Election night was a horror. Biden lost Florida and it looked like Pennsylvania might be lost. I could feel the PTSD from the 2016 election forming like a calcium deposit on my frontal lobe. My executive functions would soon start to deteriorate. I’d been thinking for some time that I wanted to work on the massive problem with PTSD that the country would be facing post-Trump and post-COVID. But how do you address the trauma when it remains ongoing and ever present?

I turned the TV off early and considered what I’d do with the rest of my life if Trump won. It seemed to me to be a problem of place. California isn’t far enough away from this madness. What about moving to Hawaii where I could pretend that paradise was enough for me? I needed to talk to someone who could save me from myself. I thought about calling Pina but I was still pissed off at her from our conversation the night before. Screw her and her goddamn self-sufficiency. Screw her and her cheating ways. I wasn’t going to let her break my heart. I considered calling Sally, but I wasn’t in the mood to deal with the possibility that my daughter was a coke freak.

Thankfully, the phone rang just as I was at the point of waking Roscoe for the sake of some companionship. My friend Arrow Wilk was on the horn. He likes to call me after he gets stoned and jabber. Tonight about his new series of paintings, The Deaths of Trump. 

“So you’re thinking in plurals? Isn’t killing him once sufficient?”

“What are you talking about? Who ever heard of a series of one?”

Arrow and I had been roommates in the city when we were students at the Art Institute. That was decades ago. Arrow moved to Sonoma County before me and has settled into a fine life in an old barn up Sonoma Mountain Road. He’s prolific. He paints all night. Sells his work cheap, but he sells it.  

“You miss the whole point, Charlie. I want to kill Trump a hundred different ways. Remember that old TV show on Spike, 1000 Ways to Die? That’s my inspiration. They had an episode on this Norse dude, Sigurd the Mighty, a superstar Viking who died from gangrene. Now get this, Charlie—what kills him is the decapitated head of one of his victims. For real. He tied the motherfucker’s head to his saddle, and the dead joker’s buckteeth ripped through old Sigurd’s leg while he was riding. Ain’t that a motherfucker?”

“Arrow, that’s epically grotesque.”

“Isn’t it? I worked on Trump’s gangrene today. Took it straight through his toes on up. Not for the faint-hearted, Charlie. It’s amazing what you can do with a gangrene palette. It has more blue in it than you’d think. 

“Yesterday I finished Trump’s death by quicksand. All we see is the top edge of his purple hair and one short, stubby finger sticking up in the air. You can tell it’s Trump’s finger from a mile away. I’m about to start on his golf course heart attack. I’m thinking a sand bunker right after he takes his swing. Sand is flying everywhere, the ball’s still in the trap, and Trump has collapsed to his knees; a second later he’s a dead man eating sand.”

“Sounds like you can kill him a thousand ways but, meanwhile, he’s winning the fucking election. I’m going a little nuts here.”

“He’s not going to win, Charlie. Lots of the states count the mail-ins last. That’s where Biden scores. This is common knowledge, Charlie. What have you been watching, Fox News? Do something for yourself. You sound like a wreck. Smoke a joint, Charlie, snort a couple of lines, swallow some shrooms. You know who you are? You’re a man in need of a creative outlet. How’s the bird? I saw him on Instagram. Very clever what you’ve done with him. I don’t know how you do it. But what are you going to do with a parrot now that the election’s over?”

“To be determined.”

“Charlie, for you, at your stage of the game, it’s too late to leave things to be determined.”

“Why are you busting my chops, Arrow?”

“For your own good. I’d hate to see you waste away. Atrophy is a dirty word in my book. Go to bed, Charlie. You’re no good to yourself now.”

I took Arrow’s advice and climbed into bed with a hearty snifter of Pina’s cognac. 

On Saturday morning before turning on the TV I did some self-hypnosis. I’d learned a simple technique from a hypnotist and noted blues singer in Sebastopol, Efraim Merz. He led me to some deep ass levels with his basso. At the start of a session he’d say, “Are you ready to go down?”

I’ve never been able to descend as deeply by myself, but it can get cavernous after I sample my breaths for a while and melt into the sensations of my limbs. That’s when a simple suggestion can go a long way. I’ve learned to work the method in an elementary way and it is part of what I’m teaching Roscoe to do with himself. I like to ask him, “Are you ready to go down, Roscoe?”

“I’m not afraid,” he says with his parrot smirk. “How about you, Charlie?”

So now, in thirty minutes time, I have successfully disassociated from Pina. It may only last the day. But I’m junking the cuckold routine and will let bygones be bygones. Who wants to project personal grievance when there’s such a climate of it in the air? I’m thinking seventy million Trump voters for whom grievance resonates. Meanwhile, I have Pina where I want her, in an emotional lock box.

After I brewed coffee I flicked on the TV. They finally called the election for Biden. The news rocked me. I think some horror stricken part of me believed we’d never get rid of Trump. Breathe.

I briefly watched the celebrations in cities across the country and wanted to join in or at least spectate in person. I walked down to the square. Three people were making noise with whistles, cymbals, and triangles at the foot of Broadway. It wasn’t enough clatter to keep me in Sonoma.

I packed Pina’s laptop in its sack and a suitcase of her clothes, although I doubted I’d deliver them, but I was heading to San Francisco. Perhaps I’d leave her stuff with the concierge who wasn’t a concierge. Would that delight Pina or infuriate her? Frankly, I didn’t give a damn. The self-hypnosis had done the trick. 

By the time I reached the bridge I decided against heading to the parts of town where the bigger celebrations were likely taking place: Civic Center, Market Street, and the Mission. I must have known, unconsciously, that I wanted a bit of old home week in the city. In the end I got far more than I bargained for.

I took the Marina Boulevard exit with the idea of parking somewhere in North Beach and walking around the neighborhood a bit. That’s where I’d lived during my time at the Art Institute. I shared a flat on Union Street with three pals from the college. All four of us were painting students, the three others, including Arrow, have kept at it. The undisputed star of the gang was Sheri Arnette, who went on to have a stellar career, with frequent shows at galleries and small museums across the country before she died at forty-nine, run over by a drunk in a panel truck as she crossed Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley. 

Sheri, a curly-headed beauty, and I were an item for a few months at the Union Street flat. Alas, she was too intense and talented for me. I also had difficulty with the fact that she rarely showered. She called me bourgeois for taking a shower every morning. Her competitive spirit was sexy at first, but it lost its charm. I remember the night Sheri challenged us all to a pissing contest; she claimed that she could piss harder than a man. None of us had the balls to take the challenge,

I used to like to watch Sheri paint; she’d go at it all night long, lovely, lyrical paintings that belied her ferocity. I thought of her work as neo Frankenthaler, with a few bits of collaged assemblage tossed in, à la Rauschenberg. She’d have killed me for saying that but, jeez, she even relied on Frankenthaler’s soak-stain technique.

Of the four of us in the house I had the least talent. The third was an Irishman, Toby Devaney, a photo-realist who specialized in painting cropped graffiti-tagged walls. Toby landed a teaching job at SMU. The dude was an Olympian womanizer. He liked to ask: “Do you know how many beds my brogue has gotten me into?” We kept in touch for a while after he moved to Dallas. In one of our last phone calls he told me, “These coeds all carry three things in their purses: a cell phone, a teasing comb, and a handgun.” I imagined he got into quite a few coeds’ purses. Living a bit dangerous, it seemed. 

Despite my paucity of talent, I was the first of the four of us to be represented by a gallery. I’d done a series of paintings embedded with coiled circuits. A hidden switch activated braids of light, clover leafs of night traffic. Collectors really ate up this shit. I imagined them in their fancy houses, delighting guests by flicking on the hidden switches. My first show at Branson-Holly was called “Electric Beasts.” It nearly sold out. I knew better than anybody that the work—an assortment of electrified mammals in the California funk style of Roy De Forrest’s dogs—was really a crock, novelty art that I had little desire to repeat. My roommates were surprisingly generous about my success. They must have known the work was a flash in the pan.

Despite discovering, during my time on Union Street, that I wasn’t a painter, those years were among my happiest. When the gallery finally cut a check for my share of the sales, I bought a McIntosh II, for which I began designing software. That was the beginning of my career in soundscaping and animation.

