BLACK LAMBS

 

 

She shouldn’t have told Charlie in the first place. Why did she? You sleep with somebody and suddenly you’re soul mates, ready to reveal the darkest secrets of your life? Now Charlie won’t let her drive to the city alone. She tries to convince him that she’ll be fine, that it is really no big deal, but he insists it isn’t safe for her to walk around the Tenderloin alone.

“I’m not going to walk around. I’ll drive to the block Vince said, open the window when I spot him, and hand him the money.”

“It might not happen like that,” Charlie says. “And what are you worried about, that Vince will see us together and jump to conclusions? As far as he’s concerned, I’m just your escort.”
“Some escort,” she says, and kisses him on the forehead. No need to spoil the sweetness between them so soon.
“Give me fifteen minutes,” Charlie says, enthused for the adventure. “I’ve got to go back to my place, take a quick shower, and put out some feed for Roscoe.”

Pina thinks of driving off before Charlie returns. This should be between Vince and her. How many ways can she betray him? Her guilt is really barking at her. She didn’t have to tell Charlie about this, but it wasn’t an accident.

Before she’s got herself fully dressed, Charlie’s at the door with a cooler and a sack full of homemade facemasks. “I made us sandwiches,” he says, “and one for Vince.”

Great, she thinks, we’ll have a little picnic in the Tenderloin.

Pina insists on driving and stops at a cash machine on the square. For a while they manage to talk about everything except their mission. Charlie has a lot to say about one of Trump’s pet projects: Space Force. The new Space Force flag was unveiled yesterday in the Oval Office. “They just went and stole the logo from Star Trek,” he says, “and then Trump calls this rocket they’re pretending to develop, a ‘super-duper missile,’ which somebody pointed out later on Twitter, was the name of a porn star in the eighties.”

“Anything to distract us from his murderous negligence and misinformation.” Pina doesn’t want to wade any further into her anger toward Trump, but maybe she should change her strategy. Vince’s description of the heroin consolidation plan comes to mind. It allows you to roll your problems into one—staying high. She might do well to combine her grievances into single-minded hatred toward Trump, except that such sustained animus would likely make her ill.

Charlie does a hemiola bongo riff—two beats against three—with his hands on the dashboard, and she wonders if, despite his good cheer, he’s a little nervous about their adventure.

He raises his index finger, altering the beats. “Heard this town hall with Joe Biden and Stacy Abrams the other night. He says he’s not going to pardon Trump.”

“Normally I’m against capital punishment, but I’d enjoy seeing that man lynched.”

Charlie’s head jerks back and his hands come off the dash. Apparently, she’s shocked him. “Would you participate in the lynching, Pina, or just be a spectator?”

She doesn’t want to go there, doesn’t want to let Charlie know what horrid thoughts she’s capable of. “I can’t think about Trump anymore. He gets into your head and you’re infected with another virus.”

They drive in silence for a while and she tries to focus on the task at hand. Will it go as she hopes, simply find Vince and hand over the dough? Or do they try some kind of intervention? How would that look? Is such an intercession even possible with a man who’s likely infected, in a time when back-up services are unavailable?

“So how long do you think the freeways will be empty like this?” Charlie asks.

She doesn’t want to make small talk. This is one reason she wanted to drive alone—single-mindedness is required.

Charlie drops a hand on her thigh and squeezes it. “Are you okay, Pina?”

No, she’s not okay at all, but she wants to talk even less about herself than this and that. “Yeah, I’m fine, but in response to your earlier question, I think it’s going to be a very long time, if ever, before the traffic becomes as it was. How many people are going to return to office buildings in San Francisco? All these giant tech companies are telling their workers that they never have to come back to the office, and without those workers present all the restaurants and services that depend on them will fold.”

“Do you think people will leave the city en masse?”

Pina thinks of the character in the Hemingway story that says, “Will you please please please please stop talking?”

Charlie answers his own question: “I mean, it’s like somebody said, ‘Why pay San Francisco rents when it’s not San Francisco out there anymore?’ The office buildings may be half empty.” His hands throb in the air for emphasis. “And tens of thousands of people won’t be able to make the rent.”
“Homelessness will be rampant,” she chips in. “The city will take on the flavor or, should I say, redolence, of Mumbai during a heat wave.” So she and Charlie are having a delightful moment of dystopian sharing. She wouldn’t have thought him capable of such darkness.
“Yep.” Charlie goes back to his two against three beat rhythms on the dashboard. “Anybody with money who stays will have to hire guards to protect them from the huddled masses.”
“Soylent Green is people,” she says, just to add another accent to the dark stew they’re prepping.

Charlie backs off the bongos and glances at her with a wary look. There’s something about his expression that reminds her of a teenage boy, somebody she vaguely remembers from high school—Jason, a boy she briefly went out with. The moment she broke-up with him his face puckered in sadness. Charlie’s expression is similar but he’s wearing his grief for a different reason.

“Do you really believe all that’s going to happen, Pina?”

She does, and she would gladly go on with the bleak recital, but thinks it better to offer Charlie some comfort. “I do think some of that will happen, but on the flip side, there may be opportunities to rebuild the city in a more equitable way. Young people will move in and reinvigorate the place with much greater diversity. Finally, they’ll be able to afford to live in the city.”

By the time they reach the bridge, they’re both quiet. Not even the gloom can erase the majesty of the Golden Gate. Years ago in school she worked with a girl, maybe seven or eight, who had a bad stutter. This girl always liked to talk about heaven. Maybe she came from a religious family. One day Pina asked her what heaven was like. Aside from the stutter, her response was quick: “Hev . . . hev . . . heaven is li . . . is like the Golden Gate Bridge.” She pronounced the balance of the sentence in one fell swoop. Pina repeated it: “Heaven is like the Golden Gate Bridge,” and the girl said the sentence perfectly. It may have been the first time in her life that she spoke without a stammer.

Pina speeds through the Presidio tunnel toward the Marina. How she would like to dally here, take a walk with Charlie along the beach at Crissy Field or past the sailboats and fishing crafts moored in the Marina. How nice it would be to drive to North Beach, where today she’d probably find a parking place. A creeping gauze of nostalgia drapes over her. She’d like to eat at one of the old family-style restaurants she used to visit with her parents, more than forty years ago: The New Pisa, The Green Valley, The Golden Spike. All of them, like her parents, long gone.

She turns away from the Marina, and heads south on Divisidero. Two blocks up, she pulls over. “Charlie, I need you to sit in the back seat. From now on you and me are not Covid bonded.”
“Got it,” he says, “I’m nothing more than your escort.” He shifts quickly to the back seat and she smiles at him in the rearview mirror.

The city sparkles, after the morning rain—a rare mid-May rain that gives the air a crisp brightness. Even the old white apartment buildings look like they have been blessed.

She turns left on Bush and her nerves flare; a knot forms in her stomach. What will Vince look like? Will she even recognize him? What will he say when he sees Charlie?

Right on Hyde, she braces herself. A few blocks south, and the scattered homeless take over the landscape. All the work the city’s been doing to try and house them is either a fiction or ineffective. Her mind struggles to synthesize what she sees, a universe of smashed leavings: broken crutches, filthy tarps, a shopping cart missing a wheel, a picket sign leaning against a wall that says, Living wages, another shopping cart filled with smashed cans, stacks of cardboard, newspapers a flutter, a row of upturned milk crates, broken bottles, a length of hose coiled around a lamp pole.

Finally, she lets herself see the people: a woman with sores around her mouth, marching back and forth in front of an empty storefront, a man sitting on a crate, smoking, another eating a chicken leg that looks to have no meat left on it, someone coiled under a disgusting blanket, sleeping directly on the sidewalk, two young guys spending their extended adolescence on the street, playing with a rabid-looking dog, a cowboy bandana draped around its neck, a stout Latina in a nurse’s uniform, the only person she’s seen yet wearing a mask.

