If you take a table outside the ‘Elm Cafe in Stubblefield, the saying goes, nobody in the world will walk by your table. I was into my second hour of testing this theory in the company of a slim volume, this past Wednesday, when I met a small calamity.
This summer, the sun has been warm and the air clement in the brackish and bellicose breezes off the Trinity river, and even the most determinedly grumpy swamp oak smiled its yellow, dusty smile into the air. The detritus of this joy floated in breezes and collected in a shimmering slick on every uncovered liquid and on every flat surface, including the rickety tables and chairs on the sun-bleached porch outside the ‘Elm.
I became aware of the calamity when he used a handkerchief to peremptorily dust off the seat of the chair opposite mine, raising a cloud of the itchy cast-off glee into the damp air.
“This place,” he said, gesturing with his dusty handkerchief toward the sign that ran the length of the cafe, “has a bad name.”
I squinted into the pollen and wrongness that now occupied a space altogether too near me.
He tried again. “I mean, it’s all oaks around here.”
My squint became a glare of contempt. “So what?”
“So, why is it called The Beautiful But Useless Elm?”
I let his words hang in the heavy, musty air for a while, to see if they had any stupid friends they wanted to invite to the party.
“Do they have another location somewhere with elms, or something?”
We sat there in our impasse while these words and their friends he’d excreted buzzed in little circles over the crumbs of my banana bread and the slick of the dregs of my coffee. The words did their little, complicated mating dances and laid their little, simple eggs and then newer, purer, stupider words hatched.
“I’m Chris, but everybody calls me Peanut.” He held out his hand in an attitude that seemed to expect response, so I gave it more than it deserved by glancing at it once and making a distasteful face.
Hoping to disperse the cloud a little, I waved a deliberately cold and tightly rolled newspaper at the conversation. “Charmed.”
He withdrew his offered hand and looked back at the sign. Silence crept back in and the gnats stopped creeping from between his molars for a few blissful moments.
Then I realized with some little distress, he had taken the chair. He was planted across the table from me.
“It’s a weird name for a restaurant. I mean, ‘beautiful,’ sure, but ‘useless?’ Why would you want useless in the name of the place? That seems like bad business.”
I sighed and placed my receipt into the pages of my book. I closed it with regret and met his vacant gaze. “It’s a mangling of an English remark on the Black Forest. After an inventory of trees, he reaches the useless elm, which savours of decorum and propriety. I think the owner of the cafe was an arborist, and ran across the quote.”
“Do you own the place?”
I realized with a start that I was having a conversation. I looked for a handy kibosh to put on the unfortunate event. “No.”
“Well, too bad. Otherwise I would have suggested you change it. Just ‘The Elm,’ maybe, or even just ‘The Beautiful Elm,’ would be OK, although it’s maybe a little pansy to make a big splash around here. Ha! See what I did there? Pansy? Like elm?”
I put my book on the table and tried to exude an aura of honest indifference, with perhaps a tinge of wounded aggression.
“You don’t talk much. Not a big thinker? I get it. Hard to do a lot of thinking if you don’t talk much. Now, me, I got ideas. Hundreds of ‘em.”
The barista drifted out onto the porch with a cup and saucer. She said, “Peanut?”
“That’s me!” He reached for the cup and took it greedily before she could set it down. He gave the coffee a deep sniff and sat back, sighing contentedly.
“That, my friend,” he indicated the cup with a wave of his hand, “that is the stuff. Espresso and brown sugar. And a little secret.”
He winked and pointed a conspiratorial finger into the cup, a man divulging a secret to an admiring throng that was thunderously absent from reality.
“Oat. Milk.”
He seemed to expect a response, so I gave him none.
“Yes, sir. I hate that hippy crap usually, but in this one case, the secret is the oat milk.”
He became expansive. “Now, I mean, you could use regular old cream, or frothed milk, maybe, but the oat milk, that puts a little nuttiness in, and with the brown sugar, it’s like a hot oatmeal and a cup of coffee, and it’s just-“ he paused his oration to put the tips of his fingers sloppily to his lips and blow a sort of wet raspberry. The barista’s eyes and mine widened, realizing we were seeing the emoji version of Calliope Syndrome playing in a real-time tragedy before us, this fool clearly not understanding how a chef’s-kiss might occur in the cold light of reality.
She turned, concealing a smile and a laugh. I was still stuck at the table with this blister.
Once she was safely inside, he pointed in the direction she’d gone with his thumb. “You see her? Terrestrial type, not really up with the latest thought, but that’s to be expected. Not in her nature. See, it’s all about the shape, the outward curve and the flat center. You look confused; I’ll explain.”
Until he was knee-deep in the ugly mud, I didn’t realize what he was doing, and by then it was too late for me. He had put the idea across the table and the bell had been rung. I’ll save you from the specifics, but he proceeded to expound a theory dividing, or perhaps ranking, women into degrees of Terrestrial and Celestial temperament, based solely on the shapes of their rear ends. His cranio-rectal exposition went on for quite some time, going into such detail it became clear to me that this was more than a mere passing idea. Realization dawned: this was one of the core tenets by which this human person lived his life, staring at posteriors while honestly believing he was observing the essence of the human soul.
“Peanut.” I interrupted his technical expostulation of the general rejection of the terrestrial as intrinsically valuable in modern film and television, based upon his inventory of the seats of pants in modern media. He paused, but with an eye toward ignoring me.
“Peanut,” I said again. “Stop. You make things too easy.”
This had the intended effect of removing a trestle or two from the tracks and necessitating a pause for maintenance.
“When you arrived here, I had an idea of your character. Now that we have plumbed the depths of your available resources, I feel I have done you no harm in my initial analysis.”
He brightened, inexplicably. “Well, thank you so much. That’s mighty wide of you.”
“I assure you, it is not.” His face fell for the briefest of moments, but the natural helium filling the space behind his sinuses quickly buoyed him back up.
“Well, there’s no cause to be unfriendly.”
“If you cannot bear the faults of a friend, you make them your own, having not the charity to correct them.”
“Well, I suppose that’s alright, then.”
I stared at him. The locusts buzzed and the birds shouted of love and violence from the park a block away. The sun beat down on the moment and the trees strained to hear. The selvages of reality popped and fell away, leaving the weft to wriggle.
“Peanut,” I tried again. “If you build the walls of your personality with these callipygian bricks, your true nature will show in every curve of the building.”
He beamed. The day unraveled entirely. I saw two futures unspool. In one, he and I spent the remainder of the afternoon here, chipper mundanity nattering into a pit of perdition. In the other, I evacuated, leaving my perch and seeking solace elsewhere. Logic and wellness dictated the necessity of the second, but the inexorable tide of social nicety would allow only the first. I had only just resigned myself to my fate when he demonstrated a third option.
He ran a searching finger around the bottom of his empty cup, then stuck it into his mouth with a self-satisfied slurp. “Well! Can’t sit around here jawing with you all day. Gotta get back before they miss me at the hospital.”
He stood, dusted his pants, eructed mildly, and left in an undignified cloud.