Waiting Out the Plague (Norris)

Park Avenue South looking north to Grand Central, 3/26/2020.

Ever since I have had to self-promote for my publisher (which I know is a wonderful problem), whenever an interview or an event is cancelled, instead of being disappointed I am thrilled. One less occasion for dressing up and being nervous—hurray! On March 12th, I was scheduled to meet in midtown with members of the I.R.P., the Institute for Retired Professionals. The I.R.P. organizes classes, or study groups, for people who have retired but are not dead yet, and indeed are still curious, and want to stay vital and learn new things. This was a unit on The New Yorker. A neighbor who is a member told them I had worked there as a copy editor and might have some stories to tell.

The I.R.P. rents space from the City University of New York at 25 West 43^rd Street, on the eighteenth floor—exactly where I started my career at The New Yorker. On the morning of the class, scheduled for nine-thirty, I got up at six, showered, had coffee, reviewed my material, and was about to get dressed and hop on the subway when the phone rang: the class was cancelled. Yes! The coronavirus quarantine had not yet gone into effect, but CUNY was closing, and the intrepid retired people had to follow suit.

Soon I began to feel guilty about the class, deprived of their New Yorker gossip, so I sent along a PDF of the flow chart—an ancient document tracing the path of a New Yorker article from manuscript to magazine—knowing full well that it meant nothing without someone to explain it, and almost instantly I received a request to reschedule the session via Zoom. Damn.

I had a chance to familiarize myself with Zoom through my weekly Italian class when the teacher suggested that we convene online and read selections from Boccaccio’s Decameron. This collection of stories, which I owned in English translation but had never read (in fact, I found it boring), is a little like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, but instead of loquacious pilgrims at the Tabard Inn, Boccaccio’s narrators are refugees from the plague, holed up together in a villa outside Florence. I could not resist an invitation to break my isolation once a week to read The Decameron online in Italian.

Zoom demands that you up your interior-decorating game. The Italian teacher, in Brooklyn, was seated to one side, looking serene, with a patch of pale sky visible through a window behind him, a few luscious leather-bound volumes arranged on a shelf, ivy snaking up a power cord. I knew enough to hide my liquor bottles, and I propped my laptop on the compact O.E.D. so as not to showcase my nostrils, but the background was cluttered and featured a dimly lit kitchen ceiling. My head was framed by the refrigerator.

The morning of the I.R.P. Zoom session, I went through the same routine: got up at six, showered, blow-dried my hair, put on makeup and earrings, and dressed in a loose pea-green top and real pants instead of sweats. The host came onscreen early, before I had made my second cup of coffee, and we kept each other company while first the early birds and then, in a big flurry, the intelligent retired professionals alit in their little Zoom boxes. They were friendly—in person they might even have been warm—but when the Zoom session was over I felt the way I feel after a book event in, say, Baton Rouge: tired, wired, all dressed up with no place to go.

I changed my shirt and bestirred myself to do the laundry. I live in an apartment building in New York, so that meant washing my hands, taking the elevator down to the basement (being careful to press the buttons with my knuckle), sanitizing my hands in the laundry room, washing them again in my apartment, repeating the process for the drying cycle, and repeating it again when it was time to retrieve the laundry, stuffing everything into the hamper and lugging it upstairs to be folded another day. I read the paper and ate lunch (soup and crackers), but finally, at 3:25 PM, I succumbed to a twenty-minute nap. When I woke up, it was three hours later. I wished I had removed my makeup.

Groggy, I kept a date with a friend for cocktails over FaceTime—another experiment. Afterward, wide awake, I clicked on a link to the Pasolini film of The Decameron, which the Italian teacher had sent us. From the opening song, with boisterous lyrics that I couldn’t understand, the movie was enthralling—every scene was like an Old Master painting come to life. There was the communal spirit of the Italians, the frank acceptance of sex, the lust of nuns, the beauty of boys, the thieves who genuflect on the way out of a church after robbing it. It is raunchy, funny, full of successful scheming. Pasolini himself plays a muralist, completing two parts of a giant triptych in a church. It ends: “Why create a work of art when dreaming about it is so much sweeter?”

Nothing has ever made me want to be Italian more.

Mary Norris grew up in Cleveland and lives in New York. Her book Greek to Me, which Steven Rowley described in Entertainment Weekly as “a wholly original hybrid, part travelogue, part celebration of language, with plenty of gods, muses, and wine,” will be published in paperback on April 14th.