“Step over the patch with one foot,” T.C. said, and I did. “No, leave the other one where it is. Now. You’re straddling the top of the San Andreas fault. Half of you is on the North American continent, and the other half is off the continent entirely, on the Pacific plate.”
Instinctively I pulled my errant foot back onto the continent. He laughed. “You’re right to be careful,” he said. “In a few million years that half of you could be in Alaska, and the other half would still be here.”
“It’s not much of a fault, is it?” I said. “I guess I expected a huge fissure with smoke pouring out of it or something. But you’d never know it was down there if it weren’t for that patch.”
“I’d know,” he said, studying the earth where, deep below, the great snake slept. “It’s like a monster organ playing down in the earth to me. It always surprises me when nobody else hears it.”
I looked at him nervously.
“Metaphorically speaking, of course,” he said, and took my arm and guided me back to the Jeep.
“The fault hasn’t moved here since the 1906 quake,” T.C. said. “The folks who know think it’s due. Earthquakes sometimes come in pairs, and some of the hoohaws think that Loma Prieta might be the first of a pair up here. Which means, I guess, that the fault right here could go anytime. But I don’t think so.”
“The soles of your feet are telling you it won’t be here?” I said lightly.
“No. They’re not telling me anything. Nothing but the singing I hear everywhere along a fault. It’s in the mountains further south that my feet and the earthquake get together.”
“What does that feel like?” I said seriously. I wanted to know. At that moment I cast my lot with T.C.’s obsession, or whatever it was.
“Like electricity, I guess,” he said. “It runs right up your legs to the middle of you; sometimes it makes your arms and hands weak. It’s like…sex in reverse. If you take my meaning.”
“I take it,” I said, and felt myself redden. This is perfect, just perfect, I thought furiously. I have been with him a little over a day and already I have cried twice and blushed about forty times. The only thing left is to swoon or get the vapors. I’m glad Glynn can’t see me.
The thought of Glynn whipped my face like cold, wind-driven water. I sat up straighter and smoothed my hair with both hands. What in the name of God did I think I was doing? Bouncing along in a Jeep at the edge of the world with a madman who had already announced that he was going to take me to bed and howl like a wolf when he did it; batting my eyes and talking half-dirty to the same madman and loving every minute of it; asking him to kiss me, for God’s sake. I am somebody’s mother. She is not at all far away from me now.
I am somebody’s wife. And he is more than a world away.
“You’re allowed second thoughts about all this, you know,” T.C. said, seeming to catch my thought. “Even third and fourths. All you have to do is call time out and things can stop right here. I would never frighten or hurt you.”
“Then I guess…time-out,” I said. I felt flat and depleted, oddly bereft, and on top of it all was a cold, seeping guilt, a stain. It seemed to reach across the continent from the house by the river to this rutted, alien road in a stunted forest of pine, live oak, and madrone: the very burrow of the snake. I missed the delight and silliness of the morning and the night before like you miss warmth and food, like you miss light in sudden darkness. The shame I felt was a very poor substitute, but it was a strong one.
“What’s the matter?” he said sympathetically. “Flashback? Little blast from the past?”
“How did you know?” I said dully.
“I used to get ’em, too. Right in the middle of something transcendent—and I don’t mean sex; I haven’t really had any of the transcendent kind out here—I’d feel this cold, wet tentacle reaching out from home, reminding me that I was a sorry, self-indulgent hound who had run off and left his responsibilities and didn’t deserve to feel so damned good. Mostly it happened out of the redwoods. What we need to do is get you back up there.”
“No, I want to see all this,” I said dutifully, though I didn’t. I just wanted to snatch up my daughter and my sister and get on a plane home, where, even if things weren’t so great, they were my things. Total unfamiliarity is only exhilarating for so long. After that it becomes like a dreadful amnesia of all the senses.
I looked over at T.C. He gave me back a half-smile, waiting.
“So how did you handle it?” I said, for obviously he had settled the flashback problem long before.
