DEER AT DUSK

 

She follows ten feet behind Charlie. Best to leave a little room for sudden stops, even though they are ambling very slowly along the park on the north side of the square. Charlie puts up a hand and she jerks to a stop. Now she’s directly in front of a life size bronze of Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, by a sculptor named Jim Callahan. Vallejo sits at his leisure on a park bench. His left arm stretches across the top slat of the bench while he holds in his right hand an oversized book, which Pina decides is not a bible. Dressed in a three-piece suit with bowtie, but without any military ornamentation—he had been a general—Vallejo looks remarkably relaxed. Beside him, taped to the back of the bench, is a photo of man in a Panama hat, with the words: “Enjoy social distancing and a conversation with Governor Vallejo.”

Charlie turns back toward her and asks, “Do you know about Vallejo?”
“Not much. He founded Sonoma, didn’t he? Before that he was a General in Alta California, I believe, and later before became a governor after the Bear Flag Rebellion.”
“That’s pretty much it. He was a learned man who wrote a five-volume history of his life and, apparently, he was generous toward the native people. They say he was a man who could find common ground with everyone, and that his main legacy to Sonoma was a climate of peace.”

Pina is surprised by Charlie’s earnestness on the subject. Perhaps he is earnest about everything.

Charlie leads her across the street and points out the white bench in front of the old Toscano Hotel. “That’s where we’ll have our lunch. I bet that bench measures well over six feet.”

The white bench disappoints Pina. She was hoping for a mysterious destination, a hidden garden or some like thing. Now she turns her anticipation toward seeing Charlie’s face again. Surely he will have to take off his mask in order to eat his lunch. She stops to read the plaque affixed to the Toscano Hotel. It was built in 1856 on land once owned by Vallejo, but the plaque doesn’t tell her what she really wants to know—when the hotel was last in use. Her disappointment extends to the plaque.

Once they’ve staked out their spots on opposite sides of the bench, which would clearly accommodate a seven-foot man in repose without his edging over either side, she pulls out the sack of mandarins. “I brought these for you, and I also have a spray bottle of alcohol so that you can disinfect the bag if you want.”

“That’s kind of you.” He grabs hold of the mandarins with his purple hands and lays the bag of fruit on his side of the bench. Then he peels off his gloves, which gives Pina a bit of excitement. She hadn’t noticed his hands the time they met at the duck pond. His long tapered fingers are beautifully manicured with bright half moons. He must go for manicures, she thinks; he’ll have to start doing the job himself. Charlie wears no rings, but Pina notices several of his fingers are bent, turning crooked at the knuckles.

Now the moment she’s been waiting for: he takes off his mask. She observes his face a bit at a time as she pulls her sandwich from the bag. It’s such a placid face with blue eyes at peace with themselves and a hint of a smile at the corners of his thin lips.

“What do you have for lunch, Charlie?”
“What do I have for lunch? That reminds me of Frances.”
“Frances?”
“Oh, a children’s story I used to read to my daughter Sally. Bread and Jam for Frances. You don’t know it?”
Pina shakes her head.
“Sally couldn’t get enough of it. You see, the only thing Frances wanted to eat was bread and jam, and her parents, a very wise bear couple . . . well, I’m not sure they were bears, they actually might have been badgers, anyway the badger mom and dad humor their daughter Frances and serve her, as she wishes, nothing but bread and jam.”
Pina is delighted with Charlie’s tone—it’s not the earnestness with which he spoke about Vallejo; it has a more amused quality, befitting its subject.
“One day at school,” Charlie continues, “Frances is going to have lunch with her friend Albert, and asks, ‘What do you have for lunch, Albert?’” Charlie leaps into a little girl voice with that, and Pina, so delighted with how this has come back to her initial query, claps her hands. For a moment, she feels positively girlish.

Now Charlie modulates into a slightly self-important boy’s accent for Albert. “’I have a cream cheese and tomato sandwich on rye bread, and a pickle to go with that, and a hard-boiled egg with a cardboard shaker of salt to go with that, and a thermos of milk, and a bunch of grapes and a tangerine, and a little cup of custard.’ Sally wanted to hear that part over and over, which is why I still remember it. She’d go, ‘Do what Albert says again, do what Albert says,’ and I did and I did.’”

Pina thinks of her father reading her poems when she was little and then, sadly, of all the little girls who didn’t get sweet fathers. Before allowing herself to grow maudlin, she says, “So what do you have for lunch, Charlie?”

He reaches into his bag and begins pulling things out. “I have here three stone-ground crackers spread with goose liver paté, a baggie with carrot sticks, and another with slices of gravenstein apple squirted with lime.”
Pina bursts out laughing. “Tell me, has Albert influenced the way you pack a lunch?”
“Absolutely.”
They eat for a while in silence until she asks Charlie about his daughter.
“Sally, Sally’s a free spirit. Graduated from Humboldt State and went into the cannabis trade. Stayed up there. Now she lives on the Lost Coast, four or five miles from Petrolia, middle of nowhere. But she’s got a guy up there and a dog. That seems to be all she needs.”
“Do you see her much?”
“A couple, a few times a year. We talk a lot; we’re close. I raised her myself from the time she was ten. Her mother ran off with a jazz drummer. Didn’t stay with the drummer for long, but she stayed gone.”

