paper,” I say, but she stops me and says that it’s not necessary.

  “Wonderful,” I say.

  Really? Not interested in the papers in the morning? I see. I can sometimes be blinded by the notion of old Europe that’s being nurtured and conserved here at The Hills, but I’m still taken aback that she can’t yield to the tradition of rustling a broadsheet over a coffee in the morning light. What does she mean it’s not necessary? Physical newspapers are increasingly swapped for other equipment in here, even in the morning, I’ve noted that. I’m not saying there’s any kind of betrayal in fishing out a device rather than rustling the paper; all I’m saying is that it’s noted. But the young lady doesn’t pull out one form of technology or another. She just sits there as though on exhibit, sipping her coffee with calm movements.

  •

  As I walk around scraping crumbs, I follow the girl out of the corner of my eye, taking in everything she does or, more accurately, everything she doesn’t do. She continues her sipping, but otherwise there’s very little to write home about. My favorite activity is actually using the crumber to scrape the crumbs from the tables. We have both crumbers and so-called crumb brushes at the restaurant; I prefer the crumber. I deftly push the crumbs onto the crumb tray I’m holding beneath the edge of the table. I hang the crumber back in its place and go over to the young woman. With the venerable New York Times in my hands—not some paper from the nervous, old Europe, I’ll have you know, but one of the papers which, ironically enough, maintains a sense of the old Europe, the Old World, or something like that. It offers an air of the twentieth century. I hand her a fresh, crisp copy.

  “That’s not necessary,” she says.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  Why am I pushing newspapers onto the guests? Thank you? I put down the eternal New York Times, grab the crumber again, and run it over the tablecloths with experienced hands. I even run it over the tops of the tables I’ve already scraped, doubling the amount of work for myself.

  “Excuse me,” the girl says, signaling that she wants to pay. I immediately present her with the bill. While she fishes out the cash from a becomingly cluttered handbag, I suggest that it looks like a lovely day today.

  “Uh,” says the girl.

  When she gets up, it sinks in how hideously well proportioned she is. Symmetrical. I’ve seen it—I saw it yesterday—but I didn’t take it in. Now I take it in. There’s a male guest in the middle of his forties two tables away, and he can’t control his eyeballs as she straightens up and stretches—yes, she stretches—before she swings an autumn coat over her shoulders, a light jacket, a crochet jacket? A knitted jacket? Was it knitted on thick needles? Is it homemade? Was it made on a machine? An organic, long-waisted, hand-knitted sweater camouflaged as a jacket? A cozy angora? The eyeballs of the man two tables away have taken on a life of their own, that much is clear. It’s interesting to watch a man whose eyeballs are out of control. How strong can eyeballs be? On the other hand, I should look at my own eyeballs before I sta
rt talking about other people’s. My eyeballs are running amok just as badly as his. The difference is that my eyes are seeking out his for brief moments, as though they want to confirm that he (his eyeballs) are seeing what I (my eyeballs) are seeing. The man’s eyeballs are in a fight with his will, which is trying to keep them to himself, but the eyeballs are drawn to the girl like two owlets as she stands there stretching and pulling on that slightly long crocheted jacket, whatever a jacket is called when it’s slightly long. Then she walks towards the door. Her journey towards the exit sucks the air from the room, reestablishing some of that personality vacuum. With elegant, possibly self-objectivizing steps, she disappears through the curtains. She reappears on the outside of the arched windows, which are covered at the bottom with lace curtains on brass poles. She disappears behind the wall again, reappears in the next window, disappears behind the wall, and continues like that along the entire row of windows, off and on, like a film strip.

  “Like all slaves, girls think they’re watched more than they really are,” the man with the eyeballs mutters, glancing at me. What does he mean by that? He should pull in his eyeballs so they don’t roll out of his skull. I see that the swindler actor has taken his seat. And, on cue, Old Johansen starts playing the piano up on the mezzanine: he gives us Bach, and Goldberg Variation No. 5, up-tempo. These small occurrences mean that the time is almost exactly ten in the morning.

  “I’ll have a vodka,” says the actor.

  “Would you prefer Belvedere,” I ask, “or Reyka?” That’s the Icelandic vodka I know he drinks from time to time.

  The actor breathes like a whale; it seems as though life itself leaves his body. He then sucks in air so that his nose whistles before he lets the air go again, and growls, “Belvedere,” with a voice so sonorous that you might think it had seeped out from the bowels of hell.

  I exchange a few words with the Bar Manager; she’s the one I talk to if I have to chat. She tells me she had some unfortunate trouble with the timing belt, as it’s known, in her car, right in the middle of the afternoon yesterday, plus that the Rwandan Twa people are, interestingly enough, potters, something which is unusual among Pygmy peoples; they generally trade agricultural products, iron, and pottery for meat. And—would you believe it?—the Bar Manager has managed to get her hands on a lovely little Twa pot. “Listen, the young lady—who is she?” I ask out of the blue. “The rapist,” the Bar Manager says cryptically, the way she often does when she owes me an answer, “is not brawling with either man or woman, but with sexuality itself.” What? She smiles and tells me that the Twa pot sits on the sideboard at home, and is of fantastic quality.

  THE PIG WANTS TO TALK

  THE PIG ARRIVES AT 1:30 on the dot and sits with his hands in his lap. He is too decent, too tasteful, too refined, to fiddle with his phone at all times. There’s something unseasoned about checking text messages and social media. If you have to pull out your phone and check it constantly, you’re a child or some kind of tart—yes, let that sound as petty as you like. Independent, balanced people with a certain status don’t do that. But then I have the misfortune of telling the Pig that the young woman he was waiting for yesterday was here not just yesterday but earlier today, too, thereby forcing the venerable Pig onto his phone.

