After Lunch

Eskrich of late had grown suspicious. In the expensive restaurants where he was a daily customer, he had begun to notice alert ears cocked his way. The waiters lingered, combing nonexistent crumbs from the tablecloth. Eskrich was forced to pause the conversation, which furthered the effect that it was something not to be overhead. It was something not to be overheard. Now, Eskrich was sure, everyone was overhearing it.

Thus, for good reason, Eskrich began eating at a budget cafeteria where the clientele was mostly aged. Almost immediately he felt calmer. The cafeteria offered incapacitated ears and a sloth-like pace. He began to look forward to the ritual of pushing his plastic tray along the brushed steel bars and watching the food roll by like fake scenery. The elderly women poked along authoritatively, steering their guests away from the lead-off treats with the assurance that better desserts lay ahead. In addition to their tray, they managed sturdy oblong pocketbooks. The ones who weren't widowed ushered husbands who had rewarded their wives' loyalty by becoming entirely useless. Folded over like shepherd's staffs, the men had to be helped with their tray, their silverware, and their entrées, all of the which the wives did for them in an exit version of changing a baby's diaper-what had once been brisk and tolerant and no-nonsense had diminished to wordless slow mechanics. The women, thinking ahead, had laid a quarter tip on the tray for the worker who carried their husband's tray to a table.

Yet it had taken Eskrich several days before he located what felt most strange about the cafeteria: there was no background music. The old suspicions started up, but a table in a private corner helped to ease his mind-that and the realization that ambient music was irksome to hard-of-hearing ears. This corner table he now thought of as his own was a four-seater. Though it was bad form among the careful seniors to grab a table larger than needed, he nevertheless folded his suit jacket over one of the chairs before going through the line.

Eskrich had tried out the cafeteria with a couple of zoning commissioners, one from the town of Mt. Levington and the other from Mapleport. Both of them had liked it. The comfort food had made their conversation about rezoning some farmland for a big-box retailer feel friendly and natural, but they were from the country, these fellows, and this kind of place suited them.

Today Eskrich had brought Sunderson here. Sunderson was a man who liked to talk. When he drank, he talked more and he talked more loudly. In fact, it was Sunderson with his big body and big laugh and big stories who had first made Eskrich begin to squirm so at his old upscale restaurants. Every time one of these places got popular the tables started edging closer and closer together. Squeezing in more people until people got squeezed out. He should have written a letter. Has your eating establishment ever heard of an intimate atmosphere or the need for a private conversation? Move the kitchen back inside, we get it already, and make room for the paying customers. Of course at his table nothing exactly transgressive had ever been said-Eskrich if anything was a master of the nothing exactly-but to discerning ears who had also mastered the same game, fill-in-the-blank phrasings were enough to give yourself away. Eskrich began to see the boys with their peppermills, always a dreaded sight anyway, though a new set of terrors. He heard them clanging their spiced blackjacks against his prison bars. Finally one noon his legs, twitching and painful, could stand it no longer. He threw down his linen napkin and ran from the wine-sipping eavesdroppers. Outside he dialed Sunderson on his cell phone and told him he had sprained his ankle and was at the hospital. He hadn't seen Sunderson since, until today.

Sunderson was ahead of him in the cafeteria line. By now Eskrich had learned a few of the tricks the old...