Fourteen Days

THE DAYS WERE GETTING LONGER, AND THE SEVEN O’CLOCK COMMOTION was now happening just before sunset instead of at dusk. This evening was the most beautiful I could recall in years, with bloodred clouds overspreading the city that cast a fierce glow downward into the streets as we banged our pots and cheered. It was like being underneath a huge fire.

After the city went quiet, as the lightshow reached its peak, a commotion came from the street below. Out in the Bowery, a man was shouting into a cell phone. At first I wondered if someone had just discovered Gund’s body after all. But from the disjointed phrases floating up, it appeared the man’s partner in an apartment nearby was dead or dying of Covid and he’d fled to the street to call 911. Everyone’s faces on the roof were imprinted with horror as we realized what was happening, as the faint, desperate voice drifted across the rooftop. Soon enough, we heard an ambulance siren coming up the Bowery and halting nearby, and then the blare of radios and EMTs shouting to one another. Nobody went to the parapet to watch. Ten minutes later, the siren started up with a series of whoops and faded away down the Bowery, and all was quiet again.

La Reina said, quietly, “God just gave the rabbit box another turning over.”

Monsieur Ramboz eventually cleared his throat. “I think we’re doing something extraordinary up here by telling stories in the face of this goddamned disease.” He added, “Maybe we should start recording them for posterity.”

“Record us?” said Vinegar. “No way.”

“I appreciate that sentiment,” Prospero said. “But what’s happening on this rooftop is an assertion of our humanity against the terror and banality of a virus. It shouldn’t be forgotten.”

“Oh, hush,” said the Lady with the Rings. “I, for one, am going to boycott this rooftop if anyone starts recording.” I couldn’t blame her, after the story we’d just heard.

“If Boccaccio or Chaucer hadn’t written down the stories they’d collected during his lifetime,” Ramboz insisted, “we’d have lost some of the great works of the Western canon.”

There was some eye-rolling at the words “Western canon.” No one else stepped in to agree with Ramboz’s proposal. I, of course, kept my mouth shut—and my recording going.

“I don’t give a la di da about your Western canon or your Chaucer,” said Vinegar. “If you want to leave something permanent behind, write or paint on the wall. Leave our stories alone.”

“The Decameron,” announced the Poet loudly, lounging back in his chair. Heads turned in his direction. He smiled, looking a bit smug. “That’s what’s going on here. I’ve been sitting here, listening to all of you up here, hiding from the plague, telling stories. How could this whole thing not remind us of the Decameron?”

“Okay, but what’s the Decameron?” La Cocinera asked.

“One of the classics in the Dead White Man canon,” said Amnesia.

At this, the Poet let out a long, low laugh that sounded almost like a whistle, which had the effect of shutting everyone up. “Yes.” The Poet looked around.

* * *

“Let me tell you a story about the Decameron. It happened earlier this year, when no one really expected the pandemic to hit America the way it has. We were all just starting to hear the news from Wuhan, and a global disaster was more of a sci-fi theory than this pathetic reality we’re trapped in. Anyway, that’s when the Decameron came up.

“The semester had begun at the downtown experimental college where I teach, and my poetry course had assumed a rhythm. About a fifth of the students had dropped the class. One half didn’t turn in their assignments on time. Two or three would be published. About every five semesters, a student enrolled in my class might become famous. Some of my students had graduated and authored bestsellers, while I, at fifty, am still an experimental poet, a sort of upper bohemian member of a family of workaholics where family members compete with one another over who would put in more overtime. Only in the arts can one be ‘experimental’ without achieving a result. If I were a scientist, I would have lost my funding years ago.