She wants to turn left on Ellis, but it’s a one-way she can’t enter, so she goes down to Eddy, glancing back at her escort in the mirror. His expression is as grim as she’s seen it. “He could be anywhere around her, Charlie. I’m circling back to Ellis, this is Leavenworth.”

“Roger. I’ll look right, you look left.”

She passes The Black Cat, a swanky bar with a jazz room downstairs that she and Vince frequented a couple of times. There’s a crooked line outside of a bánh mi shop, as she turns west onto Ellis, but Vince isn’t waiting for a sandwich. Social distancing doesn’t seem to be a thing here; small clusters of people talk together. She drives so slowly that she’s drawn the attention of some of the folks on the sidewalk.

“Haven’t seen him yet,” Charlie reports.

A car behind her, that seems like it’s come from out of nowhere, starts honking. Now more eyes from the sidewalk are turned to her.

“You better pull over.”
“Why’s everybody staring at us?”
“They think we’re cops.”
“Really, do we look like cops?”
“Turn the corner and pull over.”

She doesn’t know how she feels about Charlie giving orders. There’s another car honking behind her, but before she gets to the corner a very skinny man in a Giants’ cap tosses something at the car that actually shakes it.

“What the fuck was that?”
“I don’t know, a hunk of concrete? Come on, turn the corner, Pina.”

She turns back down Hyde and double parks in front of a Chinese laundry called Alice’s, with a window filled with thriving succulents. The knot in her stomach is now throbbing. She gets out of the car and Charlie follows her. The big boulder, or whatever it was the guy tossed, carved a good-sized crater into the passenger door. Charlie comes close to have a look. “Social distance,” she barks, and then softens, “Sorry.”

Charlie backs away from her. “You stay here and I’ll find him.”
“No, I’ll go.”

Charlie doesn’t look amused. “I’m not going to let you go alone, Pina. Let’s park the car now.” He climbs into the back seat.

Pina pulls out without looking and almost gets clipped by a grocery truck that just turned onto Hyde. She finds a questionable spot, half in the red, on Eddy. “Oh, my nerves are shot.”
“You stay here, Pina.”
She takes a long breath. “We both go.”

Charlie walks ahead and she pretends to stay six feet behind him. They head up Jones past Jonell’s Cocktail Lounge, a true dive bar that Vince took her to once. That was the kind of adventure he enjoyed in their early days together. Once he discovered that she would drink anywhere, he brought her to many of his old watering spots.

As they turn onto Ellis, a man with a Jamaican accent, leaning against a wall between storefronts, speaks to Charlie: “Wha gwan, professa. A lil hep fi a man tween opportunities.”

She inches closer to Charlie, surprised to see him reach into his pocket and hand the guy a five dollar bill.”
“Tanks for da cheddar, professa. Remine me zacly wha yu be a professa o.”
“Magic,” Charlie says, without hesitation.
“Professa o magic. Ha ha ha. Dat’s shot. Yu gots a lit mo magic fi me?”

Charlie shakes his head.
“Yu cool, professa.”
“I have something else for you.” Charlie reaches into his shoulder bag and hands over a large plastic bag with a mask in it. “It’s clean.”
“Dat’s shot, professa. The Jamaican pulls out the mask, which is zebra-striped and tries it on.
As Charlie moves along, the man addresses her, “Sistern, yu wid di professa?”

She shakes her head.

“Thot yu was. Priddy sistern, yu god a liddle cash for my rash?”
“Not today,” she says and hurries along.
“K. Yu catch Professa Magic, cum back marow.”

There are more people than she expected on the street, some under blankets and others, a bit like ghosts, camouflaged amid the gray storefronts and cardboard castles. There are also folks, who live or work in the neighborhood, numerous Vietnamese, even mothers with children, going about their business as if this tragic tableau was normal, as it is for those who live here.

Pina falls a ways behind Charlie, allowing more than ample distance between them. She’s a little bit surprised that he doesn’t turn back to make sure she’s behind him. Clearly, he has more faith than Orpheus did. She walks quickly past the skinny guy in the Giants cap that tossed the boulder at the car, but before she gets far she hears a laughing female voice shout: “That’s the woman, that’s the woman just sitting there in her car.”

She looks right and left for Vince and three quarters of the way up the block, past two men playing checkers on a cardboard box turned on end, she gets her first glimpse of him. He’s standing up, his wide shoulders tilted to the side, speaking with Charlie. She feels both a rush of joy that he’s alive and horror that he’s standing out here ravaged. How could a man degenerate so quickly?

As she creeps closer she sees that the left side of Vince’s face has a raw bruise, and his lower lip is cut. He’s wearing a torn flannel shirt over blue scrubs, and a pair of brogues with no socks. She stands back by the curb. That’s as close as she’s going to get. “Vince,” she says, “I’m so glad we found you.”
“This is where I told you.” He glances from one of them to the other. “So when did you two become an item?”
Charlie begins to explain, “No I just came down . . .”
“Like I give a damn. You got the money?”
“Yeah, we have the money.”
“Cat’s got Pina’s tongue. Go buy her a drink, Charlie. She needs a drink. Now give me the money.”
“You’re not looking so good, Vince.”
“Well the beauty contest was last week.”

It’s true, she’s lost her tongue and she feels that if she opens her mouth she’ll stutter like one of her clients. She’d like to run and just keep running. Somehow she’s lost all her agency. She thought she could rise to the occasion. It’s all she can do to stand here and not to pee herself.

Charlie is holding his ground. “I’m going to get you to the hospital, Vince.”
“Who do you think you are, Charlie, the adult in the room?”

It ‘s a funny comment because that’s exactly who Charlie is acting like. She’d laugh if she weren’t drenched in shame, for what? Having lost her voice? Betraying Vince, not so much with Charlie, but as a mate, somewhere along the line. Surely she has some responsibility for the fact that he’s come to this.

“Give me the money,” Vince hollers.
Charlie reaches into his shoulder bag and pulls out a pair of purple gloves that he slips on. “Okay, I have a mask for you and I want you to put it on.”
“What the fuck?” Vince takes the bagged mask and tosses it on the ground.
“Pick it up and put it on, Vince.”

Vince slumps and sways back and forth a moment. His eyes are rheumy and he looks like he might collapse.

Charlie picks up the mask and ties it around Vince, who mumbles something unintelligible. “Lean against the wall, Vince. Now I can either call an ambulance or take you myself.”

“I’m not going in an ambulance,” Vince says, his words slurred.
“Okay, it’s settled, you’re coming with me. We’re parked two blocks away. Can you walk that far?”
“Give me my money,” Vince says weakly
“You’ll get your money. Can you walk two blocks?”

Vince nods.

Charlie turns and faces her. She’s never seen this side of him, so assertive and clear, and now he offers her a kind smile. She’s amazed that in one breath Charlie is able to be both forceful and tender. “It’s going to be okay, Pina.” He points east. “I want you to walk over to Union Square and wait for me there. I’m going to drop Vince off at UC Med on Sutter and come back for you.”

Pina nods. “Take care of yourself, Vince,” she manages.

His face is bowed now in his fresh polka dot mask. He’s not showing his eyes. “Yeah, thanks.”

 

Charlie is back in less than an hour. The two of them take a walk on the streets around the square looking at the huge department stores: Macy’s Nordstrom’s, Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, artifacts from a lost world. Charlie takes her hand in front of Neiman Marcus and explains what happened. They checked Vince into the emergency after Charlie told them three things: that he’s a doctor, recently on the front line, who practically od’d in the Tenderloin, and ended up with a concussion. They wouldn’t let Charlie in, but somebody will call. He left a hundred dollars for them to give to Vince.

