Freedom Fries and Cafe Creme (13 page)

‘Hey, buddy. How are you?' I greeted him with a big smile.

‘Um, could be better, Luc. Want some
freedom
fries?' he offered.

I held out my hand to decline: French fries with latte, yuck!

‘And what about you?' he asked with his mouth full.

‘The usual: work, work and more work.'

‘Yeah? Hey, let me get a frozen chai latte frappé.'

‘No coffee with milk to go with your fries, as usual?'

‘No, I'm a little hot. I'd rather have a cold drink. Do you want anything else?' Jon asked, looking at my nearly empty mug.

‘No, I'm all set. Thanks.'

What on earth was a frozen chai latte frappé? Chai sounded Asian to me, latte Italian, and frappé French. And why did it have to be frozen? I'd have to ask Jon. Why create such weird drinks? The last one I'd seen advertised in the subway was a beer with some added caffeine, guarana and ginseng! Was I unadventurous, or just growing old and bitter, or was the world changing too much for my taste? Were people no longer able to appreciate simple, authentic tastes?

Jon returned from the counter with his huge frozen chai latte frappé, still munching on his French fries. His drink looked like pale caffé latte, with a huge dollop of whipped cream at the top. It was in a light-blue transparent plastic container that resembled a goldfish bowl, with a flashy multicoloured straw poking out the top.

Jon didn't give me a chance to ask about his drink.

‘Magalie and me, jeez, it's over, man!' he said quickly. He took a big sip of his frozen chai concotion.

I wasn't that surprised. The two of them were so different.

‘She dumped you, didn't she?'

Immediately I regretted what I'd said. But it seemed the only obvious explanation.

‘No.
I
dumped her!'

‘Oh! What happened? You were so proud to have her as your girlfriend.'

Even if she was French, I thought but didn't say.

‘Actually, we had nothing in common.'

Right
… They most definitely had nothing in common from the beginning.

‘You should feel relieved, Jon. You're the one who took the initiative to break up, after all.'

‘She didn't seem that sad when I told her. That's a little hurtful, you know,' he said, taking another gulp of his frozen chai latte frappé.

‘This is delicious,' he added, forgetting Magalie for a moment. ‘Want to try some?'

‘No, thanks.'

Jon went on placidly, ‘She's complicated, let me tell
you. I wonder if it's because she's French.'

I looked straight at him but said nothing.

‘It's the first time I've dated someone who isn't American, now I come to think of it.' With a sigh, he continued, ‘She was so stylish! Not that I care much about that, but I could feel other guys envying me when I was with her. I liked that feeling.'

I would have thought someone like Magalie would have encouraged him to pay more attention to his appearance, or got him to think about his personal style. But no.

‘We were so different,' he repeated. ‘Everything she liked – except yoga – I didn't.'

‘But you can't really build a relationship on yoga alone.'

‘And I also admired her being the queen of leftovers …'

‘What?'

‘Yes, I've got to confess that I really enjoyed watching her transform leftover food the way she did. She'd come home and do amazing stuff with whatever she could find in the fridge. I've never met anyone who could do that before.'

‘A talented artist …'

‘She was always saying that, for her, cooking had to be a challenge: either using whatever food happened to be available, or leftovers.'

Especially a challenge in our country, where leftovers usually go straight into the garbage.

‘Well, you know that my palate isn't really used to non-American-style food.'

Right
.

‘At the beginning, everything was going so well …'

No kidding! Exactly like almost 98 per cent of relationships. The initial discovery of the other person is so thrilling!

‘… but after a while we needed to move on, you know.'

My ex-wife had only been interested in stamp collecting. I'd found her hobby interesting too at first, but after a while, to my mind, it had become incredibly boring. I hadn't realised how obsessed she was: she would spend all her free time at home with those little scraps of paper spread out in front of her on the dining-room table; in the end I'd really despised them!

‘You learn so much from them,' she'd declare fervently, without even lifting her eyes from her stamp albums to look at me.

I'd leave her to her passion, and go out and sit in the Due Amici café with my neighbour Gino, with whom I'd practise my Italian – my mother's first language. Gino was always there because he didn't get along with his daughter's Goth boyfriend, who had moved in with the family. He couldn't do anything about the situation since his wife found the teenager darkly profound and thrilling.

Jon was now listing all the things that had gradually pushed Magalie and him apart.

‘She loves to spend hours just sitting at a table, eating and talking …'

I suspected that if I were to ask people in the coffee shop about the last time they'd spent more than an hour eating a good meal, I would hear, ‘It was so long ago I can't even remember' or, ‘Do you think I have the time for that?' or most likely, ‘What do you mean?'

‘She loves wine. I drink mostly beer, sometimes vodka.'

‘The French I met in Lyons all drank wine, and spent a lot of time really enjoying what they cooked and ate. It's an important part of their culture.'

‘But you know I've never been crazy about the French.'

‘I know.'

‘Besides their politics, they eat weird stuff like snails, and tripe. Too
awfully offal
for me. Eating guts! Yuck!'

I shrugged and said nothing while he laughed at his supposedly clever play on words.

‘I was still very attracted to her even when I found out she was French.'

At first sight Magalie had looked to me either French or Italian. But that might have been less noticeable in yoga class, where she and Jon met, since everyone would have been wearing pretty much the same clothes.

‘You'd be surprised! I even tried some rabbit she cooked once. It wasn't so bad, but I'll never tell Ma.'

Your ‘ma' would never eat a bunny, that's for sure.

‘Her cake
salé
was delicious!' I said, remembering the potluck dinner party where I'd met Magalie for the second time. ‘It was so unusual. I should have asked her for the recipe.'

‘And then she started making comments about my favourite snack …'

‘Freedom fries and café latte …' I'd always found the combination hugely unappetising.

