I met him in a coffee shop. Nothing fancy, a smudge: Klinger's
Café. Solvents for the Soul, its signboard said. An oddity anywhere
else, but not in this part of town, where nothing kept shape but the darkness.
Outside it was dead-winter cold. I'd turned my collar
up. My feet clicked against December's grey slate of street. Hands in pockets,
my breath steaming like the soul of coffee itself--then rattling overhead,
this solicitous sign, a siren in wind. Solvents for the Soul, indeed. Not
Solutions, not--even better--Indulgences. But I had no business rewriting
it even for amusement's sake. Doctor's orders.
Tinkling of doorbell as I stepped inside. Dwarf-sized
shop, rent presumably anemic: Five Formica-topped tables, three with customers.
Two ratty-looking booths, their once semi-plush cushions long ago squeezed
flat by the heft of donut dunkers. Both occupied, one by a stout and grungy
twosome, the second by a man with his face buried under hunched shoulders,
an innocuous grey head.
Young lad behind the counter: twenty-one or -two, white-smocked,
flush-cheeked, a mild but honest-looking smile. Behind him a blackboard
fashioned the "Solvents" by geography: Roman Forum, Parisian
Culture, British Biscuit, others, each bearing small, semi-legible chalk-work
scribbles meant to convey this or that quality, "baldy obstreperous,"
"sumptuously seductive;" you get the idea--pretension in a dive.
Buenos Aires Cappuccino Collegial, my first request, was
unavailable: the cappuccino machine needed mending; they'd asked a month
ago, but repair was regrettably slow. They did have Greenwich Candelabra,
however. "It tastes pretty much like tiramisu," the boy advised.
"Just what I want at nine a.m.," I said, "dessert."
When he looked at me uncertainly I added, "Yes, yes, that'll be fine."
Two dollars, but with half-price refills. "And the coffee cake, too,
please."
I took a table close to the front, a chair obliquely facing
the window. I now effectively presented my back to everyone in the room
except the loner in the front booth, who also faced the window. My choices
(besides eat and drink) were to (1) read someone's discarded business section
of the newspaper (others were similarly reading what may have been a communally
shared paper), (2) stare past the fog of winter sunlight caught in its
transit of grimy window, or (3) errantly look at the man in the booth,
who, from my advantage, sat in profile.
The business news was certainly an option, as these days
it carried not only the staid quotes of Ups and Downs, but photos of the
occasional handcuffed billionaire, or sprightly tales of the nouveau-chic
niche market in personal body armor, or the cheekiness of nanotechnology
futures.
I swear to you I had been sipping my lamentable Oreo mousse
with the paper laid flat, reading only this or that article, when the gentleman
from the booth addressed me:
"You're knowing me."
I looked up. "Pardon?"
"You're knowing me, yes? Please."
Pattern recognition is one of the lovelier arts of the
human soul: to see something, or part of something, and fill it in, to
complete wholeness where there had in fact been a hole in comprehension.
As I said, I'd seen this man only in profile--the left side of his face;
I'd read with the paper lying flat on the table, my eyes focused on paper,
my brain consuming only stories of venture capital and insider trading--this
man's visage being nothing more to me than a bland peripheral grey quadrant
of no distinction whatsoever. I'd found only my coffee regrettable, not
him. Yet here he was rotating his face into play, rotating his soul into
my span of attention. And this, I saw, changed everything.
I hesitated. "I'm sorry, I don't follow." A
defensible answer.
The man merely looked, leaving his remark incomplete.
His eyes were large and quiet: perfectly round, motionless orbs, black
as coffee. But these dark eminences were unnervingly displaced, their arrangement
unnatural. I stared back as long as I could, to show my innocence, my lack
of understanding, his inescapable misunderstanding. Any accusation was
quite his own: that was what my look said. We waited, two uncertain quantities--he
would back down. But yet he looked.
"Sorry," I said finally, returning to the page.
Still he would not give up.
"Please. For the honor of your presence." It
was now impossible not to look. He had extended an arm, his palm up, toward
the unoccupied side of his booth. "Sit."
He calmly waited. I realized in fact there was a courtliness
in his manner of defiance, if that is what it was. In theory I could choose
belligerence, taking his forwardness as the true insurrection.
But how to deny him?
The ordinary tools were not, I found, available.
"Well," I said, rising, "this is kind of
you, though I shall soon-- "
"Yes, but coffee on a morning such as this is always
such a pleasant thing," he said, rising as if to escort me to the
seat.