HUMMINGBIRDS

Coronavirus. She wakes to the terror of it every morning. Makes coffee and looks at the grim tally: Deaths in Italy. Deaths in Spain. New York. Number of medical staff down. Deficits of beds, ventilators, masks, gloves. The art of her gleaning is getting in and out quickly. Otherwise she’ll become obsessed or heartbroken or both. She reads a survival story or two each morning, today, yet another story about how loneliness is bad for your physical health. She listens to Joan Baez sing John Prine’s song, “Hello in There,” as beautiful a song about loneliness as Pina knows. Baez, with a pick on every finger, does some glorious fingerpicking, singing for Prine, as he lay dying. Part of Pina’s strategy is to stay away from opinion pieces and headlines like Domestic Abuse Hotlines Lighting Up, in which she knows the story will be too hard to bear. She also maintains an absolute moratorium regarding Trump. If his image pops up, his voice, even a quote, she cuts away. Maybe it’s a chicken’s approach, but it works.

This is after the six-thirty call from Vince, which lasts no more than ten minutes. Today she tried to distract him with talk of New Orleans, not the dire projections she’s seen about the plague hitting the city. Instead, she got him to remember meals they’d had together there in the last few years. It’s become one of their favorite travel destinations. They rent a humble place in the Bywater, which feels like a little town, and they ride around on bicycles, take long walks. For some reason they always hold hands in New Orleans. Vince has a favorite restaurant in Uptown called Gautreau. It’s not an inexpensive place but Vince insists on treating her and never lets her see the bill. He’s become friendly with the head chef, a handsome bald-headed man, who always comes out to greet them.

Pina remembers a conversation they had once after the chef left their table.

“Vince said, “Great guy, great cook, and one thing I like, the dude’s always got schmutz on his white coat, which means he really digs in back there.”
“How do you know schmutz?” she asked.
“I work with Jewish doctors, that’s how. What about you?”
“I have a Yiddish lesson I’ve used with a few clients. We schmooze with a high concentration of Yiddish vocabulary. Getting these guys to master schtunk and schlemiel and schmazel can be a real confidence builder. Ah, the wondrous sibilance of Yiddish.”

This morning she got Vince to name his favorite dishes at Gautreau.

“Oh, how can you do this to me, Pina? If you only knew what I’ve been eating. Alright, I guess I’d have to say the Peruvian ceviche and the seared scallops with the citrus emulsion for starters, but I wouldn’t want to pass on the beef tartare with pistachios and fried yucca.”
“How about the main?” she teased.
“Come on, Pina, do you think I could resist the duck breast with the mole reduction?”
“So does that mean you’re going to leave the sautéed grouper with oxtail ragout for me?”
“You’re a torturer, Pina.”

In the end, she left Vince pining, not for her, but for a meal he may never get again. Ah, the woes of privilege seem pretty absurd in this moment of time.

After her early gleaning this morning, she decides to do something constructive. It’s a phrase she remembers her mother using. “Don’t just sit around, Pina, do something constructive.” So she cleans the gunk from the bird feeder and refills it with sugar water.

Next, she needs something to read. An actual book, no more screen time and, of all things, she finds herself looking through Vince’s wall of man-novels for something relevant. And there it is, Camus’ The Plague. She’s always avoided it. Does she have the stomach for it now? She should be reading for distraction, a mystery, some domestic romance, a farce. Okay, she decides, she’ll tiptoe into the book and if the damn thing becomes offensive, toss it across the room.

She sits on the futon in the second bedroom, where the morning sun comes in, and sips her third coffee—spiked with a bit of Irish—as if it were an esteemed nutrient.

What surprises her off the bat is the formality of the narration. It is written as a history, something that has already happened, which presumes life on the other side of the telling. That, in itself, makes it feel safer than now, when the global endgame has possibly arrived.

There’s also comfort in knowing that Camus’ plague exists only in the city of Oran, not across the globe. He spends the beginning of the book describing the ugliness of Oran, a far cry from Sonoma, where Pina hopes to survive the present plague.

And there is the matter of the rats. She’s surprised herself at how she’s been able to tolerate the vivid descriptions of rats. Her husband Marco, a man of science, used to say, “When you come across something that makes you queasy, study it.” And so she’s found herself studying Camus’ rats. She even read one passage out loud, both for the sake of the writing, but also to celebrate her immunity to the description. She is the same woman, after all, who recently squealed at the sight of a rat in the square. But then, Camus, with the art of his description, has already done the studying for the reader:

“In the mornings the bodies were found lining the gutters, each with a gout of blood, like a red flower, on its tapering muzzle; some were bloated and already beginning to rot, others rigid with their whiskers still erect.”

A little after noon, Pina hears a tractor. By the tine she gets to the picture window, a wide wedge of fava beans, a good twenty yards from end to end, have been plowed under. A single man on a tractor is a beautiful thing, as lovely in its way as a man on a horse, simple ingenuity working with nature. She’s not going to stop herself from romanticizing these things. Her mother used to call her a romantic. And why not? Is it her problem that the rest of the world doesn’t rise to the occasion?

Now she imagines Charlie eating his lunch alone on the white bench. What do you have for lunch today, Charlie? Don’t be late for your nap.

But before she’s finished feeling smug, there’s his knock on the door. She knows his knock, it’s like he means to whack the door down. She doesn’t move, she’s not going to move. And then he calls, “Pina, Pina, Pina.”

She has to answer it and when she does, a bit embarrassed to still be in her yoga pedal pushers, she needs to step out on the landing, to see him. He’s standing six steps down in his purple gloves, wearing a fucking Mexican wrestling mask that covers his whole face, including his unlined forehead. The mask is essentially a whiteface with thick black circles around the eyes, a red tongue sticking out below the chin, and a wedge of red hair reaching up over his head like the comb of a rooster.

