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Using the outer edge of her pinky finger to push the spilled sugar into neat ridges, she described for Rennie the Grand Allée of elms, planted before the American Revolution, arching over her home town’s main street when she was young.  Many of them had been lost, she told him, in the Great Hurricane of 1938.  But still more perished with the arrival of Scolytus multistriatus, the insidious bark beetle.

“I remember one particular afternoon in early June—1961? 1962?,” she said (looking around for the server who had not returned from the back of the café),  ”—I was sitting beside my mother in the front seat of our boxy, chalkware white Peugeot, watching for my brother to come through the doors of our red brick grade school.  It was too warm in the car, even with the windows rolled partway down, and the station wagon’s sweet, distinctive smell—something that, even now, I sometimes catch a whiff of in older European cars (someone once told me that it’s the aroma of the upholstery’s rubberized horsehair padding mingled with the scent of gearbox oil)—was making me queasy.

“My mother, who had been silently sketching in her notebook and smoking a Camel (which she held, characteristically, between her middle and ring finger while she grasped the pencil between her index finger and thumb…and which, come to think of it, probably didn’t help my stomach a whole lot), suddenly stopped drawing, looked up, inhaled on the cigarette, exhaled a deep smokey sigh and made a slight gesture in the direction of a notably old and stately elm that stood across the broad, shady street.”

The server, who had reappeared, seemed to pointedly look anywhere but in their direction when Aimée tried to catch her eye to order another latte.

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Aimée sat silently looking out the window until the server—finally—retreated into the kitchen.  With no sense of his having been inattentive, Rennie took out his Moleskin notebook and began to sketch for her a little Welsh stick chair that he’d noticed while poking around in some antique stores earlier that week.  He told her that the legs, arms and spindles of these rustic chairs were traditionally made from the greenwood of ash, beech or oak which was split into billets and then bodged using simple tools. Rennie’s hand touched hers as, rubbing a pencil with some sugar that had spilled on the table, he showed her how the bodger would have used wood shavings, rather than sandpaper, to burnish the legs and spindles before leaving them to dry for several months.  (Aimée found his enthusiasm, free from pretense or innuendo, boyish and charming.) The seat was usually made from a single plank, with the grain running from back to front. Originally, Rennie explained—and he was quite certain that the chair he had seen was no exception—these distinctively wide yet shallow seats would be made of elm.  That was, of course, before the arrival of Dutch elm disease. (She remembered, as a little girl, walking to school along a pathway puddled with the shadows cast by a long line of great elms.)

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Appraising her handsome—no, her pretty–companion, Aimée noted that on his arrival, the previously indifferent server became a paragon of diligence.  A second latte was produced within, it seemed, less than a minute.  And while Aimée’s coffee, when it finally appeared, had been hastily set down—the cup wallowing in a saucer pooled with spilled liquid—his cup, on the rim of which was balanced a delicate cigarette russe dipped in chocolat de couverture, was placed into Rennie’s hands with the gentle, studied ease of a naturalist returning a toppled fledgling to its nest. Rennie admired the tattoo on the wrist of the server (who was suddenly in no hurry to go anywhere).  Stung by what she recognized as an inappropriately proprietary prick of jealousy, Aimée wondered whether Arden (whom she had known, and disliked, in graduate school) had, after… fifteen? sixteen?…well, quite a few years of marriage, become inured to the irritation produced by the effect—and by his seeming to delight in the effect—that Rennie had on other women.

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     He couldn’t believe that they had Trompe le Monde and Come On Pilgrim. And that was just what they had displayed in the window.  Inside the store, they might have Doolittle, an album that had never really gotten the attention it deserved. He’d have to remember to come back after he met Aimée for coffee (he could sense her watching him through the window across the street).

     Although it was all innocent enough (she had called to let him know he’d left a book at her house), it felt strange to be meeting her here.  He had suggested Caffé Verdi, but now, as he waited to cross the street, it struck him as disloyal, almost (if that wasn’t being too melodramatic) a betrayal: he and Arden had come here for dinner at least once a week when they were first together (she never had the time—or, it seemed, the inclination—to go anywhere with him now).  Oh well, he was probably fussing about nothing.  It was, if anything, just a gaffe, a false step on his part.  ”With my feet on the air and my head on the ground,” he sang under his breath as he glanced at Aimée sitting there, “…where is my mind, where is my mind?“

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     The café was located on a narrow side street that spanned only one block. Aimée gazed through its plate glass window at the row of one- and two-storey shops, set back from the sidewalk, that served the university community: a slightly upscale restaurant, where retirements, visiting professors and successful dissertation defenses were celebrated; a Chinese bakery—the Yung Sing Pastry Shop—at the door of which half a dozen students were standing in line, although it was threatening to rain; a sushi place (didn’t it have a different name the last time she was here?); DISCovery, a second-hand CD, LP and tape store (“We Buy, Sell, Trade” was hand-lettered in red on a sandwich board placed outside); and a natural food store, taped to the window of which was a faded poster advertising Omega-3 Brain Booster:      She watched as Rennie backed his black Volvo into a spot in front of the bakery.  He got out of the car, put some change into a parking meter and then, instead of walking across the street to join her, he stood looking into the window of the second-hand record store. He ran one of his hands through his hair, leading Aimée (who instinctively smoothed her own hair) to wonder whether he was looking at the CDs or at his own reflection in the glass.  He had such a peculiar, self-conscious grace, she thought, trying to recall the line from Burnt Norton about roses having the look of flowers that are looked at. He turned to cross the street and then walked up the steps and into the café.

