After the movie, late at night, when the spouse is away and there’s no place to go but home nor any reason to, you like to retreat to a certain restaurant steps from the bay where the Aztec Zen feng shui is serene and the margaritas reliably brisk and limey.
After the movie, late at night, when the spouse is away and there’s no place to go but home nor any reason to, you like to retreat to a certain restaurant steps from the bay where the Aztec Zen feng shui is serene and the margaritas reliably brisk and limey. Here, in the amber light and deep green walls, with one candle burning low inside the table lamp, you can sit in a corner with the pleasing sting of salsa on your tongue and sip your drink and write as if there were something still to say about the end of May in a drizzly spring, or Memorial Day in the fog of several wars, or the bay with its waves and their curling white smiles and the passing whales whose curves and white spouts break the surface barely a baseball’s throw beyond the breaking surf. That light—tinged blue, blue-gray or steely silver above the pelican squadrons cruising so gracefully ungainly, and over the flocks of wetsuited humans floating in search of an eternal break—reflects with generosity on everything, or so it seems those afternoons in the glint of one long breezily sunlit look. Even from here, at night, in the red-chile light and the gleam of the vino del día and the frosty glow of gold cervezas on adjacent tables, conversations creating a suggestive buzz for muses on the alert for some stray word, you can almost understand the water rocking in the dark in the near distance, whispering salty nothings into your hungry ears. “I eat with my eyes,” says the cheerfully starving artist whose thinness gives him an angle of vision keen enough to see everything, sharply, but now your plate has arrived. The Spanish love songs crooned as if forever with their kitschy lyrics reassure somehow that nothing will change, that you will remain suspended where time can’t touch you. This must be the purpose of such a place, an oasis, a kind of home where nothing is yours and you don’t care. Because all that counts is now.
