THE BEE

Vince did not call this morning. She’d made an early cup of coffee at 5:30 after going to bed late. He’d been odd when he called at midnight, troubled, and lashing out, not at her but at the civilization. He’s part Old Testament prophet, the voice of doom. That’s where he goes when he feels out of control, ineffectual. And sure, he’s in the middle of it now.

She humored him as well as she could: “Yes, I think the end of the world may be near. I lurked a half an hour on Facebook the other day. Everybody’s putting up vintage photos of themselves, pictures from the first grade and their prom. ‘Oh, you’re so cute, Andrea.’ I think people’s instinct is to make their own memorials.”
“Right. Next they’re going to start posting what they want for their last meal.”
“What would you choose, Vince?”
“Oh, don’t do that to me, Pina. If you knew the garbage I’m eating to get by.”
“Come on, Vince, we’re talking last meal here?”
“Alright, alright. It’s crazy, all I’m craving is fish. I want an endless meal from Cala. Start with the kampachi ceviche, then bring me a dunganess crab tostada, a squid taco in salsa negra, the sopes with smoked lingcod, and a mussel tamale.”
“That’s it?”
“Enough of this nonsense, Pina. Cala’s closed for the duration and the most I can hope for is a fillet-o-fish from McDonald’s.”

The thought of a McDonald’s fish sandwich made her cringe, and she remembered the cheeseburger she made earlier in the evening, a massive patty filled with diced red pepper, broiled to a perfect rare like you can never get in a restaurant, and bathed in Vella pepper-jack cheese with three thick slices of bacon between a toasted caraway seed bun. She ate it all and let the grease drip off her chin onto the plate—heathen that she’s become—before resorting to the serviette. She’s been overwhelmed by an obsession with food since the plague started. It must be a survival instinct kicking in, that and having so much time on her hands. But, clearly, her mantra has become that of the carnivorous plant in “Little Shop of Horrors”: Feed me, feed me.

Now she asks how it’s going at Kaiser and, per usual, Vince changes the subject. Instead he talks about grim stories he’s heard recently on “All Things Considered.” Parents have stopped bringing their children in for necessary vaccinations. “Do you know what that means, Pina?”
“Epidemics of measles,” she ventures.
“Right. And much more.”

Then he pivots to a story about a Kenyan flower grower who had to plow under his whole harvest because nobody’s buying flowers anymore.

She wonders when he finds the time to listen to “All Things Considered.” Do they have the radio on at the hospital?

“Now meat packing plants are closing all over the country.”
“Wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to become vegetarians.”
“That’s not the point, Pina. Safeway’s distribution center in Tracy is reporting fifty-one cases of Covid-19, which means all the produce coming to Safeway is suspect. The damage to our food chain is absolute, irrevocable, down right nuclear.”
“Then we better start growing a victory garden, Vince.”
“Yeah, right. What are we going to live off of—San Francisco fog tomatoes?”
She glanced out the picture window toward The Patch. “Everything grows in Sonoma.”
“I’ll tell you what it’s going to be like.”
She didn’t want to hear his version. They’d do better going back to phone sex, although she could do without any more of his dick pics.
“Did you ever see that sci-fi film ‘Soylent Green?’ Nice wholesome dystopian flick. The world has run out of natural food so people eat these wafers called Soylent Green. Old people like me are encouraged to be euthanized. Edward G. Robinson, the veteran of gangster films, volunteers. They give him a nice send-off, play Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ as he fades into the ether. The great line in the movie comes when somebody discovers the source of the wafers: ‘Soylent Green is people!’”
“So you think we’re going to be eating Soylent Green, Vince.”
“I think the human race may turn into the Donner Party—the survival of the fittest.”
“Well, that’s good news for me, Vince, because I’m feeling especially fit.”
Vince spit out each word of his response as if he were disgusted with her: “Bully for you, Pina.”
“And I’m going to survive without eating anybody else’s kidneys. Get some sleep, and take care of yourself. I do love you, Vince.” She said the last sentence because she wanted to hear how it would sound. But there was some truth to it. Did she think I love you would serve as a palliative for a man whose nerves are shot?

He didn’t respond, not at first, but finally he mumbled, as if distracted: “Yeah, yeah. Night, Pina.”

She expected he’d at least, sign off with a love you, too.”

Later, after sniffing her cognac for the longest time, she took a mouthful and chewed on it before swallowing. Then she whispered out loud: “Tonight is the end of Pina and Vince.”

She still expected his phone call in the morning. She will continue taking them, and will keep being his faux wife until they reach the far side of the plague. The thing is, she’s already made the separation from Vince. She can feel it in her body. Breathing has become easier. She seriously doubts that she’ll be troubled with seller’s remorse.

So what happened to Vince? Had he gone to bed without setting his snooze? Was he exasperated with her for not sharing his fatalism? Or had he arrived at the same conclusion as her?

Soon as Pina realizes that Vince isn’t calling, she whips up a Bloody Mary. Strong and spicy. That’s how she wants to go through this day. She’s not about to eat a Soylent Green wafer. In fact, she has a lot of goodies in the fridge, enough to make a lunch bag the badger Albert would be proud of. Feed me, feed me.

She’s not sure what to wear. There’s supposed to be a high of seventy today. After concluding jeans would be too casual, she decides on a sleeveless ivory linen dress; she’ll throw her cornflower cashmere sweater over her shoulders in case the wind comes up. Now she sprays a floral perfume on her wrists and her throat. It’s Ylang 49 by Le Labo. She discovered it last spring when she wandered into Macy’s on Union Square looking for a new fragrance. She tried a number of them before settling on this blend of gardenia and ylang ylang. It was ridiculously expensive and she enjoyed making the splurge. Now she realizes she’s sprayed on too much and, unless she takes a shower and starts in all over again, her lingering sillage will be like what a thoroughly-doused woman leaves after departing an elevator. What the hell? She will live dangerously.

“Pina,” Charlie says, “so nice to see you. Come out on out to the deck.” He walks faster than she wants to go, so she simply pauses in front of three intriguing paintings on the south wall. Each of the square canvases, maybe 16 x 16, feature a gloved hand with a watch timed 6:05 on the wrist above the glove. The first is a rust-hued suede work mitt, with a rough nubby texture that you can practically feel; the middle one is an ebony dress variety with gentle creases that suggest the ultra soft leather might be deerskin; the third picture, painted with more of a cartoonish approach, depicts a fat synthetic glove made for ultra cold weather.

“Those are quite amazing paintings,” she says, as she stands on the deck in front of her appointed chair, a good ten feet from Charlie’s.

“Have a seat, Pina, have a seat. Yes, those are made by my Sonoma buddy Arrow Wilk. He’s got a studio off Lovell Valley Road. Old barn. Wonderful spot. I’ll take you out there some day. Arrow’s a disciple of Philip Guston. You can see it in the fat glove and the timed watches. Maybe ten years ago, I was out at his place and everything on the wall looked like a Guston. I said, ‘Arrow, Arrow, what are you trying to do, out Guston, Philip Guston?’ He goes, ‘Charlie, what can I do? I’m like one of those alto sax guys after Charlie Parker came on the scene—they could care less about their own style; all they wanted to do was sound like Bird.’

“I have several more of Arrow’s paintings in the second bedroom. He’s onto something really cool now. I think he may be capturing the zeitgeist. He’s painting gloved hands scratching masked faces, and calls the series, Hand to Mouth. I’ve been trying to buy a couple off him, but no more people’s prices for Arrow. Say, I have something cold in the fridge for us, if that’s alright. Did you bring a glass, Pina?”

She pulls a little Ikea tumbler from her bag.

“That’ll do.”

She’s a little afraid of Charlie right now, how drawn to him she is. She glances at his impressive row of plants: huge pots of roses just beginning to bloom, and several miniature citrus, also in blossom. Bees, drunk with nectar, swarm the blossoms.

“What kin of citrus are these?” she asks.

“Well, that there is a Mandarin,” he says, pointing to the smallest plant. “It’s yield will be modest, eight or ten fruit, but they’re lovely as they grow and I keep them on there for as long as I can. The next, as you can see, is a striped kumquat with last year’s fruit still on and plenty of fresh blossoms.”

“Those are the hugest kumquats I’ve ever seen.” They seem to grow in pairs and once she sees them as testicles she can’t stop seeing them that way.

“The others are a blood orange that went on strike last year and the prolific meyer lemon. That little plant will give me upwards of forty fruits.”

Charlie stands and with a puckish expression, says, “Boy, I love your fragrance. Floral. I pick up a note of gardenia.”

“Wow, you have a good nose. I accidentally put on too much.”

Charlie nods to her on his way to the kitchen. “Come on, Pina, there are no accidents.”

The way he says that lifts the hair on her arms. All the senses at once, but the scent is too much. Why did she go mad with Ylang 49? What’s the matter with her? Is her thermostat shot? Plus she remembers the saleswoman repeating how long lasting Ylang 49 is. She’s going to have to make a quick getaway or she’ll asphyxiate them both. But Pina only gets up briefly to squeeze a pair of massive kumquats.

Charlie brings out a bottle of Veuve Clicquot and a vintage ice bucket embossed Moet & Chandon. Two champagnes at once, she thinks, and then looks at Charlie, really for the first time as he shimmies the cork out with his thumbs. The two of them are in sync, at least in one way—he, too, wears linen, shorts down fall past his knees. And yet he becomes unquestionably dominant in a weathered polo shirt, a painter’s shirt, you’d think, with wide stripes in uncommon colors: creamy turquoise, chalk with a bit of sand in it, and bruised bronze. On top of that he’s barefoot and has beautiful, long toes. Oh my God, he’s aroused her; just by the virtue of his long toes she wants him.

