THE HUMANS

 

 

It’s Saturday morning and she and Charlie decide to walk to the square to have a look at what is open and to see if there’s much tourist frenzy. Along the way they stroll past the Clydesdale farm where the man from yesterday with the feed cap, sits high in his carriage, with the collie on his lap, and drives two horses in broad circles around the dry pasture, raising clouds of dust.

They pause at the magnificent cactus in front of the mission. It’s an ageless edifice of paddles and thorns filled with tempting, unimaginable fruits. On one of her first times with Vince in Sonoma, he tried to pluck out a pear for her. This after telling a cautionary tale about people he’d seen mauled by the notorious cactus for tempting its dangers. Vince caught a few needles in his right hand and she thought she’d have to come to the aid of the old emergency room doctor, but he turned out to be good with both hands. After he got out the thorns he kept licking his fingers and lamented that he didn’t even get a fruit for her. She thanked Vince for the noble gesture, just as she realized that his hubris knew no bounds. Pina was the fruit that he really wanted to pluck; she wonders if she’s been more dangerous for him than the cactus.

At 10:30 in the morning there are plenty of tourists on the square, many do not wear face coverings. She and Charlie jut out onto the street to avoid these culprits. The other day Charlie suggested that she might want to chill a bit about people not wearing masks. “Au contraire,” she said, baring her teeth at him, “I want to get tee shirts printed that read: ARE YOU TOO REPUBLICAN TO WEAR A MASK?

The Swiss Hotel now has tables running up the alley beside it. She thinks about how much Vince loved to sit out front of the Swiss, gorging himself on the fresh bread and hot-peppered olive oil before his bowl of mussels and clams arrived. She doubts that she’ll ever sit at a table here with him again.

The Girl and the Fig has tables running up the side street parallel to their garden seating. The only inside place on the square that she misses is the gorgeous polished oak bar at the Fig.

They cross over to the park to avoid a line of brunchers weaving its way from the door of the Sunflower Café. Charlie leads her to the bench at the duck pond, where she approached him, four months ago now.

“So this is the fateful spot,” she says.
“Little did you know what you were getting into.”

She wants to tell him that she did know, although that would be a lie.

Charlie takes off his mask. “I love you, Pina.” Now he peels off her mask and kisses her.

 

A smart person, she thinks, would not turn on the car radio but stay attuned to the natural beauty around her, as she drives to the city; she flicks on the radio. There’s more talk about last night’s pardon of Roger Stone; news about the White House sending out anonymous opposition research against the administration’s leading infectious disease specialist, Dr. Fauci, because he’s seen as making Trump look bad. Trump wore a large black mask in public for the first time today. Pina figures he’s always wanted to wear blackface. If Florida were a country, the newscaster says, it would be rated #4 in the world in the number of Coronavirus cases, behind the U.S., India, and Brazil. Also, Florida is registering a new positive case every five and a half seconds. And yet, Disney World in Orlando is opening today. With that note of lunacy, Pina switches off the radio. A high silky swath of fog hangs over Sausalito, but the pylons of the Golden Gate Bridge stand clear. Across the belly of water, the city gleams.

 

Majestic Dolores Park, with its terraced hillside, its palm trees, and glittering view of the downtown skyline, was their local park. She and Vince often came over on Sundays to sun themselves, read The Times, and listen to the conga players. Now the grassy hillside and flats have been painted with huge white social distancing circles, most of them occupied. She sees the park from 20th street, the top, at first. The repetition of circles, with humans enclosed, is otherworldly. She starts to count the circles but there are too many. It all seems somehow lunar to her or like the aerial view of potential bombsites. The obedience of all these humans sitting in ones and twos and threes within their satellites is striking; humans, the most flawed of animals, managing to kill ourselves through arrogance and folly.

She finds a spot near the top of the hill with two open circles. She sits in one and kicks off her espadrilles to put in the other circle. Hard to know what the etiquette is on saving circles. Vince will know to meet her up top because it’s where they always perched in the Park. She hasn’t made up her mind what she’ll tell him. Her life these last four months, like most everybody’s, has been an improvisation so there’s little need to change it now.

Now she sees Vince striding up the hill toward her. He’s wearing his maize colored linen coat and a pair of khakis, looking tall and put-together, no slouch in his step.

“Pina,” he calls, a big grin on his face.
“Hey, Vince.” She lifts her shoes out of the neighboring circle.

Despite standing tall and grooming himself, he’s winded when he gets to the top of the hill, and looks played out.

