The Lonely Wife and Bottle of Wine

I'm sitting in a cafe where I like to study here in the suburbs of Beijing. It's as close as you're going to get to a cafe in California. Cafe culture is pretty new to China, but they do a pretty good job of it here.

I order an omelette and get ready to study more poetry. While I'm eating it, I notice at the table next to me is a young couple in their early thirties. The woman is quite beautiful and looks educated--she looks like she's still in graduate school working on her dissertation.

Her husband is on the plump side, short, with glasses. He feeds the girl some food and she smiles and eats it. Then, the server brings a bottle of wine. He inspects it and nods his head and then the server opens it and pours it into very wide wine glasses. He shows her how to swirl the wine in the glass to open it up and give it some air.

The same thing most people do in the U.S. when we don't know much about wine!

Suddenly, of course, I get it. They are married and are on an afternoon date. He must be a rich businessman and she his exquisite trophy wife.

(I know what you are thinking, "Damn, Ron, you are like a modern day American-Israeli Moroccan-Ashkenazi-Jewish Daoist Sherlock Holmes!" Thanks!)

I return to my omelette, which is pretty good. The owner of the cafe is a Westerner, I think, and I can just picture the omelette training seminar he had for the cooks. ("Guys, try to add only a few teaspoons of oil to the pan and use low heat....")

I look up and the pudgy businessman is putting on his jacket and then gets up to kiss his wife goodbye. He goes to pay and leaves.

He must have just received a phone call requesting him to attend an urgent meeting in which they will talk about the new factory they are building in Shandong. In fact, he probably has to get on a plane to go there now and will be drinking lots of baijiu tonight.

His wife is left at the table with a bottle of wine, almost full. She takes small sips and reads the textbook in front of her, hiding her sadness.