Cafe Poulard

Posted by Ace on March 13th, 2010 filed in Second Life, Tales of the Interregnum

The nook is a full ten feet above the floor, formed by a corner where two soaring bookcases meet, and on a level with the yellow glass lamps that hang from the ceiling, each shining with a gentle radiance.  There is a ladder to climb so you can reach it; pillows there for comfort, and thick books to read.  We sit side by side in it, touching each other, cradling the books in our laps, and I can feel her breathing, smell the scent of her.  I know what she’s going to say sometimes, before she says it.

She closes her book and slumps against me, lets her head fall to my shoulder.  “I have to go,” she whispers, pushing a strand of white hair out of her eyes.

“I know,” I whisper back, putting my arm around her.

She places one hand on my chest, rests it there.  “I don’t want to go,” she adds.

“It’s all right, “ I tell her.  “I’ll be here. If you can come back, come back.”   We look into each other’s eyes.  “And if you can’t, then I’ll see you tomorrow,” I add.   “Just like always.”

She smiles then.  “I love you,” she says.

“I love you, too,” I tell her.

She kisses me, and vanishes from my arms, evaporating in a swirl of teal lights.

I stand up from the nook, allow myself one sigh.  Then I jump the ten feet down to the floor, landing unceremoniously atop one of the tables.  Pigbristles is standing nearby, taking in the décor; he looks over when he hears the noise of my landing, just in time to see me hop off, and I drop heavily into one of the open chairs surrounding the table, trying not to look like a rube.  No one else seems to notice, or care.

“Have a seat,” I say to him, gesturing to the chair next to me.  He obliges.

Café Poulard sits on a tiny street in the commercial district of Mont Saint Michel, somewhere along the hillscape below the cathedral.  It has a high-pitched silver bell that rings as you come through the doorway, and cozy tables, and plates of yummy food arranged along its countertops, plus enough surprises to keep you looking around and double-taking as you sip your coffee.  The patrons seem mostly Japanese:   nekos, women in kimonos, a furry or two.  Xenno, the pretty young woman in the tan skirt and apron who bustles back and forth behind the counter, seems Japanese likewise.  She greets each person by name as he crosses the threshold, sometimes using kanji, and sometimes English.  It doesn’t seem hard to imagine that she could do so with French, or German, or whatever other language the situation demanded of her.

I pick the paper drink menu up off the tablecloth and scan it quickly.  Rose tea is tempting, but I’m not quite in the mood.  “Xenno?” I call, across the space.  “When you get a moment, may we place an order please?”

She straightens up from behind the counter holding a carafe of red wine and smiles at me. “Sure,” she says. She whisks away to deliver it to the husband and wife on the other side of the room.

Pig watches her go. “This place is cool,” he says.  He eyes the tremendous stuffed penguin occupying the third seat at our table.  “Chat’s all gibberish to me, though,” he adds.

I fold my arms and sit back. “Me too,” I reply. I listen again briefly, just in case I’m wrong, but the talk remains pleasantly impenetrable.  It occurs to me in passing that I have a Universal Translator stored somewhere Aderyn gave me, one that I’ve never tried to use.  I make a mental note to look for it when I get back to the house.

Xenno swings back by the table and pulls up short.   “Ready?” she asks, wiping her hands on her apron.

“Yeah,” I say. “Caffé Machiatto for me, please.”

“Caffé Machiatto,” she repeats.

“You want anything?” I ask Pig, glancing at him.

He squints down at the table.   “I can’t read the menu,” he mumbles.

“And a regular caffé for Pigbristles,” I add, turning back to Xenno.

Pig smiles at her. “Yes, that’d be great,” he agrees.

“Regular caffé for Pigbristles,” she nods, and is gone in a whirl of skirts.

By the time she returns with our coffees, the husband and wife are halfway through their carafe of wine, and are talking loudly about their trip to the other Mont Saint Michel, where by their own account, they never got past the sandbar that connects the island to the mainland during low tide.  Xenno hands the saucers off to us expertly, with a smile and a bow, then leaves us to sip in silent contentment.  I watch Pig to see if he knows what to do with the saucer, then just watch him in general as we relax.  He’s looking good these days.  Ylva made him over only a week or two ago, head to toe, but he still wears the Amber Horizons (47) t-shirt I gave him under his new wardrobe, and I’m secretly flattered.  He’s a good friend.

“How’s your coffee?” I ask him, breaking the silence.

“OK, I guess,” he replies, considering the half-empty cup.  “How’s yours?” he adds, politely.

“Good,” I say.  “I’m… thrilled to be here.”  I take another sip.  “I just wish D didn’t have to go, you know?”

“Yeah,” he agrees.  He takes his own turn sizing me up, over the rim of his cup.  “How are you two doing?” he asks.  “With less than two weeks to go before the wedding, you must be ready to explode.”

“Oh!” I say, laughing self-consciously.  “Great. We’re doing great.”  I look down at the table-top and smile, embarassed for no reason I can name.  “I mean, there’s definitely been a night or two when it’s been touch and go, y’know?  But we talk everything out, and we work through any differences we might have.  I think we’re closer now than we’ve ever been.”

“That’s great!” he says.

“Yeah…” I sigh, dreamily.  “Except–” I add, glancing up at him and wincing, ”–we’re still gonna have to go back to To-A-T and get you guys the right-colored waistcoats.”

