Sedentary Traveler

"Whale hunting, sometimes," He says. "And I've made an igloo. There are no nights in summer, no days in winter. All-night parties in the snow. The girls sometimes where bikini tops."
"Lush life."
"Lifeless, lushless," he sighs, drinks.
I tell him he's the first Eskimo I've met, that you never really think you'll meet an Eskimo, that I totally pictured Eskimos different,, and I'm in the middle of a mojito saying a variety of other politically incorrect things when she comes out of nowhere, yelling, smiling, saying we haven't seen each other in months.
More like years, I correct.
She's beaming with fake interest in me, all parts of her, and we proceed through classic "I missed you" formalities and she finishes by saying that she's just come back from London.
"Our little project has really taken off like a bottle rocket," she says describing a non-governmental organization she helped build there. "We're helping funnel food, radios, and diapers to Haiti now."
"That's amazing," I say. "Why diapers?"
"They're a mother's best friend."
"You wouldn't know."
"Men don't know."
I want to tell her something along the lines of "duh" and be really harsh about it when he adds, "I've never thought of that, either."
He's gazing at all the parts of her that are beaming, longingly. She seems annoyed by it, glances with ice cold eyes, and excuses herself, to make a phone call, "to London."
She says it with an air of superiority, and I'm flustered for a second, then tell myself I haven't done anything for Haiti lately.
Whatever.
Our waitress -- brown eyes shimmering, grinning at me with a certain lust behind her features -- asks if we need anything else, then lays down the check.
Maybe she's just doing it for a tip, I think.
And besides, I'm not interested. I'm talking to an Eskimo who says he'd love to go to Budapest, and nothing could be more interesting as he sketches on a napkin, pushing a boat out into the sea with a felt-tip pen the waiter gave him to sign the bill.
"There's nothing up there, for you to see," he says, meaning Alaska. "Budapest -- If I had wind pushing me, I would go to Budapest."
I'm entertained by the sudden culture quirk in his vocabulary.
"What does it look like?" Alaska I mean.
"Flat. No depth."
"I hear Budapest has nice architecture."
And he tells me something about its Western and Eastern European roots, and Turkish influence, or something he may have seen on the Discovery Channel, and I'm not really listening as the gorgeous waitress with brown eyes drops a pen and picks it up again.
It's only a momentary lapse.
As he draws I notice that it's a sail boat, not a canoe, or something native to his Eskimo tradition. I want to ask why a sailboat, and not a canoe, than think about political correctness and how I should be cognizant of such. It's so hard to be correct today.
"Where is it sailing to," I ask.
"Nowhere," he laughs, showing off bad teeth. "There's no wind!"
I'd been sitting at the bar with him for a few hours and the music that's playing has no rhythm and we were full on food so the beers didn't get us as buzzed as we'd like, so we leave.
Putting on my jacket I tell him how I just got a postcard from my brother, written from Paris, with love. It outlined how much he hated Paris. It was so superficial, he said. There was no depth, it was like so many other cities.
"Tourist pit," he said.
No layers to discover.
"I saw something on Paris on TV," he says.
Outside there is no wind. I can't immediately hail a cab.
"I think we may be going nowhere, fast, for a while," I say.
"Typical," he adds. "You can't really get away from it, I suppose."
His face twists with the irony, almost.
I laugh at the popcorn-opera reading of it all, the sedintary bore of it all.