works by w.pham

works by william pham, 2005-present

A Talent for Poaching Eggs

On February 13, 2007, I stopped at a red light and looked out the driver's side window. A car had stopped on the opposite side of the divider, its front left wheel up on top of the concrete. The front bumper was crumpled; the front left headlight had shattered. A road sign advising traffic to bear right protruded out of the concrete at a sharp angle; it was bent near its base. The driver of the car was alone and remained seated inside. Though the road sign, lying almost flat on the ground, was no longer visible to oncoming traffic, the cars bore right regardless. Drivers slowed to observe what had happened, then continued on to wherever they were going.

That is a truth.

---

Now here is another truth.

I flew to Seattle for a week-long business conference. I was looking forward to seeing some particular colleagues that I had not seen in a long time; in the distance and months that separated us, I was sure that they had come up with some great ideas about how to really turn the electric coffeemaker industry on its head. I myself had an idea or two.

You're familiar with the French press. Many people, including myself, swear by the stronger, thicker coffee produced by brewing the coffee grounds in direct contact with water, though it leaves behind a kind of unpleasant sediment at the bottom of the cup. But drip coffee tastes flat and impersonal. There's no truth in it.

What if we could eliminate the sediment, yet retain the purer brew? There are alternatives to the French press and to drip coffee, of course; vacuum brewers are extremely popular among aficionados for bringing out the pure flavor of the beans, but the process is complex. The average coffee-drinker wants good coffee with as little human interaction with the world around them as possible.

An automatic French press. A strong brew with minimal effort. Fill with water, and ground coffee, and push a button. Higher-end models would include a professional grinder tailored to create the coarser grounds needed to maximize the vibrant taste brewed by the French press method.

There are a few logistical matters to consider, of course. Price-value ratios. Efficacy scales. Profit margins. I live in this world of key terms, flow charts, and presentations, all with one goal in mind: the truth in coffee. Seeking truth, I flew to Seattle.

I arrived at Seattle-Tacoma International thinking about coffee. Grinding, brewing, drinking; cream, milk, sugar; African, Latin American, Asian-Pacific. My cell phone vibrated in my jacket pocket. I took it out, glanced at the tiny screen. "Cafetière." Coffeepot. That was my nickname for her, a very private nickname. She herself didn't even like it, because she, like most women, and like all men, was self-conscious about her body, even though she was slender and maintained a girlish figure despite her thirty years. So the nickname remained unspoken for the most part, confined to my cell phone's SIM card. Occasionally, after sex, I whispered "ma belle cafetière" into her ear in the sleaziest impersonation of a French accent that I could manage, and especially after anal sex.

My beautiful coffeepot was calling. I walked to an empty part of the concourse, answered the phone, held it close to my ear, and cupped my hand over it to block out the airport noise. "Hey," I said, stretching out the word slightly. I wondered if I sounded happy.

"Hello." She did not sound unhappy.

"What's up?" I asked.

"The divorce proceedings are underway. When you get back, I'll need you to sign a few more things. I've also finished moving everything into my sister's condo, so I won't be in your way. I'm taking care of the dog for now, but we can talk about her later; I know you're probably going to be busy in Seattle, and I'm sure you don't want to discuss dog food or Frisbee time right now. Thankfully, because our marriage was under five years in length, everything's pretty much working out without complications."

I remained silent for a while.

At that moment there was nothing I wanted to talk about more than the dog. She was the measure of our marriage, a two-year-old Siberian Husky whom we had taken home, to our new home, from a rescue shelter when she was just a puppy. Her left eye was brown and her right eye was blue. We thought it was a sign. We discussed what we would name her for hours and hours, and we played with her that first night until she fell asleep. She learned how to offer her paw when asked to shake hands the next day.

In the end we never named the dog, unless "the dog" is a name. But we loved her nonetheless.

