The policemen directed them to leave. They took a different route home, zigzagging through narrower, tree-lined streets, stopping to discuss the architecture of houses they’d never thought to notice before, even though they’d lived almost all their lives in these few square miles of their megacity. Quite by accident, they found themselves on a road that was filled with walkers, several of whom they knew. Everyone waved, everyone was delighted to see one another and made a great show of keeping a distance, even when they weren’t. Preadolescents zipped past on bicycles, unaccompanied by adults. It was the closest thing to a street party this neighborhood had ever known. Azra shouted a greeting to an old school friend, unconcerned by the pitch of her voice, the attention she might draw to herself. Her handbag swung loosely by her side, unclutched. In that moment, the world felt like a better place than it had ever been—generous, safe.
When this is all over, maybe we can sometimes walk here instead of endlessly round the track in the park, Zohra said. Maybe, Azra said.
kept a diary during the lockdown. I began by writing the date of my own personal shutdown—March 11, 2020—and the place, Highland Park, Los Angeles. On the first day, I copied down a sign on a camper van I saw that morning: “Smile. You Are Being Filmed.”
After that first entry, I could think of nothing else. Nothing much happened after that.
I wish I could say that I was up each morning writing a new chapter, but I lazed in bed. Later, as the day wore on, I grew busy deploring my boyfriend’s taste in music, made more appalling by the new speakers H. had bought that blared out clearly what had once blared out vaguely.
Mankind is divided into those who started to listen to Bach and Beethoven in their late teens and those who did not. H. did not; instead he had a huge collection of vinyl, hardly any of which was classical, and not much of which I liked.
And H. and I had not read any of the same books. His first language was French, and his mind was speculative. Thus, in one room he was busy with Jacques and Gilles while in another I was reading Jane and Emily.
He read Harry Dodge; I read David Lodge.
* * *
There was a writer who lived in a small midwestern city. I had devoured his two books and liked how emotionally exposed he became in his fiction. Even though I had never met him, I did really want him to be happy. I was delighted to read online that this writer had a boyfriend and to see some posts from him about the happy domestic life they were living. H. had actually met him, and he, too, was pleased that the writer had settled down with someone he loved.
Soon, we began to check out the writer’s posts. His boyfriend had flowers waiting for him when he returned to their house. We looked at a photo of the flowers.
And the novelist made cookies, or so his post told us, and he and his boyfriend watched films every night that were a revelation to them both.
* * *
For all of us, there are shadow people, shadow places, shadow episodes. Sometimes they take up more space than the paleness of what actually happens.
That paleness makes me shiver, but the shadows make me wonder.
I loved thinking about the shadow novelist and his boyfriend.
And I tried to imagine a narrative of domestic bliss, sharing space and music and novels and movies, posting online about our love.
But no matter how I dreamed, we could not actually agree at night about which movie to watch. When we decided, Week 1, to look at films set in Los Angeles, they included Mulholland Drive and Body Double, the first too slow-moving for me and the second too rhetorically ominous. H. not only loved both movies but, because he knew about film, wished to have a discussion about how images from one film could bleed into another, how many hidden references and secret gestures a film contained.
I had only ever gone to the cinema to amuse myself. The hour before bedtime became tense as H. followed me around the house with news of what these films really meant.
That was when I loved him most: He was so earnest and excited by film, by the ideas and images generated on the screen, so eager to keep the conversation at a serious level.
But on the bad nights, I could not help myself. I could only respond: “That film is rubbish! It is an insult to my intelligence!” in response to his detailed and pertinent quotes from Godard and Godot and Guy Debord.
* * *
I went through the names of the great gay couples from history—Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy. Why were they always cooking together, or making drawings of each other, or one writing songs for the other to sing?
Why were we the only ones like us?
It might have been a good time for me and H. to behave like adults for a change and finally and joyfully begin to read each other’s favorite books.
Instead we read more of our own favorite books. When it came to culture, he was Jack Sprat, who could eat no fat, and I was his wife, who could eat no lean.
* * *
What I enjoy most is when something that I take seriously is laughed at by someone else, or when something I think ludicrous is taken seriously by all others.
When the lockdown began, I thought the L.A. River and all its tributaries were comic. Soon I would learn the truth. And when the whole social distancing was all halfway over, I hoped never to hear another note, if note was the word, of a song called “Little Raver,” by Superpitcher, much favored by H. and played loudly by him.
I cannot drive and cannot cook. I cannot dance. I cannot scan a page or send a photo by email. I have never willingly used a vacuum cleaner or knowingly made a bed.
It is hard to justify all of this to someone in whose house you live. I hinted that all my failures came from a maimed childhood, and when that did not work, I suggested, without having any evidence, that untidiness belonged to deep thinkers, people willing to change the world. Marx was untidy; Henry James was a slob; there is no evidence that James Joyce ever cleaned up after himself; Rosa Luxemburg was really messy, not to speak of Trotsky.