She knows a little about Mexican wrestling masks because Vince has a collection of them, bought expediently online. He intended to put them around the house in the city, but they now reside, like many of his lost hobbies, in a plastic tub in the basement.

Charlie flips off the mask.
“Does that provide real protection?” she asks.
“I’m not sure. I wore it to surprise you. How did I do?’
She shrugs.
”I thought I might have offended you and I came to apologize. The problem is I was enjoying our conversation so much, enjoying your company . . .”
“So how is that a problem?” She is being purposely dense, forcing him to spell it out.
“Well . . . it’s inappropriate.”

They really shouldn’t be having this conversation outside. Voices echo in the courtyard and everybody’s home. Some units even have their windows open. But, damn, if she’s not enjoying Charlie’s discomfiture. “What’s inappropriate?”

“I think you know,” he says, calling her bluff.
“So you didn’t take a nap.”
“No, I don’t take naps.”

She steps further onto the landing and straightens her posture. “We are living in an age of social distancing,” she says, a bit archly, “and it’s incumbent on us to honor that distance.” Incumbent on us, how does this language attach itself to her? And what does she mean by her freighted statement? Is she admitting that part of her would like to walk down the six steps and put a hand on Charlie’s face?

“Just as long as we understand each other,” he says. With that, he puts his wrestling mask back on, throws up his arms, and screams like a Mexican wrestler might.

Across the courtyard, Pina sees a woman gazing out her window, and realizes that now she’s alone on the landing. Charlie’s gone down the steps and disappeared. She wanted to at least ask what he’d had for lunch.

Pina takes The Plague with her onto the deck. The afternoon has warmed up and she is able to sun herself. She reads a fascinating passage in which the manager of a three star hotel complains to a guest about the dead rats showing up in the hotel. The guest tries to console him: “But, you know, everybody’s in the same boat.”

“That’s just it,” the hotelier replies, “Now we’re like everybody else.”

Pina’s read about how the Coronavirus is, supposedly, the great equalizer. That’s true only up to a point. Sure anybody can get the virus, but aside from the mass deaths, the real fallout will be economic. People like her and Vince have an immunity to that fallout, but the vast majority are not protected. People are already hungry, waiting in food lines. Even here in Sonoma, right down the street from her, they’re standing in line at the Vintage House for free meals She needs to up her donations, and make them now. Waiting for her usual end of the year spree of contributions, for tax purposes, is not an option.

As if to distract her from this heaviness of thought, a ruby throated hummingbird alights on the feeder. It sips, flies off, and returns almost as soon as it’s gone. She’s amazed by the speed of its wings, by its iridescent feathers, and the way they change color in the light. As soon as she settles back to reading, another hummingbird, this one with a turquoise belly alights. Pina hadn’t expected a moment of such rapture. She claps her hands after the second bird flies off. I’ve done something constructive, mother, she thinks, and it’s already paying dividends.

DEER AT DUSK

She follows ten feet behind Charlie. Best to leave a little room for sudden stops, even though they are ambling very slowly along the park on the north side of the square. Charlie puts up a hand and she jerks to a stop. Now she’s directly in front of a life size bronze of Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, by a sculptor named Jim Callahan. Vallejo sits at his leisure on a park bench. His left arm stretches across the top slat of the bench while he holds in his right hand an oversized book, which Pina decides is not a bible. Dressed in a three-piece suit with bowtie, but without any military ornamentation—he had been a general—Vallejo looks remarkably relaxed. Beside him, taped to the back of the bench, is a photo of man in a Panama hat, with the words: “Enjoy social distancing and a conversation with Governor Vallejo.”

Charlie turns back toward her and asks, “Do you know about Vallejo?”
“Not much. He founded Sonoma, didn’t he? Before that he was a General in Alta California, I believe, and later before became a governor after the Bear Flag Rebellion.”
“That’s pretty much it. He was a learned man who wrote a five-volume history of his life and, apparently, he was generous toward the native people. They say he was a man who could find common ground with everyone, and that his main legacy to Sonoma was a climate of peace.”

Pina is surprised by Charlie’s earnestness on the subject. Perhaps he is earnest about everything.

Charlie leads her across the street and points out the white bench in front of the old Toscano Hotel. “That’s where we’ll have our lunch. I bet that bench measures well over six feet.”

The white bench disappoints Pina. She was hoping for a mysterious destination, a hidden garden or some like thing. Now she turns her anticipation toward seeing Charlie’s face again. Surely he will have to take off his mask in order to eat his lunch. She stops to read the plaque affixed to the Toscano Hotel. It was built in 1856 on land once owned by Vallejo, but the plaque doesn’t tell her what she really wants to know—when the hotel was last in use. Her disappointment extends to the plaque.

Once they’ve staked out their spots on opposite sides of the bench, which would clearly accommodate a seven-foot man in repose without his edging over either side, she pulls out the sack of mandarins. “I brought these for you, and I also have a spray bottle of alcohol so that you can disinfect the bag if you want.”

“That’s kind of you.” He grabs hold of the mandarins with his purple hands and lays the bag of fruit on his side of the bench. Then he peels off his gloves, which gives Pina a bit of excitement. She hadn’t noticed his hands the time they met at the duck pond. His long tapered fingers are beautifully manicured with bright half moons. He must go for manicures, she thinks; he’ll have to start doing the job himself. Charlie wears no rings, but Pina notices several of his fingers are bent, turning crooked at the knuckles.

