THE HUMANS

 

 

It’s Saturday morning and she and Charlie decide to walk to the square to have a look at what is open and to see if there’s much tourist frenzy. Along the way they stroll past the Clydesdale farm where the man from yesterday with the feed cap, sits high in his carriage, with the collie on his lap, and drives two horses in broad circles around the dry pasture, raising clouds of dust.

They pause at the magnificent cactus in front of the mission. It’s an ageless edifice of paddles and thorns filled with tempting, unimaginable fruits. On one of her first times with Vince in Sonoma, he tried to pluck out a pear for her. This after telling a cautionary tale about people he’d seen mauled by the notorious cactus for tempting its dangers. Vince caught a few needles in his right hand and she thought she’d have to come to the aid of the old emergency room doctor, but he turned out to be good with both hands. After he got out the thorns he kept licking his fingers and lamented that he didn’t even get a fruit for her. She thanked Vince for the noble gesture, just as she realized that his hubris knew no bounds. Pina was the fruit that he really wanted to pluck; she wonders if she’s been more dangerous for him than the cactus.

At 10:30 in the morning there are plenty of tourists on the square, many do not wear face coverings. She and Charlie jut out onto the street to avoid these culprits. The other day Charlie suggested that she might want to chill a bit about people not wearing masks. “Au contraire,” she said, baring her teeth at him, “I want to get tee shirts printed that read: ARE YOU TOO REPUBLICAN TO WEAR A MASK?

The Swiss Hotel now has tables running up the alley beside it. She thinks about how much Vince loved to sit out front of the Swiss, gorging himself on the fresh bread and hot-peppered olive oil before his bowl of mussels and clams arrived. She doubts that she’ll ever sit at a table here with him again.

The Girl and the Fig has tables running up the side street parallel to their garden seating. The only inside place on the square that she misses is the gorgeous polished oak bar at the Fig.

They cross over to the park to avoid a line of brunchers weaving its way from the door of the Sunflower Café. Charlie leads her to the bench at the duck pond, where she approached him, four months ago now.

“So this is the fateful spot,” she says.
“Little did you know what you were getting into.”

She wants to tell him that she did know, although that would be a lie.

Charlie takes off his mask. “I love you, Pina.” Now he peels off her mask and kisses her.

 

A smart person, she thinks, would not turn on the car radio but stay attuned to the natural beauty around her, as she drives to the city; she flicks on the radio. There’s more talk about last night’s pardon of Roger Stone; news about the White House sending out anonymous opposition research against the administration’s leading infectious disease specialist, Dr. Fauci, because he’s seen as making Trump look bad. Trump wore a large black mask in public for the first time today. Pina figures he’s always wanted to wear blackface. If Florida were a country, the newscaster says, it would be rated #4 in the world in the number of Coronavirus cases, behind the U.S., India, and Brazil. Also, Florida is registering a new positive case every five and a half seconds. And yet, Disney World in Orlando is opening today. With that note of lunacy, Pina switches off the radio. A high silky swath of fog hangs over Sausalito, but the pylons of the Golden Gate Bridge stand clear. Across the belly of water, the city gleams.

 

Majestic Dolores Park, with its terraced hillside, its palm trees, and glittering view of the downtown skyline, was their local park. She and Vince often came over on Sundays to sun themselves, read The Times, and listen to the conga players. Now the grassy hillside and flats have been painted with huge white social distancing circles, most of them occupied. She sees the park from 20th street, the top, at first. The repetition of circles, with humans enclosed, is otherworldly. She starts to count the circles but there are too many. It all seems somehow lunar to her or like the aerial view of potential bombsites. The obedience of all these humans sitting in ones and twos and threes within their satellites is striking; humans, the most flawed of animals, managing to kill ourselves through arrogance and folly.

She finds a spot near the top of the hill with two open circles. She sits in one and kicks off her espadrilles to put in the other circle. Hard to know what the etiquette is on saving circles. Vince will know to meet her up top because it’s where they always perched in the Park. She hasn’t made up her mind what she’ll tell him. Her life these last four months, like most everybody’s, has been an improvisation so there’s little need to change it now.

Now she sees Vince striding up the hill toward her. He’s wearing his maize colored linen coat and a pair of khakis, looking tall and put-together, no slouch in his step.

“Pina,” he calls, a big grin on his face.
“Hey, Vince.” She lifts her shoes out of the neighboring circle.

Despite standing tall and grooming himself, he’s winded when he gets to the top of the hill, and looks played out.

Pina indicates the empty circle.

“You want me to sit in my own? I’ve just been tested.”
“But I haven’t.”
“God’s it’s weird. I can’t even touch you.”
“No.”

Vince, still standing, scans the park a moment. “What the fuck kind of alternative world has this become? It’s like some shit out of Dante.”
“The Inferno only has nine circles.”
“How do you know that, Pina?”
“You told me once, and I even remember what they are. Aren’t you going to sit?”

She looks away as Vince goes through painful contortions to seat himself in his circle. He lands with a thud.

“Hey, I’m alive. Getting healthy.”
“I like your spirit,” she says, although it seems to her that he’s hardly even faking it. “The first circle is Limbo.”
“Yes. That’s the spot for virtuous pagans.”
“Is that how you see yourself, Vince?”
He stretches out a leg. “Certainly a pagan, but scant on the virtues. I think I’m running a deficit on the account.”

“Be kind to yourself, mister.” She smiles at him and forces him to smile back. “You need to be kind to yourself. We all need to be kind to ourselves to get through this.” Of course, she and Vince have very different things to get through, but the advice is universally apt. Pina surprises herself with her bit about kindness. Somehow she’s internalized Sylvie’s words and become an evangelist for the cause. Vince was never about kindness; she knew that from the start, just as she recognized that Vince’s self-absorption would prevent him from really caring about her. Essential to their tacit contract was that they look out for themselves, which is what makes it so easy to walk away from any contract that’s left.

Vince rests his chin on his wrist. The man’s weary. Existentially weary. Suicide weary. Sylvie never had that look. She wonders if the process of recovery and self-reflection, at this late date, has somehow taken more from Vince than it’s given him. Perhaps he’s dug deep enough to hit a reservoir of shame and left himself to wallow in it.

She’s tempted to run through the other eight circles of hell, to make Vince laugh and hear his commentary. She knows them better than she knows the Ten Commandments. After Limbo come Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Anger, Heresy, Violence, Fraud and, finally, Treachery. Taken together, they sound like the attributes of Trump’s resume. Which circle will she land in? Of course, she’d prefer Limbo; she can aspire to being a virtuous pagan.

She smiles again at Vince, whose face is abstracted. For once he is at a loss for words. She owes him something, surely, but she’s having trouble making contact with the man he is now, an addict, perhaps for far longer than she knew. “Are you still writing poems, Vince?”

He shakes his head. “I need to get back to that.”
“Are you okay?”
“Oh,” he says, and yawns for so long that the act might encompass a lifetime of weariness. “Pardon me. I guess you could say that I’m feeling a bit unmoored. Bernard brought me by the house. It’s in nice shape now.”
“How long will you stay in the halfway house?”
“It’s called an SLE, a sober living environment. How long will I stay? That’s to be determined. I can’t imagine staying very long in a house, and sharing a room with two others, when I have a two point five million dollar house waiting for me.”

He can’t imagine staying clean for long either, she thinks. And why does he find it necessary to put a price tag on his house?

“You’re not coming back, are you, Pina?”
“No.” She offers him a taut, closed-lip smile.
“I figured you’d had it with me. I was hoping it could be different, that you would wait for me.”
“Wait for what?”
“My recovery.”
“You’ll need to spend the rest of your life on your recovery. I wish you luck. I really do, Vince.” There’s no need to say anymore. If her decision is selfish, then it’s selfish. It is also the right decision.
Vince’s eyes have grown moist. “We had some good times, Pina.”
“Yes, we did.” She’s a little surprised that he’s giving up so easily, but this may be the new Vince.
“You can stay in Sonoma until you sort out what you’re going to do.”
“That’s kind of you, Vince. I’m going to move in with Charlie.”
“Charlie,” he repeats, before sparking a short laugh. “He’s a nice guy,” Vince says, with a bit of snark in his voice.

“Yes, he is,” she says, and looks ahead at the humans in circles, those gathered in twos and threes sharing intimacies, the solo-circled, like she and Vince, solitary on their islands, reading and snoozing, and having conversations with themselves.

Gradually, Pina lifts her eyes. In the foreground, she sees the tiled-roofed rectangle of Mission High School, with its quirky Spanish Baroque tower. Beyond it, although invisible from her vantage, are the countless tents of the homeless, an architecture of ruin spilling to the eastern edge, where the sun shines on empty office towers—the majestic city and the civilization, tottering.

 

—The End—

March 14 – July 15, 2020

THE ANTS

 

Olga seems less interested in greeting Pina than in scoping out Vince’s condo. She takes herself on a little walking tour of the front room. Pina wants to tell her not to touch anything, that they need to keep their social distance, but instead she’s quiet, just like one of her clients, wondering why she invited her old friend up here in the first place.

Olga saunters onto the deck. The galvanized tub filled of basils and peppers takes her by surprise.

“Wow, Pina, is it your gardening?”
“I’d hardly call it gardening. I do best with minimalist efforts.”
“At least you know yourself, Pina.”
“That’s highly questionable.”

Olga bends over the rail to have a look. “Who has the lovely roses down here?”

“That’s Sylvie. We’re becoming friends, of sorts. She’s very smart, and can be comfortable like a good aunt. She actually reminds me of my mother sometimes. Pina brings her voice down to a measured breath. “She has surprisingly good ears for somebody her age. She gets a little testy sometimes but she gives very good advice.”

Olga laughs and Pina drops a finger over her lips to remind her friend to keep on the quiet side. “As I remember, “ Olga says in an exaggerated whisper that’s more like a hiss, “you don’t take people’s advice well. How could an old woman advise you? What kind of advice has she given you?”

“Nothing comes to mind off the top of my head.” In fact, after Sylvie proclaimed Charlie kind and relayed her mother’s advice about kind men, she asked Pina for a piece of advice. She thought it sweet, the way Sylvie asked: “Please, honey, tell me how to get rid of the ants in my living room. I’ve got a trail of them coming in from the yard. I keep shooting Parsley Plus at them, but it’s like the story of civilization, Pina, the dead are simply followed by the living.”

Pina suggests to Olga that they sit out on the deck where she’s positioned two chairs at appropriate distance. She whipped up a pitcher of margaritas in advance. Now she salts the rims of a couple tall glasses, fills them and floats lime slices.

“Do you want us to get sloshed, Pina?”
“Drink at your own risk, darling.”
“Do we have to whisper the whole time out here?”
“Don’t worry about it.”

They clink glasses. “Are we supposed to do that, Pina? Is that Covid safe?” Olga spills a little of her drink on her white peddle pushers as she brings the glass to her lips.

“God dog, Olga, if you’re spilling before you’ve even drunk any you’re in a bad way.”

Olga wrinkles her nose in response, and then takes a long careful sip.

“Olga, I’ve forgotten, have you been up here to the condo beside that time with Janice and Molly when everybody got super loaded on wine and Janice made us watch Porn Hub?”
“Don’t you remember, you and Vince had me up for a weekend a couple of years ago? I slept on the futon in the second bedroom.”

