THE COCKER SPANIEL

 

 

Vince is back to his usual curt self at the beginning of his morning call. She makes the mistake of mentioning the news she heard on the radio suggesting that perhaps the hospitals will not be so overwhelmed here because of the early social distancing in California.

“That’s a lie,” he says. “Whoever says that is not seeing what I’m seeing. Everybody’s in such a hurry to have this thing over that they’re starting to tell fairy tales. Listen, Pina, it’s not going to be over. It’s not going to be over for a very long time. And when it’s over it won’t be over.”

This isn’t the kind of logic she needs at this time in the morning, but she isn’t about to argue with him, despite wondering how he can be working such ridiculously long hours if the cases in the Bay Area have begun to flatten out. He’s at Kaiser, not San Francisco General.

“Trump closed the country down late,” Vince says, “and now he wants to open it early.”
“But he’s got a lot to brag about, Vince. We’re now number one in the world in Coronavirus cases and deaths.”
“Very funny.”
“I wasn’t trying to be funny.” Time to change the subject. “Hey, your friend Charlie just dropped off a dozen rolls of toilet paper.”
“A dozen rolls—you’re in business.”

When in doubt, talk about toilet paper. “From his private stash. Apparently he’s one of those toilet paper hoarders we’ve been hearing about. I think after the plague’s over all the toilet paper hoarders should have their head’s shaved like the French who collaborated with the Nazis.”
“Well, at least Charlie’s is sharing.”
“I had to shame him. I told him I was down to my last roll.”
“Were you?”
“Yes. I went to Whole Foods and Safeway the other day, and nada. The two things I noticed that were completely gone—toilet paper and tortillas.”
Vince chortled. “Come on, Pina, you weren’t thinking of wiping your ass with tortillas, were you?”
”Oh, Vince.”
“Listen, I’ve got to go. But I’m happy for you, really happy for you about the toilet paper.”
“Up your ass, Vince.” Every now and then she can’t help stooping to his level.

 

Pina takes a ride over to Glen Ellen. She needs to get out of the condo. For days she doesn’t realize that she’s been suffocating, not so much from the place, as the endless hours of not being able to escape herself. Everything else has departed, but not the worm of daft theories, questions, and fantasies that keeps circling her brain. Her doppelgänger hovers like an insufferable saleswoman peddling chatter for chatter’s sake, warped nonsense. The churn of her mind, with its filigree of foreboding, is an endless loop. You’d think she were a philosopher, given how often she asks herself who she is. The thing she’d really like to find is her soul.

Of course, she misses physical touch, more than she thought she would. Even if they only make love once a week, she and Vince cuddle every night. His body generates such heat she clings to him. Their bodies understand intimacy that is absent elsewhere in their lives together, which is why she’s started to realize that she prefers Vince sleeping to awake, which is quite a commentary on the state of their relationship.

As she drives through Sonoma to the west, Pina feels a flush of giddiness to be going somewhere, even if it’s only a seven-mile ride to another empty town. The weather is splendid—it will hit seventy today—and she’s zipped all the windows down. She dials the radio to the classic rock station and blasts Janis Joplin singing “Piece of My Heart,” followed very nicely by The Stones “Wild Horses.”

Along with the huge vegetable market, she’s cheered to see the bodegas open in Boyes Hot Springs. However, nobody is out walking in an area usually busy with foot traffic. A sign outside El Molino Central, the best Mexican spot in the area, says that the restaurant is now offering curbside carhop service. She loves the sound of carhop service. When are they going to bring back drive-in theaters?

Years ago, she’d heard from a friend at work how good El Molino was, but she had the hardest time getting Vince to have a meal there. “Why go to an over-priced shack in Boyes when we have so much good Mexican in the city?” He changed his tune as soon as she pointed out that El Molino made the Chronicle list of best 100 restaurants in the Bay Area. Maybe she’ll swing by one of these days for a little carhop. She could go for the red mole poblano chicken or the three-cheese chile relleno.