Charlie produces an identical Ikea tumbler and fills both of their glasses, and lifts his. “I thought that we should toast the fact that we’re both alive.”
“Indeed.”
They air-toast as she squirms a bit in her deck chair. “Poor Vince thinks the end’s near, not the virus but civilization in general.”
Charlie lifts his glass again. “To Vince and the apocalypse! That be a good title for an album. Oh, I shouldn’t jest. Vince is on the front line.”
“He’d do the same.” She drinks her Veuve right down and wants more. Charlie, like Marco before him, doesn’t miss a beat, and now she sips the lovely brut.
“So where’s Roscoe? I though I’d be meeting him.”
“He’s sheltering in place in the second bedroom.”
“With the other Arrow’s?”
“Yes, they’re a series of tongues, unquestionably human. One is dotted with studs like a cloved Christmas ham. Another appears double-jointed, the way it arches back on itself. As you can imagine, Roscoe finds the tongues enchanting. “
Pina wonders what Charlie has hanging in the master bedroom and, just as she has the thought, he says, “Guess what I have up in my bedroom.”
This is getting fucking scary. She should get up right now and leave. “What do you have?”
“Vince’s Mexican wrestling mask collection.”
“What do you mean you have Vince’s . . .”
“Oh, didn’t you know? He sold the collection to me a few years ago. I know I paid too much for them. But what the hell, I love the masks. I guess Vince tired of them.”
“He never had them up. I think he was afraid of them.”
“Hell, they don’t scare me; I find them inspiring! But back to Roscoe. He’s a very intelligent parrot, you know. They’d love to have him at one of the zoos, turn him into an entertainer, but that’s not where his potential lies. I think his future is as a linguist. He has a growing vocabulary of more than 500 words. I play all sorts of recordings for him, human and animal. He loves the soundtrack of “The Lion King” and he does a good Simba. He’s mastered a few accents—the Texas drawl: Hey, y’all; gangster: ya dirty stool pigeon; and French: a tout a l’heure, al-i-ga-tour.”
“He doesn’t say that, Charlie.”
“He does, he really does. He definitely wants to meet you, Pina. Maybe a little later.”
Her head is swirling and she’s hardly had anything to drink.
“So what do you have for lunch today?” Charlie asks.
This is the moment she’s been waiting for. “Funny that you ask. I have a peanut butter and honey sandwich on Mike the baker’s Einkorn mini loaf, a cucumber and onion salad with sour cream and red wine vinegar, and a little bunch of Muscat grapes.”
“How many food miles do those grapes have, Pina?”
“I don’t know, how far is Chile? Are you having any more than bread and jam for lunch, Charlie?”
He refills her glass. “You bet. I’ve fixed myself a Jewish lunch.”
“I didn’t know you were Jewish.”
“I’m not, but I grew up among Jews and I appreciate a largely maligned cuisine. I also hit the discount Passover shelves at Safeway as soon as the holiday waned. I’ve got Gefilte fish and horseradish, matzos with homemade chopped chicken liver, and a kosher l’pesach macaroon. Do you want to trade?”

She shakes her head and pulls out her peanut butter and honey sandwich. Just like that, three bees form the citrus find her and the sandwich. She’s never been phobic about bees and swats casually at them. They flutter off and return.
“Are they bothering you?” Charlie asks.
“It’s nothing.” This time she gives the bees the back of her hand and one manages to stick to her. “Ouch.” Aroused, and smelling like a perfume factory, she’s fucking stung, right here on Charlie’s deck.
“Did he get you?”
She nods. Everything is too much.
“I wish I could help you, Pina, but, you know, the distance thing. Get the stinger out. My mother always rubbed apple cider vinegar on them. You’re not allergic or anything?”
Pina shakes her head. Apple cider vinegar. She stands and forces a smile. “I got to go, Charlie. I got to go.”

THE PARROT

The sounds of morning: a delicate crisscross of bird songs; two tractors, with comforting mechanical resonance in the baritone range; and a remote-control monster truck, perhaps inspired by the tractors, a piercing irritation, racing up and down the street. She’s learned in her study of speech that everything has a voice and that it’s good for the training of one’s ear to pay attention especially to sounds that annoy.

Her favorite sound of dawn over the last month, and one that she controls, is the custom teakettle, Vince’s pride and joy, which whistles the opening phrase of “Tea for Two” in a stiff, yet fetching, brass call to morning.

When she and Vince initially courted—if you can call it courting when you fuck the first night—he showed off the teakettle, and offered a seminar on the song. She’d always thought “Tea for Two,” was a ditty from a prehistoric time like the thirties. It actually came from a Broadway show of the twenties, “No, No, Nanette.”

Vince, the king of playlists, commanded his Bose system to play a number of versions of the tune, each of which he dubbed seminal. At the time she wondered how so many renditions could be seminal—wasn’t seminal a singular attribute? Only one example of the group was seminal, the way she saw it, but soon, she realized, that Vince favored absolute modifiers like ultimate, supreme, and definitive because they signified authority.

In any case, she paid close attention to his commentary, because the man, in the first blush of knowing him, did seem rather supreme. He began with the seminal Art Tatum recording of 1939, a dazzling complex of piano voicings with enough piano notes flying every which way to fill a hundred tea cups. Then came Tommy Dorsey’s cha-cha version, which struck her as perfectly camp, followed by Thelonious Monk’s off-beat side, spiked with tension-building dissonance, which Vince suggested grew out of Art Tatum’s example, though was seminal in its own right. Finally, Vince played the recording he clearly loved the most, a singer with the unlikely name of Blossom Dearie. Her voice was even more improbable: thin and girlish, almost seeming like a whispering parody. The song, on which the singer also played piano, was recorded at an uncommonly slow tempo.

Vince directed her to listen closely to the lyrics, the second time through. She had to admit that Ms. Dearie had precise diction and that the lyrics were lovely. Vince said, “Isn’t her tenderness unequivocal?” She didn’t know that one could equivocate tenderness, but she was cheered that Vince seemed to value tenderness. That’s what she wanted, after all, a man who was tender like Marco.

Pina soon learned the song, practicing it every morning in the shower, and one night, at Vince’s house in San Francisco, she sat on his lap and sang it to him, albeit at a more rapid tempo.

          Picture me upon your knee
          Just tea for two
          And two for tea
          Just me for you
          And you for me alone

          Nobody near us to see us or hear us
          No friends or relations
          On weekend vacations
          We won’t have it known
          That we own a telephone, dear.

So goes the first chorus. Pina’s voice is much deeper than Blossom Dearie’s, closer to a contralto range. Although she’s not as musical as Dearie, she can at least carry a tune. For a couple of years after Marco died she went weekly to a karaoke bar with a couple of girlfriends who claimed that she’d be holding out on them.

Vince was very moved by her a cappella version. Tears welled in his eyes. Yes, he was tender. That was the night he invited her to move in with him.

The sounds that affected her yesterday: the curdling, high-pitched yelp of the cocker spaniel, and Charlie’s voice message, the one a horror, the other an enticement. She listened to his message a half dozen times. It sounds like he savors her name, and he pronounced it just once. That’s all she needs. And the sweet pauses around his modest proposal—effective, if not especially artful.

But she’s not ready to call him back. After a moment of inspiration she decides to drive through the city to the ocean. She packs a lunch: a tuna and deviled egg sandwich, the same spread her mother used to make for picnics, and a baggie of dried mango slices. That and a thermos of black coffee will fortify her when she gets to the beach.

The traffic down 101 is very light and she’s shocked to see so few cars on the Golden Gate Bridge. Even under a high overcast, the city, on her left, gleams, and the channel that opens to the ocean, already hints at immensity. Years ago she’d read an article about suicides from the bridge, which mentioned that the vast majority of leapers jump from the east side, facing the city, the supposition being that few people can face the abyss of the open waters. Pina’s not sure which side she’d choose.

She exits right after the toll and drives the winding road through the Presidio, which traces the line of the bay. After a wide turn the superrich neighborhood of Sea Cliff comes into view, appearing like a white Mediterranean city, even without the sun beaming on it.

Past the beaches on the Golden Gate: Baker and China, both closed to cars, she drives up through the muni golf course—Vince’s fave, which he calls a “poor man’s Pebble Beach.” No golfers today. Vince pointed out that the golf course was built on the site of an old Chinese cemetery and that a monument from those days still exists in a clump of cypress near the first green. “That’s where my approach shot ends up half the time. Some would call it the Chinese curse.”

“But not you?” she asked.

“Heck no, I’m not a racist.”

She wasn’t sure. She’d heard him curse Chinese drivers and refer to the race as “inscrutable.”

When she asked what happened to the Chinese graves, Vince shrugged.

She drives to the top of the hill past the Legion of Honor, a repository of much mediocre French salon painting, and a cast of Rodin’s “The Thinker,” cogitating out front for the world to see.

As she shoots down to Geary, past the old fire station and the Seal Rock Inn, a motel she’s always imagined would be the very spot for a sleazy tryst, she wonders if she should try and reach Vince. Maybe she can catch him, from a distance, on a break. Selfish or not, the prospect of seeing Vince would put a damper on her day.

Just like that, the ocean comes into view, with plenty of open parking down along the Cliff House, with the actual Seal Rocks in view. But she continues down to the flats of Ocean Beach. She can see people walking on the beach, and though the rows of parking are closed off, all she has to do is drive a little further and park across the Great Highway near Beach Chalet.