Pina forces a smile. Of course she remembers. Vince blasted jazz and quoted poetry all night; they all drank way too much. Vince became sloppy and lascivious. He wanted to go to bed with both of them. He practically shoved his tongue down Olga’s throat. It was hard to say how much Olga encouraged him, but she and Olga managed to hold Vince off, until he mixed himself a chemical cocktail that knocked him out. For all she knows, Vince snuck into the second bedroom in the middle of the night and fucked her.

Olga has cut her hair short since she last saw her. With her deep dimples and bright green eyes, she appears girlish, which is curious for a woman in her early fifties. But somehow it all goes along with Olga’s childish lisp. Pina used to tell her that she could help with the lisp, help her find another placement for her tongue and show her exercises that would reinforce it, but Olga always demurred. The lisp had become part of her personality. Some people thought it was cute.

“Wow, I like your hair, Olga,” she says, even though she’s not sure that she does.
“It’s one less thing that I have to care for. I’m really in this mode now of shedding everything I can. It’s like this weird trip I’m going through due to the Covid, because who knows when I might end up dead? I don’t want to leave a bunch of crap behind.”
“You really think about that, Olga?”
“Damn straight. I’m reminded of my mother warning me to change my underwear every day because a respectable girl doesn’t want to be found in dirty underwear if she dies in a crash. I used to think, who the fuck is going to check my underwear if I’m killed in a crash?”
“So, did you change it every day?” Pina asks.
“Yep, always did, always do. The great mother still has a lot of influence. You never met her did you, Pina? She also had a lisp. I think I come from a long line of lispers.” She laughs and flaunts her flawed sibilance with a sputter of s’s and z’s.
“Anyway, I’m like liquidating my shit right and left. Books, pots and pans I never use, chipped dishes, paintings I made when I was in grad school, even my giant coleus plant, which I’ve had since before my divorce with Robert. I got sick of looking at the motherfucker.”

Who, Pina wants to ask, the coleus or Robert? She remembers Robert, a tall, thin man with a prominent Adam’s apple. He was a financial analyst or an investment banker, some damn job that made a shitload of money. She never understood what Olga saw in him, except the money. Robert was a Libertarian, who’d get heated easily on a couple of drinks and rail on humorlessly about abolishing the IRS and eliminating the “welfare state.” Pina remembers sitting with Marco in Olga and Robert’s Russian Hill apartment during one of Robert’s performances. Olga was fairly deft at getting him to quiet down, but she remembers Marco, at the end of the evening as they walked up the street to their car, asking how Olga could stand her husband. She was married to Robert for nearly twenty years, and she’s lived years now on alimony and whatever she makes teaching yoga.

“Tell me something, Pina, if it’s not too personal. Do you ever wish you had children?”
“To bring into this world?”
“Never?”
“Only after Marco died. I wished I’d had a little Marco. How about you?”
“Yes, I think about it a lot. There’s no way I was going to get pregnant with Robert—end up with a little Libertarian running around. And after Robert my biological clock . . .”

Both Olga and Pina stand and stamp their feet in tempo with each other. “My biological clock is ticking like this,” they call in unison, doing their best to approximate Marisa Tomei’s Brooklyn brogue in “My Cousin Vinnie,” a film they watched together more than once, back in the day. Pina wonders how closely Sylvie is listening to their song and dance.

Seated again, Olga takes a long sip of her margarita and then lowers her head. “Here we are, two barren women in our fifties.”
“That’s how you feel, Olga, like a barren woman?”
“I wake up some mornings and feel very empty. It’s not the same for you, Pina. You have a man, two men.”

Pina has no response. She’s never thought of herself as being barren. It strikes her as a pejorative term along the lines of old maid. She made the choice not to have children. It wasn’t something that did or didn’t happen to her, but she doesn’t want to share her feelings about this with Olga. “That must be very difficult,” is all she manages to say.

Olga’s holds out her glass: “How about a refill, Pina?”

Pina fills her friend’s glass to the very top.

“What about you, aren’t you going to have another, Pina?”
“I’m trying to cut back.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake. The world’s coming to an end and you’re on the wagon. So you made the pitcher of margaritas just to get me soused?”

 

After being introduced to Olga, it’s Roscoe that flirts with her rather than Charlie.

“Nice to meet you, Olga,” he yelps, his nasal voice, rising and falling dramatically. “Olga is a Russian name, isn’t it?”
“Oh my God,” Olga says. She’s more than a little tipsy and drops both her hands over her eyes. Olga peeks at Pina and whispers, “He doesn’t even have a lisp.”

Pina has gotten used to Roscoe’s new bursts of language. Charlie has developed ways of cuing the parrot and teaching him scripts and, now that she hears Roscoe every day, these phrases strike her as wooden and disembodied.

“Ask her again, Roscoe,” Charlie prompts.
“Again,” Roscoe repeats, his trained brain kicking into action. “Olga is a Russian name, isn’t it?”

Olga bursts into a loud spasm of bright laughter, which takes her a moment to corral. “It actually derives from the Old Norse,” she says, showing off her lisp.

Roscoe looks stumped. Norse is not a word he’s been programmed to respond to.

“Shall we take our leave of Roscoe and have some lunch now?” asks Charlie.
“Good idea,” Pina says. Her tolerance for the Roscoe project has waned over the last weeks.
After a hiccup and a spurt of laughter, Olga says, “Nice to meet you, Roscoe.”
“El gusto es mio,” Roscoe replies in a sing-songy tremolo.
Charlie smiles at his parrot before turning to Olga. “We’re just starting out on Spanish.”

 

Pina’s phone rings during lunch. It’s an unfamiliar San Francisco number so she doesn’t answer it. When a call comes from the same number five minutes later she excuses herself from the table. It could be Vince on somebody else’s phone, for all she knows. She walks out to Charlie’s deck and answers.

“Hello, is this Pina?”
“Yes, this is she.”
“This is Andre, Sylvie’s son. She gave me your number. She tells me you’ve been very kind to her.”
“Is anything wrong?”
“I don’t know. Have you seen her today?”
“No, we had a nice conversation yesterday.”
“I haven’t been able to get in touch with her, either last night or this morning.”

Pina feels tightness gripping her chest; her breathing quickly become shallower. No, she thinks, not an asthma attack. She tells herself to stay calm.

“I wonder if you would mind checking on her? I’d drive up myself, but my wife is away and I’m alone with three kids. There’s a key to the front door under the welcome mat.”
“Alright,” she says, breathless. “I’ll call you back. I’m not home; it might take me a little while to get over there.”

Pina manages to calm herself, but wants her rescue inhaler. She pictures where she left it, in the cabinet under the sink in the main bathroom. She hadn’t used one for years, and recently got a new one. She even forced herself to inhale some of a metered dose before driving up from the city. The inhaler worked and there were quite a number of remaining doses.

“I need to get something back at my place,” she says as she walks purposely past Charlie and Olga.
“Is everything okay?” Charlie asks.

She keeps walking toward the door. “Back in a flash,” she says over her shoulder, knowing full well that she won’t be. Down the steps, she holds tightly on to the railing, stepping as slowly as an octogenarian. Thankfully, Charlie hasn’t opened the door to look after her.

On the way across the grounds to Vince’s condo, she counts very slowly. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. This used to be her routine when the asthma plagued her regularly. She never counted past eight and doesn’t try it now.

Pina stands a distance from Sylvie’s door and gazes at the welcome mat under which the key should be. First she needs her inhaler. She considers the steps up to the condo and begins the count again.

The inhaler is exactly where she pictured it. Within five minutes she feels the medicine work, the muscles in her airways begin to relax, and yet the prospect of going back down the stairs and looking in on Sylvie, dead or alive, is daunting. Her resistance to asking Charlie to join her is just her same old bullshit need to assert her independence at all costs. Who cares about that now? She taps Charlie’s number. She should tell him that he’s now the first name on her favorite’s list.

“Charlie, can you come by my place quickly?
“Sure, sure. Are you okay?”
“Just come, and bring your mask and some gloves for both of us.”
“Roger. And Olga?”
“Leave her with Roscoe. Tell her to take a tour of Arrow Wilk’s paintings and your wrestling masks.”

Pina goes slowly back down the stairs. She’s breathing easier now. She has Sylvie’s key in her hand by the time Charlie arrives, masked and gloved. He hands her a matching pair of purple gloves. As she slips on her gloves, she has a rogue thought—she’d like to play patty-cake with Charlie in purple gloves—but finally forces herself back to the present.

“I’m afraid Sylvie may have done the deed. That was her son on the phone; he hasn’t been able to get in touch with her. I think it’s safe to go in here. Sylvie hasn’t been out of this place in months. She has all her food and meals delivered.”

She and Charlie look warily at each other and then he grabs her hand and holds it a minute. He is a kind man. She knocks on the door, waits, and knocks again. Now she hands the key to Charlie. It is a way of asking for help. She stands behind him as he opens the door.

“Stay back,” he barks, and that is exactly what she does. He repeats his order and adds, “I’ll tell you when the coast is clear.”

She stands in the small hallway just inside the door. Charlie steps deliberately toward the main room. In a cracked voice, he calls, “She’s here . . . dead. You don’t have to see this. You better not see this.”

“Better not,” she mutters. Pina’s lightheaded, but her shortness of breath hasn’t returned. Still she pulls out her inhaler and honks on it. And then there was Sylvie. She sees her standing in her creamy purple blouse with the black scarab, her wedge of white hair, once symbolic of her alacrity, a bit disheveled with the times.

Pina creeps, one sideways-step after another, to the main room.

Charlie hears her. “Better not, Pina.”

She hasn’t a choice. “Oh my God!” Sylvie is on the floor. The way she’s laying on her side, Pina can only see one of her eyes. A shallow pool of blood has formed beside her head and a thick trail of ants is visiting.

“I didn’t want you to see, Pina.”
“Had to.”
“I’ve tried to keep the ants away from her. I think we should lay something over her.”

Pina grabs a towel from the linen closet and comes close to Sylvie for a moment, just getting a quick glimpse—a cubist profile of Sylvie—before Charlie stretches the towel over her head.

“I don’t think she killed herself,” he says. “Can’t see how she could have.”

There’s a tall overturned stool not far from her body and a spray bottle of kitchen and bathroom cleaner close by.

“You think it’s an accident with the stool?”
“Or a heart attack.”

Pina notices the civilization of ants coming down the wall in two rows. “She was up on the stool firing Parsley Plus at the ants when she tipped over.”

“I guess it was her time,” Charlie says.

Pina bows her head. She hardly knew the woman. They may have become good friends in a post-plague world.

Charlie comes over and holds her. Finally, she lets herself cry. In a couple of minutes Pina steps clear of Charlie’s embrace. “I need to call Sylvie’s son. Why don’t you go tell Olga what’s happened. I’m going to stay with Sylvie until her son arrives.”

 

THE CANARY

 

 

As Pina counts the Japanese eggplants that have sprouted—a bounty that she couldn’t have imagined—she calls down to Sylvie, who she hears putzing with her roses.

“Isn’t it a beautiful morning, Sylvie?”
“Yes, it is. That’s one thing I’ll say for Sonoma—the weather is extraordinary. Coming from Seattle, and Minnesota before that, I almost feel like it’s unfair. Shouldn’t we have to make up for it in some way? I don’t know, pay a good weather tax.”
“That’s funny,” says Pina, “very Puritan of you.” The trouble is she’s never sure about Sylvie’s humor, but what can you expect from a woman who spoke at length about taking her own life.

