THE LIZARD

 

 

No Vince in the morning. Pina continues to wish him well, and she worries. She pitches herself questions as if her answers might give meaning to the inexplicable. But, of course, she has no answers and the questions are almost all posed rhetorically. The phrase downward spiral sticks in her head. How come you never hear about upward spirals? Once one spirals downward is there no hope of return? Is Vince engaged in a time lapsed suicide, one that stretches out for weeks or months? When did it start? Can the momentum be reversed? How did this become his fate?

Pina decides on a hearty breakfast. Yesterday she had no lunch and only a small salad for dinner. This morning she’s ravished. She gets out the cast iron pan, fries three slices of bacon, reheats some potato wedges, and cracks in three eggs, stewing them sunny side up in the bacon fat. She knows better than to prepare so unhealthy a meal but, damn, how she loves the apron of egg whites crisped in bacon fat, and the three bright yolks staring up at her from the plate like a good-natured Cyclops.

She wishes she had someone to talk to beside herself. A parrot? She recalls the bird’s sober recital, Pak the ca in Haved Yad. No, a parrot is not the ticket. She turns on Morning Edition and listens to a feature about comedians surviving without comedy clubs. One comic sees opportunity in the plague. “When comedians get a glimpse of their own mortality things can get very funny.” Survivors can rejoice in years of gallows humor. She listens to another story about dogs being trained to detect Covid-19. They’re trying everything they can, since the damn government is not interested in providing tests except for themselves. Next there’s a report about the epic job losses, and the suffering for so many. She can’t listen anymore.

Cleaning up after breakfast, she’s back to Vince and his downward spiral. She’s not yet ready to condemn him for his likely tryst with Nurse Reina, and yet she wonders if that was his reason, in the first place, for bundling her off to Sonoma. Is the royal nurse really ill? Dying? Or is Vince primarily concerned with his own exposure? When did he stop being a doctor? How could he do it at a time like this? Is his plan for dealing with the plague an overdose? Oh Vince, why are you doing this to yourself?

Pina doesn’t ask what he’s done to her, because she’s way detached by now. Perhaps she always has been. In a certain mood she holds herself culpable for that, a practiced distance that can freeze a man like Vince, who needs a lot of petting to function. She once asked him if his mother doted on him to such a degree that he’s unable to thrive without the doting. He glared at her and then dodged the question. “What are you getting at? I’m too old to remember.” Finally, he admitted that his mother neglected him. In the end, Pina’s neglected him as well. She’s failed Vince, unquestionably, like she failed others, after Marco. She should have lived alone instead of searching for another Marco. She thought she had learned something about sorrow. She practically memorized Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grief, but she learned little. What she did was adopt a posture, which kept her like an ersatz existentialist, immune to emotion and conversant in irony, which is to say, unable to love anybody or to be loved. It didn’t stop her from trying.

Both she and Vince knew early on that she was the wrong girl for him. After his initial charm faded, she found it difficult not to bust his chops when he spoke about others with contempt, or acted arrogantly, and yet her irony was a first cousin to his contempt.

Over the last couple of years, she and Vince have practiced a jagged tolerance, treating each other with surprising graciousness, more or less like adults. But as Pina wades deeper into middle age, she no longer wants to live out her life with an aging narcissist. Vince’s choices, she thinks, insure that won’t happen. Or are they even choices for him anymore? How can a man lose his will so quickly?

 

Charlie breaks through her malaise with a text that soon becomes a flurry.

Roscoe misses you, is Charlie’s opener. He asked, ‘Where’s Pina, Pina, Pina?’ in his wistful inflection.

She texts right back. Has Roscoe become your id?

He doesn’t respond for a while and she worries she offended him. She makes herself a Campari Spritz, even though she’s newly on the wagon, a resolution that grew out of yet another conversation with herself during breakfast. But a Campari Spritz is nothing—she’ll nurse it into the afternoon.

No, I think not, Charlie replies, finally. I would not entrust my needs and desires to Roscoe.

And yet, you say Roscoe has an id.

Yes, Charlie texts, I’ve spoken with him numerous times about the facts of life. Finally I think he gets it. Most recently, during a session, he said, ‘Roscoe wants a girl.’

You’re shitting me. Charlie.

Well, lets say I’m connecting the dots.

That’s when she goes off script, which is similar to driving off track in a two- wheel drive vehicle, something she’s done more than once to her detriment. Charlie, she texts, I’d like to connect the dots with you.

Let’s do it, he responds.

In time, darling, in time.

 

On the deck’s chaise lounge, Pina is shade-bathing in the buff. It just hit ninety-one degrees, her phone app tells her. She wishes she could swim in the complex’s pool, but it’s closed for the duration. Maybe if she and Charlie become friendly she’ll convince him to go swimming with her sometime at midnight, when the rest of the place is sleeping. Can Charlie be nudged toward a bit of benign rule breaking?

Pina has a new book that she’s enjoying. She finally finished The Plague, which steadily lost interest for her. Along with the book’s beguiling disappearance of the native Arabs and Berbers, the account struck her as excessively patriarchal. Aside from the Dr. Rieux’s sweet mother, the only female characters make the briefest walk-on appearances.

Pina stopped at a late passage, which read: “For the moment he wished to believe like all those others around him who believed, or made believe, that the plague can come and go without changing anything in men’s hearts.” After reading it several times, she stood up in the empty room and shouted, “What about women’s hearts?” Instead of an echo, she heard Vince’s voice, from the recent past, saying, “Pina, aren’t you taking your feminism a little too far?”

