The Cheese Incident, Documented

May nineteenth. The coffee shop by the bus stop was about half full when I got there around two o'clock, and I had picked my usual corner table and was doing nothing particular, not reading, not writing, just sitting with a coffee and letting Saturday happen, when the couple at the corner table three feet away began to argue about cheese.

Not quietly. Not with any self-consciousness about the fact that there were other people in the room. The woman said, and I am paraphrasing only slightly, that he always did this with cheese. He said that she had never once in eleven years understood his position on brie. She said his position on brie was not a position, it was a personality disorder. He looked genuinely wounded. She refilled his coffee from the carafe on the table without being asked, still mid-argument, and he accepted it without breaking his point. They had been married, I eventually gathered from context, for eleven years.

I did not mean to eavesdrop. I just could not stop. There is a specific kind of intimacy in watching two people argue about something completely inconsequential and realizing that the argument is not actually about the thing. They were not fighting about brie. They were doing what eleven years of knowing someone looks like when it is comfortable enough to be ridiculous in public. I had my phone out at one point and I nearly texted someone, I'm not sure who, before I thought better of it and just sat with it.

the face of someone doing very professional eavesdropping

I stayed for another forty minutes after they left. The mug got cold. I didn't mind. I keep thinking about the refilled coffee, how automatic it was, how she did it in the middle of being annoyed at him. That's the part I'd want to be able to write down and actually keep. Not the brie. The refill.