“My brothers are successful. Professionals. So are their wives. Their children have high IQs. They have vacation homes in the mountains outside of New York. They have good connections because they belong to the Anglican Church. One is even a deacon. They own property in Harlem. One brother, Jack Caldwell, is extremely wealthy and teases me about my occupation. He’s been frequently photographed by Bill Cunningham when appearing at charity balls and museum openings, the only time he’s set foot in a museum. Jack’s idea of poetry is ‘Roses are red / Violets are blue. . . .’ My mother, who had bought the property in Queens before those who couldn’t afford New York were driven there, asks me when I am going to get a real job. When will I get married? Should she send her hairstylist to cut my hair? When will I move from my apartment, which had the kind of space my brothers would allot to a closet? My mother and my brothers had my father put away. No, he didn’t have dementia. He couldn’t keep up with their fast pace. What was wrong with him? They consulted a psychiatrist friend of theirs, and between them, they cooked up something based upon the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which deems every act of behavior an expression of a mental illness, and placed him in one of these country-club assisted-living homes. He seems to like it there.

“With my teaching salary, which requires me to teach every other semester, I can barely keep my head above water in the expensive town that Manhattan has become, a trend that began in the 1980s. (I am one of these ‘cult’ writers, which means my books don’t sell.)

“My agent said that the market demanded ‘girlfriend’ books from Black authors and, over drinks uptown, said cynically that white feminist editors and book reviewers were pushing these books as a form of literary reparations because these white women were guilty about the conditions under which the Black domestics were treated by their families. These Black women domestics had paid more attention to these future book reviewers, editors, and bookstore owners when they were infants than their parents had, who were the types that Woody Allen satirized in movie after movie. People who spend more time in therapy than with their kids. One of these women had written that she’d had a ‘nurturing’ experience with a Black woman and was answered by one of these unpredictable outlier Black feminists, who asked, ‘Did this mean that she grew up in a house that employed a Black maid?’ For her impudence, the Black feminist was condemned by the movement, whose leaders, white women, pushed the line that there was solidarity between Latina, Black, and white feminists. She had trouble finding a job until one was available. A low-paying assistant professorship at a community college in Down Creek, Alabama. Things had gotten so bad after salespeople at big publishing companies began to dictate the trends in Black literature that an excellent poet, Rita Dove, a former US poet laureate, came in ninety-ninth among the one hundred best sellers in Black poetry. Ninety-ninth! Like weeds depriving an orchid of water and nutrients.

“My agent is a hypocrite. He could afford a big house upstate due to the best-selling Black women on his list. And his prating about the success of Black women writers was off the mark. Most Black women writers I know are either broke or had to take teaching jobs, like me, to support themselves. But unlike them, I had some support.

“Two of my students, a married couple who were arts administrators, suggested I seek a foundation grant to give me a year off from teaching. I could write a nonfiction book whose subject would instruct whites about how to get along with Black people. Life coaching. (The Black genre—besides ‘girlfriend’ books—that sells.) This was a variation of the old indulgences hustle that helped to build the treasury of the Catholic Church in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. If you buy my product, you’ll only have to spend a year in Purgatory. The new indulgences pitch was, buy my book, and I will absolve you of your racism, a sales pitch marketed brilliantly by the late James Baldwin. Nowadays, there are more Baldwin imitators than those imitating Elvis. They just don’t have his velvety rage and his painter’s eye for detail. Having taught Baldwin’s books, I could tell that most of his fans knew him by his performance rather than the perusal of his books. He studied at Actors Studio, and in the book that lost his sponsorship from ‘the Family,’ the New York literary establishment, the chief character is an actor. It was his best novel. Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone.

“I was entering Starbucks on Delancey Street to buy my usual grande with a shot of espresso when I ran into the students. It was this past January, a month or two before the government declared a national emergency—the same government that has told us that Covid-19 was nothing to worry about. That it would go away. Of course, the first signs of the infection occurred in December, as we all know, but leaders of the government assured us that it was no threat and would only happen to Blue states. This is the kind of thinking that happens when you put your son-in-law in charge of things.

