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?