NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
Mrs. Rutherford has rearranged the Cavendish Pie Shop with legendary fire. Daisy sits alone at one of two antique black wooden tables, with three high back chairs on each side. They fill the middle of the room with marble and ebony. Six winged dragons crouch down by her legs. These are the Wyvern variety, less lizard, more bird, balanced on their tails curled underneath in back and two legs with avian claws gripping the leaf and scrollwork in front. The weight they support bows their heads. Their breath is painted gold, but flaking off, and flows like a beard down toward the floor in a broken scorch. Daisy looks unmoved by the drama. Her long folded arm extends across the brown marble tabletop, with a fist digging into her cheek to hold up her head. Her thick hair is pushed back behind her shoulders like a short spreading cape. I sit down opposite, careful not to knock my shin on a folded dragon wing. A feather tip is chipped off showing not ebony, but a pale yellowish brown. The dome of Daisy’s bowler rises on the table between us, a dense soft black without the usual orange post-it note alight in the band.
She yawns.
“Excuse me Fred…”
“Late night?”
“I find the heat soporific,” yawns again.
“Ah, ‘soporifique’!”
“Oui, c’est ça…”
“Try some coffee.”
“Fred, did you hear, we lost another neighbor?”
“No, you mean departed?”
“Yes, moved on, not away.”
“On up?”
“… or down, who knows, Fred?”
“Depends what you believe.”
“I guess it is there if you do.”
“If you can!”
“I can’t think there’s a here-after, only a here.”
“ ‘So brief,’ as they say.”
“Oh really? Not so brief if you are in pain!”
“No, but you know what happens when you’re having fun?”
“Yeah, Fred, when life stops sucking, it can blow by like a sign on the freeway.”
“Not easy to read, those signs,”
“… or stay on the road.”
“Well, depends whose road.”
“It’s all a matter of choices.”
“If you can find them; I mean some people don’t seem to have much choice.”
“Yup, in the end none of us have a choice.”
“Well, then we’re talking about attitude.”
“If you are alive to it, Daisy.”
“I choose my own road; even if it leads to PU.”
“An artist must!”
“No, you can follow some one else. There’s plenty of derivative art around.”
“Right Daisy, there is always tradition under any road.”
“Frank Vasari calls it; “That Toad tradition, cold dead weight, or lively liquid eye.’ ”
“Is that original?”
“Don’t know for sure; I mean its been said in many ways, but I haven’t heard it said like that before.”
“So what artists do you like?”
“Depends when you ask.”
“I am asking today.”
“Today, Giotto, Velasquez, and Monet, and don’t forget Chartres and sometimes Rouault.”
“How about this time?”
“Ahh, he’s kind of on the threshold today.”
“Well, you might say they’re alive right now.”
“Seen with a lively liquid eye!”
“So, who were we talking about?”
“Diddlie told me it was old Ramsay.”
“We won’t see Mr. Ramsay at the Light House Gas Station again.”
“Fred, he will never be more than ninety nine.”
“A corpse is a corpse.”
My ‘small’ earl-gray tea steams, scenting the air with bergamot.
“Diddlie is always in the know!”
“Fred! Diddlie has been in on everything ever since I first met her.”
“Lou once called her, ‘mother of the neighborhood’.”
“It is like she knows stuff just before it happens.”
“Well, she does know every one.”
Daisy, sits up, puts he hand down from her face and looks at the back of her hand for a moment in silence.
“Some times I think she is on to something.”
“You mean something mystical in Diddlie?”
“Well, what to call it?”
She fingers her hat, pulling it an inch this way and that.
“Her intuitions?”
“It is hard to say…just a feeling really, some times when I am with her.”
“A woman of many parts, is Diddlie.”
“This thing, I mean Ramsay…is getting to me.”
“I didn’t know he was sick.”
Daisy holds up an arm to shake her multiple bracelets down her forearm from where they gathered at her wrist.
“Oh God! I got this letter from him about two weeks ago. I mean I was flabbergasted!”
“I wonder why he didn’t just call you.”
“I don’t know…it is pathetic, sickening and mainly confusing … now the old man is dead, I feel terrible about my attitude.”
“Well, he was pretty obnoxious in his day.”
“Yes he was, but that letter was so maudlin…I think he must have known he was about to go…”
“A last communication of his love and passion!”
“Oh please! “
“Sorry, I wasn’t…”
“Okay, okay…he opens with ‘Don’t get between a dragon and his fire.’ or something like that.”
“A quotation?”
“I looked it up…No, it was: ‘Come not between the dragon and his wrath.’”
Google says it is from Shakespeare’s King Lear.”
“Another troubled old man.”
“He dragged on and on, and then there’s this check for five thousand dollars enclosed.”
“I am getting a glimmer of your position.”
“Yes, and don’t confound me with Ophelia!”
“No, none of that!”
Daisy drains her ice tea, with a glacial rattle of melting cubes. She puts down the tall pale blue paper cup.
