“You don’t hold with masturbation either?”
“Au contraire. It’s the opiate of the solitary. I just don’t hold with it in the middle of the road. Me and Mrs. Patrick Campbell.”
“I know what you mean,” I said. “I loved the naturalness of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but Tropic of Cancer seemed awfully self-absorbed to me.”
“I should have known you’d go for the lady and the gamekeeper,” T.C. grinned. “Do any similarities to present circumstances present themselves? I’ve been practicing a Northumbrian accent, but so far it has eluded me—”
“Yeah, right,” I said, grinning at him drowsily. The sun and quiet were doing their work and I was powerfully, indolently sleepy as well as hungry. “Nevertheless, I love it that this was Henry Miller’s hidey hole. I like him better for knowing he needed one. Are you going to open that basket or should I just wrest it from you?”
We sat on the sun-warmed steps until the shafts of light leaned to the west and the warmth began to steal out of the air. He had made sandwiches of a delicious, chewy focaccia bread and crab and avocado, and brought grapes and chèvre that he said was made in a valley near the Big Basin. We ate them and drank the cool white wine and presently there was nothing left of any of it. I could barely hold my heavy eyes open.
“Okay. We’ve had lunch and it is now now,” T.C. said. “I await your pleasure.”
He sat opposite me, his long legs sprawled down the stairs, the leaning sun glinting off the mended glasses. He had not touched me since Point Reyes and did not move to do so now. I knew that he would honor my time-out. It made me feel safe and comfortable with him, sun-and food-stunned, boneless and caught fast in this moment. That there was a tight, fine wire of tension between us, somewhere far down, did not bother me. I had time to explore that or not, all the time in the world.
“I have to sleep,” I said. “Later…later I’ll make dinner for you, if you’ll let me; I got some stuff in Palo Alto yesterday, and it doesn’t seem like Laura’s going to come back anytime soon to eat it. Just let me go home and take a nap and then we’ll have a long dinner and then it will be now again, and who knows about that? But I need a bath, and I ought to call Glynn, and I really have got to sleep. Will you come to dinner?”
“I don’t go down there,” he said. “Not much; only when I have to. But I’ll take you up on dinner if you’ll cook it at my place. I’ve got the essentials for that. I’ll play my blues for you, and if you’re really respectful and ask me nicely I’ll show you some of my equipment. Earthquake equipment, I mean; get that look of panic off your face.”
“That was not panic. That was awe and wonderment. Okay for dinner, if you’ll come help me tote the stuff up to your place. It’s the makings for a kind of bouillabaisse.”
“Done,” he said, and reached down to me and pulled me up, and we walked back to the Jeep, brushing the dust and grit of Henry Miller’s staircase off our rumps.
When he came to help me carry the food up, it was just past six, and I had slept hard and showered and felt cool and clean and preternaturally clear-headed. The golden haze of the past twenty-four hours was gone.
“I need to tell you now that I’ve decided that the time-out has got to be permanent,” I said, not looking at him beside me on the path. He said nothing, merely grunted amiably, and shifted the Styrofoam cooler in his arms. Behind us Curtis capered and nosed wetly at the backs of our knees, puppyish in his relief that his person had, after all, come back.
“I mean, I thought about it hard, and it isn’t fair to you or me,” I went on, as if he had argued with me. “And it would be terribly unfair to Glynn, and to Pom, too. He’s done nothing but good for people all his life; I can’t just…lie out here in bed with you while he’s down at the clinic until all hours, or slogging through another boring dinner to try to get some more funds—”
“I can see your point,” T.C. said affably.
“I mean, think about Glynn,” I continued, as if he had not spoken. “She needs a mother, not a…an—”
“Don’t do that, Merritt,” he said rather sharply. “Don’t call yourself names, don’t categorize yourself. You were going to say adulteress, weren’t you? I’m not going to listen to that. Maybe, just maybe Glynn needs to know what a full, whole, real woman is; maybe she needs to know what joy is; but that’s neither here nor there. If you say time-out, time-out it will be. I’m not going to argue with you. It’s enough that you want to. And I know that you do, even if you don’t.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t want to,” I said rather sullenly. “I couldn’t say that after the way I’ve behaved, could I?”