Pina stops walking in front of Neiman Marcus’s rustic spring window. It’s without the fresh flowers that must have been there before the closure. She faces Charlie. “What did Vince say on the ride to the hospital?”

“Not much.”
“He must have said something.” She can tell Charlie’s holding back.

He massages his chin between his thumb and forefinger. “He said he cracked nearly two months ago, not long after you came to Sonoma. He freaked out at the hospital and started going crazy with drugs. First with pharmaceuticals, and then . . . The thing, he said, that bothered him most was how he let you down.”

“He said that?”

Charlie nods.

She’s not going to let herself cry. “Did he say anything about you and me?”
“No.”
“What did you say to him?”
“I just listened.”

 

Before they walk to the car they grab a bench in the square and eat their ham and Swiss sandwiches. Again Charlie asks her if she is okay.
“No, I’m still in a state of shock seeing him like that.”

Charlie puts a hand on hers but says nothing.

At the car, he asks if she’d like him to drive. But no, she wants to drive. They sit together in front seat and he gives her just what she wants: silence. Just after the turn at Sears Point, in the long pasture across from the racetrack, cities of sheep with their lambs are grazing. She’d seen them on the way down. Now she pulls into a turnout.

“What are you doing, Pina?”
“I just want to have a look at these sheep.” She gets out of the car and walks fifty yards to a ridge with a good view of the pasture. There are hundreds of creatures down there, mowing the fields after the unseasonably late rain.

Charlie has come out and stands a short distance from her. Vince and the city seem so far away. Not really. She’s just screening off that tableau for a moment.

“Charlie,” she asks, “How does the arrangement work between the sheep keepers and the landowners? Who pays?”

He’s beside her now and drapes an arm over her shoulder. It is still an amazement, this touching another human being.

“The landowner pays, in this case Sears Point. And the people who bring out the sheep have their own fencing and usually a couple of sheep dogs, trained to discourage coyotes. The other benefit to the landowner is that sheep fertilize the land.”
“Oh, I was hoping it was just a neighborly arrangement.” She wraps her arm around Charlie’s waist and pulls him close. Sweetness. She could call him that. They stay a moment and gaze at the civilization of sheep. She’s trying to notice all the different types, if they are even types, and then she sees them. “Look, Charlie.” She’s pointing. “Black lambs. There are three, no, four black lambs down there. I didn’t see them at all and now I’m seeing all of them. I’ve never thought of black sheep in multiples nor have I been aware of black lambs. Black lambs. I guess it stands to reason that black sheep come from somewhere. I find it a real comfort that there’s more than one.”
“A secret society.”
“A proper black sheep doesn’t care much for society.”
“How long have you considered yourself one, Pina?”
“Hmm. All I can say is that even though I’m not young anymore, I find myself identifying with the black lambs.”

 

THE LADYBUG

 

 

“Hello,” Charlie calls at the door.

“It’s open.” She’s drinking iced-tea, of all things. “In here.” She may have a glass of wine later with Charlie. “Oh no.” She can’t believe what she’s looking at—Charlie, in a turquoise wrestling mask and shiny black overalls, black leather high-tops, and a quilted pouch dangling from a shoulder strap. He leaps from the hall into the big room and lands like a gymnast, feet well apart, arms outstretched, the quilted bag swinging like a pendulum.

“I’d say you nailed it.” She claps her hands again; she can’t stop applauding for this guy. “Who are you anyway?”
“You don’t know?” He points to an ivory crown embossed on the turquoise. “This doesn’t give it away?”

Pina shrugs.

“Didn’t Vince give you an introduction to his most important masks? Yo soy Rey Mysterio, the Mystery King.”
“How do you do?” Pina folds her legs underneath her on the couch. “You know that mask offers absolutely no protection.”
“Why would I need it?” He beats his chest with his fists. “The lucha libre máscaras cover everything except the nostrils and mouth because the mightiest among us need no protection.” He stretches his arms out again and repeats, “Yo soy Rey Mysterio.”
“Have a seat, Rey. I know Mexican wrestlers never take off their masks, but . . .”
“No, no, I’d have to be unmasked. I have something for you.” Charlie/Rey Misterio pulls a plastic bag from his sack and extracts another wrestling mask. “It’s Xenia, I’ve always wanted to wrestle her.” He tosses Pina the mask, which feature an abstraction of horizontal lines.
“So you’ve come to wrestle,” she says, standing.
“That’s who I am.”

What a wonderfully funny fool of a man. Now she regards the mask skeptically.

“Nobody’s worn it. I just took it off the wall.”

Strangest fucking mating ritual she’s ever seen. Charlie’s quite a guide to alternative realities: first an African parrot that aspires to be human and who has a grasp of the facts of life, and now a tour of Mexican wrestling. Is it good that she’s sober or would she be better off bombed?

She quickly pulls the Lycra monstrosity over her head and drags it down her face. Now she’s smothered by it. At least it’s not as warm as she expected.

“Xenia,” he says, flashing her a big-toothed smile through his mask.

Is she really going to do this? Why the fuck not? Pina/Xenia makes a warbling echo in her throat. Yes, she can play his game, she thinks, as she rushes him. Before Charlie/Rey Mysterio reacts, she has him in a hammerlock, a move Corky Eichorn taught her forty years ago. She jerks his pinioned arm up high and waits for him to resist, but he doesn’t. So now he’s disrespecting her. No matter, one quick motion with her free hand and she peels off his disguise. “Ha,” she says, and marches around the fictive ring with her prize, going full Greek widow with her deep-throated warble.

Charlie’s hair stands up in a wild cowlick. “I should feel humiliated, but I’m exhilarated.”

Pina/Xenia continues to circle the big room, throwing her fists in the air and flexing her muscles. “Yeah, not so macho anymore.” His cowlick gives him the look of a man-child in serious need of a haircut.

“Aren’t you going to take your mask off?” Charlie asks.

She gets into a warrior’s crouch. “See if you can take it off.”

He rushes her. But what does he do?  He insults her again, this time with a limp headlock. How do you to expect to strip off a wrestler’s mask when you have them in a headlock? She’s out of his hold in a jiff and slips behind him, bringing her forearm across his Adam’s apple. “We’re not playing here. Can you survive this?”

Apparently, he’s had enough. He breaks out of her hold like it ‘s a band-aid and digs his arm down between her legs, up against her bare crotch—so much for social distancing—and lifts her to his shoulder, yanking off her mask. Then he twirls her around the room several times before taking a crooked a path to the bedroom and letting her fall in a heap onto the bed.

“Now for the Plancha,” he says, and drops down on top of her, expertly managing his weight with his hands so that she doesn’t absorb any of it. He pins her arms down. “Uno, dos, tres.”

Pina is lost in the blue of his eyes. “My master.”
“Forgive me.”
“For what?”
“For imposing my madness on you.”
“I’ve enjoyed it so far. Let’s see what else you’ve got.”

All of her body is awake in a way it hasn’t been forever. He tugs on a hank of her hair and the follicles of her scalp tingle. She closes her eyes as he drops small kisses on her lids, and then on the bridge of her nose with a little trail to the tip.

“I love your nose.”
“Be careful,” she says, “It’s sharp and I’ve used it as a weapon before.” Her voice sounds husky to her. Has her warbling affected it? Or is this her new love voice?

Now the moment she’s been waiting for—he begins unfastening her buttons. She takes his face in her hands, rubs them pleasurably against the grain of his two-day growth, and then kisses him fully on the lips. She wants to know how well he multi-tasks. Oh my, his hands are on her breasts and the nipples respond at once, standing tall.

 

She opens a Sauv Blanc, and prepares a cheese plate with a very local Vella Mezzo Secco, and a soft Brilliat Savarin. She has no bread or fresh crackers so she breaks open a box of matzo she bought when it went on sale after Passover.

