Barnaby began drinking coffee at the age of fourteen, when his morning schedule went like this: 6:45 a.m., out of bed and into shower; 7:00 a.m., watch The Jetsons; 7:30 a.m., walk to the subway drinking from enormous thermos of coffee while hair, still wet, freezes solid; 8:15, fly into English class like a hummingbird. Since then he has regarded the bitter brown bean as a friend of almost unmatched constancy, rivalled only by his Grandma Sylvia's cornucopia of stale cookies. When he is sluggish in the morning, he drinks coffee; when he is flatulent in the evening, he drinks coffee; when he is empaneled on a murder trial, or getting a pedicure, or waiting for a train, he drinks coffee. But recently he has discovered that the vinum amer apollonis is not the same the world round—on the contrary, European coffee is no more trustworthy than an actual European.

First it was Paris. After an obligatory hike up to the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, wheezing all the way, Barnaby wandered into the Rue des Abbesses and found a Genuine Parisian Cafe, with little round tables and wicker chairs facing the street. He sat down to read the funny pages and watch the women go by—and the men, as far as that goes—and drank an espresso; and after fifteen minutes he stood up to be on his way. But he had hardly walked ten feet before he found another Genuine Parisian Cafe, with little round tables and wicker chairs, and, reasoning that such pleasures are hard to come by in New York, he sat down, opened his paper to the fashion section, and ordered himself a beer. He spent another delightful quarter of an hour, and then he got up to be on his way—and what do you think happened? To make a long story short, at the third cafe Barnaby had an espresso, because he had just had a beer, and at the fourth cafe a beer, because he had just had an espresso, and so on, and so on, until finally, almost eighty euros the lighter, and walking not at all straight but very, very fast, he escaped from the cafes of the Rue des Abbesses and very nearly drowned in the Seine.

Next was Florence, where he went into a tabacchi early in the morning, and a beautiful girl with curly brown hair and acne-scarred cheeks looked him in the eye, gave him a smile to which she seemed to have committed her entire soul, and said, in a throaty voice, "Di mi." Barnaby meant to reply, "Caffè normale," but instead he threw his bulk across the marble counter and shouted, "Ti amo! Ti amo! Ti amo!"

But the most dramatic betrayal was in Siena, medieval Siena, where the neighborhood bank is likely to predate Columbus. At the train station he had a caffè corretto—that is, espresso and sambuca in the same little cup--and, feeling just dandy, he walked up the winding streets to the Duomo. And when he went in, wiped his nose, and looked up, the entire cathedral was striped! Brilliant, majestic, ridiculous stripes, stripes on the columns and stripes on the walls, foot-high, horizontal, black and white stripes, rendered not in plaster or in paint, but in stone! Stripes! From fifty feet up there looked down at least a hundred Popes' heads; there were enormous paintings lining the walls—with stripes in between them—and allegorical scenes cut into the black and white floors, with accents of yellow and rose. In one of these scenes, there turned a Wheel of Fortune with God the Father enthroned at the top; in another, Hermes Trismegistus in a pointy hat delivered to Moses a tablet of cosmic truth. Altogether this church's interior presented Barnaby with the most amazing, far-out, unreal design he had ever seen. He fell to his knees and clutched his hair. What in God's name had they put in his coffee? Frantically he reached and grabbed until he caught someone by the arm. It was a middle-aged woman in an "Oregon" t-shirt.

"Excuse me," Barnaby said. "Am I hallucinating, or is this entire—cathedral—striped?"

"Yeah," the woman said, "it's really over the top, isn't it? And why does it have to be black and white? Couldn't they have done it in peach?"

Just as frantically as he had grabbed her, Barnaby now pushed this woman away. He was relieved that he was not hallucinating, of course; but at the same time he was a little disappointed that the stripes were not the product of his own imagination. "God damn it," he muttered, "why didn't they put anything in my coffee?" And then Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus rose up out of his marble panel and addressed Barnaby in ancient Egyptian. "Barnabos," he said, "you must remember that the world exists as a dynamic tension, of which sexual intercourse is one expression and a vibrating lyre string another. When you can see that these Columns of Santa Maria are neither black, nor white, but black and white at the same time, then you will have mastered the truth." The Popes did not like this. One called Hermes a pagan, one called him an antichrist, and one called him a Greek. The Wheel of Fortune floated up out of the floor and turned before Barnaby's eyes. Then the Popes began to argue about whether God is better conceived of as moving or still; and then the church filled up with the noise of marble horsemen and marble archers storming a marble castle in the floor. . . .

And to make, once again, a long story short, no mattter how Barnaby threatened and wept, the Siennese barmaid would never tell him what she had put in his caffè corretto, and so finally he got back on the train.