I did try to be good. Every day, for example, I emptied the dishwasher. And a few times each day, I made coffee for H.
One day, however, when H. said that it was time to vacuum the house, I replied that the task might usefully wait until I was away somewhere doing a reading or teaching.
“Read the papers,” H. said. “Away is a thing of the past.”
It sounded like an accusation for a moment, and then, as H. gazed at me Gallically, it came to sound like a threat.
Soon the vacuum cleaner thundered through the house.
* * *
I loved days when we had nothing to do, with many days ahead the same, and we were like an elderly couple who had grown mellow and wise and could finish each other’s paragraphs. Our only problem was that we couldn’t agree on anything much.
We were happy in the lockdown, happier than we had been for a while. But I wished we could be happy in the easy, contented ways that the novelist and his boyfriend were happy and that other gay couples were happy.
I found a place in the garden to sit and read. Often, I remained outside as music blared from inside. House music, you could call it maybe; but also loud music.
One day, as I went inside, I found that H. was lifting the needle from a record. He was doing this, he said, because he did not want to annoy me with the music. I felt all sorry and tried to pretend the music did not, in fact, annoy me at all.
“Why don’t you put it back on?” I asked.
For a second, and then two, I found the music exciting. My inner teenager woke up for a minute. The music was by Kraftwerk. I stopped and began to listen. I smiled in approval at H. I almost liked it, and then I made the mistake of attempting to dance to its rhythms.
The only thing I know about dancing comes from the film Saturday Night Fever, which I was forced to attend in 1978 when I had charge of a group of Spanish students in Dublin. I hated the film, and loathed it even more when a colleague, a crypto-semiot
ician, explained its inner workings to me in slow English.
But all I knew about dancing came from that film. Over the years, I had indeed hung out in discos, but I was more interested in back rooms, side glances, and full-frontal alcohol than in the niceties of dancing.
Nonetheless, I tried, as H. looked on. I moved my feet to the rhythm of the music and waved my arms around.
H. tried not to wince.
Quietly, like a guilty thing, I crept away. I felt like Mr. Jones in the song: “Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?”
I understood that, rather than me mocking Kraftwerk, as I had been doing up to now, it was Kraftwerk mocking me.
“You are not cool enough to listen to us,” whispered Kraftwerk.
In the garden, in a hammock hanging in a pomegranate tree, I read deep in Henry James.
* * *
We ordered bicycles online. I dreamed of us zooming through the suburban streets, passing the frightened bungalows, people cowering inside, zapping from channel to channel, hoping for redemption and washing their hands with prayerful zeal.
Through the window, they could, I imagined, see us freewheel by, like the cover image for some forgotten piece of vinyl.
A few days earlier than expected, the two bikes arrived. The only problem was that they needed to be assembled.
As H. began to study the manual, I tried to slip away. When he made clear that he would need me close by as he began the mammoth task, I insisted that I had urgent emails to send. But it was no use. He demanded that I stand there and look concerned as he lay on the ground and sweated and swore, asking God in heaven why the manufacturers had sent the wrong bolts and nuts, and not enough screws.
I imagined the online novelist, the happy one, sharing this task with his boyfriend, both in unison finding the right screws and realizing, as I did but H. did not, that the thin metal rods that H. said had been included by mistake had, in fact, been provided to stabilize the front wheels. I thought of Benjamin Britten, Gertrude Stein, Christopher Isherwood, and their partners. They would know how to look involved.
Since H. was in such a rage, not only against the bikes themselves and the factory that had made them but also against me, whose idea all of this was, I decided it was best to summon up a version of myself that I last used in school when I did not know why x equaled y.
I looked dumb, but sad and humble as well, mildly placid, but deeply engaged.
Soon, after much struggle and sighing, the bikes worked, and with helmets and masks on, we set out, flying down a hill with joy and glee and controlled abandon, like two men in an advertisement for posh soap.
It was years since I was on a bike. Something happened to my coiled-up spirit as I let the machine glide down Adelante to the beautifully named Easy Street and then to York and then to Marmion Way and then Arroyo Seco Park. When it was not downhill, it was flat. There was no traffic, and there were only some bewildered-looking pedestrians on the sidewalks, with masks on.
I did not know that a tributary of the L.A. River ran through the park and that it had a cycle lane on one of its banks. It was hard to use ordinary words about this so-called river. It is named the Arroyo Seco, which means “dry stream,” and it is indeed dry, or dry enough, and it doesn’t really have banks, since it is not really a river.
Los Angeles will be lovely when they finish it.
Even though it had recently rained, this fenced-off drain soon to join the river with the grandiose name still had no water. The L.A. River and its little tributary were in pain, I had always believed, calling out for mercy.
But now, as I nudged my bicycle onto the path, I felt that I had found some element of the city that had been hidden from me. No car could come here. No images of this strange, sad spectacle would ever be sent out into the world. There would be no: “Come to L.A.! Ride your bike by a river!” No one in their right mind would be here.
