Lunchtime voyeur

I just got back from lunch at a place called Christopher’s Nothing Fancy Café. I was caught by the “Nothing Fancy” part since I didn’t want anything fancy for lunch and thought that I could probably get a salad or some soup, which I did. I had their Santa Fe salad with grilled chicken, avocado, mixed greens, tomatoes, and cheese. It was a good salad and not too heavily dressed, which is how I like my salads. And, the chips and salsa (I have eaten too many meals lately accompanied by complimentary chips and salsa) were some of the best I’ve had in recent memory, although it wasn’t too smart a move on my part to eat spicy salsa with sharp chips since that just aggravated the cut in my mouth from when I bit my lip last week while having dinner with Jon at a yummy Thai place on Divisadero, a short walk from his house.

But the food wasn’t the interesting part of the meal. The interesting stuff was going on at the table next to mine but on the other side of the large window, where a tiny, youngish-looking black woman went up to an older-looking white man, chatted him up, and then got into his car with him. What was going on? I was so perplexed and intrigued (this was way more captivating than the new fiction in The New Yorker).

I was certain that these two people didn’t know each other, since the woman was sitting next to another older-looking white man when I first started my meal and when that man left she asked this other man if she could join him. The second man readily agreed and they talked about nothing I could hear. He looked mesmerized. He moved from across the table to next to her. And his hands moved from playing with a napkin to playing with her hands and her lap. He let her into his car just as I was stepping out, leaving me to wonder what was going to happen next and utterly confused.