Most Sundays in France, whether I’d read or worked or procrastinated all day, I’d go out after dinner looking for a café. Any place where I could sit outside and enjoy a beer in some where that wasn’t my little room where I spent all day would have done fine. I’d know it was closed every Sunday but I’d still walk past Café L’Atelier because it was close to the apartment and the most familiar. Then I'd walk in to the city center to see if there was anywhere to sit at the Hotel Bar du Centre. When I first arrived in Angers no one ever went to this café. But when it got warm and they’d put chairs and tables outside it became the most crowded of all the cafés in town. It seemed like it filled the instant it opened in the morning and didn’t empty until 2 a.m. the following morning.
Once I’d realize that Hotel Bar du Centre was too crowded and that even if I could find a table it was too crowded for a boy to sit at alone I’d settle for whatever smaller café was open. I’d pay more for pint of good beer than I would have paid for dinner had I eaten anything but an omelet or just bread and olive oil. Sitting outside I’d open the book that I brought to make it look like I was there for any other reason than that I was simply lonely and wanted to be around people even though I knew no one would talk to me.
When you’re lonely in France, or any place that isn't home, you spend all the daylight hours alone cleaning, reading or killing time in whatever way you can. Then at night you decide to go out because you think maybe you’ll meet people even though you’ve been in town for three months and have tried the same way and haven’t met anyone. You sit yourself down at a little café or in a bar and watch girls who should be in love with you talk with guys who should be your friends or maybe people you don’t want to know just talking the language you don’t understand. And you order a beer because it will give you the most time in the café before you feel obligated to leave or order something else. A café, even a café grand, is cheaper than a pint but will only last you five minutes before it is cold and impalpable. So you get a pint of beer and sit.
Then you sink into a chair, surrounded by strangers, and pretend like you’re okay with being there alone for thirty minutes. And then you begin to long for something familiar like your mother’s cooking or a slow dance with an old sweetheart.
Most Sundays there would be a soccer match on T.V. and patrons yelling simultaneously cheers or curses depending on how the team they favored was fairing. I’d sit outside and at breaks in the game the sidewalk would fill with people smoking and then empty again as they went back inside to watch the remainder.
