“Come live with the San Pablo Reservoir Cluster,” he said. “Plenty of food and good water. I want you with us. Your gardening skills would be excellent to have. We’re already planting.”
Her gardening skills? She felt slightly offended but also reassured. Falsely reassured: she knew this was more than just a business proposition, but it was lovely to rest against the pretense.
“Whenever you’re ready,” he said, “but the sooner the better. You know how dangerous it’s becoming. From all directions—pissed off citizens and the police and military. You need to think about who you’re going to ally yourself with.”
“Travis?” Lily took his still-trembling hands, feeling the way his need sandpapered against the fear. It’d only been a few months since his bonobos were slaughtered, since he’d lived in the bush, where warfare and disease were daily threats, with a man who hated him and a woman who didn’t love him enough. “You’re not in the Congo anymore.”
He withdrew his hands. “There’s a rally tomorrow. Come with me.” He began to carry on, all over again, about FEMA, the National Guard, how survivors had been abandoned by their own government.
“Travis!” She nearly had to shout. “Look at me.”
He seemed unable to focus, his green eyes jumping from a bunch of orange poppies beyond her shoulder, to the path of the Black Hawk flying overhead, to his own sneaker. The startled look in his eyes and the shaking in his hands reminded her of the Gulf War vet whom Tom and his dad had hired. The guy flinched at the sound of the key cutter, and his mind sometimes ground to a halt in the middle of writing up an order. He’d just stand there with the pen in his hand, not moving, not even hearing what the customer was saying. Tom and his dad tried to live with these symptoms, but when he lost his temper at a woman who had her child on a harness leash, shouting obscenities at her right in the shop, they had to let him go.
Why shouldn’t she soothe Travis? They were both adults. Both single. He wasn’t the mythic correspondent of her youth. She wasn’t the starry-eyed innocent of her youth, either. They were two heartbroken human beings who needed comfort.
She rose to her knees and pulled his head against her chest. He turned his face in and wrapped his arms around her. She thought of his first letter, how she’d held it with both hands, the thrill of seeing beyond Fair Oaks; of the first time he used the word “love”; of his belief in the possibility of love; and of his dedication to an ape in the Congo. Travis, her wild card.
Why not? Had she anything at all to lose?
They tumbled back into the tall grasses, kissing, unbuttoning, and unzipping. The weeds and dirt clods scratched her backside and she didn’t care. His face smashed into the dirt next to her neck, and her legs gripped his thighs. The lovemaking was unwieldy, crazy, warmed by the sun, and anointed by the ripe green smell of the grasses. They talked between rounds, about ordinary things like what they liked to eat and how they’d been sleeping, as if making love to the person who’d been your pen pal, from the other side of the earth, for twenty years, was the most normal thing in the world.
“Like the bonobos,” Lily said after a while, and Travis reared back. His surprise pleased her. When he then laughed, she realized it was the first time she’d heard him laugh, fully, from deep within. She let her gaze span the sky as she listened to his genuine chesty joy. Why not like the bonobos? We are bonobos, for all intents and purposes. Except for some apparently interfering genes that block our ease with pleasure. Everything is about sex for that crazy ape. They have sex while they’re eating, while they’re grooming, while they’re playing. They don’t set it aside as something to do in private, separate from the rest of life. They have sex in public, if they want to. Males with males, females with females, all kinds of positions, too. They squeal and bare their teeth in pleasure. What’s more, they don’t just selfishly satisfy themselves. They hold eye contact while mating, monitor their partners’ responses, adjust their attentions accordingly. No shame, no modesty, no inhibitions.
Lily was glad she’d reminded him, because clearly Travis was losing his way. She wanted to return him to his own grand vision.
“My favorite studies,” she said, and he propped himself up on an elbow, looking downright amazed at how closely she’d followed his work. His eyes were agates, golden clear and smoky cloudy both. Lily spoke calmly, pretended she didn’t notice his curious alarm. “Are the ones about oxytocin, how a synthesis of the hormone is released in male brains after sex. When scientists inject it into male rats, their aggressive behavior nosedives. So there’s a correlation between sexually uninhibited societies and peaceful societies. Bonobos are compassionate and altruistic precisely because they celebrate sexuality.”
