The smoke and toxic air has finally lifted, courtesy of the west winds. Even my afternoon was clear—I’ve been doing Zooms with my clients in the morning—and Charlie asked if I wanted to take a picnic to Ocean Beach in San Francisco. The Marin County beaches are still closed to parking.

Charlie was enthused in that boyish way he gets. “We can clean out the fridge,” he said, “and pick-up a baguette along the way.”

Five minutes after I agreed to go, Charlie asked how I’d feel if Sally came along. We could all wear masks in the car or she could drive her own car, he suggested.

I did my best to swallow my disappointment and mouthed the word sure before forcing myself to pronounce it again out loud. At least he didn’t ask if he could bring Roscoe along. I pouted discreetly for a moment. Sure, it would have been nice to have a day just with Charlie but, as time has gone by, I’ve gained some empathy for Sally.

All the talk about Trump possessing nary a scintilla of empathy has made me wonder about my quotient of the stuff. It’s never been one of my strong suits. Fucking Charlie has it in spades.

We ended up driving in a single car and Sally’s enthusiasm for the outing made me glad to have her along. Charlie drove past Kelly’s Cove, down the Great Highway to an open beach lot out near the zoo. We found a sweet hollow in the dunes and had our picnic. When Charlie said clean out the fridge, he meant it. In addition to our baguette, we had a good hunk of Sicilian salami, four or five cheeses, a half eaten tub of goose pâté, a jar of creamed herring, and a bunch of Muscat grapes. I’d packed a tablecloth, utensils, small glass tumblers, and a chilled bottle of Grüner Veltliner. The three of us sitting atop a mound above the ocean reminded me of an iconic Cartier-Bresson photo of a French family picnic.

After he’d eaten half the jar of herring, Charlie mused, “I like a group of three. I don’t mean a ménage à trois, but a little family unit like this. Maybe it’s because I was an only child. We were always three. You, too, huh, Pina?”

I nodded.

Sally said, “Not me. I had the single father.”

“Somehow you survived,” Charlie said, and smiled at his daughter. “So here we are, three only children in a group of three. Freud described a couple as a group of two, which was his way of describing the baggage of each person’s parents brought to the twosome.”

I have to admit that I love the way Charlie spins out little factoids about everything. It’s never done in a pretentious way, but more, by the way . . . I’ve determined that Charlie and I have different kinds of brains: his continues to accrue knowledge, while I gradually shed the little I have.

It turned out that we each went off on a walk along the beach alone. Sally came back first with a large handful of intact sand dollars that were the color purple. I’d never seen sand dollars that color, or so many at once. Sally laid them out in a wide circle and she and I made a fuss over their color.

“That’s because they’re still alive,” Charlie said. “Turn them over.”

Sally flipped one and there was, indeed, a complex network of tiny, whispering hairs. The purple fellow was not quite ready to give up the ghost.

“I’m taking them,” Sally said, “dead or alive.”

We drove up Clement Street on the way to the Golden Gate Bridge and stopped at one take out for dim sum and at another, a couple blocks further, for a large coppery-red Peking duck. Charlie and I picked up the duck while Sally strolled up the street, looking a bit astonished to be in an actual city.

Charlie and I stood staring at the hanging duck before we decided to get it. “You know,” he said, “they pump air through the neck between the skin and fat. That’s how they get the crispiness.”

By the time we got home the sand dollars had lost their purple.

Vince has moved back into his house on Liberty Street, defying the recommendations of his recovery program, which wanted him to stay three months in an SLE, a sober living environment, where he would be tested regularly and linked with meetings and other recovery services. So now the man’s on his own, with too much time on his hands. Yesterday when he called he told me he’d grilled a two and a half pound tri tip and didn’t know what to do with all the meat. He said his friend Bernard, who he described as his only remaining mate, would have taken a hunk of the meat, but he’d recently flown off to Hawaii to get away from the fires and the Covid. Finally, Vince asked, “Do you want some meat, Pina?”

It’s not the kind of question you want from your former lover in the middle of a pandemic, but then things got worse. Vince said that he’d be coming up to Sonoma soon and staying for a while in his condo. “If you don’t mind,” he added. It was nasty the way he said that, and I didn’t respond. Of course, he has every right to stay in his own place, but the notion of him lurking around the grounds, where Charlie and I are working at being a couple, upset me.

