I tried to get a little work in with Roscoe this morning but he wasn’t up for it. After Sally woke and departed for the day—where she goes I’m not quite clear—I visited with the parrot. He’s been down, the last few days and has gotten in the habit of greeting me with a “Sorry, Charlie,” pronounced in a sad mumble. I’ve told him many times that he had nothing to feel sorry about, but there seems to be no way of convincing him. He’s clearly been traumatized by Pina’s outburst about him a few nights back. The bird not only commands a vast vocabulary and possesses a sound mind, he has genuine feelings. When I explained that our president lacks all of these qualities, Roscoe perked up. He looked at me sideways he said, “But isn’t that, to coin a phrase, like comparing apples and oranges, Charlie?”

“Indeed. You are incomparable, Roscoe.”

“Merci, Charles,” he said in his birdy French accent, “mais, je suis désolé.”

I realized that there was little hope of working with Roscoe today and, as a balm for his angst, I put on a recording of Anne-Sophie Mutter playing Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor, a piece of music I’ve heard the parrot moan along with.

Pina was contrite the morning after her outburst, saying she was so upset about RBG’s death and the Republican response that she wanted to kill somebody. In the last couple of days she’s shared items from the dark news with me as if reversing herself on the intake of news and feeding me tasty crumbs will mollify me. I’ve explained that I’m not upset with her, and that I perfectly understood her response. What I didn’t say was that the best thing she could do, would be to apologize to Roscoe.

Nonetheless she continues with her morning briefings. Today, while I was out on the deck having coffee, she offered me a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice and said, “We’ve now passed 200,000 dead of COVID and Trump bragged last night at a rally in Pennsylvania that he’s done a great job with the virus.”

I thanked her for the orange juice.

The briefing continued: “The Republicans have enough senators lined up to ram through a radical right judge for the Supreme Court. It won’t be long before we’re back to coat hanger abortions in the alley.”

When I shook my head in dismay, she changed her tune: “But, there may be remedies. If the Democrats hold the house and win the senate and presidency, they can add Supreme Court judges and make Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico into states with two senators each and untold numbers of electoral votes.”

I was impressed with how much news and opinion she’d ingested.

When Pina realized I wasn’t interested in engaging with her news—we’ve done a complete reversal on the matter—she looked around and asked, “Where’s Sally these days? I hardly ever see her. Has she found a job already?”

Or a boyfriend, I thought, and smiled benignly at the mystery.

In a time of such darkness—and I refer to the period since the pandemic began—it’s odd to have pleasant surprises. My first was back in March when Pina reintroduced herself to me at the duck pond. I’ve counted all that’s happened between us, even our rare disagreements, as a blessing. Then Sally, in a time of difficulty for her, came back home, as it were. We have looked each other in the eye and realized what a delight it is to be together in the same town. And just this morning, surprise of surprises, I got a call out of the blue from the poetry priest of Guerneville, Bobby Sabbatini. Sally had mentioned him the night she arrived. He and I have been out of touch for eight or nine years, since just after he was attacked. From what I understand, he and his wife moved out of the area for some years.

Also, to get a phone call from a man with an artificial voice is beguiling, to say the least. Sabbatini was attacked, if I remember correctly, while reciting a long David Meltzer poem. A crazed evangelist, who believed that Sabbatini’s little poetry chapel was a threat to Christianity, fired an arrow at him with a crossbow. The wonder is that the arrow didn’t kill him, but it severed his vocal chords. The would-be assassin had effectively taken away Sabbatini’s voice, but Posey, as he was affectionately known, would not be silenced for long. He managed to get a voice synthesizer, which, in the manner of Roger Ebert’s artificial voice, was fabricated to sound like him with tapes of his former voice. He typed on his iPad and out came a facsimile of his voice, sounding stiff and jagged without any of the sweetness and cajoling magic of Posey’s actual voice. So when the call came through today, I was about to hang up. The voice pronouncing my name sounded like a robot call gone haywire. It existed without breath or the normal rhythms of speech. Then the device pronounced the name of its client: “This is Bob by Sab ba ti ni.”