Pina indicates the empty circle.

“You want me to sit in my own? I’ve just been tested.”
“But I haven’t.”
“God’s it’s weird. I can’t even touch you.”
“No.”

Vince, still standing, scans the park a moment. “What the fuck kind of alternative world has this become? It’s like some shit out of Dante.”
“The Inferno only has nine circles.”
“How do you know that, Pina?”
“You told me once, and I even remember what they are. Aren’t you going to sit?”

She looks away as Vince goes through painful contortions to seat himself in his circle. He lands with a thud.

“Hey, I’m alive. Getting healthy.”
“I like your spirit,” she says, although it seems to her that he’s hardly even faking it. “The first circle is Limbo.”
“Yes. That’s the spot for virtuous pagans.”
“Is that how you see yourself, Vince?”
He stretches out a leg. “Certainly a pagan, but scant on the virtues. I think I’m running a deficit on the account.”

“Be kind to yourself, mister.” She smiles at him and forces him to smile back. “You need to be kind to yourself. We all need to be kind to ourselves to get through this.” Of course, she and Vince have very different things to get through, but the advice is universally apt. Pina surprises herself with her bit about kindness. Somehow she’s internalized Sylvie’s words and become an evangelist for the cause. Vince was never about kindness; she knew that from the start, just as she recognized that Vince’s self-absorption would prevent him from really caring about her. Essential to their tacit contract was that they look out for themselves, which is what makes it so easy to walk away from any contract that’s left.

Vince rests his chin on his wrist. The man’s weary. Existentially weary. Suicide weary. Sylvie never had that look. She wonders if the process of recovery and self-reflection, at this late date, has somehow taken more from Vince than it’s given him. Perhaps he’s dug deep enough to hit a reservoir of shame and left himself to wallow in it.

She’s tempted to run through the other eight circles of hell, to make Vince laugh and hear his commentary. She knows them better than she knows the Ten Commandments. After Limbo come Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Anger, Heresy, Violence, Fraud and, finally, Treachery. Taken together, they sound like the attributes of Trump’s resume. Which circle will she land in? Of course, she’d prefer Limbo; she can aspire to being a virtuous pagan.

She smiles again at Vince, whose face is abstracted. For once he is at a loss for words. She owes him something, surely, but she’s having trouble making contact with the man he is now, an addict, perhaps for far longer than she knew. “Are you still writing poems, Vince?”

He shakes his head. “I need to get back to that.”
“Are you okay?”
“Oh,” he says, and yawns for so long that the act might encompass a lifetime of weariness. “Pardon me. I guess you could say that I’m feeling a bit unmoored. Bernard brought me by the house. It’s in nice shape now.”
“How long will you stay in the halfway house?”
“It’s called an SLE, a sober living environment. How long will I stay? That’s to be determined. I can’t imagine staying very long in a house, and sharing a room with two others, when I have a two point five million dollar house waiting for me.”

He can’t imagine staying clean for long either, she thinks. And why does he find it necessary to put a price tag on his house?

“You’re not coming back, are you, Pina?”
“No.” She offers him a taut, closed-lip smile.
“I figured you’d had it with me. I was hoping it could be different, that you would wait for me.”
“Wait for what?”
“My recovery.”
“You’ll need to spend the rest of your life on your recovery. I wish you luck. I really do, Vince.” There’s no need to say anymore. If her decision is selfish, then it’s selfish. It is also the right decision.
Vince’s eyes have grown moist. “We had some good times, Pina.”
“Yes, we did.” She’s a little surprised that he’s giving up so easily, but this may be the new Vince.
“You can stay in Sonoma until you sort out what you’re going to do.”
“That’s kind of you, Vince. I’m going to move in with Charlie.”
“Charlie,” he repeats, before sparking a short laugh. “He’s a nice guy,” Vince says, with a bit of snark in his voice.

“Yes, he is,” she says, and looks ahead at the humans in circles, those gathered in twos and threes sharing intimacies, the solo-circled, like she and Vince, solitary on their islands, reading and snoozing, and having conversations with themselves.

Gradually, Pina lifts her eyes. In the foreground, she sees the tiled-roofed rectangle of Mission High School, with its quirky Spanish Baroque tower. Beyond it, although invisible from her vantage, are the countless tents of the homeless, an architecture of ruin spilling to the eastern edge, where the sun shines on empty office towers—the majestic city and the civilization, tottering.

 

—The End—

March 14 – July 15, 2020