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     Sitting at a small, square, wooden table situated next to a canted bay window on which “Caffé Verdi” was lettered backwards (from her perspective) in gilded Garamond, Aimée waited for her latte and watched for Rennie.  It was almost eleven in the morning but, given its proximity to the university and its tendency to be frequented primarily by late-rising graduate students, the restaurant was all but deserted.  Aimée had placed her order with a young woman who had a … sleepy? bored?… demeanor and delphinium-blue hair and who, after asking whether that was all she wanted (with a marked irritation in her voice that did not discompose the impassivity of her face), had disappeared through a door at the rear of the café.  Aimée checked the clock on her cell phone and wondered how it could take fifteen minutes to make a cup of coffee.  But it was just as well, she thought, because Rennie was late, and she was happy enough to sit alone and think about him, to watch and to wait.

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     These days, Morris didn’t like much of anything—not even baking bread. Clutching the cool metal handle of a crayola-green plastic pannier, he strode the aisles of Whole Foods, stopping to sample a pungent morsel of Tuxford & Tebbutt blue stilton before selecting some gorgonzola to crumble onto the focaccia he was going to make for dinner.  Should he use, he wondered, the Gorgonzola Verdi Dolce or the Gorgonzola Piccante?  At $59.95 a kilogram, he might as well just liberally scatter the surface of the bread with ingots of gold.  He decided on the Piccante and would, he thought, use some thin slices of woody Fontina Val d’Aosta, as well.  He waited as a couple in their mid-thirties helped themselves to the last of the rich Brie de Meaux that he had hoped to taste.  ”Far be it from me,” he muttered under his breath, eyeing the Hermès and Chanel shopping bags that they had casually set onto the floor at their feet as one of them daubed the bottom of the plate with the remaining morsel of baguette that had been set beside the puddle of creamy cheese, “to take alms away from the poor.”

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        Sitting in front of his computer in the dark bedroom, Pierrot hadn’t noticed that the daylight had faded. Before him, on the computer screen, was Hope Within the Emerald Nightmare. He had found the Acorns, elusive and illusive, sparkling through the Viridian Haze. He had passed Moonglade. This was the moment: the Flower was Taking Form. (On the chair beside him was the breakfast tray Aimée had left: the pain au chocolat she had warmed in the oven was cold, hard, half-eaten, and the boule de cidre was untouched.) He knew that he must, now, having shed all Mortal Embellishment, beware of Nightmare Figments.

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Beneath a Persian blue comforter patterned with scattered nosegays of mauve, magenta and dusky pink roses, Skye lay on her side in the darkening bedroom. Her eyes scanned the familiar room, moving from the walls, painted a light cornflower blue, to the framed reproductions of Degas’ Dancers at the Barre and Two Dancers, to her tea-green angora sweater, draped carefully over the back of a Victorian carved walnut side chair that had once belonged to Arden (who had needlepointed its seat with a spray of pale blush roses, English blue bells and Easter lilies on a powder blue ground when she was scarcely older than Skye was now). With a softened gaze, her eyes came to rest on one of the counterpane’s printed bouquets.  She watched it intently, without blinking, waiting to catch the precise moment when, in the half-light, distinct hues disappeared, leaving only values of grey: a world with no color, nothing but the play of shadow and light.  Losing herself in rapt anticipation, she forgot, for a moment or two, the strange, unyielding knur of hunger in her abdomen–like a damp dishcloth wrung out and left to dry into a stiff, twisted knot.

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Reminded, suddenly, by his phone’s vibrating in his pocket, that he hadn’t yet picked up the message from Arden, Rennie groaned audibly, “C’mon, you old fleabag, you.  Let’s go face the music.”  Talisker pushed ahead of him as he entered the unlit vestibule. He called out, but no one answered.  He felt his way down the hall into the kitchen, where the radio was playing softly.  In the room—barely illuminated by a single window beyond which shadowy dusk, a recalcitrant guest, waited hesitantly—he found a note written in Arden’s elegant, rounded script:

“Gone to pilates.
Soup on stove.
Aran babysitting.
Skye in bed.
Feed dog.
Take out garbage.
Put clothes in dryer.”

He lifted the lid on the stockpot that was set onto one of the back burners of the stove: inside was a thick pool of puréed green vegetable (what was the story he had read as a child about the “great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River”?).  He replaced the lid, noticed, in the dim light, an opened half-bottle of wine on the counter and poured himself a drink.  He thought about the little fairy cakes Aimée had set beside him and wished, with an unexpected and incongruously profound sense of loss, that he had at least tasted one of them. He sat on the floor, the dog lying beside him, and took a sip of the Shiraz.

“Parce, Domine,” the hushed voices on the radio intoned.

He lay down, resting his head on the sleeping dog’s belly, and shut his eyes.

Parce populo tuo:
ne in aeternum irascaris nobis.