Chapter 5: The Vietnamese Date
The plastic duck was still there. It hung lopsided from a nail above the kitchen pass-through, its faded green paint chipped to reveal grey plaster beneath, one wing perpetually drooping as if exhausted by the decades of steam rising from sizzling woks. Yvonne touched its foot as they slid into their usual booth, a superstitious ritual. The vinyl seat sighed under her weight.
“See? Nothing’s changed,” Salim said, grinning as he shrugged off his jacket. He looked good. He’d made an effort—a clean, dark shirt, his curls tamed somewhat. The charm was switched on, bright and familiar. “It’s like we never left.”
But that was the problem, Yvonne thought. It was exactly like they’d never left. The same sticky tablecloth, the same fluorescent tube buzzing faintly behind a strip of amber plastic, the same monumental smell of garlic, fish sauce, and searing meat that soaked into your hair and clothes. For years, that sameness had been the appeal. A fixed point. Now, it felt like a exhibit in a museum of their former selves.
“It’s good to be back,” she said, and meant it, hoping the words would conjure the feeling.
A waiter slid two laminated menus and a pot of jasmine tea onto the table without a word. Yvonne cradled the chipped cup in her hands, the heat a tangible comfort. She watched Salim scan the menu, though she knew he would order the same thing he always did: shaking beef, extra chili.
“So,” he said, setting the menu aside. “This was a great idea. A proper date. We’ve been… what? Ships in the night recently.”
“We have,” she agreed. The memory of Victoria’s focused gaze across the bar surfaced, unbidden. I remember what matters. She pushed it down. “The café consumes me. And you’ve been busy with the… what was the piece? The one on the club closures in Mitte?”
He waved a hand, a dismissive flutter. “Ah, that’s on hold. The editor’s being a prick about angles. I’m chasing something new, about the street art preservationists. Lots of bureaucracy. It’s a slog.” He leaned forward, his smile turning conspiratorial. “But this is better. Reconnecting. This is what’s real.”
Us. Reconnecting. The words felt imported from a relationship manual. She nodded, sipping her tea. The floral steam filled her nostrils. “How was your day? Really?”
“Slow. Productive in its own way. Did some reading. Messaged a few contacts.” His eyes drifted over her shoulder, tracking the waiter delivering a pyramid of crispy squid to another table. “Thought about you, though. Planning this. It felt… proactive.”
Proactive. Like fixing a leaky tap. She felt a strange dislocation, as if she were watching a play where she’d forgotten her lines.
Their food arrived quickly, plates clattering on the plastic. The vibrant chaos of colors—emerald herbs, crimson chili, golden noodles—was a feast for the eyes. Salim immediately began mixing his beef with a furious, happy concentration.
“This is it,” he moaned after the first bite. “God, I’ve missed this. Remember when we used to come here every Friday? Rain or shine?”
She remembered. She remembered laughing until she cried, sharing one cheap beer, his foot playfully hooked around her ankle under the table. She loaded her chopsticks with rice noodles and grilled pork. The taste was perfect, a riot of sweet, salty, umami. It evoked the ghost of those past joys, but it couldn’t resurrect them. The flavour was a memory, not a current event.
“I do,” she said. “You’d always steal the last spring roll.”
“And you’d pretend to be angry.” He chuckled, reaching across to spear a piece of her pork. “See? Spark. Still there.”
She forced a smile, letting him take it. He talked between bites, outlining half-formed ideas for articles, gossiping about a mutual friend, planning a vague trip to Portugal “someday.” His monologue was a warm, comfortable blanket. It required nothing from her but periodic nods.
Her mind drifted. It went to the cool canal air, to the specific cadence of a question: Tell me about this bridge. It went to the profound silence that followed, a silence that felt full, not empty. Here, the silence between Salim’s sentences was just a gap to be filled.
He was leaning back, patting his stomach. “This was exactly what we needed, Yvonne. A reset. Things have been… static. My fault, maybe. I get lost in my head. But this,” he gestured around the noisy, steaming room, “this is grounding. Real life.”