Pina moves over to her galvanized planter of basils and peppers. “Hey, Sylvie, would you like some of my surplus sweet basil? It’s growing faster than I can use it.”

“Oh, that would be nice. If I only had pine nuts I could make a pesto.”
“I’d offer you some if I had them, but you can also use walnuts, which I don’t have either.”
“Neither do I.”

They speculate on what peanut pesto would be like, as Sylvie has a bag of shelled peanuts.

“I think it would taste like a Thai dish,” Pina says, “and for that matter I can offer you some Thai basil.”
“Golly, suddenly the world is my oyster.”

There goes her humor again. Pina decides to let the matter of the basil rest. They are visible to each other now. Sylvie’s head is tilted back, looking up at Pina, who finds herself studying the rings around the older woman’s neck as if these uneven circles represented the aging of a very mature tree. Clearly, the conversation is not yet done, which Pina takes as a good omen—perhaps her downstairs neighbor plans to stick around for the duration.

“How’s your boyfriend?” Sylvie asks, unexpectedly.
“You mean, Charlie?”
“Well, I don’t know how many boyfriends you have, Pina.”

Is Sylvie being hostile now?

“The one who lives here in the complex.”
“That’s Charlie.”
“Charlie,” Sylvie repeats as if she were committing a difficult name to memory. “Charlie sounds like an interesting man. I hear the two of you sometimes when you’re talking out on the deck. I know I shouldn’t listen, but I can’t help myself. You two are better than daytime TV.”

Pina feels herself blush. What exactly has Sylvie heard? Does she hear them when they make love, as well?

“Charlie has a parrot, doesn’t he?”
“Right. Roscoe.”
“Roscoe. And I’ve heard you say that Charlie has taught Roscoe not only to speak, but to reason with language.”
“Reasoning might be a reach. I don’t think Roscoe is going to attain great heights of cognition.”
“But, still, a thinking bird. Anyway, Charlie sounds like a very kind man. He’s sweet to you. Don’t take that for granted.” Sylvie eyes fix meaningfully on Pina.

She nods. It’s true, of course, what Sylvie is saying, but something about her forthright manner is unnerving. She senses herself wanting to withdraw from Sylvie’s intense gaze.

“Pina, I want to give you a piece of advice that my mother gave me when I was young—when you find a kind man, hold onto him.”

She feels a lump in her throat and can think of only a single word in response: “Thanks,” which feels criminally insufficient.

“I followed my mother’s advice,” Sylvie continues, her eyes softening into memory, “and I’m very glad I did.”

 

Two hours later, Pina is still replaying the conversation with Sylvie. She wonders if Vince could be described as kind. Surely, he’s been kind at times, but kindness more than likely wouldn’t make a top ten list of adjectives to describe him, a list that would include charming, self-absorbed, good-looking, clever, jazz-loving, superior, contemptuous. She quits before enumerating any further, as the attributes drifts further from Sylvie’s mark.

At Charlie’s, during lunch—an omelet she whips up with shallots, gruyere, and plenty of basil—she tells him about her conversation with Sylvie, without mentioning the kindness bit.

“We can’t talk anymore when we’re on the deck over there—Sylvie overhears everything we say.”
“Maybe we should spend more time there, Pina,” Charlie says with a mouth full of omelet, “we’re keeping her alive. We’ve become her raison d’être.”
“Very funny. She probably hears us when we make love.”
“Then we should make love more often.”
“You’re shameless, Charlie.”

He wipes his mouth with his napkin and bends toward her, kissing the tip of her long nose. “Ti amo, Pina, Ti amo.”

Not only is he kind, he’s irresistible.

 

After lunch they watch Erich von Stroheim’s 1924 masterpiece “Greed” on one of Charlie’s huge computer monitors. It seems wrong to her to watch a film during a sunny day, but Charlie’s persuasive powers get the better of her. At lunch she mentioned that she’d finally finished reading McTeague, the tale of the San Francisco dentist who’s life goes off the rails, and Charlie insisted they find a link to von Stroheim’s “legendary” film of the novel.

“I haven’t seen it for thirty years,” Charlie said, his face marbling with enthusiasm. “Now that it’s front of mind, I don’t think I can live another day without seeing it.”

Pina has only watched a handful of silent movies in her life—a few Chaplin films and a Buster Keaton or two, so “Greed” is a revelation.

Charlie explains that the original film was seven plus hours but that the studio cut it to two hours and destroyed three quarters of the reels. “The studio burned all but ten of the original forty-five reels,” Charlie says, with fresh outrage, “to extract the bit of silver from the nitrate.” Von Stroheim was devastated and, indeed, when the film starts on Charlie’s computer, the first frame shows a quote from the director:

No matter if I could talk to you three weeks steadily could I describe even to a small degree the heartache I suffered through the mutilation of my sincere work.

Pina has Charlie pause the frame so she can reread the quote. “It’s not even grammatical,” she says.

“Von Stroheim was Austrian and sincere,” Charlie says, kindly. “You know, he saw McTeague as a Greek tragedy.”
“But Charlie, Charlie, Charlie, with all due respect, I can’t see how the demise of a bumbling fool and his miser wife can form the arc of a tragedy.”
“That’s a very elitist view, Pina. It’s really a story about hard-working people who have little but tragedy in their lives.”

She feels mildly chastised, but persists. “If we’re talking about the formal elements of tragedy, I’d have to say that McTeague is closer to bathos.

Charlie makes a clown face at her. “Oh, so you found McTeague bathetic, Pina,” he jokes.

She concentrates on the film now and is taken aback by how much it moves her. The acting is surprisingly good and the frames of spare text are used so efficiently you almost forget that there is no sound. She’s not sure how the director achieves it, but he’s given his characters an elemental quality, perhaps through the mix of stills and motion. Captured in stills, you’re able to see the characters’ souls, their tragedy. Pina’s almost ready to say uncle.

Charlie chirps in from time to time to rave about the director’s innovations. “Look at how many angles he shoots from. Can you imagine the lighting he had to set up to achieve the deep focus? And all of it on location, from San Francisco to Death Valley.” Charlie tells her that Stroheim filmed in Death Valley for two months in high summer to capture the scenes that take place there.

All along, Pina considers the simple man, McTeague, content with his practice in his “dental parlors.” He has humble pleasures: his pitcher of steam beer on Sunday, the six songs that he can play on his concertina, and his canary in its gilded cage. When McTeague’s new wife wins the lottery, the giant oaf loses all of his comforts. But does the story rise to the level of tragedy? No, she won’t let that question alone. Do any of our lives merit such a designation? She thinks of Vince. She can’t stop thinking of Vince. If he were to succumb to opioids, would his fall from princely doctor qualify as tragedy? If Sylvie takes her own life is that tragedy? She thinks not. And yet, who is she kidding with her formal charade? Why is she trying to insulate herself?

She remembers a conversation she had years ago with Vince about symbolism. She pointed out something as being symbolic—the fact that she can no longer remember what it was underscores the point of Vince’s response, which still chills her to the bone.

“Pina,” the would-be poet said with the coolness of a surgeon, “everything is symbolic.”

She finds something touching about McTeague, even while he’s on the lam for murder. He is so damn human in his foibles. His trail leads in circles. Although he tortures and kills the wife who brought suffering to his life, he is kind to his burro. And then there is the canary, the only thing he manages to keep with him until the end. He carries the bird in its cage, through the mining camps and straight into Death Valley, squandering some of his scarce water to keep damp flour cloths over the birdcage. Finally, at least in Stroheim’s version, he lets the bird free from its cage. They are both doomed. McTeague hears the bird’s final chirps right before his own death rattle begins.

 

This evening Charlie calls her from his television headquarters. “Pina, come have a drink with me.”
“Alright, be there in a minute.”

That’s about the only thing he could say to get her to his back room, where Roscoe perches in his cage. Charlie has become a news hound; he can’t get enough of it. He’ll sit for hours listening to CNN and MSNBC. Sometimes he even tunes into Fox News, just to get a look at the enemy’s spin. She hardly ever joins him in front of the TV.

Charlie’s trained the parrot to caw: “TRUMP, THE RAVING NARCISSIST,” every time the president’s name is mentioned. To Pina, these news shows are an endless loop of bluster. The host prompts the talking heads to spout outrage, and they then find ingenious ways to agree with each other.

Pina’s just pulled a chicken out of the fridge and turns electric stove to 475. It’s Mario Batali’s recipe, Balsamic Roast Chicken. She feels guilty for using it, given that Batali’s history of abusing women has been fully chronicled. But the chicken is so damn good, and Batali probably pirated the recipe from some old world Italian years ago. Pina salted and peppered the chicken three hours ago and stuffed it with two thickly sliced onions, three pieces of prosciutto, and a hardy rind of Parmigiano-Reggiano. When the bird comes back to room temperature in the roasting pan, she’ll pour a cup of Lambrusco over it and rub it down with two tablespoons of balsamic. The chicken, roasted at so high a temp, will be sumptuous with the onions, and render a marvelous gravy. She’ll serve it atop three heads of buttered and broiled radicchio, with a side of basmati rice cooked in the broth from the last Batali chicken.

She mixes herself a second Campari spritz. Charlie will be nursing his martini until dinner.

“So what’s the news?” she asks.
“Pina, Pina, Pina, where you beena?” squawks Roscoe.
“What’s the good word, Roscoe?”
“Word, word, I know a thousand words,” brags the parrot.
“The only good news,” Charlie says, “is that Donald Trump isn’t getting any good news.”
“TRUMP, THE RAVING NARCISSIST.”
“His poll numbers are in the toilet, his hateful rallies are sparsely attended, and now with Russians paying bounties for the killing of American troops, there is pressure on the child monster to explain his trust of Putin over our intelligence agencies.
“Actually there’s more good news. The state of Mississippi is taking the confederate reference off their flags; confederate statues continue to tumble; more and more rogue cops are getting arrested; police departments may not be defunded but their monies are being reallocated; the Washington Redskins are changing their name, and the Cleveland Indians are considering changing theirs. I’ve always had a soft spot for that much-loathed city since they got the rock & roll museum. I think the baseball team should change their name to the Cleveland Rock & Rolls, and then rebuild the city with a bunch of music clubs.”
“Any new Karen out there?” Pina asks. She’s taken particular pleasure in watching one raging white woman after another self-immolate on social media. After seeing a video of a woman go berserk in a supermarket, tossing her groceries out of her cart when told she had to wear a face mask, Pina wondered if she’d be capable of such irrational rage.
“You saw the couple out front of their St. Louis mansion with an assault weapon and a handgun. I think that they’re the latest Ken and Karen.”
“Charlie, do you think America is going to devolve into fear and loathing?”
“Some of it already has. That’s Trump’s specialty.”
“TRUMP, THE RAVING NARCISSIST.”
“You’ve created a monster, Charlie.”
“I know.”
“Can’t we run away? Get out of this country.”
“It’s not a bad idea, Pina, but there’s no place to go. We’re Americans, no other country will accept us. Not Canada. Not Europe.”
“Can’t we sneak into Mexico?”
“We better do it quickly. Mexico will be shutting the border soon. The state of Sonora, beneath Arizona’s flashpoint, is considering shutting down right now, and if we get caught trying to sneak across, Mexico will keep us in internment camps for the foreseeable future.”
“So in other words, we’re under house arrest.”
“You could say that, but at least we have each other.”
“And you think that’s a good thing, Charlie?”
“I do.”
“I do too.” Pina pours down the rest of her Campari. “Just don’t let me drink myself to death while you nurse that damn martini.”