“Decided I didn’t want to be a sorry, guilty hound any longer. I wanted to be the new guy, the one who felt fresh joy and aliveness every morning, who went to sleep smiling, hardly able to wait for the next day. I wasn’t going back, anyway; I knew that. Why keep the old sad sack around? It’s like any policy; it gets very real after you practice it for a while.”
“Carpe diem, huh?”
“Yeah. I wasn’t kidding when I said it was the only valid way to live. For me, anyway. Probably for you, too, if the last day or two have been any example. You’ve bloomed like a flower. You know that’s true.”
“And while I’ve been blooming like a flower my husband has been back home working his fanny off for the sick and the poor, and my daughter’s been seduced by a Jacuzzi-brained film director to do a porno flick—”
“Would any of that have changed if you’d sat around up here racked with guilt and hating the redwoods? How would it have changed? Look, Merritt, the lady you are back home is the one who deals with that stuff, and better than anybody involved deserves, as far as I’m concerned. The one who’s out here…she’s the one I’m getting to know and coming to care about a whole, whole lot. That was then, as the kids put it so inelegantly. This is now. This is here. The Merritt Fowler I kissed last night and hope to kiss again very soon is not the one who plays altar to her husband’s saint and puts diapers on his mother and worries herself sick about an anorectic teenager. The one I kissed last night and hope to kiss again soon loves my woods and my dog and looks like a gypsy and laughs like a loon and eats like a longshoreman, and kisses me back like it feels fantastic. That’s not to say the first one isn’t valuable. It’s just that the second one is so much more—complete. I think. Am I wrong?”
“No…”
“Then stop worrying about it. Enjoy the day and the Point and whatever you feel like enjoying. If it’s not me, that’s okay. The time-out still stands till you call it off.”
The cold tentacle from home let go its grip abruptly and well-being flooded back. I did not have to take this any further than I wanted to. He was right. There was an enormous lot to savor about this day, to taste and explore and wriggle my toes in. It did not have to include touching him again unless I wanted to. I did not know yet whether I did or not. If I did…well, there was a lot of day left.
“Next thing I know you’ll be handing me an apple and telling me to take a bite; what could it hurt?” I said.
“No. Next thing you know you’ll be standing at the edge of the earth looking off it and, if I’m not wrong, seeing something you’ll never forget. And the next thing after that is lunch. I brought it with me. I know just the place for it.”
“And…after that?”
I could not seem to stop flirting with him. Was that the name for it? Whatever you called it, it was something that came from a part of me I had not known I had. I could not recall flirting with anyone in my life. Pom and I had been beyond that from the beginning, beyond the giddiness of discovery and into the urgent business of assuaging need almost before we knew each other. I wondered suddenly if I had ever known much more than the feel of his body and the shape of his need. I wondered if he had known more of me than the shape of my body and my ability to fill his gaps.
But it has sustained us, I said to myself. Many, many marriages have run on thinner fuel than that. It has fulfilled us. It has been what we both needed.
But not anymore.
&nbs
p; The thought was as clear as if someone had spoken it aloud to me. And I knew it was true. If I went on with this day as it had started out, if I went on with this man, then an entirely different sustenance would be required. Forever after I would need other things.
Then find them. Go home and renegotiate. Redefine. Or simply stay here, the voice said. Isn’t that what’s at the bottom of all this? The thought that you might just stay? Or the thought that you might not?
We had been walking as I had been listening to the voice. Now we were back at the Jeep. T.C. opened my door and handed me up into the front seat.
“Anything after lunch is then instead of now and will be dealt with when we come to it,” he said. “And you’ll call the shots. Are you flirting with me, Miss Scarlett?”
And again I laughed, because he had so accurately read me.
“Why Captain Butler,” I drawled, “I do believe that I am.”