A sharp, almost painful pang of guilt shot through her. He was trying. He was here, being charming, acknowledging a staleness. It was more than she’d done. She had been harboring a secret, glowing coal, comparing his offered blanket to another woman’s lightning strike.
She opened her mouth. The confession felt like a physical lump behind her tongue. I met someone. I had a drink with a woman. She listened to me in a way that made me feel unknown to myself. The words teetered on the precipice.
Salim’s phone buzzed on the table. He glanced at it, his face lighting up. “Ha! It’s Leo. That timing.” He looked back at her, his eyes bright. “He’s at a bar near here with some people. Wants us to come by. See? The universe agrees our night shouldn’t end! We can continue the date there. More fun, less…” He wrinkled his nose at the now-greasy tablecloth.
The moment shattered. The confession dissolved into cold relief and colder disappointment. He hadn’t seen her poised on the edge of something vast. He’d seen a text message.
“I have to open tomorrow,” she said, her voice quieter than she intended.
“One drink! Leo’s been asking about you. It’ll be fun. We’re already out, we’re already… connecting.” He said it as if ‘connecting’ were a task they could tick off and now move to leisure.
The plastic duck stared forlornly into the kitchen. She realized, with a clarity that was like a sip of cold water, that telling him would be pointless. He wouldn’t hear the subtext, the tremor in the foundation. He would hear a problem to be solved, or worse, a drama to be soothed. Don’t be silly, you’re just tired from the café. This Victoria person was just being polite. He would fold it into his narrative of their ‘reset.’
“You go,” she said, shaping her lips into a convincing smile. “I’m really finished. The larders won’t fill themselves at dawn. Tell Leo I said hello.”
“You’re sure?” He was already calculating, his desire to please her battling his desire for the easier, louder fun waiting at the bar.
“I’m sure. It was a lovely dinner. Truly.”
He relaxed, reaching for her hand across the table. His palm was warm, slightly damp from his teacup. “Okay. I won’t be late. And hey,” he squeezed her fingers, “this was great. We should do it every week. Make it a thing again.”
“Yes,” she said. “A thing.”
He paid the bill, insisting. He walked her to the tram stop, his arm around her shoulders, talking about Leo’s latest misadventure. When her tram appeared, he kissed her, a firm, familiar kiss that tasted of ginger and chili. “Love you,” he said, effortless.
“Love you too,” she echoed, the habit as deep as muscle memory.
She took a seat by the window, watching his figure recede as the tram clattered into motion. He was already walking with a quicker pace, phone to his ear.
The city slid by, a blur of lighted windows and moving tails of cars. The restaurant’s spices clung to her, a fragrant ghost. She replayed the evening. His happiness had been real. His affection was real. But it existed on the surface, like rain skimming concrete, never seeping deep enough to touch the dormant roots beneath.
He was happy with the idea of ‘us,’ with the ritual of the date, with the story of rebuilding a spark. He hadn’t once looked at her and seen the person who was silently trying to map a new, terrifying continent inside herself. He hadn’t noticed the distance because, to him, the distance was just a bit of quietness, easily filled with plans and chatter and a visit to a bar.
The tram rumbled over tracks. She thought of Friday. Two days away. Victoria’s promise, uttered in the grey dawn: I’ll be in the café on Friday. For my usual.
Salim would likely still be asleep when Victoria walked in. He would be a silent, sleeping presence in the apartment above, completely unaware of the woman downstairs who remembered the history of paint on a bridge.
The tram’s electric hum faded into the night as she stepped off two stops early, the impulse sudden and decisive. The smell of the restaurant still lingered on her wool coat, a fragrant ghost of a failed experiment. She needed a different kind of silence.
Klara’s street was a quiet canyon of altbau facades, their stucco glowing butter-yellow under antique-looking streetlamps. A single bicycle, chained to a wrought-iron fence, wore a cap of dew. Yvonne pressed the bell for ‘Leigsnering,’ the sound echoing sharply in the cobbled courtyard.
The intercom crackled after a long moment. “Hello?” Klara’s voice was fuzzy with sleep.
“It’s Yvonne. I’m sorry. I know it’s late.”
“Yvonne?” A pause, then a sharper, concerned tone. “Come up. Fourth floor.”
