Coffee and Cake

I thought that the waiter looked about the most boring man alive. Even calling him a man is a bit disingenuous, because there was something unformed about him. He had a little tuft of fine black hair, like Velcro fuzz, on top of a scalp that seemed to have never had any more hair to begin with; better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all, I thought. The scalp soon became the face, which was fat and round like an egg, and the face stretched tiredly over what must have been golf balls fused to the rim of his jaw, then down to the neck, down to the belly, and so on and so on.

‘I’m sorry, about last night.’

I liked the pause she made in the middle. It felt like confession; I was the arbiter, thumbing my way through her big book of sins while she knelt, neck rising from her little desecrated temple like a snake, pleading, ‘Yes! Yes! It’s true, all of it.’

‘It’s alright, honestly. I was just a bit confused.’

Fuck. Where did that come from?

I knew it had come from my mouth, and I knew it had been formulated tediously by my brain earlier in the day – I make a habit of carving out a few phrases to use when I know a certain conversation is coming, then I use them like signposts to navigate my way through the whole thing. I figure it’s not really cheating, because some poor writer sweats away years of his life over drafts upon drafts of conversations in the movies, and all I really want is to sound kinda like the movies.

All the same, the words weren’t an accurate representation of how I was feeling just then, with her in front of me, but I knew immediately that I would be held to them like a hostage for the remains of the conversation. It can be a queer thing, to be misrepresented by yourself. I felt I had a right to be vindictive, and I wanted to be vindictive too. It was, after all, about the closest you could get to cheating where two people aren’t actually in a relationship. But in times like that, I have this reflex that halts me in my tracks and makes me act all magnanimous. Pretty much everyone has that instinct that stops you doing any real damage to yourself– like if you try twisting your arm until it snaps, and your body hits the emergency brake – but I seem one of the few whose instinct covers other people too.

There were a few more platitudes exchanged; we were very polite and glib. I thought for a second that you couldn’t help being polite sitting in one of those West End coffee shops, the ones with knee-high oak tables and glass mezzanines, but then I remembered that I had had very different conversations in such places, only with very different people.

Another waiter, this one in a nauseous Hawaiian shirt that made him look like a can of lemon-and- lime soda, placed down two cups of coffee, and one slice of chocolate cake. We both thanked him, before she asked him for a glass of tap water, please, peremptorily. I thought she might want the whole damn building, but I didn’t ask.

‘They do the best chocolate cake here.’

With a little fork that looked like a surgical instrument, she lopped off the pointed head of the slice in three quaint blows. It seemed more like she was sucking a cough sweet than eating cake, and she closed her eyes as if in her mind she had gone someplace else.

I wished I were someplace else.

I’ve never liked chocolate cake. Either it’s too sweet so it’s sickly, or it’s not sweet enough like you’re eating mud. Frankly, it’s more hassle than it’s worth. That’s at least the rational part of the dislike. The other part is clandestine and pornographic, and is as follows: whenever you don’t like a food, people always make a habit of breaking it right down to its constituent parts and then throwing each one in your face like logical shuriken, each one more difficult to outwit than the last, and it makes them feel smart. ‘How can you not like the soup? You like chicken, don’t you? And you like rice? And sure, you like water. That’s all it is, thrown together.’ But taste isn’t a rational creature, and it shouldn’t be treated like one. It’s certainly not something people should get all high and mighty about or patronise you for. Anyway, chocolate cake is probably the example that I encounter most often, so I make a very particular point about disliking it. I enjoy picking fights like that, where I can beat people without them knowing.

I came out the shop alone. She had another friend meeting her, another appointment with another cup of coffee. I stepped into the street and met the wind like a lover. It had been too warm in the place, or at least I was too warm, so I let the November gusts whip across my face and drew them up through my nostrils and down into my lungs where they could cool my insides. I took a right towards the park because I was in the mood to see the trees and get a little more air before going back home, where work waited for me like an evil lodger. At that time of year, the work from the university could mount up, and I had been lazy and let it slide a little too long.

At a bus stop, there was an old lady fumbling a tiny red glove off one hand to pull change from the purse that was in the other. She managed out a fist, but a tiny bead of gold fell between her fingers and hit the concrete with a squeal, where it rolled a few yards down the street. I picked it up and handed it back to her, and she thanked me. I thought it was funny how often you could tell a real thank you from a fake one.

By the time I got to the park, dusk had begun to sneak in; the waning sunlight wandered down the big hill like lilac honey, and trickled languidly through the branches of the beech trees that guarded the old fountain. I thought of the moon creeping up on the sun like Peter Pan’s shadow, and smuggling her away someplace hidden; that’s all night is, really. One big shadow.

By this time, I was really feeling a lot better about the whole fiasco. It’s not like it’s a pleasant thing, to get screwed over by a girl – it’s not pleasant to get screwed over by anyone – but piece by piece, it was occurring to me that, when I took a step back and admired the whole wreck like an amateur Picasso, I didn’t really like her very much at all. In my head, I ran through all the things I enjoyed about her, like the characters in Friends do when they’re trying to cheer up whichever one was jilted that week – she was smart, and pretty, and funny, in a disgracefully PG kind of way, and she had deep green eyes, like little emerald bath bombs.

But none of that seemed to matter too much as I looked at her then, back in the coffee shop. I guess when you’re trying to love someone, or at least find them attractive, you do a hell of a lot more than just look; you take them in your hands, like a Rubik’s cube, and fiddle around with bits and pieces to see if you can get them to work. A twist here, another twist there, turn the whole thing over. Sometimes they just make sense to you. And sometimes they don’t. Sometimes you find one already completed, colours gleaming right back at you, and then maybe you can fall in love and all that other nonsense.

I began to see the mistake I had made with this girl – I had just been looking. And when it came to it, the colours didn’t add up. They never would. Love, evidently, isn’t a rational creature either, and it shouldn’t be treated like one.

I was satisfied with the revelation, considering it an impatient chapter of my life closed, and I gave a little smirk as I left the park; two runners passed me just then, dressed in bright lycra, and they probably figured I was mad. It didn’t bother me though, they looked like fizzy sweets.