12
A tall, slim man with a fresh haircut appeared at the top of the driveway, apparently traveling by foot. He wore a tight white T-shirt, an open, worn-out black leather jacket, skinny black jeans, and scuffed dress shoes.
“You the guy selling the Electra-Glide?”
“Yep.” Vicky didn’t bother correcting his gender assumption.
The man touched the headlight, and then glanced at Lily. “She’s beautiful.”
He had brown almond-shaped eyes with long lashes, a large forehead, and a cowboy nose. Two lines, long parentheses, enclosed his mouth, like his smile would be a secret. His pale white skin gleamed under the sheared sides of his short black hair, but a longer boyish lock flopped in front. A worn copy of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando stuck out of his back pocket.
He ran two fingers around the circumference of the front hub, touched the chrome spokes. “I’d like to ride her,” he said. “Before deciding.”
“Sure,” Vicky said.
“You should take a deposit,” Lily advised.
“It’s cool. Go for it.”
Lily scowled at her. The man could just disappear with her motorcycle.
He pulled a wad of bills from his front pocket, peeled off several, and laid them on top of a pile of suitcases. “That’s the full asking price. Looks like she’s in great shape. I just want to ride her first.”
“Absolutely.” Vicky waved a hand at the cash as if it were inconsequential. “Take her for a spin.”
“I’m Wesley, by the way.”
“Vicky. This is my sister, Lily.”
The man threw a leg over the bike and walked it out of the garage. He looked over his shoulder at Lily and said, “Come along?”
Vicky wore that prurient smile of hers. She wagged her eyebrows.
All at once, relief slammed into Lily. Vicky was alive. Alive. Ridiculous. In trouble. But alive.
So was Lily. Intensely, heartbreakingly alive. A sense of freedom, of wild possibility, rushed in where the vertigo had been just minutes ago.
Lily climbed on behind Wesley and grabbed two handfuls of his leather jacket. As if she were in one of Vicky’s virtual gaming worlds where there were no real-life consequences of risky behavior. As if she regularly climbed on the backs of motorcycles with strange men. The copy of Orlando poked out of his back pocket, hitting her thigh, so she slid it out and tucked it inside the front of her own jeans. Just underneath the pungent smell of leather was a fresh scent, like green grass. Lily breathed it in, then felt embarrassed about her own smell. She’d showered this morning, but her clothes were pretty ripe. When she turned to wave goodbye to Vicky, her sister gave her a salacious wink. Lily gave her the finger.
Wesley lifted his feet and gave the bike gas. They motored down Ridge Road, turned left onto Grizzly Peak Boulevard, and headed for the top of the hill. He drove too fast for the broken road. Many of the rifts had been bridged with dirt and rocks and scrap lumber, but rather than inching over these sections, he gassed up the bike and bounced over the patches. He banked the Harley on the sharp turns, putting Lily at a forty-five-degree angle to the road. She could have dropped a hand and touched the pavement. She let go of his jacket and wrapped her arms all the way around his middle, pressed her cheek against the baby-soft leather.
As they crested the top of Grizzly Peak, she looked down on the glittering bay. She’d heard about the flotilla of sailboats occupied by a group of people who could simply sail away but chose to stay near home. She saw them now, the boats forming an armada, a tiny navy, the sails fluttering like handkerchiefs. Beyond the bay, the Golden Gate Bridge arched like an elegant collarbone, burnt-red against the blue sky, with the headlands on either side like soft green shoulders. To the north, Mount Tamalpais hulked black and sturdy. San Francisco’s buildings stood tall and blocky, as if there’d been no earthquake at all.
The wind felt so good. The speed was intoxicating.
Alive. Vicky was alive. The relief kept coming in bigger and bigger waves, like tsunamis of joy.
She shouted, “Vicky is alive!”