“Ah,” Charlie says, “Matzo in bed.”
“Yes, we’ll be nicked by hard crumbs all night, reminding us that we’re living in the middle of a plague.”

Still standing, she takes him in, all curled up like he belongs in her bed. She loves that Charlie’s a guy who’s comfortable with his body and who shares it nicely.

He props himself up with a couple of pillows. “And the matzo reminds us that we are like the Jews, making our bread in a hurry, well not that much of a hurry.” He shoots her a sideways smile.

The top of his hairy chest is a small joy sprouting above the quilt. Pina lays the tray down beside him on the bed and pours them each a glass of wine. She raises her glass to him. “Chin chin.”

He offers a singular Chin in return. “Also, the matzo recalls the Exodus.”

She climbs into bed beside him. “You’re really stuck on the matzo.”
“No, I’ve been thinking about this,” he says. Two cute worry wrinkles spread across his high forehead.
“The Exodus is a good corollary for our time, don’t you think? We all need to make the crossing from our old lives to the new, whatever that is.”

She spreads Brillat over a couple of pieces of Matzo and hands him one. “Have some manna from heaven.” She washes a big splash of the cold, dry wine around her mouth.

“Hmm,” Charlie says as he inhales the creamed matzo. He props himself up on an elbow. “The thing is, no matter what the Trumpites say, there’s no turning back on this journey, there’s no old life to return to.” Charlie pauses for a sip of wine. He holds up a finger to indicate that he’s not finished. “And the Exodus will not happen quickly. The Jews wandered in the desert for a generation ”

“Do you think our Exodus will take a generation? Will there be Golden Calves and a new set of Ten Commandments along the way?”
“Of course, the whole shooting match. Greed has a way of manifesting itself everywhere.”
“And there will be new doctrines?”
“Of course.”
She pours them each of them a fresh glass of wine. “You see I know all about the Exodus—I watched Charlton Heston in “The Ten Commandments” on TV when I was a kid.”
“Makes you an expert. Myself, I was always fond of the burning bush.”

She prepares another matzo for him, this one with the dry Monterey Jack. As he nibbles on it she drops a kiss on his forehead, but it doesn’t seem like enough, so she continues all the way down to his neck, riding the lump of his throat as he swallows the last of his Exodus matzo.

When their repast is finished, they make love again. “How can you do that, Charlie? You’re not twenty anymore.”

“It’s you, darling. You’re the inspiration.”

It’s clear that they’re not going to sleep much tonight. She falls off for a half an hour or so. Now she can say she knows what it’s like to sleep in Charlie’s arms. “Did you sleep?” she asks, rubbing her eyes.
“No, but I watched you sleep.” He kisses her again on the bridge of her nose. “You still haven’t used it as a weapon on me.”
“Just wait.” There’s only one thing she wants to do—shower kisses on his chest and slowly slide on down. “Look, Charlie,” she says, “I have a theory of my own: I believe I’d be happier in love during the great Exodus, than not.”

Charlie massages his chin between his thumb and forefinger. “The great Exodus and beyond. That’s the kind of theory that I can subscribe to.”
“But we’re only talking theory,” she reminds him.
Charlie burrows his nose into her neck. “I know. Let’s keep it that way,”

 

At noon they get out of bed and have their coffee on the deck. She’s done an excellent job of keeping any thoughts of Vince at bay. Neither of them have spoken of Vince. She turned off her phone before Charlie came and only checked it once in the night. There’d been no calls. But now when she goes to make more coffee, she feels the phone vibrate in the pocket of Charlie’s red flannel, walks to the second bedroom, and shuts the door.

Vince’s breathing sounds like that of a man who needs oxygen.

“Hello.”
“Pina. I got you. I must be blessed.” Vince sounds like he’s speaking in a room full of fog. She can hear the noise of the street—cars going by, voices, incoherent arguments.
“How are you, Vince?” She tells herself not to ask where he is, though that’s what she needs to know.
“Oh well, let’s not talk about me,” he says, and laughs, and then chokes a moment on his laugh before corralling it. “It’s the same old, same old with me. I’m down here with the strange people. If you ask them what time it is, they say, ‘Night time.’ And that’s during the day. You’ve got to mind your P’s and Q’s down here. Do you know that expression, Pina? You should, you’re a drinker. It pertains to pints and quarts, but let’s leave it at that. I don’t know why you brought that up. So any-who,” he says, drawing out the word in a sorry imitation of his debonair self, “I have a situation here that’s troubling me. I’m temporarily out of cash. Things are not as liquid as I’d like. What would be nice, what would be really nice, is if at your earliest possible convenience you could bring me some cash, that would be tip-top and I would be eternally grateful.”

She can’t keep herself from asking him where he is.

“Well that’s the thing. Where I am and where I will be are very different matters.”
“Can you give me a street corner?”
“Let’s just say Leavenworth and Eddy, though I stay away from street corners. That’s where bad things happen.”
She takes a long breath. “I can meet you there, Vince. Leavenworth and Eddy, but not at the corner. Give me two hours and I’ll be there.”
“Two hours, huh? Two hours is a long time out here. Are you getting your nails done, Pina?”
“I’ll see you in two hours, Vince,” she says and ends the conversation.

 

Back out on the deck, Charlie has a big grin on his face. “Pina, Pina,” he says, “look what I’ve found.”

He’s still seated where she left him. Pina goes to him and wraps an arm around his shoulder. He has ladybug perched on the middle of his left thumbnail.

“She’s been sitting here the whole time you’ve been inside. That’s a lot of good luck. Put your hand out here. Let’s see if she’ll transfer to you. That would make for double good luck.”
“But what if she flies away?”
“We have to live dangerously, Pina.”
“Won’t that spoil your luck?”
“My good luck has already been made with you. Open you hand.”

She offers her hand and brings his thumb to meet, gently spilling the orange bug into her palm where it rights itself and settles.

“Good luck abounds,” says Charlie.
Pina wants to cry, but forces a smile instead. “Funny, I’ve been collecting all manner of creatures since I’ve been up in Sonoma. Maybe they’ll come along on the Exodus.”
She notices Charlie’s empty cup. “Oh no, I’ve forgotten all about the coffee.” She manages to pass the congenial ladybug back to Charlie. “Be right back.”

She’d rather not tell Charlie about Vince, but she has to. Over coffee she has to tell him.

THE RABBIT

 

 

“I just started driving. I had nowhere to go, but I went driving.” It’s Vince, calling early.
“Are you driving now?”
“I feel like I’m driving, but I’m not.”
She props herself up on her pillows. It’s a quarter to six. He sounds scared, maybe disoriented. “Are you okay, Vinnie?”
“Not so much. I think I’m loosing it. I’m all bled out. I should go off and die in the woods like an old wolf.”
The urgency in his voice forces her out of bed. “Tell me what’s going on, Vince. Talk to me now. Is it really bad at work?”
“I don’t want to tell you. You don’t need to hear about that.”
She slips on Vince’s corduroy shirt and goes to the kitchen to start coffee. “Talk to me, Vinnie.”
“I heard about an emergency room doctor at Presbyterian New York who killed herself on Sunday. The thing is, you see too much. Human beings are not meant to process all this. You can’t. Did you know we’re very fragile . . . very fragile? You don’t know how fragile we are, Pina. Some docs will do themselves in now, some later.”
“Do you feel like you might harm yourself, Vince?”

Vince is quiet now, really beginning to frighten her.

“Should I come to you, Vince? I’ll come if that will help.”