The hallway smelled of wood polish and yesterday’s soup. Klara was already at her open door, wrapped in a thick, oatmeal-colored cardigan, her blonde hair flat on one side. Her eyes, usually so calm and clinical, scanned Yvonne’s face with professional swiftness. She didn’t ask if everything was okay.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost that gave you a particularly difficult riddle,” Klara murmured, stepping back to let her in. The apartment was warmth and order, a neat row of medical journals on a shelf, a thriving monstera by the window.
“I’m sorry,” Yvonne said again, hovering on the threshold.
“Stop apologizing. You’re here.” Klara grabbed her own coat from a hook. “My downstairs neighbor would hear every word, and she’s a terrible gossip. There’s a place around the corner that’s still open. They serve terrible tea, but it’s hot.”
They walked in silence for a block, their footsteps the only sound. The café was a narrow wedge of light, mostly empty, smelling of stale espresso grounds and lemon cleaner. They took a small wooden table in the back.
Klara ordered two herbal teas, then folded her hands on the table, waiting. Her silence was an invitation, not a pressure.
Yvonne wrapped her hands around the thick porcelain mug. The heat was almost painful. “Salim and I went to that Vietnamese place. The one with the duck.”
“I remember. You loved it.”
“We went tonight. A ‘date’.” Yvonne heard the air quotes in her own voice, harsh and ugly. “He talked about rebuilding our spark. He was happy. He didn’t… perceive me at all.”
Klara nodded slowly, blowing on her tea. “You’ve felt distant for a while. You said the café was consuming you.”
“It is. But that’s not…” Yvonne’s throat tightened. The words felt like physical objects, awkward and dangerous. “There’s a customer. A woman. She’s British, a consultant. She comes in. She notices the ceiling.”
Klara’s eyebrows lifted a millimeter. “The ceiling?”
“The pressed tin. She asked about it. Last week.” Yvonne took a shaky breath. “Then she came back, late, after closing. We went for a drink. We walked by the canal for hours. She asked me about the paint on a bridge, Klara. The paint.”
She watched her friend’s face, that calm, analytical surface. She saw the moment the clues connected, the diagnosis forming.
“And this has… unsettled you.”
The understatement was so vast it was almost funny. A laugh caught in Yvonne’s chest, dying as a choked sound. “Unsettled. Yes. She listens in a way that… it feels like being unpacked. Layer by layer. Salim listens to react. She listens to know.” The confession poured out now, a quiet, desperate flood. “I can’t stop thinking about it. About her. The way she looks at me, like I’m a city she wants to map. And I keep thinking… what does that mean? About me. About Salim. Am I just… bored? Or is this something else?”
She couldn’t say the larger word. It hovered between them, huge and silent.
Klara took a careful sip of her tea. “You’re questioning your relationship because someone showed you a profound kind of attention. That’s logical. It’s also possible,” she said, her voice soft and precise, “that you are questioning your relationship because it lacks that attention, and has for some time. The two things can be true at once.”
“But the quality of it,” Yvonne whispered, her eyes burning. “It’s not just attention. It’s a… a frequency. When she touched my wrist, it was to brush off flour. It was the most deliberate thing I’ve felt in years.”
“Ah.” Klara let out a long, slow breath. “So it is also that.”
Yvonne put her face in her hands, the pressure of her glasses frames sharp against her skin. “I don’t know. I’ve never… I’ve only ever been with men. I thought it was just a crush on a fascinating person. But it feels tectonic. It feels like it’s rearranging my interior geography and I can’t read the new map.”
She finally looked up, tears blurring the harsh café lights. “Am I a terrible person? For letting a stranger’s gaze dismantle my life in a week?”
Klara reached across the table, her hand cool and dry over Yvonne’s clenched fist. “You are not terrible. You are a person who has been seen, deeply, perhaps for the first time in a long time. That is a seismic event. It would make anyone question their foundations.” She paused, choosing her words like sutures. “Salim may be a good man. But a good man can still be the wrong anchor. The question isn’t just about her. It’s about what her attention revealed was already missing.”
“What do I do?” The plea was raw, childish.
