It is a holiday. The Cavendish Pie shop is open only until noon. We sit outside in the mid morning humidity.
“How can the air be so humid yet the ground so dry?”
Bel’s question goes unanswered, bit it seems to have aroused Artie’s golden retriever, Bounder, dosing under her chair. She addresses him in Italian as she reaches down and gives him a treat.
“Is Bounder ever going to learn English?”
“Oh he knows plenty of English bel, but I have to keep up my Italian.”
“Hi Bounder, good boy!” Bounder comes out from under the chair with his big blond tail swishing and bumping against the chairs and table legs. Bel pets his head. He pants. His long thin tongue slides out the side of his mouth and seems to be in peril so near the two spiky canines. It has a nick in the side. He puts his two front paws up on the arm of bel’s chair in a friendly gesture. They look at each other face to face.
“Bounder, your breath stinks!”
His fur shines and his bared teeth glisten, benign, his mouth is slightly open and looks as if he is smiling.
“Bounder, down!”
Bilingual in English and Italian, he obediently gets back under Artie’s chair on command.
The sun has risen above the tree line highlighting the gold leaf of 2141 in the center of the rectangular window above the door. Also heating up those of us sitting outside the Cavendish Pie Shop facing Maxwell Avenue. A cement truck’s breaks hiss and the engine note descends as it slows at the light beyond the Lighthouse filling station. The huge orange conical tank turns slowly revealing the word “Dordrechts” in brilliant red, once with each revolution.
We wait for Steve, and drink hot coffee in spite of the weather. I think Artie has invited us to the studio later today. She started by inviting Steve the other evening, but Lark was present and couldn’t be left out. That is how Artie put it just now, and Lark gave Artie a high five. I had been walking along Wicket Street with Lambert and bel earlier, as I so often do first thing, and had no idea that she would be at the Pie Shop when leaving home later in the morning. Artie and Lark were already sipping and eating their crumbly muffins at a small table. I was invited too in their usual good nature. Some blackbirds are watching us from a dying Sycamore. It was probably there when the parking lot was first paved and kept in place to shade the parked mass of shiny painted metal underneath. Sparrows hop around below in the litter, dead leaves, crumbling pale brown bark and dust. Lark tosses some crumbs toward them. They fall short.
“Why are so many trees dying around here?”
“Lark, it’s the white oak borers. They are eating under the bark. You can see their tracks if you peal it off. That kills the trees.”
“But you just said that’s a sycamore!”
“It is. I guess something else is killing that one, but most of the trees in Fauxmont are red and white oaks.”
Steve has walked over with a heavy book under his arm.
“Good morning Ms. Bliemish.” He puts it half on the table and half in her hand avoiding the four cups of coffee in that small space. He moves on to get some refreshment.
“Well thanks Mr. Strether. Very formal this morning.”
Steve looks at us, grinning though his graying beard as he holds the door open for two couples to come out. They all look athletic in shorts, running shoes, and tee shirts with Snaz logos. One man has an orange baseball cap with Glitz Holdings printed across the back.
Lark looks over and reads aloud from the cover of the catalog and then Artie leafs through the pages of illustrations.
“Gustave Caillebotte.”
“Who is he Artie?”
“Lark, he was a French Impressionist.”
“Never heard of him.”
“Steve and I went down to the exhibition at the National Gallery last week. You should go Fred. Only go later. It was way too crowded and so after a quick look around he bought the catalog and we left.”
“Those reproductions are no substitute for the real thing.”
“No they’re not Fred, but there’s a lot of interesting information in here. Look at this elevation of an, ‘Apartment building, first class at 125 les Champs Elysees’.”
“So what?”
“That’s the new Paris of the 1860s!”
“Lark, Baron Haussmann redesigned the city at the time the Impressionists were working.”
“Well Steve, I do happen to remember the Eiffel Tower went up for the World’s fair, what ever year that was.”
“We’ll go back to the exhibition though. You ought to come too Lark.”
Artie opens the book to a print of ‘The Floor Scrapers’.
“A lot of his paintings don’t look like impressionist work.”
“Yeah, that one for instance, Fred.”
Steve comes out with his coffee and a slice of peach pie.
“Why don’t we move inside? It’s a little steamy out here!”
“There’s no room.”
“There is now. Those people left a table right in the corner.”
Steve points through the glass wall where Mrs. Rutherford is serving the last in the line of customers. Her assistant is carrying in a pile of fresh cookies from the back on a dented metal tray. Her left arm is bare but as she turns to put the tray down on the counter I can see her right arm is covered in dense tattoos.