Wesley looked over his shoulder and then accelerated, soaring down the backside of Grizzly Peak. Twice he leapt the Harley over crevices, like he was Evel Knievel. All her fears merged into thrill. She unlocked her hands and slipped them inside Wesley’s unzipped jacket. His ribs felt prehistoric, his torso as skinny as grief. She slid one hand up his breastbone and held it, open-palmed, over the place of his heart. So bold. Like Travis’s apes.
She laughed out loud, remembering an incident Travis had written to her about. A bonobo named Madonna got jealous when Travis had been playing with another one for too long. She ran over to him, locked her hairy legs around his middle, and smacked him on the lips. Before he knew it, Madonna had pushed her tongue in his mouth! “What a whiskery kiss,” he’d written. “For the bonobos, sex is love. I think they’re right.”
Lily had looked up bonobo sexuality that evening and had been shocked to learn about their freewheeling ways. Not only did those apes have sex often and easily, not to mention with a variety of partners and in a multitude of styles, but scientists thought there was a correlation between their embrace of pleasure and their compassionate nature. Tom had been skeptical, but even he found the idea intriguing.
Well, Lily was a human being, not a bonobo, but apparently there wasn’t a whole lot of difference between the two when it came down to the DNA, so she left her hands where they were and pressed her cheek against the soft leather on Wesley’s back.
He took Fish Ranch Road to the freeway where the National Guard had a checkpoint. Two troops waved their arms in big X’s over their heads, but Wesley didn’t stop. He roared right by, flying along the deserted freeway, swerving around the shells of abandoned vehicles.
Then, suddenly, he braked hard and bucked the bike to a stop. Lily pulled away from his back and saw that they’d come to a fissure too big to jump. On the other side of the crevice were four crashed and spun cars. A head, a human head, appeared in the closest car’s back window, like the ghost of a crash victim. Wesley cried out and then checked a sob in his throat, cutting it off, sounding as if he were gagging. His chest cavity inflated and deflated in big scared woofs.
Lily kept her arms around him and stared in horror. It wasn’t a phantom. It was a living person. The head ducked back down, out of sight. He or she must have been living in the cavity of the car. Maybe there was a stream nearby. Lily pressed the side of her head against Wesley’s back, needing the hard physicality, the vitality, of contact with his body, even if he was a complete stranger.
He walked the bike around 180 degrees, then sat still for a moment, looking out in the distance, his breath calming. On the way back, he drove slowly, though he still didn’t stop at the National Guard checkpoint. When they reached the top of Grizzly Peak again, he pulled over.
Lily dismounted. Wesley climbed off, too, and put down the kickstand. They stood side by side looking out. So much air and sky, the bay a frothy slate green.
“Boy, that was spooky,” he said. His voice was extra deep, almost comically so given his skinny nerdiness.
“I know.” She wanted to step closer to see if she could get that grassy smell again.
“So you saw it, too? The head?”
“Yes.”
“It’s like…I don’t know…the gap between alive and dead no longer exists. Here in the earthquake zone.”
“I thought Vicky was dead until about an hour ago.”
“I heard you shout her name.”
“You just kind of take life for granted. And then, boom, you don’t.” Lily checked his face to see if he understood. “It changes everything.”
Wesley nodded and scrunched up his face, suppressing tears. There was a little sunken place, over his solar plexus. Lily touched it. “You lost people.”
“Yeah. Lots.”
Lily had stop
ped saying the words I’m sorry. They were useless out here.
“My boss and my mom and my ex-wife. My sons lost their mom and grandma in one fell swoop. I’m buying the bike so I can go to see them.”
“Where are they?”
“In Eugene. What about you?”
“I was at home in Nebraska. I came out here because I hadn’t been able to contact my sister.”
Wesley nodded. “I was driving my cab, taking a woman and her son to the airport. We were on an overpass that collapsed. How I survived, I don’t know. I carried the kid all the way to the bookstore, my other job. Those first few days, I’d sit on the roof and watch the Black Hawks hover over victims. Men in fluorescent jackets being lowered in swinging cages. Plucking people from the piles.”