She couldn’t believe she’d just said those two words, “celebrate sexuality,” out loud. She laughed, willing him to return to his laughter, but he sat up and folded his arms over his knees. As she started to reach for him, she heard a buzz and then saw the bee alighting on the purple blossom of a lupine. She dove for her backpack and dug around for the epinephrine.
“What?” He rose up on his knees. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said once she’d fisted the medicine and the bee had flown away. “Just that I’m allergic.”
“Move out to the reservoir,” he said. “I can keep you safe.”
“I want so much more than safety.”
Travis nodded. “Come to the march tomorrow. We can talk about it more then.”
“Look,” she said, lying back again and pointing her nose toward the sky. “So much blue.”
But just then a chopper ripped open the blue, the noise of its engine a prolonged psychic aftershock.
29
Lily locked her bike to a metal pole and found Travis where he said he’d be, waiting for her on the corner of Fourteenth and Washington in downtown Oakland. His smile was guarded—did he regret the day before?—and his hands curled into loose fists. She hugged him hello. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Everything’s fine.”
They milled, side by side, through the gathering crowd. Travis knew a lot of people. He shook their hands and bumped their shoulders, his energy amping up with every passing minute. By the time the march began at noon, he twitched with excitement.
As they headed down Broadway, Travis bounced along by her side, as if there were springs in the balls of his feet. People shouted, called out insults about the president and the governor, sometimes chanting in unison. Travis’s voice deepened as he hollered along with them, and soon he was hoarse.
The crowd thickened. With people pressing so close, Lily could almost walk with her eyes closed and let the jostling guide her. She took Travis’s arm, afraid that she might lose him in the crush.
Someone screamed. It was a shriek, intentional and prolonged, like a warning. The group picked up its pace. The voices grew louder, one massive conversation barreling down Broadway. The crowd tightened, then began running. She grabbed the tail of Travis’s shirt, trying to keep up, but his entire body seemed to uncoil, spring forward in the mob, and she lost him. She tried to make her way over to the sidewalk, but it was like wading against an undertow. She gave up and let the surge carry her forward.
She heard a dull crunch, like the sound of a car being driven into a wall, followed by shattering glass, the flying shards tinkling like chimes as they landed on car hoods. A woman’s voice rang out, “Stop it! Stop now!” A long pause followed, as if everyone stopped to listen and consider, and then a roar of voices crescendoed all at once.
Lily chanted, too. The crowd was running again, and she felt supported by the press of bodies, by the charging throng, like they were the cells of one moving beast. It felt good, even joyful, to demand their inalienable rights for food and water and shelter. She felt filled with purpose, and she thought: For this I left Tom and Fair Oaks, to be a part of something bigger, much bigger. Her heart pounded with the running and adrenaline, an
d she even liked the flying arms and legs, the collisions between bodies. Humanity, she thought, as if she were part of a tribe raiding another village. For a moment, it felt like truth.
The storefront window next to her exploded. Glass daggers flew past her face and lodged in her hair. The crowd surged backward, and she got pushed aside and then knocked down, one hand sinking into glass. Another woman, trying to escape, tripped on her leg and fell across her, the weight of the woman’s body forcing Lily’s face to the pavement. She yelled Travis’s name.
Lily tried to get up as the crowd dispersed, people running in all directions. Not fifteen yards away, she spotted Travis, hefting a green garbage bin. The top of the bin flapped open, and banana peels and coffee grounds and onion skins tumbled onto his shoulders and head. Oblivious to the rot raining down on him, Travis charged forward with the bin, leading with the smaller bottom end, and smashed it through the window of a sandwich shop. Lily was amazed that he had that much strength.