Pina grew up going to the pristine beaches of Marin County: Stinson, Muir, and Point Reyes, and to the state beaches on the Sonoma Coast. Ocean Beach was always maligned as a city beach with few attributes, but she has a fondness for the democracy of it and, even on an overcast day, she finds the straight edge of the horizon line, and all that she imagines lying beyond it, beguiling.

She lays out a blanket, has a good hit of coffee, and rolls up her jeans past the calves. It’s not really cold at all and she has the perfect layers on top. She opens her arms to the ocean as if she was a kite and the wind might lift her up over the sea. She can’t remember when she last felt such exhilaration.

Barefoot, she strolls along the hard wet sand, on the apron of the waves, past masked and unmasked people, with dogs and without, feeling a tug of despair at the thought of the cocker spaniel she maimed yesterday.

At Kelly’s Cove, the north end of the beach, she watches several long-beaked seabirds she doesn’t recognize, neither standard seagulls nor pelicans, swoop down over the wet sand to dig out morsels and dive into the water for larger side dishes.

Back on the blanket, she thinks of her mother as she bites into the tuna-deviled egg sandwich. It’s taken her years to discover her mother’s secret about this comfort food: it requires a ridiculous amount of mayonnaise. A picnic at the ocean was her mother’s favorite ritual, as close as they came to going to church, and clearly more liberating.

On the way back she drives through Golden Gate Park, stopping almost at once at the Dutch Garden, by the old windmill. Not another soul to be seen. The tulips, arranged in a wide circle, are losing their petals, but there is much else in bloom in the glade, bordered by cypress trees.

She spots a perfectly ripe tea rose on the way back to the car, and brazenly breaks off a wedge of the lower branches. That, too, was a favorite activity of her mother’s—capturing wild branches in spring bloom, like mimosa, cherry blossom, and quince. As a child, Pina was horrified by the practice. Her mother kept clippers in the glove compartment, and would have her dad stop the car so she could plunder the wild. It seemed like the behavior of a peasant. Now, all these years later, she’s become her mother.

Pina feels triumphant on her return to Sonoma. She finds a vase for the tea rose, which she decides are a saturated hue of blackened fuchsia. The branches bend forward as if wind-blown by an ocean breeze. For a long moment she’s actually delighted with herself and mixes a martini.

“Vince was pleased that you left me the toilet paper,” she says, when Charlie answers. “And so was I.”
“I’m glad I pleased you.” He has a little laugh in his voice.
“We talked about how toilet paper hoarders of this era should have their heads shaved like the colabos in France after the war.”
“That was Vince’s idea?”
“No, it was mine. He thought you were generous.” She lifts her martini and savors the first crystalline sip.
“I wouldn’t go that far. I had the means.”
“Well, you may be able to keep your hair.”
“Thanks. Hey I want you to meet somebody.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Say hello to Pina, Roscoe.”
A clipped, nasal voice says, “Pina, Pina, Pina.”
“What are you doing, Charlie?” she asks, before taking a bracing swill of her cocktail.
“I wanted you to meet my parrot, Roscoe.”
“How do you do?” the strange, alternative voice says.
“I didn’t know you were a ventriloquist, Charlie.”
“No, that’s Roscoe. Aren’t you going to greet him?”
She shakes her head, but says, “Hello Roscoe.”
“Hello, hello.”
“Shall we sing a song together, Roscoe?”
Now she hears two voices, the faux parrot voice and Charlie’s, intone “Row, row, row your boat.” She reminds herself that Charlie’s an animator who specialized in sound projection.
“That’s a nice trick, Charlie,” she says. “What else have you got?”
“Maybe you should come over and meet Roscoe, Pina.”
“Pina, Pina, Pina,” the parrot voice says.
“Yeah, right.” She all but finishes her martini, swirling the thimble full at the bottom of the glass.
“That brings me to my proposal. I thought you could come over to my place for lunch, out on the deck. We’d do it staying absolutely mindful of social distance. I have my friend George over once a week.”
“Is George a parrot as well?”
“No, no, George is quite human. He’s a retired violist from the symphony.  He likes to pass out his business card, which says: ‘George Kostelanetz. Since 1945. Persona non grata.’ But as you can imagine he’s very accomplished. He has perfect pitch and makes the most beautiful wind chimes.
“When he comes, I leave the door open. He doesn’t touch anything, and I have his seat ten feet away from mine out on the deck. So, Pina, you’d have to bring your lunch and a glass for wine.”
Pina wants to shout YES into the phone, but tempers her reaction. “Let me think about it. I’ll get back to you.”
“I’d certainly enjoy having you here. Now say goodbye to Pina, Roscoe.”
“Arrivederci, Pina, Pina, Pina.”

THE COCKER SPANIEL

Vince is back to his usual curt self at the beginning of his morning call. She makes the mistake of mentioning the news she heard on the radio suggesting that perhaps the hospitals will not be so overwhelmed here because of the early social distancing in California.

“That’s a lie,” he says. “Whoever says that is not seeing what I’m seeing. Everybody’s in such a hurry to have this thing over that they’re starting to tell fairy tales. Listen, Pina, it’s not going to be over. It’s not going to be over for a very long time. And when it’s over it won’t be over.”

This isn’t the kind of logic she needs at this time in the morning, but she isn’t about to argue with him, despite wondering how he can be working such ridiculously long hours if the cases in the Bay Area have begun to flatten out. He’s at Kaiser, not San Francisco General.

“Trump closed the country down late,” Vince says, “and now he wants to open it early.”
“But he’s got a lot to brag about, Vince. We’re now number one in the world in Coronavirus cases and deaths.”
“Very funny.”
“I wasn’t trying to be funny.” Time to change the subject. “Hey, your friend Charlie just dropped off a dozen rolls of toilet paper.”
“A dozen rolls—you’re in business.”

When in doubt, talk about toilet paper. “From his private stash. Apparently he’s one of those toilet paper hoarders we’ve been hearing about. I think after the plague’s over all the toilet paper hoarders should have their head’s shaved like the French who collaborated with the Nazis.”
“Well, at least Charlie’s is sharing.”
“I had to shame him. I told him I was down to my last roll.”
“Were you?”
“Yes. I went to Whole Foods and Safeway the other day, and nada. The two things I noticed that were completely gone—toilet paper and tortillas.”
Vince chortled. “Come on, Pina, you weren’t thinking of wiping your ass with tortillas, were you?”
”Oh, Vince.”
“Listen, I’ve got to go. But I’m happy for you, really happy for you about the toilet paper.”
“Up your ass, Vince.” Every now and then she can’t help stooping to his level.

Pina takes a ride over to Glen Ellen. She needs to get out of the condo. For days she doesn’t realize that she’s been suffocating, not so much from the place, as the endless hours of not being able to escape herself. Everything else has departed, but not the worm of daft theories, questions, and fantasies that keeps circling her brain. Her doppelgänger hovers like an insufferable saleswoman peddling chatter for chatter’s sake, warped nonsense. The churn of her mind, with its filigree of foreboding, is an endless loop. You’d think she were a philosopher, given how often she asks herself who she is. The thing she’d really like to find is her soul.

Of course, she misses physical touch, more than she thought she would. Even if they only make love once a week, she and Vince cuddle every night. His body generates such heat she clings to him. Their bodies understand intimacy that is absent elsewhere in their lives together, which is why she’s started to realize that she prefers Vince sleeping to awake, which is quite a commentary on the state of their relationship.

As she drives through Sonoma to the west, Pina feels a flush of giddiness to be going somewhere, even if it’s only a seven-mile ride to another empty town. The weather is splendid—it will hit seventy today—and she’s zipped all the windows down. She dials the radio to the classic rock station and blasts Janis Joplin singing “Piece of My Heart,” followed very nicely by The Stones “Wild Horses.”

Along with the huge vegetable market, she’s cheered to see the bodegas open in Boyes Hot Springs. However, nobody is out walking in an area usually busy with foot traffic. A sign outside El Molino Central, the best Mexican spot in the area, says that the restaurant is now offering curbside carhop service. She loves the sound of carhop service. When are they going to bring back drive-in theaters?

Years ago, she’d heard from a friend at work how good El Molino was, but she had the hardest time getting Vince to have a meal there. “Why go to an over-priced shack in Boyes when we have so much good Mexican in the city?” He changed his tune as soon as she pointed out that El Molino made the Chronicle list of best 100 restaurants in the Bay Area. Maybe she’ll swing by one of these days for a little carhop. She could go for the red mole poblano chicken or the three-cheese chile relleno.

Pina drives through Agua Caliente, where Vince used to swim as a kid, and past the bodega that makes the great barbecue chicken that you can smell from a half mile away. Nothing’s cooking outside today. Now she heads through a few miles of open vineyards. She can see small leaves starting to burst off the recently dormant vines, but there are few mustard flowers left, growing in the fields, although scattered rose pushes are blooming along the edge of the road.

She waits for the green arrow to turn off to Glen Ellen. That’s when she begins crying. She didn’t think she would this time. Glen Ellen was Marco’s town. He’d started reading Jack London when he was a kid, and went on to read just about everything London wrote. Marco loved hiking at the state park named after London. He insisted each time that they take the short walk to Wolf House, before beginning a more rigorous hike through the park. When they first visited Wolf House, London’s twenty-eight room dream mansion, you could scramble among the ruins—Marco loved climbing the stairways and turrets—but later they fenced it off. Marco was disconsolate the first time he encountered the fencing. “It’s like going to the zoo, without animals.”

