THE TURTLE

 

 

He calls in the late evening after she’s gotten out of the bath. She’s on the leather sofa, her legs folded under her, wearing a long corduroy shirt of Vince’s.

Charlie asks after her, seems concerned. She tells him that his mother’s remedy worked.

“I’m so glad. Now, since you’ve used the word, I should tell you that my mother had a lot of remedies. She came from mountain people in West Virginia and led my sisters and me through a do-it-yourself childhood. I credit her with my becoming a nerd and engineer.”

She’s amazed how much easier it is to listen to Charlie than Vince.  His voice is melodious and not freighted with an attitude of having been wronged like Vince’s. She’s also pleased that Charlie’s kicked off the conversation without referencing their aborted lunch. If she didn’t know that something more was happening she’d think they were old friends.

“Yeah, I was the kid you couldn’t get out of his room,” he says, “always building something. My old man wasn’t around much and my mother had no remedy for his drinking. She had a closet full of old wives’ tales, though. Swallow a piece of gum—it’s going to stick in your stomach for seven years. Everybody eats eight spiders a year in their sleep. That one really spooked me when I was a kid, and one of my sister’s, Betsy, used to tease me at the dinner table: ‘Maybe Charlie’s going to swallow a spider tonight.’ I was fascinated with the number. How did the ninth spider know not to enter your mouth? Nope, he’s already had his eight this year.”

Pina pictures Charlie as a boy, curly headed with a yellow pencil stub propped behind his ear and a magnifying glass popping out of his shirt pocket.

“So, you were the only boy?”
“Yes, the only boy, and the baby.”
“How many sisters?”
“Three.”
“And they adored you.”
“How could they not?”
“Hush,” she says, and wonders if he can tell how much affection she feels for him. “But this wasn’t in West Virginia.”
“No, no. L.A. San Gabriel Valley. Rosemead.”
“You actually grew up in a place called Rosemead?”
“Hey, don’t malign my hometown. It’s not like it’s in the middle of nowhere. It’s only three miles to Temple city. And you’re from San Rafael.”
“Did I mention that?”
“I don’t believe so, but Vince did when he introduced us.”
“You have a good memory.”
“I wrote it down, Pina.”
“Get out.”
“And you’re an only child, my notes tell me.”
“You’re bad, Charlie.”
“You know that Ellington song, ‘I’ve Got it Bad, and that ain’t Good’?”

She’s doesn’t want to go there. There’s no reason at all to go there.

“How’s Roscoe?” she asks.
“He was very upset to miss you. At lights out, he practically cried, ‘Pina, Pina, Pina.’”
“You’re such a liar, Charlie.”
“You’ll see.”

With the phone in tow, she heads over to the liquor cabinet and drains what’s left of the bottle of Courvoisier into her snifter.

“What are you drinking, Pina?” Charlie asks.
“You could hear that?”
“No, that was telepathy.”
“You’re spooking me, Charlie.”
“Well, you’ve already spooked me, Pina.”

Time to change directions. No need to keep going this way. This will not take either of them anywhere good. “So the world as we know it,” she says, “is turned on its head.”

“What exactly are you referring to, Pina?”
“The Plague.”
“Ah, the Plague.”
“Did I mention that I’ve been reading the Camus? The parallels with our time are chilling, but when you realize that that plague only takes place in a single city, Oran, while ours stretches across the globe, the novel begins to feel a bit tepid.”
“Yes, this is worse than science fiction, but Camus was writing allegory, not science fiction.”
“Something that’s begun to disturb me about the book,” she says “is that Camus doesn’t make a single reference to Arabs or Berbers or Muslims, whatever they are. It’s like he’s disappeared them. They do not exist. So this is Algeria with only European types: doctors and journalists, priests and bureaucratic functionaries. Catholic churches. He tosses in a Spaniard here and there, shopkeepers and smugglers, for a bit of exotica. Of course, I’m only halfway through the book. Maybe the Arabs come on strong in the second half.”
“Don’t count on it,” Charlie says. “It’s a pied noir novel. You’re seeing Algeria through the eyes of a colonizer.”

She just lets herself taste the cognac on the tip of her tongue. Pied noir. Black foot, maybe for the black shoes of the French soldiers. “As a reader, does that make me a colonizer or the colonized?”
“I think you’re like a U. N. observer.”
“Is that good?” She doesn’t know what anything means any more. “Charlie, how are we supposed to live our lives in the face of all this?”
“You mean the pandemic?”
“I mean everything. How do we live with others? What if we want to hold somebody in our arms?” There, she’s said it. He isn’t quick to answer. Maybe he shouldn’t.
“I think that if we are true to our feelings and ourselves,” he says, finally, “then we take a chance.”
“That’s a good answer, Charlie. And what if we get sick?”
“That’s the chance we take.”
“The only one?”
“There’s the chance you’ll lose Vince.”
“That may be a choice.”
“Hmm,” he says.

