'Frost the window with your breath', the poet says. 'That was our everyday, back then: breath on glass, the becoming opaque of what was once transparent'. He thinks of Duchamp's Large Glass, which was supposed to slow the light which passed through it, to keep it. To slow light, as those days seem to slow down the story that would speak of them, and bring it close to standstill.
Something had been kept in those afternoons, in those four o'clocks, the poet says. Something was hidden there.
The afternoon, the cafe. Four o'clock: after lunch, after the lunchtime crowd, but before the evening crowd, the drinks-after-work crowd, for whom it became a bar and restaurant. Four o'clock: who knew it as a cafe, and only as a cafe? He who did not work, and who did not need to rest from work. He for whom the street, on which its chairs and tables spilled, was not on the way to anywhere.
A place to meet? At first, it was not that. He sat mute and alone, head down, reading a free paper. At first, he hardly said anything, not even to the waitresses who brought him coffee. He went there, to the cafe, to punctuate his day. It was part of its rhythm, his life, part of the turning of the day. It was necessary, at that time, to go out in order to return; necessary to make a voyage out so he felt the promise of his own solitude.
He was a regular, in short, just like the man who, each morning, would underline words seemingly at random in the cafe newspapers. The poet only heard about him, his predecessor, at secondhand. The waitresses told him, when he asked them about the faint pencil marks on the pages.
Why these words?, he asked them, when they told him about the other regular. What's he looking for? They didn't know, the waitresses. They had no idea. But if he was mad, it was benignly so; he was never any trouble, never anything but polite, just as he, the poet, was also polite.
'I'm not sure when I began to speak to the others who assembled there, at the cafe. I was drawn into conversation, I suppose. I was drawn, pulled along, my skiff finding the middle of the channel. I was part of it, part of something.
'Ah, what it is to talk, to talk of nothing in particular! Anyone is speaking, everyone is speaking: to talk about the weather, about the biggest stories on the news. About celebrities, about film stars. And now each speaker is only a relay of speech, saying nothing in particular, letting everything be said'.
He was part of something. A scene, a group. They would read the tabloids together. Someone would bring in Chat, and they'd read that. Who didn't care about Brad and Jennifer? Everyone cared, in a distracted way; laughingly, with laughing avidity. About Brad and Jennifer and the others, about Renee Zellweger's marriage breakup, and the sting that caught Kate Moss snorting cocaine.
Didn't everyone know Renee Zellweger's marriage would end? Didn't they know Brad and Jennifer wouldn't last? - 'We looked on at our celebrities, we cafe regulars, with wisdom and compassion. And then looked out at the world around us with wisdom and compassion. We had learned something. No: we'd had had something reconfirmed.
'We who barely worked, who were playing truant from life, could be sure of some things. Of justice: Kate Moss, after all, was caught. Of finding your level: Jennifer was aiming much too high. Of keeping your head: wasn't Renee Zellweger just a little too mad? Reassurance: we all want the same things; we need the same things: celebrities are like us, only more beautiful than we are.
'Justice, justice. Sometimes we would talk about TV. About The O.C., for example. Everyone had a view about The O.C., which was showing as repeats every weekday morning. About confused and angry Marissa, about Summer and her love triangles. So Julie didn't poison her husband after all! So Ryan has a brother, brutishly good looking, like him, trying for the straight and narrow, like him!
'The view in the cafe was that the brother was a poor addition to The O.C. – that the programme makers were, in this case, simply throwing events at us, replaying Ryan's story, which was a very good story, with a kind of desperation. But The O.C. remained happy, laughing; and, like the events of Neighbours, which also depended upon the stability of one central family amidst the mayhem, we always knew everything would always be okay. Sandy and his wife. The room by the pool, where Ryan lived. Yes, everything would be okay again.
'The afternoons were ours, the cafe regulars. The four o'clocks. We hovered together like a swarm of midges. We moved together, banked together like a flock of swifts. To say the word, 'we': that was something. No, not to say it, not quite, but for it to be implied. 'We': those who were at the cafe. 'We': those of us, who, every weekday, would gather at the cafe'.
One afternoon – summer at its height – he went out with a waitress to the meadows. He would show her the meadows, he said, the Ees. They took some bread and pesto from the deli, and there, in the grass, in the flattened grass, she stretched her white arms and yawned.
A cafe waitress and he, out in the sun. He'd reached a plateau, he thought. He climbed the steps up to summer. But now he shouldn't be greedy, he thought. She was young, and he was – what was he? Neither young nor old. Out of it, youth, and not old yet. Out of it, and nearly outside life. On its edges, that was all, and that must be all.
Now, for a time, he could go out with a waitress to the meadows: that should be enough. He should ask for more. In the avenue of his days, in the green tunnel of his summer walks, he had a companion for a time, that was all, and she would disappear as suddenly as she had taken up with him.
It was a summer lunchdate, only that, a summer picnic, that and that only. And he succeeded. There was a small intimacy between he and her, which he never sought to expand. She had told him something of her life – a few facts, and that was enough. He knew a few things, and watched approvingly as their intimacy disappeared.
What was between them – so little – disappeared. He became anonymous again for her. More then anonymous, and to him it was like a drink of cool water. It was like dipping his head underwater. He was no one in particular. He was anyone, and no one in particular.
'To be forgotten – do you know what bliss that is? Of course not. To be forgotten, neglected …'
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