“You know, he is the reason I wasn’t evicted!”
“How bizarre!”
“To say the least.”
“Had he been sending you checks all along?”
Daisy’s bracelets move between the fingers of her free hand, as if she is counting them on the abacus of her forearm.
“No, he paid the trustees in my bankruptcy through an intermediary, a company or something. I couldn’t imagine who it was.”
“Must have been quite a surprise.”
“Embarrassing, would be more like it.”
“At least you didn’t have to hit the road.”
“No, I was kind of psyched for it though…well in a way.”
Daisy shakes her head and lets her hair fall in two long dense curtains down each side of her face.
“Well! Well! Well!
High thigh-cut shorts, two navels, and four breasts, pillowing in SnazE sports bras, move through the opening glass doors.
“Quite a distraction!”
“Fred, I thought you were a grown up.”
“I regress.”
Cargo shorts, snaking blue veins, thick tanned legs and heavy shoulders follow in and wait at the counter while the women place orders. Daisy waves to him, with her jingling bracelets moving around he arm.
“Lou Waymarsh!”
He is talking to the two women, but looks over at Daisy and waves back.
“Those are the del Sarto twins.”
“Oh, don’t know them Daisy.”
“They grew up in Fauxmont. One is Andrea, I forget the other one.”
“Are they high school or college?”
“Oh, I don’t know, college age…I guess.”
I look up to catch Lou’s short-sighted eye, as he turns around from the counter.
He holds up his coffee as if toasting his guests.
“Looks like Lou kept up with the family.”
“He bought the family property when they left…around two thousand perhaps.”
“But Lou has lived here thirty years or more.”
“Right, his first place was on Maxwell Avenue.”
“That’s right! I had forgotten, I remember visiting them there.”
The del Sarto twins stand with their backs to the counter. Holding their iced drinks in one hand and phones in the other, waiting for Lou. He pays and goes out with the twins and sees them into a car. He unexpectedly comes back and sits down next to Daisy. Mrs. Rutherford walks over.
“You need this hon.?”
“I could do with it in fact!”
“Well so could I hon.”
She puts his platinum SnazE Visa card down in front of him.
“Let me sign you up…they have an online special this week. I’ll get points and you’ll get discounts!”
Mrs. Rutherford has gone before he finished.
“Interesting company you keep Lou.”
“Maria and Andrea start as interns at my old shop tomorrow.”
“Is that what they wear to job interviews?”
“No Fred, they were at a weekend activity. I was chauffeur.”
“They could be my students at PU.”
“Daisy, it is great experience for them. Nice and close too, near St. George’s Church, you know that office building?”
“Sure Lou, what are they doing, delivering mail?”
“No Daisy, Maria is working in the PR department and Andrea is helping in attire.”
“Attire? When did the Fib. get into Tux. rentals?”
“Its advisory, part of protocol, you know, State Department contract.”
“Some times I think we are ruled by contractors!”
“They can only do what they are told, Daisy.”
Daisy shakes the ice in her empty cup looking at Lou in silence.
“What are you teaching out at PU Arts Center Daisy?”
“Frank has me doing a stained glass course, Lou and two drawing classes, so far at least.”
“Did you know Frank Vasari?”
“Not really, I met him at one of Artie’s openings I think…any way I recognized him at the interview. Doubt if he recognized me.”
“Enjoying it?”
“Well, I am trying to Lou, trying to like it.”
“Any experience?”
“I did a class at a frame shop about 25 years ago.” She yawns.”Oh sorry…”
Lou leans back, takes off his glasses and starts cleaning them in his lap with the bottom of his T-shirt.
“‘Soporifique’, I see the subject is having its effect!”
“I think Frank hired me because Boris’s agent, ahh, what’s his name?”
“Oh, Gloriani?”
“Yes, Gloriani, apparently Gloriani saw my designs for the Trip house.”
Lou leans forward still without his glasses on.
“What, Frank hired you sight unseen?”
“Lou, Gloriani has all the influence money can buy out there.”
“You mean at PU?”
“Yes, he and Frank are building a little empire around Boris Tarantula.”
Lou sips his coffee. A diesel is ticking over outside, close by, then you can’t hear anything above grinding gears and air breaks and a metallic squeal as a truck starts backing up to the Safeway loading dock. When it switches off, a spoon’s rhythmic click, in a hot mug at the opposite table stirs the new quiet.
“Have you heard Mr. Ramsay died?”
“We were just taking about that Lou.”
“He made a bequest to the PU Arts Center.”
“NO!”
“What’s the matter Daisy?”
“How do you know Lou?”
“It came out when they read his will. I was there, in the Heisenberg Rooms. He had a big stake in one of Macadamia’s funds and it all went to PU Arts.”
“Oh…”
“I wonder what will happen to the Light House Gas station?”
“I don’t know Fred … I mean, who is handling the estate?”
“Did he live alone?”
“I don’t think so Fred, but I don’t know who he lived with. His wife died years ago and the kids are grown and gone.”