She can’t believe they’ve said all this, no longer even speaking in code. “You know I’m feeling really tired now, Charlie. Very tired.”
“Goodnight, Pina.”
“Ciao.”

 

Last night she did go to bed before ten, but Vince’s phone call woke her at midnight. He said nothing about not calling in the morning and she didn’t ask. Maybe that’s how their relationship will devolve—the twice a day calls will become daily, then weekly, monthly, and not at all.

He wanted to talk plunging oil prices, something she doesn’t give a flying fuck about. She turned the volume down as he blathered: “The benchmark price on a barrel hit minus 37 on Monday. There’s no place to put it. They have to pay to get rid of it.”

She asked if they ‘d pay her to fill up her car, but he didn’t even hear her and kept yammering: “They got oil tankers up and down the coast from Long Beach to San Francisco Bay, with twenty million barrels, and no place to go. It’s enough oil to fuel a quarter of the globe, and there’s no way to suck up the fucking glut.” Vince’s voice was agitated, nearly hysterical.

Meanwhile she tried to get a handle on what these factoids really meant. The world, now in shutdown mode, demands so little oil that it’s drowning in its former glut. You had to admire the justice and inverse beauty of that. She finds it cosmically satisfying. And what are the consequences of this? Some oil speculators will go belly up and people in the Himalayas get to the mountains for the first time in their lives.

It turns out that Vince is heavily invested in oil. She should have known that his passion for the subject hadn’t risen out of neutral interest. Clearly, Vince is not a U. N. observer on the issue.

He said, “I’m directly and indirectly invested in oil.”

“So you’re directly and indirectly fucked,” she couldn’t keep from saying.

Again, he didn’t call in the morning. They seem to be advancing their tacit dance to dissolution.

 

It’s Earth Day, the fiftieth anniversary. She had just begun toddling in the backyard at the time of the original commemoration. Her father particularly liked the outdoors. They hiked every Sunday at Mt. Tamalpais, Samuel Taylor State Park, or along one of the beaches. You could even visit Muir Woods back then, before the hazard of tourists that have plagued the site in the subsequent years. When she was little she loved hiking like a big girl, especially on Mt. Tam. On those hikes they usually ended up at West Point Inn, the historic lodge, where the old railroad from Mill Valley stopped. That was gone long before her time, but throughout the year you could get fresh lemonade there and, during the summer, a pancake breakfast. Her father liked to say, “Pancakes on the mountain—heavenly.” He said it so often during those years that she and her mother joined in for the last word. That may be her favorite childhood memory—the little family of three on the porch of the West Point Inn, high in the mountain woods, pronouncing the word heavenly.

Pina read an article about a place in town to hike, in the Sonoma Index-Tribune­­­—what an uninspired name for a newspaper in so beautiful a place. Why not the Valley of the Moon Light, like the Pulitzer Prize winning Point Reyes Light?

Fryer Creek starts just south of Whole Foods. She takes a narrow packed- dirt path off Second Street West that looks like it leads somewhere. It’s supposed to be a native restoration site. The creek is on her left and in no time at all it turns into swampy grasses and then high water with large piles of branches. She feels like she’s on a Bayou hike out of New Orleans. Ducks, in ones and twos, swim by. No alligators here, but she spots a mallard hiding in the reeds.

There are beavers in the creek, the article noted. She wants to see one, but they happen to be nocturnal creatures. She notices a couple of large trees they’ve brought down. The trunk of one has a gaping ax-like wound, miraculously engineered by the beavers. From the one article she’s read, she has a fount of information about beavers: they are rodents and build dams because they like flat waters to more easily defend themselves against predators. Unlike humans, beavers are naturally monogamous, mating for life.

She reaches the end of the narrow dirt path and sees that the trail broadens and is paved. But before continuing she sits on a bench facing the afternoon sun, imagining someone snapping a picture of her and applying the caption: Earth Day sun worshipper. She thinks of Charlie, sitting amid his blossoming citrus. She hopes that by now the sillage from her Ylang 49, with its flush of gardenia, has dissipated. Charlie—aside from the possibility of illness, what chances will he be taking?

The paved trail is quite populous. Folks with and without masks, do their best to create the phantom six feet whenever she approaches. She is unmasked today, vulnerable to both disease and love.

The creek and trail bend left and she sees something she hadn’t expected—a large turtle, climbing from the water and up a side bank. She wants to get closer to see its little head, but doesn’t want to scare it. Do turtles, covered so broadly by their shells, sun themselves? What does it portend to spot a turtle? Go slowly, she thinks. Stay close to the earth. You will soon be carrying your house on your back. And then, as if the turtle has just fulfilled its function, it slips down the bank into the green-mossed water.