Vince’s laughter begins as a low rumble and grows so loud she turns the volume down on her phone. “Where are you now?”
“It must be fatigue,” he says. “Fatigue has a way of getting under your skin.” He breaks into song, in a crooked voice: ”I’ve got you under my skin.”
“Will you tell me where you are, Vince?” The teakettle starts whistling “Tea for Two.” It sounds like a cruel joke this morning.
“Yeah, it’s got to be the fatigue,” Vince says.

A blush of normalcy returns after she coats the coffee grounds with boiling water and the dark aroma rises.
“Tired to the bone,” he says, and starts up with a raspy blues song: “Tired to the bone, like nothing I’ve ever known.”
“Then why did you go driving?”
“Tired to the bone,” he bellows, full voice. “No, I’m not a rolling stone.”
“Vince,” she shouts into the phone. “Then why the hell did you go driving?”
“Hey, back off, Pina, back off. Why did I go driving?”

Pina grips her mug of coffee with both hands and lets the heat radiate before taking her first sip. What is Vince fucked up on? Clearly he’s fucked up.

“Why did I go? I’ll tell you why . . . I wanted to come up and see you, Pina, if only from a distance. But then I drove in the other direction. That way there wouldn’t be any temptation.”
She tries to gauge if there is any truth to what he’s saying. “So where did you drive to?”
“I didn’t go anywhere. Downtown. I drove downtown. Drove in circles. Hardly any traffic but the red lights were still on. Drove me crazy. They served no purpose, no purpose at all. Red light. Red Light. Red light. Where’s the motherfucking green light? I tell you, I was either at a red light or aimed the wrong way down a one-way. This is the truth. This is the absolute truth. I’m not fucking bullshitting here. I felt like I was stuck in a video game, some fucking nightmare I couldn’t get out of. WHO DO I HAVE TO FUCK TO GET OUT OF THIS MOVIE?”
Pina holds the phone away from her and tries to stay calm. “What was your reason for driving downtown?”
“My reason? You’re asking me my reason. Is everything with you about reason? Are you fucking Pythagoras? Is reality a mathematical equation for you?”

Pina wonders whether to end the call, but she’s too worried about Vince to leave him like this.
“I don’t know, I don’t know why I went. Something stupid—I wanted to race around the financial district in my Miata. I pictured it, zipping around corners, no other cars or pedestrians. Dream come true. I know . . . I know . . . if it had been you, you’d have driven to the ocean, Pina.”
She slurps down what’s left of her coffee. “Where are you, Vince? Are you at home? Tell me where you are. I can be there in an hour.”
“Cut it out. Don’t talk nonsense, Pina. You’re not coming here. You are not coming. That would . . . that would defeat the whole purpose.

What purpose, she wonders, to keep her safe? Now she hears the woman downstairs weeping. Pina hasn’t seen or heard any sign of her for days. The crying is almost a comfort—that’s how strange things have become. The woman must have the opposite experience of her. Having to hear Pina clanging pots and pans while she’s cooking, listening to her do her powerwalking around main room.

“Did you have a cocktail, Vince?”
“Of course. Why . . . why do you ask questions that you know the answers to? Yeah, my mixology was a bit off—too much adrenalin. My heart was pounding, a real quarter-pounder. All that adrenalin, it’s not good with stoplights. Not good at all. Good. No I wouldn’t say things are exactly good. I’m scared, Pina. People I work . . . people everywhere, I mean rally everywhere, getting sick. All around me sick. I’ve lost whatever courage I had, which probably wasn’t much in the first place.”
“Where are you, Vince?”
“Quit asking me where I am.”
“Then tell me.”
Silence, except for his raspy breathing. He’s probably been up all night tripping.
“Is there somebody you can talk with, Vince?”
“I’m talking with you. Aren’t I talking with you? This . . . this is a conversation. Are you missing that point? That’s what’s going on here? I mean it’s pretty clear . . . all you have to do is apply your advanced reason to see what’s going on.”

Vince is not generally a nasty man, but with certain compounds, the rush he wants brings an edge. “Vince,” she says, “you need some help. Get yourself some Thorazine and talk with somebody.”
“What?” he snarls. “I should get some Thorazine? You’re telling me to get some Thorazine. When did you start prescribing, Pina? I missed that, And you want me to talk to somebody. Can’t you rise to the occasion, Pina? Is that too much for you? I mean, I’m out here . . . I’m out here all the time. All the time. And you, you’re telling me to take Thorazine . . . telling me you can’t talk me down, you don’t . . . you don’t know . . . you won’t talk me down . . . talk me down from here. Is it always about you, Pina?”
“Tell me where you are, Vince, tell me how I can help.”
“Help. Ha. You can’t help. I’m fucked.” And with that, Vince slams the phone down.
Pina tries calling him back several times, but he does not answer.

 

Some time during the night Charlie left an oversized baggie at the door with six facemasks. A note says, “Dear Pina, I plucked these right out of the dryer with a pair of tongs. They should be good to go. Wishing you a sweet day, Charlie.”

The day hasn’t gotten off to a sweet start, but she allows herself a moment to think of Charlie. It was only yesterday that they held each other’s hand. It seems so long ago. Maybe that’s as far as it goes. Maybe that’s as far as it should go.

She chooses a black and brown batik facemask and heads to the car without a plan. Didn’t shower and barely brushed her teeth. She runs the engine, revs it, and turns on the radio, as if Morning Edition will tell her what to do. She knows what to do, just doesn’t want to do it. A quick story about online dating, just before the hour, and she puts the car into drive.

There’s no traffic so she gets to San Francisco in forty-five minutes. Drives up Divisidero, with only a few small grocery stores open. When she crosses Market Street, she gazes with something close to disbelief at the empty streets of the Castro. Granted it’s early, but only one man is walking on the sidewalk under the rainbow banners.

Pina pulls into the driveway of the house on Liberty Street. Sweet Liberty. It’s more than six weeks since she’s been here. She slumps down in the car, almost hides beneath the dashboard. How much she resented being shipped to Sonoma. For her safety. It seemed like an invention. It’s so long ago now—how many deaths later? Who’s counting? Everybody. The count’s the big thing. She sees the numbers everywhere. They prove what’s getting worse—496 Hormel pork packers, who are 79% Latino, have tested positive. The numbers are flattening, they say, but the flattened numbers sure look crooked to her. Now they’re saying that flattened may be a sustained condition that we live with for the foreseeable future. All this is a distraction to delay going into the house.

She ties on her facemask. In the rearview, the batik is suave. She tugs on the drawstring so that it fits snug. Next she slips on a pair of gloves and climbs the outside steps. Before turning the key, she takes a deep breath and tells herself to touch nothing, even with the gloves.

It’s hard to push the front door open against all the mail on the floor beneath the mail slot. The stench is overpowering. When the fuck did he last dump the garbage? She’s going to retch. She’s never seen so much mail on the floor, not even after a three-week trip to Europe. Snail mail has meant nothing to her since people stopped writing personal letters. She takes care of all her bills online, but the mail doesn’t stop coming. She kicks at the pile to see if anything jumps out. Catalogs. A shitload of catalogs. Almost all of them addressed to Vince, the avid consumer.

She leaves the front door open. Let the awful smell spill out onto the street. It’s hard to believe that two months ago she lived here and life was more or less normal. What the fuck did he leave in the garbage? She’s not about to find out. No way she’s going anywhere near the kitchen. She calls his name, more from reflex than anything else. He couldn’t possibly be here, not with this smell, and his car no place to be seen. He probably hasn’t stayed here for weeks. No point wondering where he’s been. If she hadn’t just had the crazy conversation with him she’d think he was dead.

Up the stairs, there’s a display of family photographs, mostly Vince’s: his parents, two brothers, and several photos of him as a child, of his late wife Anita and all four of his children. He invited Pina to put up some family photos of her own. They could have one homogenized family, he said. Right, people who never met each thrown into an absurd collage. No way. She did, however, set off a distinct section in the stairway for her family—just four framed photos: her mother and father, Marco, and Zia Giulia, not one of her. She didn’t need to see herself on the wall.

