THE CLYDESDALES

 

Three afternoons after they discovered Sylvie’s body, a pair of Clydesdales pulls a wagon, shiny black enamel with spokes and wheels painted bright white, up East Second Street. Having heard hooves striking the pavement down the street, she and Charlie spring out of bed and hurry to the edge of the deck to watch the horses and wagon pass. The late afternoon sun shines on the brown flanks of the animals. It is a placid scene. Nobody is in a hurry. The enormous strength of these behemoths is fully restrained, and the clack of hooves might be percussion for a slow movement of Aaron Copeland’s “Appalachian Spring.” She can’t resist thinking of these animals as noble even though they are probably dumb as beans.

Now Pina thinks of photographs she’s seen of ceremonial hearses, among them images of President Kennedy’s funeral procession. Didn’t horses lead the open carriage that held his coffin, draped in an American flag? The two chattering men sitting atop this wagon, one in a feed cap holding the reins, the other sitting shotgun in a cowboy hat, with a collie on his lap, dispel any sense of the funereal. This is Norman Rockwell rolling up East Second Street.

She and Charlie have spent most of the last three days in bed. After Sylvie’s death, Pina wanted to go on a retreat, but when you can’t go anywhere, and you’ve already withdrawn from the world, bed seemed like the only viable option. At first she thought Charlie was simply humoring her, but from late in the first afternoon, when she turned him from his stomach to his back, explaining that she didn’t want him to end up with bedsores, and then performing epic fellatio on him, he’s been all in. It’s true, they’ve made love more often in the last couple of days than she and Vince did in the last months they lived together. She’s not sure what kind of medications Charlie takes, nor does she care, but he is one hell of a tiger.

The wide-ranging conversations they’ve had have been even more surprising than the prodigious lovemaking. At first she was reminded of her early days with Marco, when they seemed to have discovered every hidden corner of each other during their nightlong talking jags. With Charlie, who is the least defensive man she’s ever known, no subject is forbidden. Once he got going about his ex, Cynthia, who left him for the jazz drummer, he disclosed so much about their intimacies, or lack thereof, that Pina felt embarrassed for him, although he didn’t seem self-conscious in the least. Whatever embarrassment there was belonged to her.

“The long and short of it is that all Cynthia wanted to do,” he said, putting a wrap to the subject, at least for the time being, “was party.”
Pina smirked. “Sounds like me.”
“The difference is huge, Pina, because you party with a soul.”

After she got him to promise to never again use the word party as a verb, she asked him to describe her soul, as he perceived it. His explanation was not only endearing, but it went on for hours, on both sides of their naps.

During their three days in bed, Charlie only got up to use the bathroom and look after Roscoe’s feed and water. In addition to her visits to the bathroom, Pina prepared their simple meals, fried eggs and toast, pasta with vegetables and parmesan, and a niçoise salad, all of which they ate together in bed.

The real breakthrough for Pina came from talking about Marco. Charlie wasn’t much interested in hearing about Vince. He knew Vince, described him as a moving target, and said that the last thing he wanted to do was put any pressure on her to make decisions about Vince. But Marco was a phantom, an abstraction, is what he said. “I wouldn’t know where to begin with an animation of him.”

That’s where they began, with Marco in his body. How he stepped in the world.

“Marco was short,” she told Charlie, “but he was proud of his body.”
“Good balance?”
“Yes, he was a terrific skater.” She could see that Charlie was already imagining his animation, so she offered him more: “When he walked he was quiet. Quietest walker you’ve ever seen, Charlie.”
“So was he devious?”

“That’s a question for later,” she said, but talked for so long about what made Marco’s body quiet that the spill of her language, across the sheets, bled into Marco’s personality and she explained, as much to herself as to Charlie, that Marco’s soft step was present in his affect, and she found herself revealing that, with Marco, it was easy to confuse his silence with virtue, “not that he was without virtue,” she asserted, clinging, vaguely still, to her myth of Marco’s unimpeachable goodness.

When Charlie asked how Marco’s quietness affected her personality, she began to cry, but did so only briefly, recalling how she sometimes felt like a brash boor beside Marco and had trained herself to be less emotional. “Somehow I decided that all the defects were mine. I guess it kind of makes sense that after Marco I ended up with a guy like Vince, who can’t be quiet for a moment and is brimming with defects.”