We drove out of the forest and onto a vast, undulating prairie. Yellow, red, and purple wildflowers blew in the steadily increasing wind like the pennants of miniature armies. The wind increased, gusting so that it rocked the Jeep and moaned around the plastic side curtains. Soon we parked and headed down a cypress-bordered footpath. The fog flew before us, revealing wind-battered dairies and huddling herds and not much else. Near the tip of the cape the wind was so strong that we struggled to walk against it. I would have fallen before it if T.C. had not kept an arm around me. the fresh, cold air was heavy with droplets, whether from the vanishing fog or spray I did not know. But I tasted salt and knew that they were born of the sea. When we broke through the cypress windbreak that guarded the path out to the tip of the cape, it was to meet the sun as it finally vanquished the fog and lit what looked like the entire western sea to sparkling foil blue. I felt the breath go out of my lungs in a gasp.
There was virtually no limit to the tossing water, or the sky that swept down to meet it, or the rushing blue air around it, or the sun riding overhead. There was land behind us and beneath our feet, but everywhere else we were drowned in a world of water and space. Steps led tortuously down to a lighthouse that rode a ledge below us, seeming to be borne up by the hollow boom of the surf far, far below. Gulls and cormorants wheeled and banked in the thermals over the water, and far down the cliff two specks soared.
“Eagles,” T.C. said. “There’s a nest not far down the coast, in a dead tree. I don’t know why those guys always hang out over open water here; they couldn’t dive into that stuff down there, and there are no fish in heavy surf, anyway. I’ve always thought they were playing. There are about a million nesting seabirds in the cliffs, too, and a colony of sea lions down there. When the wind’s right you can hear all of it; it’s bedlam. Like a tenement. Want to walk down to the lighthouse?”
“No,” I said, leaning back against him, letting the wind pound me, letting it pour past my face like a tide. “No. I want to stay here. Oh, T.C. It’s a glorious place, isn’t it? But somehow you feel you shouldn’t make yourself at home here. It’s like a church; it’s not a place to just hang out in.”
“You couldn’t, anyway,” he said. “There’s usually fog, and the wind today is as mild as I’ve felt it. A bad one would blow you over, literally. Look, Merritt. Straight out, about three hundred yards offshore. See those black shapes? There are four of them, right there where I’m pointing.”
I could not see anything in the dazzle of light off the water, and then I could. As I found the shapes and tracked them, twin spouts rose from the sea.
“Whales!” I cried. “Oh, my God, T.C.! They are, aren’t they? I’ve never seen them.”
I felt him nod. His chin rested on the top of my head; he stood behind me, literally holding me up against the wind. I did not want to move.
“Grays. They’re on their way back to the Bering Sea way up north, from Baja. They go down there every winter to breed and calve in the lagoons, where it’s shallow and warm. The entire population of the Pacific Gray whales does it, sixteen thousand strong. They start heading back in the spring; the whole trip is six thousand miles, and will take them three months. For some reason there’s always four or six off Point Reyes into June; I’ve seen them several times before. Usually it’s mothers with calves, like those out there. See how there are two large ones and two small? The mothers only have one calf at a time, and they suckle them like humans do. They hug the shore all the way down and back, to avoid the killer whales, and the mothers will close ranks around the calves if they spot a pod of killers, like a wagon train circling. I’ve seen them do it. It makes you want to cry, somehow. Brave, classy broads, aren’t they?”
I stood in the circle of T.C.’s arms in the tearing wind and thought about the great mothers and their calves, braving all this, braving everything, to take their children home.…
The wind dried tears on my face as they came, and I did not think that he saw them. But his arms tightened around me, and he said into my hair, “I thought you’d like them.”
“So brave,” I whispered. “Such good mothers. Never losing sight of what’s important. They make me feel ashamed of the kind of mother I’ve been—”
“Yeah, well, they’re a lot less complicated than us, remember that. They don’t have the hard choices to make. Classy broads, but strictly limited. Don’t worry. You’ve got nothing to apologize for in the mothering department. I should have known they’d make you cry, though.”
“It doesn’t take much, does it?” I said. “I always seem to be weeping up here. I don’t cry much back home.”