In the years she lived in the house she learned to navigate the stairway so that she hardly ever faced Vince’s family. Except Anita. Every few months she’d pause in front of Anita, a dimpled, dark-eyed young woman in the photograph. Pina used to wonder what she and Anita had in common beside Vince, who likely cheated on her as well. Anita had been an RN, a practicing Catholic. Still, the only reason she made it on wall is that she died. No way their marriage would have lasted this long.

Pina thinks to lift her photos off the wall, but forces herself up the stairs. She screams after she pushes open the door of the master bedroom. At first she thinks the room has been ransacked by thieves, but a little voice in her head whispers: Vince. The bed’s unmade and there’s blood on the sheets. When she starts spotting needles on the ground, mixed in with the piles of clothes, she drops a hand over her mouth—there’s no point in screaming anymore. Vince is an addict who’s gone off the rail. When did he start? He can’t have gotten to this point in so short a time.

The medicine cabinet in the bathroom has been plundered as well. Pill bottles, as well as loose capsules and pills, are spilled across the floor, with disposable razors, tweezers, fingernail clippers, band-aids, containers of talcum powder, combs and brushes, and random toothbrushes. The plastic reservoir for the Waterpik is splintered; it looks like it’s been stepped on.

She wants to get out of the house quick, but first rushes down the hall to her office, wondering what disaster awaits. Somehow he’s left it alone. Was this out of respect for her? Oh, Vince, what have you done to yourself? She takes a quick look around the office, still without touching anything. Does she need something from here? No, she doesn’t need anything. Then she spots the carved rabbit lamp, with the beautifully marbled shade, that Marco gave her on their first anniversary. The life-size carving is Indonesian, crafted from an unknown hardwood, painted in a dark finish with a yellow dotted necklace of flowers that Pina decided, long ago, means that the rabbit has been deemed holy. She’s never believed in holy or in the luck that rabbits have or convey, but she wants this bunny with her. She yanks the plug from the socket, coils the cord, and holds the rabbit in her arms as if it were a baby. Come with me, she whispers, out of this house of horrors.

Once she’s settled the rabbit into the passenger seat up front, she pulls off her gloves and tosses them into the trunk of the car. She shoots several squirts of sanitizer into her hands. There’s only so much it can sanitize. She calls Vince again. Pick up. Why don’t you pick up? Who else to call? She tries Bernard, his best friend, his chess buddy, and is surprised that he answers.

“Pina,” Bernard says, in his lilting British accent, “everything okay?”
“You know,” she says, buying time. She feels oddly exposed standing on the sidewalk, but she needs the fresh air; she’s not ready to get back in the car.
“You’re up in Sonoma still?”
”Actually down in the city today. Have you been in touch with Vince?”
“Can’t say I have. Tried him a couple times but figured the poor man’s deep in the trenches.”
“I spoke to him this morning and he was very disturbed.”
“Oh, no.”

She’s not sure how much to tell Bernard.

“If there’s anything I can do,” he says.

She’s not sure what anybody can do. How do you care for an addict, even one you once loved, in the middle of a plague? Her conversation with Bernard trails off into sweet niceties and she’s left with herself on the sidewalk.

Before she gets in the car, she looks up and down the street. Somebody must know when Vince was last around. She shouldn’t do it but she does—walks right across the street and knocks on Robyn’s door. It’s a brazen thing to do given their history, but not as audacious as sleeping with your neighbor’s mate, as Robyn did with Vince for more than six months.

Pina waits down several steps and still can hear voices inside the house. Earl, Robyn’s husband, a dentist—Dr. Sconcy—has probably been off work for weeks, and, far as she knows, they have a couple of teenagers at home.

“Robyn,” she says, when the door opens and she sees the tall redhead looking quizzically into space.
“Oh, Pina. I thought you were . . .”
“Yes. I’m looking for Vince.”

Robyn steps outside and shuts the door behind her. “You know, I haven’t . . . we haven’t . . .”
“I know. I just wondered if you’ve noticed Vince coming and going.”
“Why would I? I mean . . .”
“Maybe you’ve noticed his car in the driveway.”
Robyn shakes her head. “Is something the matter?”
“You mean, beside the world going to hell.”

Robyn laughs a little too loud.

Pina is surprised to feel so little animus toward her. She’s just another woman who fell for Vince’s charms, but at least she had the decency to tell her and express contrition.

The front door opens.

“Hey Earl,” she calls to the bespectacled dentist.
“Pina. Everything okay?” That seems to be the benign question of our age.
“Peachy. Just saying hello.”
“Hey, I like your facemask. Very stylish.”
“Thank you. It’s the only fashion statement we have left.”

After Pina says goodbye to the Sconcy’s, she heads across town toward Kaiser, but before she crosses Market Street she needs to pull off on a side street to vomit. She heaves more, it seems, than last night’s dinner and is ashamed to leave her dis-ease on the curb.

She has no idea what she’s going to do at Kaiser. Surely they won’t let her into the building. She finds a parking spot across Geary on Lyon, and sets her facemask in place again, after worrying about what will happen if she has to vomit again.

After a quick search through the doctor’s parking lot for Vince’s car, to no avail, a security man approaches her. Can he help her? She tells him she’s waiting for her husband, Dr. Lester.

“Well, you can’t wait here, Ma’am.”
“I’m not waiting here,” she shouts, “I’m looking for his fucking car.” She’s surprised by her rage and apologizes to the guard as he hustles her out of the lot. Pina hurries off to the parklet on the northeast side of the main building. Staff members often catch a bit of fresh air there. What does she expect to accomplish? She approaches two beleaguered nurses, from safe distance, and asks whether they’ve seen Dr. Lester. One gives her little more than a blank stare, while the other repeats his name, “Dr. Lester . . . Dr. Lester,” and shakes her head.

Despondent, by the time she gets back to the car, she notices the carved rabbit, sitting shotgun. He appears ready to go for a ride and she’s pleased for the companionship.

THE SPIDER

 

 

Pina dashes some Irish in her coffee as she heads out to the deck. It’s a warm sun at ten. There will be wonderful dry heat today. At the rail with her coffee she notices the spring leaf bursting, in sheets of light green lace, on the long row of Osage trees, straight across. They’re beautiful trees—thirty odd feet high, with twisting boughs. She wonders when they were planted. Up a lane they make a good windbreak and property fence.

Vince told her that the Indians made prized bows out of the branches and tomahawk handles from the denser wood. She’d never heard of an Osage tree. The fruit is what attracted her. Late summer they look like huge yellow apples or round pears, but when they begin dropping on the street in the fall, they have a deformed human quality; they’re sweaty, and dimpled like brains.

At first she thought they were breadfruit, which can be turned into gruel, but these Osage oranges, are inedible, ceremonial like the Clydesdales down the street. She used to pick up a sack of them from the street and bring them back to the city—nine ugly yellow brains aligned, according to stature, atop the backyard fence.

 

After a half an hour in the sun, Pina has a trail of sweat on her forehead. She wants a cool bath. Vince can’t understand this pleasure. “What’s the point of a lukewarm bath? Baths are for the hottest water you can stand.” She even likes a cool bath at the beginning of a hot day.

Pina spots the spider as she bends to turn on the water. She’s surprised by its size—much bigger than a house spider should be. It’s so large she can see the bristling of the hair on its legs. Her first thought is to crush the spider and flush it down the toilet. Or maybe she’ll scald it in hot water from the shower, see if it can scamper away in time to save its life. The old torturer in her has returned. As a child, running with the Eichorn brothers, she became a ruthless assassin. They’d find slugs and garden snails and salt them until they sweated to their terrible deaths. She also liked gathering bees in jars of sugar water. You had to be brave to put the lid on the jar, filled with drunk, buzzing creatures, but if you pulled it off, you were the one who got to shake the jar until all the bees had drowned.