“If you’re determined to be Hester Prynne I can’t stop you,” he said with what sounded close to laughter under his voice. “But you haven’t even earned your A yet, so why don’t you let up on yourself? Speaking of Glynn, she called while you were asleep. I almost forgot.”
“What did she say? Is anything wrong?”
“Absolutely nothing, unless you consider a trip to the mall for a movie and some shopping a calamity. I myself would. Relax. Her friend’s father is taking them. She’s having a great time. She said cool four separate times. There was much giggling and squealing in the background. I gather she isn’t starving; her mouth was definitely full of something.”
“Did she…did she ask about Laura? Or about me, what I was doing?”
“Nope. She was fully as concerned about her elders as any sixteen-year-old on her way to the mall would be. She did, however, ask about Curtis.”
I let my breath out in a long, slow sigh.
“It sounds okay,” I said. “I should be glad she’s having such a good time. But I feel guilty, too; I’ve hardly thought about her in twenty-four hours—”
“For shame. What a terrible mother you are. You’re right to deny yourself the pleasures of the flesh. But I draw the line at mortifying it. If we can’t screw, at least we can eat. Are you a good cook?”
I didn’t answer. I was aware, suddenly, of how prim and presumptuous my little speech had sounded.
“T.C., listen, I’m sorry if I sounded like the church lady,” I said. “I can be awfully stuffy sometimes. It’s just that when I woke up from my nap I needed some…context or something, needed to know where I fit, and where I fit is back there. If you think that means that I don’t want to, you know, do that with you, you’re wrong. I want that very much, but I’m not going to do it. I’ll try not to be all over you for the rest of the night. And yeah, I am a good cook. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”
He stopped on the trail and turned, and traced the line of my mouth with his free hand, looking serious and sleepy-eyed. My mouth flamed with heat, and I swallowed hard and turned my head away.
“I understand,” he said softly. “It’s okay. The pull of home is one of the strongest in the world. E.T., phone home. Shit. I almost forgot about this, too. A guy called you this morning before I came to pick you up, but I don’t know who it was. I was downstairs, and the machine got it. The storm last night fried the machine again, so all I could make out was ‘just tell her I called.’”
“What kind of voice? What kind of accent?” I said, more sharply than I meant.
“Couldn’t tell for the static. I’m sorry. I really did forget. You can call when we get up to the tower. It would be your husband, wouldn’t it?”
“Probably. I ought to check in; you know, I told you his mother has been very ill.”
“You don’t have to justify calling your husband to me, baby,” he said gently.
I loved him in that moment, tenderly and without tension.
“Your wife is a damned fool, T.C.,” I said, and this time he did not answer me.
When we reached the tower, he carried the cooler up for me and then whistled to Curtis.
“You need to be left alone now,” he said at the door. “And I need to check the equipment. I think we’ll eat outside; it’s going to be a terrific night. Probably cold later on, with so little win
d. The stars will be phenomenal. I’ll make us a fire then, and play you some Earl Hooker. I’ve got one of the very few albums he ever made. Slide guitar; there’s nothing like it. I’ve been trying to learn it, but I can’t even come close. Go on, Merritt, and tend to your business. You’re as jumpy as a flea on a griddle. Pity to waste good bouillabaisse on a nervous woman.”
I smiled at him, my heart hammering with confusion and a kind of gathering anticipation, as though some interior engine had revved up a notch, moving me closer to an inevitable conclusion that I could not name.
“I won’t be long,” I said. “Mommee has probably burnt down the clinic. Fix me a drink and I’ll be right down.”
He and Curtis left, and I approached the telephone and sat down on the edge of his bed, looking at it. I knew, without knowing how, that this call would forever after divide time for me, but I did not know how that might happen. I did not want to pick up the receiver, to dial the house on the river—my house; why could I not think of it as that?—and wait for the fragile lines between it and this tower to solidify, to reshape reality.