There were different theories about the cause of the fire that burnt Wolf House to the ground just before its completion. Marco had read a report on a forensic investigation of the fire that concluded that it had ignited in the massive kitchen, which had just had linseed oil applied to the wood shelving, and that it may have been caused by incidental combustion. Pina preferred the popular theory, which suggested that workers disgruntled with London ignited the blaze.

Personally, she found Jack London a boor. He may have been a great adventurer and facile writer, but he was also a racist, narcissist, and dipsomaniac. She never let Marco know how she felt. For him, it was something like hero worship that started when he was a boy.

Pina loved the village of Glen Ellen, though. That was something they shared. She even liked drinking whiskey at the London Saloon, where the man supposedly drank, even though this establishment, with its long oak bar, was a rebuild of the original that, too, had burned down. She’d read London’s story “To Build a Fire,” in school, about some dolt traipsing through the Yukon, unable to make a fire. The fires did not elude London.

Marco wanted to buy a second house in Glen Ellen, which had been a hippy town back in the day. Now, it was way too pricey and they could never afford it. They came up every year for a week and stayed at the London lodge, hiked in the state park, hit wineries, good restaurants, and loitered in the saloon.

She drives past now, thinking to pull over and have a walk around the small center of the village, but instead bears right up into the hills, growing nostalgic as she pauses by Benziger, the family winery, the welcoming grounds which she and Marco adored. Benziger farms biodynamically, a designation she’s never quite understood. The copywriters, however, found a brilliant way of describing the earth-friendly product: a wine with both character and conscience. Personally, she’s never met a wine with a conscience. An insectary thrives on the property, breeding the bugs that kill the vine’s pests. Does an insectary exist, she wonders, which could breed bugs to prey on the pestilence plaguing the planet? That’s what the pharmaceutical firms are after.

She drives further up the twisting road to the state park gate. A park ranger in a green uniform, wearing a yellow homemade facemask with playful cat whiskers, indicates, by windmilling his right arm that she needs to turn around. Damn. She knew the park would be closed but she hadn’t expected the ranger. She wanted to walk up to the ruins of Wolf House and have a good cry. She thinks of making a case for exemption just like the journalist Rambert in The Plague. I’ve come from a long way . . . my late husband adored this place. . . but, obediently, she follows the ranger’s direction.

On the way back through the village, Pima pulls to the side across from the saloon. She tries to gaze through the front glass, imagining that she can see Marco sitting at the polished bar, she beside him. Marco never got polished himself. She used to joke that watching him nurse a tumbler of whisky and water all night is what drove her to drink. But he was good company with his boyish grin and all the attention he paid her. He truly seemed to enjoy refreshing her drinks, and said, “I don’t know how you can go on effortlessly drinking without ever getting smashed.”

“You just can’t tell whether I’m smashed or not, Mister.”

She loved flirting with him, straight through their dozen years together. He was so beautiful with his olive skin and blue eyes—a northern Italian beauty. When she purred at him he’d be shy at first, bunching his full lips modestly. Then, slowly, he got bolder. He liked telling her how lovely she was and describing each of her features as if he were crafting the Song of Songs. Despite being a physicist, he had the sensibility of a poet. She always figured that was the Italian in him. Maybe his strategy of plying her with drink was to get her to relax her resolve not to have children. Poor Marco. She may have liked having his child; she just didn’t want to care for it. A barren woman, but not frigid, fully sexed, always raring to go, an apparent contradiction that’s never bothered her. Let people think what they will. Better this way than to be frigid with a brood of kids.

With that settled, Pina checks for traffic and puts the car in drive. Before she really gets going, a cocker spaniel, from out of nowhere, leaps in front of her. She can’t be going ten miles an hour, but she hits the breaks a beat too late and clips the poor beast in its hindquarters. The spaniel is spun around in an imperfect one-eighty, and hobbles back the way it came, ringing the air with the horrible squealing yelp of primal betrayal that only a wounded animal can make.

Pina gets out of the car. The cocker spaniel is long gone, even in its compromised condition. One day a fox dashes past her; now a dog can’t quite get by. Is she on her way to a head-on collision?

There appears to have been no witnesses. She looks around to find someone, anybody. She needs to tell somebody that she’s sorry. The dog is still yelping in the distance, or is it her addled mind that’s creating the echo? She stands beside her car, crying. A young couple, both in facemasks, walks by and regards her with indifference.

When she drives up to the condo, she sees that they’ve almost finished plowing the fava beans in The Patch, they being one guy on a tractor, his face masked in a red bandana, for dust rather than Coronavirus.

The favas had gotten so high, lustrous in the midday sunlight, and now they were plowed beneath the skin of earth, leaving only green stubble on the surface. Pina took pleasure in looking out over the field of favas and will miss them. Pretty soon the real crops: onions, potatoes, peppers, and early girl tomatoes will be rising out of the earth. She parks the car and walks over to the fence at the field’s edge to watch as the man on the tractor carves the last furrows.

By the time she gets upstairs, she’s wrecked and proceeds to get more wrecked after fast-sipping a second dry martini. She is all sorrow and mewling. She killed a cocker spaniel, or at least maimed it for life, because of her distraction and carelessness. Even today, taking a field trip, she couldn’t get out of her head.

Tear-sodden, she falls asleep in a deck chair, and wakes from a dream that she wants to capture with whatever shadowy memory of it remains. She’s chilled and goes in for a sweater.

As often happens to her in dreams, she’s walking rapidly in one direction or another trying to remember where she parked her car. But now there are men in hazmat suits prowling the streets. They are lugging large canisters marked with heads and crossbones. The men do not seem extraordinary to her. She’s on a mission and keeps switching directions. Where the hell did she park her car?

Funny, she’d heard a story the other day on NPR about a website that collects people’s plague dreams. Everybody is having them, but she’s stuck with the same old dream, trying to find her damn car. Sometimes in her dreams, amid her manic, speed-walker chase to discover where she’s parked, she relies on one of Vince’s favorite quotes to wake herself. It’s from Terry Southern’s novel Blue Movie, in which the porn actress asks, plaintively, “Who do I have to fuck to get out of this movie?”

Pina warms a bowl of yesterday’s vegetable soup and makes some toast. All she wants to do is plunge into a warm bath and read a few pages of The Plague, with a snifter of cognac on the side table.

While she is in the bath, the phone rings. Who in the world wants her at this hour? Vince’s midnight call is not for hours. Before getting into bed she checks the message. It’s Charlie. “Pina,” he says—and only says it once—“I hope you had a good day.” Yeah, right. “I was thinking . . . well . . . I have a modest proposal to make. Call me when you have a chance.”

THE FOX

She gets a call from her cousin Enzo while she’s gleaning the news. It’s her Zia Giulia; why else would he call. “Pina,” he says, “Mamma went to the hospital last night. I think she caught this bug. She got the fever and the shortness of breath. I don’t know about the dry cough. Allison wouldn’t even let me go in her room. We called the ambulance. Who knows, maybe it’s a blessing in the end. You know, her quality of life, you had to wonder.”

A blessing for you, Pina thinks, but surprises herself with her restraint. “I’m so sorry, Enzo. Zia Giulia wasn’t going out was she?”

“No, no. At least she wasn’t supposed to go out. We can’t keep her under lock and key. She wakes up before either of us and goes down to the beach—an old lady with a cane—before it’s even light. And you know what she does? You’re not going to believe what she does. We have evidence. She feeds the homeless. I’m not kidding, Pina. She feeds the homeless like she’s feeding ducks. The dementia . . . the dementia. A couple of weeks ago a half chicken was missing from the fridge, all the bread gone, a five-pound sack of apples. I’ve been telling her for years, You stay away from the homeless, mamma, those people are bathed in germs, those people aren’t people anymore. What am I supposed to do, put a lock on her door?”

Pina has disliked her cousin Enzo from the time they were children. Three years older than her, he was a fatso, and that’s what she called him, if not jelly belly. He’d chase her around the block in Redondo Beach, but he couldn’t catch her and he couldn’t climb trees like she could.

She and her mother spent two whole weeks down there, the year her father started getting sick. Two weeks playing with Enzo. It was the summer she turned eight. She’d just cut her hair herself. Real short. Went into the bathroom with a scissors and clip, clip, clip. She left hair all over everything. Her mother had a fit and marched her down to the beauty shop, where the beautician did what she could to calm her. “We’ll have her looking like Audrey Hepburn in no time.”

Pina was angry all the time that summer. Her father had stopped being her father. He’d become this unshaved block of a man spending the whole day in bed propped up by a thousand pillows.

Enzo started taunting her as soon as she got down to Redondo.
“You look like a boy, Pina.” And then he’d chase her around the block: “Pina, Pina, she’s got a wiena. Pina, Pina, she’s got a wiena.”
She did her best to respond: “Enzo, Enzo, with a missing wiena.” Even though her version didn’t have the rhyme, it set Enzo in motion.
“Sure do have a wiena,” he’d holler. “You want to see it?” And then he’d unzip his jeans and pull out his peewee.
“Put it away, Fatso. You’re a disgrace.” Pina was usually up a tree by then, doing her best to hang a long loogie on Enzo’s head. She’d learned the language of the neighborhood from the Eichorn’s, next door. Five roughhousing boys, age four to thirteen, who adopted her, miraculously, when she was six. On weekends and when school was out, she played with the Eichorns from morning until the streetlights came on. Tommy Eichorn, the oldest of the brothers, built a platform in the backyard that they turned into a pirate ship.

Enzo coughs into the phone. “Now Allison and I are probably going to get sick with this Chinese virus.”

