A Table for Two, Again

The restaurant had kept her reservation for seven years. That was the joke, anyway, when the waiter found Clara standing in the doorway with rain in her hair.

“We've been expecting you,” he said.

“Maya's already here?”

He looked at the booking tablet. “Your guest is at the table.”

There was something careful about the way he said it. Clara followed him past a mirror that made the narrow restaurant seem twice its size. The corner table was occupied by a man in a blue shirt, attempting to straighten a vase of yellow tulips.

Ben stood so quickly that a spoon hit the floor.

For a moment she saw him as he had been seven years earlier: barefoot in their shared hallway, holding two grocery bags and trying to retrieve his keys with his teeth. Then he bent to collect the spoon, and the present returned.

“Maya,” Clara said.

“Yes.”

“She told me dinner for her birthday.”

“She told me the same.”

His phone was on the table. He turned it so Clara could see the latest message: Before either of you starts, you're both free to leave. But I paid for the wine.

Clara almost did leave. Not because she disliked Ben. That would have made it simpler. She disliked the sudden feeling that she had been transported into a room where a younger version of herself still lived, waiting to be embarrassed.

“I can go,” he said.

“You were here first.”

“That has never been a useful basis for deciding anything.”

It was such a familiar kind of answer that she smiled despite herself. She hung her coat on the chair.

“One glass,” she said.

The waiter brought bread. Ben pushed the basket halfway across the table, then paused. She took the heel before he could pretend not to want it.

“You remember,” he said.

“It's bread, Ben. I'm not signing anything.”

They had lived opposite each other for four years. Their doors were so close that opening both at once made the hallway impassable. At first they exchanged parcels. Then milk, tools, spare keys. Once she came home with a fever and found soup outside her door in a saucepan he later claimed not to need back.

Nothing had happened between them. This was the sentence Clara had used when people asked. It was also the sentence she had used privately, though she knew how much labour went into making it true.

“So,” she said. “Tell me something I don't know.”

He considered it with irritating seriousness.

“I make bowls now.”

“For a living?”

“Badly, on Tuesday evenings.”

She laughed. He took out his phone and showed her a photograph of three uneven pots on a shelf. One leaned so dramatically that she wondered how it remained upright.

“Your teacher lets you take them home?”

“She says everybody deserves evidence of improvement.”

He had started the class after his father died. Clara knew about the death; Maya had told her. She had written a message, erased it, written another, then sent a stiff paragraph that sounded like a card from a bank.

“I wanted to call,” she said.

“I know.”

“No, you don't. I didn't.”

He set the phone down. “I liked the message. You remembered what he called my car.”

The reluctant hearse. His father's name for the old estate that had refused to start on mornings involving anything important.

“Do you still have it?”

“No. It finally became a permanent hearse.”

The waiter returned. Neither had looked at the menu. Clara ordered the dish she used to order. Ben chose something new and immediately asked whether she thought it would be a mistake.

“You've become adventurous,” she said.

“Only with supervision.”

Over dinner he asked about the job she had moved away for. This was the part she had hoped to skip.

She had spent three years there, learned a great deal, become good at defending work she no longer liked, and left before the fourth round of restructuring could persuade her that exhaustion was a personality. Now she translated books and legal documents from a kitchen table ten minutes from the restaurant.

“You're back here?”

“For eight months.”

He looked surprised. Then he glanced toward the window.

“I didn't know,” he said.

“I didn't announce it.”

She had not told Maya to keep it secret. But she hadn't asked her to tell anyone either. Returning had felt like failing an examination nobody else remembered setting.

“Do you like it?” Ben asked.

“The work? Yes. The kitchen chair less so.”

“That's what you should have bought before the adventurous dinner.”

She told him about a novelist who used the same word for seven different shades of sadness and insisted none could be translated by the same English word. About the small thrill of finding the right sentence while waiting for laundry. It was the first time that week she had spoken about her work without reducing it to a practical answer.

Ben listened. He always had, and she resented how quickly she remembered that.

When their plates arrived, her sleeve caught the tulips. Water spilled across the table, drenching the paper wrapper around his cutlery. They both reached for the vase. Their hands collided.

“Still graceful,” he said.

“Still offering commentary.”

They laughed, and the waiter rescued the flowers with the tired patience of someone witnessing the third minor disaster of his evening.

Without the vase between them, Clara could see Ben more clearly. There were lines beside his eyes she didn't remember. He wore no ring. She had already noticed this three times and disliked herself for counting.