Charlie smiles at her.

“You know what Sylvie said about you, Charlie? She said you were kind, and I don’t think she was mistaken.”

The buzzer of the electric stove asserts itself; it’s time to put the chicken in.

 

THE BERGAMASCO SHEPPARD

 

 

Pina decides to keep her birthday to herself, but a flurry of phone calls come from old friends, and she feels pleased to be remembered, if guilty for being so out of touch since the plague began. She hasn’t spoken with her old chum Olga once in the last months and is sorry to hear how the Coronavirus has turned Olga’s life upside down. Her elderly parents both died in April from the virus and Olga’s lost all of her work as a yoga instructor. On top of that, Stephen, Olga’s longtime boyfriend, recently moved in with his boyfriend Geoff, a relationship he’d been having on the sly for years.

“I’m waiting to get cancer,” Olga says. “It’s been suspiciously quiet around here lately, although pretty soon I will be evicted and have to move into my parents’ house in Modesto, which will represent death on the installment plan.”
“Why didn’t you call?” Pina asks.
“The same reason you didn’t.”

Pina wonders what that reason is, but isn’t curious enough to probe the question. She and Olga had been best friends during college and for years after, but after Marco died, Pina pulled away from many of her old friends, preferring solitary grieving to the cloying pity of others. Olga was a friend she later reunited with, but the friendship didn’t resume as it had been.

Pina doctors her Bloody Mary mix with Worcestershire, Tabasco, and smashed garlic. She’s been on a sobriety kick since Sylvie called her a noisy drunk, but today is her birthday, for God’s sakes.

“So what’s it like spending all those months in the country?” Olga asks.
“I wouldn’t exactly call Sonoma the country.” A jigger and a half of vodka, and voilà.
“Compared to a funky apartment in the Lower Height, it’s the fucking wilderness. So, what’s the deal with you and Vince? Have you found that you enjoy each other more being separated?”
“I think that’s about right.” She’s resolved not to say anything about what’s happened to Vince, but for some reason she tells Olga about Charlie and can sense her friend’s gossip consciousness springing to life.
“Is it serious, Pina?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s he like?”
“Like nobody I’ve ever known. He’s kind of a wizard geek dude.”
“A wizard geek dude. What the fuck is that, Pina? Does he have a particularly big wand?”
“Don’t talk dirty, Olga.”
“Why the fuck not?”

Olga, always one of the most straight-laced of Pina’s friends—she was raised a Christian Scientist and evolved into a devout practitioner of Transcendental Meditation—has discovered the value of obscenity, pitching fucking this and fucking that everywhere now that both her parents have died and the Coronavirus has turned all of us into existentialists. Pina takes a bite of her Bloody-laced celery.

“Are you eating, Pina?”
“Yes, I’m eating my Bloody Mary.”
“That sounds good. Okay, describe a wizard geek dude, Pina.”
“Oh, he’s indescribable.” Pina wanders out to the deck and sees Sylvie in her garden. She waves furiously to Sylvie until she’s spotted and points to her phone and shrugs. Another night survived; the suicide watch is lightening up.
“Come on, Pina, tell me about Charlie.”
She walks back inside. “Okay, for one thing, he’s not only trained his parrot Roscoe to talk, he’s trained him to think.”
“Get out.”
“I’m not kidding.”
“So you’re having an affair with the wizard geek, parrot master in your husband’s condo.”
Pina swirls what’s left of her Bloody around in the glass. “Vince isn’t really my husband and Charlie and I spend most of the time over at his place.”
“Technicalities. You’re hiding behind technicalities, Pina.”
“I’m not hiding.”
“Vince knows?”
“No, no, no, no, no. And I don’t want any gossip from you, Olga.”
“Wouldn’t think of it. So, tell me, can I come up and meet the wizard geek? I’ll wear my mask.”
“You sure you’re willing to venture into the wilderness, Olga?”
“I’m ready for anything.”
“Then come on up next week.”
“Do you think the guy knows another wizard geek dude?”
“I’ll enquire.”
“Alright, Pina, now that I know you’re going to have a happy birthday, I can let you go.”

 

The next call is the one that really takes her by surprise.
“Happy birthday, darling.”
“Vince, where are you?”
“Not to worry. I’m where I’m supposed to be, at Harmony Acres in Nicasio. They gave me my phone back the other day, but I thought I’d wait for your birthday to call.”
He sounds normal, whatever that means. “It’s good to hear your voice, Vince.”
“And yours, darling. Of course, all I want to do is apologize to you, Pina. I sure as hell went off the deep end and I’m so sorry to have put you through hell.”
“You’re the one who went through hell, Vince, and I hope you don’t go back.” Pina walks briefly back out onto the deck, squeezes the Thai basil and admires the majesty of the Japanese eggplant. Sylvie is nowhere to be seen now.
“I don’t intend to go back to that madness, but they say that being here is the easy part.”
“What’s the place like, Vince?” Pina mixes herself another Bloody Mary, a bit sorry to be drinking alone.
“The grounds are nice and they let you go for walks in the morning. There’s a dairy farm nearby and I walk by everyday and talk to the cows. They’re about the best company I have. Almost all the clients are half my age or younger. Some of them even call me gramps. They’ve gotten a bit kinder since I’ve started cooking dinner.”
“You’re cooking dinner?”
“Yeah, they found out I could cook so that’s become my job. Dinner’s gotten a lot better, I must say. Otherwise, we have three daily meetings, meet individually with a counselor, and write heaps in our notebooks everyday. Shame seems to be the subject I keep swimming through. It’s a real cesspool. The big news is I’ve gotten back to writing poems. I say back as if I’d taken a brief sabbatical, but it’s been more than forty years since I’ve written a poem.”
“That’s wonderful, Vince.”
“Yeah, look what it took me to get back to writing. But I wrote a poem for you, Pina. I wonder if you’d be willing to let me read it.”
“Of course.” Actually, Vince doesn’t really sound normal. There’s something different about him she can’t put her finger on. It’s as if a bit of humility has crept into his personality, but she reminds herself that it may only be a new manner he’s adopted.
“It’s called Calves. For Pina.”

        It’s good to see the heifer calves
        run free on a dairy farm.
        They’ll likely have a full life.
        The bull calves have another fate.
        Do you remember the day
        we came upon a village of calf huts
        on the road to Point Reyes?
        You asked me to stop the car
        at the side of the road.
        The calves, chained to their huts,
        could only move a few feet.
        They lay on their haunches
        and had already given up their spirits.
        Why, you wondered, why do they keep them like that?
        We both knew it was to prevent them
        from building muscle.
        Tenderness is what’s treasured in a calf,
        and in a lover.
        I watched you cry
        as if they were human children.
        Compassion has always been your strong suit.
        It’s never come naturally to me.
        I am trying to discover that quality in myself
        and believe it exists less between my ears
        than in my heart.
        That’s a staunchly defended territory, hard to reach.
        You should know that a lifetime
        of bad habits and lazy reckonings
        are tattooed to my psyche
       What can I promise you?

 

Pina waits for more lines, but the poem is over. “Gosh, that’s powerful, Vince.” She got tangled in the lines, though certain phrases haunted her: Tenderness is what’s treasured in a calf, and in a lover; Bad habits and lazy reckonings; and What can I promise you? Now she wonders what more can she say about his poem. “It sounds like you’ve been digging deep Vince.”

“Do you think? I’m not so sure. It all might be mood making. I don’t trust myself, and when I realize how much my shtick is a part of me—a load of flim flam competence—changing myself after all these years seems impossible. You know what they say about old dogs. But it’s become a very clear choice for me, Pina: I either tilt the windmills of sobriety or go off like a mad dog into the night.”

Mad dog, she thinks, pronouncing the words in her mind. Pina, carelessly, pours down the rest of her Bloody Mary and her throat catches fire.

“Forgive me, Pina, for laying all this shit on you. This was supposed to be a birthday call.”
Pina gasps before she is able to respond. “So when do you get out, Vince?”
“Ten days. It’s very scary.”
“Can you sign on for another month?”
“I might be able to, but I want to get back to the real world and take on the challenge. I spoke with Bernard the other day and he’s arranged for a couple people to clean out the damage I did to the house. It will be two guys in Hazmat suits and cost a small fortune. Can I see you, Pina? Can we try to start over?”
“I’d be happy to see you, Vince—from a distance. That’s all I can say for now.”
“From a distance,” he mumbles, and now, in his new humble voice says, “I understand. I perfectly understand. Send me good thoughts, Pina, and enjoy your day.”

 

Before she can make herself a third Bloody Mary, Charlie arrives at the door with a large package for her. She’d forgotten that she’d told him when her birthday was, many weeks ago. She welcomes him inside and offers him a Bloody.

“I better stay with coffee.” He’s still wary of drink after his recent three-martini night. He takes her into his arms. “Happy birthday, Pina.”

She can’t get Vince out of her head and tries to force herself into the present. “You didn’t have to get me anything, Charlie.” She takes the box with her and leads him into the second bedroom, where he settles into the leather La-Z-Boy.

When she comes back with coffee and a glass of rosé for herself, he says, “Three guesses what’s in the box.”

She makes a show of shaking it; it’s denser than she expected. “I don’t have a clue.”

“Here’s one.” Charlie breaks into song:

        “How much is that doggie in the window?
The one with the waggly tail
How much is that doggie in the window?
I do hope that doggie’s for sale.

        I must take a trip from California
And leave my poor sweetheart alone
If she has a dog, she won’t be lonesome
And the doggie will have a good home.

 Charlie’s voice wobbles back to careful speech. “My big sister Alba sang that to me when I was a child, but I never got the dog. Open it, Pina.”

She rips the paper and lifts the lid from the box. It’s a stuffed animal. A charming and densely hairy dog, its coat, woven of browns and grays, covers its eyes. She sweeps away the hair on each side and is delighted to find its deep brown eyes.

“It’s a Bergamasco Sheppard, Pina. Didn’t you say your people were from Bergamo? This one may have wintered in Bergamo, but he was native to the Alps.”
“Where did you find it, Charlie?”
“That’s my secret.”

And then she discovers the discreet label: Fialdini’s, Bergamo.

“You sent to Bergamo for this?”
He smiles at her, pleased with himself. “Let’s just say, I didn’t re-gift it.”
Pina’s squeezes the animal. The girl in her—when she allowed herself to be the girl—would have loved this large dog, and she adores it now.
“What are you going to name him, Pina?”
She sweeps the hair from its eyes. “Giovanni. His name’s Giovanni.”
“Perfecto.”
“How does that song go again?”
Charlie sings it even more sweetly than he did the first time.

        “How much is that doggie in the window?
The one with the waggly tail
How much is that doggie in the window?
I do hope that doggie’s for sale.

 She thinks of Charlie never getting his dog and then of Vince, turning into a mad dog. Be with the one you’re with. She smiles at her wizard geek. “You can share Giovanni with me, Charlie. He can be ours.”

THE WOODPECKER

 

 

She tells Charlie about Sylvie’s plans to kill herself. “It’s a calculation she’s already made, and there’s no stopping her.”