I lucked out, finding at a two-hour meter in front of Da Flora on Columbus Avenue, certain that in such a prominent spot no one would break into the trunk and pounce on Pina’s stuff. I was tempted to wait in line for a table in the parklet and a plate of gnocchi, but the day was crisp and lovely and I headed up Green Street, where a half dozen parklets had been established in front of restaurants. On Grant Avenue, several cars were blowing their horns while revelers on foot marched in my direction. A group of three—two women, and a man in an Uncle Sam hat, hailed me with a cheer: “Ding-dong, the witch is dead.” 

“That’s right,” I said, “Rigor Mortis has set in.”

Someone across the street began singing that tune from The Wizard of Oz. More cars, driving five miles an hour, sat on their horns.

This was what I came to the city for. I walked north toward Filbert Street, past quirky shops and watering holes, a number of which seemed to have called it a day, and then turned back down to Washington Square Park and grabbed an empty bench on the park’s perimeter. Some celebrants, all masked, were keeping a good three feet from each other while snaking through the grass in a wondrous line dance. Apart from the sprawling dancers, a young Asian woman, barefoot in shorts and a T-shirt, did Tai Chi with a grace that was beguiling. I couldn’t remember seeing a young person doing Tai Chi. What a revelation, a body, at once strong and lithe, redefining time. 

One of the line dancers, swaying close to my perch on the bench, tried to get me to join in, but I demurred. Meanwhile a small terrier puppy sniffed at my shoes. The tall, willowy woman at the end of the dog’s leash yanked the pup away from me and apologized. I knew the voice if not the woman, masked in African batik with round, impenetrable art deco shades. I stood up. “Gita?” I just had to pair the voice with the body.

“Not Charlie?” 

”Himself.”

“Oh, my.” Gita’s long fingers spread evenly over her batiked face. “You’ve aged well, Charlie.” 

“You can’t really tell, can you? The mask does wonders for me.”

Gita stood with her feet apart, her long arm bent with a hand on her waist. Her limbs captured sharp angles; her body seemed like an architectural wonder. “Isn’t this serendipitous?” she asked.

“I didn’t think there was any serendipity left in the world.”

“There must be.” She climbed onto the tiptoes of her saffron-hued Chuck high tops, and kind of bounced, a girlish gesture that cheered me.

Gita and I had been colleagues at Industrial Light and Magic and I’d run into her only once or twice, at ILM reunions, in the decade since I retired.

“Don’t tell me you live in the city, Charlie?”

“No, just down for the day from Sonoma. But you live here, right? With a puppy.” I bent down and gave the little guy a pet.

“Dart,” she said, by way of introduction. “Yeah, so when Daryl and I split a few years ago I decided to leave Marin County behind. Wise decision. You were always an inspiration to me, Charlie, retiring before you were fifty. I thought that was so cool—a man in his prime deciding to pursue creative interests of his own.”

“Just don’t ask me how I’ve done.”

“I’m sure you’ve done nicely.” I didn’t need to see Gita’s lips to know that she was smiling. She’d taken off her shades and her dark eyes sparkled. I felt an amorous twitch inside my jeans. At ILM I’d kept my attraction to myself. Gita was a married woman, after all, and I didn’t think it was a good idea for people who worked together to get involved, not that she’d have had any part of me. Not long before I left, I fessed up, told her that I’d always had a crush on her.

She gave me a peck on the cheek. “I think you’re wrong. It’s me, I’m the one who had a crush on you, Charlie.”

Now she met my eyes. “I wasn’t as clever as you, I didn’t get out until I was fifty-two, a couple of years ago now. We’re queer ducks, as my mother from Iowa would say.”

“Queer ducks?”

“Yes, retiring early. I know a lot of people who could afford to, but would never consider it. What would they do with themselves? I don’t have that problem. I mean, I need to acknowledge my privilege—I made fortunate investments. That’s how I can afford to live here. Do you still have your sailboat, Charlie?”

 “We are privileged, aren’t we? No, I sold my share in it, not long ago. I wasn’t getting down to Sausalito often enough. It suited me for a period. 

Gita stretched her arms in the air languorously, and then they arched in a balletic gesture. I noticed that shte stood framed between the two spires of Saints Peter and Paul, across the street. The tabernacle that her arms briefly formed was lovelier.

“You never remarried, Charlie?”

I shook my head, but thought of Pina, who I’ve known for little more than six months but who has felt as much like a wife to me as anybody since I was first married.

“I live with a parrot named Roscoe,” I said.

 “Roscoe! Oh, I can’t believe it. I know about Roscoe. ‘Roscoe here.’ I knew somebody amazing was behind Roscoe. He’s brilliant. Oh, Charlie, can you come up for a glass of wine? I’m only a few blocks away. There’s a very nice deck and we can stay as far from each other as we need to.”

With that, the business in my pants acted up. I did my best to hide it by crossing my legs but felt as awkward as an outsized rubber plant in a small apartment, even though I was standing outside and made of flesh and blood. That’s when Gita noticed she’d let go of the leash and her puppy had wandered away. She sprung to action, leaping off in her saffroned high tops, her lithe strides knifing through the line dancers, calling, “Dart, Dart,” before high-stepping past the Tai Chi master.

With puppy in tow, Gita led me on a steep hike up Greenwich Street, practically to Telegraph Hill, and then to the upper unit of a posh building. This was major multi-million dollar territory, but before I worried about being out of my depth, I reminded myself that I’d only been invited for a glass of wine.

The loft was huge with gorgeous heavy timber beams under a vaulted ceiling. Gita led me past the cork-floored kitchen with its Viking stove, across from a mile of granite countertop, covered with a dozen huge jars of olives. 

Gita followed my gaze. “I’m brining twenty-five pounds of olives. Don’t ask me why.” 

The living room was even larger, with quite the view of the bay. I admired the redwood plank floors and Persian carpets. One side of the room was with oak bookshelves. A witty, madly colored ceramic sculpture of a woman, life-size, wearing vintage librarian spectacles, held forth beside the bookshelves. “You have a Viola Frey,” I said, approaching the ceramic lass.

“Yes, isn’t she lovely? Let me show you the deck.”

The view from outside was even more spectacular.

“When it gets chilly,” Gita said, “we can light a fire.”

I considered the fire pit and the possibility that I might be in for more than a glass of wine.

As Gita went inside to get refreshments, I heard her whisper to her Echo: “Sketches of Spain,” and suddenly Miles Davis’ plaintive trumpet filled the deck. I looked around to see where the music was coming from because, clearly, a superior speaker system was in play, but I couldn’t find them. 

Gita was taking her time. As I listened to Miles weaving his way through Rodrigo’s “Concierto De Aranjuez,” I thought a moment about loyalty—my loyalty to Pina and hers to me. Apparently it wasn’t fixed in stone for either of us. That reality made me sad. Briefly. In a year like this when the world goes to hell, I reasoned, it behooves us to be adaptive, a conclusion, I must say, that came a little too easily.

Gita glided out onto the deck, balancing a round tray with two cocktails, a plate of crackers and some hors d’oeuvre. “I hope you don’t mind a Manhattan. I didn’t have a chilled white. But I did find a tin of caviar just waiting for us in the fridge. We may be the only people in the world to eat caviar on bagel chips. I really need to do a serious shop.” Gita set the tray down on the red rattan table before peeling off her mask. It was good to see her generous lips, her pert nose. She smiled at me oddly, her head tilted sideways. “You’ve been really careful about the COVID, haven’t you, Charlie?”

I nodded and lifted off my mask. We toasted each other and then Gita planted her lips on mine. In no time, my hands found their way to her breasts. It was old-fashioned making out on the deck until Gita pulled us back to our caviar and martinis. 

“It’s really good on the bagel chips,” I said.

“It is, isn’t it?”

We made eyes at each other as Miles, his trumpet muted now, continued to sketch his way through Spain. I’d heard it was a recording he was unhappy with. When a reporter asked him why he said, “Too pretty.”

In the morning, after kissing Gita goodbye, I picked up a double espresso at Café Trieste. I’ve never been fond of drinking coffee out of takeout cups, but these are the times we are living in. On Columbus Avenue, I found two tickets on my car; I’d expected there to be one. Then, gobsmacked, I noticed that the trunk was ajar. Really? Somebody had made off with Pina’s laptop and suitcase of clothes.

