The silence of the regulars

by David Benjamin

“The fact is, I don’t know where my ideas come from. Nor does any writer. The only real answer is to drink way too much coffee and buy yourself a desk that doesn’t collapse when you beat your head against it.”
― Douglas Adams

PARIS—The fat girl was asking after me.

Hotlips got here a week ahead of me. As usual, she began her mornings at the old Viennoiserie on rue de l’École de Médecine, with a cup of café crème and the Financial Times on her mobile. The fat girl, who has served our coffee and pastry for several years, didn’t ask Hotlips for her order. She knew. We’re regulars.

We shouldn’t call her the fat girl, although she’s large enough to debunk the myth that all young Parisian women are alarmingly slim. Her face is lovely with a new hairdo that frames it nicely, and her attitude is welcoming and charming. Tomorrow, perhaps, I’ll ask her name and she will no longer be the fat girl.

Meanwhile, however, the fat girl asked after me ’til I showed up. Her insistence on my presence made me think of how long I’ve been psychologically dependent on a routine of morning coffee in a familiar place with a newspaper to read and a postcard to write to Hotlips.

I grew up among black-coffee drinkers in Wisconsin. If my Dad saw a guy adding cream and sugar, he dismissed him as effete and probably foreign, or at least from “back East.” I eschewed coffee through my teens and didn’t make it a morning habit ’til I was living back East, shlepping to a warehouse job at an auto radiator factory next to Fenway Park. On route, I stopped at Dunkin’ Donuts and ordered a cup of joe. The first time I tried this, the barista said, “Regular?”

I thought he meant “black,” so I nodded. But, in Boston, “regular” means lots of cream. The translation of this formula, nowadays and outside Boston, is “latte.” Since I was then a neophyte to caffeine and unaccustomed to high-octane java jive, “regular” suited my delicate palate. Later, I revised my Dunkin’ order to “dark,” a variation understood by a minority of baristas, none under the age of forty.

However, it was years before I had the place and time to turn my morning mug into a sanity-sustaining ritual. First, I needed the right locale and, more important, someone to share it. The place turned out to be Paris, the companion Hotlips. This was thirty years ago, when we took up sporadic residence in our Latin Quarter garret. Something about Paris made it seem sacrilegious—or at least bourgeois—to get up in the morning and stay home. So, we brushed our teeth, threw on clothes and stumbled down the stairs to the damp streets of Paris.

Our first regular coffee joint was two narrow rooms on the blvd. St.-Germain. The outer salon was all business, tightly spaced tables filled with merchants and workers hurriedly fueling up on their way to the grind. Some didn’t either bother to sit, just leaning on the bar long enough to chug a café noir and split.

The “back room” was a circle of tables with banquettes against two walls. Here lingered the leisurely, the retired, the readers and writers. Here we met George Ball, an American artist who combined poetry with his black-ink images of faceless figures in flight, and his dog Jason. Most mornings, the baker—who was wider than he was tall because he indulged in his own confections—joined us, slumped into a bentwood chair that barely bore his weight and drank sweet wine. He presided over the room like a judge in chambers tipsily regaling his clerks about the motley parade of malefactors he had just condemned to durance vile.

Unfortunately, this glamourless grotto was not long for the high-rent precincts of the blvd. St.-Germain. Returning to Paris one spring, we found it replaced by a beauty salon. George told us that our baker had sold out and gone back to Brittany, hopefully to do a little hiking and lose some weight. We realized then that we had a “lifestyle” that required daily coffee in a familiar setting. I had developed a habit of drafting my essays and sketching my stories into a notebook over my morning cup. Luckily, not far away, on the corner of rue des Écoles and rue Jean de Beauvais, we found a signless boulangerie, with excellent pastries, that served coffee atop oak tables whose surfaces were abstracts of intersecting circular stains.

It took years for us to determine that the place had a name. Long before we knew it was called Le Reglait (“settled” in English), we had loosely befriended the main counter guy, Stephan. He recognized us no matter how long we’d been away and who never asked what we wanted for breakfast. We had a particular table, tall with two stools, beside a window that looked out onto a tiny square and the statue of a Romanian hero. On days when someone else had beaten us to our table, we swallowed our pique and perched elsewhere. But we were set in our ways and, until Stephan or one of the girls had delivered two crèmes, a croissant and a pain au chocolat, we felt out of sorts and ill-prepared for the day to come.

One of the joys of Le Reglait was Patrick, a burly merchant seaman, blued with tattoos, who moonlit there between voyages. Patrick had taken an inordinate shine to Hotlips. Whenever we entered—especially after an absence—and Patrick beheld my wife, he would engulf her in a huge, hairy embrace that rendered her breathless and her feet swaying back and forth a foot above the floor. Then, to intimate his purely platonic intentions, he would seize me by the shoulders and kiss both my cheeks. After Patrick’s greeting, followed by coffee and pastry at our favorite table, it was easy to face whatever horror might lay ahead.

It’s been years since we’ve seen Patrick. Stephan disappeared from the place before the pandemic, leaving it to the mercies of a bottle blonde of a certain age who had always been there, but had hung back discreetly behind the pastries and sandwiches. After Stephan was gone, she recognized us only grudgingly. We never learned her name. Although she knew our breakfast by heart, made us say it, out loud, before allowing us to sit down. Finally, returning to Paris one day, we discovered that the place had been renovated, with a new name. There was a self-service payment machine instead of a woman and a cash register. The old blonde was visibly tickled at the subsequent reduction in human contact.

We’ve never been back.

After casting about the quartier and resorting briefly to the wonderfully atmospheric and expensive Les Editeurs at Odéon, we remembered the Viennoiserie on rue de l’École de Médecine. We had often paused outside to stare at the most tempting display of pâtisseries in all of Paris, through panes of glass almost a century old.

The light inside is weak and yellow. The main salon is narrow, cluttered with mismatched chairs, rickety tables and ancient booths unattached to the floor that tend to travel when one shifts one’s weight. There’s a lightless window at one end and, at the other, a perilous stairway leading down to a vintage toilet that I hesitate to visit. The walls are a particular color, identical to the stucco of Paris’ exteriors. Historian Eric Hazan has called this creamy off-white, “the true colour of the city, alongside the gray of raw stone … It is a miracle, in any case, that the generations of builders who succeeded each other on the scaffolding, at one from the Creuse and now from Mali, have been able to preserve this colour.”

Every morning, around 9:30, the garbage trucks stop right outside the Viennoiserie, on a street barely twenty feet wide and proceed, deafeningly to collect the contents of a dozen poubelles. Anyone involved in conversation has to fall silent and wait, because this is no place for shouting.

Hotlips and I never have to shout here, or even speak. They know what we want, and the fat girl is always glad to see us.