Pina drives through Agua Caliente, where Vince used to swim as a kid, and past the bodega that makes the great barbecue chicken that you can smell from a half mile away. Nothing’s cooking outside today. Now she heads through a few miles of open vineyards. She can see small leaves starting to burst off the recently dormant vines, but there are few mustard flowers left, growing in the fields, although scattered rose pushes are blooming along the edge of the road.

She waits for the green arrow to turn off to Glen Ellen. That’s when she begins crying. She didn’t think she would this time. Glen Ellen was Marco’s town. He’d started reading Jack London when he was a kid, and went on to read just about everything London wrote. Marco loved hiking at the state park named after London. He insisted each time that they take the short walk to Wolf House, before beginning a more rigorous hike through the park. When they first visited Wolf House, London’s twenty-eight room dream mansion, you could scramble among the ruins—Marco loved climbing the stairways and turrets—but later they fenced it off. Marco was disconsolate the first time he encountered the fencing. “It’s like going to the zoo, without animals.”

There were different theories about the cause of the fire that burnt Wolf House to the ground just before its completion. Marco had read a report on a forensic investigation of the fire that concluded that it had ignited in the massive kitchen, which had just had linseed oil applied to the wood shelving, and that it may have been caused by incidental combustion. Pina preferred the popular theory, which suggested that workers disgruntled with London ignited the blaze.

Personally, she found Jack London a boor. He may have been a great adventurer and facile writer, but he was also a racist, narcissist, and dipsomaniac. She never let Marco know how she felt. For him, it was something like hero worship that started when he was a boy.

Pina loved the village of Glen Ellen, though. That was something they shared. She even liked drinking whiskey at the London Saloon, where the man supposedly drank, even though this establishment, with its long oak bar, was a rebuild of the original that, too, had burned down. She’d read London’s story “To Build a Fire,” in school, about some dolt traipsing through the Yukon, unable to make a fire. The fires did not elude London.

Marco wanted to buy a second house in Glen Ellen, which had been a hippy town back in the day. Now, it was way too pricey and they could never afford it. They came up every year for a week and stayed at the London lodge, hiked in the state park, hit wineries, good restaurants, and loitered in the saloon.

She drives past now, thinking to pull over and have a walk around the small center of the village, but instead bears right up into the hills, growing nostalgic as she pauses by Benziger, the family winery, the welcoming grounds which she and Marco adored. Benziger farms biodynamically, a designation she’s never quite understood. The copywriters, however, found a brilliant way of describing the earth-friendly product: a wine with both character and conscience. Personally, she’s never met a wine with a conscience. An insectary thrives on the property, breeding the bugs that kill the vine’s pests. Does an insectary exist, she wonders, which could breed bugs to prey on the pestilence plaguing the planet? That’s what the pharmaceutical firms are after.

She drives further up the twisting road to the state park gate. A park ranger in a green uniform, wearing a yellow homemade facemask with playful cat whiskers, indicates, by windmilling his right arm that she needs to turn around. Damn. She knew the park would be closed but she hadn’t expected the ranger. She wanted to walk up to the ruins of Wolf House and have a good cry. She thinks of making a case for exemption just like the journalist Rambert in The Plague. I’ve come from a long way . . . my late husband adored this place. . . but, obediently, she follows the ranger’s direction.

On the way back through the village, Pima pulls to the side across from the saloon. She tries to gaze through the front glass, imagining that she can see Marco sitting at the polished bar, she beside him. Marco never got polished himself. She used to joke that watching him nurse a tumbler of whisky and water all night is what drove her to drink. But he was good company with his boyish grin and all the attention he paid her. He truly seemed to enjoy refreshing her drinks, and said, “I don’t know how you can go on effortlessly drinking without ever getting smashed.”

“You just can’t tell whether I’m smashed or not, Mister.”