 

When I drove off Thursday afternoon, I had no idea of a destination. I was more or less sober by then, but, as I’ve experienced innumerable times the morning after, I dripped with shame. Why did I do this damage? Who was I trying to hurt most—Charlie, Vince or myself? 

I drove south on 101, past San Rafael, where I’d spent much of my childhood, and was tempted to turn off to Stinson Beach but, after gazing with some longing at Mt. Tam, I kept south, crossed the Golden Gate, and landed like a homing pigeon at Ocean Beach. That’s where I am now. Well, close by—in my room at the Seal Rock Inn. 

I made a good choice with this motel. It’s pricey for what it is, but that’s the cost of having a room across the street from the ocean. From the foot of my bed I can see the crisp geometric edge of the horizon line, where the ocean meets the sky. Each day I walk miles up and down the beach. Some days I dislike myself a little less, some, a little more. 

I left without anything. Not even a phone charger or a change of underwear. Chaos, I figured, would be the order of the day, but a certain calm set in. I’ve talked myself into appreciating the abstract beauty of being unmoored, aligned with nobody. This existential approach is my initial posture. As if I could live my life without people at all, in a house whose furniture is a Danish Modern echo of me: sleek surfaces and edges, no attachment or resonance.

A woman can reassemble her exterior life, easily enough, if she’s sufficiently solvent. The interior is another matter, although I remind myself that my psyche was likely as twisted before my betrayal of Charlie as it is now.

At first Charlie called frequently and left simple messages. The last one really got me: “Pina, I hope you’re safe. I miss you. Tonight I wished so much I could hold you. Let me know if I can help in any way. I love you.” How to characterize a message like that? Kind. Thoughtful. Helpful. Loving. The first time I listened to it, I thought, where is his fucking malice? Why am I the one left with it? Aside from his flash of anger when I blurted out what I’d done, Charlie has been all equanimity.

I’m not clear why I haven’t returned his messages. I force myself to remember that just days ago Charlie and I were holding each other in bed, living beside each other, convivial. I won’t talk about love because I decided after my husband Marco died that there wasn’t a lot of percentage in it. Consequentially, Vince was easier for me to live with than Charlie. I knew that Vince was only looking out for himself. I didn’t have to worry about loving him; if I hurt him he had it coming. I’m not a spiteful person, but I don’t know how good I am either. Self-destructiveness is a swamp. It sucks me down like quicksand, and makes me afraid that if I talk with Charlie I’ll do more damage. I’d like to do some healing before I make contact. Or is that simply a stall tactic. A therapist once told me: you need to be your own mother once you’ve lost yours. I like that idea and sometimes I try.

My mother would ask: Why are you being so difficult? Why don’t you just break the ice, Pina? Don’t you think Charlie deserves to know where you are? Do you really mean to be cruel to somebody you love and have already hurt badly? Can’t you be a little bigger, honey? Fortunately, my mother isn’t around to hear my answers.

Charlie didn’t call yesterday nor has he called today. Has he given up on me? I could hardly blame him. Tomorrow is Election Day; I like to picture him madly posting last minute Biden videos of Roscoe. I saw one on Twitter. It lasted seven seconds and had three million views, and that was days ago. Roscoe’s perched atop the wine barrel on Charlie’s deck: Roscoe here, he says with a little jerk of his head, any parrot will tell you that a vote for Biden-Harris is a vote for diversity and justice. 

Daylight savings ended yesterday and this morning I woke ridiculously early, drained a cup of motel coffee and walked directly down the hill to the beach. I descended the first bank of stairs at the north end and gazed south. I couldn’t see anybody except a lone fisherman in the distance. The tide was way out. The water seemed a day’s walk away in the pre-dawn light.  

The other day, during an hour trip to Target, I acquired, in addition to a humble wardrobe, a few practical items: a backpack, a cigarette lighter, flashlight, a phone charger, and a Swiss Army knife with a saw blade and a corkscrew. I brought most of those things with me to the beach this morning; . Barefoot in the sand, I collected driftwood, a few tarry hunks of logs or decommissioned telephone poles, and dry sea wrack. In short, anything that would burn. 

Once I managed to get a small fire going. I stripped off my clothes, folded them into the backpack, and dashed the 100-odd yards through the cool sand, skipping over the damp apron of waves and white water before diving into the frigid sea. My face stung with chilled needle pricks; my scalp felt like a slick surface of ice. The ocean was surprisingly calm and I swam a couple of dozen strokes perpendicular to the waves, before going out a little deeper and riding a modest wave back in. Tumbling out of the water, I dashed back to the fire, where I wrapped myself in a pair of motel towels, and stared out at the glassy sea, every bit alive.  

After I warmed up and dressed, I gathered more wood scraps to keep the fire going, and then sat cross legged in the sand and meditated. I could feel myself sink deeper, having succeeded to some degree in keeping my thoughts at bay. But soon enough I found myself recalling, of all things, The Book of Jonah. I tried to steer my attention back to my breathing and banish the image of Jonah, who, in childhood, I pictured as a gnomish fellow in a loincloth. I had limited success and, when I emerged from the meditation, Jonah was still with me. 

My father liked to tell the story of Jonah when I was a kid. Although he wasn’t a religious man, he found the tale of a man running away from God and being swallowed by a whale an apt narrative for his daughter to consider when she’d been caught telling lies or running away from the truth. He told the story lightly, particularly emphasizing its supernatural qualities. “Can you imagine being swallowed by a whale, honey? What would it be like inside a whale’s belly with all that blubber? When he burped you out, how far would you fly?” At one point the story frightened me, but by the time I was old enough to realize that I’d likely not be swallowed by a whale in this lifetime, I started to appreciate the tale’s parabolic value. Now, nearly a half-century later, I realize that I’m still running away from myself. “Can you imagine being swallowed by a whale, honey?”

Now I wonder why Jonah visited me. What am I lying about? Who, if not everybody, am I running from? And it’s not just Jonah visiting me. Along with my parents, it seems that every spirit with moral sway over me has visited.

Tonight, at dusk, I sat on the edge of my bed and watched the remaining light bleed out of the sky. When it was truly dark, I called Charlie. I began with an apology and he asked me if I was all right.

“I’m not exactly thriving, but I’ll survive.”

“Yes, I hope so.” 

He sounded distant and who could blame him. He asked me where I was and I told him.

“Do you need anything?”

“I’ll get by.”

“But do you need anything?

I wanted to say it was him I needed but I didn’t have the courage to tell him.

“I can bring your laptop and a suitcase of clothes. You don’t have to see me. I’ll leave it with the concierge.”

I laughed. “Nobody would confuse the guy at the front desk with a concierge.”

“Whatever,” Charlie said.

I wondered if his generous offer was really just a way of his dropping off my things and effectively dropping me. I told him not to bother, that I’d become reacquainted with my stuff when I finished quarantining.

“Suit yourself,” he said, and wished me goodnight. That was that; I was left with myself.

I switched on the lamplight and gazed in the mirror above the bureau. You again, I thought. I turned to the side to have a look at my profile, and then switched to the other side. In no time at all, I’d created a rogue’s gallery.

 

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.

 

The last couple of days have been bats, what with Roscoe going viral and Charlie getting requests for custom videos from the Biden-Harris campaign and Project Lincoln, among others. Charlie had been as stressed as I’d seen him until he got his old saxophone out of the closet. I didn’t even know he played the sax. He apologized in advance and locked himself in the second bedroom with Roscoe. There was a lot of honking at first and long, siren squeaks that sounded like they might rip paint from the walls. For the first time, possibly, I felt sympathy for Roscoe.

Charlie played the horn for hours, the first day, and by the end of his lengthy session he had begun to civilize the thing, playing single notes for so long I feared he’d run out of breath and collapse. But, instead, after the long tones, he started playing recognizable songs like “Greensleeves” and “Amazing Grace.” Charlie also weaved all over the sax with sound patterns that sounded closer to classical music than jazz. At times I could swear he played snatches from some Bach composition or another.

Today I conducted two morning Zoom meetings with clients out on the deck but could still hear the saxophone in the distance, roaming around tunes I’d never heard, punctuated by occasional squawks. My client Carl Sneed asked if I was Zooming from the zoo.

Finally, Charlie emerged from the room with a saxophone strap hanging from his neck and a big smile. Again, he apologized. I told him that he’d begun to sound good and he smiled some more.

