INGRID AND THE CAFE

In The Cafe

Ingrid stirred her coffee indifferently, and without knowing it, I could no longer avoid staring at her hand, focusing with undivided attention on its irresistible motion.   The tips of three fingers did all the work ( as if she were drawing circles with a pencil), her wrist held just above table level.   It was a picture of the supreme economy of motion, no wasted energy, no excess movement.   It seemed effortless and graceful.   The longer I stared the more my mind wandered, experimented with the image.  Soon, the noise of the cafe became a meaningless din of people, their tables blending into the blackness of the walls behind them, and the objects on our table became blurred and indefinite.   While waiting for Ingrid earlier, before she arrived, there was nothing that attracted my eye or held my attention in the haze of cigarette smoke, food, garbage, varieties of teas and coffees, and the myriad of brands of cheap perfumes that hung in the air.  They all joined together to produce an elusive, indefinable and disturbing smell, seemly and unpleasant really.   My ear could only catch snatches of conversations, a word here or there, garbled from all directions, of varied pitch and volume, none with any meaning.   For the eye there was the movement of waitresses, constant and rapid, but going nowhere, and the customers, entering, leaving, and the occasional motion of an arm in some gesture, or a leg crossing or uncrossing.   But nothing really "moving," the eye remained unsatisfied and bored.   Over all this enemating from some invisible source, was some kind of music, or what was supposed to be music, or what should have been music.    What did I hear?  A beat, a bit of a melody, a rhythmic patter?   Did matter.   No.   (But it should have mattered.   It should have completed a portrait of the scene, making us more than we were making this moment more than it was, rich and alive.    But it didn't.   It couldn't.  This music was not supposed to inform on who we were, on what our society was.   It was just there, somewhere, somewhere in the mess of sounds, empty and pointless.)   Together these sensory elements combined to create a rather unsettling atmosphere, oddly sedating, but unwelcome, like that of an unexpected or bad reaction to some drug.  

But now, I only saw her fingers, the motion of those beautiful, graceful fingers that held some object, round and round, her gentle, sweet, caressing fingers. . .

Fortunately, she stopped, and forced everything else to "reappear," to me.   It was jarring and I hoped Ingrid hadn't noticed.   Of course she hadn't.  She hadn't noticed that I stopped listening to her for several moments as she spoke.  I suppose she was in her own little separate place.  I was able to make sense of that last sentence, which was a question, and so I answered it.

"No, I have not seen 'Fitzcarraldo,' yet but I intend to."    And so she was happy.  I was not.  I had to end this absurd, irrelevant conversation.   I had asked her to meet me here for more important reasons.   I was determined to get some grasp of what was going on between us, between her and her ex-husband, but most of all, what she wanted of me.  Sex, I hoped, of course, being a rather shallow person, and male.   Maybe that's all I wanted from her.  I wanted to ravage her.  

"Ingrid, how are things with your husband?"  I surprised myself with my own directness. "The last time I saw you things were kind of bad.  Do you still see him?"

In one long, agitated breath Ingrid responded, "Oh, yes, I saw him today, in fact, -- he seems much better, much better-- I don't think he's drinking anymore--he was much nicer to me, he has been seeing a doctor and he's much better, it's strange, yes?-- he wants to have another child, well, I'm just not ready for that besides, my God, we don't even live together anymore and -- but -- "  

With the rest of her monologue becoming more and more indiscernible and contradictory I stopped listening.   Ingrid herself how, finally, began to fade into the strained, unpalatable fog.   What am I supposed to make of this woman?  She nearly begged me for a date, lavished me with compliments and physical affection, repeatedly asks to see more of me, but now speaks of her husband as if there was some kind of imminent reconciliation.   Why not?   The bastard only beat her regularly.   So what? 

I could tolerate sitting there no longer.   Convinced there was no reason to stay and that Ingrid was a bewildered, lost woman who didn't know what the hell she wanted from life, probably never knew, maybe never knew who the hell she was, I had to get away.  I wondered if I would continue to seek to be with women who seemed only to want more punishment from men, not love, not laughs, not at least, affection.   I  seemed to find women who wanted only drugs, alcohol, cigarettes and an occasional beating.  I knew there were women out there who didn't want that.  Why were they so hard to find?  

And so, I became cold and indifferent to this beautiful women before me, and feeling myself getting more and more anxious could now think only of leaving.   I signaled the waitress for our check.  She brought it and as I paid I apologized to Ingrid, saying that I had to rush off to a lesson and could not afford to lose the money it would earn for me.   She thanked me warmly and whispered, "Will you call me?"  I lied.   Then she stood and kissed both my cheeks.  I turned, quickly, leaving her in that noisy, odorous atmosphere that created the particularly confused din of the cafe.