“The grant application, which my students submitted on my behalf, was a masterpiece. They had navigated the complicated eligibility questions, a maze on paper, done to discourage poor arts organizations from applying. All I had to do was to describe my project. And if gyms closed due to the national emergency, reading books about how to get along with Blacks would replace aerobics. I submitted an outline and a budget to the couple. For example, (1) On your first meeting, don’t bring up Black athletes; (2) Don’t ask Black women how much they charge to do laundry; (3) Don’t ask Black men if they had ever used Konkaline; (4) Don’t bring up Elvis Presley. Don’t bring up Oprah; (5) Don’t tell the story about the first Negro you ever met; (6) Instruct your child not to say ‘poopy face’ to describe a Black person; (7) Don’t ask Black women to be your psychiatrist. If you do so, pay them two hundred dollars per hour.

“Where in an earlier time, fledgling organizations were provided with seed money so that they could grow, now an organization has to have a large budget to receive grants. This favored arts organizations like the opera and the ballet. But with the help of my students, all I had to do was sign or initial my name in several places.

“They were carrying huge containers of coffee.

“‘Where are you guys going with all of that coffee?’ I asked.

“‘We’re holding classical readings about the plague now that it has been declared a national emergency.’

“I figured this must have been the husband’s idea. Every time I’d try to introduce Latinx, Black, Asian American, Native American, or feminist poets to my students, he’d object and accuse me of lowering standards or practicing political correctness. I think he was gunning for a job as a critic at City Journal. The guy is one of those Manhattan know-it-all-niks. Kept interrupting the other students and doing a lot of intellectual hotdogging. An obnoxious name-dropper as well. You wouldn’t know that both of his great-grandfathers were radicals who arrived here in the early 1850s. They signed up for the Civil War and were part of a group of immigrants who fought the Confederate army at Gettysburg.

“He submitted poems that were so abstract and dense that they were unreadable. If you asked him to translate, he would say snarkily, ‘That’s for me to know and for you to find out.’ The husband’s poems were more like riddles, but unlike riddles, if an exasperated reader said, O.K. I give up, they’d look like a Philistine. Meanwhile, his spouse used poetry to get even with her father, who is the head of a social media company. One of her poems scolded him for forgetting to send the limousine to take her to an elite school. The school was located three blocks from their Park Avenue apartment.

“‘Why don’t you join us, Professor Caldwell? We’re serving lunch.’

“Why not, I thought. I was supposed to have lunch with my agent, but he’d canceled. He said he had a meeting with an ‘important’ client. I doubt my agent even read the books that afforded him a very handsome living. He’d become an agent by accident. He’d begun as a waiter in the town house where publishing executives had lunch when ‘riot books’ were popular, named that by a publisher’s cynical sales department. They were looking around for Black editors, and as he was pouring water into the glass of one of the executives, a famous publisher, who’d had too much to drink, said, referring to him, ‘How about Jake?’ They took him out of the dining room and made him an editor. He quit publishing after a while and became an agent. He was now in his sixties.

“I asked my student where the readings would be held. He said Kenkeleba House, an art gallery located on East Second Street.

“The building in which the gallery was located has a fabulous history. ‘Known as Henington Hall and located at 214 East Second Street, it was built in 1907 as a six-story and two-story building, according to the building permit. Designed by architect Herman Horenburger for Solomon Henig, the community space was likely created for the area’s Jewish residents. Since 1974, it has been home to the Kenkeleba Gallery.’ The curator of Kenkeleba said that the students could use some space in the gallery to hold their sessions. They were apparently instrumental in getting grants for the gallery.

“These would be after-lunch readings, the model provided by the storytellers who had fled plague-ridden Florence for the countryside from where they conducted the original after-lunch storytelling.

“Lunch would even be provided. Vegetarian pizzas, avocadoes, cucumber sandwiches, broccoli, carrots, celery, cheese, green tea, and Starbucks. There were pound cakes and strawberries for dessert. I decided to attend a meeting. Seated around a long table were attendees who reflected the racial and gender complexion of our Lower East Side, which could be called Nerd City. The couple distributed texts of the readings, which included footnotes that sometimes took more space than the stories.