“I used to be pretty good in band class,” he said, “but that was a while ago. After I practice some more I’ll be able to play more quietly.”

I asked if he planned to teach Roscoe an instrument and he took my question seriously.

“Roscoe has the ability to sing and, if anything, we’ll do something with that.”

“Yeah, you could work up a fetching duet on ‘Amazing Grace.’ It would go viral for sure.”

Charlie had gone elsewhere. His face had an infinite calm spread across it.   “You look stoned, Charlie.”

“The thing is, playing the sax becomes a form of meditation for me—the thinking kind of meditation. I did so much musing while I noodled around that I solved all kinds of problems.”

“I didn’t know you had that many problems,” I said.

Charlie smiled at me and I tugged on his neck strap until he bent toward me and kissed me sweetly on the lips.

I made a grave mistake yesterday, the consequences of which will be with me for the foreseeable future. It began with me agreeing to have lunch with Vince, who’s been up in Sonoma going on two weeks, since the air turned clear. Every morning when I go for my walk I check to see if his car is still in the carport. Meeting him, I figured, was a way to thank him for not bugging Charlie and me. He’d kept peep. You didn’t see him around the condo the grounds; the only contact he made with us was laying the big Chinook on Charlie. His invitation to lunch was the first time he and I have talked since he came up here.

We met at garden gate of The Girl and the Fig. Vince stood tall in tomato red Bermuda shorts, a white short-sleeve Polo, and slip-on Bally loafers without socks. For some reason he decided to masquerade as a wealthy tourist in a surgical mask.

“You’re looking good, kid,” he said when I walked up. “As much as I can see you in your mask and shades. Where did you get the fancy face covering?”

I’d grabbed a zebra-striped number without much thought, on my way out the door. “Charlie makes them.”

“Charlie sews? Well, I guess he does. He’s quite the fabricator.”

I poker-faced Vince and watched him shift, awkwardly, from one foot to the other. “She’ll have a table for us in a couple of minutes,” he said, indicating the hostess.

“So what else is Charlie fabricating these days? Does he still have his wiggy parrot?”

“Roscoe happens to be a genius, Vince. Charlie’s got him doing campaign messages for Biden.”

“Get out.”

“The funny thing is, nobody believes Roscoe is real. They think he’s an animated manipulation.”

Vince’s lips puckered for a moment and, in a vaguely lewd tone, said, “I bet Charlie is a master manipulator.”

I stood back from Vince. “You know, you look like you’ve just gotten off your yacht, Vince.”

“I wish. Well, at least I look a little better than the last time you saw me.”

“Yes, you’ve always cleaned up well.” The question was: how long could he stay clean? I tried to remember that day that Charlie came to the city with me. We ended up searching the Tenderloin for Vince. I did my best to block it out. It was some time in June. We found him finally on Turk Street, or was it Eddy? His face had open sores and he’d settled against a wall in a small pool of scum—the debonair doctor, the man I referred to as my husband even though we weren’t married, had metamorphosed into a whacked out street junkie. In the aftermath of our meeting, at which I handed him a bundle of cash, I’d felt a tremendous surge of guilt, as if my leaving him had contributed mightily to his demise. I’d shared his bed for seven years, but finally had had enough of his lying and infidelities. And yet his downward spiral had begun long before he knew I’d left.

Now he was looking me up and down.

I stared back at him and said, “You’re appraising me like an old lech, Vince, like I’m a piece of meat.”

Vince, startled by my forwardness, went on a coughing jag. Once, after we made love, he’d actually described me as a cut of meat, a porterhouse steak, no less. I don’t remember being offended at the time. It was amid a short season of playful after-sex banter. “You see, the porterhouse is the champion of the steakhouse,” he said. “It’s quite formidable in stature, two cuts in one, separated by bone, and like you, Pina, one part is very tender while the other is super flavorful.”

The hostess seated us at a secluded corner table in the garden. I gathered that this was what Vince asked for, since there were open tables in the middle of the big yard. The table seemed too small for a couple that was not COVID-bonded and I edged my chair back.

“I have nothing you can catch, Pina. I haven’t been in contact with anybody. What are you going to do, eat on your lap? Maybe you should ask them to bring you a TV tray. Do you remember TV trays or are you too young for that?”

“I know what a TV tray is.”

“They were the glory of the Fifties. You’re not going to believe this after listening to me carry on as a foodie bon vivant all these years, but my ideal was a frozen Swanson TV dinner in a tin tray—fried chicken with mashed potatoes, a medley of cubed carrots, kernels of corn, and very green peas, and a little pocket of cinnamon-flecked apple fritters. That and a cherry coke and I was in heaven. I felt like a free agent. Had everything right in place. You know what I mean? I had my TV dinner on a TV tray as ‘Gunsmoke’ came on the tube.”

“Your mother must have really loved you, Vince. Sounds like the good old days.”

Vince nodded, a little sadly, it seemed. Although he perked up quickly when the waiter arrived at our table. “Will you join me in a martini, Pina?”

“Of course.” I was going to need something to get me through the hour. I didn’t pause to wonder if martinis were part of Vince’s recovery plan.

He certainly knew what he wanted. “I’ll have a Hendricks up with olives and a dash of horseradish.”

Both he and the waiter glanced at me to see how I’d customize my cocktail. You couldn’t just order a martini anymore, but I had to admit that the drink Vince described sounded tantalizing. “I’ll have the same.”

Vince’s eyes sparkled with triumph. When the martinis arrived he lifted off his mask and toasted me: “To old times.”

I undid my mask. “You mean the days of TV dinners on TV trays?”

“No,” Vince said. He shook his head and his eyes assumed a serious cast. “To pre-COVID, pre-addiction, to when you and I were together. To when I was still a doctor.”

“Aren’t you still a doctor?”

“A practicing doctor.”

“To all of that,” I said, and clinked glasses. No sense being acrimonious straight through lunch.

“I want to get to the bottom of some things with you,” Vince said.

I didn’t want to get to the bottom of anything with him. I sipped on the martini, enjoying the faint sting of horseradish.

“I want to level with you.”

I didn’t want to be leveled with and gazed at the menu, which was a card with a barcode that I had to aim the camera of my phone at. I knew I was being rude.

Vince plunged on: “What I had was an existential crisis, Pina. I don’t know what else to call it. I saw what was happening in New York in the hospitals and assumed it was going to be just as bad here. I lost my fucking nerve is the long and short of it. To be honest, it had begun before the pandemic. I never told you this. I don’t know why I didn’t tell you things. Maybe I didn’t want you to see me as weak. But, anyway, I’d started freaking out in the emergency room. More than thirty years in the ER and I was lost. I should have told you way back when, but I was always afraid to show you any weakness. I think I got it into my head that you were too cool, too distant, that when push came to shove you weren’t really sympathetic. I know that’s a terrible commentary on our relationship. Maybe it was all in my head.”

Clearly there was a measure of truth to what Vince was saying, but damned if I was going to engage with his conjecture, which felt like it was edging toward an excuse for his addiction. I wouldn’t allow him to guilt me out for turning “cool” after his string of infidelities. I focused my attention on my martini.

“It’s all instincts in the ER, Pina, and I’d started second guessing myself. Every time a patient died—and their deaths were most likely inevitable—it hit me very hard. Lots of people, nurses mostly, were covering for me.”

Of course, I thought, the nurses. How many of them had he slept with?

“And, you didn’t know this either—nobody did—but I’d been using heroin for quite a long time. Judiciously.”

I mused for a moment about the judicious use of heroin. I suppose I had been a judiciously heavy drinker during my time with Vince and just after. That my drinking has tailed off considerably since I’ve been with Charlie has to mean something, but I’m not sure what. I took a long silver slug of the horseradish martini and told myself to never stop drinking altogether. What a waste that would be.

I could see that Vince was about to launch into the next phase of his big reveal and I preempted it: “Since we’re getting to the bottom of things, Vince, I have a couple of questions. When exactly did you stop being judicious in your use of heroin, and which nurses were you sleeping with at the time?”

Vince gulped for air and his cheeks reddened. I felt briefly like a bitch for getting in the face of a recovering addict, but then I wondered if Vince’s true state was recovery or a checkered return to judiciousness. Now he looked flustered, aiming his phone at the menu card.

The waiter timed his approach perfectly, just as the old doctor vanquished a short attack of hiccups.

