The scene starts with him waiting for Rora at Fitzgerald’s, Mary’s favorite Irish pub, “the place where we connected with her Irish roots by way of imbibing stout.” While he is waiting we are shown an insecure side to him. He says, “whenever I waited for someone, I spent some time contemplating the possibility of that person never coming. I sometimes imagined Mary not coming back home from the hospital; I imagined her so sick of my writerly ambition and the accompanying underemployment that one day she would just decide not to return from work and leave me hanging there until I recognized that my parasitic existence was no longer acceptable to her.” This was a very powerful message, in which he shows us how vulnerable and paranoid he is. He then goes on to say, “expecting Rora to stand me up, habitually anticipating humiliation.” He expects the worst and imagines the negative in life. He is full of insecurities about every aspect of his life.
During the meal, we are shown an insight to his background and how he became the person he did. He tells us, “I was here when the war started; I had odd jobs, until I finally started teaching English as a second language. Then the column gig came in; I wrote about the experiences of my students, not all unlike my own: looking for a job, getting the Social Security number, finding an apartment, becoming a citizen, meeting Americans, dealing with nostalgia, that sort of thing. The column did pretty well, though it paid very little.” This tells us a lot about his past, and helps us to understand his life and how he got to where he is at the present time. He is sort of a “self-made” man, and was able to do very well for himself considering where he came from.
He then goes on to inform us, “Three years ago I married an American woman, and she was great.” He met her at a singles night at the Art Institute, where he says, “loneliness, transnational as it is, had brought us together.” This is a very honest side of him, and shows us a possible vulnerability. He tells us that he has a speech that he often delivers to avoid awkward silences at dinner parties. People are always, “gushing over the neatness of my immigrant story; many would recall an ancestor who came to America and followed the same narrative trajectory: displacement, travails, redemption, success.” This seems to be a common story among immigrants, and it is interesting to me that he has enough confidence to tell this story to a room through of strangers. He then goes on to show a bit of insecurity and says, “I couldn’t bring myself to tell them that I had lost my teaching job and that I was pretty much supported by Mary.” This also shows a bit of his insecurities and that he may be putting on a façade in front of other people.
Something that struck me when I was reading, was what happened when they were eating at the restaurant and the waitress brought them the check. Rora says to the waitress, “Ah, that is too much. Can we negotiate?” “The waitress seemed tired and emaciated, her flaxen hair slipping the grip of a couple of clips, but she smiled. He was a big charmer, Rora was. In my country, charmers used to be as endemic as land mines were now.” This shocked me when I read it…the thought of someone being able to negotiate the price of their meal at a restaurant astounded me. I though it was a crazy concept, one that is definitely not common these days.
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