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Overheard

Posted on September 4, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

They were talking loud enough for her and everyone else in the restaurant to hear. So she felt no guilt about eavesdropping. Two guys, late thirties, swapping stories like teenagers. One of them was animated, waved his arms around a lot and managed to knock over an empty glass and send a breadstick flying within the first two minutes of picking up a new conversation thread. She decided to call him Trip because she would have bet her Louis Vuitton handbag that he had enjoyed the sting of more cuts and scrapes than the average thirty-something loudmouth from being so clumsy.

The other one was not bad looking at all. She would definitely not have kicked him out of bed for having a hankering for garlic-heavy Italian for dinner. She decided that he could be Pits, as in the nickname she would have used on Brad the actor, if he wasn’t so busy traversing the globe adopting babies to meet and fall in love with her.

Naturally it was Pits telling the following story, “I’m telling you man, she said ‘Is it the sex? Because I can improve. I can learn something different and I promise you will never look at another woman again.’ And I’m sitting there thinking ‘it’s definitely the sex darling and you could line your vagina with mink and knock out all your teeth so you never scratch me again and I’d still leave you for Catalina.’ It was depressing. Pathetic really.”

Their waiter delivered water, topped their glasses up and while Pits had the good grace to thank him Trip was so engrossed in the exploits of his friend she would have wagered her other LV handbag that he was sporting a tiny woody right then. The first time she realised that men got hard from other people’s stories she was trying to get to know a British playwright better. They had just met at dinner and she was very pleased with their host for seating her next to the man who smelt of Old Spice and something else, something exotic she couldn’t quite place yet but it was an aroma she felt quite familiar with. She had leaned in, placed her palm high on his thigh and said, “I love your cologne. What is that?”

She had been surprised by the fact that he was hard and embarrassed. The embarrassment had not come from his realizing that she had discovered that he was hard. His reaction was to her question. So while she made the connection that he was excited by the exploits of some guy who thought it was perfectly appropriate to publicly narrate the story of the first time he had sex with the woman he ended up marrying, it took her over a year to figure out why her question had embarrassed him. That happened when she was fooling around with another guy and he sported that same smell she had encountered around the British playwright. She had asked, “Hey that cologne smells familiar. What is it? It’s amazing.”

The guy she was en route to the horizontal tango with was an experimental artist who always made himself part of his own installations, so he was considerably less uptight than the playwright. With a self-deprecating laugh he said, “I didn’t want to finish too early incase we hit it off so I jacked off earlier.” Then he sniffed his fingers and said, “You must have a very good nose though; because I washed. Thoroughly.”

And that had solved that mystery.

Back to Trip and Pits.

Trip was asking a question, “So you just fucked her for three weeks and dumped her?”

“No. I pursued her for three weeks. Fucked her three times and dumped her.”

“Can you tell how good she is going to be after only three times?”

“You can tell how good she is going to be by the way she undresses.”

“Really?”

“If you know how to read the signs.”

“What signs?”

“I could tell you but it would make no sense.”

“Why not?”

“Because there are no rules. It’s more a feeling. Like the girl behind me? Cold fish.”

“What are you talking about! That dress, those lips, that cleavage! I just want to go in there and rub my face between those beauties.”

“First: They are fake. Second: She wears so much red because she is blue on the inside.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“Women are always lying about who they are. Push-up bras, corsets, Botox, hair extensions, taking years off their age…hanging out with some rich old guy because he provides security and claiming that they love him…lies. All lies. Which is why the confident ones are so sexy.”

“You think confident is sexy. I think big tits and a nice ass is sexy.”

“To look at? Sure. To jack off to? Definitely. To fuck? Not so much. For that you need a girl who knows what she’s doing.”

“Do you see anyone here who looks like she knows what she is doing?”

“Maybe?”

And Trip whirled around, knocked his glass of wine over and stained the tablecloth maroon. He started to say, ‘where’ but the question was lost in his scramble to grab his napkin and mop up the mess. Of course his inability to be anything other than all thumbs meant that his mad dash for the wine streaking towards the edge of the table ended in him upsetting the bread basket, sending a wedge of butter flying onto the next table and mint chutney on the cuff of his expensive white shirt. He swore, apologized and swore some more while Pits watched the whole performance with the patient expression of someone who had seen it all before.

Interesting though the two of them were, her date had paid their cheque so she got to her feet, smiled and made her way towards the exit, all the while wondering which woman Pits had thought of as being adequately sexually experienced.

When they were outside in the rain-scented air, her date laughed and said, “What was with those two guys? You think they were gay?”

She smiled, “Definitely not.”

“They were talking so loudly but I couldn’t understand a word of what they were saying. What was that? French?”

“Hebrew.”

“What?”

“They were speaking in Hebrew.”

“Oh.”

He didn’t ask how she knew, she didn’t tell.

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