All I could do was echo what I just heard, in one fell swoop: “This is Bobby Sabbatini?”

“The  one  and  only. How  are you, Char lie?”

“I can’t believe it’s you.”

“Be lieve  it, Char lie. I didn’t    ex ac tly  rise    from  the dead. Did you think  it was  Laz a rus    call ing?”

I must say I was stunned by the mechanical voice and left in a bit of a stupor. I held the phone a good distance from my ear because the voice was so difficult to listen to.

“Have    you  been    keeping up  with  your    po et ry,    Charlie?”

“Yes,” I muttered.

“Re cite some thing  for  me.”

I began in a halting way to recite “The Second Coming.”

The voice cut me off two lines in. “Not  the Yeats,  you’ve  known  that poem  for a hun dred  years. Give me  some thing new  to  you.”

I felt like I was stuck in a confession booth, a place that I’ve never been.

“Have you for gotten that  po et ry is a  liv ing  re lig ion, Charlie? You  have to  keep en gag ing  with  fresh mat er ial or you be come like one  of  the old re lig ions, a par ody of your self.”

I was beginning to forget about my distaste for the mechanical voice—the spirit of Bobby Sabbatini was coming through. “It’s good to hear from you Posey.”

“Yes, I’m  glad  to  have  found  you, Char lie. For give my hec tor ing and this ter rib le ex cuse  for a  voice.”

“How did you find me? I changed . . . ”

“Did  you for get that I was a de tec tive  for twen ty five years?”

“Right.” My mind drifted to Sabbatini’s wife, a beauty, and their young son. Suddenly their names came back to me. “So how are Blossom and Milosz doing?”

“Blos som . . . what   can I   say? She’s   my   true   north. She   keeps me hap py   and more   or   less   sane, which is   not   as eas y as it used to be. She’s been cook ing up a storm as   us ual and is   writ ing a book of   food   poems. Her work ing tit le: ‘Rut a bag as and Oth er Un pop ul ar Pleas ures.’ As   for Mi losz, he’s a nor mal ten year   old, at   least as nor mal   as a   kid of   mine could   be. He’s in to   base ball   and po et ry. His lat est lit er ar y   ex er cise   is re writ ing   fam ous   poems. He   calls them   trans la tions. Frost’s   poem ‘Fi re and Ice’ has   be come ‘ Spi res and   Mice’ in Mi losz ’s   ver sion.”

“But   let   me cut to   the   chase, Char lie.   Here’s the   thing—a friend re min ded   me that   you   were at   In dust ri al   Light and Ma gic for years   and   that one of   your   spec ial ties was ar ti fic ial   sound. I   wond ered if   I could   get you   to look   at my  voice   syn thes iz er   and   see   if   you   could   tweak it in   some   way so that   the   voice   sounds more nat u ral.”

“I’m afraid that may be out of my league, Posey. I’ve never been particularly clever working on other people’s software.”

“Then  cre ate  your  own, Char lie. I  know what  you’re cap ab le  of. The wor ld  of po et ry  will thank you. I ’d  like  to come ov er  to Son om a  next  week so  we can kick  this a lit tle  fur ther  up the road”

I offered Sabbatini a couple of times and he told me he’d firm it up in a few days. What the hell am I getting myself into?

“You re al ize,” he said, “I’m teth ered  to this so ur   voice box  of mine all the time.” He quickly segued to a Kenneth Patchen poem:

THE IMP AT IENT

EX PLOR ER

IN VENTS

A  BOX  IN WHICH

ALL  JOUR NEYS

MAY BE  KEPT.

As glad as I was to hear from Sabbatini, the conversation wearied me and I took a lengthy nap in the short of the afternoon.

After dinner I took a walk by myself. Pina decided to stay back and do some work on a Zoom meeting she has tomorrow. I headed up through the cemetery at twilight and could hear small animals running through the grounds. I was unable to see them, but I had the distinct feeling that they were watching me, that I was the odd-one-out in their neighborhood, rather than the other way around.