It’s seven in the evening at Charlie’s place. Neither of them has any interest in eating. Charlie’s already quaffed two large martinis and is sprawled on the Persian carpet looking at a third, which is sitting within reach on the tile table. Pina’s helped Charlie discover his natural affinity for drink, but a third jumbo martini would be hallucinogenic for him. He needs to build his endurance. She mixed the first two martinis, but refused to make a third. With martinis, she observes the maxim: Three is too many and a dozen’s not enough. The third one’s on Charlie, if he partakes. At this point he’s only flirting with it.

“You know, Pina,” he saws, drawing out the final vowel of her name forever, “People who decide, you know, to do themselves in, don’t generally blab about it.”
“It wasn’t blabbing. More like seasoned reporting. She called me a noisy drunk.”
Charlie smirks from the floor. “I don’t think that you’re that noisy, Pina.” Charlie sits up and has a sip of his martini.
“Be careful.”
“Is that why you’re drinking bubble water tonight.”
“It’s not just bubble water. It’s San Pellegrino. Tell me, Charlie, have you ever been suicidal?”
“Me? No, not really. I went through a macabre period as a young teen when I built suicide sets in shoeboxes. I was always building thing, but I hit upon this idea of coming up with suicide tableaus. I remember I had a guy in a prison cell hanging by his bed sheets, and another dude sitting lotus style at the rear of a Karmann Ghia with a tiny hose extended from the exhaust to his mouth. There was a woman in a bathtub who slit her wrists.”
“I can’t believe this, Charlie. You were a sick kid.”
“I don’t know. They were true scale models and I built every part of them, except for the Karmann Ghia, which came from a kit. It was painstaking work.”
“But why suicide?”
Charlie lifts his martini, studies it for a long moment, and takes a full swig. “I guess I was processing some baggage. My mother killed herself when I was seven.”
“Oh, shit, Charlie. You never told me that.”
“Yeah, some things I tend to keep to myself.”
Pina gets down on the rug beside Charlie and holds him close. “I’m so sorry.”
“Thanks. Lot of water under the bridge.” He grabs his martini and pours down most of it. The poor man is putting some genuine hurt on himself.
“Anyway, I made five different models. They didn’t go over so well at the science fair. There was a lot of talk about self-determination in those days. So I called my project: Five Varieties of Self-Termination.”
“Oh, Charlie.”
“How about you, Pina? You ever been suicidal?”
“We don’t have to talk about this, Charlie.”
“No, I want to.” He gulps the rest of his martini and vaults himself up from a sitting position, staggering a few steps sideways.
“Where are you going, Charlie?”
“Make myself another.”
“I won’t let you.”

Charlie stands on his spot, bowlegged as a cowboy, before his knees buckle and he veers over to the sofa and collapses. In two minutes he’s asleep. Pina finds a light blanket and covers him.

 

She returns to Vince’s condo, disturbed by Charlie’s revelation and wondering what else he’s kept from her.

Tonight she’s going to keep some sort of strange vigil, her thoughts are with her downstairs neighbor. The curious thing is she hasn’t heard Sylvie cry for weeks. Maybe having made her decision eliminated her grief.

For Pina, suicide’s never been a viable option. She doesn’t like the idea of leaving a mess behind, and even if you did the deed in a neat way, say with pills, you’d leave a psychic mess in your wake, with everybody close to you forced to consider what they could have done to prevent your death. What was it like for Charlie at seven? She’d never be able to forgive the cruelty of the act.

Vince told her about a poet, whose name she can’t remember, who’s father killed himself while his wife was pregnant with the future poet. The poet lived to be 100 and was beloved, but he never stopped writing about the father that he never knew.

The Eichorn brothers gave her an odd introduction to suicide. Benny, the oldest, who spoke with a hushed authority, explained to her that suicide was a crime and that if you killed yourself they threw your body in jail. They had special jails for suicides way out in the country and the bodies stayed behind bars until they were fully rotted and nothing was left but skulls and bones. Then they came and made soap out of the suicide bones. “You never know, Pina,” he said, “you may be taking a shower with a suicide. That’s why I never use soap.” Benny went on to explain that one of the really good things about suicide prisons is that they didn’t have to spend a lot of money on prison guards.

Tonight Pina limits herself to one glass of wine, which amounts to a vow of sobriety. She’s not sure what’s she’s waiting for: A gunshot? The smell of gas? She opens all of her windows. The deed may already be done. It’s silent downstairs.

 

To say she slept fitfully would be an understatement. In the morning she calls Charlie to see how he’s doing.

“It’s like I blacked out.”
“You went past your limit.”
“I guess. The hangover is epic. What should I do?”
“Make yourself a short screwdriver, take three Advil, and lay low.

She wants to ask if he remembers telling her about his mother, but she doesn’t. She tells him she’ll come over in the late afternoon and make dinner for him.

Now as she poaches eggs, she hears the sliding door open downstairs. When she dashes out to the deck, she sees Sylvie watering her potted roses. So she’s willing to keep her roses alive if not herself.

Pina has just started a garden. Her first. It’s humble, a galvanized tub that takes a cubic foot and a half of soil. The two pepper plants, padrone and serrano, delight her with their efficiency, already flowering and birthing miniscule suggestions of the peppers to come. Past the ripe green of the copious sweet basil, sits a small thatch of Thai basil that she loves to squeeze. The redolence spills off her hands and it smells like sex to her. A corner of the galvanized planter sprouts a fat, curly leaved lettuce, a bit bitter, that holds up to a robust vinaigrette. Beside the tin, in a good-sized turquoise pot, her Japanese eggplant is already sporting a splash of aubergine in its flowers.

She peeks over the railing; Sylvie is still down there fussing with her roses. She’s got to know that the noisy drunk is knocking around up here. Pina’s been conspicuous, thumping the tin a few times with a trowel and then whistling some damn jazz tune stuck in her head.

She leans over the railing. What does she have to lose? The worst thing that can happen is the woman kills herself. “Sylvie,” she calls, “are you ready to apologize?”
“Apologize to you? Ha.” Sylvie does her best to broadcast some arch contempt but, really, it’s a weak performance.
“You called me a noisy drunk, and I’ll admit that I can be noisy, but all I had to drink last night was a glass of rosé. So, how are your roses, Sylvie?”

No answer, but she can feel Sylvie stiffen in the garden, just out of her sight. Sylvie wants to be outraged that Pina would deign to engage with her, but she isn’t able to disengage. She doesn’t know how to stay ill-mannered, even during what could be her final day.

Pina hears a woodpecker begin drilling in one of the Osage trees across the street. Is Sylvie listening to the woodpecker as well?

“Myself,” Pina says, pitching her voice so that it falls softly on Sylvie, “I’m growing Japanese eggplant, the first of my life. It’s a revelation. The leaves themselves are an amazement. They’re so large and many-chambered. I wish I were a photographer, I really do. And this morning, the first blush of purple sur les petites fleurs. I’m humbled.” Pina’s enjoying herself. Is she playing with house money or Sylvie’s life? “I’m also enamored of the Thai basil that I have growing.”

“Pina,” she hears, in an arch croak from below, “You are a chatterbox.”

“Yes, I’ve been accused of that before. I think it may have something to do with my work. Did I mention that I’m a speech pathologist and I spend a lot of time helping people talk naturally? The worst thing somebody in my position can do is to fill the silence. They should take away my license.”
“They should.”
“You haven’t told me about your roses, Sylvie.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
She’s grasping at straws here. ”Have you found your next book to read?”
“I’m not going to read another book, Pina. Now goodbye.”
“Wait,” she says, though she has no idea what she’s asking Sylvie to wait for.
“What?” Sylvie says, trying to project impatience.
“I have something for you.”
“No thank you.”
“You can’t decline before you see what it is.”
“I can do as I wish.”
“I’ll be right down with it.” She listens again to the woodpecker. Such persistence. It’s a good model for her.

She wraps her knuckles on Sylvie’s door three times before she answers.

“I wanted you to have this,” she says, and thrusts Blyth’s Summer Haiku volume into Sylvie’s hand. I thought it might be perfect as a follow-up to Proust. Here you have three-line masterpieces. And the book’s beautifully arranged.” Pina flips open to the index. She can’t believe that Sylvie’s still standing in her doorway, listening to this spiel. “Look: The Season, Sky and Elements, Fields and Mountains, Gods and Buddhas, Human Affairs—I think that one is my favorite—Trees and Flowers, Birds and Beasts.” The longer she talks the better chance she has to keep Sylvie alive. It’s as simple as that. Or is that madness? As it is, she’s petrified Sylvie. The woman can’t move; she can’t speak.

“May I read you a poem? I think my favorite poet is Issa. In three lines you see his humanity. To call the poem a snapshot is to belittle it, but I’m not particularly good with words except, perhaps, with speaking them.”
“Yes,” says Sylvie in a far-off voice.”

Pina flips to Human Affairs. “Alright, I’m going to cheat, and read two poems, six lines total. Same theme.

The change of clothes
                Be careful of your head
                        With the door.

I think the poet’s talking o himself. And here’s the second one:

The change of clothes;
               And sitting down,
                          But I am alone.

“That’s the one that gets me. We are all alone.” She’s said too much, probably hit the wrong note, but she can’t stop now. “I think part of my love of haiku comes from my ADD. Like, seriously, I’ve been reading the same novel, McTeague for more than a month and I’m just halfway through. It’s really a spectacular book. Do you know it? Well, it’s set in San Francisco in the 1890’s, a folk opera, if you will, on Polk Street. Dr. McTeague, the outsized, unlicensed dentist, who learned his trade in the mining camps, realizes his primal desire—to have a giant gilded molar mounted beside the sign for his dental parlors on the corner of Polk and California Streets. But I can tell the book’s going to turn dark. Also, the book was made into a legendary film in the twenties that nobody’s seen, called Greed,”

“Pina,” Sylvie says, “it doesn’t sound like there’s any chance of my reading that book, so can you stop talking about it?”
“I’d be happy to give you the book.”
“I don’t want your book.” Sylvie’s face turns stern and then she offers a total surprise: “Would you like a cup of tea, Pina?”
“I’d be delighted.”
“We shouldn’t have our relationship end on a bad note. Go around through the garden gate. I don’t want you coming through my house.”

As Pina waits in the garden for Sylvie to come out with her tea tray, she listens to the insistence of the woodpecker as he peck peck peck peck pecks away at the Osage tree.

THE MONKEY

 

 

Charlie sits her down to watch a video of the comic Sarah Cooper lip-syncing Trump’s inane prattle about the bible, after his shameless photo-op at the Episcopal Church.

A reporter asks: “Wondering what one or two of your favorite bible verses are. Cooper’s eyes roll back into her head before she opens her supple face and nails Trump: Well, I wouldn’t want to get into it, because to me that’s very personal. You know when I talk about the bible it’s very personal, so I don’t want to get into verses.”

Pina bursts into uncontrollable laughter as the reporter presses for just a single verse and Cooper uses both hands to play a dissonant chord on an imaginary piano. No, I don’t want to do that … the bible means a lot to me, but I don’t want to get into specifics. Then Cooper taps her chin with a finger to indicate the answer is complete.

Another reporter asks a question that also cracks Pina up: “Are you an Old Testament guy or a New Testament guy?” Cooper’s eyes go deer-in-the-headlights, shifting from right to left before answering. Probably equal. I think it’s just an incredible . . . the whole bible is an incredible . . . the whole bible is . . . I joke . . . very much so . . . they always hold up The Art of the Deal, I say my second favorite book. But I just think the bible is very special.

