Table for two
Before We Begin This First Date, Please Accept My Face’s Terms and Conditions
You can make your selection after I’ve finished smiling.
You look like your photograph. I hope that’s all right to say. I mean it as a compliment, although I appreciate that you may have supplied the photograph for identification purposes only.
Before we sit down, could you tell me what your glasses are doing?
No, I know what glasses do. Mine do that. Yours have a light beside your eyebrow, and when I said your name, the light came on.
Wonderful. An assistant. Does it need a chair?
I’m sorry. That sounded hostile. I was nervous on the bus, and I rehearsed a joke about the restaurant having seventeen kinds of salt. I hadn’t prepared anything for a third person without a body.
You say it only remembers things you might find useful. Useful how?
For example, if I tell you I hate olives, will you remember that because you are interested in me, or will something remind you next October as we approach an olive?
I’m getting ahead of myself. October would be lovely.
Let’s order.
Actually, before you look directly at me again, there are a few conditions. You may observe my face for the purposes of having dinner with me. You may retain a general impression. If things go well, you may recall particular features while doing something boring tomorrow.
Please don’t improve anything.
This is my actual face. The asymmetry comes with it. That tooth moved when I was twenty-three, and I decided I had already given orthodontics enough of my youth.
You can tell your sister about me. Of course you can tell your sister. “Nice, a bit intense about glasses” would be fair. You can even do my voice if you’re good at voices.
What I’m asking is that you do it badly.
Leave things out. Give her the wrong colour of my coat. Tell her I work with maps when I’ve explained twice that I restore them. I’d like there to be some evidence that I passed through you.
My last boyfriend remembered everything.
Not in a romantic way. If I said I’d never liked his friend Paul, he could show me a message from March in which I’d called Paul lovely. Paul had brought soup. It’s possible to be lovely for the duration of soup.
Eventually I stopped saying things until I was sure I would always believe them. We had a very accurate final year.
I don’t want that again.
The light’s gone off.
Thank you.
No, I’m not going to ask you to prove it. That would become a whole other evening, and the waiter has now approached us three times with the expression people use around frightened horses.
I’ll have the fish.
You will too? Well, already we have something that nobody needs to write down.
Your spare glasses are nice. You look a little different in them. More—
No. I can’t quite see you either. These are my reading glasses. I wore them because my sister said the frames made me look approachable, and I have been assuming the dark patch above your mouth was a moustache.
It is?
Good. I like it.
You can remember that.
And you can ask me about the scar. I fell out of a tree at nine. I was trying to get a kite down.
Actually, it wasn’t a kite. It was a carrier bag. I thought it was a kite until I reached it.
Please don’t remember the better version.