The costuming for the ceremony has been a complicated affair. It is generally agreed upon that each groomsman’s waistcoat should match the dress of the bridesmaid he will be escorting. Ylva has expressed her preference for wearing a green dress, and no one wants to contradict her, as she has done so much to assist us in the preparations, so that leaves Harp wearing a dress of the wedding’s other predominant color, teal. Harp, in the meantime, has decided of her own volition that she wants to be partnered with Jazzn, and is ignoring anyone’s suggestions to the contrary, including mine and my fiancée’s. The combination of these three factors therefore dictates that Jazzn needs a teal waistcoat, and Pigbristles, who will accompany Ylva, a green one.

I, however, true to form, somehow managed to get that mandate mixed up on the day I took the men to the store. Thanks to my instruction, each groomsman is now in possession of a waistcoat of the wrong color, the color the OTHER should be wearing. It’s embarrassing for me, and frustrating, not just because I can’t figure out how I could have made such a bonehead mistake in the first place, but because I have no latitude to fix it: I have no authority the bridesmaids will recognize, and the waistcoats are neither exchangable between the two men, nor returnable. And I HAVE to fix it: Dragonia is under a great deal of stress dealing with her half of the arrangements, sufficiently so that I’m not about to throw any additional complications on her plate if I can help it.

Pigbristles shrugs, not without humor; he’s already heard me vent on this topic at least twice, which is perhaps what provoked his original question.  “Not a big deal,” he says.

“Nnnnh,” I mumble into my coffee lamely.   “Just– dumb of me.   And now it’s going to drive ME crazy if we don’t fix it,” I add, with a smile.  “Which is worse than anything.”

He smiles then, too.  “We can go after we’re done here, if we still have the time.”  He raises his coffee cup to his lips–

–and freezes. So do Xenno, and all the other patrons. So does the café.

So do I.

“Crap,” I spit, slipping off my headphones.  The view of Café Poulard on my monitor snaps to the Black Screen of Death, then the White Screen of Death, while the cursor spins pointlessly.  It’s the third time tonight.

Something about Second Life gives Eve [my computer] hives.  I don’t know if it’s a processor issue, or an operating system issue, or a bandwidth issue–  she’s high-end, and is supposed to have power, and to spare.  But every once in a while, she decides she’s had enough of virtuality and pulls the plug on me.  The Mont Saint Michel sim is making her particularly skittish, just like the Frank Lloyd Wright museum did a couple of months ago.  It’s infuriating because there’s no recourse for fixing it short of a hard reboot:   once the program locks up, she ignores any command to shut the window down or restart it, or to shut herself down.  And if you Control-Alt-Delete to bring up the Task Manager and force-quit, she locks up completely.

Smaller programs running concurrently, I have learned through hard experience, continue to run unaffected, so long as you don’t rock the boat.  Maybe she just doesn’t like architecture, I think. I whistle up Skype on the auxiliary monitor, riffle through the contact list until I find Pigbristles, then ping him and hope he’s paying attention. Crash, I type into the white box.

He is.  Figured, pops up the return message.

Am I still sitting there? I type.

No, he types back.  You just disappeared.

Damn. I glance at the title bar of the imager window: “(NOT RESPONDING)”.  It’s going to take a few minutes for me to get back, I continue typing.   I have to reboot the whole system.

No problem, he responds.  I’ll go back to the store now and get the new waistcoat.

NO!! I type frantically, trying to get something, anything on the screen to stop him before he finds the landmark and teleports.

The chat box freezes for an agonizing heartbeat.  OKAY! OKAY! comes his reply, all at once.

His use of caps on both words is impossible to ignore; even without audio, it paints him as offended.  I grimace, ashamed of myself.  If we both just disappear without paying for the drinks, I hasten to explain, Xenno will think we skipped out on her. :(

There’s another long pause.  Then he actually types *blush*.   It’s a convention Dragonia and I use all the time typing to each other, without ever giving it a second thought; coming from him, it surprises me.  I don’t know the rules, he adds.

I don’t either, I think, hands poised above the keys, embarrassed.  I’m just making it up as I go along. My mouth quirks.  But I know I wouldn’t want to leave a cool café without paying for the coffee and tipping the staff.   Especially if I was planning on coming back.   And I am.

Tell her I crashed and apologize for me, I type.  Please :).  Then give her 20 or 30 Lindens for the coffee and a tip.  I’ll be back as soon as I can.

I reach down to the front of Eve’s case, find the power button, and hold it in.

—

I rez in five feet above the floor, again, land on the tables a second time.  Pigbristles has left his seat, and is standing by the counter with his back to the door, talking to Xenno.  I am in time to overhear him say to her, “My friend had to leave unexpectedly.  Please accept this for the caffés.”

“Thank you for the tip,” she replies to him, with a smile.

“I’m back,” I say, tumbling off the table-top, and springing to my feet.  “My apologies for disappearing.  Has Pigbristles taken care of everything?”

Xenno goes back to wiping her counter without bothering to respond to me.  I amble up behind Pig, my pride wounded.  Ah, well, I think.  Let someone else be the class act for a change. “How much did you give her?” I whisper to him.

“Thirty Lindens,” he whispers back.

“Thanks,” I say, as we turn towards the door.  I count out thirty Lindens of my own money and slip it into his back pocket to pay him back.

“Will you cut that out?” he barks at me.   “There’s no button I can press to decline that!”  I just laugh.  “Next time the coffee’s on me,” he growls.

“Deal,” I say, nodding.

The silver bell tinkles again as we push our way out through the doorway, back into the winding streets of Mont Saint Michel.  When we’re a safe distance over the threshold, I step to one side and whisper a few quick syllables, creating my own landmark–  one that will deliver me to the street and not into the Café airspace.   Dragonia isn’t back yet, but she’s out there, somewhere, and when she does return, I’ll know.

Pig vanishes in front of me, teleporting to the clothing store.  We’ll come back after the ceremony, I think.  Just her and me. And I smile.