“Play it again,” Pina shouts. “The idiot doesn’t even know the difference between the Old Testament and the New. He’s not opened a bible once in his life.”

Charlie plays it again and when the thirty-seven second clip is done, Pina asks for it once more.

“Gosh, you’re reminding me of my daughter when she was a tiny girl. I’d throw her in the air and catch her and she’d say, “Do again, da-da, do again.”

Pina follows suit: “Do again, Charlie, do again.”

 

If she hadn’t already been through menopause, Pina may have thought she was pregnant, waking up this morning with a craving for pickles. It’s not the store bought varieties she wants, but the type of sweet and sour, thin-sliced vegetables her mother used to prepare. She is certainly not pregnant, though she’s become a bit frightened by her longing to return to the comforts of her early childhood, most often expressed, since the plague has exerted its grip on her, in the desire for foods from childhood. She’s concerned by what this nostalgia, or whatever you want to call it, portends. Is she about to die or, perhaps, entering her second childhood?

In any case, she searches the Internet for quick pickling recipes before heading off alone to Sonoma Market in search of vegetables to pickle. Charlie cast her out of his condo this morning so he could spend a few hours alone with Roscoe. “I’ve neglected the poor bird lately,” he said.

“I’m sorry to have come between you,” Pina responded, with a wink and a rueful smile. “I don’t need exclusivity, Charlie. Stay away from other women and you can spend as much time with Roscoe as you like.” After saying this she wonders at what point she’ll become jealous of the talking bird.

 

Home from the market, with a massive load of vegies: baby carrots with their stems, Japanese eggplant, haricot vert, young beets, cauliflower, zucchini, and red onions, she washes all in a colander. Before preparing the various pickling solutions and rounding up her jars, Pina links her computer with the hotspot, and watches the vast protests in Washington D.C., Philadelphia, Chicago, and Atlanta, as CNN flits from one city to another.

Damn, she’d like to be at one of these protests. With the computer on the kitchen counter, she slices vegetables and measures her solutions, halving the recommended amount of sugar. She will soon be in quick pickling heaven and when her bounty is ready she’ll bring a jar downstairs to Sylvie.

The peaceful turn the protests have taken astonishes her. She’s not clear how it’s happened. Did the cops actually root out all the white supremacist agitators, even though a good number of their own subscribe to those attitudes? The discipline and high energy of the protesters are remarkable—the country is being remade right before our eyes with the inspiration of the masses. She particularly loves the massive yellow letters: B L A C K   L I V E S   M A T T E R that the D. C. mayor ordered painted on the street facing the White House, which is now circled in ugly black fencing to protect the bunker baby from himself. The protesters have made use of the black fencing as a spot to mount posters and lay memorials.

Now the news shifts to San Francisco where a huge crowd of protesters on the Golden Gate Bridge blocks the northbound lanes of traffic. Social distancing appears to be a thing of the past. She can’t go. No, she can’t go.

Once all her vegetables are in jars bathed in pickling solutions, she slices up a cardboard box, finds a couple of markers, and makes signs to hang from the balcony of the deck. Two signs are ubiquitous around town, one in support of Sonoma Valley high School’s 2020 graduates, who missed their live graduation, and the other, which strikes her as curiously cryptic:

YOU  C A N ‘ T   Q U A R A N T I  N  E   L O V E.

She’s been seeing that sign for weeks and hasn’t a clue what it means.

With pencil, and black and red Sharpies, Pina crafts two handsome posters, using statements she noticed while watching protests on TV. One reads:  S I L E N C E   I S   V I O L E N C E, the other: W H I T E   S U P R E M A C Y   C A N C E L E D.  She tapes the posters to the outer balcony rail. It ain’t much, but it’s something.

 

She’s come to town to see what’s opened up this weekend. Sonoma, which has been so barren since the quarantine started, is now brimming over with people. Every parking place in the square is filled. It seems like a typical Saturday in a typical June. She and Vince tended to avoid the square in summer; now it is dangerously exciting. A long line of people waits outside the ice cream shop. Folks dine on linen covered tables outside of the Plaza Bistro. Pina turns up the first alley and notices all the tables filled in the back patio of La Casa. She skips the second alley, with the idea of catching a beer in the patio of Murphy’s Irish pub. The tables are well distanced from each other and there’s actually one waiting for her.

For a moment she wishes Charlie were here and thinks to call him. Has he had enough time with Roscoe yet? But, no, it’s lovely to be here herself, basking in the mild sunshine. At the next table, three white women in their twenties, are talking about George Floyd and about the concept of being complicit. What she can hear of the conversation is intelligent. The woman in the group whose voice projects the most forcibly—a redhead with a perky nose, wearing a crucifix, says, “It’s really counterintuitive, but one can be as guilty doing nothing, as doing something evil.”

The woman beside her, with juicy red lips, shakes her head. “No,” she says, “evil is worse.”

“Silence can be evil,” the first woman asserts. “How about those cops who stood by while George Floyd was murdered right in front of them.”

Pina wants to tell the redhead that she’s right.

Finally the masked server approaches, offering Pina a lunch menu.

“No, I only want a beer. I’ll have a Lagunitas on tap.”

Given a choice between a sixteen-ounce glass or a twenty, she doesn’t hesitate before choosing the twenty. The young women at the next table are now talking about CNN host Chris Cuomo, debating about whether he’s cute or not. Two of them think he is, but the redhead says, “I think there’s something boorish about him. Pina agrees with her again.

On her way out of the alley Pina hears a boisterous crowd on the square. She’s thrilled to see that it’s an actual protest on the square. Tractors, adorned with signs, are parked at the foot of the square. “Black Lives Matter.” “Cultivate Justice.” There are maybe 200 people bunched in the street around the tractors. Everybody is wearing a mask and, because the wind is blowing formidably enough to dissipate any virus floating around, she feels it’s safe to join the others. Notably, there’s not a single law enforcement officer visible. Have they already been defunded?

The crowd is made up almost entirely of young white people, mostly women, but an older black lady with an American flag-styled straw hat holds the megaphone. She balances herself on a long red staff. “I was just driving through town and I saw y’all, and I thought, Sonoma, all these white people—amazing. So I hope you don’t mind me saying a few words. This is doing my heart good. Look at how young you are. You don’t have to be out here, but you are. You’re out here speaking up for justice for black people, for all people. I grew up in Austin, the capitol city of Texas. The Clarksville neighborhood where I lived was founded by freed slaves, but didn’t even have its streets paved until 1975.”

The woman says that she’d like to lead demonstrators in the singing of “We Shall Overcome,” describing it as “a nugget of the Civil Rights era, written by Mr. Pete Seeger.” Before commencing she says, “Only we need to change the tense of the verse. With all due respect to Mr. Seeger, we shall not be overcoming SOMEDAY; we ARE overcoming TODAY.” The crowd responds with a rousing shout. The song, which had always sounded dirge-like to Pina, is far more powerful in its new iteration.

Next a young black woman takes the megaphone and leads some call and response. “NO JUSTICE,” she shouts, and the protesters holler back, “NO PEACE.” “SAY HIS NAME.” “GEORGE FLOYD.”

Pina is thrilled to be a part of this—a genuine protest in Sonoma, the first she’s attended since the Woman’s March, just after Trump’s inauguration. She realized then as she realizes now that it’s women who are the most inspired leaders of these movements.

They now march around the square, at safe distance, with more call and response and, somehow, all the storefronts that she’s familiar with look different. There is something transformative about being numerous. When they’ve made it all the way around the square. Pina stands close to a man she noticed earlier sitting atop his red tractor. She loves seeing a guy in big beard, cowboy hat, and bandana mask standing beside a tractor emblazoned with all manner of Black Lives Matter signs. The man, no doubt noticing her appreciation, gives her a big wink.

Pina also spots a man with a small monkey on its shoulder. Every time there is a round of applause the monkey claps its little pink hands. Monkey see, monkey do. She wonders how much she’s lived her life as a monkey, behaving according to script. The monkey has no choice, but she . . . She’s reminded of a poem, “The Woman at the Washington Zoo,” by Randall Jarrell, which Vince read her more than once in their early days. One line of the poem, in which the woman stands at the cage of an animal, has stayed with Pina:

Oh, bars of my own body, open, open!

Pina gazes again at the monkey and is astonished by how everything she sees is filtered through her monomaniacal consciousness.

Now the young woman with the megaphone introduces herself as a graduate of Sonoma Valley High, who attends Santa Rosa Junior College. She reads a well written and harrowing history of the racism she’s experienced in her life from age five to the present, and then she talks a little bit about white privilege. While in college, Pina had read Peggy McIntosh’s seminal essay, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” which contained a long list of ways that whites in this culture had unearned advantages. At the time, Pina took the list very seriously and strove to add items to it, but that was a long time ago and her resolve to remain mindful of her unearned advantages has all but disappeared.

The speaker has them all raise two hands in the air and gives the instruction for people to put down a finger each time they’ve experienced one of the racial indignities she reads from a list. These indignities range from being called a racial epithet to losing a job to a less qualified person who happened to be white. As the list proceeds, Pina gazes around the crowd. Most people have not dropped a finger. She notices a few Latinas and black people with many missing fingers. When the list is finished Pina’s fingers are all still stretched tall in the air, emblems not of triumph but privilege.

THE WORM

 

 

It takes Charlie until Wednesday to pull the Sunday New York Times out of its blue sleeve.

“I read about it,” he says, “but didn’t feel like I was ready to see it.” He lays the front page on the kitchen counter and they gaze at the countless memorialized names.
“And to think that this is only a fraction of the 100,000 dead.”
“It’s very difficult to represent enormity,” Charlie says, “but they’ve done a good job of it. And look at the short phrase they’ve written about each person. Look at how it humanizes them. Here’s where seven words are worth more than a thousand pictures. What a lot of work this represents, combing obituaries, talking to the mourning families. They’ve honored these people with epithets worthy of Homer.”
“What’s a Homer epithet?” she asks, trusting Charlie enough to show her ignorance.
“Oh, you know, it’s the defining attribute of each character. Hector of the glinting helmet; Hermes, the messenger of the Gods and conductor of men; Zeus, who marshals the thunderheads. But listen to these, Pina.” Charlie begins reading: “June Beverly Hill, 85, Sacramento, no one made creamed potatoes or fried sweet corn the way she did; Denise Camille Buczek, 72, Bristol, Conn, loved writing birthday cards, holiday cards, poems and lists.’”
“That sounds like my mother.”
“’Norman Gulamerian, 92, New Providence, N. J., art supply businessman with a romantic streak.’”

She thinks Charlie has a romantic streak. She’s surely too skeptical for that.

“Oh, I found a guy here whose distinction is that he turned down a job playing trombone with Duke Ellington, but I can’t find him again. It’s like the names keep rolling past me on a ticker tape. I’m deeply moved.”

She admires Charlie’s access to his feelings. Unfortunately she’s trained herself to hide her own. Can the gate to her emotions be coaxed open or has it atrophied?

“Read a few, Pina. Look.” He opens the newspaper. “There are more pages of names here.”

She takes hold of the newspaper and scans the front page, trying to make contact with an individual amid the infinity of names. Now, spotting one, she hopes to find the appropriate voice. It comes out quiet like someone speaking in a library: “’Marlene B. Mandel, 88, Collingswood, NJ, first woman on her block to work outside the house.’”