This spider is quite a stately character, thoroughly at ease in the middle of the white porcelain tub. She, too, appreciates the coolness of the tub, and why not? The spider is in no hurry to go anywhere. Ah, such languor. Pina is sorry to disturb her. She kneels beside the tub and gets a better look at the creature, standing so high on all eight of her elegantly bent legs. She tears off a few sheets of Charlie’s precious toilet paper, deftly captures the spider, and drops her on the deck, where she scrambles away, with at least the majority of her legs intact. Come on back in if you like. Pina runs a cool bath and slips into it with a shiver.

 

She and Charlie meet at noon on the bike trail. She’s wearing a pair of blue and white striped shorts with a tie, a white cotton blouse, a straw hat, and a N95 mask. Charlie, hatless, is in green cargo pants and a tee shirt advertising a restaurant in Fairfax called Gestalt Haus. He wears a beautiful mask made, it appears, from African fabric. Pleated, with a drawstring, it’s clearly of superior design.

Charlie greets her with a wave and she waves back. They both have their lunch in a bag.

“I love your mask. Where did you find it?”
“I made it. In fact, I have a few masks for you which I forget to bring.”
“You sew? You have a sewing machine?”
“Of course.”

The amazement never ends.

Charlie’s idea is to walk east to the end of the bike trail, up Fourth Street to the top of the hill, across Brazil, and back down Gehricke Road toward Sebastiani Winery, where they’ll eat their lunches along the stone wall.

They stroll single file along the trail, Pina in the rear, just far enough behind that she can read the text on the back of Charlie’s Gestalt Haus tee: The French Laundry of Sausage. That amuses her and she realizes that Charlie chose the shirt this morning in order to amuse her.

Up Fourth, Charlie goes out into the street so they can walk together at the required distance. They stroll along the vast grounds of Casa Sebastiani, with its twin baby-faced lions out front, meant to look malevolent, and Italian cypresses lining the driveway. The stone mansion, largely obscured from street view, sits atop a grassy knoll, and suggests a Tuscan villa. On one of the middle terraces a wedding cake fountain shoots water toward the sky.

She faces Charlie. “Vince says this place has six bedrooms and rents for $2,500 a night. Not now.“
“Nope.”
“Does the Sebastiani family still own it?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Looks like the family made a good dollar on their wine.”
“Yep.”
She’s not seen Charlie be so laconic.

When they reach the top of the hill and turn down Brazil Street, Pina stops; Charlie follows suit.
“Is there something wrong? You’re so quiet, Charlie.”
He shakes his head. “Just happy to be with you.”

They look at each other a long moment. It’s true—his blue eyes are twinkling above his mask. Pina steps closer to him and he doesn’t back up. That’s all she needs. She’s not going to stop until she touches him. And yet, she’s frozen, two feet off the curb, three feet from him. He smiles at her and she smiles back. They stay like that for a glazed moment. Then he reaches out his hand, and she takes it. There it is—the first time she’s been touched since she and Vince hugged goodbye six weeks ago.

Charlie’s hand is warm but not damp. She might have dropped it if it had been damp, but now she holds on, and they turn together to face down the street.

There’s nothing to say, absolutely nothing. They start walking again, her hand in his, or is it, his in hers. It hardly matters. Holding hands—a sweet buzz tiptoes all the way up to her breast. Their arms swing in the air together, as if they are on their way somewhere, as if they might fly.

Pina sucks air to her diaphragm and counts it on the way out, no trace of asthmatic breathlessness. Who knows what it means, holding a man’s hand in the middle of a plague? She tells herself to stay in her body. Stay in the warm air. Stay with the hand that’s holding hers, whose hand she’s holding.

There was a boy named Reuben, her high school boyfriend, with whom she loved to hold hands. Ruby—that’s what everybody called him—wasn’t like other boys. He’d hold hands with you as long as you liked. She and Ruby made love sometimes and it was never very good. Ruby didn’t have much control of himself and would get frustrated. Afterwards they lay together and held hands. That was the first time it mattered and this, the first time it’s mattered since.

“Warm,” Charlie says.
She’s so happy for his single syllable; it brings her back. “Yes, quite warm.”

 

She and Charlie know not to discuss the details of their lunches. They already have a history together and no longer need to go on like a pair of badgers. Instead they’re bashful, if that’s what you’d call it. They chew their food in neat little bites like kids at camp with a crush on each other. She’s so pleased with herself for not filling the silence.

Back on the bike trail, they go single file again, no more handholding. They step aside for people with dogs, people without, some sans masks, some with. She hears snatches of conversations she’d like to banish: Lysol injections; toilet paper out on Eight Street East; Tuesday night market not going to be in the park. Everybody looks like an alien to Pina. She’s savoring something they can’t imagine.

When they arrive back at the condo complex they again face each other. You’d think they’d just made love.
“Charlie, Charlie, Charlie,” she says. “Ciao.”
“Ciao, Pina.”

 

She sits out on the deck, with the summer volume of haiku, as the evening cool descends. There’s a section in the book that Blythe calls “The Coolness.” It quite logically follows the section called “The Heat.”

Shiki, the last of the great haiku poets, according to Blythe, has this one:

      The coolness
A crab climbing in a pine-tree
      In the rain.

She loves the delicacy and resonance of Buson’s:

      The voice of the bell
As it leaves the bell,
      The coolness. 

And then there’s Issa’s:

      I have nothing at all,
But this tranquility!
      This coolness!

That’s what Pina wants—to distill the coolness and somehow internalize it as she proceeds through this madness and, perhaps, into the heat of love.

THE TURTLE

 

 

He calls in the late evening after she’s gotten out of the bath. She’s on the leather sofa, her legs folded under her, wearing a long corduroy shirt of Vince’s.

Charlie asks after her, seems concerned. She tells him that his mother’s remedy worked.

“I’m so glad. Now, since you’ve used the word, I should tell you that my mother had a lot of remedies. She came from mountain people in West Virginia and led my sisters and me through a do-it-yourself childhood. I credit her with my becoming a nerd and engineer.”

She’s amazed how much easier it is to listen to Charlie than Vince.  His voice is melodious and not freighted with an attitude of having been wronged like Vince’s. She’s also pleased that Charlie’s kicked off the conversation without referencing their aborted lunch. If she didn’t know that something more was happening she’d think they were old friends.

“Yeah, I was the kid you couldn’t get out of his room,” he says, “always building something. My old man wasn’t around much and my mother had no remedy for his drinking. She had a closet full of old wives’ tales, though. Swallow a piece of gum—it’s going to stick in your stomach for seven years. Everybody eats eight spiders a year in their sleep. That one really spooked me when I was a kid, and one of my sister’s, Betsy, used to tease me at the dinner table: ‘Maybe Charlie’s going to swallow a spider tonight.’ I was fascinated with the number. How did the ninth spider know not to enter your mouth? Nope, he’s already had his eight this year.”

Pina pictures Charlie as a boy, curly headed with a yellow pencil stub propped behind his ear and a magnifying glass popping out of his shirt pocket.

“So, you were the only boy?”
“Yes, the only boy, and the baby.”
“How many sisters?”
“Three.”
“And they adored you.”
“How could they not?”
“Hush,” she says, and wonders if he can tell how much affection she feels for him. “But this wasn’t in West Virginia.”
“No, no. L.A. San Gabriel Valley. Rosemead.”
“You actually grew up in a place called Rosemead?”
“Hey, don’t malign my hometown. It’s not like it’s in the middle of nowhere. It’s only three miles to Temple city. And you’re from San Rafael.”
“Did I mention that?”
“I don’t believe so, but Vince did when he introduced us.”
“You have a good memory.”
“I wrote it down, Pina.”
“Get out.”
“And you’re an only child, my notes tell me.”
“You’re bad, Charlie.”
“You know that Ellington song, ‘I’ve Got it Bad, and that ain’t Good’?”