This was the moment Vince stopped being courtly. He barged ahead with his order as if he were eating alone. “I’ll start with the steak tartare—now you do it properly here with the raw egg atop, don’t you? And I’ll have a half-pound of the moules-frites. How about a glass of the Sonoma Roadside Grenache for starters?”

The waiter turned toward me. “Madam?” I ordered the fig and arugula salad and a bottle of San Pellegrino.

Vince glared at me once the waiter left. “What, are you on a diet, Pina?”

Vince was never particularly good at provoking me. “No,” I said, “I’m in a less-is-more groove these days.”

“You always had a knack for being spare, Pina. I used to think you had this automatic elegance—you didn’t have to do anything, you just had it. You could breeze through the world like a model, never accruing any baggage.”

“That’s how you saw me?”

“Yes. It made me jealous.“

“Is that because you need to perform all the time?”

Vince’s clean-shaved face had relaxed but now it was halfway back to pinched. His springtime and summer dissipation hardened the leatheriness of his skin and fresh crags carved their way into his chin. The lines crossing his forehead deepened into a music stave without notes. I imagined the notes of a dirge filling the stave as he died. But Vince was still handsome, almost more so, with a hint of an aged, hard-eyed Robert Mitchum.

I shifted my focus to the raw egg atop Vince’s steak tartare. It sat Cyclops-like in a pocket of the beef. Before Vince mixed the egg into the raw meat, I pictured the yolk dripping onto his white polo shirt. But, alas, his storied ER skills returned and he operated with his fork like a judicious surgeon.

Vince looked up at me after eating a couple of mouthfuls of his mash. “Why don’t you have another martini, Pina, while you wait for your salad to come?”

Not only was I tempted by the idea, I gave into the temptation.

Vince’s face again took on a triumphant look as he signaled to the waiter.

I’m not going to make a slew of excuses for what happened later in the afternoon, after quaffing the second martini and half a bottle of $105 Viognier, after barely touching my salad and telling the waiter, who looked unsure where to place the check, to give it to my father. Nor am I going to go on at length about stumbling out of The Girl and the Fig garden and being forced to grab hold of Vince’s arm as we took a weaving path through the tourists, all the way back to the condo complex. When Vince led me up the stairs to his condo I didn’t protest, and when he laid me back on the dining room table and pulled down my jeans and knickers till they puddled around my ankles, I didn’t once say no. In fact, I encouraged him: “Fuck me harder, you prick. Fuck me harder.” Maybe it was because it had happened before—not on the dining room table—but there were plenty of other times when we led each other back to our digs, snookered, and hopped into bed. In fact, I’ve always liked being drunk when I fucked. At first it was the only way I could stand it.

Clearly my self-esteem, at bedrock, is shattered. Why else would I participate in so tawdry an event? Sure, I was smashed, but not beyond reason. I knew what I was doing, what I let happen to me.

After I showered and did my best to wash the smell of Vince from my body forever, I had coffee with him on the deck. At one point I said, “You’re a bad influence on me, Vince.”

“I hope to continue being a bad influence on you, Pina.”

“It’s not going to happen again,” I said, and knew that I meant it.

Relatively sober after three cups of coffee, I stepped gingerly down the stairs and found a spot behind the oleanders to pee. Then I sat in my car for a good hour before driving off.

 

I worked late into the night tweaking Roscoe’s video but, when I awoke a little after nine, I wasn’t ready to post it. I needed to clear my head. Pina was on a Zoom meeting in the living room, so I left the house, and hiked up through the cemetery and down the other side into town. Fortunately, there was an open table outside Sunflower Café. I tend not to be much of a breakfast person but I was seduced by the idea of a poached pear waffle. They sold me a pitcher of coffee so I wouldn’t have to keep going inside for refills. I also traded two dollar- bills for quarters to buy the Chronicle from a news box. Usually I blow through the Chron in ten minutes, but today I pretended that it was the Times and read every story in it.

Since the pandemic started the newspaper has become a thinned down version of its previous weak self. Many of the stories are Readers Digest versions of wire service reports. The strategy for the front section—a piddling ten pages—has been to enlarge the headlines and the font size of the stories to make up for the paucity of reporting but, like I said, I read them all, anything to take me away from my obsessive work with Roscoe.

A two-paragraph story on the South Carolina State Fair turning into a “drive-through experience” had me wondering why the esteemed editor chose it for inclusion. I read four paragraphs about the National Stadium in Warsaw being turned into a hospital, and nine slim graphs on the French schoolteacher that had been beheaded by an eighteen-year-old Chechen refugee for showing Charlie Hebdo caricatures of Mohammad as part of a discussion of free speech, but the story didn’t mention Charlie Hebdo or that the Chechen did the deed with a knife and fired a BB gun at the police before they killed him.

As I wolfed down my poached pear waffle, I thought about the implications of the beheading story: the clash of cultures—Islamic fundamentalists celebrating the killing against the traditional French concept of freedom. I considered the story’s parallel with right wing extremists and media outlets in our country, excusing the seventeen-year-old kid who murdered two peaceful protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Now, I thought, the backlash against immigrants will intensify in France.

Four cups of coffee in, my mind spun off on a tangent about how the French balanced their virtues and brutality. They cherished liberty while mistreating Jews, North Africans, and immigrants of all stripes.

Then my caffeinated mind shot back to Gabrielle, my perfect French girlfriend who dumped me during my junior year of college for a Senegalese track star. Gabrielle corrected every word I tried to pronounce in her native language. She also shook her head like she believed I was hopeless. Once I remember bringing a small bouquet of flowers to her apartment. They were zinnias in a muted pink that seemed very French to me. Gabrielle said, “Oh, they’re vieux rose, or old pink to you.” The French phrase struck me as the perfect description of not only the color but the character of the flowers. I tried to pronounce vieux as Gabrielle did and she corrected my pronunciation three times. On my fourth try I got it, more or less, and she laughed: “You should see your mouth; you just turned your lips into a duck’s mouth.”

I must have been reliving that infamous moment, trying to pronounce vieux soundlessly, when Sally turned up on the sidewalk and startled me. “What the heck are you doing with your lips, dad?” She burst out laughing. “You trying to make your mouth look like Roscoe’s?”

There are times when the past and the present become perfectly synchronized.

I invited Sally to sit at my table and pushed my chair back to gain some extra distance. I felt bad that I hadn’t called her for more than a week. I got so caught up with Roscoe and just thought I’d let her carry on for herself awhile.

Sally sat and settled her elbows on the table. She looked good like she’d been getting her sleep and eating well. I worried that when she moved into her apartment she’d be drinking and doing drugs all night with her new boyfriend.

“No, really, what were you doing with your lips, dad?”

“Practicing my French.”

“You are so weird, dad.”

I wasn’t sure whether or not to celebrate the assessment.

“So, how’s Pina?”

“She’s good, back to a pretty full schedule at work.”

“I like Pina, but I don’t think she likes me.”

“That’s not true.”

Sally shrugged.

“Are you hungry, honey?”

She tilted her head sideways and smiled at me. “What’s the deal with you old people? You always use food to change the subject. Is that something they taught you in school?”

“Yes, cafeteria studies. It so happens that the poached pear waffles are pretty tasty.”

“I just had my cereal, dad. But I’ll pick up a latte here.”

I offered Sally money for the coffee and she declined, the first time she’s done that in modern memory.

A few moments later when she sat down with her latte she said, “Guess what, I got a job at Whole Foods. I know, working for the devil. Somebody said that if Jeff Bezos gave every one of his employees $100,000 he’d still have as much money as he had before the pandemic started. I don’t know if that’s just Amazon or if it includes all the subsidiaries like Whole Foods and the Washington Post.”

“Do you like the job?” I asked.

“Yeah, they’re good people to work with. I like being in Sonoma, aside from when there was the awful smoke. Sonoma’s like a fairy town; everybody’s so easy going. But that guy you saw me with—bad news. I cut him loose when he told me he voted for Trump and was going to do it again.”

I wanted to grab Sally’s hands, but talked myself out of it.

“Maybe I can finally get over being with bad boys.” Sally’s eyes grew cloudy and her lips quivered. “I never told you, but Alger used to beat on me. I mean, not really bad.”

“Oh, Sal.” I felt a mix of sorrow and rage and could hardly stay seated.

