Wednesday, January 26, 2005
(10:44 PM) | Adam R:
Brad and Jennifer Break Up Over Coffee
Brad gave Jennifer a tired look. He couldn’t stand the way she held her mug with two hands, interlocking her fingers behind the handle and pressing her thumbs together as she sipped the hot coffee. Things hadn’t always been this way, he thought. He used to adore these peculiarities.Now he even hated the slight curl of hair that hung over her face, that style that had become so famous, that had covered so many magazines. This, he thought, is going to be tough. He looked into his coffee.
A few specks of cane sugar rose to the top and spun in a slow circle. He sunk them with his spoon. When he lifted the utensil from his cup the sun caught the concave edge and a gleam of light reflected off of it onto his tooth, which gleamed white. Someone walking past the outdoor café recognized him then.
“Eetsa Mistuh Brad Peet!” the Japanese man said loudly. He started to walk toward the couple but was efficiently redirected by Carlos, who was paid weekly for the favor. Brad smirked.
“What’s with you today?” she said. “You won’t get out of bed. I open the drapes onto the . . . what, the Mediterranean sunrise and you roll away. I take the covers and you don’t move. You won’t get out of bed. Finally you get out of bed but you sit in the bathroom for an hour.”
It was true. When he finally lifted himself from the bed—the sheets on which, it should be noted, had a thread count of over 1,000 and were engineered so finely that traditional ratings were meaningless—Brad simply stumbled into the shower and sat on the bench without turning the faucet. His pajama bottoms hung loosely from his sculpted abdomen and his stubble grew in patches.
He looked into his coffee again now, waiting for runaway sugar. None came. He toyed with his spoon, which reflected light several hundred feet across the square. “Could I crash a car with this?” he wondered, shooting beams into the windows of an oncoming Fiat. The car swerved into a cypress tree and Brad guiltily set the spoon onto his napkin.
“Argh!” said Jennifer passionately, looking at the accident then back to her remote husband. The driver climbed out of his dented car and said something in Spanish.
“It’s a perfect effing day for bananafish.”
“Come again there, good buddy?”
“Perfect.”
Jennifer didn’t know what to make of this. It was nonsense as far as she could tell but on the other hand she was glad to hear him say something finally. Maybe he was thinking about a screenplay or an old joke.
“Well, good. I’m glad you’re happy.”
Brad fixed his gaze on her. In the distance he heard the scream of foreign sirens, so unlike the sound the police cars made in the States. Carlos watched the action across the narrow street. The police officer parked his car behind the Fiat and went to the enraged driver who gestured at Brad’s table, but Brad focused on Jennifer. He was just someone having coffee in Spain with a beautiful woman he no longer loved. “Dum-de-doodle,” he hummed innocently in his head, trying to think of something else to say.
And Jennifer held her coffee mug with two hands, also trying to think of something. Meanwhile, the police officer couldn’t get the driver to lower his voice or to explain why his car was crashed into the city’s tree.
“A Starbucks out here, who’d have thought it?” Jennifer said.
Brad was lifted from his introspection. “You know, that’s just like you to celebrate the gross corporatization of the world. If I wanted to drink this crap I’d have stayed in LA, or in, dang, in Muncie, Indiana. Or I’d have shot myself.” He said “dang” again then emptied his mug onto the sidewalk and stood up.
“Where you going, Tyler Durden?” but Brad didn’t catch the reference because he was already half-way across the street. He opened the door, climbed into the Fiat and backed it off the tree, then past the now speechless driver and the officer who cocked his head curiously, and then, with the problem all solved, got into his squad car and drove away.
