The fight started right after the oysters, but before the salads, post the martinis but pre-wine. When your job depends on timing these things, you tend to also notice when they all happen. However, timing aside, I got the immediate impression that the fight had started long before that. In fact, it had all the residual echoes of a fight that had been going on for quite some time. And as the saying goes, “in wine there is truth.” But sometimes it’s the type of truth that’s better left unsaid.
“She wants you to do what?” asked the woman, picking up her glass of white wine.
“She just needs help moving,” said the man.
“She doesn’t know anyone else?”
“I guess not. I didn’t ask her that,” he said.
“Well, maybe you should have.”
Long ago, I gave up using the phrase “should have,” because you cannot undo what is already done. Let psychologists concern themselves with the past, and the philosophers with the future, it’s only the poets that concern themselves with the present — and the bartenders.
“Do you two have everything you need?” I asked, wanting to be anywhere but standing right in front of them.
There’s nothing more awkward than being the third wheel in a relationship fight. But the demands of a service job do in fact demand that you be there. Because if there’s one thing a fighting couple can bond over it’s a general dislike of you, their server. And you don’t ever want that. Transference is a powerful thing, be it the past, present or future.
They both looked at me with burning hatred in their eyes. Hatred for me? Hatred for each other? Hatred for the situation? I didn’t stick around to find out.
Two steps down the bar and it was a different situation entirely. This couple was making out furiously. The slurping, sloppy sounds were palpable, and uncomfortable, but still infinitely better than standing in front of the other two.
Occasionally people will look at a bartender as if dismissing them.
“We need a few minutes,” they will say, not realizing that where the drinks are made is where the drinks are made. If you sat in front of us, we aren’t leaving, no matter how much you might want us to.
But over the sloppy sounds of love, and the bang and crash of cocktail shakers, I could still hear the ongoing fight of the couple two steps over.
“She’s flirting with you,” said the woman.
“No, she’s not. She just needs help,” replied the man.
“You are so naive.”
“We are just friends,” countered the man.
“She wants to be more than friends, I’m sure,” said the woman, draining her glass of wine and signaling for another.
“So, what?” said the man.
And if there’s truth in one glass of wine, just imagine how much more truth two glasses gets you.
“Don’t you trust me?” asked the man after that second glass of wine.
“I don’t trust her,” she said.
Hemingway once said, “The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.” But then again, he was married four times. Perhaps his trust issues went the other way?
“You don’t have to trust her, you just have to trust me,” he said, making a perfectly logical point.
But logic is often not the point in a relationship fight. It’s often about feelings — the obvious ones, and the not-so-obvious ones.
“You feel so good,” came muffling out of the obvious couple directly in front of me.
Maybe it was better standing over there? I thought. Two steps over and I was there.
The fighting couple looked up and directly at me in unison.
Maybe not. Soon I was consigned to standing over in the far corner acting like I was watching the TV.
Shortly after the entrées, and before the third drink, things seemed to have simmered down between the two combatants. And the other couple had left, for presumably more horizontally comfortable environs. But the fight continued in a slightly different context.
“I have to take my car in tomorrow,” said the woman.
“I told you that I can fix it,” said the man.
“Tommy always fixes it for me for free,” she replied.
“Why would he do that?” asked the man.
“Because he’s my friend,” replied the woman.
“I don’t understand how you can have male friends that help you, but I can’t help my female friends,” he said.
“Because that is totally different,” she replied.
Leaving me with these thoughts:
• The saying “good for the goose, good for the gander” actually means that the same sauce should be served with cooked goose as with cooked gander, which is particularly poignant to a service professional.
• What we assume of others’ behavior can often be a more accurate measurement of what we expect of our own.
• Trust, like wine, doesn’t exactly work on a sliding scale.
• Sometimes the only real difference comes from perspective.
• If the bartender can hear you order your drink, they can hear everything else you say, too.
Jeff Burkhart is the author of “Twenty Years Behind Bars: The Spirited Adventures of a Real Bartender, Vol. I and II,” the host of the Barfly Podcast on iTunes (as seen in the NY Times) and an award-winning bartender at a local restaurant. Follow him at jeffburkhart.net and contact him at jeffbarflyIJ@outlook.com
