His beady eyes, the color of mold on whole wheat bread, held her attention like a pair of ocular handcuffs.
Between his eyes and the wild, unkempt, grizzled mop hanging from his upper lip, was a nose that reminded her of Barry Manilow with a really bad nose job or perhaps Cyrano De Bergerac wearing a flesh-tone nose cast.
Try as she might, she can’t take her eyes, the color of soggy cardboard, off him.
His platter-shaped, burnt-sienna face commands the same attention visually that the half-rotted whale vertebra that the University of Hawaii at Manoa dug up in Kaneohe then dropped on the middle of the Kahekili Highway right where the highway meets Kaneohe Bay Drive did in a putrid, festering-meat kind of way to one’s nose a few years back.
His lips, flaccid, rubbery affairs that resemble under-filled water balloons wave slightly like a pair of mud flaps on the back of an off-road vehicle with every loud, growling, sloughing breath as if to prove that yes, people can snore while fully awake.
And then she caught a whiff of the unmistakable aroma of mint mouthwash used to mask the smell of garlic-mayonnaise topping slathered on raw octopus.
Completing this picture was his rectangular, pale-caramel chin that seemed to begin just above the volleyball-sized knot in the necktie that reaches halfway down his barrel-shaped body and seems to spread across his shirt from one lapel to the other like a kind of bib that looked like he spilled Spaghetti-O’s on himself and then washed it off with a gravy-drenched paper towel.
He’s captivating in a way that not even a five-car pileup on the icy roads outside can match.
In a way, as his jaw moves up and down and side to side in an almost circular motion, she's reminded of a cow chewing its cud, and the soft slurping sounds he makes as he chewed evokes images of a Holstein in a field.
A low, rumbling sound emerges from him, and the image is cemented when the sound that waved his lips even harder is so much like a low, contented ”˜moo’ that she can’t help the smile.
He sips his drink with a loud, wet slurp that dares her to try outdoing him.
She lifts her glass with a smug smirk. She’s the four-time, reigning champion of her synagogue’s slurping contest, and nobody can slurp the kaddish wine the way she can. The last time she slurped the wine, it was so bad the rabbi made her leave the fellowship hall on account of her blatantly-bad manners.
The sound she produces sounds like air being squeezed through the loose-necked opening of a balloon after said neck has been soaked with water.
She manages a full two seconds and almost four different notes at three distinct volumes as she slurps the rich, burgundy wine.
His plump-sausage lips spread like taffy being pulled apart, and reveal a set of yellowish-brown teeth that probably get flossed with a jump rope- when it occurs to him to floss, anyway.
She smiles back and arches a thick eyebrow slightly.
He takes his wine glass in his flipper-like hand and raises it to his loose, flabby lips and makes an impressive, roiling growl as he sips his chardonnay.
Not to be outdone, she applies her famous ”˜round-and-round’ tactic, moving her lips in a circular motion as she sucks in wine from her own plastic goblet to produce a hissing, snarl like a sock stuck in a vacuum cleaner's hose.
His eyes shine like sunlight on an oil slick beneath his thick, shaggy, caterpillar of an eyebrow that wanders across his forehead in a single, unbroken line of fur.
After a moment, he raises his own plastic goblet and makes a guttural, hissing, burbling sound akin to the sound of water being sucked down a bathtub drain.
It lasts an impressive four seconds.
Fully drawn in now, she combines her ”˜round-and-round’ tactic with her ”˜ibis-beak’ trick and creates a snorting, nasal whistle of slurp that she draws out for three seconds and takes up and down the musical scales like an out-of-tune slide whistle.
His eyes widen with pleasure and he reciprocates with a long, twittering, hissing gurgle from his glass as he finishes the last of his wine.
She finishes her own wine with a pursed-lip, sideways-snorting motion that results in a low, grinding, hollow snoring sound that wavers like the flame of the candle between them on the table.
He reaches for the bottle of wine, but is stopped by a stern-faced man in a tidy uniform.
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.” The waiter sets the bill down on the table as he speaks. “You’re putting others off their appetites.”
She looks at the waiter. “Who had the best slurp?”
“I’m no judge of bad manners, monsieur.” At her faint frown, he sighs. “He did.”
With a scowl at once again being mistaken for a man, she takes her wallet out of her back pocket.
“Don’t worry about it,” her date smiles kindly. “We can slurp all we want later.”
She raises an eyebrow suggestively. “Wine or beer?”
“Surprise me.”
A man at the next table over grabs the bill from me. “Gimme. I don’t care who pays your tab, justleave, will you?”
Oblivious to the looks from other patrons, they leave the diner.