Coffee

 

            I was sitting at the bar alone.

            Having written that, I feel the need to explain some things.  This is what I was doing, but you shouldn’t think of it as something I do.  I’m not the kind of person that sits at bars alone.  Besides, it’s different than how you imagine.  It wasn’t night, for one thing, it was morning, and it was the bar in a hotel restaurant, with businessmen and biscuits and 10 year olds with toast, those kind of Sunday morning things. 

You’re wondering, if it was so innocent, why I need to point this out.  I’m tempted, actually, to cross over everything and start again.  But this weak way I have of justifying, of qualifying everything, has to do with the story, so I’ll keep it as it is.  Without it, the flavor would be wrong.  And you have no way of knowing how many beginnings I’ve crossed out already.  How much I’ve wasted of this hotel stationary. 

            And even then I was thinking about what it meant: to be sitting at the bar alone.  I’ve always felt, no matter where I am, the need to justify my presence, to excuse, somehow, or explain my being there.  For example: I wanted orange juice.  Hotels have good orange juice, sometimes, and I like to drink a glass in the morning.  But at the same time I knew there was something strange about sitting at the bar just for the sake of a glass of juice, and if someone saw me they might question my motives.  So I picked up a paper.  Which solved the problem, also, of what to do with my eyes.  The restaurant was one of those places with a lot of mirrors, to make it look larger than it really was: caves of you and the tables reflecting recursively from wall to wall.  I pretended to choose a section of the New York Times, and opened it on the bar to pretend to read.

            Looking at this now, my thoughts laid out, I can see how strange they must seem to you.  Your impression must be that I’m paranoid, a maniac.  These things have a force on paper that they didn’t in life.  I mean I thought these things, certainly, but only as a habit, half conscious, and when I was having these thoughts I hardly noticed them at all.  There’s a part of my brain that maintains these fictions, and leaves the rest of me free to think.  Like the part of you that always checks your fly walking out of a restroom.  You only notice it when it doesn’t work.  But with me it’s a little more.

            For example: it occurred to me that someone who was reading the paper might be bothered by the television, which was crackling from a wall mount with its morning cartoons.  So I glanced up at it with mild annoyance (not enough to be taken as irritation, or intolerance) and then softened the gesture with a benevolent smile, as if noticing how quaint it was to show cartoons in a bar.  Cartoons, by the way, have a fascination for me (this is a real, and not a feigned, observation) because of their obvious and utter incapacity for deceit.  The domain of the cartoon is one of clear signification, of meaning unmitigated by its self-awareness.  I don’t mean to sound smarter than I am.  All I mean to say is this: in cartoons, when some bunny rabbits eyes bug out, you know they’re in pain, and when they’re conspiring, their smile twists their face until it fills the screen.  Cartoons are incapable of human duplicity, at least to the audience, if not to each other.  The monitor made me think of security cameras, trained to spy in on a simpler world.

            If I looked to long, though, it would be obvious that I hadn’t really been reading the paper (you start, I think, to see what I mean), and cartoons, as it goes, make a worse excuse than a paper.  So I looked back down, approximating about where my eyes would be given the time I’d been there pretending to read.  Do all these calculations, considerations, seem improbable?  Even if they don’t, I can see how you must be picturing me now: sad and self-conscious, a timid little man, open like a book and obvious at a glance.  But I’ll tell you, not caring if you believe me or not, that as transparent and pitiable I may be on the page, in life I am absolutely inscrutable.  Now maybe you laugh.  My study, the careful and contrived presentation of myself, is flawless, I assure you, and undetectable.  In 30 years, no one has ever seen through it.  My deceptions, in fact, are so effortlessly effective, that I’ve sometimes wondered if others are the same.  Knowing that this is the “just like me” daydream of every unpopular schoolboy, I’ve gone so far as to imagine if I confessed these things, the planned out falsity of every word and action, admitted nearly all of my visible, external, existence was a fraud, then the world would suddenly and simultaneously recognize itself: would smile, would nod, relieved and grateful someone had the courage to say what everyone had felt.  But even that smile, that nod, would be prepared, would be a performance.  Just because the world were to recognize itself wouldn’t mean it could cease its insincerity.  Knowing the disease is different from a cure.

I’m not saying that my demeanor is perfect, that I’m a superhuman paragon of style and wit.  There have been miscalculations, embarrassments, but no more than there would be without this conscious attention to everything I do.  People have even seen me as self-confident, arrogant, or at least unconcerned with what others may think.  The reason I can get away with this is simple.  As contrived as all my actions are, their effects premeditated and weighed and sorted beforehand, at the center of things I’m not pretending.  That is, I am pretending, profoundly and absolutely, but the end result of this deception is identical to the thing I actually feel, the projection of what I actually am.  All my subtle self-promotions have honesty at their core.   Maybe that is confusing.  I am terrified not of understanding, but of misunderstanding.  There is one exception: the embarrassment I feel for all the energy I expend, the trouble I go through in the constant maintenance of my truthful appearance, the fidelity of my image.  Growing up I honestly felt that my intellectual complexity warranted this constant campaign, deliberate defense against people receiving the wrong idea. I walked under the unshakeable conviction that I thought much more than other people; now I realize I only think more about less important things.  I have to study, model, and maintain what for others is effortless and natural.  In the end, other people and I act exactly the same, only I’ve wasted more energy, exhausted myself keeping up with their instincts. If people knew the details of this effort, the extent of it, it would of course be a bit embarrassing.  It’s like running a toaster off of a nuclear reactor, or hiring a zen master to do your taxes on an abacus.  So I keep all this machinery hidden, underground, so no one guesses the needless expenditures of my mind.  I’ve done this for so long—seething subscape of semiotics—I couldn’t function without it.  And like I said, even though it is cumbersome, the machinery works perfectly.