“I’m not criticizing you. I’d hate it if you didn’t. The first time I saw them I stood out here by myself and bawled like a baby.”
Suddenly I wanted to be done with wind and tumult and water and the dangers that swam in all of them. I wanted quiet, and the sun falling in shafts through the great trees as in a cathedral, and the smell of sun-warmed pine and madrone. I wanted to hear nothing but the breath of the great silence.
“I want to go home,” I said. “Can we eat lunch there as well as where you’d planned?”
“I’d planned it for around there,” T.C. said, and we walked back to the Jeep hand in hand, saying nothing.
We sat locked in our separate thoughts until we were back across the Golden Gate Bridge and through the city and heading back up into the Santa Cruz Mountains. It was a comfortable silence. I steeped in the peace of the warm, sun-filled Jeep after the great shouting wind and cold of Point Reyes, listening to the soft jazz T.C. found on the old radio and, below that, the hum of the big, battered wheels on asphalt. We did not go back down Highway 1; it was as if we had both had our fill of the bellowing sea. Instead, we took 280 down the spine of the mountains, and cut over to Skyline Drive, and entered the domain of the redwoods as gratefully as if we had gained a fortress after a battle. Without meaning to I fell asleep against the window and only woke, neck cramped and mouth tasting of old salt, when I felt the motion of the Jeep stop.
“Are we there?” I said thickly.
“We’re here. Or where I wanted to eat lunch, anyway. You hungry?”
“Starved. How long have I been sleeping?”
“A while. We’re a good bit south of home, in a place called Mount Madonna County Park.”
“What, they gave her her own mountain and park? Not bad for a material girl.”
“I think they meant the other one, the one with the halo,” he said. “Grab the wine and I’ll take the basket. We’re going to walk a little way.”
We climbed into a thinning forest of redwoods and presently came upon a flight of stairs that led up into nowhere. Beyond the last stair I could see the slumped, vine-tangled shape of ruins, and a fallen chimney. A house. Here in this sunny glade among the whispering giants, its bones softened by shrouding ferns and baby evergreens and the wild white heaps of rhododendron and laurel, a house had sheltered someone and then watched them go, and fallen to the wilderness. The little pink flowers I had noticed around the base of the lodge’s redwoods teemed
around the steps and at the base of these great trees, and the undergrowth was dense with what T.C. said were elderberry and thimbleberry bushes. It was very quiet; the voice of the silence only murmured. The sun fell in straight, near-palpable shafts. The smell of sun-warmed evergreen was hypnotic. There was a peculiar enchantment about the stairs and the ruins, as if something very old and elemental had made it appear for us, and could make it disappear in an instant if it wished.
“I’d never have left it,” I said, aware that I was nearly whispering. “I wonder who did.”
“Henry Miller,” T.C. said, putting the basket down on the steps and plopping down beside it. “You know, the writer. Or at least, I think he’s the one. It’s a summerhouse or was. I know that he had a place around Big Sur, and a lot of the artists and writers of his time hung out there with him. I’ve always thought this was where he came to get away from all those egos and all that talk.”
I thought of the great minds and names that must have clustered around Miller, and most probably followed him up here into the redwoods. I could almost see candles and Japanese lanterns on a stone terrace, and a great fire of madrone in a stone fireplace, and hear the atonal skittering of music yet unknown in the East, and the tinkle of ice in glasses, and late-day laughter, and voices raised in argument and dalliance far into the cold, still nights.
“I wonder why he left it? I wonder who let it go like this?”
“Who knows? From what I know of writers’ egos, they can’t survive long in a vacuum. He probably went back down to Big Sur where the faithful could worship and adore him.”
“You don’t like Miller?”
“Not especially. I think he really is a dirty writer. Consciously dirty, in a way the other so-called dirty writers never were. D. H. Lawrence was never dirty to me, but the old woman who lay down in the Tottenham Road and pulled up her skirt and masturbated bothers me. It’s like the sound of one hand clapping: self-aggrandizing instead of transcendent.”
Fault Lines Page 29
