Two Cups

The street is busy and not much to look at. Thirty years ago, some modern vandals tore down whatever it was that the architects in the wake of Baron Haussmann’s renovation of Paris had built here and which five generations of Parisians had lived in, worked in, and had probably been born and died in. Busy with foot traffic and too many cars, the street is, still and all, not lively, just drab and cheap. A bad idea gone wrong, but I guess that a street full of junky buildings selling pricey bargains is necessary—if not quite rising to the dignity of a necessary evil—even in pretty Paris. The street’s sole virtue for me is that it’s on the way to a couple of places I like, but I’m on my way back and I can’t wait to turn the corner.

But something stops me in my hurry, some snag at my peripheral vision, something my eye sees before my brain develops and prints the picture: I have to back up three or four steps at the cost of two hard bumps in the shoulder and two Pardonnez-mois. It doesn’t look like much, either, the café that caught my eye. It’s every bit as crummy as the street, and the sidewalk is so narrow there’s no room for tables and chairs outside. I’m almost disappointed the windows aren’t grimy. If they had been, I wouldn’t have noticed the coffee cups and stopped.

They’re sitting on a table, two cups, right by the window, and it’s clear that the people who’d ordered them have gone: the printed check is near one of the cups with a couple of coins on top, the small extra tip most Parisians leave, especially with a small order, in addition to the built-in service. Does the voluntary pourboire on top of the obligatory service charge—literally so, since the coins always perch on the check—reflect a profound belief in free will, the spontaneous generosity of the individual rather than the calibrated tithe of the state? Don’t know, but it’s probably habitual and mannerly, and it doesn’t matter. Not now.

The cups matter to me, they must, because they stopped me and sent me into reverse. One of them, closer to the window by the chair facing in, is empty. The other is full, untouched as far as I can tell. I look at them for a minute, maybe less, then I’m on my way again. But the espresso cups stay with me. I mention them to friends, and everyone comes up with the same idea, a kind of tired, but persuasive, mise-en-scène from the same old movies.

A couple has come to the end of the road—and what could be a better, more atmospheric setting than a sorry café like this one? One of them has had it, wants to end the affair and go back to the husband or wife or maybe wants to end the marriage and go back in time and start over. That’s the one who has left the coffee untouched in the cup. The other, hopeful despite having a dread of what must be coming, is trying to be normal, to drink the coffee since, after all, that’s what you do when the serveur puts the cup down in front of you. You pour in the sugar, you stir with the little spoon, you sip, put the cup down, stir a little more, sip again. Anything to stop what is coming—maybe order another cup, suggest wine, even a meal.

That’s the consensus scenario, more or less, when I tell the friends what I have seen. One entrepreneurial soul suggests a flop of a business meeting instead and one broad-minded friend suggests that it is the man who tells the woman he wants to go home to his husband, but these are all variations on the familiar theme and becoming a parlor game. One-upmanship gets stale, and we drop it, agreeing the only differences among our interpretations are in the footnotes.

But the cups stay with me, for three days running now. Maybe the plausibility of the scene as everyone described it is just too dull, too trite, and much too triste to convince me. Maybe reality has been conditioned by movies and other fictions, by conventions. Maybe what we have concluded as an emblem of the end of an affair was really nothing more than a sour stomach or a low opinion of the coffee in the ugly café. Maybe the two persons—the couple?—remembered they had an appointment, or one of them did, and they left in a hurry, the thriftier one insisting on drinking the coffee in a gulp since it was paid for.

But after three days of maybes, I’ve had it with the plausibly cinematic and the prosaically plausible. And a thought nags, tugs at me, finally, after three days, gets my attention. The untouched cup, the full one, belonged to the person facing the window and looking out into the shoddy, busy street. He—it could have been she, but no matter—he looked at the street the way I have looked at it and was distracted, distraught even, by it while the other was unbothered, busy with her coffee ritual. He looked at it, had no choice, and couldn’t stand it, couldn’t bring himself even to reach for the sugar and the spoon, but wondered what they were doing drinking coffee in a dump of a café with a crummy view and decided they could do better and certainly deserved better. And he said as much, said something about getting out of here, going somewhere else, going anywhere else, going to bed, for all I know and that’s the idea I like the most. It’s optimistic, sure enough.

But I suppose optimism has a lot to do with point of view or maybe just the direction the wind’s blowing, not just hopefulness. Face the wrong way, you see the ugly sight, inhale the bad smell: turn around and face away, you know nothing, stay put, put up with it. Facing the wrong way, the optimist says there’s better and I want it. Let’s clear the cups from the table, wash them, and put them away—get rid of the evidence and get out of here, go. We should. And so they did, and left happy at the cheap price of a coffee untouched and a small tip.

© Joseph Lestrange