I could have written this, even, without giving any hint of my sort of illness, my enormity of wasted intellect.  I could have described these events simply, without digression, perhaps even with a hint of humor, tagging it at the end with some kind of vague moral, or suggestion of insight.  But I don’t write this to convince anyone, or please them, but rather to figure out for myself the thing that happened.  That I’m writing it down is a matter of convenience.

So again, I say: I sat at the bar alone.  As an illustration to what I’ve been writing I can say that I felt unusually happy, and relaxed, so my subconscious devisings were manufacturing ways in which I might appear happy and relaxed as I sat at the bar.  I went so far as to allow myself to hum, quietly, as I pretended to read, and to smile a little as if there was something I found amusing.  I may have been acting, but it was method acting, so I both was and seemed happy as I sat at the bar, humming to myself as the waitress approached.  The first clue I had that she’d mistaken me for someone else was her teeth.  A few of the ones in front were slightly yellow, doubtlessly gateways in their time to innumerable cigarettes and substances that had stained them, and they were slightly misplaced, wandering on her gums like little pilgrims who had lost their way.  She was smiling when I looked up from the paper, and it struck me that the courage to inflict her open mouth on someone implied some sort of past relationship, a vulnerable trust she wouldn’t share with strangers.  Actually I’m not sure if I thought this at the time or if it occurred to me afterwards.

“Two coffees, right?” she said in a tone of unfeigned friendliness.  The frankness of her voice, its familiarity, caught me off guard even more than her unmasked teeth.  She said, “One for you, and one for me?”

Immediately following this was a moment for me of observations, calculations, like when I used to sleep in high school and then suddenly was called on.  As much as the phrase “pivotal point” sounds, well, like something in a story, it really is the easiest way to explain how these moments feel. Because pivoting doesn’t just mean changing directions, turning off one highway to go somewhere else, but a point you step on that spins around, pivots, like a magic stone in a labyrinth maze, and you can step off into all different possibilities, including back to where you came. I think of standing on a compass that is swinging in the dark, the time when North is undetermined.  To say “pivoting” also seems right to me because it has the feel of vertigo, dizziness, the moment right before you jump off of a merry-go-round. 

My mind was presented with a quick parade of possibilities: questioning look, flat denial, blank stare, “I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else”, all with implications, drawbacks, uncertainties and futures.  And above all this I was thinking to myself: I hate coffee.  There are certain things I did without thinking, before I could think, like meet her glance and return her smile.  Because there is a certain power that people have, to make you match an emotion they confront you with, happiness, anger, or whatever: a simple human involuntary response.  It would be the same as if she had come up to the bar, and stood there stark naked—I would have responses beyond my control.

I have to admit that most likely, as frantically as I tried to decide what to do, everything that I actually ended up doing was as automatic as the smile, as cut off from all of my helpless thinking.  It feels good to be smiled at like that waitress smiled at me, and I didn’t want to do anything that might make her stop.  There is a kind of warmth that comes off a person, even if they have mistaken you for someone else.  It wasn’t that I didn’t think about what I was doing, just that what I did and what I thought had nothing to do with each other.  Strangely, though, the more confused I am the more natural I sound; autopilot is always a better flyer than me.  In this case I leaned back, maybe even (dear God) gave a little wink, and said something like “well, of course.” 

Another thing I was doing in that moment was studying her face.  You never observe things so closely as you do in a moment of panic.  Besides her teeth, she had a mole under the left side of her chin, above where it met the neck.  It was a ridiculous place, really, to have your eyes drawn to on a face—a part of the body, like the top of a foot, you would only ever mention or notice if there was something wrong with it.  Because of the mirror behind the bar, I could see the back of her head, brittle brown-black hair pulled back in a pony-tail.  The way it was bunched up high on her head, and her bangs came forward from the front and the sides, made me think (seriously) of her head as a flower.  Not that she was beautiful—but it would be unfair, too, to call her wilting.  Plastic, maybe, with all her make-up.  I’m not saying this to be “literary” or to push it off as some kind of metaphor, I’m just saying that when I looked at her dry and mascara-swamped head, the first thing that popped into my mind was a half-open flower, bobbing on its stem.

