Coffee Shops
“You’re gonna have to spend a lot of time in coffee shops,” said my hard-ass divorce lawyer as we finalized our “temporary custody agreement.” I saw it as self-preservation, a way to have as little contact as possible with my soon-to-be ex, Brett, while he lived in my basement, fucked my best friend, and refused to move out until I paid him enough.
I hate coffee shops. In fact, I didn’t even start drinking coffee until this year, when my inability to sleep collided with the need to stay awake during daylight hours to at least appear to be earning my paycheck. I’ve never had trouble sleeping before. I suppose it is the brain’s cruel joke that when you most want to turn it off, it resists without reason.
I also hate coffee shops because of the customers. Not so much customers as groupies. People with no place better to spend half the day, who feel so superior for their laptops and ipods and multiple shots of espresso. My now-ex-husband Brett spent more time at coffee shops than anywhere else. As a Medieval Literature professor (no, I’m not kidding), he only needed to be on campus (or anywhere really) for about 8 hours a week. Now, I’m not saying he didn’t work more than 8 hours. He DID work—at least a few hours more a week between tinkering with his antique motorcycles and scooters, writing a movie script with his middle-school best friend, going to the movies and reading novels. He had his own stool in the local coffee shop, where he graded papers and read arcane literary criticism, writing his own tortured prose for the 50 or so people on the planet who cared. I used to think it was deep, intellectual, even admirable to follow such a passion. I never quite understood the coffee shop, though. We bought a house with a large sunny office for him, where he stacked boxes of books and papers and never, ever sat at the desk.
So, without having the studied hipness it takes to sit in a coffee shop all day, scowling at my facebook page and pretending to read the New Yorker, I found myself in a quandary. I had to be out of my house every other evening and one weekend day in exchange for having him out of the house on the opposite days.
I tried it the first weekend day I was homeless. Where else can you even go in the Bible Belt at 9 on Sunday? I tried to read, I managed to get online, and then I figured I’d organize all the files Brett had moved, in a fit of kindness or guilt, to my mom’s old laptop. I opened iPhoto and started the import.
I forgot that when iPhoto loads, it flashes each picture on the screen. Over 6,000 of them. They start with my baby boy naked, a star drawn around his belly button. He was probably 3 years old and impossibly round compared to the wiry 9 year old I now half-live with. There are very few pictures of me, in favor of Ben’s smiles and grimaces, but when I first appear, I am as round as a grape, with a belly full of Tillie. There are friends and family and beach trips and Christmases and many, many pictures of the two old dogs we raised together even before the kids. They both died last year, and so did the family in those pictures. That life got picked off and fell away in what felt like, at that moment, decomposition to the bone, captured in a slideshow.
I sat in that damn coffee shop, where Brett used to have his own stool until he and Tiffiani started “studying together” at the “library,” with tears running down my cheeks, my life literally flashing before my eyes.
From then on, I brewed my coffee at home and got my lonely meals in bars.
