While we were there — no, as we walked in, I saw a man I see quite often in the neighborhood. Everything is the same about him: always a jacket and jeans, always the haircut. He is always alone. Tonight he was eating alone without even a book. What do you do? I have done it and had to stare out the window or at the wall to avoid staring at people. I see this man in the same cafe every morning, and I only know this because of all the mornings I have spent in this cafe. I saw him once become confused and agitated when he arrived and a woman was sitting at his usual table. He was visibly uncomfortable as he set up his computer at the table beside it. Only once have I seen him converse with someone and in the course of it he complained about another man I know, saying that he didn’t know why this man was so popular at the open mic nights at this same cafe. He didn’t like that this other man was so well liked because he didn’t see that he had any talent at all. He promised to come to a new open mic and bring his guitar. Then he was alone again when the man he spoke with was gone. Tonight he ate alone, left alone. After we ate we left for gelato and as we walked past the restaurant later to collect the car I saw another man I know, someone I knew well years ago sitting with his new girlfriend, who I also know, though from very different circumstances. They were holding hands and he was explaining something and the look on her face betrayed her contempt, her utter disbelief that she could sit there with him and entertain some notion that they were about to eat bad food together in a cobbled-together restaurant. It was though she couldn’t believe he was talking at all, much less care about what he was saying. He was wearing the same clothes I saw him wear a decade ago. It is always like that in this city. Wherever I go I see the past.
