cafe

HERMIONE WANTED to borrow my car. Not that Hermione, another Hermione. The mix-up is understandable. You can imagine what her life is like with a name like that. We agreed to meet at the cafe, which at that time was just a few days from closing its doors. The owners were moving to Tallinn — the two youngest sons in music school — and the carefree days of the cafe were over. Chance meetings, long courtships, loving glances, babies, divorces, goat cheese salads — the walls of the cafe had seen it all. This was where we would meet. I had the car keys in my pocket. Hermione arrived, her blonde ringlets bouncing as she came up the steps into the cafe. A long dark coat. She was wearing mostly black. Hermione didn’t wear black for long.

Soon we were making love on a table.

This is something I have never understood, the randomness of these incidents. People ask me, “Why do these things happen to you?” Others have said, “Man, I wish I had your life.” But do they really? Do they really want to make passionate love in a cafe? Hermione said there was nothing shameful about it. I didn’t even think about it as a trade-off for the use of the car. I forgot the car. “Sex is so wonderful,” she said. “The birds do it, bees do it, even sea lions.” I really liked making love to Hermione in a cafe. Even one that was closing. There was something about its impending closure that gave our breathy coupling a sweaty urgency.

Soon some town children arrived to take advantage of the discount on organic sweets. A teenage girl stood there dressed in white with a cello and a saintly expression. Hadn’t I once been her English tutor? A boy marveled at us as if he had just identified a new constellation. “We can’t do this in front of everyone,” I told Hermione. “Stop fussing,” she said. “It’s natural.”