Then she saw: it wasn’t strength. Rage uncoiled in his arms and legs as he heaved the bin again, this time hurling it through the hole he’d made in the window, letting it drop like a bomb inside the shop, spilling the rest of its garbage. Lily couldn’t move. She froze in place on her hands and knees, caught between her memory of his sunny smile and this display of fury. The window he’d smashed hadn’t belonged to a corporate bank or even a giant retail chain. That window was the sole source of light in a tiny lunch shop that sold premade sandwiches and boxed salads, probably owned by one family. The window had survived the earthquake, only to be destroyed by Travis.
“Travis!” she yelled, hoping to bring him out of the spell and also needing help herself.
A siren seared the already heated air. He didn’t hear her. She yelled his name again as she got to her feet and picked the glass off her clothes. A warm, sticky ooze of blood bathed her entire hand. The siren snaked closer. Travis was gone. A swarm of people who’d been running toward Telegraph Avenue moved back toward her. She saw why. A riot squad rounded the corner, marching forward in their knee-high shiny boots and helmets, carrying batons and bulletproof shields.
A few men stayed to throw random street debris at the police, and one guy charged them with no weapon at all, as if he could take on the fully geared-up police with his fists. Lily ran with the remaining crowd. Splinter groups took rights and lefts, and she went alone down an alley, cursing herself as she did for how easily she could be trapped there. But near the end of the alley, she realized that no one had pursued her, and if she simply stopped running, there would be no reason for anyone to chase her. She hadn’t done anything wrong, other than sleep with a man who smashed the windows of innocent peoples’ shops.
Lily leaned her back against the stone wall of the building and slid down until she was sitting. Her hand throbbed with pain and thirst parched her throat. She was losing a lot of blood. Bile rose in her esophagus as she examined her hand and found the piece of glass in the pad at the base of her palm. Another inch and it would have been her wrist. The shard was slippery with blood and it took four tries before she was able to pull it out. It hurt like hell. She took off her T-shirt and used her teeth to tear a hole in the fabric. Then she ripped out a strip of the jersey and bound her hand as tightly as possible, hoping the wrap would staunch the flow of blood. She pulled the neck opening of the T-shirt back over her head and adjusted it so that at least most of her bra was covered by the remaining shirt. She rested her head back against the stone wall, the scenario of Travis heaving the garbage bin through the window replaying over and over in her mind.
Lily dug out her phone and called Tom.
His “hello,” both syllables extended, a big friendly welcome to the caller, sounded exactly like his dad’s, probably like his granddad’s, too. She could just see him, maybe on his rubber kneepads before a lockset on a door, grasping his tools in one hand as he fished the phone out of his pocket with the other, not bothering to look at who was calling.
“Hi, Tommy.” Why did she use his childhood name? “It’s me.” Then, absurdly, she added, “Lily.”
They hadn’t spoken since he’d confessed about Angelina. His two-week silence since then told her everything she needed to know. God, she was sick of cowards. When he finally spoke, iron gates bracketed his greeting. “What’s up?”
“I’m in downtown Oakland at a demonstration for victims of the earthquake.” How badly, even now, she wanted him to hear, to understand. “It was wild. Some demonstrators got out of hand, started breaking windows.”
He took a breath, and in that breath she heard his entire opinion of the big-city stupidity. As she waited for him to say something, she counted the pulses of pain in her palm.
“It’s dinnertime here.”
That’s right: it was Sunday. Was he sitting at the table, surrounded by his siblings and their spouses and children? She wanted to ask him to tell his mom hi for her, but his mom was probably less interested in hearing from her than he was. She wondered if he had checked who was calling but answered anyway, pretending not to know.
“I didn’t get arrested. Or hurt.” She looked at the blood soaking through the strip of T-shirt wrapped around her hand.
“Well, I assumed that.”
“I won’t hold you up.”
“We’re getting ready to sit down. Maybe I can call you later.”
“You could have come with me, Tom.”