Now the moment she’s been waiting for: he takes off his mask. She observes his face a bit at a time as she pulls her sandwich from the bag. It’s such a placid face with blue eyes at peace with themselves and a hint of a smile at the corners of his thin lips.

“What do you have for lunch, Charlie?”
“What do I have for lunch? That reminds me of Frances.”
“Frances?”
“Oh, a children’s story I used to read to my daughter Sally. Bread and Jam for Frances. You don’t know it?”
Pina shakes her head.
“Sally couldn’t get enough of it. You see, the only thing Frances wanted to eat was bread and jam, and her parents, a very wise bear couple . . . well, I’m not sure they were bears, they actually might have been badgers, anyway the badger mom and dad humor their daughter Frances and serve her, as she wishes, nothing but bread and jam.”
Pina is delighted with Charlie’s tone—it’s not the earnestness with which he spoke about Vallejo; it has a more amused quality, befitting its subject.
“One day at school,” Charlie continues, “Frances is going to have lunch with her friend Albert, and asks, ‘What do you have for lunch, Albert?’” Charlie leaps into a little girl voice with that, and Pina, so delighted with how this has come back to her initial query, claps her hands. For a moment, she feels positively girlish.

Now Charlie modulates into a slightly self-important boy’s accent for Albert. “’I have a cream cheese and tomato sandwich on rye bread, and a pickle to go with that, and a hard-boiled egg with a cardboard shaker of salt to go with that, and a thermos of milk, and a bunch of grapes and a tangerine, and a little cup of custard.’ Sally wanted to hear that part over and over, which is why I still remember it. She’d go, ‘Do what Albert says again, do what Albert says,’ and I did and I did.’”

Pina thinks of her father reading her poems when she was little and then, sadly, of all the little girls who didn’t get sweet fathers. Before allowing herself to grow maudlin, she says, “So what do you have for lunch, Charlie?”

He reaches into his bag and begins pulling things out. “I have here three stone-ground crackers spread with goose liver paté, a baggie with carrot sticks, and another with slices of gravenstein apple squirted with lime.”
Pina bursts out laughing. “Tell me, has Albert influenced the way you pack a lunch?”
“Absolutely.”
They eat for a while in silence until she asks Charlie about his daughter.
“Sally, Sally’s a free spirit. Graduated from Humboldt State and went into the cannabis trade. Stayed up there. Now she lives on the Lost Coast, four or five miles from Petrolia, middle of nowhere. But she’s got a guy up there and a dog. That seems to be all she needs.”
“Do you see her much?”
“A couple, a few times a year. We talk a lot; we’re close. I raised her myself from the time she was ten. Her mother ran off with a jazz drummer. Didn’t stay with the drummer for long, but she stayed gone.”

Charlie faces her with a wistful smile and then bites into his last goose liver cracker.

This time the silence feels worrisome. She doesn’t want to fill it, to be one of those people who can’t abide silence. She pretends that, sitting on this white bench, she’s actually in a foreign film, draped in silence, but soon it gets the better of her. “So, does Frances finally tire of bread and jam?”

Charlie’s eyes spark blue. “She does. Her parents had a good grasp of psychology for a pair of badgers. You’re a therapist, aren’t you?”

“A speech therapist.”
A woman in a flower hat walks past them at the edge of the curb. She turns back and says, “You two look cozy.”
“Wonder what she meant by that,” Charlie says.
But Pina does feel cozy sitting on the white bench with Charlie, even at a seven-foot distance.
“So, you work in a school?” he asks.
“No, in a large private practice in the city. Over the years I’ve come to work solely with men. Some have difficulty with swallowing after surgery, others are recovering from strokes, some stutter or have psychological issues that effect their expression.”
Charlie folds up his empty lunch bag. “Why just men?”
“I’m not sure. I like to think I’m a feminist, and I should probably just be helping women gain agency with their voices, but I’ve gotten seduced by the phenomenon of men unable to claim what they want. In the world I grew up in, the men I knew seemed to get whatever they wanted. It’s not true with the men I work with. They’re frustrated, some are heartbroken, but I can often find where they are tender and help them be tender to themselves and learn how to work with their problems. Of course there are angry ones who come in, but I choose not to work with them.”

Charlie lifts his butt off the white bench, apparently in excitement. “That’s so interesting what you say about helping these men be tender to themselves.” Charlie wiggles back down onto the bench. “Sort of apropos of what I’ve been working on, or thinking about—PTSD. People with PTSD are not generally tender with themselves, and we are all going to have deep deposits of it before this is done. What do we do with that much PTSD? The virus will do plenty of physical damage, but the psychological damage is going to create a psychic pollution like we’ve never seen before.”

“Yes, I’ll have many more clients than I can possibly see. Some men will stop talking altogether. I imagine there will be mass paralysis.”
“I think you’ve put your finger on it, Pina.”
She’s excited that he said that even if she isn’t sure what she’s put her finger on.
“We will focus so much of our attention,” he says, “on getting people back to work, starting the economy back, getting folks properly housed—all necessary goals—but I’m afraid we will neglect what we are really going to need: to build a new psychological infrastructure within the struggling communities.”
“Yes, yes,” she says, though she can’t quite wrap her head around the phrase psychological infrastructure.

Charlie stands, again, she thinks, with excitement. She loves his emotion.
“But with psychological matters,” she says, “a global approach won’t work. Psychology is such a personal matter. One size won’t fit all.”
“Agreed.” Charlie, still standing, stretches out his arms. “This is endlessly fascinating, and there is so much more here. To be continued.” With that Charlie pulls the plug and puts on his purple gloves. “But I’m no good if I don’t get my afternoon nap.”