Ah, evidence of Trump killing his supporters. She wants to gibe Enzo again, like she did forty-odd years ago. Do you believe it’s real now, Enzo? Are you still wearing your MAGA hat and jammies? But she doesn’t want to soil Zia Giulia’s demise with eight-year-old behavior. “Thank you for letting me know, Enzo. I’m very sorry. Your mother and I have had a special relationship.”

It’s not a surprise that, a couple of hours later, she wants to walk up Second Street East to the Mountain Cemetery, her sacred ground in Sonoma. Vince introduced her to the cemetery, but refuses to hike up there anymore. “I’m gonna hang among the living,” he says, which generally means, I’d rather stay here, drink wine and watch golf. She’s glad to go off by herself. Who needs his haggling? Come on, Pina, enough’s enough. How many graves do you have to see?

The Mountain cemetery is historic, opened in the 1840’s. Few fresh bodies are buried there any longer, maybe one or two connected to the old families. Governor Vallejo and his wife are there, as are a survivor of the Donner Party, lots of Italian pioneers, early winemakers, founders of nearby towns, and old Sonoma common folk: stone cutters, carpenters, barbers, school teachers, dentists. The only descriptive attached to women is wife or daughter.

Pina finds solace amid the shifting terraces of graves. She loves scampering off trail to remote burial spots, many with cracked gravestones, their chiseled lettering blurred with moss or eaten by the mists. Humble wooden markers stand like crooked teeth, no longer bearing identification. Earthquakes and erosion have shifted whole outcroppings of graves downhill.

And yet the cemetery is alive. Palm trees, black walnut, live oak, olive, bay laurel, California buckeye, horse chestnut, willow, and all manner of ferns. Volunteers grow sideways from crevices and complex stone formations, spotted with lichen. And the flora: lupine, wild cucumber and radish, golden poppy, Mariposa lily, blue dick, mule ears, and the Toyon bush, make a mockery of the plastic flowers, rising like a toxic species from odd vessels and strewn haphazardly across graves. Pina has seen deer roaming through the cemetery, wild turkeys, lizards, snakes; she’s been circled by butterflies, and heard that coyotes and cougars have been spotted on the hillside.

It’s a quick, steep hike from the condo and she’s cheered to not be winded at all when she reaches the top, but then she notices the sign—the cemetery has been closed, along with everything else in town. What could be more ominous than a shuttered cemetery? Are they trying to keep the dead from getting out or the living from slipping in? Doesn’t matter to her. She’s going to risk a citation. Beg off in a loopy Italian accent in the unlikely event that an authority sees her. I dida not knowa.

Pina slips around the gate and, on Willow Walk, stops in front of the tombstone of Francis Thornton Seawall, a native of Gloucester County, Virginia, born 168 years, less a day, before her. Time has split his stone into vertical halves and she thinks of the Ten Commandants. Yes, she does honor her father and mother, in her way.

Up weaving Cypress Way, a fox darts past her, not even separation distance away. She leaps in the air as if she’d just beheld a pod of whales spouting, and tries to spot the fox on its downhill dash, but it’s long gone. What does a fox in a cemetery mean? It has to be portentous. A fox is a form of trickster, so in a cemetery he must be outfoxing death.

She heads up Cedar and down Sea Breeze, past graves she’s known for years, and has affection for: the pipe fitter, whose colleagues at PG&E in the 1920s, had his tombstone crafted out of a fat pipe; the guy, nicknamed Jazz, lamented as a fine gentleman; the seaman, as his plaque attests, who served as a mate on The Hazard in the Colonial Navy, later becoming the captain of a merchant ship, The Albatross, and sailing around the world seven times, to be buried, not at sea, but on a hillside in Sonoma nearly 175 years ago.

She passes mausoleums branded with family names, rough stone sepulchers, cracked, canting from their foundation, the Druid tombs of Sonoma.

Pina climbs a boulder atop an outcropping of rocks. Today she is a trespasser, a breaker of the code in a time of plague. Her justification is that she’s come up here to mourn the recent dead, and the whole scourge of death that blankets us. The problem is she’s not in the mood for mourning. The air’s fresh and she’s walked past more than one almond tree, in blossom, bursting out of a side hill. She saw a fox rush past. Everything is alive. She has no need to mourn her mother and father, her husband Marcello—Marco. She’s done that. Neither will she mourn her Zia Giulia in advance. When there is so much gone, so many lives and ways of life lost, she stands with the living. Up here, she is alive, she and the fox. It is important to remember that she, too, is a part of nature.

Her phone’s marimba interrupts her just as she’s sparking a joint. She drops it into the abalone shell on the deck. Shouldn’t be smoking anyway. The whole business is respiratory and, with her past, it’s a death wish. She takes a deep breath and answers.

“Pina, Pina, Pina.”
“Yes.” She’s curt. Why does he insist on repeating her name like she’s a trained seal? He sounds like a guy, swallowing his words, trying to sell a bag of peanuts. Pina, Pina, Pina.
“Vince gave me your number. Hope that’s all right.”
What if it’s not?
“I thought I could do some shopping for you. I go shopping pretty much everyday.”
“You’re crazy,” she says.
“Yeah, I think I am.”

His agreement disarms her. She wants to tell him to fuck off, but instead, says, “Toilet paper.” She’s down to her last roll and starting to eye the stack of newspapers.

“Not a problem. I’ve got a fortress of rolls. Anything else?”
“No, the toilet paper will do it.” That strikes her as the perfect line for the end of a flirtation, but rather than hanging up, she holds onto phone long enough for him to ask: “So, how are you, Pina?”

He says her name so warmly this time that she feels obliged to finesse an answer, but something else happens. She becomes garrulous, chatters on endlessly about her afternoon in the cemetery, profiling the cabin boy on The Hazard who became captain of the Albatross, as if he were a member of her family. Somehow she even spouts lovingly about playing pirates with the Eichorns.

“Was that recently?” he asks, deadpan.
“I wish. It was forty odd years.”
“Why did you quit? Who grew up first, you or the brothers?”
“You call it growing up? I would have kept on playing. I saw a fine future in being a tomboy, but when my father died my asthma kicked in, and then I got my period. I was that girl that screamed, I don’t want it, I don’t want it, I don’t want it, when I realized what had happened. I’ve been devastated ever since.”
“Hmm,” Charlie says.

She has no idea why she’s saying all this. Is she so lonely, so desperate for talk that she ends up telling a stranger about her first period?

“Pina, can I ask what it was that devastated you?”
“All of it. As an eight-year-old, playing pirates, I was indestructible, impervious to fear. I had everything I wanted. Even my father.” She plucks the joint from the abalone shell. She’d like to take a toke right now.
“You would have scared me, Pina,” he says. “I was what you’d call a nerd. My parents couldn’t get me outside. All I wanted to do was stay in my room and build things. I had no friends; I had no need for them. It’s funny how you can see in your childhood, the person that you’ve become all these years later.”
“You seem sociable enough.”
“Yes, I’ve learned to live among people.”
“So, you must be thriving with the isolation.”
“Let’s just say it’s reminded me of who I am.”
She thinks of his once calling himself Raoul. “Aren’t we all a multiplicity of people?”
“A multiplicity of people,” he echoes. “Hmm. I have trouble enough being a single person. But Pina, may we pause for a moment so that I can tell you how much I love hearing you speak. On the phone, without seeing you, your voice is a treasure.”
Now, he’s playing with her. Or is he for real? She lights the joint and takes a deep toke.

Charlie says: “Your diction is a revelation, and I tell you that as a former animator with a keen interest in vocal fidelity. And one more thing, Pina, you shouldn’t forget that you’ve retained some of your fearlessness. You broke into a cemetery today.”
“I know, in the middle of a plague. Doesn’t that sound gothic?”
“Indeed. Good night, Pina.”

So, now he cuts her off. She should have known it.

“The TP will be on your doorstep in the morning.”

THE FLY

She wakes early in anticipation of the 6:30 call. Her inner clock is spot-on. Unlike Vince, she never uses an alarm. He likes to hit the snooze button thrice. She doesn’t get it—interrupt your sleep three times for the sake of a few pathetic reprieves.

As she waits for the phone to ring, she thinks of Charlie’s wrestler roar, a mid-range bellow, not exactly Walt Whitman’s “barbaric yawp across the roofs of the world.” Charlie surprised her so marvelously with the wrestling mask that she nearly wet herself. What did he mean by it? Was he expressing his exasperation with her? He admitted, to use her mother’s idiom, having feelings. What does it mean to have feelings you can’t act on? What do risk-free feelings amount to? It’s too much to contemplate with Vince’s voice practically upon her.

He’s brusque this morning on the phone. He’s starting to freak out. She’s at the window in a light robe, listening and letting him know she’s listening. Everything’s about him. She doesn’t try to distract him, not today, but applies her bare-bones reflexive listening skills: That must be hard, Vince. Oh, I bet that’s scary. He thinks he’s going to die and doesn’t like the idea. He sees it in a very singular way as if others haven’t contemplated the prospect, as well. Of course, he’s on the front line or will soon be. On the other hand, she has her history of asthma. Even though it hasn’t flared in years, her lungs are compromised. If she’s going to die, she’ll die, but she’s not going to waste time worrying about it.

She wonders if Vince would have been a man who fled in battle. She’s ashamed for having the thought, but she persists. What does it mean, to flee a battle, a worthy battle just to spare your own life? Isn’t part of the Hippocratic oath to serve your community, even in times of war and pestilence? Or as Camus’ Dr. Rieux puts it, while contemplating the plague, “The thing is to do your job as it should be done.” Lovely perch she has, above The Patch, for grading other people’s nobility.

