Man

In the Panera there are two Polish princesses who come in with a man. He is all scruffy he walks like he’s being dragged, and he has a loose, ragged mouth, like the bulldog in the old Tom Hanks movie. He walks with a purposeful stride, but his back is slightly bent, lending even more to the sense of a man overburdened. His eyes are black, his hair trimmed short, so as not to have any aesthetic function at all, and his mode serious; he shows no signs at all of fatigue, or complaint. At worst, he is just impatient to act, to do.

The two women he is with are beautiful, one of them, in her 40’s (his age, perhaps his partner) wears heavy black eyeliner that, for some reason, makes her look slightly depraved. As I sometimes find with people who wear eyeliner, I cannot tell if it’s the bold blackness of the lines that give the impression of beauty, or the woman herself. The other woman, perhaps their daughter, or the younger sister of the woman, is entering the prime of her beauty in youth. She wears a tightly fitting dress but is perhaps no older than 17, with clean and symmetrical, light features. She sits beside me and begins looking at her round pocket mirror immediately, drawing on more lines on her eyebrows to make them evermore defined. She has her own world at her feet. The two women sit graciously while the weary man with efficiently trimmed hair ventures off boldly into the noisy forest that is the ordering area. I do not see him for some time.

All the time he is gone, I think of him. He went forth without complaint, to serve, as a servant who was tasked with carrying heavy treasures upon his shoulders, treasures he will never see. A dutiful man. After some time he returns with two trays in his hands, they are packed with soups, sandwiches and chips with slices of pickles and some sweets for the two women. He places them down on the table with a stressed forehead, lines always in it. He mutters something in Polish to them, and they respond with happy noises. Despite the fact that he never smiles, he seems happy, or contented, that he has brought them their food. Equally, they receive it like happy, hungry Queens; it is their right to be served their food by this man. He goes off again after seeing them delight and begin eating (he never sat down). It is nice that he seems contented each time they are contented. There is, equally, a silent appreciation for him in their auras, and in the way they speak to him. After another period of time elapses, he returns again, with another tray, presumably for himself; the tray looks rather empty and contains just one small cup of soup.

He sits down like a man sits down on the toilet, and immediately he begins to attack the soup. He eats it like a slave who is eating what he knows will be his only meal of the day. Voracious. He dips bread into his soup eagerly, and it resurfaces from the brown goo, dripping. He holds it there for a moment to look at it before opening his mouth widely and somewhat wildly. His eyes widen when he opens his mouth, just before devouring it. Like Jaws the shark. I am transfixed by how he holds the bread there, for that short moment in time; just then it looks like a piece of gold, covered in dripping, liquid gold. The whole time he talks with his mouth full, lips sometimes smacking, with full energy, and the ladies, practical and of the Earth in a way that is very Polish, respond cheerfully. They seem happy to have a man at the table. He keeps dipping the bread in and eating it so ravenously, fully aware that dipping the bread in the soup will increase the overall volume of his meal. He knows what he needs, where his duties lie, what his role is.

After some time they finish their plates, and the young girl goes off somewhere, perhaps to the bathroom; the fast lunch is efficiently concluded. The older woman hands him her things one by one, and he gets up to take the plates back to their place. As he gets up to go, walking away, he is visibly still licking his lips and also picking food out of the inside of his mouth with his tongue. He dumps the trash and returns. He comes back to the table, empty handed now, and still with a tensed forehead. He rubs his two hands together, as if to say — both to the woman and to himself— “Now what should I do?”