This afternoon I stood beside the slightly open door of Charlie’s study for a few moments as he worked with Roscoe. I suspected that he left the door ajar for my benefit. He confessed to me some time ago that he had the room sound-proofed to keep me from freaking out about Roscoe’s extraordinary abilities with speech and conversation. So why did he want me to experience Roscoe’s progress now? Or was the open door simply an accident, a curious happenstance? I happen to hold the belief that there are no accidents.
The parrot repeated the same sequence of sentences four or five times with remarkable consistency, pausing deftly between sentences, speaking with a trained broadcaster’s voice, albeit in a parrot’s register: “Greetings, my fellow Americans. They call me Roscoe. Much as I would like to vote, they won’t allow it. But you can vote. Do it for yourself. Do it for your country. Do it for Roscoe.”
The parrot’s diction was astonishing. Any of my clients would be delighted to speak so crisply. Charlie offered a flurry of encouraging words; his excitement sounded genuine. “You are amazing, Roscoe, an absolute superstar! You can take a break now.”
“What’s the matter, Charlie?” the parrot said, “are you getting tired?”
The two of them carried on with some banter like a pair of old friends and I moved away from the door. It was one thing to listen to Roscoe repeat sentences, as if by rote, but to hear a freewheeling conversation between the bird and his trainer was unnerving, to say the least. As I walked away I wondered if I was hallucinating or living in a science fiction reality. Perhaps, I thought, Charlie had actually created a monster.
The phrase: This is not humanly possible floated through my head, but a more apt question concerned the animal feasibility of what I had heard. I still entertained the notion that Charlie was performing a bit of industrial light and magic; that he’d designed a voice box and somehow managed to install it inside the bird and operate it remotely. This seemed the most likely possibility. I’d pretty much ruled out the idea of ventriloquism; I had seen Roscoe, with my own eyes, speak improbable sentence after sentence, and I’d closely watched Charlie’s lips to see if he was throwing his voice, but I could not detect the slightest murmur of his lips.
It was all too much for me so I made myself a double martini at four in the afternoon and put on Van Morrison’s Back on Top. I listened to his song “Philosopher’s Stone” over and over, and sang a two-line lyric with Van each time through:
It’s a hard road, a hard road, daddy-o
When my job is turning lead into gold.
By the time I downed my super martini and contemplated another, I had decided that Charlie was, in fact, an alchemist who had turned a pet store African gray parrot into a human.
After nursing a rare hangover all morning, I zoomed with two clients this afternoon. The first, Carl Sneed, a man in his late fifties, has battled back valiantly from a stroke. I’ve worked with him going on three years now. When he first came to me he still had difficulty with swallowing and we spent the bulk of our time doing exercises that improved his swallowing. For the first visits his wife Betty sat in during the sessions. They had been high school sweethearts, raised three kids together, and still seemed to adore each other. I encouraged clients to bring their spouses when they were comfortable with the idea, because many of the exercises we practice during sessions can be sustained with the aid of a spouse at home. Betty was also helpful in providing information about Carl’s history and interests that he failed to reveal.
At an early session Betty told me that in Carl’s pre-stroke life he was an ardent singer, both in his church choir and in a popular barbershop quartet, which performed regularly at civic functions. “He has a gorgeous baritone but he won’t even try to sing anymore.”
“I have tried,” Carl said.
“When have you tried?”
“In the shower,” Carl answered. Rather than stuttering, he seemed to occupy a silent fog between words. Three-word replies could fill a moment, in which his lips formed a vacant O between each word.
Betty also let me know that prior to his stroke Carl was a newshound. He read the Chronicle and Times cover to cover every day, and was also a MSNBC addict.
In due time, after Betty stopped coming to the sessions, I got Carl to sing his answers to my questions and he quickly attained another level of fluency. Singing, it turns out, comes from a different part of the brain than speaking. Pretty soon I had Carl sing me a news story during each of our sessions. It’s a practice that has continued as our sessions have resumed via Zoom.
Carl has become quite sophisticated with his lyrical news briefings; he no longer sings a news story verbatim, but synthesizes it and drops it into a well-known melody. Clearly he spends time rehearsing his stories before our sessions. Today Carl sang about this week’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearings for a new Supreme Court Justice, to the tune of “Over the Rainbow.”.
According to
Amy Comey Barrett
she has no opinions,
neither does she have
an agenda,
but she confuses
a person’s sexual
orientation
with the idea
of choice.
Lindsey Graham,
the chair
of the committee,
referred to the
good old days
of segregation.
He’s the one who said
he would never do
what he is
doing now.
Fitting the words to the tune was a little tortured, but the ditty made me laugh.
My session with Carl was delightful but, following that, I had a disaster of a session with Aubrey, who weeks ago told me I looked fine. I had counted that time as an aberration or a misunderstanding on my part, and in the subsequent weeks Aubrey hadn’t made any untoward references to me personally.
Today’s session began amiably enough; Aubrey seemed to be in good spirits. “Pa-pina,” he said, stumbling over my name, per usual, “things have . . . have been going better for me.”
Aubrey was dressed in a freshly ironed shirt with a tie and, surprisingly, he wore a face mask. It appeared like he had carefully staged his Zoom background, sitting in front of a full bookshelf with a bouquet of sunflowers atop it. I suggested that Aubrey take off his mask as it would be better for our work.
