Everybody was fed up with the pandemic. Even those of us who had not gotten sick had had our lives upended. Everything was closed, nobody could work, kids couldn't go to school. You couldn't go to a restaurant, a bar, you had to stand six feet apart to talk to somebody. Friendships were deteriorating, people were losing their fucking minds. Gaining weight, killing each other, drugs and alcohol were over the top.
I was sitting at the kitchen table going through email. It was a chilly winter day, windy; the sun was out but it brought no relief. I could feel the cold coming through the wall at my back. The neighborhood listserve was its usual barrel of laughs. Somebody had seen a fox in their yard and there were more than seventy comments, about evenly balanced between terror that your German shepherd was at risk if you let him outside and people pointing out that foxes are part of nature, and were here first, and don't actually hurt pets. About every two weeks this same argument broke out - and you should have seen them when somebody saw a coyote!
I scrolled down to the free stuff. I keep an eye on these things. Today there was an unusual object, a kind of wooden guitar stand. It looked like an antique, maybe cherry wood, hand-tooled. It was free, and had just been posted an hour earlier, so it was probably still available. This looked like something my buddy Lumpy the bass player could use, so I texted the seller. The reply was, "It will be on the porch, come get it," with an address.
My wife agreed it looked good so I grabbed my keys and jacket. "Don't forget a mask," she called out as I shut the door behind me.
The GPS brought me around to a clean suburban neighborhood on the other side of the creek, houses a few hundred thousand dollars more than mine. "Your destination is on the left," the phone said, and I did not see the guitar stand so I went up a block to turn around and came back to the address.
Wouldn't that be fucked-up if they gave it away already, in the ten minutes since they told me to come get it? I parked my little red sports car in front of the house, pulled on my cloth mask, and got out. They had a "Black Lives Matter" sign in the yard and a little library box at the sidewalk, but I did not see the wooden stand. I was going to knock on the door and ask but as I got near the door I saw it, on the front porch. I didn't want to look like I was stealing it, so I knocked lightly on the door to tell the people I was taking their stand.
There was no response, so I picked up the thing and started walking. Then the door opened. "Oh hi," I said, "We had messaged earlier, I was just picking up your guitar stand."
"Oh, good," a woman's voice said through the screen. The door opened and she stepped out. "We just have so much junk, you know, we have to get rid of stuff sometimes."
"Perfect," I said, "I know a guy looking for something exactly like this."
The woman was not a real head-turner, you might say. She was a little younger than me, with a kind of attractive streak of white in her black hair. She was wearing a sort of housedress or nightgown thing, pale blue with dark blue flowers, I guess, some kind of pattern, and was holding a mask to her face - it had straps to hook over the ears but she did not have it hooked. Obviously she doesn't wear it in the house by herself. One of the funny things about the pandemic was clothes. Sales of work clothing had plummeted, sales of sweat pants hit historic highs. Nobody changed clothes from day to day - why would you? And the funniest thing of all was bras. Women everywhere, staying in the house all day, had rebelled against their bras. Nobody wore them, except for the occasional Zoom meeting where somebody could tell, or the rare trip to the grocery store. And often not even then, bless their hearts.
The woman asked me, "Are you a musician?"
"Yes, actually I am," I said. "But it's not for me."
"I see, yeah you said that," she said. "Well it's a pretty good stand. It's different." Chatty broad, okay, everybody's lonely these days. I'd been feeling a little stir-crazy myself. "We have a lot of instruments in the house," she said. "We collect them, but we don't play them." She laughed apologetically. As she talked I could see her breasts swaying under the fabric of the gown she was wearing. Her garment, whatever you call it, was nothing sexy, really, just a polyester thing like you might find at Target. The fabric was pleated like a paper fan and as she held her mask to her face with one hand the folds swirled around her in an ethereal way, rocking slowly with her breasts, like waves out on the ocean. "We have an old guitar," she said, "From the sixties. I don't know if it's any good."
A word of explanation for the uninitiated. It is an actual fact that across America there are incredible, and often incredibly valuable, old guitars under beds and in closets. Some kid got it in high school when he wanted to be Buddy Holly or Elvis or the Beatles, and then he went off to college and got a job, a family, and this beautiful, great-sounding, valuable guitar is sitting there taking up space, nearly forgotten. Just like new, hardly played, rusty old strings. So when she said this my ears perked up. "Is it electric, or acoustic?" I asked.
"I guess it's electric," she said, "I don't know how to play it. Would you like to see it?"
The answer to that question was obviously yes.
She stood there a second, looking me over suspiciously, then shrugged. "You look like I can trust you," he said. "My husband is in Oregon. Come on in." She opened the door and went inside first.
The house looked like I imagine all the houses on this block look inside. Pictures were hung straight, the seascape behind the couch. Decorative plates, framed family photos, a piano in the living room. There were a couple of violins and a ukulele hanging on the wall, tilted to carefully measured casual-looking angles. "Don't mind the mess," she said, as any wife on this block would say in her spotless house. "I was not expecting company." She led me back down a hallway. "It's in his room, I guess he got this when he was a teenager. I never saw him play it."
The husband's room was also immaculate, with an antique dresser that had more framed family photos on it. I couldn't really imagine living here, it was way too tidy for me. I figured his socks were all sorted and neat in an upper drawer, underwear in another. She pushed the door open and waved me in. "We have separate rooms," she said. "Probably for ten years now."
"I see," I said.
"Is that too much information?" Detecting that I was not offended, she went on, obviously glad to have someone to talk to. "I never would have imagined it. Maury used to be quite the frisky young man, I could hardly keep up with him."
She was standing beside the bed, still holding the cloth mask to her face - I don't know why she didn't hook it over her ears - and a sunbeam was shining through the window behind her. The nightgown she was wearing was a filmy veil over her body, which was now entirely revealed by the sunbeam piercing through the pliant fabric. The silhouette of her flesh moving underneath her garment was strangely romantic, sort of innocent, very sexy. I'm sure she was unaware of the effect the sun was having.
"Well, age is hard on all of us," I said. "We can't stay young forever."