Pina is pissed. She looks at her watch. One thirty in the fucking afternoon and he needs his nap. He has all afternoon for that. Standing there, waiting for her to say something, to release him, Charlie, in his purple gloves, looks like some absurd soccer goalie. She wishes she had a ball, and she wishes she could kick one, because she would launch it right at his head and love to see if he could stop it with his purple hands, the way he stopped this conversation. “Sleep well,” she says.

He nods to her eagerly. “Hope to see you soon.”

Pina gathers her bag and watches him put on his facemask. Now he looks like a hockey goalie.

“Lunch tomorrow?” Charlie asks.

She has nothing more to say.

After dinner, Pina walks east to the end of on the bike trail, past Sebastiani Winery on Fourth Street, and then up Lovall Valley Road. All afternoon she felt both angry and horny. She can’t remember ever juggling the two conditions at the same time. But now, after some mindfulness exercises, she’s pretty much stopped thinking about Charlie and stopped worrying about Vince and missing Marco and her father; she’s stopped musing about her clients and their conditions; her lips no longer move in sympathy with them as they try to form words. She has, in fact, pretty much stopped thinking about any man she’s ever known.

The dusk light is lovely. It shimmers across the wide field of fava beans. The quiet is a balm. The frogs have yet to start up. Everyone is tucked away in their safe place.

As she turns back, she surprises a family of deer munching on wild grapevines, turned to shriveled raisins. The deer jerk away and dash west along the trail, one coming so close to Pina that she feels the draft of its flight. This is closer than any creature’s come to her in more than two weeks. She finds the thought arresting and wants to cry. When will some being, any being, next touch her?

Back home, she leaves a message for Vince: Gone to bed early. Talk in the morning. She wants to sleep tonight, to sleep well. After two generous snifters of cognac, she peels off her clothes. She won’t even bother brushing her teeth tonight. In bed, as she switches off the light she remembers an advisory she saw issued by the New York Department of Health: “You are your safest sex partner.”

COLD CRAB

For the first ten days she only plugged into the news via her phone, but tonight, hours before Vince’s midnight call, she figures out how to get the hotspot going and uses her computer for the first time since arriving. After flitting around the news sites, avoiding any story in which Trump’s in the headline, she sinks into the sadness of Italy. Daily deaths in the seven hundreds. People forced to die alone without visitors. Funerals outlawed. Not enough beds or respirators. Doctors taking respirators from the old to use on those more likely to thrive. Pina has to close the computer and spend half an hour walking around the living room. To call it walking is a lie; it’s something just short of a trot. She wants to run away from the searing images of Italian doctors and nurses on the front line, their faces bruised from the shields that they’ve been wearing for half an eternity.

Thank God her parents didn’t live to see this—Bergamo, the beautiful city of their births spewing out dead after dead after dead, most from their own generation, their friends, their loved ones. Actually, both of her parents emigrated as young children after the war, but Bergamo was in their hearts. Her ache extends to her husband Marcello, who emigrated with his family from Padua at sixteen.

She drinks a stiff tumbler of Glenfiddich and returns to the computer. No more news. On Facebook she finds people are remarkably generous to each other, offering sweet blessings, posting photographs of themselves when they were young, and photos of happy crowd scenes. She also hears fear underlying many of the posts. How to pay the rent, the mortgage? Trying to decide which bills to pay with the $1,200. Will there even be a job left for me when this is over? Pina pauses to register her privilege, and moves onto “friends” who are offering advice. An old colleague suggests that we do a nice thing for ourselves everyday and do two nice things for others. Pina finds herself wondering what exactly a nice thing is, before realizing that she hasn’t done anything nice for anybody, if you don’t count taking Vince’s calls at all hours.

Somebody’s posted a video from a doctor in Michigan about how to disinfect your groceries after bringing them home from the store. She watches the entire thing and sees that she hasn’t followed any of the required steps with her groceries. She may never shop again.

A “friend” named Alice Schwartz, a total stranger, offers a thought that’s garnered ninety-eight likes: Eat big, people, fatten up now. The Coronavirus deadens your senses of taste and smell, killing your appetite. Make like a bear before hibernation.

Pina feels like she’s done nothing but eat and drink since she’s been here, and yet on the scale this morning she was down another pound to 122, down five since arriving. It probably should be expected given the three or four hours a day she spends dashing in circles. Stress relief, she tells herself. Fitness.

When Vince calls she notices that her attitude toward him has completely changed. She’s concerned. Solicitous. Doing a nice thing? Heck, the poor man is running himself ragged. Will he soon be scarred with raccoon bruises under his eyes like the Italian docs? “Are you getting enough to eat?“ she asks. “How’s your sleep?” She tries to remind him of his charm even if she rarely sees it anymore. “You know what I wish I could see?” she says.

“No,”
“Your smile.”
“It’s not been around much lately.”
“What can I do to help?”
“I think I’m beyond help.”
“Maybe we should have phone sex sometime,” she says. “Or are we too old for that?”
She’s gotten him to laugh. “You want to have phone sex, Pina?”
“It may be our only option for awhile. But how do you do it?”
“Well, you have to get on Face Time and then you do things that turn each other on.”
She’s surprised that he’s taking her seriously “You sound experienced,” she says.
“No, never done it in my life.”
“Oh,” she purrs, “I thought you were experienced, Vince.”
“I’m too tired now.”
“Are you sure? Well, then it’s something to look forward to.”
In the morning, he’s in good cheer when he calls, “Pina, I had a wet dream last night. First time since I was a teenager!”

