I was so absorbed filming new election videos with Roscoe that I didn’t notice, until after six, that Pina hadn’t returned from her lunch. At first, I didn’t think much of it. Pina often gets restless in the late afternoon and drives off somewhere to walk or catch the sunset. I went down to the carport and noticed that her car was missing. That was that. Ravenous after having skipped lunch, I grilled four merguez sausages, and sautéed a shredded red cabbage with eight strips of duck bacon, setting a portion aside for Pina. 

At 8 o’clock I started calling and when she didn’t answer I began to worry. Had I done something to upset her? Nothing came to mind. I figured it must be all the time I’ve been putting in with Roscoe. This was Pina’s little way of punishing me. I could almost hear her say, Go ahead, have your dinner with Roscoe. 

When Pina still didn’t answer her phone at 10 o’clock, I got in my car. At first I drove the two blocks to town and circled the square looking for her car. The emptiness of the square surprised me. Thursday afternoon is when the weekend tourists start arriving in Sonoma. Still in my car, I watched three local teenagers, their faces draped in bandanas, strut by the Swiss Hotel, followed, a couple of moments later, by a masked middle-aged couple walking a black lab. In my anxiety about Pina I’d almost forgotten about the pandemic.

I drove back to the east side, to Lovell Valley Road, hoping to see Pina’s car parked along the stone wall of Sebastiani Winery. She once mentioned it as one of her favorite spots in town; she said she liked to sit on the wall in front of the vineyards and watch the grapes grow. Of course it was dark now and the harvest had been weeks ago. Still, I could picture Pina poised on the wall, maybe dangling her legs, and nursing a pint of cognac. 

The only vehicle parked along the wall was a pickup with a pair of Latino men drinking from cans of beer and listening to a ranchera tune. I found the song affecting, a female voice soaring above strings and trumpets. Once I ferreted out the repeated words of the chorus: Ya me voy para siempre, I am leaving you forever, I drove off.

Back at the complex, I called Pina again, to no avail, and then checked the carport. She was still gone. I made a plan: drive out to the lonely pier at the San Pablo Bay Wildlife Refuge, where Pina sometimes went to watch a sunset, and if I didn’t find here there call the highway patrol and hospitals. 

Before I left the grounds my phone rang.

“Charlie,” she said.

“Oh my god, I was so worried about you. Are you okay?”

The long pause that followed troubled me.

“Not so good,” she said, finally.

“Are you hurt, honey?”

“Well, yes, but no.”

She sounded as if she were in some kind of shock. “Where are you?”

“I have to quarantine.”

“You have to quarantine?” I felt a flood of relief that that was all it was, and laughed as I asked: “What, from your lunch with Vince?”

Again there was an extended pause before she blurted: “No, from after lunch, getting drunk and fucking him.”

I repeated her words silently, one at a time, until I understood what they meant. I could have hung up the phone right then; I probably should have, but something kept me from abandoning the live pulse of the device, as if the grim news was still speculative. To end the call would bring everything to a full stop.

Pina started crying and making a flurry of apologies. Her words sounded like mush to me. My teeth chattered; the reality of what Pina just revealed drilled its way into my flesh. I made a quick plan to become a monk. I’d taken that approach years ago when my ex left me for a drummer. Back then I didn’t get  far with the monastery routine, though, because I had a daughter to look after. Now I wished to disassociate completely, just go off and make a flurry of last minute election videos with Roscoe.

I breathed into the phone but wasn’t ready to speak.

“Charlie,” she said. Her voice was a shy hand reaching toward me. “It won’t happen again. I promise you.”

Ha, I thought. I could tell my monkish aspirations were already failing me. “So that was the price of your freedom—one last fuck.” My voice surprised me, how mean it was. I couldn’t stop it. “What the fuck did that bum have over you, Pina?”

I heard a single sob caught in Pina’s throat. Then the phone went dead. I called back in five minutes. No answer. I still had no idea where she was, or if or when she would return. Did I want her to return? 

After getting no answer again and again, I went up to the condo and mixed a stiff negroni, which I poured down my throat quickly like medicine. Then I stalked around the carports, looking to see if Pina had tried to hide her car in an empty stall. As far as I knew she was still with Vince. The idea made me shudder. I couldn’t find her car, but Vince’s was tucked in its spot. They could have driven off together in her car. I started to imagine places they’d gone, including Vince’s house in the city. Maybe they’d return to their life as it had been before the pandemic. I winced at the idea that I’d been nothing more than a brief interlude in Pina’s life. At a complete loss as to what to do next, I did something I’m not proud of: I peed all over Vince’s BMW.

After that I decided it was time to go monkish, for real. I vowed not to call Pina anymore. I had to tough it out. No sense turning myself into a cuckold pest. I went back upstairs and stuffed a towel in the bell of my tenor sax. I didn’t want to disturb the neighbors or have them hear me sob through the horn. The towel muffled the sound, but also took out half of the lower register, its gravitas, just as I’d lost mine. 

Recently I got the tenor out—the first time in years. Really hadn’t played it since high school. I discovered that I’d kept some muscle memory in my fingers; the real problem was with the blowing. The first couple of times, I honked away, and the reed squeaked badly, almost at regular intervals. There was no ugly beauty to it. But then I worked on my breathing, drew out long tones with as little tremolo as I could manage and, later, reversed course with a wide, deliberate vibrato that I strove to keep even, before refining it to a trace. When I finally linked a few phrases together, I was surprised to hear the voice of the horn. It was a man’s voice; it was mine. I hadn’t sounded like that, if I sounded like anything, as a teenager. 