“Were you ever married?” he asked.

“No. I lived with someone for a while. It ended last year.”

“I'm sorry.”

“It needed to. You?”

“Engaged, briefly. We were very good at making plans together. Less good at being in the same room once we'd finished.”

He said it without bitterness. She wondered how much time it took to learn that tone.

They ate. For a while, the conversation became ordinary: rent, railway works, Maya's habit of arranging other people's lives more efficiently than her own. Clara relaxed into it. She began to think they might leave with the pleasant feeling of having corrected a small omission.

Then Ben said, “I went to your door the night before you moved.”

She put down her fork.

“What?”

“I heard music. Someone laughing. I thought you had somebody there.”

“My sister. She was helping me pack.”

“Oh.”

“Why didn't you knock?”

He looked at his glass. “I had practised something. The circumstances in the hallway didn't match the circumstances in my head.”

“What had you practised?”

The waiter approached with a pepper mill. Ben waited until he had gone.

“Asking whether the job was the only reason you were leaving.”

Clara felt herself become very still.

“What answer did you want?”

“That there was something here you might miss.”

“There was.”

Outside, a bus stopped beyond the window. Its upper deck briefly filled the restaurant with red light. Clara watched a passenger turn a page in a book, then disappear as the bus moved away.

“I thought you were happy for me,” she said.

“I was.”

“You said it was exactly what I should do.”

“It probably was.”

She wanted to be angry. A younger Clara would have been. There was a particular comfort in making a missed chance entirely somebody else's fault.

“I could have knocked on your door,” she said at last.

He nodded.

They did not catalogue every moment. There were too many, and most would have become smaller under examination: a hand resting on a shoulder, a late film, a shopping bag carried upstairs. It was impossible to know which had meant what at the time. Remembering them now changed the evidence.

When the waiter offered dessert, Clara ordered two spoons.

“One glass,” Ben reminded her.

“I didn't specify how slowly.”

They shared a pear tart. He told her about his father’s last summer, when the two of them had driven to the sea every Wednesday and barely spoken. She told him about sitting outside the office on the day she resigned, unable to make her legs carry her to the station because she had no explanation ready for anyone.

“You don't seem like someone who needs an explanation ready,” he said.

“That's because I usually have one.”

The restaurant emptied. A member of staff folded napkins at a nearby table. Maya called twice. Neither answered.

At last Clara said, “I don't know whether we'd have worked.”

“Seven years ago?”

“Or now.”

“No,” Ben said. “We don't know.”

She liked him better for leaving the answer unfinished.

They split the bill; Maya had indeed paid for the wine. The waiter returned the tulips wrapped in paper and handed them to Clara with a diplomatic expression.

At the door Ben offered to walk her to the station.

“I really do live ten minutes away.”

“Then ten minutes?”

The rain had softened. They walked beneath the same umbrella because neither had brought one and the waiter had produced a lost black one from behind the counter. It pulled them closer at every narrow stretch of pavement.

They passed their old building. Someone had painted the front door green. The café beneath it had become a shop selling expensive soap.

“I hated the noise from that café,” Clara said.

“You went there every morning.”

“I contained multitudes.”

At her street they stopped. She could see her kitchen light through a gap between two buildings. For a moment she imagined taking him upstairs, making coffee, recovering all the ease they had once mistaken for something that would last without attention.

Instead she said, “Would you like to have lunch on Saturday?”

He smiled. “With you?”

“Yes, Ben. I can be clear when necessary.”

“I'd like that.”

They chose a time. He put it into his phone. Clara watched him add her full name as if this were a new arrangement that deserved to be treated carefully.

“Can I kiss you?” he asked.

She answered by stepping closer, then said yes anyway. The kiss was brief and slightly awkward beneath the umbrella. Afterward he laughed against her forehead, and she found that she didn't want to improve it.

Upstairs, her phone lit up again. Maya: I assume you're both alive?

Clara placed the tulips in a water jug. She took a photograph, making sure to include the two coffee mugs she had left by the sink that morning. Then she reconsidered. There was no need to make the story more complete than it was.

She sent only: Lunch on Saturday. You're not invited.

A moment later Ben's message arrived. He had made it home. He had also discovered that the umbrella had a hole above his left shoulder.

Clara looked at the damp sleeve of her own coat and smiled. Seven years was a long time. Saturday was only three days away.