  “She was here earlier today?” His eyes widen.

  “Yes.”

  “Did she ask after me?”

  “Not today.”

  “And yesterday?”

  “Yes, she asked yesterday.”

  “Would you excuse me a moment?”

  From the inner pocket of his suit jacket—impeccable, not the pocket of his trousers, spotless—he pulls out his phone, depraved. He starts jabbing at it. Will he call, I wonder, or will he send a message? So far so interesting. I pay attention. Is he going to make a call, or is he going to text? Will he use his fingers or his voice to communicate what needs to be communicated? He taps the glass with his fingertips. From where I’m standing, it’s impossible to tell whether he’s bringing up a number or whether he’s typing. He half turns to me and gives a gesture which is supposed to mean Two minutes, before he goes off towards the exit. As he disappears behind the curtain, the heat blanket, the fabric covering the door, he lifts the phone to his ear. Interesting. I watch him outside; he even lights a cigarette. He walks up and down the street for three minutes as he breathes in tobacco smoke, drag after drag, and talks on the out breaths. His right hand, which is holding the filterless cigarette, gestures calmly between inhalations. When he comes back in, he says: “Right.”

  I fetch the bottle of white burgundy, which I swiftly open with the opener I keep in the right-hand pocket of my jacket, then I pour.

  “There will be three of us today, not four,” says the Pig. And then:

  “You know, there’s a thing I’d like to discuss with you.”

  I clear the unneeded fourth setting from the table.

  “What is it?”

  “I’ve wanted to mention it to you for a while.”

  “I beg your pardon?” I say as my face warms up.

  “You know,” says the Pig. “You know, when Peter Norton bought the letters Joyce Maynard put up for auction at Sotheby’s in 1999 . . .”

  “Peter Norton,” I say.

  “Yes, fourteen letters and notes from 1972 and 1973, in which Salinger, among other things—ironically—warns young Joyce Maynard against fame and exploitation . . .”

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “Norton’s intention in buying the letters—they went for well over $150,000, double the estimate—was to give them back to Salinger, so that he could do what he liked with them: lock them away in a safe, burn them . . .”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I have to see to the other tables.”

  “But there’s something I really want to discuss with you . . .”

  “Excuse me,” I say.

  “Norton was also after one of Holbein’s more obscure Tudor drawings which was on sale at the same auction . . .”

  “You’ll have to excuse me.”

  “When does your shift finish?” asks the Pig.

  “At five, but then I have to go straight to a meeting.”

  “I see.”

  I never have meetings. I’m always at work. What was that? I have to do my job now. Where’s the crumber? Tables five and twelve have gone, I need to de-crumb them. I quickly clear the tables, find the crumber, and run over the tablecloths with energetic movements. Now seven and three have left. I take payment for nineteen. Table eleven wants more mineral water, and four sends back a Loosen Bros. Riesling. What was this talk about Salinger and Maynard? Holbein? The Bar Manager hints that table three will be getting new guests. The two people keeping the Pig company at his usual table ten also arrive. I escort them over; one is a colleague of the Pig’s, a sharp-nosed, vulture-like figure called Årvoll; the other is his polite but slightly startled daughter. I recognize both of them from previous occasions. I fill their glasses. For thirteen years, we’ve kept things professional, the Pig and I. Why this sudden eagerness? A “thing”? I keep in continual motion until the clock strikes five, at which point I quickly get changed. I have to get out, away from the eager Pig, who is still sitting here, three and a half hours later—likely full of questions about Maynard and Salinger—sipping his never-ending burgundy. He studies the greasy belts of alcohol sliding down the glass. Doesn’t he have anything better to do? I have to get away from the Pig’s sippings.

  ABUSE OF ANIMALS

  “SHOULD I ASK THE CHEF to fry some onion?” I ask two days later.

  “No thank you,” says Anna.

  “If you have,” says Edgar. He looks at Anna and points to the beef patties with a surprised expression.

  “Beef patties,” says Anna.

  “Beef patties.” Edgar nods.

  The chef rinses the chopping board and peels, cuts, and fries the onion. That this vegetable has been used for thousands of years is strange, and that the ancient Egyptians wors
hipped it is hard to believe, in my opinion. Is it because concentric skins and multiple layers symbolize eternal life or the solar system? Onions weren’t used in cooking in the countryside where I grew up. The chef shovels the fried onions onto a medium-sized plate, and I place it in front of Edgar so that the restaurant logo is at precisely twelve o’clock, if you imagine the plate as a clockface.

  “Thanks,” he says. “You don’t want any?” I shake my head. He knows I never eat at work.

  “I’m not too keen on onions.”

  “Me neither,” says Anna.

  “In the past, people thought onions made them strong,” I say.

  “How strong?”

  “Strong. Gladiators rubbed onion onto their muscles to get stronger. In the Middle Ages, people paid their rent with onions.”

  “Now you’re being silly,” says Edgar.

  “No.”

  “Could you pay with onions in the shop?” Anna wonders.

  “I don’t know. Maybe they didn’t have shops. But you could get your hair back if you went bald. They made you strong. And potent.”

  “What’s potent?” asks Anna.

  “Getting erect,” says Edgar.

  “And think of the poor Indians. We took the onion to America,” I say.

  “ ‘We’?”

  “Europeans. We found potatoes, turkey, gold, and tobacco over there. And coffee. And cocaine. And bananas. We brought it all back home. And we took the onion over with us. What did the Indians make of that?”