Preface
A writer at work in a café, brooding over the nub of his story, looks anxiously about in search of an idea from his seat in front of a cold cappuccino and an open laptop. But instead of inspiration he keeps getting something else⎯a snippet of the conversation underway at the neighboring table, the decisive moment in a battle of wills between waiter and customer, a fumbling exchange between two parties to a first date, the suffocating silence of a final break-up, an argument between two sly-eyed businessmen, the gibes of onetime classmates, a hopeless attempt to restore a broken family, and the affronts of solitary customers. Indeed, a longtime regular at a café hears conversations from even the most distant tables and sees those he cannot see. Why? Owing to a heightened sensitivity to “café moments,” he feel the stories, and because this person is, it so happens, a writer, he jots them down, too.
“Wait, I’ll pay this time.”
“No, no, no. I’ll pay.”
“But you paid last time.”
“It was you who paid last time.”
“But this time I ate twice as much as you did.”
“That’s so.”
“That’s not so. What is so is that I insist on paying this time.”
“Okay, but then we won’t be having breakfast together ever again, that’s for sure. Not if it means arguments like this.”
“Then we won’t, what do I care.”
“And do I care?”
“Then I’ll pay, okay?”
“Go ahead.”