“You know, over the years I got a few black eyes is all, and he broke my arm once. I could usually talk him down. It starts to seem normal; that’s the scary part. He’d take the money you put in my account and sometimes there wasn’t much to eat.”

“Oh, no, honey.”

“He has a habit, that’s the thing and, you know, his dad beat him. He told me I was fat a lot, even though I’m not fat, but that’s what he told me, and I guess I started to believe it.”

I stood up. “I’m so sorry.” I so much wanted to take Sally in my arms, but I reminded myself of Pina and the virus. Damn the virus. “Have you thought about doing some therapy, dear?”

Sally didn’t answer, but her face kind of collapsed into the table and I could see a puddle of tears forming.

I felt overwhelmed with a sense of futility and, of course, said the predictable thing: “Sally, the poached pear waffles are really good.”

“Dad,” she said, a slight smile forming on her crumpled face.

Two hours after getting back home and sitting with my head in my hands, I posted Roscoe’s near perfect video, with the aid of a hashtag generator, which suggested: #vote2020, #votenow, #parrotspeaking, #parrotmagic, and #doitforroscoe. I had done my homework and already set up a Facebook page for Roscoe along with a YouTube channel, as well as Twitter, Instagram, and Tik Tok accounts.

At the start of the video Roscoe holds his head high as he says: “Greetings, my fellow Americans.” He chirps three times and turns his head to the side, before he deadpans: “They call me Roscoe.” His pause after that line is as deft as a stand-up comic’s. Now he looks directly at the camera and his parrot voice deepens, with an assist from listening to many hours of Alfred Hitchcock tapes: “Much as I would like to vote, they will not allow it.” Roscoe winks his left eye before holding his head high again and coming in for the kill, with four crisp sentences: “But you can vote. Do it for yourself. Do it for your country. Do it for Roscoe.”

Two hours after posting the video on each of the platforms, it went viral. It was Sally who let me know. She called just as I was preparing chicken cacciatore.

“Dad,” she shouted, “Roscoe is everywhere. He’s gone viral and #doitforroscoe is trending.”

I dropped my wooden spoon into the Le Creuset.

“If you have any more videos get them out there quickly. Roscoe could rock the vote!”

I was thinking that that sounded like a bit of hyperbole on Sally’s part, when she said, “You know, I’ve been reading the comments and most people don’t think Roscoe is real; they think he’s an amazing manipulation. Anyway, he’s more valuable that way.”

“You mean a fake talking parrot is worth more than the genuine thing?”

“Come on, dad, you know that. The real thing is a dime a dozen, but quality fake things are rare. Everybody wants to know who’s doing the Roscoe manipulation. You could end up famous, dad.”

“I don’t want end up famous.”

“It may be too late for that.”

Pina and I discussed the Roscoe phenomenon and I told her I’d had enough of it and didn’t want to talk Roscoe or the video until after dinner. Pina wasn’t keen on discussing last night’s final debate—I did manage to get in David Axlerod’s good line about Trump’s debate performance: “Republicans were relieved that he was eating with a knife and fork. But it was still the same meal.’’ And since Sally’s revelations were more than I had the heart to reveal at that moment, we were left with too much time to analyze the cacciatore. Pina thought I could have used more wine in it. I begged to differ. I got her to agree that the Kalamata olives I tossed into the stew came to play.

By the time we tuned in to the video on Twitter, it had 890k views, 109k hearts and Roscoe had gained 92K followers. After the third time through Pina said, “You’ve created an icon, Charlie. Roscoe can become a force for good in the world.”

“I think that’s a little much,” I said. “People don’t even think he’s real.”

“It doesn’t matter. Now that you’ve created the Roscoe brand, you can do whatever you want with it.”

So now Roscoe had become a brand?

“And, you know what,” Pina said, “the video makes me like Roscoe better.”

What’s not to like, I thought. Roscoe is the hardest working parrot in the world.

Later in the evening Pina and I walked into Roscoe’s room. I felt bad about waking him, but I decided to take Sally’s recommendation to strike while the iron is hot. I told Roscoe how popular his video is.

“Naturally,” he said, with a wink.

“You’re a rock star.”

We worked hard on the next video, in which I had the parrot take a more jaunty approach: “Greetings, citizens. Roscoe here. I tend to be a non-partisan parrot, but I’m now compelled to say, ‘Vote Biden!’ Do it for yourself. Do it for your country. Do it for Roscoe.”

In the morning when I post it, I will add a hashtag: #roscoerocksthevote.

 

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.

 Vince came to the door of the condo this afternoon. I should say, he assaulted it. He leaned on the doorbell like some angry trick-or-treating kid who figures the residents are blowing him off. 

“Sorry,” he said, apparently about going rabid with the doorbell, “but this is getting rather heavy.”

In his arms he cradled a long rectangular package wrapped in layers of tinfoil. Given his surprise visit, I was in no hurry to relieve his burden. 

When the doorbell began to ring I was working for the first time with Roscoe on the concepts of voting and elections. It wasn’t going well. Whenever possible I try to spell out abstract concepts for Roscoe, but often, as in this case, one abstraction leads to another. We talked about candidates, political parties, even taxes, and a woman’s right to choose. 

Finally, after digesting as much of this as he could, Roscoe asked, “Who should I vote for, Charlie?”

“You can’t vote, Roscoe, you’re not a citizen.” So there was another concept that I had trouble explaining.

Roscoe made a series of angry caws. He does this when he’s exasperated with me, as if to say, if you’re going to be like that with all your words and contradictory theories, I’ll just revert to being a bird. He cawed three times purposely and then spoke very slowly, to underscore my dimness, “So, Charlie, who can be a citizen and who can’t?”

That’s when the doorbell began driving me crazy.

The last time I saw Vince, only a few months ago, he was propped against a wall in the Tenderloin, looking like a man who’d been clobbered in the head, awaiting his next beating. Now he appeared put-together, almost preppy despite pushing seventy, in a blue seersucker suit and fancy beige loafers with tassels. His denim face mask was made to look like a monkey’s mouth and had stitched lettering that spelled out: Regards. I have to admit I found the mask witty.

I’ve known Vince for years, from the time he bought a condo in the complex after his second or third divorce. He was looking for a friend, back then, and I got a kick out of him—an emergency room doctor who talked incessantly about everything from political theory to medical abnormalities. He also offered pedantic teachings on the lives of poets and jazz musicians. 

As an observer by nature, I tend to enjoy Type A narcissistic characters as long as I’m not emotionally involved with them. My tolerance may be selfish in part, because in the company of creatures like Vince I think: I’m sure as heck glad I’m not like him. In any case, I always found it fascinating to notice the disappointment and sadness behind Vince’s pronouncements and bluster, something akin to watching a bittersweet performance in which it’s clear that the clown is actually suffering. I might feel the same about Trump if he hadn’t killed tens of thousands of us, and wrecked our country.

Vince and I played on a trivia team together on Tuesday nights at Murphy’s Irish Pub. Neither of us was particularly sharp with trivia. One night on our way back from the pub, after our team finished last, and Vince again failed in his attempt to pick up a much younger woman, he went on a rant: “You know why we lose, you know why we lose, Charlie, because the fucking questions are designed for Philistines. It’s all moronic pop culture bullshit. The only way to train for this—I mean the idea repulses me—is to sit and watch hours of sit-coms. That’s the only way. Where are the questions about poets and poetry? Why not a token query here and there about America’s only true art form, jazz. And Heidi and Janet, tell me what they know, tell me what they actually know.” 

Vince often disparaged our teammates, primarily, I suspect, because neither Heidi nor Janet was drawn to him. If it weren’t for their combined knowledge of TV shows and celebrities our team would hardly compete. The women routinely teased Vince and me for our lack of knowledge about sports. Janet, a local real estate maven with a Brooklyn brogue, really provoked Vince’s ire the time she said, “What’s the matta wit you guys? Are you even too intellectual for baseball?”

A year or so after Vince got the place up here—he also had a house in the city where he primarily lived—he told me about his new girlfriend Pina, and I invited them over for a steak dinner. I remember being impressed with Pina and surprised that Vince was able to find a woman so intelligent and lovely. The effect she had on Vince was remarkable. It was as if he mellowed overnight. He deferred to her like a wild horse that had been broken, and Pina appeared to have a regal ease in the saddle. After she moved into the San Francisco house with Vince, I saw him rarely.

