FAMILIES OF QUAIL

 

She talks with Vince twice a day. He calls too early in the morning and too late at night. It’s the only time he has. He doesn’t want to discuss the hospital and always changes the subject. What he wants to know is how she’s holding up, how hard it is for her. She’s careful not to let him know that she’s doing quite well. She fabricates a sense of fear, a phony abstraction to hide the fact that in some ways she feels more alive than she has in ages. She tells him what he wants to hear most, that she misses him. She says it so many times she’s sure he must see through her. He wants to talk about Trump. Did you hear what he said? Did you hear? “We can’t let the cure be worse than the problem.” That’s what he tweets. How many thousand lives will that tweet cost?

She’d rather talk about the hospital and tries to steer the conversation that way. It’s not pretty is all he ever says, until last night, when clearly exhausted, he started blubbering: Oh my God, the models we’re seeing. Before you know it they’ll turn the fucking convention center into a hospital. It’s doomsday. We’re all going to die.

Today he’s all about money. Six-fifteen in the morning—she hasn’t had her coffee yet—and he wants to talk about money.

“Have you been following the markets?” he asks.
“Vaguely.”
“Vaguely isn’t good enough.”

They keep their money separate. In fact, they’re not actually married. They’ve agreed to call themselves married. Husband and wife. He doesn’t want to have to provide for her. That’s the issue. He has four grown children, two he barely knows. That’s where he wants his money to go. She doesn’t want his money. She doesn’t need it. She put the assets from the sale of her Mill Valley house into mutual funds.

“You need to pay attention, Pina.”
“I’m trying,” she says and waits for him to say that trying isn’t good enough. He doesn’t. She puts the water on for coffee.
“The markets are in free fall.”
“I’ve heard.” She doesn’t tell him that she spoke with her financial advisor a few days before coming to Sonoma, and that she went to cash. The advisor, Scarlet Holmes, a woman she’s known since college, a closet Republican, advised strongly against cashing out. The market is fundamentally sound. We’re near a bottom. You don’t sell at the bottom. That seemed to Pina an old world way of thinking. How long could things stay fundamentally sound when fifty million people might soon be out of work, when whole industries have collapsed?

“The press is blowing this all out of proportion,” Scarlet said.

That was what clinched it for her. The market was already 30% down. She did some quick math in her head and concluded that 70% of something was more than 100% of nothing. She’d let her TIAA CREF pension ride.

Now Vince begins a rambling monologue about the mistakes he’s made in his life. He sounds like a man about to die. She’s never heard his fear like this and doesn’t know how to comfort him. The best she can do is to listen and let him know that she’s listening. She says, I know. I understand. I’m sorry, at regular intervals, and takes a long, satisfying sip of French Roast. She closes her eyes in an effort to feel more compassion for him. He’s making an enormous sacrifice, she thinks, he’s working to save us all. Still, she can’t quiet the thought that Vince is a man who’s neglected his emotional work along the way, and that now it is too late.

At the picture window, Pina watches a family of quail scamper out of the bushes and then back in. And there they are again. Mom and dad are definitely leading the little ones somewhere, but where? The baby quail take three hurried steps for each of mom and dad’s. Her decision not to have children, made at different times in her life, never seemed more right.

She listens to Vince, deep in a swamp of remorse, talk about his first wife, his second, as well as his children, especially the ones he hardly knows. I’m sorry, she says, I know.

For the first six months or so she thought she loved Vince. Maybe she did. They met at Jordan’s Kitchen, a cooking class in SoMa, where they got cozy while preparing the polenta with chanterelles. Then came a whirlwind month of food, wine, sex, and she moved into his Noe Valley house.

Along with a shared love of food and wine, they both had had a spouse die, but Vince’s wife Anita passed away more than twenty years earlier, while her husband Marcello died only three years before she met Vince.