“I could just forget it,” I said to myself. “If T.C. had, I’d never know about this call. I don’t strictly have to do this; if it had been an emergency he would have called back.”
But I did have to do it, and so I pulled the phone toward me and looked out over the sweep of trees undulating away toward the sea, their tops going pink in the darkening sky now, and dialed my house, and sat back to wait, stretching my legs out before me on the bed.
The phone rang and rang, with the hollowness that always means no one is at the other end. I looked at my watch; after nine now, back home. Was he at the clinic this late? Out with the African team and their charismatic leader? Despite my nervousness, the burring phone annoyed me; I had been primed for this connection. I started to hang up, and then the phone was lifted, and a voice said, “The Doctor is in,” and laughed.
It was a rich, low voice with, somehow, the dark of loamy earth and the scent of sunny grass in it: a woman’s voice. I knew who it was, even though I knew also that I had never heard her speak when she was at the clinic before, much less seen her. I did not move or breathe. I could not seem to think of any words. I could not hang up, either.
“Terry?” she said finally, “I’m sorry we’re running late. Pom’s in the shower now. You all go on and we’ll meet you in twenty minutes max.”
I said nothing. I still did not breathe.
“Is that you, Ter?” she said, and very slowly and gently I put the receiver back in its cradle. For a long while I simply sat there on T.C. Bridge water’s bed, watching the pink fade from the sky and the silhouettes of the redwoods darken against it, their needles like brush strokes of India ink. I thought how easy it would be simply to crawl under the Chief Joseph blanket and slide into sleep. To sleep, and sleep, and speel.
When I finally stood up, it was just a few minutes before full dark. The tender shaving of a new moon, almost transparent, rode above the trees and a great star bloomed above it, the first I could see. My ears rang and I could feel my pulse beating in my throat and wrists, but there was a tickle of senseless laughter at the corners of my mouth, too, and down deep and low in my stomach, the slow heating of the iron core. I took a deep breath and ran my fingers through my hair. I could see no mirror in the room, but my hair felt wild, and my cheeks, when I laid my cold hands on them, flamed as if with fever. I was suddenly conscious of the vast loneliness around me, of the amplitude of space and the relentless coming on of unbroken night, and felt a flutter of the cold, old fear I had felt on the bridge this morning. Had it really only been this morning? Suddenly I wanted light and sound and the smell and touch of T.C., just those things and nothing else. I ran down the long, steep steps in one swoop, without seeming to touch the railing. My entire body was light with the fear. It was only when I reached the boards of the veranda that I realized that I still clutched the blanket, trailing it after me.
He was drowsing on the sofa, covered with a pile of blankets and a sleeping Curtis, one hand laid against his bearded cheek, one brushing the floor beside him. He had good hands, long and brown and strong. Warm hands. I wanted to feel them on me as I wanted air to breathe. I stood, trying to get my breath, looking at him. He woke as though he felt the look. Curtis lifted his head, too.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I didn’t talk to him. A woman answered. I know who she is. It was probably nothing. I couldn’t say a word; finally I just hung up. I feel like such a fool…”
I slowed and stopped.
He said nothing, only lay propped on one elbow, looking steadily at me.
“I want to rescind the time-out, T.C.,” I said. “Can I do that?”
After a long moment, he said, “This is my cue to tell you that I don’t take advantage of ladies whose husbands have just shit on them. But I can’t do that, because I’ll take you any way I can get you and be grateful for whatever changed your mind. I’m not going to have one iota of regret afterward, but if you think you are, you’d better tell me now.”
“No regrets,” I said. “I mean that, T.C. No regrets.”
“Then,” he said, sitting up and holding out his arms to me, “come here to me. Come here and let me love you. It’s time somebody did it right.”
And, shivering and beginning, without knowing it, to cry, I let the blanket fall to the deck and went into his arms.
