For a Moment at The Rue

Friday night at the movies, regular as clockwork. Deborah, the babysitter arrives. She dreams of owning a llama farm but in this moment, she can't see when or how. In this moment, she is the babysitter assembling ingredients on our kitchen counter. First activity, baking chocolate cookies with the twins. We are on the clock. Due back by midnight. A couple living on borrowed time.

Friday night, again, and again. The tick- tock of life in a rut, stuck on repeat, unwilling to grow. We drive to town in silence, park in the lot across from the theater, choose a movie, buy popcorn (no butter), find seats, sink gratefully into the darkness. The plot feels uncomfortably close—a relationship, fraught as a wind-up clock, vibrates to the edge of a high shelf. As it falls, its glass face shatters. Time is up. We tip-toe out of the theater over the splintered shards of our marriage.

Across the street is The Cafe Rue, owned by an Argentinean couple, Manny and Valentina who have a young son. When the cafe is not busy, the boy helps out behind the counter, but this is Friday night. The cafe is buzzing and the espresso machine is in constant use. Besides the after-movie clientele, there are the regulars— local artists who love to linger. There’s the French photographer who sells pastoral images of Provence and Arles (framed or unframed) for a friendly price, a ceramicist whose cobalt blue serve-ware occupies pride-of-place on the pastry counter, a jewelry designer whose gold wire and beach glass earrings dangle from the Valentina’s ample lobes, a poets circle sharing their work in hushed conspiratorial tones, and a lone guitarist, his eyes closed in concentration, his feet propped up on his bass case, an unacknowledged cappuccino cooling on the table before him. Then, there’s us.

A crucial conversation is hanging in the air, but we retreat onto familiar ground. Mark is psychoanalyzing the characters in the film, and I am pretending to listen as my mind drifts to thoughts of the children, to the adagio of a Bach flute sonata I’d been practicing, to the strange, ethereal music playing over the sound system, and seeming to accompany my reverie like a film score. Soon enough I am caught in its harmonic stream, caught in its unfamiliar tonal landscape of synthesizers counterpointing strings and acoustic guitars. Though I can see that Mark is still talking, I can no longer hear him. My eyelids flutter and close. The breathing of the music feels as essential to me as my own.

A moment later, Cafe Rue vanishes! Mark, Manny, Valentina, the patrons, the waiters, the tables, the pastry cabinet, the clinking glasses, the wailing espresso machine, the wall art photos of French cows and bicycles, the walls, the windows, the lamp light pooling on the rain streaked road. My head tips back and tears flow into my hairline. The score of a flute part has floated into view and I know, with unaccustomed certainty, that I am meant to play it.

With the next breath I’m back in the cafe's thrum where it appears that I have not been missed at all. Mark is checking his watch.

“I’ll get the car. It’s raining,” he says.

“I’ll get the check,” I say, recognizing an opportunity to ask about the music.

At the bar, Valentina is laughing with a customer. Her green glass earrings catch the light. Manny is pulling espresso shots, admiring his wife, tending the cash register. I catch his eye.

“That music—do you know what it is?” I ask.

“Yeah,” Manny says handing me a demo cassette. “The composer—he was just here, at the corner table by the window. Young guy, long hair— carries a bass.”

“Do you mind?” I say, borrowing his pen to copy the composer’s name, Ricardo de Mas, and the title, Present Dreams onto a paper napkin.

“He comes in a lot. Same table. Never finishes his coffee. I’ll tell him he has a fan.”

“He does,” I say, unable to suppress a smile. I pay the bill.

Almost midnight. The corner table is unoccupied. The movie crowd drifts off. The poets linger. Manny and Valentina share a coffee, steal a kiss, check tomorrow's menu. I don’t bother with an umbrella or avoid the puddles as I head out into the rain. Mark pulls the car up to the curb but I’m already dripping wet. Still, I am unusually pleasant on the ride home with my future scribbled on a paper napkin folded neatly in my pocket.