Once the bloom of their romance faded Pina began to see Vince more clearly as he was. No longer in love with him, her thoughts turned practical. Vince remained a good catch and a worthy companion. He was smart, handsome, and solvent, with an abundance of surface charm. Now, it seems, a devastating assessment. She wished that he were more introspective; she missed the man she never knew, who wanted to devote his life to poetry. That was the road not taken. And the path Vince did take was smoothed over by the pleasure he took in himself and his acquisitions: clothes, cameras, snazzy cookware, and women. The first, a neighbor named Robyn, came to Pina herself to confess the month-long tryst. Vince, contrite, promised it would never happen again.  After the next time, with Esti, a crazed resident who called the house at all hours, Pina made him sleep in the second bedroom for three months. That was how long she stopped having sex with him, at which point she realized that she, too, was being hurt by the prohibition. She happened to like sex, even with Vince. The cure might be worse than the problem. Her dentist friend Janice, the one who brought Porn Hub to the dinner table amid the bloody dishes, once said that the only sane way to view a man was as a tool. Since taking him back in her bed, Vince became her tool.

Finally, his maudlin reckoning with himself winds down.

Yes, she says, I know.

He has to get to the hospital. He’ll call again later, before midnight.

As they are about to sign off she can’t resist asking, “So what are you going to do about the stock market, Vince?”
“I’m not sure. I’m torn.”
“I miss you, Vince.”
“I miss you too.”

Not a word of love between them.

Pina strolls across the bike path to the farmer’s market on First Street West and is surprised to see how crowded it is. Long lines weaving from Paul’s Produce and Mike the baker, who’s got his wood burning stove in tow, finishing trays of warm pretzels and bialys. The lines have grown a bit shaggy and people are standing closer to four feet from each than the mandated six.  The crowd is mostly older folks, cheerful, glad to be out on a beautiful Sonoma morning. A month from now a good number of them could be gone.

She’s got a nifty little bag in her purse, but realizes she’s not going to buy anything. Germs everywhere, she fears. So much for her immunity to the terror. She digs her hands deeper into the pockets of her jeans and stands apart to check out the scene. Everybody seems to know each other. Someone in the bread line hollers, as if she’s trying to reach a person on the other side of the moon, “Doris, Doris, if he has soda bread, I’ll split it with you.”

The mushroom man is here as well as the meat vendor who, according to his sign, has a wide variety of steaks and chops, ground beef, lamb, and bacon. Last night she craved a bolognese sauce. Maybe by next week she’ll have the nerve to buy some ground beef.

“So does he have the soda bread?” Moon woman wants to know.

Beside the baker’s oven, the solar man, a real happy guy in his forties, adjusts his silvery panel. Vince said that in the summer he bakes chocolate chip cookies via his solar panel. He’s got a table with solar info sheets beside a toy human skull. She catches him pitching a guy, too old to buy solar. “Yep, four or five years it’s going to pay for itself.”

The old guy gets a little too close to the salesman, and says, “What about the skull?”

“Oh you don’t know? You haven’t seen it?” He grabs the skull in his right hand, juts out his chin, “To go solar, or not to go solar, that is the question.”

Pina is amused but thinks he should quit while he’s ahead because he’s half-laughing at himself. But he keeps going.

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer outages,
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take . . . to take . . .

And now he’s truly laughing as he muffs the line, and from some

forgotten place in herself and, at a ten-foot remove from the man holding the

skull, she broadcasts in an arched voice with measured elocution:

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take up arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ‘tis a consummation
Devoutly to the wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream . . .

A smattering of applause follows from the shoppers. “Sorry,” she says to the solar man.

“Are you kidding? That was wonderful.”

She scoots off after she hears the old guy say, “You’ve picked a funny time to sell solar. The sky is falling.”

Pina isn’t ready to leave the market, not without buying something. She gazes admiringly into shoppers’ faces. They are carrying on quite well. And she too. The meat man has only a small line. She checks her pocket for the bottle of Purell and when her turn comes, snags a vacuum-packed pound of ground beef and another of lamb.

“That comes to $22.50,” says the cheerful young man.

Where, she wonders, does all this good cheer come from?

She hands him twenty-five dollars and tells him to keep the change. After she drops the meat into her bag, and steps aside, she squirts her hands five times with Purell and swishes the gummy liquid between her fingers, she hums like the mother she’s never been to the child she never was, Go away germs, go away now.

Down First Street West, she heads to the square. The meat will keep. She has an egg salad sandwich in her bag. And there they are again, the quail family. Of course, it’s another family, weaving in and out under a disorderly fig tree, navigating their way as well as anybody, in this strange time.

Pina decides, on second thought, that she’ll take a raincheck on the egg salad sandwich at the duck pond, not sure whether it’s the thought of Charlie or the rapacious mallards that turns her toward home.