A little before noon, there’s a hard knock on the door. It scares the shit out of her and makes her slip out of her Downward Dog pose. The door resonates under another boom. Is this how Coronavirus comes for you, with a stout knock on the door? She’s decided not to answer it and then she hears her name, “Pina, Pina, Pina.”

There’s nobody at the door when she opens it, but a red and white cooler sits on the welcome mat. She peers down the stairs and is surprised to see him standing off-balanced, six or seven steps down, his hands in shocking purple sterile gloves.

“Charlie.”

“Pina,” he says, and smiles up at her a bit bashfully. Then he holds his gloved hands high and rotates them in a comic version of a royal wave. “I brought you a crab. Hope you like crab. Got a call from a fisherman friend in San Rafael. He had a big haul this morning. So I drove down and picked up three live ones, one for my neighbor Saul and one for you. Do you know Saul?”

She shakes her head. She wants to say something, but is so overwhelmed by Charlie’s thoughtfulness that she’s tongue-tied, a condition she now shares with a number of her clients.

“Saul’s a lovely guy,” Charlie says, shifting his feet on the stairs. “Lovely guy. Orthodox Jew with a soft spot for Dungeness crab. Saul’s the kind of people I like, a man with conviction that can make the rare exception when opportunity knocks.
“So I steamed up the crabs when I got back and they’ve had a chance to cool. Now I didn’t clean yours or crack it. Thought it best in the interest of safety not to.”
“That’s so sweet of you,” she manages.
“Not at all.” Again, he smiles, bashfully.
He’s cute, she thinks. “Wish I could invite you in.”
“No, we can’t have that. You know how to crack crab, don’t you?”
The question makes her want to laugh and she thinks of Lauren Bacall’s line: You know how to whistle, don’t you? She’s tempted to put her lips together and blow. “I’ve cracked a few,” she says, but not as often as I’ve cracked my knuckles.”
He laughs so hard, that he stumbles down a step and looks like he might fall.
“Charlie,” she says, alarmed.
“Yeah, lost my balance for a moment.” He climbs a step closer to her. “I used to crack my knuckles all the time when I was a kid. My father says, ‘Stop it now, or you’ll end up with arthritis when you’re old.’” Charlie rotates his hands again. “Damn it if the old man, may he rest in peace, wasn’t right.”
They smile at each other.
“You been keeping up with the news?” he asks.
She shakes her head.
Trump wants everything back to normal by Easter. He wants the churches full and everybody back to work by Monday.” Charlie throws his arms in the air at the craziness of the idea. “Not even Jesus could pull off that kind of resurrection.”
“That’s very funny. Are you religious, Charlie?”
“Not so much. Was brought up Catholic. I suppose I’m still a little trapped by some of the trappings. You?”
“Same.”
Charlie bows his head and then lifts it slowly, facing her directly. “So, Pina, you holding up okay?”
“I’m doing alright.”
“Well, you keep it that way. Understand?”
Charlie offers a sweet, lingering smile, and raises his gloved hand, once more in a royal wave, before turning to walk down the steep steps.

Pina finds a hammer in the kitchen junk drawer. The crab is enormous, the largest she’s ever seen. It could feed a family of four. She pulls off the legs and claws and splits them on the butcher block. The body she’ll save for later.

A few months ago, on a Saturday morning, she and Vince waited in line for a half an hour at Swan’s Oyster Depot, to get stools at the bar. Vince ordered among other things, a crab back. He’d seen Anthony Bourdain on his TV show, filmed at Swan’s, dipping hunks of sourdough into the feral juices of a crab back. Vince kept trying to get her to taste it. She demurred.
“But Anthony Bourdain . . .”
“Yeah, well look what happened to him,” she said.
“It wasn’t because of the crab back, for Christ’s sake.”
Pina rips the back from the body. Coronavirus hasn’t changed her mind, she still wants no part of it, and rinses out the salmon hued shell before tossing it. A scary trip to the communal garbage will be her dark adventure of the day.

After whipping up a butter and lemon sauce she sits on the deck with a dishtowel over her blouse and gorges herself. A little later she cleans the meat from the body and is amazed by the yield, a bright white mound of crabmeat, enough she guesses for a half dozen crab cakes.

At 9pm she gets a text from Vince: a live photo of his erect prick without any accompanying words. What’s there to say? After she recovers from her outrage she studies the absurd appendage, pressing her finger on the image to make it go live. The damn thing waves back and forth like a thick magic wand, in its circumcised glory. Vince’s hand must be hidden in his blue scrub bottoms, rocking his weenie at the base of the shaft. He’s become a puppeteer. Will he give his engorged Johnson a voice? She imagines it speaking monosyllabically in a slow basso: I’m a big guy, don’t you think? How many Cialis did he have to pop to accomplish this feat? She can make out an industrial sink behind him with a huge pump bottle of disinfectant. This is how he spends his break? How many photos did he snap of his schlong before arriving at the winner?

She sends him a return text: Are we sexting now? I’m not playing. She’d like to say, Hey, find some other girl to send your tired Willy to. But then she realizes that she’s the one that brought it on with her silly talk about phone sex.

Vince’s reply sounds almost wistful: I was afraid you’d forgotten it. He goes on to tell her that he’s heading to bed early. They’ll talk in the morning.

As she prepares to go to bed, she hears the woman downstairs crying again. Is it fear or loneliness? Perhaps a measure of each.

Curiously, when Pina’s head hits the pillow, it isn’t Vince or his magic wand she thinks of, but Charlie, with a grin on his face, his purple hand pivoting slowly through a royal wave.

