No shame in it. She looked at him then, one brief, level look. "Wait, I've got the table." She said. Gerald opened his mouth and then closed it.
Something in her voice had closed a door he didn't remember opening. She walked back to the floor. The duck came out perfectly, medium rare bordering on rare, exactly as Takahashi had specified in Japanese. The specification he'd never bothered to repeat in English. The one he delivered as a test.
The one he had fully expected to go unmet. The plate was set in front of him with the sauce separated, the bread already cleared, the water refreshed to the temperature he'd requested without anyone having to ask again. He looked at the plate. He looked at it for just a moment longer than a man simply admiring a well-prepared dish. Then he picked up his knife and fork and said nothing.
Uh the dinner moved through its middle stretch the way most dinners at tables like this one did. Conversation in clusters, wine refilled, the quiet machinery of the restaurant turning around them. But the texture of Takahashi's table was different from the others. There was an edge beneath it that hadn't dulled. If anything, as the meal progressed and the food met every specification without comment or complaint, that edge sharpened because Takahashi was the kind of man who found it more irritating to be served well by someone he dismissed than to be served poorly by someone he'd already written off.
He was working through the duck when he spoke again. This time it wasn't a murmur to Yamada. It was louder, not enough to carry across the restaurant, but enough that it sat in the open air of the table, unambiguous in its intent. Uh he spoke in Japanese and what he said was directed nowhere specific and everywhere at once, the way a man speaks when he wants to perform certainty rather than feel it. She got lucky with the order.
The kitchen probably flagged the preparation. These places coach their servers before big tables. She's running on instructions, not understanding. Watch her when the script runs out. Yamada said nothing this time.
He picked up his wine glass. Bryce was looking at the table's centerpiece with the focused attention of a man who had decided to be somewhere else in his mind. Claire set her fork down with a small, deliberate click. Takahashi continued. His voice stayed easy, conversational, but the words turned sharper.
He spoke about the restaurant's habit of hiring for optics. Hey, he said that diversity in service roles was a performance put on for a particular kind of guilty conscience. He said, and here his voice took on a musing quality, as though he were thinking through something philosophical rather than saying something cruel, that some people moved through spaces they hadn't earned, trading on the discomfort of others who didn't want to be seen as the kind of person who noticed. She belongs somewhere smaller, he said. Somewhere she doesn't have to pretend.
He cut a piece of duck and brought it to his mouth. The table was quiet. And then, from just behind his left shoulder, came a voice. It was not loud. It was not rushed.
It was not the voice of someone who had lost their composure or found it necessary to raise any kind of flag. It was calm in the way that still water is calm, not because nothing is happening beneath the surface, but because whatever is beneath the surface is entirely in control. The voice spoke in Japanese. If you wanted proper service, you should have ordered correctly the first time. The The in Yamada's hand stopped moving.