Today I am at loose ends, after giving myself a two-week holiday from my clients. Almost all of them seemed happy for a break. A person can only work so much on her frailties. The only client who’s seemed to regret the interruption is good old Aubrey, who’s actually made strides with his stutter. He’s had two recent setbacks, however: his mother died of COVID in a Berkeley nursing home, and then he got furloughed from his job. The man still has difficulty pronouncing my name. “Pa-pina,” he said during our last session, “can’t you make an excep . . . an exception for me? You’re the only thing that . . . that . . . that keeps me ce –ce-centered.”

I insisted that I needed the break. When I expressed sympathy for his mother’s passing for a second time, Aubrey said, “That woman was a ba-bitch, Pina. She always made fun of me, made fun of her own . . . her own son. Ba-bitch.” 

We were out of time, but that didn’t seem a good place to leave it. I asked Aubrey if he had any plans for the holiday. 

“I might do anything, Pa-pina. I’m a free man now. My mother, the ba-bitch, left . . . left me her how-house and her stock . . . stock holdings. One thing for . . . for sure, I’m not going to take shit . . . take shit from anybody. I will miss  . . . miss you, Pa-pina.”

After Charlie leaves to meet some detective in town, I decide to drive to the city. I’ve become a little homesick for San Francisco and have thought again about renting an apartment there, seeing if I can get Charlie to divide his time with me in the city. It’s a discussion I’ve been afraid to bring up as Charlie and I repair our relationship.

Musing about this upsets me and I respond with an odd homing instinct by taking the exit for San Rafael, the small city in which I grew up, and where I lived during my marriage to Marco. The problem is that I’d just as soon keep the ghosts of San Rafael at a distance. The solution, I decide, is to head to Fairfax and pick up a Reuben at Gestalt Haus. I turn onto Sir Francis Drake and suddenly I am all appetite. The Gestalt Haus Reuben is perhaps the best example of the species I’ve ever had. On marbled bread, with a glut of corned, Swiss cheese, and sauerkraut, it is so large that half of it could be today’s lunch and half tomorrow’s. 

But, alas, Gestalt Haus is closed and it appears that closure might be its permanent fate. When there is so much to grieve—345,000 deaths from the virus when I last looked—is it unseemly to mourn the demise of a watering hole, beloved to bicyclists and lovers of beer, sausage, and deli sandwiches, an establishment that bills itself with endearing humor as The French Laundry of Sausage? I think not. 

And now I’m left with the matter of my appetite. I walk the three or four blocks of the village looking for some takeout that appeals. Nada. Where the hell am I going next? Such pressing problems. I decide, finally, that a walk on Limantour Beach at Point Reyes might clèar my head. Before leaving Fairfax I call ahead to the Bovine Bakery in Point Reyes Station and order my consolation prize: two croissant sandwiches, one with chèvre and spinach, the other, scallions and comté. 

The drive from Fairfax to Point Reyes is filled with memories from my childhood and beyond that I am unable to steer clear of. I suppose that is to be expected at the end of a year that featured the Death March as its theme song. I drive past the one-block town of Lagunitas, the site of my first car crash. I backed away from the lone grocery store, without looking, and rammed an old man’s weathered pickup, as he was about to pull in. My friend Denise was with me and, though we were both sixteen, we’d each managed to buy a pint of Southern Comfort. After backing into the truck, I whispered frantically to Denise, “Hide those bottles under the seat,” and then climbed out of my car—an ancient Oldsmobile Cutlass that my father thought would be a good “learner” car for me—and apologized to the old man, who’d stepped from his truck and actually tipped his seed cap. “Young lady,” he said, “looks like we was both in the wrong place at the wrong time. The good thing about it is you managed to wake me up.” He laughed at his own joke and then bent over to consider his fender. “Don’t see any damage here worth enumerating.” He turned to my Olds. “Looks like you lost a taillight. You’re gonna want to have that replaced. Other than that it’s a matter of cosmetics, young lady, and I guess you know more about that than me.”

“So we don’t have to call the police?” I asked and held my breath.

“I don’t see why we would.” He tipped his cap again and, as he climbed back into the truck, said, “Watch out now. Next time it might be me backing into you.”

At that moment in my life, when I suspected anybody over the age of twenty of being an alien, the old man’s kindness brought tears to my eyes. 

Instead of driving home, Denise and I pushed off to a spot along Lagunitas Creek, where we managed to polish off one pint of Southern Comfort between us. I can still remember passing the bottle back and forth and practically gagging on the stuff as I wiped my lips on the tails of my summer blouse. The Southern Comfort was Denise’s idea. She said, “If it’s good enough for Janis Joplin, it’s good enough for us.” That sweet hooch, along with a long crooked joint, left us both sizzled and we were wise enough to save the extra bottle for another time. It was a warm August day and we went skinny-dipping in the creek, wishing a couple of boys would come along and join us. 