FAMILIES OF QUAIL

She talks with Vince twice a day. He calls too early in the morning and too late at night. It’s the only time he has. He doesn’t want to discuss the hospital and always changes the subject. What he wants to know is how she’s holding up, how hard it is for her. She’s careful not to let him know that she’s doing quite well. She fabricates a sense of fear, a phony abstraction to hide the fact that in some ways she feels more alive than she has in ages. She tells him what he wants to hear most, that she misses him. She says it so many times she’s sure he must see through her. He wants to talk about Trump. Did you hear what he said? Did you hear? “We can’t let the cure be worse than the problem.” That’s what he tweets. How many thousand lives will that tweet cost?

She’d rather talk about the hospital and tries to steer the conversation that way. It’s not pretty is all he ever says, until last night, when clearly exhausted, he started blubbering: Oh my God, the models we’re seeing. Before you know it they’ll turn the fucking convention center into a hospital. It’s doomsday. We’re all going to die.

Today he’s all about money. Six-fifteen in the morning—she hasn’t had her coffee yet—and he wants to talk about money.

“Have you been following the markets?” he asks.
“Vaguely.”
“Vaguely isn’t good enough.”

They keep their money separate. In fact, they’re not actually married. They’ve agreed to call themselves married. Husband and wife. He doesn’t want to have to provide for her. That’s the issue. He has four grown children, two he barely knows. That’s where he wants his money to go. She doesn’t want his money. She doesn’t need it. She put the assets from the sale of her Mill Valley house into mutual funds.

“You need to pay attention, Pina.”
“I’m trying,” she says and waits for him to say that trying isn’t good enough. He doesn’t. She puts the water on for coffee.
“The markets are in free fall.”
“I’ve heard.” She doesn’t tell him that she spoke with her financial advisor a few days before coming to Sonoma, and that she went to cash. The advisor, Scarlet Holmes, a woman she’s known since college, a closet Republican, advised strongly against cashing out. The market is fundamentally sound. We’re near a bottom. You don’t sell at the bottom. That seemed to Pina an old world way of thinking. How long could things stay fundamentally sound when fifty million people might soon be out of work, when whole industries have collapsed?

“The press is blowing this all out of proportion,” Scarlet said.

That was what clinched it for her. The market was already 30% down. She did some quick math in her head and concluded that 70% of something was more than 100% of nothing. She’d let her TIAA CREF pension ride.

Now Vince begins a rambling monologue about the mistakes he’s made in his life. He sounds like a man about to die. She’s never heard his fear like this and doesn’t know how to comfort him. The best she can do is to listen and let him know that she’s listening. She says, I know. I understand. I’m sorry, at regular intervals, and takes a long, satisfying sip of French Roast. She closes her eyes in an effort to feel more compassion for him. He’s making an enormous sacrifice, she thinks, he’s working to save us all. Still, she can’t quiet the thought that Vince is a man who’s neglected his emotional work along the way, and that now it is too late.

At the picture window, Pina watches a family of quail scamper out of the bushes and then back in. And there they are again. Mom and dad are definitely leading the little ones somewhere, but where? The baby quail take three hurried steps for each of mom and dad’s. Her decision not to have children, made at different times in her life, never seemed more right.

She listens to Vince, deep in a swamp of remorse, talk about his first wife, his second, as well as his children, especially the ones he hardly knows. I’m sorry, she says, I know.

For the first six months or so she thought she loved Vince. Maybe she did. They met at Jordan’s Kitchen, a cooking class in SoMa, where they got cozy while preparing the polenta with chanterelles. Then came a whirlwind month of food, wine, sex, and she moved into his Noe Valley house.

Along with a shared love of food and wine, they both had had a spouse die, but Vince’s wife Anita passed away more than twenty years earlier, while her husband Marcello died only three years before she met Vince.

Once the bloom of their romance faded Pina began to see Vince more clearly as he was. No longer in love with him, her thoughts turned practical. Vince remained a good catch and a worthy companion. He was smart, handsome, and solvent, with an abundance of surface charm. Now, it seems, a devastating assessment. She wished that he were more introspective; she missed the man she never knew, who wanted to devote his life to poetry. That was the road not taken. And the path Vince did take was smoothed over by the pleasure he took in himself and his acquisitions: clothes, cameras, snazzy cookware, and women. The first, a neighbor named Robyn, came to Pina herself to confess the month-long tryst. Vince, contrite, promised it would never happen again.  After the next time, with Esti, a crazed resident who called the house at all hours, Pina made him sleep in the second bedroom for three months. That was how long she stopped having sex with him, at which point she realized that she, too, was being hurt by the prohibition. She happened to like sex, even with Vince. The cure might be worse than the problem. Her dentist friend Janice, the one who brought Porn Hub to the dinner table amid the bloody dishes, once said that the only sane way to view a man was as a tool. Since taking him back in her bed, Vince became her tool.

Finally, his maudlin reckoning with himself winds down.

Yes, she says, I know.

He has to get to the hospital. He’ll call again later, before midnight.

As they are about to sign off she can’t resist asking, “So what are you going to do about the stock market, Vince?”
“I’m not sure. I’m torn.”
“I miss you, Vince.”
“I miss you too.”

Not a word of love between them.

Pina strolls across the bike path to the farmer’s market on First Street West and is surprised to see how crowded it is. Long lines weaving from Paul’s Produce and Mike the baker, who’s got his wood burning stove in tow, finishing trays of warm pretzels and bialys. The lines have grown a bit shaggy and people are standing closer to four feet from each than the mandated six.  The crowd is mostly older folks, cheerful, glad to be out on a beautiful Sonoma morning. A month from now a good number of them could be gone.