“No, no,” he said. “Don’t you see, Pa-pina, that’s the whole point. I wear the mask all of the time now. It’s the cover I’ve always . . . I’ve always wanted. I know you want to see my lips, Pa-pina. Everybody wants to see my lips. They think that if they see my lips they can see what’s wrong with me. Now, with the mask, nobody can see my lips, and I’m being . . . I’m being socially responsible at the same time. Sometimes I even think of wearing a mask to bed because . . . because then I might not stutter in my dreams. Is that weird, Pa-pina, wearing a mask to bed?”
“I suppose if it gives you comfort it’s fine.”
“It does give me comfort. That’s ex-exactly what it does, Pa-pina. It gives me comfort.”
“What would you like to talk about today, Aubrey?”
“Hmm,” he responded, his eyes widening.
I can’t say why, but I was beginning to feel odd about this Zoom session; my eye fixed on the button that reads: leave meeting. And yet there was something strangely addictive about Aubrey’s performance, like watching a man self-destruct before your eyes and not doing anything to stop it. Aubrey’s conduct, I decided later, was not self-destruction, but raw aggression aimed at me. The shame I felt afterword involved my passive complicity, which is consistent with the feelings that victims of sexual abuse sometimes describe.
Aubrey kept talking “If you want me to wear the mask to bed, Pa-Pina, I will.”
I should have hit the leave button right then, but I just watched and listened.
“I’d like to have a meeting with you in Sa-mona, Pa-Pina. We can meet at a safe . . . a safe distance. I will wear my mask and you can wear yours.”
“That won’t be possible,” I managed to say.
“We could . . . we could make it pos-possible, Pa-pina.”
That’s when I noticed that Aubrey’s breathing began to change, his eyes closed, and his head appeared to shake. At first I thought that Aubrey might be having a stroke, perhaps because of my earlier meeting with my client Carl Sneed. Later, I cursed myself and asked, how dumb can you be, girl?
Only after Aubrey said, “We can do this together, Pa-pina,” punctuating it with the obscene exclamation, Ahhhhhh, did I realize that Aubrey had been whacking off. It took all that to get me to leave the meeting.
Charlie and I had a quiet dinner—I made a simple omelet and a salad with the last of the little gems. By the time I’d whisked the vinaigrette, I had successfully expelled both Aubrey and Roscoe from my thoughts. At dinner there was no need to tell Charlie that I wasn’t in the mood for conversation. We spoke in short sentences about nothing in particular and smiled at each other across the table. At one point Charlie rested his hand on mine. When I told him that I was going to turn in early, he shooed me out of the kitchen and said he’d do the clearing up.
I took a long, decadent bath; whenever the water began to cool I turned the hot back on. As steam rose around me, with the light scent of lavender from the bath oil, I found myself in the midst of a mindfulness exercise, considering the choices I’d made to arrive at this moment: bathing in the house of a man I came to know less than six months ago, after the pandemic began. With little effort, I peeled away successive layers of my life. It was a dispassionate exercise. I clearly saw myself as middle-aged, as a widow, a married woman, a young professional, a college student, a rebellious teen, and a sweet-souled girl. The surprise, if any at all, was how straight the path had been, how little it deviated from the standard trail. Chance had played its part, no doubt, but my responses to heartbreak and serendipity always kept an eye on due north. Whether I should have lived a more adventurous life seemed a question for another time. Instead of soaking away the years in the tub, I had the odd sense that I’d regained them.
Charlie asked if I minded him coming to bed early with me. I think we both were surprised by the tenderness of my response: “You don’t have to ask, my love.”
Neither of us was in the mood for making love or reading, nor were we ready for sleep, so we lay on our backs and talked for a long hour about nothing and everything.
At one point Charlie asked a question that reminded me of his sharp intuition: “Do you miss your youth?” It was as if he were privy to my thoughts in the lavender bath.
I puzzled over how to answer. The way he said youth made me think of a person who’d gone away forever, but that wasn’t how I regarded that period of my life. “No,” I said, finally, “I feel like I have my young self with me and that it comes along wherever I go.”
“I know what you mean. I suppose we can’t shed our past. I just had a funny thought.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s silly. What if we had to carry all the clothes we ever wore, our lifetime wardrobe, on our back?
“That sounds like a tortoise’s life. How about you, Charlie, do you miss your youth?” I enjoyed pronouncing that odd word.
Charlie rubbed his chin, pensively. In the lamplight he looked handsome, his features accentuated in profile. “I have the feeling that as a child, I was older for my age than I am now, if that makes any sense. If anything, now, I feel younger than my age.”
“You’re very youthful, Charlie.”
“Get out.” His lips bent into a shy smile. “It’s not like I try to forget my childhood. In fact it’s been coming back to me more than ever, little episodes in the life of the only child, scenes that have an iconic glaze.” Charlie paused as if he were recalling something in particular. I turned away so as not to intrude. A moment later he faced me. “Do you think about your parents much, Pina?”
“Yes, yes, I do and, even when I don’t, I have the sense that they are always present—my mother’s solidness, my father’s, oh, I don’t know, his kind awkwardness. I have them with me more now than I did when they were living.”
“And more selectively, I suppose.”
“Yes, I have them, just the way I want them.”
Charlie and I gazed at each other for a long time. I thought it interesting that during all of our talking we had little need to say anything about us. That was understood. Charlie asked if he could turn the light off. I nodded and settled into his arms.