After I said “well, of course,” I was again thrown into a delirium of indecision.  Luckily, she smiled even larger, tapped her pen on the counter three times, and left to go clean a table.  As she was walking off, looking at me over her shoulder, I felt the full weight of the confusion I’d dropped myself into.  Imagine my newspaper changed before me into a tactical map, me some sweating general marshalling the forces of my own ego.  Why, you might be asking, did it make me so nervous, did all my muddled mental resources of the morning shift gears and focus on the brown haired waitress and who she thought I was?  Because, for one thing, from the moment I’d ordered the coffee, I’d locked myself into pretending to be someone else, the person she thought she recognized, which is a good deal more difficult than pretending to be who I am.  In some ways, though, I wasn’t unprepared.  The reason I’ve been relatively successful in life is because, in the first few minutes of a conversation I can tell, by hints they don’t know they are giving, who it is a person wants me to be.  After that, it is an easy thing to approximate this image, to mold myself into their obvious expectations. 

The problem was that in this case I had very little to go on, and the chances were that by the time I’d finished the coffee she had just sat in front of me, that I didn’t want, she would discover her mistake.  At first I thought that when this happened, I could fall back on the defense that I’d been playing along for fun, for a laugh, a practical joke I couldn’t be blamed for finding amusing.  This would have been possible, a perfect smiling safety net for the whole stupid situation if it weren’t for one thing: that I’d bought her coffee.  Once money is involved, no matter how little, people see things differently.  As a businessman I know that a situation changes the minute it is monetary.  The fact was, (a fact she couldn’t help but see) that I’d paid money for her misunderstanding, I’d bought her mistake for the price of a cup of coffee. This compromised my position, precluded passing it off as only playfulness.  It meant something had happened that I’d been willing to pay for.  You can’t buy someone a cup of coffee as part of a joke.

And since I’ve gone this far already, mauled by writing this any dignity I may have had, I may as well tell the truth.  The thing I was terrified of her inferring, that I knew she would guess if she guessed anything at all, was that her smile, her mistaking me for a friend, had been worth the price of a coffee, even more.  It’s not, as you might be thinking, that I don’t have friends, or that I’ve never had anyone smile at me before.  It’s just that there are different ways of smiling, and different kinds of friends.  Whenever I meet someone, this film of distance develops between us, before we get to the point where this woman was with the person she mistook me for.  Like I said, there is a kind of warmth that comes off people.

“When are you guys gonna come back here?” she asked when all the tables had been cleaned.

“I don’t know.  Maybe tonight.”

The waitress laughed, twirling the dishcloth around her hand, “I’ll keep the whiskey ready.”

I hate whiskey more than coffee.  I sat there, my blood thumping, while she went and stood near another waitress, talking to her and sipping the coffee I’d bought her.  Would the other waitress know, would she tell her that it wasn’t me?  They both were looking over.  I will spare you the nervous tumblings of my quickly firing mind as I watched and smelled the thin vines of steam that were climbing from the cup.  The saucer had a checkered pattern, and under the rim of the cup was a high-tide line of lightly stained grey.  I flashed on fantasies of coming back to the bar that evening, and the evening after that, learning, through a subtly and cunning campaign of cleverness, exactly who I was supposed to be, what I’d done to make us friends.  I would always skirt the knife edge of discovery, barely escaping, until eventually I displaced in her memory the original person.  Maybe he would return one night when I was with her, exchanging confidences, talking comfortably at a booth, reliving together episodes we had never really shared.  There would be a kind of stand off, a challenge, both of us claiming primacy, accusing the other of vile imposture.  The waitress would side with me, and call hotel security to hurl my unfortunate double into the street.  The two considerations that marred this scenario were that the waitress wasn’t attractive, and it would mean drinking more coffee.

Darkly, too, I considered the possibility that she didn’t really think I was someone she knew at all, that this was some kind of a joke, a scam, to inveigle from people free cups of coffee.  She picked me because she could tell I would be too embarrassed to refuse.  Weren’t she and the other waitress over there laughing?  Maybe they’d had a bet…  Her smile, though, couldn’t have been faked.   The only thing to do was to keep from getting caught, to keep up the game as long as I could.  Unfortunately, I had no idea what kind of person this whiskey drinker was.  Would he be interested in the football game that someone had switched the television to?  What section of the paper would he be likely to read?  I was sure he would know at least the name of the waitress, so it was important for me to find out.  She was wearing a small red nametag, but it was just over her breasts, and she might think I was staring. 

And anyway, the chances were, if I were him, I would have said more by now, would have asked her how she was, invited her to sit.  More than five minutes had gone by.  I had a headache from the coffee.  She had to know, or at least suspect; I could see her face had changed, she looked at me now with a veiled doubt on her lips—she’d retreated from the surface of her eyes.  Other people might not have noticed, but I’m careful about seeing these things, tuned to them like a radio signal, and I can hear them as clearly as something spoken.  She smiled, but her mouth was closed.

The thing I was, I still am, so puzzled by, the thing I turned over and over in my head for hours after alone in the room, the reason I bothered to write this at all, but am still no closer to knowing, is that as I got up so quickly and walked out, because she was walking over to me, and I couldn’t let her ask the question her face showed that she would—as the stool was wobbling on its base and both coffees were left unpaid for, as I pretended weakly to remember something important, or that I saw someone suddenly that I knew outside, as I put my shaking hands in my pockets, I heard her call my name, somehow she knew my name.