Standing next to a concourse wall in an airport a thousand miles away from the woman I loved, I suddenly felt a very strong need to hold the dog in my arms. After we taught her how to shake hands, we taught her how to hug. When we crouched in front of her and called out "hugs!" in an excited voice, she raised her front paws, leaned forward, and rested some of her weight (but not too much) on one of us, whoever was closest. There were few things more comforting to me than the unconditional love and loyalty that she gave to me. She had very beautiful eyes. She was a quiet dog. She liked to lick faces, but not too much. I loved her.

I leaned against a wall; ma belle cafetière broke the silence.

"Are you still there?" It was not what I expected to hear. Or, rather, it was not what I wanted to hear.

"Yes," I said. I had no other words.

"This is hard for me, too, you know," she said, defensively, as if I was somehow lording my hurt over her, wielding it like a Viking and his axe, running down his ship's landing plank to rape, pillage, burn, and kill.

"Yes," I said.

Another silence. "Say something," she said. Her voice was wan, and flat. Like drip coffee.

"All right. Here's something. I have a great idea for a new type of coffeemaker, an automatic French press. It's the best of both worlds. People are lazy. Everyone wants the easiest solution, the least interaction with the world around them. Everyone wants instructions with less words and more pictures. No one reads anymore. Few Americans can speak English properly, while almost anyone in any other first-world nation can speak two languages proficiently. And yet we demand quality, the kind of quality we don't strive for in our own lives. We want it to fill the gaps in our lives, the gaps left behind by synthetics and convoluted terminology and television commercials addressed to pie slices on a PowerPoint presentation and..." The words fell out of my mouth with a force I didn't know I was capable of summoning, one word after another, pouring out over the coarse silence. When I realized I was almost shouting into my cell phone in a crowded airport, I trailed off.

She hesitated, then said: "I think that's great."

"What's great? The emptiness of people's lives?" I said, feeling for the first time all the bitterness compressed into a knife-point sentence.

"No. Never mind. I hope the conference goes well," she said. "I really do, you know." I knew that when she said "the conference," what she really meant was "the rest of my life without her."

I sat down, still leaning against the concourse wall. A coldness settled into my bones. I wasn't used to Seattle weather. Then a terrible thought crept into my consciousness: from this point on, we would never eat Eggs Benedict together ever again. It was a Sunday ritual; whoever managed to wake up first would prepare the meal for both, poaching eggs and toasting English muffins and cooking ham and making hollandaise sauce from scratch. I had brewed two cups of coffee using a French press every morning, but on those Sunday mornings, or sometimes early afternoons, I took great care in the brewing. She liked her coffee lukewarm, with lots of cream and sugar; I liked mine the same way. When I discovered this on our first date, I realized that I would eventually fall in love with her, and then I did.

"Are you still there?" she asked. I must have been quiet for some time.

"Yes," I said. I had no other words, none at all.

"Look, I...I better get going. Run some errands, take care of things, you know. I'll, um -- well, try to have a good time, okay?"

"Yes," I said. She started to say something else but I pulled the phone away from my ear and pressed the red "end call" button while she was in mid-sentence.

I walked to the ticket counter with my single carry-on bag and asked for the next flight back to California. I purchased a ticket and sat in an uncomfortable chair at my departure gate for five hours, trying to think of nothing at all but not doing a very good job of it. She had always been better at making the hollandaise sauce, but I had a talent for poaching eggs, and every time she drank the coffee I brewed for her, she closed her eyes, every single time, and smiled a faint smile. It was a beautiful smile. Her left eye was brown and her right eye was blue.

Eight hours after the phone call, I was back in California. While driving past an intersection, I pulled hard to the left on the steering wheel and crashed into a road sign. My air bag deployed. I was mostly unhurt. But I sat in my car for a long while after that anyway, until someone knocked on my window asking if I was okay, if I needed an ambulance.

"No I am not okay please get me a cup of coffee brewed from a French press, please get me my wife back please, I love her so much please, please -- please."