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.