“Alright, it’s off to the slaughter yards for me,” Vince says, before signing off, not once asking after her.

Some men burn out quicker than others, she decides in the shower, and some, like her father, die young. The fact is she met Vince too late. He’d already started to wind down. It didn’t stop his philandering. He’d just turned sixty but was ready to bale from his job; he said he’d socked away enough dough. Still vital, he was casting around for hobbies. Playing chess online. Yes, he may have been fond of her, but he was also seeing Pina as his retirement maid.

And if she had met Vince earlier there would have been a lot more hot blood and ugliness. By now she’s sharpened a functional skill, traditionally a male skill, to disassociate. When Vince gets hot she stays cool, so cool that it doesn’t even threaten him.

Once the bathroom mirror is no longer fogged, she stands in front of it for a moment. Pina, Pina, Pina, she says to the reflection of herself. That makes her smile. Her mother used to say, “Smile, Pina, show off those beautiful teeth.” She smiles again, still obedient.

The truth is, she doesn’t know who she is anymore. Maybe she’s never known. Fifty-one-years old and she’s beginning to look worse for wear. Little bags under the eyes, the first sign of vertical wrinkles like slash marks marching across her upper lip, and a suggestion of turkey flesh, beginning to form pleats under her chin. The skin itself has become drier and drier no matter how much moisturizer she lavishes on it. She needs a haircut, that’s for sure. How is she going to accomplish that? First world problem, she thinks, and turns away from the mirror. That nifty phrase, with which the happily privileged gently nudge each other about their advantage, is dated. How do we now differentiate the haves from the have-nots? The solvent and the insolvent? The fed and the unfed? The armed and the unarmed?

She has a new companion this morning: a fly. He, like Vince, wants her undivided attention. But reflexive listening—I hear you, you little buzzer—isn’t as effective as it’s been with Vince. She crosses and re-crosses her legs, flails her arms, but the little guy keeps coming back for more. Rather than trying to swat the fly, she decides she’ll try to better understand it, and picks up the summer volume of Blythe’s Haiku set, where she remembers the fly poems are catalogued. Jackpot. Issa describes the situation perfectly:

            One human being
One fly,
            In the spacious chamber.

And then he offers a cautionary tale:

Striking the fly,
I hit also
            A flowering plant.

Shiki also does the deed:

Killing the fly,
For some time, the small room
            Is peaceful.

But Pina decides to leave the domain to the fly and closes herself out on the deck where the bees are active but have no interest in her. She flips open the summer volume to a page where she’s left a marker: “Planting Songs,” a category of its own. Basho has a lovely one:

The beginning of poetry:
The song of the rice-planters,
                        In the province of Oshu.

And again, Issa:

In the shade of the thicket,
            A woman by herself,
                        Singing the planting song. 

Pina imagines a field of women singing planting songs. The same song, not in unison, but in rounds with thin and stout voices, young and old.

Soon they will be planting at The Patch. The few planters here, Latino men, are remarkably efficient. If they sing, she doubts it’s planting songs they’re singing. The Miwok must have planted seeds in this valley. Maize. But what does she know? Nothing about the Miwok, that’s for sure. She goes on a silent rant. Why are we not taught anything about the people whose ancestral land this is? Born and raised in the Bay Area, and we have no curiosity about the first people to live on this land.

Without disturbing the fly, she dashes in to grab her computer, and discovers, on the Angel Island Conservancy site, this pithy profile: “The Miwoks had no pottery, made no fabric, and planted no seeds. They kept no domestic animals. Instead, they were gatherers, fisherman, hunters, and basket makers.”

Pina admires the efficient distillation, in three short sentences, of a way of life, and realizes, sadly, that her thirst for information about the Miwok has been slaked.

Pina walks into town with a ham and cheese sandwich, a baggie of salt and pepper potato chips, celery sticks, and a teeny Tupperware of almond butter, a lunch almost worthy of Albert the badger. She didn’t bring the mango cannabis gummies she set aside for dessert. She’s a truant. It’s already 12:15 and Charlie’s not expecting her. He may have scarfed down his goose liver paté and scrammed. She’s not going to go directly to the white bench. She doesn’t want to look desperate. She’ll loop the square the opposite way. If he’s there when she makes it around, fine.

She scoots south down the east side past Dirty Girl Donuts, which produces glazed profanities in iridescent shades that don’t exist elsewhere in the world.

Despite their bakery exemption, D. G. is shuttered for the duration, but the Basque Boulangerie is still open for take-out.

Charlie’s probably seen her by now, and is watching her loiter, timing her as she makes her way around the square. Is he following now? She doesn’t look back. Charlie is playing with distance. It’s rather thrilling. Is he following her?

She cuts up the alley past the Basque’s cooling racks, sniffing country rounds and sour baguettes. Murphy’s Irish Pub, a ghost of itself with the chairs crooked atop the tables, offers take-out, five evenings a week, beer-battered fish & chips and buttermilk chicken breasts.

The real temptation comes next door at the 1920’s Sebastiani Theatre, which under normal circumstances would be showing “Portrait of a Woman on Fire,” the title hand-lettered above the blue-suited eternal ticket taker. Pina would truly love to break into the theater and flick on the digital projector. If Charlie snuck in and chose one of the lumpy seats two rows behind her, she might become undone. But she keeps going, without glancing back toward Charlie, who surely must be following by now. Past the shuttered Town Pump, the lively tavern that usually has a signboard out front advertising, Daycare for Husbands.

She can’t resist a glance back as she turns onto the south side, but Charlie must be laying low in a storefront. She’s surprised to see a guy, high on a cherry picker, affixing a regal sign to a yet-to-open shop, The Sausage Emporium. Nice that somebody’s feeling bullish about the future. The building blocks of the new Sonoma, reborn beside the old adobes, will be garish-glazed donuts, buttermilk chicken breasts, and artisanal sausages. Surely, all of the winetasting shops—maybe twenty-five around the square and in the alleys—can’t survive.

But Pina expects The Church Mouse thrift shop will thrive. It’s the place that helped Vince get going with his cocktail shaker collection. She stops at the window, which as thrift store windows go, is top drawer. It’s designed to honor the Academy Awards and the Sonoma Film Festival (cancelled). Posters of Marilyn and a few old movie reels flank a woman in a floor-length magenta dress, bejeweled in faux diamonds and a mink stole. Pina keeps expecting Charlie to creep up behind her so that she’ll first see him reflected in the window display. But, no.

She crosses to the park side of the street, where she spots three rapacious mallards resting in the grass. By the time she makes it to the north side of the square, Charlie’s nowhere to be seen. She’s made the whole thing up. Such absurdity. She’s behaving like a prepubescent teenybopper. How can she fall in love with a man she can’t even touch?

She’s reminded of a story Sylvia, a psychotherapist friend told about her daughter Allie, who, at twelve, announced that she was “going out” with a classmate named Alec. “They didn’t go out once,” Sylvia said, “and then a few weeks later Alec broke up with her. Allie’s stoic response, “I guess were not going out anymore.”

Pina sits a moment on the white bench, reaching into her sack for celery sticks. Actually, she has no heart for eating. As she leaves the square she wishes she could hear his call: Pina, Pina, Pina. The silence is not golden.

At home, the fly is also silent. Maybe he made his way out an open window. She pours herself a Campari—a little something to stimulate the appetite—and opens to the second part of The Plague. Nodding along, she reads: “Under other circumstances our townsfolk would probably have found an outlet in increased activity, a more sociable life. But the plague forced inactivity on them, limiting their movements to the same dull round inside the town, and throwing them, day by day, on the illusive solace of their memories.”

Time to refresh her Campari. After another, with a couple of splashes of Hendrick’s and Cinzano, she’ll have the appetite of a horse.

Pina puts her feet up on the ottoman and settles back with The Plague. Her Negroni isn’t quite right; it’s a little on the sweet side. She wonders how two mango gummies will alter the flavor and, as she chews them, the wily fly finds her again. He’s risen from his slumber and his personality, after repose, is friskier than ever.

RATS

This morning, still in bed, she has a quick exchange with Vince, which begins with him apologizing for his lurid text.
“What do you mean, Text? That was a fucking s e x t,” she says, loving the sound of the word, even as she pretends to despise the thing itself. She’s become a fucking Puritan.
“So I guess there’s no phone sex for us,” he says with a laugh. “Was a silly idea.”
“Oh, I don’t know. We’ll see how things develop. Don’t work too hard today.”
“Fat chance. I’m too old for this, Pina. We haven’t even seen the surge yet, but it’s coming. It’s on its way. I knew one day I’d meet my match. Maybe we all have.”
“You’ll be okay, Vinnie,” she says, using her sweet name for him. “Have you been eating? I wish I could cook for you.”
“I can cook fine, but I don’t.”
“What are you eating?”
“Frozen pot pies, junk.”
“Don’t eat junk, Vince.”
“Whatever you say. Listen, I gotta go.”
“Talk with you tonight.”

Out of bed, Pina blasts the heat high and does a half hour circuit in the nude, sucking coffee from her sippy cup because she’s moving too quickly to use her mug. Nobody can see her in the big room. She counts that as one of the features of the place.

Today, she decides to do something for somebody else. It’s a cold morning, but she’s out on the deck with an actual cup of coffee and her phone. She has her Zia Giulia, her mother’s older sister in Rodondo Beach, on speed dial even though she hasn’t spoken to her since she’s arrived in Sonoma.