“With the kid?”
“He died. I buried him behind the bookstore.” His deep voice was clear, not gravelly, an echoing cave.
“Will you stay in Eugene?”
Wesley didn’t answer for a long time. “Most people are desperate to leave here. I assumed I’d leave, too, as soon as I got the means. But I don’t know. I’ve been interviewing survivors, people who’ve stayed, by choice or otherwise, and posting their stories.” He glanced at her. “My blog is called The Earthquake Chronicles. People need to tell their stories. To witness and be witnessed. It’s something I can do.”
His words made her think of the way she felt behind the steam table at Trinity Church, that acute sense of well-being as she handed out trays of hot food. To keep him talking, she asked, “Which job did you like best? Driving the cab or selling books?”
“The two jobs had a kind of symbiotic relationship. I mean, most of all, I love stories. Sometimes I think they might be the only thing that can save a culture. The way we talk about ourselves to each other. So I liked driving the cab because motion helps me think, especially in the middle of the night when the streets are so peaceful. That’s when I’d get the best ideas for my novel. But then during the day I got to talk to people about books. I liked sussing out customers, figuring out what they wanted, even when they hadn’t asked. Like, someone would come in for a Zagat guide and I’d convince them to leave with Alice Munro or Sherman Alexie.
“But Ramon was always pressuring me to drive more. He said he couldn’t afford to leave a car with a driver who only used it part-time. Sometimes I had to take off in the middle of a shift at the bookstore to pick up a fare. Cynthia threatened to fire me about ten times.
“Geez,” Wesley said. “I’m talking too much.”
She didn’t mean for her silence to be agreement. She was only thinking about stories saving culture and wondering if he knew about the bonobos. But he jumped back on the bike and started the engine, drowning out her eventual, “No, you aren’t.”
He didn’t turn off the engine in Vicky’s driveway, just shouted thanks, and waited for Lily to slide off. Then he opened the throttle and purred the bike down the street, his scuffed dress shoes resting on the foot pegs, his knees jutting out.
“Look at you,” Vicky said. “All flushed.”
13
Okay, this one’s a 1929 Le Corbusier. Gorgeous, right? It looks like a woman lying down. A woman in cowhide. Go sit in the one hanging by the window. It’s the Eero Aarnio Bubble Chair.”
“What’d you do to chase her off?” Lily asked as she flopped onto the metallic silver cushion inside the clear orb. She pushed her feet against the carpet and swung herself.
“Those over there,” Vicky pointed, “are my Eameses, including the Time-Life and four from the Evolutionary Aluminum Group. And, hey, look! The molded maple plywood Isamu Kenmochi!”
“You said you loved her.”
“A Pierre Paulin back-to-back. And my Pierre Guariche La Vallee blanche daybed. All originals. All in pristine condition.”
Lily swung herself higher in the bubble chair and said, “You always sabotage yourself.”
No one knew her like Lily did. She supposed she could just fess up to the truth—which was that she hated this wrung-out feeling. No algorithm could address how much she liked Sal. It made her crazy, actually, thinking about the nutty mad fun they had. Sal’s big-mouthed toothy laugh was her favorite thing in the world.
But that was the exact kind of thinking she needed to ditch. She needed to move on. Moving on was all about distraction. To stopgap the devastation and aloneness, she’d had to find a project, and she had, a brilliant one. Making the kayak land-worthy. Vicky couldn’t wait to try out the new vehicle. But how would she propel it? Pushing sticks instead of paddles? If she hadn’t just sold the motorcycle, she might have attached the motor to the wheeled kayak.
“I asked you a question.”
Lily was here! How awesome was that? An even better distraction. Lily always calmed her. But this line of questioning needed to be aborted.
“I saw that look of abandoned thrill on your face,” Vicky said.
“Now what are you talking about?”
“Lily Jones, the sensible one, joyriding with a complete stranger.”
“He left you with a few hundred dollars. And he’s reading Virginia Woolf. How dangerous can he be?”