I made my way down the main path through the sloping hillside of graves. The gravestones on either side of me, some more than 150 years old, appeared like crooked teeth, due to gravity and erosion. Pina and I have walked through the cemetery numerous times together. We love it for its natural beauty and for the way time and geological processes have reshaped what was once “set in stone.” We are also fond of the sentiment expressed on some of the gravestones that can still be read. And yet we see the cemetery as an anachronism. Pina once asked me what I’d like done with my remains—that’s an appropriate question, even for new lovers, in the time of COVID—and I answered without hesitation, “Send me to the furnace.” Pina, almost cheerful, agreed, “Yes, I want to be ashes as well.”

I strolled down the hill, past the modern part of the cemetery, mostly reserved for veterans, and then made my way towards town along First Street West. I wasn’t looking for Sally exactly, but I thought I might see her in town.

As I walked past the diners outside of The Girl and the Fig, I recalled a time when my father came looking for me. During my senior year in high school, I became distraught after my girlfriend, Rita Sanders, broke up with me. I’d been slow to dating and Rita was my first real girlfriend. One night at dinner with my parents, after weeks of being uncommunicative, they each suggested that I see a therapist. I stormed off from the table, slamming the front door on my way out of the house. An hour later my father found me running around the outdoor track at Lincoln High, which was a good mile from our home. He pretended he’d just been walking by. As I circled the track the third or fourth time since he arrived, he called to me: “Did I ever tell you about the time your mother left me?” I didn’t want to hear about it.

I decided to circle the square and walked south down First Street, past the El Dorado Hotel and Kitchen—the diners outside looked like determined tourists. I was surprised how loud everybody was, especially the men. Oh, what a little drink and braggadocio will do. I took a wide berth around them, stepping out into the street. At the Sign of the Bear, the superior kitchen shop, I looked at the window display, trying to find a gift I could buy for Pina, and then I noticed my own reflection in the glass and half expected to see Sally passing behind me.

I cut through the park to the east side of the square and strolled up the alley beside the Basque Bakery. Loaves of sourdough were on the cooling rack. The tables were full outside of Murphy’s Irish Pub and across the way at Taste of Himalayas. Everybody seemed like locals here. I waved to a librarian I knew from Murphy’s and she waved back and then bent over and whispered something to the two women she was with. I’d once asked the librarian out for a drink at The Fig. We talked for two hours, but now I can’t remember her name. I never called her again. All of the things that could have been.

Out of the alley, I cut across to the north side of the square, and went past the old barracks, where a young couple was kissing on a bench, past Mary’s Pizza Shack, with people at tables and standing in line for takeout, and then, in front of the Swiss Hotel, I saw Sally at a table, holding hands with a guy wearing a mountain man’s beard. I don’t know if she saw me, but I walked right past. I wasn’t going to bother her on the spot.

Instead, I waited up for her after Pina went to bed. It reminded me of when she was in high school, but this was more serious. I wasn’t sure if she’d return, but I heard her singing to herself as she came up the steps, a little before midnight. I could tell that she’d had too much to drink, and met her at the door with my face mask on—she, of course, wasn’t wearing one.

“Sally, you can’t come in.”

“What do you mean, I can’t come in?” she said, too loud.

The drink seemed to have made her face rounder. “You broke one of our rules.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I saw you out front of the Swiss with the mountain man.”

“Mountain man?” she echoed, like it was the most absurd thing she’d ever heard.

“Maybe you should stay in your car until you’re sober. If you need money for a motel I can give you some. I can’t have you coming in here. Pina is high risk with her asthma.”

Sally mimicked me in a nasal voice: “Pina is high risk with her asthma.” How quickly a thirty-year-old could devolve to a teenager. Sally turned, stumbling down a couple of steps before grabbing hold of the handrail. After a pause, she glowered up at me and flipped me off. I walked into the condo with a knot in my stomach, wondering if and when I’d see Sally again.