She’s doesn’t want to go there. There’s no reason at all to go there.

“How’s Roscoe?” she asks.
“He was very upset to miss you. At lights out, he practically cried, ‘Pina, Pina, Pina.’”
“You’re such a liar, Charlie.”
“You’ll see.”

With the phone in tow, she heads over to the liquor cabinet and drains what’s left of the bottle of Courvoisier into her snifter.

“What are you drinking, Pina?” Charlie asks.
“You could hear that?”
“No, that was telepathy.”
“You’re spooking me, Charlie.”
“Well, you’ve already spooked me, Pina.”

Time to change directions. No need to keep going this way. This will not take either of them anywhere good. “So the world as we know it,” she says, “is turned on its head.”

“What exactly are you referring to, Pina?”
“The Plague.”
“Ah, the Plague.”
“Did I mention that I’ve been reading the Camus? The parallels with our time are chilling, but when you realize that that plague only takes place in a single city, Oran, while ours stretches across the globe, the novel begins to feel a bit tepid.”
“Yes, this is worse than science fiction, but Camus was writing allegory, not science fiction.”
“Something that’s begun to disturb me about the book,” she says “is that Camus doesn’t make a single reference to Arabs or Berbers or Muslims, whatever they are. It’s like he’s disappeared them. They do not exist. So this is Algeria with only European types: doctors and journalists, priests and bureaucratic functionaries. Catholic churches. He tosses in a Spaniard here and there, shopkeepers and smugglers, for a bit of exotica. Of course, I’m only halfway through the book. Maybe the Arabs come on strong in the second half.”
“Don’t count on it,” Charlie says. “It’s a pied noir novel. You’re seeing Algeria through the eyes of a colonizer.”

She just lets herself taste the cognac on the tip of her tongue. Pied noir. Black foot, maybe for the black shoes of the French soldiers. “As a reader, does that make me a colonizer or the colonized?”
“I think you’re like a U. N. observer.”
“Is that good?” She doesn’t know what anything means any more. “Charlie, how are we supposed to live our lives in the face of all this?”
“You mean the pandemic?”
“I mean everything. How do we live with others? What if we want to hold somebody in our arms?” There, she’s said it. He isn’t quick to answer. Maybe he shouldn’t.
“I think that if we are true to our feelings and ourselves,” he says, finally, “then we take a chance.”
“That’s a good answer, Charlie. And what if we get sick?”
“That’s the chance we take.”
“The only one?”
“There’s the chance you’ll lose Vince.”
“That may be a choice.”
“Hmm,” he says.

She can’t believe they’ve said all this, no longer even speaking in code. “You know I’m feeling really tired now, Charlie. Very tired.”
“Goodnight, Pina.”
“Ciao.”

 

Last night she did go to bed before ten, but Vince’s phone call woke her at midnight. He said nothing about not calling in the morning and she didn’t ask. Maybe that’s how their relationship will devolve—the twice a day calls will become daily, then weekly, monthly, and not at all.

He wanted to talk plunging oil prices, something she doesn’t give a flying fuck about. She turned the volume down as he blathered: “The benchmark price on a barrel hit minus 37 on Monday. There’s no place to put it. They have to pay to get rid of it.”

She asked if they ‘d pay her to fill up her car, but he didn’t even hear her and kept yammering: “They got oil tankers up and down the coast from Long Beach to San Francisco Bay, with twenty million barrels, and no place to go. It’s enough oil to fuel a quarter of the globe, and there’s no way to suck up the fucking glut.” Vince’s voice was agitated, nearly hysterical.

Meanwhile she tried to get a handle on what these factoids really meant. The world, now in shutdown mode, demands so little oil that it’s drowning in its former glut. You had to admire the justice and inverse beauty of that. She finds it cosmically satisfying. And what are the consequences of this? Some oil speculators will go belly up and people in the Himalayas get to the mountains for the first time in their lives.

It turns out that Vince is heavily invested in oil. She should have known that his passion for the subject hadn’t risen out of neutral interest. Clearly, Vince is not a U. N. observer on the issue.

He said, “I’m directly and indirectly invested in oil.”

“So you’re directly and indirectly fucked,” she couldn’t keep from saying.

Again, he didn’t call in the morning. They seem to be advancing their tacit dance to dissolution.

 

It’s Earth Day, the fiftieth anniversary. She had just begun toddling in the backyard at the time of the original commemoration. Her father particularly liked the outdoors. They hiked every Sunday at Mt. Tamalpais, Samuel Taylor State Park, or along one of the beaches. You could even visit Muir Woods back then, before the hazard of tourists that have plagued the site in the subsequent years. When she was little she loved hiking like a big girl, especially on Mt. Tam. On those hikes they usually ended up at West Point Inn, the historic lodge, where the old railroad from Mill Valley stopped. That was gone long before her time, but throughout the year you could get fresh lemonade there and, during the summer, a pancake breakfast. Her father liked to say, “Pancakes on the mountain—heavenly.” He said it so often during those years that she and her mother joined in for the last word. That may be her favorite childhood memory—the little family of three on the porch of the West Point Inn, high in the mountain woods, pronouncing the word heavenly.

Pina read an article about a place in town to hike, in the Sonoma Index-Tribune­­­—what an uninspired name for a newspaper in so beautiful a place. Why not the Valley of the Moon Light, like the Pulitzer Prize winning Point Reyes Light?

Fryer Creek starts just south of Whole Foods. She takes a narrow packed- dirt path off Second Street West that looks like it leads somewhere. It’s supposed to be a native restoration site. The creek is on her left and in no time at all it turns into swampy grasses and then high water with large piles of branches. She feels like she’s on a Bayou hike out of New Orleans. Ducks, in ones and twos, swim by. No alligators here, but she spots a mallard hiding in the reeds.

There are beavers in the creek, the article noted. She wants to see one, but they happen to be nocturnal creatures. She notices a couple of large trees they’ve brought down. The trunk of one has a gaping ax-like wound, miraculously engineered by the beavers. From the one article she’s read, she has a fount of information about beavers: they are rodents and build dams because they like flat waters to more easily defend themselves against predators. Unlike humans, beavers are naturally monogamous, mating for life.

She reaches the end of the narrow dirt path and sees that the trail broadens and is paved. But before continuing she sits on a bench facing the afternoon sun, imagining someone snapping a picture of her and applying the caption: Earth Day sun worshipper. She thinks of Charlie, sitting amid his blossoming citrus. She hopes that by now the sillage from her Ylang 49, with its flush of gardenia, has dissipated. Charlie—aside from the possibility of illness, what chances will he be taking?

The paved trail is quite populous. Folks with and without masks, do their best to create the phantom six feet whenever she approaches. She is unmasked today, vulnerable to both disease and love.

The creek and trail bend left and she sees something she hadn’t expected—a large turtle, climbing from the water and up a side bank. She wants to get closer to see its little head, but doesn’t want to scare it. Do turtles, covered so broadly by their shells, sun themselves? What does it portend to spot a turtle? Go slowly, she thinks. Stay close to the earth. You will soon be carrying your house on your back. And then, as if the turtle has just fulfilled its function, it slips down the bank into the green-mossed water.

THE BEE

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

She pulls a little Ikea tumbler from her bag.

“That’ll do.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

THE PARROT

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

“But not you?” she asked.

“Heck no, I’m not a racist.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

THE COCKER SPANIEL

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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