Charlie faces her with a wistful smile and then bites into his last goose liver cracker.

This time the silence feels worrisome. She doesn’t want to fill it, to be one of those people who can’t abide silence. She pretends that, sitting on this white bench, she’s actually in a foreign film, draped in silence, but soon it gets the better of her. “So, does Frances finally tire of bread and jam?”

Charlie’s eyes spark blue. “She does. Her parents had a good grasp of psychology for a pair of badgers. You’re a therapist, aren’t you?”

“A speech therapist.”
A woman in a flower hat walks past them at the edge of the curb. She turns back and says, “You two look cozy.”
“Wonder what she meant by that,” Charlie says.
But Pina does feel cozy sitting on the white bench with Charlie, even at a seven-foot distance.
“So, you work in a school?” he asks.
“No, in a large private practice in the city. Over the years I’ve come to work solely with men. Some have difficulty with swallowing after surgery, others are recovering from strokes, some stutter or have psychological issues that effect their expression.”
Charlie folds up his empty lunch bag. “Why just men?”
“I’m not sure. I like to think I’m a feminist, and I should probably just be helping women gain agency with their voices, but I’ve gotten seduced by the phenomenon of men unable to claim what they want. In the world I grew up in, the men I knew seemed to get whatever they wanted. It’s not true with the men I work with. They’re frustrated, some are heartbroken, but I can often find where they are tender and help them be tender to themselves and learn how to work with their problems. Of course there are angry ones who come in, but I choose not to work with them.”

Charlie lifts his butt off the white bench, apparently in excitement. “That’s so interesting what you say about helping these men be tender to themselves.” Charlie wiggles back down onto the bench. “Sort of apropos of what I’ve been working on, or thinking about—PTSD. People with PTSD are not generally tender with themselves, and we are all going to have deep deposits of it before this is done. What do we do with that much PTSD? The virus will do plenty of physical damage, but the psychological damage is going to create a psychic pollution like we’ve never seen before.”

“Yes, I’ll have many more clients than I can possibly see. Some men will stop talking altogether. I imagine there will be mass paralysis.”
“I think you’ve put your finger on it, Pina.”
She’s excited that he said that even if she isn’t sure what she’s put her finger on.
“We will focus so much of our attention,” he says, “on getting people back to work, starting the economy back, getting folks properly housed—all necessary goals—but I’m afraid we will neglect what we are really going to need: to build a new psychological infrastructure within the struggling communities.”
“Yes, yes,” she says, though she can’t quite wrap her head around the phrase psychological infrastructure.

Charlie stands, again, she thinks, with excitement. She loves his emotion.
“But with psychological matters,” she says, “a global approach won’t work. Psychology is such a personal matter. One size won’t fit all.”
“Agreed.” Charlie, still standing, stretches out his arms. “This is endlessly fascinating, and there is so much more here. To be continued.” With that Charlie pulls the plug and puts on his purple gloves. “But I’m no good if I don’t get my afternoon nap.”

Pina is pissed. She looks at her watch. One thirty in the fucking afternoon and he needs his nap. He has all afternoon for that. Standing there, waiting for her to say something, to release him, Charlie, in his purple gloves, looks like some absurd soccer goalie. She wishes she had a ball, and she wishes she could kick one, because she would launch it right at his head and love to see if he could stop it with his purple hands, the way he stopped this conversation. “Sleep well,” she says.

He nods to her eagerly. “Hope to see you soon.”

Pina gathers her bag and watches him put on his facemask. Now he looks like a hockey goalie.

“Lunch tomorrow?” Charlie asks.

She has nothing more to say.

After dinner, Pina walks east to the end of on the bike trail, past Sebastiani Winery on Fourth Street, and then up Lovall Valley Road. All afternoon she felt both angry and horny. She can’t remember ever juggling the two conditions at the same time. But now, after some mindfulness exercises, she’s pretty much stopped thinking about Charlie and stopped worrying about Vince and missing Marco and her father; she’s stopped musing about her clients and their conditions; her lips no longer move in sympathy with them as they try to form words. She has, in fact, pretty much stopped thinking about any man she’s ever known.

The dusk light is lovely. It shimmers across the wide field of fava beans. The quiet is a balm. The frogs have yet to start up. Everyone is tucked away in their safe place.

As she turns back, she surprises a family of deer munching on wild grapevines, turned to shriveled raisins. The deer jerk away and dash west along the trail, one coming so close to Pina that she feels the draft of its flight. This is closer than any creature’s come to her in more than two weeks. She finds the thought arresting and wants to cry. When will some being, any being, next touch her?

Back home, she leaves a message for Vince: Gone to bed early. Talk in the morning. She wants to sleep tonight, to sleep well. After two generous snifters of cognac, she peels off her clothes. She won’t even bother brushing her teeth tonight. In bed, as she switches off the light she remembers an advisory she saw issued by the New York Department of Health: “You are your safest sex partner.”