“The wife spoke first. ‘This was me and my honey’s idea. With the news coming out of Wuhan, we decided that we could read classical literature about earlier plagues—Boccaccio’s Decameron, along with Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Defoe—and become acquainted with one another at the same time.’ Turning to her partner, she asked, ‘Honey, did you want to say something?’

“Of course, there were earlier plagues that had ravaged New York, but as recipients of a Eurocentric education, these two believed that only Europeans produced classics.

“‘We’ll begin with readings from the Decameron.’” He then talked about Boccaccio and his times and the history of the Florence plague. The husband yammered on and on while aiming lecherous glances at the women who were present. After we were given instructions, some attendees hung around to talk. I inspected some of the paintings on the gallery’s walls.

“By the time of the next session, the others had read the sections from the Decameron that the couple had assigned. The husband asked, ‘Is there anything you want to say about what you’ve read?’

“A Black gay playwright spoke up. ‘It’s homophobic. Gay love is called “unnatural.”’

“Where did you find that?

“‘“The Second Story, Day the First.” And when he sends Abraham, The Jew, to Rome, Abraham finds a papal court, “shamefully given to the sin of lust, and that not only in the way of nature but after the Sodomitical fashion, without any restraint of remorse or shamefastness.” This text says that being gay is something to be ashamed of?’

“‘From “The Third Story, Day the Second,”’ a white transgender curator for a major museum added, ‘when the abbot prepares to make love to Alessandro, thinking that Alessandro is a man, he finds that he is a woman. In Boccaccio, some characters are cross-dressers who conceal their identities. We’ve fought hard for the right to our true identities, and you accost us with a story where the characters are afraid to reveal theirs.’

“The husband tried to speak up. ‘Ma’am, we were not aware that—’

“‘My pronouns are they/them. You’re as backward as Boccaccio, you asshole.’

“Seeing this smart-ass squirm as he was fired questions, I thought to myself, ‘This will be fun.’

“A dancer in a wheelchair rolled into the gallery. He was a protégé of David Toole, who championed greater visibility for disabled actors and dancers. His face was red. He could hardly talk; he was so angry. ‘I was disgusted by his using the word “cripple.”’

“‘Where?’ the wife asked.

“The dancer quoted, ‘The First Story, Day the Second’:

“‘Martellino answered, “I will tell thee. I will counterfeit myself a cripple and thou on one side, and Stecchi on the other shall go upholding me, as it were, I could not walk of myself, making as if you would fain bring me to the saint, so he may heal me.”’

“‘In his story—in this passage—disabled are mocked. Having chosen this passage, are you agreeing that the disabled are funny and that people can disguise themselves as disabled to deceive? Do I look funny to you?’

“Before the two arts administrators could defend themselves, a director of a downtown radical theater protested.

“‘The stories are all about rich people. Kings and queens, people with money. Just like today, if this novel coronavirus hits our shores, the rich will flee to the Hamptons or their yachts and leave the poor to suffer the plague. The wealthy will receive experimental cures that are unavailable to the general population. While these few told their stories in a villa in Florence, wheelbarrows full of corpses filled the streets, and families had to keep their distance from one another. Boccaccio favors the rich. Why did you choose this toady for wealthy people? I guess you chose these characters because they reflect the libertarian values of your generation. You have the luxury of wasting our time reading stories.’ He sat down.

“The editor of a Brooklyn arts weekly spoke up. ‘I just came to tell you that I won’t be attending more of these readings.’ He walked up to the graduate students and stood before them. If they were the designated ‘king and queen’ of the gathering—which were the titles given to those who moderated the original Decameron readings—a revolt was already underway. The editor was shaking. ‘Boccaccio, Dante, Chaucer in his Prioress’s Tale, in which Jews murder a young schoolboy for singing a song in praise of the Virgin Mary—all the rest of these bums were anti-Semites. In “The Second Story, Day the First,” we find “that the soul of so worthy and discreet and good a man should go to perdition for default of faith; wherefore he fell to beseeching him on friendly wise leave the errors of the Jewish faith and turn to the Christian verity, which he might see still wax and prosper, as being holy and good, whereas his own faith, on the contrary, was manifestly on the wane and dwindling to nought.”’