She’s got a nifty little bag in her purse, but realizes she’s not going to buy anything. Germs everywhere, she fears. So much for her immunity to the terror. She digs her hands deeper into the pockets of her jeans and stands apart to check out the scene. Everybody seems to know each other. Someone in the bread line hollers, as if she’s trying to reach a person on the other side of the moon, “Doris, Doris, if he has soda bread, I’ll split it with you.”

The mushroom man is here as well as the meat vendor who, according to his sign, has a wide variety of steaks and chops, ground beef, lamb, and bacon. Last night she craved a bolognese sauce. Maybe by next week she’ll have the nerve to buy some ground beef.

“So does he have the soda bread?” Moon woman wants to know.

Beside the baker’s oven, the solar man, a real happy guy in his forties, adjusts his silvery panel. Vince said that in the summer he bakes chocolate chip cookies via his solar panel. He’s got a table with solar info sheets beside a toy human skull. She catches him pitching a guy, too old to buy solar. “Yep, four or five years it’s going to pay for itself.”

The old guy gets a little too close to the salesman, and says, “What about the skull?”

“Oh you don’t know? You haven’t seen it?” He grabs the skull in his right hand, juts out his chin, “To go solar, or not to go solar, that is the question.”

Pina is amused but thinks he should quit while he’s ahead because he’s half-laughing at himself. But he keeps going.

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer outages,
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take . . . to take . . .

And now he’s truly laughing as he muffs the line, and from some

forgotten place in herself and, at a ten-foot remove from the man holding the

skull, she broadcasts in an arched voice with measured elocution:

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take up arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ‘tis a consummation
Devoutly to the wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream . . .

A smattering of applause follows from the shoppers. “Sorry,” she says to the solar man.

“Are you kidding? That was wonderful.”

She scoots off after she hears the old guy say, “You’ve picked a funny time to sell solar. The sky is falling.”

Pina isn’t ready to leave the market, not without buying something. She gazes admiringly into shoppers’ faces. They are carrying on quite well. And she too. The meat man has only a small line. She checks her pocket for the bottle of Purell and when her turn comes, snags a vacuum-packed pound of ground beef and another of lamb.

“That comes to $22.50,” says the cheerful young man.

Where, she wonders, does all this good cheer come from?

She hands him twenty-five dollars and tells him to keep the change. After she drops the meat into her bag, and steps aside, she squirts her hands five times with Purell and swishes the gummy liquid between her fingers, she hums like the mother she’s never been to the child she never was, Go away germs, go away now.

Down First Street West, she heads to the square. The meat will keep. She has an egg salad sandwich in her bag. And there they are again, the quail family. Of course, it’s another family, weaving in and out under a disorderly fig tree, navigating their way as well as anybody, in this strange time.

Pina decides, on second thought, that she’ll take a raincheck on the egg salad sandwich at the duck pond, not sure whether it’s the thought of Charlie or the rapacious mallards that turns her toward home.

THE DUCK POND

Pina walks to town as she has the last three days. It’s just a short stroll past the gorgeous stone building of Vella Cheese Company (still open), maker of a fabled dry Monterey Jack, past a horse farm where she counts them—six Clydesdales out grazing today. The rain has greened up the big yard. The horses strike her as marvelously mindless, but maybe they’re more locked into their place in time than she can imagine. She stops to watch them, the way their bodies shimmy with the current of life. She loves the feathery hair above their hooves. These massive creatures no longer do the hard work in the fields that they were bred for. Their only use is ceremonial now, pulling wagons for parades, and such. She pauses, briefly, to think about a world in which humans became irrelevant. The horses bunch together even as they graze, have little interest in separation, unlike the woman with the umbrella trundling in her direction, once Pina turns the corner. This woman, taking wide deliberate steps, looks like she’d weaponize her parasol to keep folks at their distance. Fortunately she crosses the street thirty yards ahead.

There are no more tourists in town, just a few cars, and fewer people. Past the old adobe Barracks and the defunct Cheese Factory, Mary’s, the homey pizza joint, has brought its outdoor tables in and offers takeout meals, between twelve and five. It’s noon and looks completely dead. Next door, The Swiss Hotel, Vince’s favorite place in town, is fully shuttered. Two days ago they still offered limited take-out. Vince feels like he’s won the lottery when he’s able to snag a table on the wide outdoor patio. There’s a choice view of the park and parade of tourists. Plenty of women for Vince to appreciate. Nobody today. She can almost hear Vince’s lament: When will they next serve a bowl of clams and mussels with sausage? Ah, just the basket of sourdough with the peppered olive oil.

Next corner, The Girl and the Fig, her favorite. Vince says it’s too hoity for its toity, but damn if it doesn’t have the most exquisite bar for eating. A Hendricks martini and a mushroom tartine to start. Yum. She loves the duck confit but is just as happy with a rare hamburger with grilled onions and frites. Sixteen bucks. Is that hoity toity? One winter night they shared the cassoulet at the bar. Vince relented, called the French beans soul food and asked her to make it. “Forget about it,” she said, “that would take days of cooking, and you have The Fig,” which now has a sober note of closure on the door addressed to the Fig Family. She’s never considered herself a member, but why not?

It’s the same with such closure notes all the way down the west side of the square, from Eldorado Hotel to the Sunflower Café, the Global Free Trade market, the great kitchen store, the boutiques and wine tasting rooms, the art gallery, the spa. She passes Steiners, the hard-drinking bar that’s been in place since 1927, and stops at the windows of the ancient menswear shop, Earlad’s, since 1922, which used to be the last place in town, as Vince told her, where a fella could get a cowboy shirt. There’s not one to be seen through the windows. No string ties either. Catering to the tourists, Earland’s offers lots of Hawaiian shirts.

