Up the down escalier

Have you ever been on the receiving end of behavior so baffling that you couldn’t figure out whether the other person was being deliberately rude or just plain clueless? And then come down with a bad case of l’esprit d’escalier, the “spirit of the staircase,” in which you don’t come up with the perfect way to say, “Hey, WTF?” until some time after the fact?

Me too. And today I got to make up for it.

Necessary background: there’s a coffee shop near my apartment which I basically use as my second living room. I’m there just about every day, either to hang out with friends or to get work done or to sit and contemplate the crema on my espresso. I talk to a lot of the other regulars, and some of them have become good friends. So it’s not unusual for me to start conversations with people if I’ve seen them there a few times.

Some months ago, I started having conversations there with someone I found intriguing: frequent traveler, food and wine lover, international background, well-read. You know, a good conversationalist. And after a few good conversations, he invited me to meet him for a drink at a new local watering hole one evening. Which I did, although I had to run off after just an hour because I had another commitment. So I figured I’d reciprocate with an invitation to my own favorite bar, on an evening where an artist friend was having an opening.

So. On the appointed evening, my new pal showed up with another friend in tow, spent the entire evening at the far end of the bar, and came over just long enough to meet the artist and inform me that he was going to escort his (by then very drunken) friend home. And then he vanished. And I was astonished. Boggled. Flummoxed. And, frankly, insulted. Mind you, it’s not that I was expecting some hot romantic date — I had actually suspected my new friend played for the other team. It’s just that I think it’s astonishingly rude to show up to an event and ignore the person who invited you! I thought of several dozen cutting things to say when I saw him next. The only problem is, I didn’t see him next. Not for two months.

Then I walked into the coffee shop this afternoon and there he was, standing in line right in front of me. He smiled broadly when he saw me, told me he’d been busy, asked how I’d been. And I cocked my head and said coolly, “You know, I have to ask you something. What the hell happened the last time I saw you? I invited you to do something and you showed up with a friend and didn’t interact with me the entire time, and frankly, I found that shocking.”

Even as the words were coming out of my mouth, I was thinking, Is this me? The person who tries so hard to be nice and give everyone the benefit of the doubt? The person who hates being at all confrontational? Go, me!

My erstwhile coffee shop pal stammered something about having misunderstood, that he’d thought I had just told him about the event and not actually invited him there as my guest, that he was sorry. Then off he went to drink his coffee in another part of the cafe. Oh, how proud of myself I felt! But wait, it gets better. A little while later, he came over to my table and said that he appreciated how honest and straightforward I had been, and he apologized again. And I said it was water under the bridge, in a slightly less chilly tone than I’d used before. And that was that.

Boundary set. BS not taken. The end.

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