“So what do you have there?” I asked.

“It’s a fifteen pound Chinook salmon that I brought for you and Pina. I just took it out of the fridge. Caught it yesterday on a charter out near the Farallon Islands. I have too much time on my hands, Charlie, and I keep doing crazy ass things I’ve never done before. It was rugged fucking seas out there. I’m not ashamed to say I upchucked, any first-timer would have. Other than that it was quite an adventure. Pricey though, when you figure in the cost of the charter, the fishing license, and all the damn lures I lost. I was the only one of the six of us to land a salmon. Beginner’s luck, I guess.” 

It all sounded to me like a fish story, the kind normally told by a guy who didn’t catch the fish. “Why don’t you keep the salmon for yourself, Vince?”

“What am I going to do with a fifteen-pound Chinook? Thought you and Pina could poach it, or some damn thing, and have a party with all your friends.”

Vince was taunting me a bit with that since he knows I pretty much keep to myself. “The only people having parties these days are Republicans, and I don’t happen to know any, Vince. So, Pina tells me that you’re intending to spend some time in Sonoma.”

“Yeah, yeah. I checked the air quality index and the forecast was green for a couple of days. Thought I’d come up and have a look-see.”

“I’d tell Pina you were here. She’s in the middle of a Zoom meeting with a client.”

“Zooming it, huh? That’s my girl.”

I wanted to tell the prick that Pina was no longer his girl and to shove his fifteen-pound Chinook up his ass, but I remembered my manners, held out my hands and said, “Thanks for the fish, Vince.”

“What are we supposed to do with the fucking thing?” Pina said, when I told her about Vince’s visit and the salmon. “Why didn’t you tell him to take his damn fish and go to hell?”

“I thought of it, as a matter of fact, but I didn’t want to start a war.”

Pina stood in the middle of the room with her hands on her hips, looking genuinely angry. I’d rarely seen her so angry. I sat on the sofa with my legs outstretched and reminded myself that it wasn’t me she was angry at. 

“It’s not a gift,” she said. “Why would Vince give us a gift? It’s his way of taunting us, like Luca Brasi putting the horse head in Jack Woltz’s bed.”

The comparison seemed a bit much, but I was glad to flash on that scene from “The Godfather.” 

“The fish is probably rotten, too.” Pina said, and then surprised me by shaking her head and laughing. “The fucker brings us a fifteen pound fish. A couple of weeks ago he tries to pawn off his leftover meat. What next?”

“I’m thinking some form of fowl.”

“Or a ninety pound pumpkin.”

“Maybe he’s just trying to make amends,” I suggested.

“That’s as likely as Trump making amends.”

Funny, I thought, that Vince has a way of reminding us both of Trump. “Speaking of which, are we still going to celebrate tonight?”

“Of course.” Pina flashed me a mischievous smile and sidled next to me on the sofa. “I put a bottle of Veuve Clicquot in the fridge.”

“Yes, I saw it, it’s next to the Chinook.”

Pina narrowed her eyes on me in a faux glare. “Don’t, Charlie.”

“It so happens that everything in the fridge is now next to the Chinook, it’s so damn big.”

We had decided this morning to celebrate Trump’s COVID diagnosis with a bottle of champagne and a couple of dozen oysters tonight. “After that,” Pina said, “we jump in the sack. You can be my main course tonight, Charlie.”

I had a five o’clock appointment with Bobby Sabbatini at the duck pond, and decided to get there early so I could choose a pair of benches from which we could safely distance. Sabbatini was already there with his wife, Blossom, who’d dyed her hair the color of over-ripe cantaloupe. Usually I’m repelled by these florid hair colors, but on Blossom it somehow looked witty. The couple was seated on one of my favorite benches. Blossom wore a facemask that read: FREE and, to her left, Bobby’s read: VERSE. It was Blossom who spoke first.

“Golly, what a sight for sore eyes you are, Charlie. Look, Bobby, he’s in love. Don’t you see that twinkle he has? I’m right, aren’t I, Charlie?”

I nodded. “You’re right.”

“See.”

I stood in front of their bench and greeted them both. Sabbatini had yet to offer a word, although he wore a wide smile, and an oversized iPad sat on his lap. 

“Bobby’s shy at first.”

“You weren’t shy on the phone last week.”

“It’s the in-person thing that gets him.”

Bobby shrugged.

Blossom, deftly deflecting attention from Sabbatini, asked: “So how’s your daughter doing? I’ve forgotten her name.”

“Sally.”

“Yes, Sally. I remember when she was a little kid and got up on the pulpit and recited a Shel Silverstein poem. That was très cool. So how’s she doing?”

“Fine, fine. She just moved to Sonoma. Has her own apartment. I guess you could say she’s in reinvention mode.”

Sabbatini smiled at that, which one might expect from a guy who transformed himself from a police detective into a poetry priest.

“Shall we find a place where we can sit together safely?” I asked.

“Sure,” Blossom agreed. “How about on the grass?” She rose in a flash and led us to an ample patch of lawn. I watched how nimbly both Sabbatini and Blossom sat on the grass, like a pair of teenagers, while I, a newly minted fifty-nine-year- old, with the stiffness of a centurion, was obliged to deliberately squat and then tumble, as slowly as I could manage, onto my butt. 

Sabbatini laughed soundlessly and, for the first time, typed on his iPad. A few seconds later a rusty, speakerphone version of his voice crackled: “That’s the way I talk, tak  ing lit tle hops as soon as I go mul ti syl lab ic.” 

“Wait till I have to get up.”

Sabbatini went back to typing. The crackly voice said: “Have you got a poem for us, Char lie?” 

“I’m working on a new one from Louise Gluck who, as you know, just won the Nobel Prize in Literature. I can give you the last couple of lines from her poem “Nostos”:

As one expects of a lyric poet

We look at the world once, in childhood.

The rest is memory.

Sabbatini smiled and the three of us sat quiet for a moment in the glow of free verse. He tapped out another sentence and pushed the device broadcasting his disembodied voice toward me. “See what you can do with this, Char lie.”

      I glanced at him and Blossom before pulling a small bottle of disinfectant out of my pocket. 

”Good idea,” said Blossom. 

But before taking hold of the iPad and spraying the screen, I said, “Look, Bobby, I could fart around with this thing for awhile and get nowhere. You really need to go back to the developers to get at the source. I’m sorry to disappoint you.”

Sabbatini nodded his head, clearly disappointed.

“I have an idea, though. Your voice comes across just fine when you use single syllable words. You should consider speaking only with them. It will be like learning a new poetic discipline. Retrain your brain to converse monosyllabically.”

Sabbatini typed and the device blurted: “That’s ease for you to say.”

“See you’ve got it. Cut off the parts of words that are understood. You’ll come off as a hipster. It’s not, How are you doing? It’s, How do? Hemingway understood the power of the simple sentence. You can do the same for the sole syl. You once were a detective, now you’re a dick.”

Blossom exploded with a horselaugh.

Sabbatini typed. “But I can’t call you by your name, Char lie.”

“Call me Chuck. My ex-wife did.”

“Did you like it when she did?”

“No, but I will when you do.”

Blossom grinned at me. “It’s a great plan, Chuck.”

Sabbatini went moon-eyed as he gazed at his wife and typed: “What should I call you?”

“Oh, Bob, how I love you. Babe, why don’t you call me Um.”

After I struggled to get to my feet, I suggested that Bob and Um come by the condo. I told them I couldn’t invite them in because we were being very vigilant due to Pina’s asthma. Nonetheless, I had something for them.”

Um pronounced Pina’s name with relish.

“That’s Peen to you,” I said.

“Can we meet Peen from a dist?” Um asked.

“She’s in San Fran now,” I lied.

At the condo, I ascended the stairs quickly. “Back in a flash.”

I handed the old dick the tin-wrapped pack. “It’s a King Sam. Pulled from the sea.”

Bob tapped on his pad. “Thanks, Chuck. Um and I will have some peep come by and I’ll grill it.”

 

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.

 

The smoke and toxic air has finally lifted, courtesy of the west winds. Even my afternoon was clear—I’ve been doing Zooms with my clients in the morning—and Charlie asked if I wanted to take a picnic to Ocean Beach in San Francisco. The Marin County beaches are still closed to parking.