“Wow, a whole wedge of cultural history there. Read some more, Pina.”
“Here’s one I love even if I can’t really picture it: ‘Lovie Barkley, 69, Chicago, while revelers did the Soul Train line at a wedding, he combined it with The Worm.’”
“Well, I can tell you about Soul Train. I used to watch it all the time and I created animations of some of the dancers, just for fun. The show started in late Mr. Barkley’s Chicago so he may have been with it from the beginning. Didn’t you ever watch Soul Train, Pina?”

She shakes her head.

“Oh you were deprived. I mean it. What a pleasure to watch black people dance. The show ran thirty-five years, all these different eras. It started with Rhythm and Blues. You had Gladys Knight and the Pips doing ‘I Heard it Through the Grapevine,’ and the godfather of soul: ‘WOOO!’” Charlie throws his voice as a startlingly good James Brown: ‘Get up off of that thing . . . get up off of that thing, and he shimmies up the long narrow kitchen and then herky-jerks his way back, his joints going from crisp to slack, deliberate and precise.”
She claps her hands. “Oh, Charlie, you are great.”
“I used to be able to dance a little.” He dives to the floor and stops his fall expertly with his hands. “I can’t really do The Worm anymore. Don’t have the strength.”
But he does slither across the floor with beautifully articulated faints to each side. “Charlie,” she says, moved almost to tears, “what a wonderful memorial tribute you’re paying Lovie Barkley of Chicago.”
Charlie springs back onto his feet. “Yeah, but what they’re not telling you about Lovie,” he says, a bit breathless, “is that he could probably do The Caterpillar, as well.”
“Want me to teach you The Worm, Pina? You might have more strength than I do.”
“Yes. Please teach me The Worm, Charlie.” She drops to the ground. “Can we do it side by side?” This was not supposed to happen. She told herself not to let this happen, but, damn it, if she’s not falling hard for the guy.

 

Bernard calls her after he drops Vince at the treatment facility in Nicasio. “The grounds are quite lovely, Pina, and the program appears sound. They keep the clients busy with group meetings and private therapy sessions. They even get daily homework.

She tries to imagine Vince doing homework, but she can only picture him humoring the counselors, treating the whole enterprise as a farce.

“Vince will be in blackout for two weeks,” Bernard continues, “which basically means he can’t use his phone or get calls during that time.”

That sounds good to her—it gives her a two-week reprieve from having to worry about him.

“In usual times, you would then be able to visit Vince during the Saturday afternoon family program, but they’ve suspended the family visits during the Coronavirus.”
For once she’s glad that these are not usual times. “I can’t thank you enough, Bernard. So how is Vince?”
“I’d use the word sober,” he says, following up with what she’s come to think of as his British pause, “if sobriety wasn’t the heart of the matter at hand. But he seemed to me to be really quite serious. I’d say determined, but his determination remains to be seen. I saw sadness, I saw remorse, and Vince clearly expressed concern about you.”
“About me?”
“Yes, concern about the damage he’s done to his relationship with you.”

She wonders if that really has anything to do with worry for her. More likely his concern is about having upended the status quo. “Did he say anything about his work, Bernard?”
“Only that he was ashamed of himself for not being able to rise to the occasion. He called himself a coward. Yes, coward is the word he used. I reminded him that he isn’t the first person to have cracked under pressure.”
“He isn’t suicidal, is he, Bernard?”
“I don’t believe so, I really don’t. But then his recent behavior, with the drugs and in the streets, belies that assessment. What I know about these treatment centers is that clients tend to thrive during their residence. They eat well, get their sleep, and go to several meetings every day that keep them engaged with their addiction and give them direction. Of course, the genuine challenge begins when they get out.”
“Yes, that makes sense.” She wonders if Vince has the stuff to meet the challenge. Sadly, she doubts it. And what would Vince look like sober? He’d have to give up everything, including drink. He’d lose his personality. Nothing like a dry drunk who likes to pontificate. She wants to ask Bernard whether Vince mentioned where he’d been living, after he left the house in shambles—she suspects he was staying with Nurse Reina—but it doesn’t seem fair to get Bernard mixed up in all that. Does it even really matter anymore? Instead, she thanks Bernard again for all he’s done and, although it seems inadequate compensation, she tells Bernard that, when they are on the other side of the virus, she would like to take him out to lunch.
“That would be a pleasure, Pina.”

 

She and Charlie watched the video together. Charlie had read about it online and suggested they both watch it. Pina became furious. “The cop is taunting the guy while he’s killing him,” she screamed. “’Ah, you’re a real tough guy now,’ and look at these other cops, these bastards are just standing there like it’s just another routine day killing a black man. What’s the matter with these people?”

Pina stood up from the sofa and marched in circles around Charlie’s living room, shouting: “The fucking bastards, the fucking bastards.” Charlie approached and tried to throw an arm around her waist, but she pushed him away, “Leave me alone,” as if he, too, were the enemy.

The rest of the week they stayed together, glued to the cable stations in Charlie’s condo, as Minneapolis burned, and peaceful protests and riots proliferated in large and small cities across the country.

“The cable stations have turned this into a spectator sport,” Charlie complained.
“Well, look at us, we’re the willing spectators.”

And yet they couldn’t pull themselves away from the television, except to mix cocktails. Charlie really upped his drinking game. He must have realized it was necessary if he was going to continue to hang with her.

They didn’t even make regular meals anymore. Pina whipped up a bottomless bowl of guacamole and, when they ran out of avocados, she blended a double batch of kalamata olive hummus, and when the Greek olives were gone she concocted a strange tasting pile of martini olive hummus.

By the weekend, after watching peaceful protests and the destruction of cities on TV, after listening to real people and countless talking heads speculate about the potential for racial equality in America, as well as the strategies of law enforcement for controlling the violence in dozens of cities, including Trump’s sick threat to sic the active military on the protesters, and after hearing about the goals of white nationalists, particularly a group called the Boogaloo Boys, who wear a uniform of Hawaiian shirts and fatigues as they rampage through cities in caravans of cars without licenses, with the stated goal of igniting a civil war between the races, after all of that watching, Pina clamors to attend a demonstration in San Francisco.

Charlie argues against it. “There’s still a pandemic out there, Pina, and you’re in a high risk group.”

“Enough with me and my risk,” she hollers. “I read an article that said it’s seventeen times more difficult to catch the virus outside than in.”
“Who made up those numbers?”
“They’re real. It’s from a study.”
“Mmm hmm,” Charlie says.
“Do not patronize me.”
“So, are we going to have our own civil war, you and me, Pina?” he asks, after dipping one last piece of pita bread into the martini olive hummus, and then pushing away the bowl.
“The world is coming to an end and I don’t want to be this old white woman watching it on TV.”
“First of all, you’re not an old woman and, secondly, the world is not coming to an end.”
“Every time she begins a dystopian rant Charlie shoots it down. Finally, he says, “You’re behaving self indulgently, Pina. Stop it.”

She knows he’s right and feels embarrassed. There’s something else that bothers her: Each time she returns to Vince’s condo to get clean clothes, food or drink, she hears Sylvie, downstairs, crying and, instead of going down to ask after her, she simply slips back to Charlie’s place.

The next evening Charlie presses her to become more responsible. They are sitting at his dinner table after he’s made the first real meal they’ve had in nearly a week—a tagine of shrimp in tomato sauce with Moroccan spices.

Charlie skillfully peels a shrimp with his fork and knife, and then asks, “Have you been thinking about what you’re going to do, once the pandemic is over? We’re all going to have to contribute to the rebuilding our country. Or are you just going to sit on your privileged white butt and complain about the world going to hell?”

At first she’s speechless. She can’t believe that Charlie’s going off on her like this. Angry, she narrows her eyes on him. His expression is placid; there’s nothing provocative about it. Somehow she keeps quiet and continues to stuff her mouth with the savory meal, pausing only to quaff the good Bourgogne Charlie decanted.

“You have great skill at helping people find their voices, Pina. That’s a calling. You could contribute a lot of good to the world as you’ve done, no doubt, in the past, but you seem disinterested in the future, content to live off the proceeds of your house.”
“I wouldn’t use the word content to describe myself.”
“I never hear you talk about going back to work. Is this really enough for you?”

She finds herself shaking her head even though she doesn’t like the idea of agreeing with him. Why does she have to be so damn stubborn? Finally, she relents. “No, Charlie, I do want to contribute. I’m just not sure if it’s as a speech pathologist, but I do want to do something useful. How about you?”

Charlie refills her glass. “I think I told you from the time we first met that I believe that PTSD will be a widespread problem on the other side of all this. A lot of people have been emotionally damaged and now with the murder of George Floyd a lot more hurting is inevitable. For starters, I’d like to find a therapist who specializes in PTSD and develop with them some form of public service messages for TV and social media platforms.”

“Wow, that’s so specific.”
“We’ll see what I actually manage to do.”

Pina gazes across at Charlie with admiration. His blond, going-white hair stands up wildly. Could that figure into his epithet: Humble man with a comic cowlick? Charlie is genuine and kind, filled with imagination. At first she found something lacking in him, a quality that Vince possesses, which amounts to little more than grandiosity. What attracted her to Vince’s faux splendor? Did it make her feel grander?

Now she falls to the ground, more nimbly than she expects, and squirms up the hardwood floor, wiggling from side to side.

“What are you doing, Pina?”
“Maybe this is where I belong.  I don’t know how to do the dance, but I’m really feeling a bit like a worm.”

 

In the morning she knocks on Sylvie’s door. She’s not sure whether Sylvie will open it. Finally she does. Pina stands well back from the door. Sylvie’s expression shifts to a smile when she recognizes Pina, who notices a smear of tears on the older woman’s face.

“I’d invite you in, Pina, but . . .”
“No, no, we need to keep our social distance. I just wanted to say hello and see how you are and if I could do anything for you.”
“That’s so sweet of you, Pina. To tell the truth, I haven’t been doing too well. I wouldn’t call it loneliness exactly, but this isolation has been difficult for me. Now on top of that, I’ve been very upset with the violence, particularly in Minnesota. You see, my husband and I spent most of our married life in Minneapolis, where he grew up.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry.”
“I always thought it such a beautiful city filled with progressive minded people and this . . . this violence and destruction almost makes my life there seem like it was a lie.”
“It wasn’t a lie, Sylvie.”
“I don’t know. I never spent . . . I never spent any time at all thinking about the reality of black people’s lives. I just lived in my upper middle class bubble by the lake.”
“I know what you mean, Sylvie. It takes a lot for some of us to see beyond ourselves.”
“Why is that, Pina?”
“I don’t know. The culture teaches us that in order to be happy we just need to accumulate more things for ourselves. It doesn’t teach us to think of others.”

Sylvie closes her eyes and bows her head.

For a moment it’s like having her mother back again.

“Pina, do you think I could have your phone number?”
“Of course, Sylvie. In fact, I would like it if we could talk every day.”

THE SCARAB

 

 

She finally meets the woman from downstairs that she’s heard crying from time to time. She’s coming out her garden gate and Pina, on her way to the cemetery, introduces herself before the lady can get away.

“Hello downstairs neighbor.” She speaks from a ten-foot distance on the sidewalk. “I’m Pina Trentini, the one you have to blame for all the noise above. I’m sorry about that. The virus has turned me a little crazy and I spend a lot of time up there walking in circles.” She wonders how it sounded below when she and Charlie ran around the apartment in Mexican wrestling masks, exercising their war chants, on the way to having loud sex.

