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.