“So it’s you, Pina.”
Her octogenarian zia has good days and bad ones with her memory; it’s cheering that she recognizes Pina without her having to identify herself.
“I was going to call you, honey, but I didn’t want to bother you.”
“Nonsense.”
“You live such a busy life, Pina.”
“Not now. I’m not busy at all. We could talk everyday.”
“Talk everyday. What would we talk about?”
“We could talk about something different every day.”
“Ah, you were always a funny one, Pina.” Her aunt giggles again. What was once a round musical laugh—her trademark in the family—has begun, in her dotage, to take on the rust of a cackle.
“So how are you, Zia Giulia?”
“I have everything I need. Enzo looks after me very well.”

A widow for thirty-five years, Zia Giulia lives with her son Enzo, a captain in the Torrance Fire Department, and his wife.
“Except he won’t let me out of the house anymore. What’s the point of living by the beach if I can’t walk on it? How am I going to get my exercise? It’s just a flu, Pina. I’ve had the flu before many times and always recovered. The fake news is blowing it out of proportion.”

This is why she hasn’t called Zia Giulia. Her zia, along with the whole clan of them in Rodondo Beach, are Trumpites, even the grown kids. They have Fox News on from morning to night.

“On the other hand, I’ve heard people on the news say that the old people like me should sacrifice ourselves, you know, for the sake of the economy. We’ve lived a good life, which is true, so now we should go on our merry way. They say we should have chicken pox parties. Sounds like fun. What do you think, Pina?”
“I think it’s a terrible idea.”
“Well, you should know, Pina.”
She’s can’t decide if her Zia Giulia can possibly be speaking sarcastically.
“So, how’s that handsome husband of yours? What’s his name? I’ve forgotten his name.”
“Vince. He’s very busy now.”
“And how about the other one, the one before, the one who died? What was his name?”
“Marcello.”
“Right, Marcello, a real Paisano. What did you call him?”
“Marco.”

Once the questions start they can go on forever.

“Right, Marco. And where did he come from?”
“Padua.”
“Oh, Padua, a beautiful city. Enzo took me there when we visited Venice. It’s one of the oldest cities, you know.”
“Yes, I visited several times with Marco.”
“Marco, that’s right. And what did he die of?”
“Cancer.”
“So young for cancer. How old did you say he was?”
“Forty-one.” She needs to stop the conversation before she begins weeping. “It’s been good to talk with you, Zia Giulia. Please stay well.”
“I’m sorry to bother you, Pina.”
“You haven’t bothered me.”
“No need to call tomorrow, Pina. You take care of yourself. You’re not as young as you used to be.”

She decides that it wasn’t a good thing she did, because she suspects that the call didn’t make either her or Zia Giulia feel better.

Pina decides not to transform her shimmering white mound of crabmeat into crab cakes, but makes a lovely crab salad instead, with celery, red onion, a hardy dash of cumin, and mayo. She toasts two slices of sourdough that she took from the freezer this morning and whips up a sandwich, wrapping it in wax paper just as her mother used to do. She wants to bring something for Charlie and settles on a three-pound sack of mandarins—she has two bags. They are not enough as a return gift for the magnificent crab, but he may not accept the gift anyway, for fear of transmission. She packs a big spray bottle of alcohol in her bag and heads to the bike trail.

At the entrance to the trail, a sign banning bikes. Pedestrians only, and they are reminded to keep at least six feet of social distance. The language of the plague depresses her. She’d like to turn the blasted phrases into cocktails. The Social Distance could be made in a variety of ways but always includes onion and garlic; the Flatten the Curve calls for a martini glass hosting a long pour of gin or vodka, a shimmer of Chartreuse, and a lengthy coil of lime peel; the Sacrifice Yourself, a very tall cocktail, features four jiggers of tequila, four of rum, gin, vodka, and grappa—it must be ingested in one long swallow. The Super Spreader is, of course, a party drink, served in a tall pitcher with eight long straws. The Hoarder is a very dirty martini with three toothpicks filled with olives, the stem of its glass decorated in a filigree of toilet paper. The Shelter in Place, a clear potion with a single hazel nut, to represent our isolation, comes with a lid, that can only be flipped after use of hand sanitizer, which itself might become a cocktail.

There’s not a single soul on the trail today and Pina only sees three people strolling around the square. She notices signs posted at the park entrances: The park is closed.

The news hits her hard. It’s not that she’s going to miss the ducks or weaving through the few paths. Each day something else, every little thing, is being taken away. The park is sacred ground in Sonoma, the soul of the place, where diverse groups have gathered for generations. She and Vince often come up for the Tuesday night market during the season. All the picnic tables are filled and families lay out on blankets, with amazing spreads. Everybody is drinking wine out of actual glasses. Vendors are loaded with beautiful produce. The food trucks hum, good bands play. On weekends throughout the year, there’s a full calendar of festivals in the park

Pina’s disturbed by something else about the closure: Charlie. She’s alarmed to realize how much she’s been looking forward to sitting on a bench with him and eating her crab salad sandwich. She doesn’t even know which unit in the complex he lives in. She’s almost at the point of crying when something from the bushes dashes right past her. “A rat!” she shrieks. In broad daylight, a rat. She looks around to see if anybody’s heard her. Not a soul. She’s shaking a bit. A rat right next to her. And then she hears her name: Pina, Pina Pina. It’s like a sweet bell ringing in the distance. She sees him, Charlie, in a mask and with his purple gloves, coming toward her down the West side of the square. She does start crying now.

“What’s the matter, Pina?” he calls from ten feet away. He comes closer, but not too close.
“I just saw a rat,” she says, wiping her eyes with her sleeve. “In broad daylight.”
“So sorry. It gave you a scare. Funny, at the market the other day, I overheard this nasty woman in the bread line talking about the ‘Chinese virus,’ like Trump calls it. She said, ‘It’s no coincidence that the Chinese started this plague in the Year of the Rat. Pretty soon we’re going to start seeing the rats.’ She really said that.”
“And I saw a rat.”
“Which doesn’t confirm that woman’s racist conspiracy theory.”

Somehow she’s calmed down. Charlie’s calmed her down. She smiles at him and lets herself look him over. He dressed in jeans, a wool coat, maybe a Pendleton, and a gray felt hat. Rather dashing, really, for a man in a facemask with purple hands. He notices her looking at his mask.

“I saw it in the Times today. They think everybody might do well to wear a mask. A scarf will probably do.”
“Women have started making masks out of their old bras.”
“I heard that,” Charlie says, without affect.
“Maybe all the women in America should stop wearing bras until they have a vaccine.” She doesn’t know why she said that, and can’t tell whether Charlie’s blushing behind his mask or suppressing a laugh. She’s gone a bit daft being in company. “I brought my lunch,” she says, and shakes her bag as if he requires evidence.
“Oh, good.”
“But they’ve closed the park.”
“It’s okay. Follow me, Pina, I know a place where we can both eat safely.”

THE FROGS

At first she doesn’t know what to do with herself. She has five loads from the car. A ridiculous excess. Pasta and dairy. Tuna, sardines, anchovies. A whole massive chicken, salmon fillets, two packs of smoked mackerel, Imagine portabella broth, a squat edifice of Trader Joe’s pizzas: woodfired heirloom tomato and arugula. First time in her life she’s been a hoarder. Her liquid provisions: ten bottles of Whole Foods Italian water, a six-pack of Chateauneuf du Pape from Vince’s cellar. Sauvignon Blanc, Tavel Rosé, Hendricks and Stoli for the freezer. Sake. Campari. Cinzano. Glenfiddich, and Courvoisier. She decided against rum—it goes down too easily. If the virus doesn’t get her she’ll drown herself in booze à la Nicholas Cage.

Clearly, she’s going to run out of toilet paper in two weeks unless she changes her habits. That’s what this is about. Retooling the middle-aged brain. Stop touching your face. Wash your hands for long enough to sing Happy Birthday twice. Beam disinfectant vibes wherever you tread. Be mindful.

As she puts away the groceries she catches herself picking her nose. There’s no hope for her. Her thoughts come in fragments, bullet points in search of focus. She tries to get herself to sit down a minute, but she’s too wired for that and keeps circling the living room, pausing from time to time in front of Vince’s picture window. That’s what he calls it even though it’s an inelegant sliding glass from the seventies, framed in steel, which nobody can keep clean.

Across the street is a small farm, dense with fava beans that will soon be plowed under to nourish the earth. Every year she’s impressed that this farm, The Patch, refrains from early spring planting. Land stewardship. The phrase pops into her head from who knows where. It’s never been part of her vocabulary.

She heads out to the deck to light a joint and a flash rainstorm with tings of light hail delights her. At the edge of the overhang she gets a little wet. Five hits of Golden Uni and she’s seeing things more clearly. She has options. She pours herself a sake on ice.

This is Vince’s condo with his things and his esthetic: a determinedly male sense of comfort with a wide Italian leather sofa and a pair of Prairie School black leather Morris chairs, not to mention a high-end La-Z-Boy in the second bedroom in front of the TV. Dominating the master bedroom are three charcoal sketches of female nudes by the North Beach artist Homer Sconce, who sold them, Vince claims, for a song.

Although she’s come up with him weekends for seven years, she’s never come alone. Now she’s to stay for the duration. A few years ago three girlfriends from college joined her here for a getaway weekend in June. They hired a limo and went to a few wineries. Molly, the financial advisor with Ameritrade, vomited, mostly out the window, and the others cheered as if it were a midlife triumph. They had more wine with dinner. Olga, the yoga teacher with a bothersome lisp, brought outsized T-bone steaks. She’d thought Olga had become a vegan.