The woman blinks her eyes and almost forms a smile. “You’re not so bad. I’m Sylvie Saunders.”
“You moved here recently didn’t you?”
“Just before the holidays. From Seattle, to be closer to my son and his family in San Francisco. Now I can never see them.”
“That must be so hard.”

Sylvie nods. She looks to be in her early seventies. Her wedge of gray hair has grown out in odd ways since she’s been to the hairdresser, but she’s still put together. In that way she reminds Pina of her mother. She’s quite elegant, really, in a wool button-down blouse, a creamy shade of aubergine, and a straight black skirt. She stands with her legs crossed, apparently at her ease. Sylvie wears a pin on her blouse that Pina would love to see better, but she can’t get closer. It’s a black enamel scarab, beautifully dimpled over the body of the beetle, and set in old brass.

“By the way, I love your brooch.”
“Oh thank you. It’s Egyptian Revival, a gift from my husband forty years ago. It’s at least 110 years old, Edwardian, if the dealer is to be trusted. It’s really nothing more than a dung beetle, but the Egyptians held it sacred. The scarab shares a hieroglyphic with the early morning sun, if my memory serves me.”
“It’s marvelous.”
“The Egyptians believed that a scarab amulet brought luck.”

She wants to ask if this one brought Sylvie luck, but she keeps quiet.

“Oh, what a beautiful smile you have, Pina.”
She hadn’t known she was smiling. “Thank you.”
“I’m going to leave my scarab to you. I’ll write a very short codicil to my will.”

Pina nods her head reflexively a half dozen times; she’s just met the woman and she’s going to pass on her luck, good or bad. It’s seems a fair gamble is such an unlikely event transpired.

It’s an odd flirtation they’re having—mother and daughter? Pina’s curiosity gets the better of her and she asks a question that may be too forward: “How do you spend your days, Sylvie?”
“Reading. Reading and listening to music.”
“Funny, I never hear your music.”
“Headphones.”
She’d really like to ask Sylvie what’s prompted her bouts of crying, but that’s clearly a bridge too far. Instead: “And what do you read?”

Sylvie becomes animated. “I’m working my way through Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu in French. My mother was French and I grew up speaking it, but I’m afraid my French has faded over the years. It’s a bit of a struggle, but what else do I have to do? I’ve always wanted to make it through the whole thing. I will get through two books or three but I’ve never read all seven. Now I’m going to make it.” Sylvie has a cute gesture—wrinkling her nose after certain sentences, which has a way of brings a bit of lightness to her visage.

“Are you familiar with Proust’s À la recherché du temps perdu, Pina?”
“I know about it, but I’ve not read it. I’m sorry to say that I’m pretty much a philistine.”
Sylvie smiles at her tolerantly. “Proust has a character in the first book, a composer named Vinteuil, who’s written a sonata for violin and piano in F sharp minor, a little phrase of which sticks in the mind of the central character, Charles Swann.”

Pina realizes that Sylvie has probably not spoken to anyone face to face for weeks and she’s happy now to be a listener. How different from her drive to the city a few days ago with Charlie when she thought if he said any more she would have to scream.

“And every time Swann hears the phrase,” Sylvie says with a bouncing nod of her pointed chin, making sure she has a listener still, “every time he hears that musical phrase he becomes emotional. It brings him back particularly to his lost love Odette. For decades people have speculated about who Proust based the composer on. Camille Saint-Saëns is a popular choice, and the same can be said of César Franck, Gabriel Fauré, Claude Debussy, and even the Richard Wagner of Lohengrin. So, you see, I listen to all those composers as I read Proust. My son set-up Spotify for me, which I think is, frankly, one of the wonders of the world.”

“So have you figured out which composer the character is based on?”

“Oh, I’m glad you asked. There happens to be a lesser-known composer named Gabriel Pierné. The man was by no means obscure in the Paris of his time. Among other things he conducted the premiere of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite with the Ballet Russes, and he has a square named after him in the Île-de-France. His Sonata for violin and piano in D minor, opus 36, composed in the year 1900, just might be what Proust had in mind. We’ll never know for sure.

“The funny thing is that the phrase catches in my brain as well. It comes early in the second movement, the allegretto tranquilo. The violin states it. Let me see if I can give you an idea.” With surprising alacrity, Sylvie hums the melody, articulating each note precisely. “You see, it’s really a folk melody. Nothing more.”

“Does hearing the phrase bring you back to anything, Sylvie?”
She sighs in a satisfying way. “Yes, it brings me back to who I want to be with.”
“Lovely, and to think you may have solved the puzzle about the composer.”

Sylvie’s hazel eyes brighten. “Yes, I may have. And now I’m getting close to the end of the seventh book.” She squints and her expression turns grim. “Each day I read a little less. It’s roughly 2,000 pages and I have only 200 pages left. I really don’t know what I’m going to do with myself when I finish À la recherche du temps perdu.”

“I’m sure you’ll find something else to read.”
“After Proust? I wonder.”
“It’s very nice to meet you, Sylvie.”
“And you too, Pina, and you too.”

 

Each evening she and Charlie make dinner together. He is a much more gifted and imaginative cook than she is and she has no problem at all serving as his sous chef. Tonight they prepare slow roasted lamb shanks and Pina takes pleasure chopping onions and herbs while drinking a fine Gruner Veltliner that Charlie had on ice. The last days, she’s been trying to imagine what sharing a life with Charlie would be like. It’s lovely to watch him standing at the stove, barefoot, in cargo shorts and an apron that reads: Country Master, as he braises the shanks, the fragrance of shallots, garlic, and charred meat, spilling through the kitchen.

He cranes his neck toward her. “Would you open the window, Pina?”

She does. “I know you, you want to share the great smell of our dinner with the neighbors.”

“Exactly.”

If she were to move in with Charlie she’d need to make peace with Roscoe. Charlie’s done a good job of keeping the bird in his own realm. He senses Pina’s ambivalence to the parrot, and she makes a point, in deference to Charlie, of always greeting the bird when she comes over. “Pina, Pina, Pina,” he says in his parrot bark, “where you beena?” Roscoe’s added a new trick phrase: “I’ve been thinking about you.” She wants to tell him not to bother.

Meanwhile, there’s some hope for Vince. Once he’s done detoxing, which should be soon, he’s scheduled to spend a month in a treatment facility in West Marin called Harmony Acres. The morning after Charlie took Vince to the hospital, she called Vince’s close friend Bernard and apprised him of what was going on. Since then Bernard has been a godsend, helping to make the arrangements at Harmony Acres and offering to drive Vince out to the Nicasio facility.

A psychiatrist at Kaiser, Bernard offered to take charge of the situation during the long conversation they had together. Pina revealed that it was unlikely she’d move back in with Vince. “I don’t want to live with an addict,” she said. She doesn’t need to tell Bernard that she has become very fond of another man or that she an Vince were already having problems. His addiction on top his philandering is more than she can fathom.

“But what,” Bernard asked in his posh English accent, “if Vince managed to get clean?”
“This is a little rough to say, Bernard, but I wouldn’t bet on his staying clean. I’m going to start looking for a new place to live because the place I’m staying in is his.”

Bernard, really a good friend to Vince, got her to agree to wait until Vince came out of recovery “before she did anything rash.” Pina likes Bernard and really appreciates what he is doing for Vince, and what he’s sparing her from having to do. And yet she felt obliged to describe the depth of Vince’s fall.

“Let me explain what it was like walking into the Liberty Street house, Bernard. What Vince did to that house was criminal.” She described in sordid detail what she encountered in the house that she’d called home for seven years.
“I can only imagine how you must feel, Pina. It must seem a harsh betrayal.”
“Yes, one of many.” In the end she relented. She wouldn’t do anything rash.

 

“The lamb shanks are in the oven,” Charlie announces, triumphantly. “We eat at ten o’clock, just like the Spaniards.”
“And what shall we do in the meantime?”
“Well, in keeping with the Spaniards, I think we should have a siesta, of sorts.”
“Of sorts?” she asks.
“In a manner of speaking.”
“So we shouldn’t expect much from this siesta?”
“It remains to be seen,” says Charlie. “We keep our expectations low and likely exceed them.”
“Is that your philosophy of life?”
“Pretty much.”

She walks behind him and unties his apron. Then she lifts his black Yosemite Park Half Dome t-shirt over his head and leaves a trail of kisses from his neck to his navel.

Charlie pulls her close. She loves the smell of him: a mélange of sandalwood body lotion, Arm & Hammer rosemary and lavender deodorant, and his native tang, which she can’t get enough of. Charlie kisses her sweetly at the corners of her mouth. “I think this is going to be the kind of siesta we like best.”

 

She wakes after Charlie to the smell of coffee. By the time she gets to the kitchen in her short kimono Charlie is truly angry. She’s never seen him like this. “It’s Memorial Day weekend,” he shouts, “with 100,000 dead, and this fucking asshole is out playing golf and tweeting personal attacks and conspiracy theories from his golf cart.”

She pours herself coffee. “And good morning to you.”
“I’m sorry, Pina. It just gets the better of me sometime and I need to blow off steam.”
“Please go on. It’s fine with me as long as you’re not aiming your anger at me.”
“At you, no way.” He gives her a big lollipop kiss on the lips, and then veers off into a more muted rant. “What percentage of those dead would still be alive with a competent leader?”
“A wild guess—50%.”
“You’re underestimating it, Pina.”

Charlie hustles out of the room, clearly on a mission.

She sits at the kitchen counter sipping coffee and dangling her legs. She wouldn’t mind a little Irish in her cup this morning. Take a nice hop into the day. Charlie has a bottle of Bushmills, she noted when she took inventory, but she doesn’t want to scandalize the man. As it is, she’s kept her imbibing to a minimum in his presence—no more than a bottle of wine a night, and a couple of snifters of cognac for the varnish. Now he’s been gone a while. She should have grabbed the Bushmills.

Charlie hurries back, doing the dance of a man with an open laptop and a cup of coffee.

“Charlie, why are you going back and forth with your coffee?”
“Thought I might want some. Got to stay agile.” He grins at her. The guy’s falling in love. That’s what she was afraid of.
“Look at this, Pina, look at this.” He crouches down beside her and cues up a video as well as the narration: “A mass of white people,” he says,” in a voice from an old newsreel. “Yes, very white people, no masks, keeping scant distance as they jump up and down in a pool the size of a valley, which looks like it might run to the River Jordan. These are the new liberators of our country.” She loves to see him get worked up and admires the humor he can bring to his earnestness. Pina doesn’t know if she has the heart left to be earnest.

“Look at them prance around in a sunken American petri dish under a massive flag.”
“Are they getting baptized?” she asks.
“They already have been. Make America Great Again.” Charlie’s brogue has become urbane like a voiceover by John Hamm on Madmen. She bets that Charlie’s an old Toastmaster.
“We must understand,” he says, “that this is Lake of the Ozarks, the Babylon of Missouri.”
“You mean the Ozarks are a real place?.”
“And look at this.” He starts up another video: “Very unpleasant. A trio of unmasked white women deliberately coughing in the face of a masked restaurant host.”

Pina shakes her head. “Who is this guy, Christ? Turning the other cheek. I would have smashed them.”

Charlie switches back to his newsreel delivery. “This is America 2020. The silent majority has finally discovered all its grievance and its moronic voice.”