“‘The errors of the Jewish faith? Christian verity? For choosing this reading, you must endorse this anti-Semitic view of Judaism.’

“‘But this is the world’s great literature,’ the husband said as the director stormed out.

“An outburst of murmuring followed. I was enjoying this. I got myself a cup of coffee and leaned back in one of the chairs. It was turning out to be quite a show.

“The editor of the feminist journal Représailles spoke up. She was an excellent writer on paper but, performing before a large audience of women, she’d rip men to pieces, and the audience would call for the blood of the species, and there would be foot-stomping and jeers, and the men who were present would receive angry glares. Those who weren’t heading for the exits. She said, her voice quaking, ‘I find Boccaccio to be deeply misogynistic. Women are called “fickle, willful, suspicious, faint-hearted and timorous,” or “men are the head of women, and without their ordinance seldom cometh any emprise of ours to good end; but how may we come by these men?” How dare you ask us to read such woman-hating trash? His Il Corbaccio is even worse in its misogyny. And then you plan to do Chaucer? Another writer who rages against women. He’s the one who translated Romance of the Rose, in which women are, as one scholar put it, “contentious, prideful, demanding, complaining, and foolish; they are uncontrollable, unstable, and insatiable.” He translated these diatribes against women and had to apologize in his poem “The Legend of Good Women.”’ Turning to the wife, she asked, ‘How can you live with this man who would ask us to read such woman-hating rubbish?’

“A Black woman, a costume designer whose works had been used in Broadway plays, spoke up. ‘Why couldn’t you have chosen something American? Like William Wells Brown, a Black playwright who wrote a play called The Escape; or, a Leap for Freedom, about doctors making money from the epidemic of yellow fever. Isn’t that what’s happening with Moderna, Pfizer, Kodak, Johnson and Johnson? Competing to create a vaccine. One that will make their investors profits. Instead of choosing Wells, you choose this Decameron, which is racist.’

“The husband spoke up again. ‘How can that be—there are no Black people in the story.’

“‘That’s just the problem. There were Black women in Florence at the time, yet they don’t appear. Boccaccio didn’t care about Black women.’ She sat down.

“Others objected to the way Boccaccio treated their groups. Lunchtime became dinnertime. It was five p.m., and a Nuyorican muralist was criticizing the couple. He was complaining about the lack of visual representations of plagues. ‘What about Indigenous portrayals of the consequences of the plagues brought to the continent by Europeans? You can find the sick and dying in Aztec drawings.’

“The couple was withering under the assault. The wife looked defeated. Her arrogant husband continued to defend the readings. He termed the gatherings’ criticism of his reading list as part of a cancel-culture literary coup whose effort was to undo the Western canon. One after the other, the protesters explained that their cultures were the ones that were being canceled.

“One Black male writer spoke up. ‘You take a look at the catalog of, say, Princeton and Harvard, and the faculty devoted to Western culture is as big as the personnel for General Motors. Yet you guys are always pretending to be on a mission to salvage Western civilization, which would be nonexistent without Muslim scholars saving works considered pagan by Christian vandals.’

“After all of this, I’d begun to feel sorry for the ‘king and queen.’

“I thought about how they’d prepared that grant for me to take off a year from teaching to write my nonfiction book. My life-coaching book. Telling white people how to get along with Black people. They weren’t charging me anything. I’m the guy who believes that if you rub my back, I rub yours. That’s how things are done in Tennessee, the ancestral home of my parents. I rose.