Now, the muffled voice of the horn underscored my humiliation.

I did call Pina, first thing in the morning; she still wouldn’t answer. Then I did something that felt weird: I took an inventory of Pina’s belongings. Perhaps, I thought, she snuck up here and gathered her essentials yesterday while I worked with Roscoe. I’d already noticed that she hadn’t taken her laptop. She’d also left her work journals, I discovered now. Her closet appeared full. I ran my hands through a short stack of Pina’s sweaters and the smell of her fluttered in the air, a floral hint I used to love, now turned sour. I flipped through Pina’s underwear drawer, which was chock full, to see if she’d hidden anything beneath. Damn, if I didn’t feel something at the bottom of the drawer. I scattered some of her panties onto the floor in my hurry to unearth the treasure, which turned out to be an envelope. Pina, Pina, Pina, it read on the front in my handwriting. Inside were three love notes to her I’d dashed off in March. I wanted to rip them up, but stuffed them back in the bottom of the drawer with her underwear instead. It was time to for me to go full monk.

Late morning I got a call from a Washington Post reporter wanting to do a feature story on Roscoe. It’s Friday, October 30, and they plan to run the story on Election Day. The reporter pushed to come this afternoon, but I put him off until tomorrow morning.

The idea of more notoriety got me walking around the condo in circles. Early afternoon, and I hadn’t eaten anything and was still in my underwear. Roscoe commented prudishly and erroneously on my sartorial style: “You’re naked as a jaybird, Charlie.”

“Not at all. I’ve got my underwear on.” I wondered where he heard that phrase.

“Whatever you say, Charlie,” Roscoe replied, with the tenor of condescension he’d mastered.

The phone rang again and I ran to it, disappointed, as I’d been earlier, that it wasn’t Pina. Sally was yapping syllables in garbles before I could say hello. I wondered if she was coked up.

“You got to keep Roscoe tweeting. His singularity is a necessity now. Tweeting, dad. Roscoe needs to be tweeting. Extended relevance depends on it. Eight, ten, you know, twelve new tweets a day. That’s the only way to build your brand. Look, the election is like in three days. You ever heard of zeitgeist, dad? Zeitgeist. Carp diem? Think about it, dad.”

“Are you okay, Sal?”

“Excellent. Focused as a keyhole.”

I stumbled over the simile and used it as a way to avoid any direct parental-adult child confrontation. Was a keyhole focused? I wondered, standing in my underwear in the living room, or was focus reserved for the person, or parrot, that peeps into the keyhole?

“You’re talking about a lot of work, Sal.”

“Are you afraid of work, dad?” 

She was giving me back my own shit.

“I don’t understand . . . I don’t understand your generation, dad.”

“Anyway,” I said, “Roscoe doesn’t tweet.” I had to regain some ground. “Roscoe speaks. A little parakeet might tweet, but Roscoe speaks.”

“That’s a good line, dad: Roscoe speaks. We’ve got to use it. Build a campaign around it. It reminds me of the Nation of Islam newspaper from the sixties and seventies, Muhammad Speaks.”

“How do you know about that?” I asked. 

“Did a paper on The Nation in my ‘American Religions’ class.”

Sally always knows more than I think she knows, which is more of a commentary on me than her. “Given the present climate in France, I don’t think we should conflate Muhammad with a parrot. We don’t want anybody around here to get decapitated.”

“We’re not in France, dad.”

I switched the phone to speaker. “Say hello to Sally, Roscoe.”

“Sally, Sally, Sally, are you still in the valley?”

I left the phone beside Roscoe as I went to the bedroom to grab a pair of pants. 

When I got back Sally was speaking through the phone to the parrot. “Who do you think . . . who do you think will win the election, Roscoe?” She asked it without expecting an answer. She’d already decided that the bird was worth less real, than as manipulated craft.

Roscoe’s roving eyes settled on me and he chirped a couple of times and then corralled his voice. “I am a parrot not a soot-sayer, Sally. But the one with the purple hair makes me think poorly of the human race.”

“You’re really good at that dad. Cute how you have him say soot-sayer.”

“It was all Roscoe.”

“Whatever. So here’s what we need to do . . . here’s what we need to do with Roscoe, dad. You churn out a couple of new videos everyday and I’ll post them on all the platforms. Meanwhile . . . meanwhile you feed me lines, you feed me lines like the purple hair and I’ll cut them, you know edit them. That’s what I did on the college paper.” 

“You worked on the university newspaper?” I asked, innocently.

“You don’t know anything about me, dad. I was editorial page editor of the Humboldt State Lumberjack. Anyway, let’s start out . . . let’s start out with a tweet an hour, dad. I’ll keep fresh tweets . . . I’ll keep fresh tweets going out all day.”

I told Sally about the call from the Washington Post reporter and that he was planning to have a photographer join him.

“You can’t do that interview, dad. Everybody will find out that Roscoe’s real.”

I no longer knew what was real. Reality had begun to seem beside the point.

“Goodbye Roscoe,” Sally called.

“Your father is finally decent,” said the parrot.