Instead of turning to the south side of the square, she crosses to the duck pond. The time Vince brought her there, he said, “This is where you can witness rape in plain sight everyday.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Just wait.”
“What if I don’t want to wait?”
“Just watch the ducks.”
“What is this, Vince, going to a lynching?” She did in fact watch the ducks. It was late in the afternoon. There were seven or eight of them swimming around. It was calendar pastoral. She and Vince were on a bench ten feet from the pond. Vince started whistling, one of his damn jazz riffs that he can’t leave alone, and in a minute, maybe two, a mallard swooped down on a hen, clamped onto the poor duck’s throat, and started humping her. Did she just see what she saw? Fucking Vince. She pushed him; she wished she were able to push him off the bench. “Did you just incite that with your fucking whistling?”
“Come on, Pina. I’m not that powerful. It’s just nature playing out in front of us.”
“Is that why you come here?” she asked. “To incite that shit?”

Now, across the pond from the bench where she sat with Vince, she recognizes a man, with legs crossed, eating a sandwich. It takes a moment for her to place him. It’s Charlie, an acquaintance of Vince’s who lives in the complex. They’d had a glass of wine with Charlie at his condo, which, as she remembers, was filled with engaging art and red enamel furniture that looked like it came from China. They had a pleasant visit, sitting on Charlie’s deck where he had beautiful planters of roses and all sorts of citrus. Later, Vince waxed on about Charlie. It was a good story, which is why she remembers it. The guy grew a long droopy mustache and changed his name to Raoul when he moved up from L.A. Eventually he worked as a lead animator at Industrial Light & Magic, and retired with a big sailboat moored in Sausalito, not long after turning fifty. Once he retired he took his old name back and shaved his mustache.

Pina strolls around the pond and ten feet away, says, “Charlie?”
He looks up, blinking at the sun. “Yes, yes.” He doesn’t recognize her.
“Pina,” she says and is about to explain.
“Oh, yes, Vince’s wife. Nice to see you. Really nice to see you. Vince up here now?”
“No, I’m isolating from him here.”
“Oh, right, right. The poor man’s in the trenches. I worry about the doctors.”
She nods. Charlie is holding his half eaten sandwich in his hand. It looks like tuna. “I’m sorry to interrupt your lunch.”
“No, no. Sit. I think we’ll have a good six feet between us.”
It looks closer to five feet, but she sits. Living dangerously.
“Pina—that’s a beautiful name. Rare but beautiful.”
“It’s short for Crispina, which means curly-headed in Italian.” She doesn’t know why she’s volunteered this.

He gazes at her head and smiles. Yes, her hair is still wavy. She likes it, even the small wedges of gray that keep asserting themselves. White women who straighten their hair amuse her.

Charlie has slipped what’s left of his sandwich into his paper bag. In a knick of time, she stops herself from reaching to touch his arm, to tell him that he should keep eating. What’s the matter with her? In the middle of a plague she’s sitting on a bench with a strange man she’s about to touch.
“So you’re Italian?” he says.
“Yes, my parents came from Bergamo.”
“Ah, Bergamo. Beautiful city. I spent a few days there on the way to Lake Como.”
She looks into Charlie’s face, which is well tanned and, strangely, without lines across his high forehead. How can a man in his fifties be unmarked by age? She tries to imagine him with a droopy mustache and almost starts laughing.
“Matter of fact,” he says, “I’ve been thinking a lot about Bergamo. You know it’s become one of the epicenters of the virus?”
“Yes, I heard.”
“And your parents?”
“They’ve passed.”
“So sorry. Anyway, they’ve been dropping like flies in Bergamo. The mortality rate is brutal. They don’t even get a chance to bury their dead.”
Charlie has become emotional. He pulls a handkerchief from his pocket and pats his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he says, “sometimes it just gets the better of me.”
“I understand.”
“But Bergamo. Ah.” The laughing blue comes back into his eyes. “I take it you’ve been there.”
“Yes.” She thinks to tell him about her trips as a child, but stays silent.
“I was there at chestnut time,” he says, “and in the morning you’d see the old men going out with their sticks and their sacks to gather chestnuts, and, oh my, the bakery windows were stacked high with grand, marvelously colored macaroons. Cypress Umber. Red ochre. Vermillion. I mean colors a Renaissance painter would be proud to have in his palette.”

Charlie’s eyes are lit up with the colors he names.

“I’ve got to tell you, I had a very memorable meal in Bergamo. Little birds. They call them uccillini. Three of them came on the plate in a cognac sauce with polenta. They’re songbirds, really. You put the whole bird in your mouth at once. Crunch the tiny bones, the brain. Two three bites of flesh. Delicious. The only thing I didn’t eat was the feet. You’d think after eating three songbirds I’d be able to carry a tune.” He laughs at his little joke.
“Hmm,” she says, not knowing what else to say.
And then a blush of worry crosses Charlie’s face. His eyelids flicker and close. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“I’m just sitting hear talking your ears off. Too much time alone, I guess. Forgive me.” He stands, grabs his paper sack.

Did she do something to offend him?

“Good to see you, Pina. Send my best to Vincent. Tell him I’m proud of him.”

What did she do? It all happened so fast. She watches him walk off. And then he surprises her again. “Pina,” he calls from a short distance. “I’m a creature of habit. That’s what this thing’s done to me. Anyway, I have my lunch here everyday at noon.”

She watches the ducks for a while, keeping a keen eye on the mallards. For now, they all circle seamlessly, their worlds, despite the paucity of visitors, far less changed than hers.