‘Comments about my beer-drinking while we were eating cheese …'

Beer with cheese! Oh, please!

‘She would only eat her cheese if it was left out of the fridge for at least a couple of hours. Some of it was actually
runny and it stank! I could barely stand to taste any of it!'

‘The French like it that way: perfectly ripe and at room temperature.'

‘But I don't like smelly cheese.'

‘You simply don't like cheese, then.'

‘Whatever, I don't care.'

Looking in cheese-shop windows had been a great source of pleasure for me when I was in Lyons. I'd wanted to try every type of cheese. I must have tried almost a hundred different kinds – not too bad in four months.

‘Every weekend she would write up the whole week's menus and tape them to the fridge door, because she would cook all the time for her and her roommates. You can't imagine how long she would spend faffing around in the kitchen. I've never seen a woman behave like that before. I can still picture her in her little apron … Wow, she was pretty, though!'

He sighed and sipped his frozen chai latte frappé.

‘But our conversations got more antagonistic every day. After we'd said all we could about yoga and our past lives, there just wasn't much else I could talk about with her. Then she started talking all the time about her country, and the rest of Europe, which she described as great, and sometimes she criticised America. I realised that she was getting on my nerves with all her annoying opinions, as well as her strange food habits.'

‘She may have been homesick. Didn't you ever think of that? It's not always easy to live in a foreign country.'

But how could Jon understand this? He'd never even been out of the States.

‘Why doesn't she go back to her great country, then?'

‘I'd like to meet a woman like her, who would share my passion for cooking, who would appreciate real coffee, fine wine …'

‘In a way, the two of you would have been a better match. She's always said good things about you, you know.'

I looked at Jon, quite surprised that he'd told me that.

Staring at my empty mug, he suddenly burst out laughing. ‘Do you know that you're the only one here who's having his coffee in a ceramic mug?'

‘Yes, so?'

‘When Magalie and I went out for coffee, we always had to find a place where we could sit down, where she could have her coffee in a real cup. She could never drink standing up and from a paper cup.'

‘I don't blame her.'

‘She could be so annoying. What difference does it make, anyhow? Coffee is coffee.'

I didn't think so. I tried to explain.

‘Taking time to drink coffee turns it into more of a ritual: smelling it, sipping it slowly to savour it – it's so much more than putting caffeine into your system like gas in a car.'

Jon stared at me with an expression that reminded me of the purple-haired girl earlier.

‘Like I have time for ritual when I drink coffee. Just like Magalie, you can be a real snob sometimes!'

I shrugged. That was the sad story of our lives. We didn't take time for the essential, simple things in life!
Everywhere I went, people drank what passed for coffee from hideous giant plastic containers as they drove their cars, or sat on buses or on the subway, and even while they were walking down the street holding their cell phones to their ears!

‘You'd rather get up later in the morning, buy your coffee at the corner store and drink it in your car,' I said.

‘Yes, I would,' Jon admitted. ‘So? Everyone does it, don't they?'

With a sigh he repeated, ‘Magalie and I – we were just too different.'

I tried to cheer him up. ‘You'll get over it, and you'll meet someone who's more like you. A good American girl who loves big juicy burgers and beer, has French fries and coffee with milk while watching TV, and who likes to drink chai latte frappé in a huge plastic cup while she rides in your big Mercury listening to Lionel Richie or Celine Dion!'

‘So what? There's nothing wrong with that, is there? Lionel Richie and Celine Dion are a lot better than the cheesy Italian songs they play at Due Amici. That's all too much Eurotrash for me.'

I laughed, remembering how much Jon had disliked the little café the first time he went there because the service had been too slow, the coffee too strong and served in a tiny cup, with no French fries available, and the beer had only come in small bottles. On top of all that, the Italian pop music had pushed him over the edge!

I suddenly remembered something I'd wanted to ask Jon for a long time.

‘How did you ever get involved in a yoga class in the first place?'

‘For Christmas, my boss bought all his employees a gift certificate for yoga classes to help us deal with stress.'

I personally thought that less work, more vacation, and more time spent relaxing in cafés would be better at relieving stress. Though, actually, Jon was seldom stressed out. He was custom-made to be the perfect American workaholic, since he had no passions outside work except watching sports on TV and driving his big black car – two activities that were perfectly compatible with workaholism, that perfectly respectable addiction in today's society.

‘But you're
not
stressed most of the time.'

‘I know, I know, but all the guys I work with went. So I figured I should go as well.'

His cell phone rang, the tone immediately recognisable as ‘The Star-Spangled Banner'. Jon was such a flag-waver.

‘Hello …?'

After listening for a few minutes Jon said, ‘Let me get some booze and I'll be right there.'

He put the phone back in his shirt pocket. ‘I've got to go.'

‘Cherry, again?'

Jon nodded.

Cherry, the favourite cousin, always called Jon whenever she got dumped by a boyfriend. It happened pretty much every two months. Each time, she got drunk and wanted to kill the bastard who had broken her heart, and then herself. But before she did anything really silly
she always phoned Jon, who rushed in to save her from her distress.

‘Don't get too deep in despair with Cherry!'

‘I think I'll get a bottle of vodka and get smashed myself. Care to join us?'

No, thanks!
Spending an evening with Cherry, watching her get more and more drunk and hearing her drone on about her failed life was not my idea of a good night in.

‘No, thank you. I think I'll go to the movies next door. They're showing
The Party
.'

‘Never heard of it. You always have such weird taste in movies anyhow.'

We left the coffee shop and Jon sauntered away towards the liquor store. I walked to the movie theatre, happy to breathe some fresh air and promising myself I'd never go into that place again. Even if the evening air seemed a little polluted by the traffic, it was still better than the enclosed over-cooled, over-conditioned air of the coffee shop.