She tried to picture him at her side now: holding a hand-painted sign that said, Water is a human right; or sleeping next to her in the tent on the hillside; or mopping the floor at Trinity Church. But she couldn’t place him outside of Fair Oaks. He’d only been as far west as Laramie and as far east as Des Moines, and he claimed to be fully satisfied with his range. “Why would you ever go anywhere else?” he’d say when neighbors or friends went on vacations.
“I didn’t ask for anything outrageous,” she continued. “I asked you to consider adoption. I asked you to be patient while I looked for my missing sister. You wouldn’t do either.”
She heard his footsteps, and then a door shutting. She pictured him in the den of his parents’ house, letting himself down in his dad’s big brown leather chair. He said, “I know.”
“But you’re not sorry.”
“You were going to go out there, whether I came or not. By the time you decided, I was superfluous to you and your plans.”
“That’s not true.”
“How do you think it makes me look? Sitting here in Fair Oaks while my wife mucks around in a disaster zone on her own?”
“How you look?”
“You didn’t care what I thought. You found a way out and you took it. At least be honest about that.”
The wild joy of her motorcycle ride with Wesley, those feelings of liberated abandon, popped spontaneously into her thoughts. Followed by the rather more recent memory of sex with Travis in the weeds. “Okay,” she said. “But I don’t think it’s quite that simple. But okay.”
“Look.” He coughed and she heard a thump, as if he’d banged his fist on the leathery arm of the chair. “You’re going to hear this sooner or later, better sooner. Angelina is expecting.”
She had about five seconds of amusement. What a ludicrous term. Expecting what? A package? A high return on an investment? To enjoy the summer? Who used that archaic half sentence anymore?
And then her five seconds ended. The truth body-slammed her. He had found someone who could conceive his child. Deliver his DNA.
Lily clicked off her phone and screamed. She got up and stumbled over to a pile of bricks, picked one up in her good hand, and hurled it at the alley wall a couple feet in front of her. It bounced back and hit her in the shin.
Her hand hurt like hell. Her husband was having a baby—was expecting—with another woman. Travis was a maniac. She was homeless. Lily sat in the dark alley and cried herself empty.
&nbs
p; Then, when there was no other possible course of action, she got to her feet and walked to the corner of Fourteenth and Washington where she’d locked her bike. It was still there. She touched the top tube in gratitude, her vehicle of salvation, pretty much all she had left.
Riding one-handed was tricky, but she made it to the church parking lot. As she carried her bike up the stairs to the door of the community room, she started to black out and had to sit down, dropping the bike. She heard it clatter down the short flight of cement stairs.
Kalisha and Ron carried her inside. They washed her wound and dressed it with antibiotic ointment, gauze, and adhesive tape. They gave her a fresh T-shirt. After a couple of glasses of water and a plate of Ron’s corned beef hash, Kalisha handed her some latex gloves and suggested she get to work.
“Sh-sh-sh-sh-shit, g-g-g-g-girl,” Ron said.
Kalisha gave him her deadpan look. “What, you want to drop grapes in her mouth while she reclines on the duvet and recovers? People gotta eat.”
As the clients crowded in the door at four thirty, the room filled with the smells of unwashed bodies, but also of trees and sunshine. Flatware clanked on the plastic trays and the rubber feet on chairs scudded across the linoleum. Lily dug into the vat of Ron’s corned beef hash and dumped the servings onto the plastic trays, followed by watery splats of peas. To each tray she added a chocolate chip cookie, and then clunked it onto the shelf beyond the serving window. Blood seeped through the gauze and pooled under the latex glove, and some of the clients eyed her hand with distaste, but no one turned away the tray of food. She missed the professor.
Riding uphill with her sliced hand was impossible, so Lily walked the bicycle, hoping she wouldn’t run into the ferals. She did. As the wild children approached, their hair matted and their hands mud-crusted, she unwrapped the gauze from her hand. Fresh blood spurted out of her wound and she shouted, “HIV positive! Come and get it.”
The Evolution of Love Page 19
