Gregor threw himself into clean clothes, made sure he had his wallet and keys, and left the room. In the hallwayoutside, there was nothing but quiet and a few small stacks of dishes waiting by one of the other doors. He might not like to sleep in, but presumably most other people who came to stay at a place like the Windsor Inn preferred to.
2
The Aubergine Harpsichord was indeed at the end of Gregor’s own short block, just past an art gallery selling what looked like children’s drawings rendered in oils and earth tones and a store with no stated purpose at all but with a beautiful pewter teaset in the window. Gregor had no idea who bought teapots. Bennis owned a beautiful ceramic one but never used it. He thought she had received it as a gift. The Aubergine Harpsichord’s front windows were made to look as if they were divided. Gregor could tell that they were, in fact, plate glass with cosmetic dividers pasted over them. He went in through the divided wooden door and saw that the restaurant itself was very nearly a political statement. There were posters on the walls, carefully framed, of the kind that particularly intellectual college students favored: Barishnikov in midleap, Alice in Wonderland, Che Guevara. There were two posters of the kind Gregor thought of as “fat letters, caught drunk.” They had mud brown backgrounds, and the letters themselves were black, plump, and sort of wandering all over in different sizes, the text swooping around the sides, nothing made straight or easy to read. LIVE SIMPLY THAT OTHERS MAY SIMPLY LIVE, One of them said. The other said, RACISM: RANDOM ACTS OF BLINDNESS. Gregor had no idea why those posters irritated him so much. He didn’t disagree with them. He thought people who piled up mountains of stuff and spent their money on things they wouldn’t want in six months’ time were stupid beyond belief, and he had never had any patience with racism at all, not even in his early days at the Bureau when it had still been considered both “natural” and “inevitable” that African Americans would never become full-fledged agents. Forsome reason the posters brought out the anarchist in him. He was sorry he wasn’t able to drive up to the curb in a gigantic SUV, and that in spite of the fact that no sane person allowed him to drive anywhere where there might be traffic.
He found a seat at a table near the window and sat down. He looked at the menu—more fat letters curving around the front cover, these saying WAR IS HARMFUL TO CHILDREN AND OTHER LIVING THINGS, as if whoever had opened this place had found it impossible to escape from 1968. He found the section of the menu with “beverages” on it and paused. There were at least fifty different kinds of tea listed there, and two dozen kinds of coffee. The waitress came up, dressed in what looked like a burlap apron over a shirt made out of something similar that flowed to the floor, and he said, “Could I have some coffee to start? Just plain coffee, with a little milk in it.”
“We have Bana Tiryu coffee. It’s grown and harvested by native peoples on their own cooperative in the Brazilian rain forest The Aubergine Harpsichord participates in the boycotts of Brazilian and Colombian corporate-harvested coffee and of all GM coffee wherever it is grown—”
What’s GM coffee?”
“Genetically modified.”
“Ah,” Gregor said. He still had no idea what she was talking about. “Is this Bana—”
“Bana Tiryu.”
“Yes, is that regular coffee? Not flavored or noncaffeinated or—”
“lt’s plain coffee, yes. But you don’t have to worry about that kind of tiling here. We don’t serve artificially flavored coffees or teas of any kind. If we offer vanilla coffee, it’s because we’ve ground the vanilla beans and flavored it ourselves.”
The front door opened. Gregor looked up and was relieved to see Brian Sheehy, dressed in yet another badly fitting suit with nothing more than a down vest over it, in spite of the fact that it was still cold enough so that it hurt to breathe outside. The waitress saw him come in and backedaway from the table a step or two. Brian sat down on the other side of the table and said,
“Good morning, Alexandra. Give the man a cup of plain coffee, will you please, and not a nervous breakdown. Give me a cup of plain coffee while you’re at it.”
“A little cream,” Gregor said.
“You should consider the facts of dairy farming before you decide to have cream,” Alexandra started; but Brian shot her a look, and she shrugged. “I’ll leave some pamphlets,” she said, taking off.
“It’s like being in a time warp,” Gregor said.
“Not really,” Brian told him. “I remember hippies, and these people are not hippies. Alexandra is taking a year off to work before she starts a master’s degree program at Tufts in sociology. Nobody around here is going back to the land and giving up their possessions. They just all drive minicompacts and vote for Nader.”