Page 12 of Up All Night
I perused the entrée menu while he went ahead and ordered us a regular sized pizza, French fries, and a large salad. At first, I thought that was for him. (You know, men and their healthy appetites.) Then the menus were taken away. I hadn’t ordered anything.
If you’re older than me or from a select few other places even in America, you may wonder why I was weirded out. I had never had this experience before. Not on a date. Never in my life had a man gone ahead and ordered for me. Wasn’t that passé back home? I know that in Oregon you would’ve been smacked up the side of the head if you dared order on behalf of someone you just met – that shit barely flew for people you had known for twenty years.
Then again, this guy was so fine he could’ve ordered me up some haggis and I would’ve been all over it. Me. The woman pickier than a cat when it came to her food. Yes, even her Italian food.
Hadrian was already glued to his food when the surly waitress walked away. Awkward.
At first I didn’t know what to think. This man had ordered me stuff to consume without consulting me. (Other than asking if I was okay with alcohol.) Now he wasn’t even looking at me. Oh, God, I was on one ofthosedates…
His phone was in front of my face. Hello, Google Translate. Apparently communicating with me by any means possible was what was most on his mind.
“Do you like for the atmosphere like this?”Well, it was Google Translate…
I looked up at him. “Yes?”
He took his phone back and punched something else into it.“Please I try my English.”
“What language do you speak first?” Was that too complicated of a sentence? Was I making things worse? This was supposed to be a nice and relaxing date.
Hadrian has some of the most expressive eyebrows I had ever beheld. They weren’t necessarily thick, but they were as black as the hair on his head and moved every time he thought about what I said. I knew that look. Teaching Japanese students English for over a year taught me what that look meant.“How do I use English? Oh, fuck, what is this American woman saying? They talk too fast! They use too many slang words! This is a pen?”
“I am from Greece.”
“Oh, so you speak Greek?”
“Yes. I speak Greek.”
I don’t think I had ever met a speaker of Greek before. “You speak Japanese too, yes?”
“Oh, yes, I speak Japanese okay. Not so good, though.”
“Bullshit!” He jerked back at my exclamation. “You ordered dinner perfectly. I majored in Japanese. I think maybe your Japanese is better than mine.”
Was he blushing? Maybe not, but he had no problems waving away my statement with a shy smile. “No, no, my Japanese is no good. I don’t study it. Just learn.”
Let me tell you, as someone who has studied Japanese for most of her life, a textbook teaches you nothing. Not like how living in Japan teaches it to you.
“But you speak English. It is the best.”
“You think so?” I was used to hearing that. I could never understand why everyone around the world was so obsessed with English (aside from the ubiquity of it, I suppose) but it often explained why my fellow Americans rarely felt compelled to learn other languages. Why bother when everyone else was learning English?
“Yes. I want to learn English most! But… English is maybe… fifth language.”
The waitress brought him a beer and me a glass of white wine. “Fifth? You speak four more languages?”
“Yes. I speak…” He counted on his fingers. “Five. Maybe six.”
Holy shit! “What do you speak?”
He considered that question before rattling off a list of languages. “Greek, Kurdish, Turkish, Russian, Italian, Japanese…”
“And English! So that’s seven.”
“I don’t speak English. It’s not good enough.”
Keep in mind that so far we had been speaking entirely in English with only a smattering of Japanese. Damn polyglots. And here I loved to slyly move Spanish into my list of languages even though I am so bad at it now. Shit!
“I think Italian is most beautiful.” Hadrian nodded. “Italian, Turkish, Kurdish… Greek is okay.”
