The café is half empty, which is why you chose it. Your friend rang to say she needed to talk to you, and the tone of it has stayed with you all afternoon. You sit down at the little table by the window, two coffees arrive, and before she’s said a word you do what plenty of people do: you pick up your phone and turn it face down on the wood. It’s a small gesture, almost an elegant one. It means: now there’s only you. She notices, and half smiles.
She starts to talk. She feels for the words and, when they won’t come, starts again somewhere else. Halfway through a sentence you feel the wood tremble under your palm, a buzz so brief she doesn’t hear it. You don’t look, and your hand stays where it is. For half a second part of you has gone off to wonder who it was, and she stops, reaching for the word that was on the tip of her tongue, with no idea what interrupted her. She looks down at her cup and starts again from further back.
The gesture speaks to you as well. It’s a promise you make to yourself in front of her, and it reassures you mostly because it can be seen, like certain promises made out loud. She, meanwhile, keeps her eyes on yours and notices something you think is invisible: the moment your gaze, just for an instant, goes blank. A sliver of your attention, still listening out for the phone, was enough.
It’s easy to confuse the two: showing attention and giving it. The first is made of gestures, and you know those gestures well: the upturned phone, the tilted head, the “of course” at the right moment. The second has no gestures of its own. You see it mostly from the outside, in the way the other person, at some point, drops their guard and says what they really think. That was what had been about to happen, before the buzz: she had just stopped talking round it.
You do the only thing you can: you come back to her, to the sentence left hanging. You ask her to repeat the last bit, and she does, a little surprised, in the same words, more slowly. There’s a small embarrassment in asking, in admitting you were somewhere else, and perhaps that’s what tells her you’re here now. She carries on, and this time she gets all the way to the end, to the thing she rang you about. The rest of the conversation lasts more than an hour, and the coffee goes cold in the cups.
Only on the way out, as you shrug on your jacket and she says goodbye at the door, does the phone come back to mind. You don’t know whether it buzzed again, perhaps more than once. You pick it up from the table without turning it over and put it in your pocket.