The Old Man and the Tea

 

Nick watched the old man and his tea across the room at Starbucks. The old man couldn’t sip as he once did when he was young. His hands were bent with age and worn by time and hard work. That was in the days before Starbucks anyway, so what did it matter, really?

Nick ordered his usual; a venti mocha Frappuccino. The young, pretty barista asked him if he wanted whipped cream, which was a needless indulgence, thought Nick. “Nada”, he said.

“Nada?” replied the young barista who Nick thought looked like a woman he’d known in the war, a long time ago.

“Nada”, repeated Nick.

“Nada?”

“Yes, nada, nada, por favor mi amiga.”

“Ok, nada”

Nick found a table by the window and sat down to grade the exams from his class on the works of Ernest Hemingway. He sipped the mocha Frappuccino through the straw. This is a good Frappuccino, he thought. Not too much ice or foam. It reminded him of the Frappuccino he had with Francesca at Harry's Bar and Grill in Florence before she left him for the Count Di Choculati.

This particular test covered “The Sun Also Rises” and he’d asked the students to discuss the allegory of the running of the bulls in Pamplona to Hemingway’s view of life and to what Gertrude Stein called “The Lost Generation”. Nick had a hard time getting the students to connect with this book, so he knew the bull would soon be running all over the pages they had written. He forged on anyway, because even the young and clueless deserved a break in this world and that was more than the young soldiers got in the war, but at least they were brave and died with grace. The first essay he read confirmed what he feared. “I think the protagonist, Jake Barnes, and his friends cared more for the wine in their goat-skin bag than for the lives of the innocent bulls in the ring. As a member of PETA, I was disgusted by this book and therefore, I did not read it.” Nick sighed heavily and rubbed his eyes and looked out the window at the hills like white elephants.

His weary eyes fell on a fly hopelessly buzzing against the glass pane next to him. “I must kill you”, he said to the fly. “I love you as one of God’s creation, but I must kill you.” He thought of the really big flies he’d hunted out in the dumpsters behind the shopping center when the he was young and time spread out before him like a trout stream in Idaho. Now, he thought, I am neither so young nor so eager to hunt those flies. Besides, he didn’t have the big bug zapper that he’d bought from the blind street beggar in Mozambique.

That’s when he saw her. She opened the door and stood for a moment trying to balance the shopping bags and her latte. He was unable to take his eyes off of her. She was bathed in light so radiant it reminded Nick of the surface of the sun, or maybe the thing the ophthalmologist uses to see the back of your eye. Maybe it was just the sun reflecting off the truck delivering ice cream to the Rite-Aid next door. He knew that the woman of his dreams had just walked into this clean, well-lighted place, or was it well lit place? No matter. He had to possess her. He yearned to take her to Paris and share quiche at a café along the Seine as he did with Elaine in the days after the war and all of the brave young soldiers had gone. He wanted to take her to hunt rhino below the snows of Kilimanjaro. He longed to take her fishing big marlin in the Stream and later drink the dark red wine at The Floridita in Habana. He knew none of that would ever happen. She was probably in love with another, someone he knew was not worthy of her. He’d been wounded in the war and he knew he could not satisfy her as he once did the farm girl in Spain he’d met during a lull in the fighting when their passions flamed and burned hot in that barn like two running bulls and he was as brave as Belmonte, yet lacked the bull fighter’s grace.  Still, he was drawn to this amazing visage in the doorway and could not help himself.

“Here, let me help you” he said to this struggling beauty of the Bloomingdales bags.

“Nada”, she said.

“Nada?”

“Si. Nada, senior. Nada. Déjeme sola. Mi corazón pertenece a otro.” (“Leave me alone. My heart belongs to another.”)

With an aching heart, he retreated to his table. He’d been brave and strong, but to no avail. The woman struggled through the door and fell into the embrace of a man in a Mercedes. He knew at that moment that life was nothing more than a bad mojito made with great rum. This was still a damn good Frappuchino.