May 09, 2003
Lotus Eaters
My girlfriend has a Gevalia Coffee maker. You have seen the commercials. In one, a business man is offered a cup of coffee from a coworker. “No thanks,” he says “I’ll get my own.” The coworker leaves, but not before looking at his spare coffee cup and smelling it dejectedly. The man who rejected the coffee walks out of the office – he’s an important person at the company, no need to tell anyone where he is going. He walks through the active city streets to his apartment, prepares a cup a Gevalia coffee with his sleek Gevalia coffee maker. He sits in his chair and drinks. There is no television on, no newspaper or quarterly return. He is a man at one with his coffee, a man incapable of arousal by any coffee save the only brand served in the Swedish Royal Court.
I imagine the other coworker with his two cups of coffee. He tastes one, then the other. Nothing wrong with them on the face of it, and yet Gevallia man rejected them. What did he see in this coffee that cheapened it? The coworker with the spurned coffee looks out the window and sips and thinks about his old girlfriend in college. He broke up with her just before finals seven years ago – her name was Joie, and the breakup as notable because she was the first woman he had ever made cry. Over the summer she left messages for him with his parents and he never returned the calls. By the next semester he had forgotten about her entirely, until one day, while walking through the student union, he spotted her with a graduate student whose leather jacket he had admired occasionally when they crossed paths on campus. He turned his head down and pretended to be examining the school newspaper. They passed one another, and he thought he was clear, but then at the last moment she said “Michael!” They introduced themselves, smiling:
"This is Jacob."
"Nice Jacket."
"How have you been?"
What can he tell her? She’s here now with Jacob and his leather jacket and for the first time since the day they broke up he feels regret. “It’s so good to see you,” she says, and as she walks away he notices, for the first time, how good she looks in stonewashed jeans.
There is the aroma of hazelnut in the air, he takes a sip of coffee and returns to his spreadsheets. Someday he will discover Gevalia -- the only coffee with the variety and history to satisfy the uniquely personal desires of discriminating connoisseurs -- but until then he will never enjoy coffee again.
As I mentioned, my girlfriend has a Gevalia coffee maker. In the freezer she keeps a Tupperware container with the grounds, along with three boxes of coffee. The instructions on the box read:
“We suggest you prepare Gavalia Kaffe the way you normally prepare coffee, and then gradually adjust the recipe to your taste,”
which is to say that even if you are lucky enough to discover Gevalia you are still required to calibrate the recipe to satisfy your desire. Nothing is easy.
In the morning, while she sleeps, I prepare a pot of Gevalia. I am the man from the commercial. Tidy, single minded, self-satisfied. I take out the Tupperware and reflect for a moment on the color of the frosted plastic. I open it up and scoop thrice, adjusting the spill on each one in the way I have discovered is unique to me. While it brews I admire the logo on the coffee maker. The bubbling sound reminds me of a brook that I used to fish in for minnows at my aunt and uncle’s house in an alternate childhood. So that’s what Gevalia man was thinking about.
I take a cup of coffee into her room. She is curled on one side like a crescent moon. Her nose twitches.
“Gevalia?” she mumbles, pulled from the moorings of dream.
“Of course.”
She props herself on one elbow and reaches for the mug.
“How is it?” I ask, but she doesn’t answer. There is no communicating this thing. It is as unique as personality, and, like personality, if anyone were to know another person’s true Gevalia experience the complexity of difference would be too much to bear-- it’s best just to enjoy your own Gevalia experience. Staring into space with a smug look is the only appropriate way to communicate it.
“I’m quite fond of this coffee.” I say.”
“Are you really?”
“I have discovered the unique heaping of grounds in the scoop that completes me.”
“Um.”
“There is a recognition between me and this coffee. I think that in a past life I was probably drinking Gevalia in Amsterdam.”
“Did I just wake up in a coffee commercial or am I still sleeping?”
“I would sit at my desk drinking Gevalia and going over receipts for my many investments in India.”
“I’m going to make some corn pops.”
“I remember once my assistant walked in and offered me a cup of some local brew, and without even acknowledging him I stood up, left the building, walked past the tulips in front of the Rijksmuseum, entered the estate through the servant’s quarters, shoed away the scullery maid, and prepared myself another cup. I remember it distinctly. There was not a thought in my mind. It was a pure Gevalia moment, one that is somehow connected to every Gevalia moment I’ve ever had.”
“No more Gevalia for you.”
“I wonder if I knew the taste as a child? Did I remember it? Or did I only become myself when I discovered that I needed something -- something that I didn’t know was Gevalia, but which could have been nothing else.
“I’m serious. Give me the cup.”
What happens to me now? Now that I have satisfied desire with Gevalia. Do I just leave the office every day at three, go home, make Gevalia, drink it, and think about absolutely nothing? Is that all there is? What’s the use of going on?
“If you don’t give me the cup I will hit you.”
“This is why enlightenment must be avoided at all costs. Gevalia is too dangerous, it ends everything, it is frozen in space, the event horizon of coffee drinking.”
We are silent for a moment. I am pondering my mug of coffee, she is searching through the sheets for something to throw at me. She settles on the remote control.
“Ouch.”
“I guess it’s all over for you in terms of coffee drinking then.”
“I guess it is.”
“The only thing to do is to stop drinking Gevalia.”
“Stop?”
“Pretend you never had it at all.”
“Does it work that way? Wouldn’t it be like looking forward to a vacation you already took?”
“You’ll have to find out the hard way.”
“But the memory will be with me always.”
“I’m not going to renew my subscription to Gevalia. This is it. Forget it. No more Gevalia for you.”
“There’s still some left in the Tupperware.”
“In the Tupperware?”
“Yes. Enough for a week at least.”
“That’s Folgers in the tupperware. I never bothered opening the Gevalia. I just wanted the coffee maker.”
“What? What about my unique heaping?”
“Folgers.”
“The brook, the minnows, the far away look?”
“Folgers.”
“Wow. That’s some coffee maker.”
“It’s free when you order Gevalia.”