She also took issue with Camus’ philosophical posturing, which often seemed forced and pompous, as if he were trying to squeeze every drop of wisdom while observing men’s behavior during a difficult time. She began to think of the narrator’s pronouncements as blood-from-a-turnip wisdom. Camus was thirty-five when he published the book, already a hero of the Resistance, and more sexy than anybody smoking a cigarette. Where does she get off questioning the philosophical bone fides of a man who pioneered existentialism and won the Nobel Prize in Literature? And yet, in this book, he says a lot of things that sound more important than they are and, as is the case with many male writers, he was given a pass.

Pina plucked a few books at random from Vince’s shelves of man novels. Surprisingly, she chose one called McTeague, about a primitive dentist operating in San Francisco in the 1890’s. What grabbed her was the introduction to the book, particularly the sentence: “Has any other dominant character in a novel every been called ‘stupid’ on so many pages?” She liked the idea of reading about a stupid man, since idiot men are so underrepresented in literature, given their dominance in the population. Another thing that grabbed her was the dentist’s fantasy of having a huge gilded molar mounted above his sign, on the corner of California and Polk: ‘Dr. McTeague Dental Parlors. Gas Given.’ The gilded molar struck her as quite an imaginative leap for an idiot.

Just as she finishes a passage about McTeague drinking a pitcher of steam beer on his Sunday day off, the phone rings, a number she doesn’t recognize. She thinks better of dismissing the call. As soon as she answers, she hears Vince’s breathing on the other end. How strange to be so familiar with a man that you recognize his breath from afar.

“Vince?”
“Yeah, it’s me.” His scratchy voice sounds more raw than usual.
“Why the strange phone?”
“I lost mine.”
“You lost yours?”
“Didn’t I just say that?”
“Where are you, Vince?”
“Where am I? That’s the $64,000 question. I don’t know where I am.”
Pina tells herself to stay calm. “Are you in San Francisco?”
“Yeah, San Francisco, but not anywhere you know.”
“Do you know the neighborhood?”

Vince doesn’t answer but he’s still there.

She gets up and walks through the house, putting on one of Vince’s tee shirts. It’s too warm for one of Charlie’s flannels.

“The Tenderloin,” Vince says finally.
“What are you doing in the Tenderloin, Vince?”
“That’s where I live.”
“Why aren’t you staying at the house?”
“I don’t belong there.”
She keeps herself from asking about Nurse Reina. “What street are you on, Vince? What’s the intersection?”
“Why do you always, why do you always ask so many damn questions? You’re persecuting me,” he says, his voice breaking into a screeching wail.
“What’s your intersection, Vince?” she persists.
“I don’t know. How should I know? Leavenworth.”
“Leavenworth and what?”
“Enough already,” he says, and she hears the line go dead.

 

At nine o’clock she texts Charlie: Would you like to go for a swim?

He wastes no time responding, The pool’s closed.

I know, I was going to wait until midnight, but I could go now.

We would get cited.

I’ll take the risk. In the middle of all this caution I need some adventure. Maybe I’ll see you.

She wastes no time and puts on her swimming suit and drapes her light Japanese robe over her shoulders. It would be nice to have a shot of Irish first, but not now. She’s been good, had nothing more than the Campari. She grabs a towel and walks barefoot to the pool.  It’s clear from a sign on the fence that it’s closed due to Covid, so entering through the gate is a clear violation. They haven’t changed the locks so there’s not need to climb over the fence. Is she being selfish to do this? Will anyone follow her lead? Could she be charged with being a spreader like all those kids invading the Florida beaches? She can’t think about that now.

She’d hoped it would be dark but there’s an obnoxious light atop the pool house. So much for atmosphere. She reminds herself that there’s still air and water. Anyway, she’s not going to sit around and wait for Charlie, who in all likelihood is not coming. The night has cooled considerably, but she’s still warm. She slips off her robe and asks herself the point of her suit, and loses that, too.  She goes to the deep end and dives. In a flash, her body is caramelized in the warm chill of water and air. She swims a lap. She was right to do this. How good she feels to have followed her instincts. Her body feels like a teenager’s, not the body of a woman pushing fifty-two.

But now, of course, there’s somebody at the gate. Will it be trouble or more pleasure?

Charlie opens the gate. He’s wearing pretty tan trunks, a print with seashells, and a muted Hawaiian shirt, bamboo on black. He nods to her and takes off his top. She’s surprised that he’s come and very happy. She swims another lap, this time underwater, and then treads water on the deep end. He has a hairy chest, but not too hairy. His legs are beautifully turned. She’s so pleased that neither of them is saying anything. She swims one more lap. Before she gets back to the deep end, he’s in the pool. They keep their social distance.

She swims a final lap, climbs out of the pool, and quickly wraps herself in her towel. No need to be an exhibitionist. “Come on over, Charlie, and have a nightcap.”
“Yeah?” he asks.
“Would you rather wait until the plague’s over?”
Charlie shakes his head.
“Give me fifteen minutes to shower.”

 

Vince’s welcome mat says Get Lost. She’s railed against it for years but has done nothing to replace it. And now, nearly two months into the plague, she steps on it every day. As she climbs the stairs tonight she sees a dead lizard on the mat. Given her history with lizards, it must mean something to have one come home to roost. Perhaps it’s the sign of the plague itself. Before she can admire the creature, it skitters off into oblivion.

She loved catching lizards as a kid. She wasn’t lacking nerve, but it seems like it took her years to be able to catch one. They called them mini dinosaurs and put them in a shoebox with pinholes in the lid. It was common to torture them with live dissections.

She also remembers the time Corky Eichorn said, “I’ve got to go drain my lizard,” and she asked if she could come and see.

He shrugged. “Sure.”

Pina went off dutifully with Corky to the bathroom and watched him pull out his little pinkie penis and pee.

 

Now she showers and puts on Charlie’s red flannel with the bright white buttons. It’s cozy. She’s all wrapped up like a prize and she likes the feeling. How nice it is to wait for him.