They grilled on the deck. When she saw the slabs of meat on the platter, charred crisp at the fat edges and swimming in blood, she wondered why they were masquerading as men, and as if to amplify this curiosity, Janice, the dentist from Alameda, brought her computer to the table, before they’d even cleared the dinner dishes, and went directly to Porn Hub.

They gathered around the screen amid the detritus of plates heaped with gristle and bone and puddles of blood, and gawked at random cocks. The men attached to them either looked like pea-brained adolescents or heavily-inked carnies who’d just as soon slit your throat as fuck you.

She broke away from the others and stood with a glass of Zinfandel at the picture window. Despite it being dark she knew she was gazing in the direction of rows and rows of Early Girl tomatoes.

At the dining room table, Janice hooted, “I’d take an itty bit of him,” and Molly, who’d fully recovered and was far along on round two, shouted, “You don’t get an itty bit. You get all of him.” It wasn’t the weekend she hoped for.

Vince bought the condo after his first wife died and he lived here awhile with his second. He has his library here—a lot of man novels and poetry. He keeps his nonfiction at the house in the city. The poetry was one of the first things that endeared her to him. He’d written it in college but the writing fell away during med school. “Poetry takes time,” he’d said, “and I didn’t have it.” In any case, he’s bought plenty of poetry books over the years and is proud of his collection.

Some nights Vince picks a book off the shelf and reads a poem to her. He’s quite a performer. She wonders if that comes to every man who knows that he’s handsome. His elevated elocution isn’t particularly pretentious. It’s clear he loves the language. The rounded vowels resound with a warm, woody, clarinet timbre.

Her father recited her poems when she was young. Longfellow and Wordsworth, poems he’d learned in school. He loved Whitman’s “O Captain, My Captain.” The poems weren’t delivered as fluidly as Vince’s but he was her father and he was sweet to her. She loved the way his brow furrowed when he tried to remember lines.

She’s never mentioned her father’s affinity with poetry to Vince. In this and in other matters she’s done her best to keep the two men apart, as if standing with arms outstretched, one on each side of her. She’s not been as mindful of this separation with other men, but then Vince is nearly twenty years her senior. It’s her father, who died when she was thirteen, who’s in need of protection. His spirit must endure no matter what becomes of Vince.

A few weeks after they met, he read a poem to her the first time. It was “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” by W. B. Yeats. Later she memorized the poem and began to use the first stanza in her work with a few clients, because it was so lucid and the words fell directly into their natural pockets.

     I went out to the hazel wood,
     Because a fire was in my head,
     And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
     And hooked a berry to a thread;
     And when white moths were on the wing,
     And moth-like stars were flickering out,
     I dropped the berry in a stream
     And caught a little silver trout.

That first time, after he’d finished reading the poem, she swallowed some air in the spell of the poem’s simple majesty. She was slayed by its pictorial clarity, not to mention the loveliness of the man reading it. But then he broke his spell, “You know,” he said,  “it’s quite daunting to read poetry to a speech pathologist. I imagine you listening to every word with your speech pathologist ears.”

That struck her as an odd thing to say, perhaps because that wasn’t at all the way she’d listened to the poem. “It shouldn’t be daunting,” she said, “to read poetry to the woman you love.”

Their eyes met. She’d clearly overstepped her bounds. Neither of them had yet spoken of love.

At the picture window she’s waiting for dusk. With it, she expects the frogs. It’s been raining. They’ll be out in force and will become her closest confidants.

The first time they came to Sonoma, Vince showed her his beautiful four-volume set of Haiku poems, edited with pithy explication by a divine Englishman, R. H. Blythe. She latched onto the volumes, perhaps as a way of latching on to Vince. And yet, apart from him, the bite-size poems continue to nourish her. She writes them down by the dozens in her daybooks. In Blythe’s volumes the haiku are not translated in the nifty 5-7-5 syllable count that she was taught as a child. When she asked Vince about that he said, “The syllable count is the thing Americans like most about them. They think they’re crossword puzzles or some damn thing.”

Blythe is a sweet companion. He provides context for seeing the burnished images in relief, along with a hint of their spirituality. She brought the four volumes with her to the city and now back to Sonoma. Her favorite poet is Issa. He’s the earthiest. According to Blythe, Issa wrote nearly 300 haikus about frogs.

         Frogs squatting this way,
     Frogs squatting that way, but all
       Cousins or second cousins.

It was Vince’s idea that she isolate up here. Her history of asthma, he argued, put her in the high-risk category. His age marked him as high-risk as well, but he’d stay on the front lines at Kaiser and probably get the virus and probably die. She’s never been especially fatalistic, but now it’s clear that one of her pastimes during the plague will be noting each of her atypical attitudes and behaviors.

The first discussion of isolation was at the dinner table in the city. She’d roasted a leg of lamb in mustard sauce and steamed asparagus that she dashed with olive oil and Balsamic and flecked with red peppers. There’d be plenty of leftover lamb for him to take sandwiches to work. Her office had just closed; she wouldn’t need sandwiches. Vince went at the lamb like it was his last meal and extolled the virtues of the bottle of Oregon Pinot Noir they were sharing. “It’s perfect with the lamb,” he said, “no need for a jammy California Pinot,” and then, very matter of fact, after taking a long sip of wine, he said, “I think you should isolate in Sonoma, Pina.”

“Why not just stay here?”
“You need to isolate from me, darling. I have to keep working.”
The idea shocked her. Her mind whizzed with questions. Was he just trying to get rid of her? Seeing somebody else again? Was this the beginning of the end?
She fixed her eyes on him. “So I’m going to just be left up there like The Woman in the Dunes?” She had no idea where that came from; she hadn’t seen the film in decades and all she remembered was a slight woman with a broom sweeping furiously at the encroaching sands.
“Pina,” he joked, “there are no dunes in Sonoma and very little sand.”
“That’s not what I’m fucking talking about,” she hollered.
He took her hands and nodded, and nodded some more, horse-like. Then, in his let’s-be-reasonable voice, he said, “I can’t have you getting sick. You mean too much to me, Pina.”

This evening, before the frogs start up, she hears the woman downstairs crying. Talking on the phone and crying. Pina’s never met her—a newcomer to the complex—she doesn’t even know her name, but she’s been impressed, the couple of times she seen her, with her fastidiously-coifed wedge of white hair. It matches up surprisingly well with her REI ware.

To cover the sound of the poor woman’s crying, she clicks on Vince’s Bose system, with his thousand imported songs, mostly jazz and a couple of Dylan albums, and keeps clicking forward till she lands on a Bill Evans album she can stand. She’s never met a man so jazz crazed. He accepted, he said, the fact that she didn’t hear jazz. She heard it fine; she just didn’t like it for the most part. It sounded automotive to her, all pistons and thrust, aching for a muffler. That impression may have been gained in part from one of the half dozen framed album covers Vince has on the walls of the living room. It comes from the one that she didn’t understand. She acknowledged the beauty of the others: Coltrane pensive on the cover of Blue Train, Monk honky-tonking at the piano in a funny hat, Dexter Gordon, illusory, shrouded in smoke from the same cigarette forever. But this one: a racing car, a Corvette in motion, titled “Hard Driving Jazz,” made no sense to her. It didn’t align with Vince’s style. A college friend had given him the album. “The dumb fuck,” Vince explained, “thought he’d picked up this cool album to play when he had girls over, but it turned out to be this hot out-there deal with Cecil Taylor on piano and Trane, who for contractual reasons, is listed as Blue Train. Yes, she’d been schooled on the album and, yes, jazz will always sound automotive to her.

Back to what to do with herself, Pina decides to check what’s on TV, and then remembers that last month Vince cancelled the cable service and cancelled the Internet in Sonoma, since they rarely use it. He railed for a half an hour against Comcast. “Why pay those bastards $150 a month?” She still has her phone for the Internet and there’s radio on the Bose system. Clearly she is better off than the Woman in the Dunes. After washing her hands for the tenth time today, despite being in contact with nobody but herself, she wonders exactly who’s birthday it is.

At the picture window, she takes half a gulp of cognac. Vince tells her, you should chew a good cognac. Who wants to chew it? She loves a splash of something strong and fine that brings a burn to the throat. She’s been good today. She wanted to drink the whole bottle of sake but she only did half. Hey, she made it through the first day.

Pina puts all the lights on. It’s dark outside. The frogs are in full serenade. She sees herself in the glass: sharp Italian nose, doubting eyes, high cheekbones, ruthless, or pretending. She parts her lips, which an ex once dubbed her generous lips. She’d like to paint them now with the rich dusty rose matte she brought with her, but instead she dips into the snifter and caramelizes her nostrils before properly drawing the brandy in, like a bird from a feeder. Now she holds it, her tongue is there, a fortified bubble of dark honey on the palate. She resolves to follow this with strong black coffee and another cognac.

The lit room is visible to the street. Not that she wants to be seen in her isolation. Of course, there’s nobody out there. She slips out of her sweater and then pauses at each button of her blouse. Some insane part of her wants to remember every button she’s ever buttoned or unbuttoned or had unbuttoned. She needs a new bra, but she’s out of it. The truth is, she’s always liked her breasts. Her college boyfriend Cole told her they were well turned and she insisted that only ankles and legs could be well turned. “That’s a lie,” he said, with a breast in each hand. But, always a realist, even at twenty, she pointed out that they’d soon droop and become unturned.

She slips off her skirt. Bright pink panties. Who’s she kidding? Actually, it’s surprising how well her body has kept its shape. She’s not going to turn from the sight of it. Feast your eyes, frogs! There are so many out there, so many little green hoboes, such a crowd. What do they know about separation?