I want Vince to recede into my past or to somehow expel him, like a meal you eat when you’re famished that turns out to be bad. And yet every time the man calls, I answer. Why do I still let him sink his claws into me?

I’ve been in a bad place since we got the news that Ruth Bader Ginsberg had passed last evening. I couldn’t get the image of Trump and McConnell salivating out of my head. I saw Ted Cruz with his shit-eating grin in the robes of a Supreme Court Justice. Then I thought of RBG, the worlds she opened for women and justice, and now the coming evil. How total can it be?

Charlie was sweet. He knew how to touch me briefly so I felt his warmth, and then leave me room. He offered a double martini; oddly I turned it down. I wanted nothing, not even a glass of wine. It’s not like me. I hunched a long time over the small Chinese desk in our bedroom that’s become by itself my office. It was as if I felt obliged to make a rational response. Write my feelings. But I had no pen or paper and the laptop was closed on the bed. Something of me had hollowed out and I lost the scant sense of hope I’ve had for this country.

Later, Charlie brought out a bowl of sliced apples and some honey for dipping. “Even though neither of us is Jewish, I think we can dip apple for the sweet justice she brought.”

He told me something he’d read on twitter: “There’s a Jewish teaching that if somebody dies, as she did, right as the sun sets and Rosh Hashanah begins, God has held them back because they are most needed.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I don’t find any solace in the idea of God or Jewish legends.” I felt like a jerk as soon as I said that, because Charlie was only trying comfort me.

He squeezed my hand and said, “I agree with you,” and then added, “by the way, I don’t think the Jews have legends; they have interpretations and teachings.”

That correction was so Charlie, I couldn’t help but laugh.

We went to bed together early and he held me close but let me be quiet. When he turned off the bedside lamp and the dark cloistered us, he whispered right into my ear. “I have the feeling that Clarence Thomas is going to drop dead early in the Biden presidency, and if that doesn’t happen, I believe the Democrats are going to find a way to add Supreme Court justices.”

Charlie has a touching way of trying to make things better that can’t be made better.

This afternoon he brought Roscoe out on the deck to feast on the deliciously fresh air. When I came out, the parrot was perched on the top of the rail, bobbing his head in a regular beat as if he were listening to some secret music. I had a quick vision of his flying off, wishful thinking, I suppose.

I watched as the parrot became aware of me. The music in his head stopped and only his eyes moved.

“Hello, Roscoe.”

The parrot glued his eyes on me. “Good afternoon, Pina.”

His words were polished, with crisp diction like a butler in a parrot’s crackly nasal brogue. He sounded a little like Alfred Hitchcock at the start of his old TV show: “Good evening ladies and gentlemen.”

Actually, I’m happy he’s stopped saying, Pina, Pina, Pina, where you beena? every time he sees me.

Charlie, settled in a director’s chair, watched me watching the parrot. Clearly he was taking Roscoe out for a test drive for my benefit, and he seemed the most anxious of the three of us. Here we were again in a group of three. Sally had driven out to the Sonoma coast for the day and I wondered if she was becoming so lonesome for the ocean that she’d just keep on driving back to the Lost Coast.

I mentioned to Charlie that with Roscoe and me he had another group of three.

“Not according to Wallace Stevens,” he said and quoted the poet’s fourth way of looking at a blackbird.

A man and a woman

Are one.

A man and a woman and a blackbird

Are one.

“So you think that applies to parrots?” I asked.

Charlie nodded.

Now Roscoe took charge of his own head and nodded meaningfully at me. “Pina,” he said, “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

I stared at Charlie. It seemed like some kind of ventriloquism was going on. I knew Charlie had been a special effects star for years at Industrial Light and Magic, but this was too much. The words were actually coming out of Roscoe’s mouth, but less surprising than the words were the parrot’s affect. How did the gray bird convey such sympathy?

“My loss?” I asked.

Roscoe began nodding his head again, as if it was some strange way he had of winding himself up. The five words of his answer were recited solemnly with a pregnant pause between each: “Charlie   told   me   RBG   died.”

That’s when I went off on Charlie. “How dare you turn Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s death into a farce?”

“That wasn’t my intention.”

“Well, you managed to do it. Take your damn pet to the freak show.”

With that Charlie signaled to the parrot and it flew to his outstretched forearm. I glared at Charlie as he took the bird inside and spent the next hour alone on the deck, crying my eyes out.