“‘I think all of you have been unfair to these young people. Why blame them? All of their lives, they’d been led to believe that no civilization exists outside of what American professors call Western civilization. This was the realm of all that was worthy of study and thought. With the “woke” generation, there has been what might be called a recall of Western civilization. Just as a manufacturer would recall an automobile whose brakes were unreliable. We don’t want to get rid of the whole car because of defective brakes.’ Addressing the ‘king and queen,’ I tried to become a mediator. ‘Your critics say that our examination of your author’s bigoted stance against Jews, Blacks, the disabled, and queers shouldn’t exempt them from the kind of criticism they’d receive if they were around today.’ Some members of the gathering nodded.

“‘But isn’t that censorship?’ the husband asked.

“Here I was, throwing him a life raft. Why couldn’t he shut up? I said, ‘Well, if some of our members are into censorship, the Decameron is loaded with didacticism. Lots of proselytizing for Christianity.’

“‘He’s right,’ came a voice. The speaker identified himself as a Russian poet who was here on some kind of artist exchange program. He spoke with an accent.

“Standing, he said, ‘The professor is correct. This Decameron is full of didacticism. The couple that organized this reading can recognize the didacticism in the works of others but not in books adopted by your Western canon. They are immune to such accusations, which is why you did not include in your readers’ list the works of one of the great plague writers, Marina Tsvetaeva.’ He held up her book of poems, Moscow in the Plague Year. ‘You westerners believe that Russian artists are confined to propaganda posters about five-year plans. Unlike Boccaccio, with his beautiful education and middle-class upbringing, or Chaucer, who always had a good job, or Dante, who was city prior to Florence. Not only did she write about the Moscow plague, but she lived a life that was a plague, something that privileged Americans will never understand.

“‘Our people have been tested while you have become soft and flabby. Even if this coronavirus takes root here in America, let’s be realistic. Sacrifice never comes to American shores. In a global pandemic, you will continue to enjoy life in restaurants and taverns and crowd the beaches while swapping breaths filled with bat fluids. Could you have taken high casualties as we did during World War II, our cities surrounded by enemy troops during a cold winter at Leningrad, where we stood fast for over eight hundred days? No, for you Americans, nothing should interfere with your right to party. To observe one of your sacred Capitalist holidays like Black Friday, a perfect image for your society, where, if you are not fast or greedy enough, you get trampled. You Americans don’t know hardship. You’ve become bloated. The airlines have had to create bigger seats to accommodate your fat asses, yet you’re always telling pollsters the country is moving in the wrong direction. Slothful. Pampered. Life has never been a spring break for us Russians. Life was not a social for Marina, yet she produced four-to-six liners that were like little jewels. Her Palm Sunday poem, “1920” for example.’ Reciting the poem, he closed his eyes like Andrei Voznesensky when reciting a poem. He had Voznesensky’s tight, intense face.

“‘“I’ve sunk so low, and you’re so wretched / so isolated and alone / Both of us sold for a farthing despite our good characters / I don’t own so much as a stick / She used the note to light the stove.”’

“‘Unlike the bourgeois men whom you have chosen, men who had patrons like Petrarch, she was so poor that, in 1919, a man who was about to rob her, seeing the miserable conditions under which she lived, offered her money. While your heroes Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer had connections to aristocrats, Marina writes about owning one dress during the Moscow plague. She joked about it.’ He began to recite once more.

“‘“My day: I get up—barest glimmer from the window in the roof—cold—puddles—sawdust—buckets—pitchers—dusters—little girl’s skirts and blouses everywhere. I saw wood. Light the fire. Wash potatoes in icy water and cook them in the samovar, which I keep going with coals taken from the stove. (Day and night, I wear the same dress of fustian, made for Asya in Alexandrov in spring 1917 while she was away, and which, one day, shrunk horrendously. It has burns all over, from falling embers and cigarettes. Before, I kept the sleeves in place with an elastic band. Now they are rolled back and fastened with a safety pin).”’