Much, much later we lay in his bed upstairs with the stove throwing dancing red shadows around the room and only the incredible silver starlight pouring down on us from the skylight, a cold, old radiance. We had not eaten the bouillabaisse; I had not, after all, cooked it. We had not listened to Earl Hooker. He had not shown me his earthquake equipment.
There is a popular song: “I want a man with a slow hand.” Lying in the crook of his arm, letting my breathing slow, finally, to normal, I thought of that song and felt my body flush all over at the words. A slow hand. Yes. T.C. Bridgewater had, among other things, a slow hand. Our coming together had been as soft and slow and without urgency as the warm, deliberate ripples in a tide pool. Only at the last had the urgency come crashing in, a scalding, red-black tide from the open sea that took me down with it, far, far down, so that I could only hear the sounds I was making, and that he was, as if from the bottom of an ocean. When I swam at last to the surface, he was laughing. I began to laugh, too. In all the times that I had made love with Pom, I could never remember laughing. Pom’s love was like Pom: intense, focused, very, very direct. T.C.’s was utterly different, and like T.C. himself. Indolent. Inventive. Teasing to the point of near madness.
Slow.
I loved it. My whole body glowed with it, as if I had been scrubbed all over inside and out with hot water and warm oil. I laughed in it, cried out in it, opened all of myself to take it and give it back; tasted it on my tongue and breathed it in as deeply as if it had been pure oxygen. As soon as it was ended I begged for more and got it. By the time we had stumbled upstairs into the bed, I was so sated with it that I could not lift my head from his arm.
“Don’t open the skylight,” I said to T.C. when we had managed to crawl under the Chief Joseph blanket. “I’ll go right out it on a breath of cold air.”
“No more?” he said, running the tips of his fingers from my breasts down my stomach and into the warm pit of me.
“Please, sir, can I have some more?” I said, moving slowly against his fingers.
He rolled over me and held himself above me, looking down. His hair fell into his eyes, and his teeth flashed in the black beard. Starlight poured down over his head and shoulders, melted silver ore.
“If you want a repeat performance, you have to assure me you do C.P.R.,” he said.
“I do anything,” I said, reaching up to pull him down. “Anything at all. You cannot conceive of anything I don’t do.”
Deep into the night we lay on our backs and watched the stars through the skylight. They burned with such chill bri
lliance that they seemed to pulse slowly against the black velvet sky. I have never again seen stars like those. They were, in that moment, fully as alive and sentient as we were.
“What am I looking at?” I said. “What are the stars out here?”
“It’s kind of hard to tell, with just a slice of sky showing. Let’s see. Arcturus, going down. See, the orange one? Vega was the first one you saw at nightfall. Deneb just overhead. It’s almost impossible to tell about the constellations from here. If we were outside you could probably see Perseus over in the northeast, but Pegasus is too far southeast, and the Dipper has gone down by now. You’d see them at home, though. And you’d still see the Summer Triangle. Maybe you can see a little of that here. Back home you could see the rising of the Boat and what they call the wet constellations, water carrier, fishes, and southern fish. They mean fall’s coming. We can’t see them out here yet.”
“Same stars, then. But different sky.”
“Right,” he said drowsily. “You know, I think that the most awful, the loneliest thing in the world, would be to see different stars in a different sky. There’d be nothing of what you knew then. Total alienation, total newness. I wonder if the human spirit could stand it long. The bravest people in the world have always seemed to me the ones who sailed out so far that they were following different stars in a different sky. Like the ancient the Bora Borans did, when they sailed all that hideous long way across the ocean in outriggers, guided by a strange star they knew only from their folklore and the old songs. God, think of it—different stars in a different sky. It makes my blood run cold. This is better; this you can bear. The same stars in a different sky, I mean.”
I turned my face into his neck, hiding there, shutting out the presence of that different sky.
“Be my same stars, T.C.,” I whispered, salt in my eyes and throat. “Be my same stars, because I have most surely come a terrible long way under a different sky.”
Fault Lines Page 30
