Palm Springs, California stirred as little as possible.
Another afternoon of hot wind washed over the town and scrubbed it clean. After the white-hot sky burnt itself out and turned purple, the two of them walked through violet twilight to the little French restaurant.
They’d been there before. It was convenient and good, just down the street from their hotel.
His first impression of their waiter was mixed. The young man may have been Pakistani, Indian or Ceylonese. He wore a salmon shirt, studious glasses and a pair of dangling earrings.
The waiter didn’t appear pleased to learn they had been to the restaurant before. His look suggested an unfair denial of an opportunity to perform.
His behavior took on increasingly sullen dismissiveness, which deepened when they didn’t order an expensive bottle of wine and didn’t request his recommendations.
When he asked if they were finished with the baguette and they told him no, his annoyance swelled. He would have to rearrange things on the small tabletop to make room for the big plate of Steak au Poivre.
He had taken a dangerous step across the line that separates self-assurance from arrogance. Despite his somewhat fragile and delicate demeanor, he had acquired an unsettling intensity.
The waiter at the restaurant they liked so much in Palm Springs, California seemed unable to shake his feelings of superiority. He seemed incapable of disguising his disdain.
He may have felt waiter’s work beneath him. Or perhaps betrayed, blocked from breaking through the threshold of one world into another.
They paid their bill and left a good tip.
The waiter in the salmon shirt didn’t say thank you.
