Sluts and Wives
Scenes From A Restaurant
“Door!” the owner would scream as new customers relentlessly charged into the heaving restaurant. I was the door girl. The first smiling face every customer would see when they came in to one of Canberra’s busiest restaurants and bars.
It was my job to say ‘yes, of course we can fit you in!’- no matter how booked out we were.
In addition to the cast of servers, customers and chefs, there were the charismatic owners…and their wives.
The owners were married to good women… of course. ‘Well behaved’ women. Not the type of women who would sit around like some of our customers shooting lustful eyes to the staff and their husbands.
While I was at High School and University (College, for my US readers), I worked in cafes and restaurants. I have always been ‘good’ at hospitality. My mind can comfortably hold different tasks and conversations at a time, and I thrive in stressful and fast paced environments. Problems that arise in the bustle often need to be solved with smiles, a good memory and some conversational massaging.
My body would move quickly as I worked the floor. Fast friendships were formed with my colleagues as we trauma bonded from the sheer stress of working in the restaurant.
Even if large bookings were about to walk through the door in 15 minutes time to no table, it was my job to make it all ‘work’ somehow. It was my job to immediately build rapport with the customers so that they wouldn’t want to complain. I was under heat. There were many times when I quite literally felt my body turn red hot from the stress, yet I would somehow smile my way through. Nine times out of ten, I would manage to wriggle my way through to the end of the night, where I would then sip on a glass of wine with my colleagues, as we compared stories of the disastrous near misses that we each navigated throughout the shift.
Call me a thrill seeker but I did enjoy the drama of it all.
The customers always fascinated me, especially the middle aged women who came in to flirt and ‘be seen’ by other customers. Online dating was not what it is today, and the restaurant had a particular energy as a result. These were the ‘before times’ where if you wanted to meet someone, you had to get dressed up and make the effort to leave the house.
My hospitality days felt like an education in the human condition, and satiated my love for people watching. I always wondered what was going on with people. The couples who came in and barely spoke to one another sparked my curiosity, were they in the midst of an argument? Or were they in a comfortable plateau of not needing to make conversation after decades of being together?
When the wives of the owners would come in to the restaurant, the owners would be on their best behaviour. Flirting was dialled way back. When the women who they would regularly spend time flirting with would come in, they would barely be acknowledged if the wives were present. I always found this interesting. It made me question if what I witnessed while working the floor was merely the tip of the iceberg.
Were there affairs at play?
If they wouldn’t acknowledge these women in front of their wives, did they have something more serious to hide?
Unsurprisingly, when the wives left, the larrikin energy was back in full force.
I witnessed the duality of these men. Their overt flirting with customers felt unbridled. Was it all a marketing strategy? Was it all a show, creating an environment where women could go to receive attention whilst not ‘technically’ doing anything wrong? Even at 7:30am, the energy of the restaurant was heaving with sexual tension.
As a far younger, silent witness to these men, I would listen to how they would speak about the customers, “Table 48 is thirsty, look at her”, “Oh my god, Bella. Which one of us will go over to her?” “You went to the last one, I’ve got this.”
Locker room talk, but in the middle of the restaurant, right in front of us younger, female staff.
It was here that I realised that to these men- there were wives and then there were sluts.
Whilst I never saw affairs, the connections between some of the customers and the owners was undeniable. Phones were out, flirting was blatant. Their eyes were scanning the restaurant doors as they spoke to the women, ready to abandon the table at the mere sight of a wife walking through the door.
The wives always liked me. I was always appropriate and respectful. Aside from their charisma, the owners never appealed to me. They seemed like a pack of desperate puppies lapping at, and barking at the heels of any beautiful woman who walked by. If anything, I felt embarrassed for them and their wives. If I were to ever marry, I hoped it would be to someone who wasn’t frantically scratching up the walls for validation like these men were.
Without being fully aware of it, the wives had become a symbol for something that these men felt the need to break free from. There were multiple personalities clearly at play.
As I cleared the plates of the women, I wondered if the wives had their own desires and parts of themselves that were similar to the women who would come in during the evenings? They had not always been married. They were once single women, most likely ‘good girls’ but surely still fun? Fun… but not ‘too much fun’… Still marry-able. Still good girls. Still women with ‘self respect’. I wondered if they ever longed to be spoken to with hungry eyes from a stranger? Or were they just ‘too good’ for such behaviour?
What also perplexed me with the owners was that these men were all religious. They would go to church, wear crosses around their necks and carry on about ‘respect’. We all have parts of ourselves that we don’t share with everyone, yet something felt wrong with the split personalities that I witnessed. It didn’t feel right to me that these men would behave in ways that they would hide from their wives. It felt sad for their wives, and for them?
As the beautiful women who were almost twenty years my senior flocked into the restaurant, time seemed to slow down. I watched the male staff flock to greet them with kisses on the cheek. Knowing that these men would never acknowledge the existence of these women if their wives were present. I knew that if I were to ever marry, I never wanted to be one person with my husband whilst suffocating another part of myself. If I enjoyed the attention of someone else while being married, I wanted to be able to share that truth with my husband.
My life partner deserves to know the very depths of me. My shadows. My desires. My longings. The good girl in me. The ‘bad girl’ in me.
I never wanted to be in a long term, committed relationship with someone who I had to pretend to be ‘good’ with. The sheer stress of having to pretend just wouldn’t feel worth it.
Whilst I never saw acts of infidelity at the restaurant, I could feel it in the interactions. These men, whilst choosing to marry the good girls were undeniably drawn to sexually liberated women who flirted with them without shame. These were women who they would never marry, would never bring home to meet their mothers. But they were women who they so clearly craved.
Madonna and the whore. How cliché.
For these men, everything seemed compartmentalised and binary. There were the women who you married and the women who you fucked. There were wives and there were sluts. But these women couldn’t be both. The women existed for different purposes. They fulfilled different roles to these men.
As the stampede of playful women stormed the restaurant, I wondered if they could be both? Was there a possibility for a hybrid woman who could be her own person, sexual, free, as well as being a devoted mother and wife?
When I watched the wives dote on their babies in the mornings, only to see the other women flirt with the owners in the evenings, I knew that both of these breeds of women, and perhaps many more existed inside of me.
It wasn’t a profound thought. Of course we are all complex whether we acknowledge our many selves, or not. But the real magic would be to find a life partner who celebrated and made space for all of these parts of myself to come alive. That would be the true complexity of it all.
He couldn’t be a man like the men who I witnessed at work.
Underneath their good looks and bravado, their tender egos would take a beating if they were active liberators of their wives instead of playing into the good girl/ ‘mother is martyr’ mentality.
Witnessing all of the men in the restaurant showed me clearly what I did want in my life.
The truth.