Now the winding road that passes through the redwoods of Samuel Taylor State Park reminds me of my family and the times the three of us camped in the park. My father grew up in Italy with a love for American cowboys. Camping was as close as he could get to the wild frontier. Conflating the wilderness with this particular campground, which always seemed to be filled with screaming teenage boys, took some imagination, and yet being less than a half hour drive from our home in San Rafael, made Samuel Taylor my father’s favorite spot. Back in those days you didn’t need to make a reservation; there always seemed to be an open campsite. My dad would come home from work on a Friday afternoon and say, “Pack your sleeping bag, Pina, we’re going camping.” My mother, a good sport in these matters, brought a tin of Folgers—she carried teabags for herself so she wouldn’t have to drink the cowboy coffee—and filled the Igloo with eggs, bacon, potatoes, and the ubiquitous package of Oscar Meyer hotdogs. I was responsible for making sure every piece of the camp cook set was clean. My father stacked a supply of firewood, which he kept under a tarp in the back of the station wagon. You were only allowed to burn presto logs at the campsite. I suppose that sneaking some cherry wood into our campfire was his way of being an outlaw. We also fished without licenses, though rarely caught anything. One time my dad landed a good-sized trout and it became part of our supper. He charred it on the outside and it was raw inside. I remember pushing hunks of it off my tin plate when he wasn’t looking and grounding them under my shoes.

My father wore his cowboy hat, an outsized black Stetson, on our camp outs. When I was young he looked heroic to me in the hat, but by the time I hit middle school, by which time my parents embarrassed me, nothing underscored what yokels they were as much as the black Stetson.

How many times did Marco and I take this road from Point Reyes Station to Limantour? It was our favorite beach. Today it is practically empty. Marco was a man who liked to hold hands. As I walk north along the beach, I feel the weight of my empty hand. Twenty minutes north I spot a pod of whales. The sight of three or four breaching gets me excited. I want to believe that Marco sent them, but I know better. I wish I had someone with me to share my excitement. That somebody would be Charlie. There is no bringing back the dead. That I’d choose Charlie, from all living beings, for company—that’s the way I phrase it in my head—is a genuine comfort and strikes me as a line from a marriage vow.

The whales must be feeding because they’re not heading north or south, just breaching in some kind of cosmic choreography with an occasional spout slowly feathering into the air. I can’t gauge their distance—two hundred yards or much further? How close must I be to see such particularities? 

I had questions along the same lines the other week when Charlie and I climbed to an open spot in the Sonoma Mountain Cemetery to gaze at the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. Being high above the lights of Sonoma gave us the illusion that we were closer to the planets than to the town. It was a cool night; we brought a blanket, a thermos of coffee, and a flask of cognac. With our bare eyes we could see the fat dot of Jupiter and the blurred suggestion of Saturn to its left. Then Charlie surprised me: he pulled a good pair of field glasses from a case in his pocket. With those the distance shrank; our vision became crisper and our imaginations more daring: Charlie saw all the rings of Saturn and I had no doubt that my enhanced eyes actually perceived the fluid dry-ice atmosphere of Jupiter, which Charlie kept referring to as the gas giant. He explained that both planets consisted of mostly helium and hydrogen, and that neither had a hard surface. I couldn’t understand how a thing could exist, especially such a huge thing, without a hard surface.

At some point I asked the distance we were from the planets and Charlie, like a guy who had studied for the quiz, said, “Jupiter is between 365 and 601 million miles away depending on our respective orbits of the sun.” 

I took a good slug of brandy and asked, “Well, how many miles away is it now?”

Charlie picked up the binoculars and took a long look. In his British astronomer voice, he said, “It appears to be 385 million miles away at the moment.” 

I demanded to know how the human eye could see something 385 miles away.

“We can hardly not see what’s right in front of us,” he responded in his arch brogue. “It gives you a sense of just what insignificant specks we are in the universe.”

Charlie poured himself a cup of coffee; I wasn’t sharing the cognac. 

“It’s a comfort,” I said, “to know that no matter how much you fuck up your life it doesn’t even register the tiniest blip in the universe.”

“Oh, Pina,” Charlie said, in his own sweet voice, “you’re always looking on the bright side.”

There is no cell service out as far as Limantour Beach, not that I wanted any. My phone doesn’t start dinging with missed calls for quite a few miles, and I don’t stop to respond to Charlie’s numerous calls until I reach Petaluma.

“Where are you, Pina?” Charlie shouts. “Where are you?”

It is hard to go from the solitude of the beach to Charlie’s frenetic talk. I do my best not to take it in, once he checks off the list of all the terrible things that could have happened that didn’t. I feel badly for whatever has made him so anxious, but he tells me that he can’t explain until we are together in the same room. He keeps asking if I am safe. I wonder if he’s had a nervous breakdown, and if so what’s driven him to it. He keeps talking some nonsense about Jesus being killed. I tell him that I will be home soon.