“Steve, Mrs. Rutherford isn’t going to let Bounder in now.”
“Why not? She has before!”
“No Steve, it’s too crowded. His tail will clear somebody’s table.”
Steve pulls up another chair to our small crowded round table. There are already four cups of coffee on it and the book. Steve pauses while we lift our new sky blue paper cups to avoid a spill. Each printed in white with a passage from the 111th psalm,
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The cups are new to me but no one remarks on them. Perhaps every one else has seen them before. I haven’t been here for months, close as it is.
Bounder is resting with his head on his paw under Artie’s chair. He stirs as Steve sits down between Artie, and bel. Artie leans over the thin metal arm of her chair to look down at the dog, brushing Steve’s sleeve with her head as he puts his plate down. The plate tips in his hand and his wedge of pie falls down next to Bounder’s paw. Peach filling bursts from the crust on impact leaving the steep escarpment of its light brown pastry with indentations of the pie tin. Bounder’s long pink tongue curls around the yellow fruit instantly, as if he was expecting a serving.
Artie raises her head and runs her hand through her hair and finds it sticky with pie filling.
“How the fuck did that happen?”
She wipes her hand on one of the napkins Steve dropped on the table trying to recover control of the plate and pie.
We all put our coffee cups back on the table carefully.
“Sorry Artie.”
“Sorry? It wasn’t your fault Steve.” He seems unconcerned about the loss of his slice and more interested in the catalogue, which he takes
it partly off the table to look at it with the bottom resting on his lap. Bel gets up, walks around Steve’s chair to help Artie.
“There’s a little more towards the back Artie.”
Bel guides Arties’ hand to the spot. “There and down further.”
Artie keeps working with fresh napkins.
“Artie that’s it.”
“I still feel yucky bel.”
“You look okay though.”
Bel returns to her chair tossing another sticky napkin on the pile of scrunched, soft and gooey paper in the middle of the table like a centerpiece and memorial to Steve’s lost pie.
Steve is looking at the print of Caillebotte’s ‘The Floor Scrapers’ and moves to put the book back on the table for all to see. We all grab our cups to make room and then put them back down close together. It’s a bit of a stretch for Artie to reach across the book.
“That’s the right picture for study today.”
“Too true Lark, its Labor Day!”
“So many of the gains of the union movement are getting lost over here. In India and China they have to start from scratch, like there never was a movement in the world.”
“Pretty sad Lark.”
“It is, Fred. That’s why I am a progressive!”
Artie gets up, speaking to Bounder in a series of rhyming Italian syllables. Bounder is licking the ground next to Artie’s chair, even though I can’t see any fragment of pie in the wet shape his tongue has painted on the pavement. Artie reaches for her coffee crowded among the others surrounding the pile of sticky napkins like a blue stockade. She tries to pick it up from above with thumb and two fingers. The cardboard squeezes inwards a bit and the coffee rises burning her fingertips. It spills down the sides and a drop falls on the catalogue. She puts the cup down again quickly.
“Look, this table is too crowded … I’ve got to go.”
“Wait Artie, I am through. Let’s go up to the studio.”
“No Lark!”
“Why not Artie?
“I mean there’s too many of you.”
“We don’t all have to come Artie.”
Steve has been perusing the catalogue in silence, and ignoring everything else.
“Here, look at this!”
He points out the print of ‘Man at his Bath’.
“You know, I think that is one of the strongest paintings in the show.”
Bel picked up her cup more easily the instant Artie made room by lifting hers. She sits back sipping her coffee showing no concern about the studio visit. “Makes a change from all the women painted after their baths!”
Lark looks away from Artie to see the picture. “Yeah bel, I’ve never seen such good a painting of a man’s ass before. Well not in art with a capital ‘A’.”
Artie ignores Steve’s observation. She has turned Bounder away from the table, where he has scented the sticky napkins. He goes on methodically licking the sweet ground where his gift fell to him.
“No Lark, I can’t deal with a crowd, okay?”
“Oh Artie!” Lark backs her chair away from the table and gets up slowly.
“Stay there, Lark. Talk to you later.”
“You want the catalogue Artie?”
She doesn’t respond.
“Will you just wait a minute Artie!”
“No Lark, we will be as crowded up there as the stuff on this table. Besides I have got to feed Cangianti and Sfumato, and then go home to wash my hair.”
She only half turns to answer Lark and pulls Bounder away from his sweet spot on the pavement. She and Bounder walk down the hill by them selves, past the Pie Shop, towards her studio at the back.
