Coffee with C

[Steven Hunley]

Steven Hunley




This isn't a short story so here it is here:


Coffee with C

by Steven Hunley

I still have a chapter to write so I tip-toe around and make coffee, Sumatran, for its fruity after-taste. The coffee merchants on the Rue de Café always carry the stuff. Abdul, The Moroccan we call him, who swept up after hours introduced me to it, one night when I sweated away the wee hours, as Stevenson would have put it, on one of those hot August nights we have to endure in Paris, when it’s so damn hot, water evaporates from the Seine, and bleeds onto both banks, left and right, making you sweat through your silk shirt like a hippopotamus ballerina in a Disney cartoon.

Always wanted a silk shirt but my worm died and my mulberry bush got a disease. You know how it is with pets. They die.

But at her house I pour and sit at the coffee table using a coaster. She always makes you use a coaster. I like how her crafts table, the one she uses for art projects, is wasted by her artistic carelessness, colored with her ego, stained with splashes of turquoise paint, cut and nicked by her scissors, and has been for an eternity. She says she’s going to refinish it, just not now. Careless and careful at the same time, yet she manages her life like an acrobat, with exquisite balance, requiring no fringed parasol. Her name is Babette. Right, that's it, the only one C will let me use, since it irritates her no end when I write about our personal life, to her, it's a travesty. That's how C looks at it.

And gee, why are my sentences getting so long? Why so many commas? It must be the coffee.

You know, Ian Fleming wasn't the first one to use an initial instead of a name. Hey Litnetters, who else did?

[BookBeauty]

Coffee is helping me write these days. But, it also seems to have a negative effect on sentence structure. Ah well, at least it's getting written. Can always go back later.

Anyway, I found this to be a charming, witty little number.

[AuntShecky]

making you sweat through your silk shirt like a hippopotamus ballerina in a Disney cartoon.
I remember those hippos perspiring--or as a genteel lady might put it, "glistening" in Fantasia, but I don't recall them wearing silk shirts. Tutus, I think they were.


Always wanted a silk shirt but my worm died and my mulberry bush got a disease.

By the time that sole worm spun you enough silk to make a shirt, it would probably be out of style.


You know, Ian Fleming wasn't the first one to use an initial instead of a name. (for a character.) I don't know about you, but I tend to find reading initials rather than full given names to be mildly irritating. Always
strikes me as pretentious and overly-stylized. Maybe an author uses the initial to make the reader think the character is based on a real person and wants to conceal his or her identity, in which case, why not change the whole name (beginning with an entirely different letter of the alphabet and set us off the track)? To borrow a favorite word from TV political pundits, the whole scheme is "disingenuous."

H
ey Litnetters, who else did?

Nabokov's V and wasn't there a Peter Lorre movie called M? I don't know if Peter Lorre wore silk shirts, and Nabakov, I think he was more interested in the adult rather than the larva stage of the butterfly.

[Steven Hunley]

Poe and a few of the older authors do it too and it irritates me no end. I don't know if they were afraid of being sued, accused of impropriety, or trying to be mysterious or coy. Either way it irritates me.

[Steven Hunley]

The point is that many authors insert themselves into the fiction, all to some degree. And the same thing with people they meet, their family, their lovers, husbands and wives. Maugham was infamous for it.

If your lover is the type I described in Millie the Magnificent, she wants to be in your latest story. She wants you to celebrate her! She yearns to go public. Public Displays of Affection and all that.

On the other hand we have women more like C. She doesn't want her private life spilling onto the common streets. They're too close to the gutter. It's too precious to advertise. I can see that point too.

That's both sides of the coin, but as an author, I'm always willing to negotiate. I'm a regular diplomat.