Later, when she addressed Charlie’s initial question, she cried again. “If Marco was devious,” she said, “it was in making it seem that something was going on when there wasn’t. I didn’t hear John Prine’s sweet song ‘Hello in There’ until later, but that’s the kind of thing she wanted to say to Marco at times: ‘Hello in there. Is anybody home?’ Sadly, Marco embodied Gertrude Stein’s long ago description of Oakland: ‘There was no there there.’ He wanted a simple life with very little conflict. His manner came across as enlightenment while I ended up feeling like a complicated mess. And when Marco got sick and never complained he became saintly in my mind, and that’s the Marco I’ve lived with all these years.”

“And so now,” Charlie said, after a long silence, “you’ll probably have to mourn your ideal.”

“Yes,” she said and became weepy again before falling into a long afternoon snooze.

By this afternoon, when they saw the Clydesdales pass, she and Charlie had begun to tire of being in bed, but they went back anyway. Charlie brought his large laptop and they started to watch “Hamilton.” Sadness swept over Pina, but she felt as if she’d been freed of something. Perhaps she was the only person in America to not make much contact with “Hamilton.” And yet, it seemed consequential when she and Charlie began singing, “No one else was in the room where it happened.” She lay in Charlie’s arms and smiled at him. She was so glad to have let him into the room where it happened.

 

A call from Vince comes not long after they finish their dinner, a tasty roast chicken with asparagus and Basmati rice. She left Charlie in the kitchen with the dishes and walked out onto Second Street East in the direction of the cemetery.

After quickly dispensing with pleasantries, Vince asked if she could meet him tomorrow in the city. Bernard was picking him up tomorrow—his month at the facility in Nicasio was coming to an end and he was supposed to move into a sober living environment—a halfway house, of sorts, that they arranged for him in the Mission.

“I only have a short window of time, a couple of hours, before I’m due at the house,” he said, his voice sober, free of its cunning lilt. “And just so you know, I was just tested again for Covid and I’m negative.”

Pina agrees to meet Vince at Dolores Park tomorrow at two o’clock, and walks up into the cemetery. The light is beginning to go out of the sky. It is a Friday night and she can hear a group of rollicking teenagers at the top of the cemetery, where they go to drink beer. The living and the dead. After passing the split gravestone of Thomas Thornton Seawall, which she can barely make out in the dusk light, she thinks more of Marco and Sylvie than of Charlie and Vince. A sweet impression of Andre, Sylvie’s son, lingers. Clearly, he was in grief as he waited with Pina for the county morgue to come pick up his mother, but the way he grasped Pina’s hand in both of his, and thanked her for what she’d done for Sylvie, moved her deeply.

 

Charlie is full of news when she gets back. Over their days in bed, she has steadfastly kept herself from the news, though she suspects that Charlie’s been sneaking looks on his laptop all along.

“Trump just pardoned his crony Roger Stone. They always do this shit on Friday night. Friday night massacre. His corruption knows no bounds.”

Pina doesn’t want to remember who Roger Stone is or what his crimes were, but no matter, Charlie quickly moves on to another outrage.

“He’s saying, against the advice of the health professionals, that if schools don’t reopen in the fall he’s taking back their federal money. He says, children don’t’ get sick anyway, which isn’t true, and what about the teachers and their families?”

Pina nods and hopes the news will end quickly.

“He bragged on Sean Hannity or some damn place about acing his cognitive test and you should see what Sarah Cooper did with that. I think it’s her best one yet.”

Pina sits beside Charlie on the sofa. Their streak of days in bed has officially ended. They watch Sarah Cooper’s “How to Cognitive” over and over, maybe a dozen times, until they are both repeating the words:

“Because he hasn’t taken any cognitive test cause he couldn’t pass one. I actually took one. Very recently when I . . . ah . . . when I was . . . when the radical left was saying, ‘Is he all there? Is he all there?’ And I proved I was all there because I aced it . . . I aced the test.” This is where Sarah pulls up the blank coloring book page of the donkey. “And he should take the same exact test, a very standard test. I took it . . . I took it at . . . Walter Reed . . . Medical Center. In front of doctors . . . and they were very surprised. They said, ‘that’s an unbelievable thing. Rarely does anybody do what you just did.” Now she shows the donkey fully scribbled over in a half dozen colors, as a one-year-old would do.

“You know,” Charlie says, after shutting his laptop. “Sarah Cooper has given us something of immeasurable value. Now when I hear his voice I see her face and I’m laughing.”
Pina slips into Charlie’s arms now. “Should we sleep out here tonight, just for a change?”
“Anything you want. By the way, I have a little question for you: Will you move in with me, Pina?”
“You’d have me?”
“Don’t answer a question with a question.”
“Do you think there’s room for me?”
“We’ll make room. I want you and all of your very complicated soul.”
“What will Roscoe say?”
“You’re still asking questions, Pina.”
“Don’t you think you should have a cognitive test, before we decide, Charlie?”