Klara withdrew her hand, her expression turning practical, the way it did when explaining a treatment plan. She stared into her tea as if the leaves might offer a clearer prognosis.
“Okay,” she said, the word a gentle reset. “Listen. I am famously, spectacularly bad at relationship drama. You know this. But I am good at cause and effect.” She looked up, her gaze steady. “This woman, Victoria. She is a symptom. Or a catalyst. She is not the disease.”
Yvonne blinked, the clinical terms a cold splash. “What does that mean?”
“It means you can’t solve this by fixating on a mysterious stranger who notices paint.” Klara’s voice was firm, kind. “She’s a data point. A very compelling one. But putting her in the equation right now is a distraction. The equation is just you. And Salim.”
A bus rumbled past outside, its windows glowing like distant planets. The café’s neon sign buzzed, a faint electric insect hum.
“Forget her for a second,” Klara continued, leaning in. “Impossible, I know. But try. The reaction she caused in you—that’s the important part. That feeling of being seen. That’s what you need to examine. Is that missing with Salim? Has it been missing?”
Yvonne’s mind flashed to the restaurant, to Salim’s narrative of ‘spark’ that required no input from her. To the vacant space where a confession might have landed. “Yes.”
“And,” Klara pressed, her tone softening, “is your café—the plants, the pastries, the bumblebees at dawn—does that bring you more real, actual joy than the man sleeping on your sofa? Is your life, as you’ve built it, nourishing you more than your relationship is?”
The question was a spear, clean and terrible. It sought the core. Café Klee was her spine. It was fatigue and fulfillment woven together, the scent of roasted beans and the sound of Joost’s calm voice. It was her own hands making something. Salim was… a pleasant old song played on a damaged speaker, familiar but frayed.
Yvonne opened her mouth. No sound came. She looked at her friend, her eyes wide with a kind of startled fear. She wasn’t ready. The answer was a shape behind a thick curtain, ominous and huge.
She swallowed hard. “I don’t know.”
Klara nodded, as if this were the only honest answer. “That’s okay. You don’t have to know tonight. But that’s the only question worth asking. Not about her. About you. About this life you’re in.”
She reached for the bill the waiter had left, pulling a few coins from her cardigan pocket. “My advice? Sit with the quiet. Don’t chase the lightning strike. Look at the blanket.” She stood, the chair legs scraping softly on the tile floor. “And for god’s sake, get some sleep. Your eyes look like storm drains.”
A weak, grateful laugh escaped Yvonne. She stood, her body feeling both heavy and strangely light. “Thank you. Really.”
“For terrible tea and blunt-force trauma? Anytime.” Klara hugged her quickly, a solid, reassuring pressure. “Walk home. The cold will help.”
The night air was a blade, sharp and cleansing. Yvonne turned her collar up, the wool scratching her chin. She walked without taking the tram, her boots a steady, rhythmic sound on the empty sidewalks. Klara’s words rearranged themselves in her head, settling into a new, less terrifying pattern.
Victoria is a catalyst. Not the equation.
Is the café your joy? Is Salim?
She passed a closed flower shop, the blooms inside a muted riot of shadows. She thought of her own plants upstairs, their quiet, persistent needs. She thought of Salim, probably still out, laughing in some smoky bar, his hand on Leo’s shoulder. He was not a bad man. He was a man living on the surface of things, and she had only just discovered the dizzying depth beneath her own feet.
Her building was a dark silhouette. She let herself in, the foyer smelling of stone and old mail. Upstairs, the apartment was exactly as she’d left it, but the silence had a different quality now. It wasn’t empty. It was waiting.
She took off the coat still smelling of garlic and fish sauce and hung it on the back of a chair, a deliberate act. She did not check the bedroom. She washed her face, the water shockingly cold. In the mirror, her freckles stood out like dark sand, her eyes indeed hollow.
She slid into bed, the sheets cool. The space beside her remained untouched, a flat expanse of linen. She listened to the old building settle, its creaks and sighs a language she understood.
The catalyst had done its work. The reaction was underway, slow, subterranean, irreversible. The question hung in the dark, immense and simple. She stared at the ceiling she could not see, and began, finally, to look at the blanket.