But it was almost beautiful. I should not have laughed at the L.A. River.
As I harbored these deep and liberating thoughts, H. sped by. When I looked behind, I saw the novelist and his partner, the happy ones, the online ones, in the form of ghosts, followed by all the happy homosexual pairs in history, cycling as best they could. I changed gear and moved farther ahead of them, following H., trying as best I could to catch up.
March 12, 2020
Fact: The baby has a fever.
Evidence: Two thermometers produce a succession of worrisome readings. 103.9. 104.2. 104.8.
Evidence: The baby is hot. The baby’s cheeks are red. The baby is trembling. The baby, when he nurses, is nursing askew: mouth fluttering incorrectly, lips slack, hands and arms limp. The baby, instead of crying, is mewing.
Fact: Babies frequently get fevers.
Evidence: Both of the babies in the household have gotten fevers regularly over the time that babies have resided in the household. Three years and nine months is the length of time that babies have resided in the household.
Belief: The 3.75-year-old does not have a fever.
Evidence: The 3.75-year-old’s forehead is cool.
Methodology: The 3.75-year-old’s mother tiptoes into her room, breath held, avoiding certain floorboards, lowering lips to skin, lips being the best fever-readers on the human body.
Question: What thermometer reading necessitates a visit to the pediatric emergency room?
Research Process: The baby’s parents conduct several internet searches using the following phrases:
Pediatric temperature emergency room
104.8 fever E.R.
Answer: The internet returns two conflicting pieces of advice.
A. Go right now
B. Give Tylenol; call doctor
Response: The baby’s parents look at each other silently for six seconds, considering more facts.
Fact: There is a new disease in the world.
Fact: It has entered the human population.
Fact: The baby’s father was notified, yesterday, that three of his co-workers have this disease.
Acknowledgment: The timing looks bad.
Rebuttal: Babies get fevers. Babies frequently get fevers. The baby has no other symptoms aside from a fever. Most fevers in babies are not caused by viruses that have recently entered the human population. The other three members of the baby’s family do not, so far, show symptoms.
Unknowns: Infectiousness of virus. Disease course. Time from exposure to symptom manifestation. Typical expression of disease in adults and children. Short-term and long-term effects on both. Typical trajectory. Lethality.
Declaration: “There are a lot of unknowns here,” the baby’s mother says.
Considerations: It’s 1:45 in the morning. The baby’s sister is asleep. One parent would have to drive the baby, alone, to the children’s hospital. The other parent would—
Interruption: The baby vomits. The vomiting is matter-of-fact and unviolent. A bored opening of the mouth. The expulsion of the contents of the baby’s stomach. Following the vomiting, the baby wilts. The baby falls asleep.
Considerations (cont.): —have to stay behind with the baby’s sister.
Further considerations: Is it a greater risk to take this baby into a medical setting than to monitor him at home? If what the baby has is not the new disease—could the baby or his parent actually get the new disease, from the medical setting?
Decision: The baby’s parents choose Option B. Infant Tylenol is administered. At 1:50 a.m., the doctor is called.
Correction: It is not the doctor. It is the answering service. The doctor will call back.
Interlude: The parents clean the floor. They dim the lights in the living room. The father lies down on the sofa, baby on chest. The father notes the heat of the baby’s body, improbable, heat like a kettle, an engine. Heat derived from work, from spent energy, the work of the new little body going to war. The father remembers the baby’s first days, recalls swollen eyelids that opened and closed with real effort, underwa
ter movements of fingers, considers how bodies of newborns are built like shields, the torso an inverted triangle, the limbs insubstantial. This thought reassures him. They are designed to survive, the father tells himself—an affirmation. The baby is 10 months old now. The baby has grown. His body is plump, his weight, on the chest of his father, both comfort and alarm, a reminder of all that has been invested into the baby’s body (7,315 ounces of milk from the body of his mother, 722 raspberries, 480 ounces of yogurt, 120 bananas, 84 small pieces of cheese, 15 packets of small air-like food items called “yogurt melts,” of which this baby is very fond, one taste of cake that the baby’s sister furtively smuggled him), and aside from what’s been physically invested into this baby’s body, there is also the fact of their love for him. For his laugh. For the maw of his mouth, the three teeth the baby has sprouted, the way he has learned in the past week how to give a kiss, the way the kiss is deposited, open-mouthed, on the recipient’s cheek—and the hand of the baby, which the father now touches, which the baby has recently learned how to wave. On his father’s chest, all parts of the baby are still now. All parts of the father are still. The mother sits in a chair, watching them. Watching her phone. Awaiting the call of the doctor. Three times, she checks to ensure her phone is not set to silent.
Observation: An hour passes. The house is quiet. Maybe, thinks the baby’s mother, it will all be—
Interruption: The baby vomits. Onto the father’s chest. The sofa. The rug. The baby lifts his head to observe what he’s done. Lowers it directly into the pool of the liquid that has come out of his body. Returns to sleep.
The Decameron Project Page 3