Charlie was enthused in that boyish way he gets. “We can clean out the fridge,” he said, “and pick-up a baguette along the way.”

Five minutes after I agreed to go, Charlie asked how I’d feel if Sally came along. We could all wear masks in the car or she could drive her own car, he suggested.

I did my best to swallow my disappointment and mouthed the word sure before forcing myself to pronounce it again out loud. At least he didn’t ask if he could bring Roscoe along. I pouted discreetly for a moment. Sure, it would have been nice to have a day just with Charlie but, as time has gone by, I’ve gained some empathy for Sally.

All the talk about Trump possessing nary a scintilla of empathy has made me wonder about my quotient of the stuff. It’s never been one of my strong suits. Fucking Charlie has it in spades.

We ended up driving in a single car and Sally’s enthusiasm for the outing made me glad to have her along. Charlie drove past Kelly’s Cove, down the Great Highway to an open beach lot out near the zoo. We found a sweet hollow in the dunes and had our picnic. When Charlie said clean out the fridge, he meant it. In addition to our baguette, we had a good hunk of Sicilian salami, four or five cheeses, a half eaten tub of goose pâté, a jar of creamed herring, and a bunch of Muscat grapes. I’d packed a tablecloth, utensils, small glass tumblers, and a chilled bottle of Grüner Veltliner. The three of us sitting atop a mound above the ocean reminded me of an iconic Cartier-Bresson photo of a French family picnic.

After he’d eaten half the jar of herring, Charlie mused, “I like a group of three. I don’t mean a ménage à trois, but a little family unit like this. Maybe it’s because I was an only child. We were always three. You, too, huh, Pina?”

I nodded.

Sally said, “Not me. I had the single father.”

“Somehow you survived,” Charlie said, and smiled at his daughter. “So here we are, three only children in a group of three. Freud described a couple as a group of two, which was his way of describing the baggage of each person’s parents brought to the twosome.”

I have to admit that I love the way Charlie spins out little factoids about everything. It’s never done in a pretentious way, but more, by the way . . . I’ve determined that Charlie and I have different kinds of brains: his continues to accrue knowledge, while I gradually shed the little I have.

It turned out that we each went off on a walk along the beach alone. Sally came back first with a large handful of intact sand dollars that were the color purple. I’d never seen sand dollars that color, or so many at once. Sally laid them out in a wide circle and she and I made a fuss over their color.

“That’s because they’re still alive,” Charlie said. “Turn them over.”

Sally flipped one and there was, indeed, a complex network of tiny, whispering hairs. The purple fellow was not quite ready to give up the ghost.

“I’m taking them,” Sally said, “dead or alive.”

We drove up Clement Street on the way to the Golden Gate Bridge and stopped at one take out for dim sum and at another, a couple blocks further, for a large coppery-red Peking duck. Charlie and I picked up the duck while Sally strolled up the street, looking a bit astonished to be in an actual city.

Charlie and I stood staring at the hanging duck before we decided to get it. “You know,” he said, “they pump air through the neck between the skin and fat. That’s how they get the crispiness.”

By the time we got home the sand dollars had lost their purple.

Vince has moved back into his house on Liberty Street, defying the recommendations of his recovery program, which wanted him to stay three months in an SLE, a sober living environment, where he would be tested regularly and linked with meetings and other recovery services. So now the man’s on his own, with too much time on his hands. Yesterday when he called he told me he’d grilled a two and a half pound tri tip and didn’t know what to do with all the meat. He said his friend Bernard, who he described as his only remaining mate, would have taken a hunk of the meat, but he’d recently flown off to Hawaii to get away from the fires and the Covid. Finally, Vince asked, “Do you want some meat, Pina?”

It’s not the kind of question you want from your former lover in the middle of a pandemic, but then things got worse. Vince said that he’d be coming up to Sonoma soon and staying for a while in his condo. “If you don’t mind,” he added. It was nasty the way he said that, and I didn’t respond. Of course, he has every right to stay in his own place, but the notion of him lurking around the grounds, where Charlie and I are working at being a couple, upset me.

I want Vince to recede into my past or to somehow expel him, like a meal you eat when you’re famished that turns out to be bad. And yet every time the man calls, I answer. Why do I still let him sink his claws into me?

I’ve been in a bad place since we got the news that Ruth Bader Ginsberg had passed last evening. I couldn’t get the image of Trump and McConnell salivating out of my head. I saw Ted Cruz with his shit-eating grin in the robes of a Supreme Court Justice. Then I thought of RBG, the worlds she opened for women and justice, and now the coming evil. How total can it be?

Charlie was sweet. He knew how to touch me briefly so I felt his warmth, and then leave me room. He offered a double martini; oddly I turned it down. I wanted nothing, not even a glass of wine. It’s not like me. I hunched a long time over the small Chinese desk in our bedroom that’s become by itself my office. It was as if I felt obliged to make a rational response. Write my feelings. But I had no pen or paper and the laptop was closed on the bed. Something of me had hollowed out and I lost the scant sense of hope I’ve had for this country.

Later, Charlie brought out a bowl of sliced apples and some honey for dipping. “Even though neither of us is Jewish, I think we can dip apple for the sweet justice she brought.”

He told me something he’d read on twitter: “There’s a Jewish teaching that if somebody dies, as she did, right as the sun sets and Rosh Hashanah begins, God has held them back because they are most needed.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I don’t find any solace in the idea of God or Jewish legends.” I felt like a jerk as soon as I said that, because Charlie was only trying comfort me.

He squeezed my hand and said, “I agree with you,” and then added, “by the way, I don’t think the Jews have legends; they have interpretations and teachings.”

That correction was so Charlie, I couldn’t help but laugh.

We went to bed together early and he held me close but let me be quiet. When he turned off the bedside lamp and the dark cloistered us, he whispered right into my ear. “I have the feeling that Clarence Thomas is going to drop dead early in the Biden presidency, and if that doesn’t happen, I believe the Democrats are going to find a way to add Supreme Court justices.”

Charlie has a touching way of trying to make things better that can’t be made better.

This afternoon he brought Roscoe out on the deck to feast on the deliciously fresh air. When I came out, the parrot was perched on the top of the rail, bobbing his head in a regular beat as if he were listening to some secret music. I had a quick vision of his flying off, wishful thinking, I suppose.

I watched as the parrot became aware of me. The music in his head stopped and only his eyes moved.

“Hello, Roscoe.”

The parrot glued his eyes on me. “Good afternoon, Pina.”

His words were polished, with crisp diction like a butler in a parrot’s crackly nasal brogue. He sounded a little like Alfred Hitchcock at the start of his old TV show: “Good evening ladies and gentlemen.”

Actually, I’m happy he’s stopped saying, Pina, Pina, Pina, where you beena? every time he sees me.

Charlie, settled in a director’s chair, watched me watching the parrot. Clearly he was taking Roscoe out for a test drive for my benefit, and he seemed the most anxious of the three of us. Here we were again in a group of three. Sally had driven out to the Sonoma coast for the day and I wondered if she was becoming so lonesome for the ocean that she’d just keep on driving back to the Lost Coast.

I mentioned to Charlie that with Roscoe and me he had another group of three.

“Not according to Wallace Stevens,” he said and quoted the poet’s fourth way of looking at a blackbird.

A man and a woman

Are one.

A man and a woman and a blackbird

Are one.

“So you think that applies to parrots?” I asked.

Charlie nodded.

Now Roscoe took charge of his own head and nodded meaningfully at me. “Pina,” he said, “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

I stared at Charlie. It seemed like some kind of ventriloquism was going on. I knew Charlie had been a special effects star for years at Industrial Light and Magic, but this was too much. The words were actually coming out of Roscoe’s mouth, but less surprising than the words were the parrot’s affect. How did the gray bird convey such sympathy?

“My loss?” I asked.

Roscoe began nodding his head again, as if it was some strange way he had of winding himself up. The five words of his answer were recited solemnly with a pregnant pause between each: “Charlie   told   me   RBG   died.”

That’s when I went off on Charlie. “How dare you turn Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s death into a farce?”

“That wasn’t my intention.”

“Well, you managed to do it. Take your damn pet to the freak show.”

With that Charlie signaled to the parrot and it flew to his outstretched forearm. I glared at Charlie as he took the bird inside and spent the next hour alone on the deck, crying my eyes out.