There are only certain places I can take her.  She is sort of bulky; she never orders anything.  Nowhere too crowded, I wouldn’t feel right taking up a booth with her.  But at the same time, nowhere that doesn’t have the possibility of running into someone more interesting, in case I wanted to ditch her, or at least set her aside for awhile.  Somewhere with just enough scenic beauty to fill a background but not enough to completely divert my attention from her. 

Today I tried a new place that neither of us had ever been to, or perhaps she had, with a former companion.  La Conversation, nestled just under Sunset on Doheny.  I stared over her and people watched, hoping to enter into a ‘conversation’ with someone I had not yet met.  I watched a beautiful older woman accompanied by her nurse and her nurse’s son.  The woman daintily forked her salad while the nurse and her son loudly fought about his day and the nurse gulped down a smoothie.  The woman looked past her dining mates in my direction, although her senility suggested she stared into space and wasn’t really interested in me. 

I looked around the sidewalk at the sparse comings and goings of ----.  But then, somewhere between sips of my iced tea, before my warm chicken and goat cheese salad had even arrived, I lost sight of everything around me and became completely immersed in the woman I had brought.  And the ‘conversacion’ I had hoped would occurred, only not in the form I had previously imagined. 

“Vengeance is mine; I will repay.” –Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina


La Conversation
639 N. Doheny Dr.
Los Angeles, CA 90069-5506
(310) 858-0950

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