“‘Marina could not keep her children. She sent her girls to an orphanage. One contracted malaria. The other died of starvation.

“‘Next time you choose an author who wrote about a plague, choose an author who was a victim of one yet found joy and humor. Not one of these men who hobnobbed with royalty. And by the way, women’s rights?’ He looked over at the feminist who had objected to the misogyny of Boccaccio and Chaucer. ‘We were way ahead of you. What better way to empower women than to arm eight hundred thousand with weapons, the number of women who fought alongside men in the war against the Nazi invasion. Russian women fought side by side to repel the enemy at Stalingrad. The Germans, who put German women on a pedestal and treated them in a chivalrous manner while murdering millions of women who were “non-Aryan,” were shocked to see these men and women fighting side by side. One of them, Lidiya Vladimirovna Litvyak, the “White Rose of Stalingrad,” brought down ace German pilots and fought them even when she was heading for the crash that killed her. But some say she wasn’t killed and was last seen escaping Nazi planes in fast pursuit. She was one of the world’s two female fighter aces. You Americans who sacrificed during World War II have forgotten how to suffer. How to go hungry.’

“He sat down. There was silence. I was thinking of Litvyak. Would people in our selfish nation defend each other against the virus as much as the men and women united to defend Stalingrad? I’m sure that others were thinking about that one dress that Marina owned. It became a kind of objective correlative for the meeting. Maybe that’s why the feminist who’d given the husband such a hard time was looking down at her shoes, which she’d probably bought at a seventy percent discount at Saks Fifth Avenue. The men’s wardrobe included wares from Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, and Nike. The clothes were likely made by child labor. Hearing of Marina’s condition, maybe the Black costume designer was thinking of the beautiful health insurance that she received for belonging to a union. Her children would never contract malaria or die of starvation. The disabled dancer must have known that he was in demand to book performances in both the United States and abroad, in part because of the movement to promote disability rights, which was also helping to draw attention to excellent poets like Jillian Weise. The university buildings all had ramps and elevators. Like the others who were reading about the plague, he was comfortable.

“Hearing Marina’s powerful words, some of the audience had been left sobbing, quietly. The husband showed signs of compassion as he held his wife’s hand. The molasses-colored sun was descending into the Hudson River, and, as I’d predicted, a few attendees were suggesting we needed dinner. I’d called Grubhub earlier in the evening, and now the deliverer finally arrived. He set three large bags on the table and left. There were what appeared to be TV-dinner-type pies, but instead, these pies had different ingredients. Poi. Poi is a Hawaiian dish made from the underground stem (corm) of taro. The participants began to dig in and, having tasted some, the gathering gave their thumbs-up of approval.

“‘Why did you order this?’ someone asked.

“‘Well, it applies to our discussion,’ I said.

“‘How is that?’

“‘One person’s poi is another person’s poison.’ Groans. ‘I know this might be a hokey metaphor, but it applies to art, don’t you see? One person’s censorship is another person’s didacticism.’

“The smart-ass husband interjected. He said, ‘But shouldn’t art be universal?’

“Quoting T. S. Eliot, I said, ‘All ethnic writers may not be great, but all great artists are ethnic.’

“That sat him down, but then his spouse spoke up. ‘We can’t apply the values of our enlightened times to Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Dante.’

“That remark drew laughter. Someone said, ‘Our enlightened times? Millions elected a man who believes that water flows from the oceans to the mountains and that the way to end forest fires is to sweep the forests.’

“Someone else said, ‘One quarter of Americans believe that the sun revolves around the earth.’

“Another person began to talk, but he was interrupted by the sweet strumming of a guitar. The resident blues musician had begun to sing after reminding the gathering that the original daily Decameron readings ended with a canzone. A song. He began a song by Blind Willie Johnson. The blues musician had a voice like Taj Mahal’s. Raspy, and robust. He started singing.

“‘Well, we done told you, our God’s

done warned you, Jesus comin’

soon

We done told you, our God’s done