She loved flirting with him, straight through their dozen years together. He was so beautiful with his olive skin and blue eyes—a northern Italian beauty. When she purred at him he’d be shy at first, bunching his full lips modestly. Then, slowly, he got bolder. He liked telling her how lovely she was and describing each of her features as if he were crafting the Song of Songs. Despite being a physicist, he had the sensibility of a poet. She always figured that was the Italian in him. Maybe his strategy of plying her with drink was to get her to relax her resolve not to have children. Poor Marco. She may have liked having his child; she just didn’t want to care for it. A barren woman, but not frigid, fully sexed, always raring to go, an apparent contradiction that’s never bothered her. Let people think what they will. Better this way than to be frigid with a brood of kids.

With that settled, Pina checks for traffic and puts the car in drive. Before she really gets going, a cocker spaniel, from out of nowhere, leaps in front of her. She can’t be going ten miles an hour, but she hits the breaks a beat too late and clips the poor beast in its hindquarters. The spaniel is spun around in an imperfect one-eighty, and hobbles back the way it came, ringing the air with the horrible squealing yelp of primal betrayal that only a wounded animal can make.

Pina gets out of the car. The cocker spaniel is long gone, even in its compromised condition. One day a fox dashes past her; now a dog can’t quite get by. Is she on her way to a head-on collision?

There appears to have been no witnesses. She looks around to find someone, anybody. She needs to tell somebody that she’s sorry. The dog is still yelping in the distance, or is it her addled mind that’s creating the echo? She stands beside her car, crying. A young couple, both in facemasks, walks by and regards her with indifference.

 

When she drives up to the condo, she sees that they’ve almost finished plowing the fava beans in The Patch, they being one guy on a tractor, his face masked in a red bandana, for dust rather than Coronavirus.

The favas had gotten so high, lustrous in the midday sunlight, and now they were plowed beneath the skin of earth, leaving only green stubble on the surface. Pina took pleasure in looking out over the field of favas and will miss them. Pretty soon the real crops: onions, potatoes, peppers, and early girl tomatoes will be rising out of the earth. She parks the car and walks over to the fence at the field’s edge to watch as the man on the tractor carves the last furrows.

 

By the time she gets upstairs, she’s wrecked and proceeds to get more wrecked after fast-sipping a second dry martini. She is all sorrow and mewling. She killed a cocker spaniel, or at least maimed it for life, because of her distraction and carelessness. Even today, taking a field trip, she couldn’t get out of her head.

Tear-sodden, she falls asleep in a deck chair, and wakes from a dream that she wants to capture with whatever shadowy memory of it remains. She’s chilled and goes in for a sweater.

As often happens to her in dreams, she’s walking rapidly in one direction or another trying to remember where she parked her car. But now there are men in hazmat suits prowling the streets. They are lugging large canisters marked with heads and crossbones. The men do not seem extraordinary to her. She’s on a mission and keeps switching directions. Where the hell did she park her car?

Funny, she’d heard a story the other day on NPR about a website that collects people’s plague dreams. Everybody is having them, but she’s stuck with the same old dream, trying to find her damn car. Sometimes in her dreams, amid her manic, speed-walker chase to discover where she’s parked, she relies on one of Vince’s favorite quotes to wake herself. It’s from Terry Southern’s novel Blue Movie, in which the porn actress asks, plaintively, “Who do I have to fuck to get out of this movie?”

Pina warms a bowl of yesterday’s vegetable soup and makes some toast. All she wants to do is plunge into a warm bath and read a few pages of The Plague, with a snifter of cognac on the side table.

While she is in the bath, the phone rings. Who in the world wants her at this hour? Vince’s midnight call is not for hours. Before getting into bed she checks the message. It’s Charlie. “Pina,” he says—and only says it once—“I hope you had a good day.” Yeah, right. “I was thinking . . . well . . . I have a modest proposal to make. Call me when you have a chance.”