THE SPIDER
Pina dashes some Irish in her coffee as she heads out to the deck. It’s a warm sun at ten. There will be wonderful dry heat today. At the rail with her coffee she notices the spring leaf bursting, in sheets of light green lace, on the long row of Osage trees, straight across. They’re beautiful trees—thirty odd feet high, with twisting boughs. She wonders when they were planted. Up a lane they make a good windbreak and property fence.
Vince told her that the Indians made prized bows out of the branches and tomahawk handles from the denser wood. She’d never heard of an Osage tree. The fruit is what attracted her. Late summer they look like huge yellow apples or round pears, but when they begin dropping on the street in the fall, they have a deformed human quality; they’re sweaty, and dimpled like brains.
At first she thought they were breadfruit, which can be turned into gruel, but these Osage oranges, are inedible, ceremonial like the Clydesdales down the street. She used to pick up a sack of them from the street and bring them back to the city—nine ugly yellow brains aligned, according to stature, atop the backyard fence.
After a half an hour in the sun, Pina has a trail of sweat on her forehead. She wants a cool bath. Vince can’t understand this pleasure. “What’s the point of a lukewarm bath? Baths are for the hottest water you can stand.” She even likes a cool bath at the beginning of a hot day.
Pina spots the spider as she bends to turn on the water. She’s surprised by its size—much bigger than a house spider should be. It’s so large she can see the bristling of the hair on its legs. Her first thought is to crush the spider and flush it down the toilet. Or maybe she’ll scald it in hot water from the shower, see if it can scamper away in time to save its life. The old torturer in her has returned. As a child, running with the Eichorn brothers, she became a ruthless assassin. They’d find slugs and garden snails and salt them until they sweated to their terrible deaths. She also liked gathering bees in jars of sugar water. You had to be brave to put the lid on the jar, filled with drunk, buzzing creatures, but if you pulled it off, you were the one who got to shake the jar until all the bees had drowned.
This spider is quite a stately character, thoroughly at ease in the middle of the white porcelain tub. She, too, appreciates the coolness of the tub, and why not? The spider is in no hurry to go anywhere. Ah, such languor. Pina is sorry to disturb her. She kneels beside the tub and gets a better look at the creature, standing so high on all eight of her elegantly bent legs. She tears off a few sheets of Charlie’s precious toilet paper, deftly captures the spider, and drops her on the deck, where she scrambles away, with at least the majority of her legs intact. Come on back in if you like. Pina runs a cool bath and slips into it with a shiver.
She and Charlie meet at noon on the bike trail. She’s wearing a pair of blue and white striped shorts with a tie, a white cotton blouse, a straw hat, and a N95 mask. Charlie, hatless, is in green cargo pants and a tee shirt advertising a restaurant in Fairfax called Gestalt Haus. He wears a beautiful mask made, it appears, from African fabric. Pleated, with a drawstring, it’s clearly of superior design.
Charlie greets her with a wave and she waves back. They both have their lunch in a bag.
“I love your mask. Where did you find it?”
“I made it. In fact, I have a few masks for you which I forget to bring.”
“You sew? You have a sewing machine?”
“Of course.”
The amazement never ends.
Charlie’s idea is to walk east to the end of the bike trail, up Fourth Street to the top of the hill, across Brazil, and back down Gehricke Road toward Sebastiani Winery, where they’ll eat their lunches along the stone wall.
They stroll single file along the trail, Pina in the rear, just far enough behind that she can read the text on the back of Charlie’s Gestalt Haus tee: The French Laundry of Sausage. That amuses her and she realizes that Charlie chose the shirt this morning in order to amuse her.
Up Fourth, Charlie goes out into the street so they can walk together at the required distance. They stroll along the vast grounds of Casa Sebastiani, with its twin baby-faced lions out front, meant to look malevolent, and Italian cypresses lining the driveway. The stone mansion, largely obscured from street view, sits atop a grassy knoll, and suggests a Tuscan villa. On one of the middle terraces a wedding cake fountain shoots water toward the sky.
She faces Charlie. “Vince says this place has six bedrooms and rents for $2,500 a night. Not now.“
“Nope.”
“Does the Sebastiani family still own it?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Looks like the family made a good dollar on their wine.”
“Yep.”
She’s not seen Charlie be so laconic.
When they reach the top of the hill and turn down Brazil Street, Pina stops; Charlie follows suit.
“Is there something wrong? You’re so quiet, Charlie.”
He shakes his head. “Just happy to be with you.”
They look at each other a long moment. It’s true—his blue eyes are twinkling above his mask. Pina steps closer to him and he doesn’t back up. That’s all she needs. She’s not going to stop until she touches him. And yet, she’s frozen, two feet off the curb, three feet from him. He smiles at her and she smiles back. They stay like that for a glazed moment. Then he reaches out his hand, and she takes it. There it is—the first time she’s been touched since she and Vince hugged goodbye six weeks ago.
Charlie’s hand is warm but not damp. She might have dropped it if it had been damp, but now she holds on, and they turn together to face down the street.
There’s nothing to say, absolutely nothing. They start walking again, her hand in his, or is it, his in hers. It hardly matters. Holding hands—a sweet buzz tiptoes all the way up to her breast. Their arms swing in the air together, as if they are on their way somewhere, as if they might fly.
Pina sucks air to her diaphragm and counts it on the way out, no trace of asthmatic breathlessness. Who knows what it means, holding a man’s hand in the middle of a plague? She tells herself to stay in her body. Stay in the warm air. Stay with the hand that’s holding hers, whose hand she’s holding.
There was a boy named Reuben, her high school boyfriend, with whom she loved to hold hands. Ruby—that’s what everybody called him—wasn’t like other boys. He’d hold hands with you as long as you liked. She and Ruby made love sometimes and it was never very good. Ruby didn’t have much control of himself and would get frustrated. Afterwards they lay together and held hands. That was the first time it mattered and this, the first time it’s mattered since.
“Warm,” Charlie says.
She’s so happy for his single syllable; it brings her back. “Yes, quite warm.”
She and Charlie know not to discuss the details of their lunches. They already have a history together and no longer need to go on like a pair of badgers. Instead they’re bashful, if that’s what you’d call it. They chew their food in neat little bites like kids at camp with a crush on each other. She’s so pleased with herself for not filling the silence.
Back on the bike trail, they go single file again, no more handholding. They step aside for people with dogs, people without, some sans masks, some with. She hears snatches of conversations she’d like to banish: Lysol injections; toilet paper out on Eight Street East; Tuesday night market not going to be in the park. Everybody looks like an alien to Pina. She’s savoring something they can’t imagine.
When they arrive back at the condo complex they again face each other. You’d think they’d just made love.
“Charlie, Charlie, Charlie,” she says. “Ciao.”
“Ciao, Pina.”
She sits out on the deck, with the summer volume of haiku, as the evening cool descends. There’s a section in the book that Blythe calls “The Coolness.” It quite logically follows the section called “The Heat.”
Shiki, the last of the great haiku poets, according to Blythe, has this one:
The coolness
A crab climbing in a pine-tree
In the rain.
She loves the delicacy and resonance of Buson’s:
The voice of the bell
As it leaves the bell,
The coolness.
And then there’s Issa’s:
I have nothing at all,
But this tranquility!
This coolness!
That’s what Pina wants—to distill the coolness and somehow internalize it as she proceeds through this madness and, perhaps, into the heat of love.