“You kept his book. Guess he’ll have to come back and get it.”
“Don’t change the subject. What’d you do to Sal?”
What a stroke of luck, the earthquake! The planet’s crust shook hard, shuddering away the dreck, and left standing two women, on a hillside, all alone, their senses of humor and libidos intact. It was perfect. For a hot second, anyway.
But yesterday Sal couldn’t have been clearer: the past two weeks were disaster-induced intimacy, nothing more. Her face all red the way it gets, she’d spelled it out: O-V-E-R. F-I-N-I-S-H-E-D. “I don’t understand,” Vicky had joked. “Could you just say what you mean?” No smile. Not even a swat of her hand to indicate the joke was really stupid. Sal just jammed her shovel into the dirt and continued turning over the soil in her vegetable patch.
Someone knocked on the front door and Lily leapt out of the bubble chair, as if she expected armed mobsters to bust in.
“Get a grip,” Vicky said. “It’s probably just the wine guy.”
The big man was impeccably dressed in gray flannel pants and a pale green shirt. He held out a large, warm hand.
“So, you actually got a car up here?” Vicky asked him.
“I have a Subaru and there are doable routes, if you know where they are.”
“Cool. Come on. I’ll show you the wine.”
“Exquisite,” he said, hefting a bottle. “Wow. You have this? I didn’t think there were any bottles left. Oh, and look at this.”
A few minutes later he handed Vicky cash for the entire collection while Lily looked on with mute astonishment. When he went out the door to get his hand truck, Vicky said to her sister, “Craigslist is awesome. You can sell anything. And fast. Which is a good thing because I only have about ten percent charge left on my computer.”
Would Sal let her come by, just to recharge her computer on the generator? Probably not.
“They’re calling them Vultures,” Lily said, that huffiness in her voice, signaling that she was about to explain something for Vicky’s benefit. “People who buy up stuff from desperate people. At rock-bottom prices.”
“Do I look desperate to you?” Vicky laughed at the look on Lily’s face. “No, no, you’re right. I sort of am, aren’t I? I mean, I have to be out of the house by midnight tomorrow. And I need cash. So whatever the Vultures want to give me is very welcome.”
“Sorry I’m late,” said another man letting himself in the open front door. “Let me have a look at the chairs. I’ll tell you right up front, people always think their knockoffs are originals.” The slight but muscled man shifted across the room as if he were too caffeinated. He glanced at his watch.
“Originals,” Lily said. “Every single one.”
Ha! Lily was rallying! Vicky winked at her loyal sister.
The antiques dealer squatted before each chair, touching lightly, and began to almost vibrate with excitement, though he tried to conceal his avarice with a scowl. He commented on the small wine stain on the cream-colored upholstery of the Pierre Guariche. With its radiating stainless steel arms and legs cradling the daybed’s seat, that piece was the most sensuous of the collection.
“I like the wine stain,” Vicky said. “It’s from a very silky Pinot I drank with Sal the night I taught her how to play chess. It adds intrigue, a touch of eroticism. Do you know—” Vicky continued, turning to Lily. “She actually beat me a couple of times. That woman’s mind is whacked, but—” Don’t think about Sal.
The dealer fingered the deep scratch in the Kenmochi. Vicky whispered to Lily that that had been made intentionally, with a car key, by a former girlfriend who stopped by unannounced and found Vicky with another woman. “In flagrante delicto.” She wagged her eyebrows. “Don’t you think the arms on that chair, the way they curve wide, look like a woman’s hips?”
“Hardly pristine condition, as you claimed in your ad,” the man said, flicking his fingernail against the scratch.
Lily jumped in with, “Are you kidding? For chairs this old and beautiful? This is about as pristine as they come. The stain can be removed. The scratch is an easy repair.”
The wine guy rolled three cases of wine by on his hand truck. He winked as he said, “These chairs are all midcentury originals, aren’t they? Beautiful.”
The antiques dealer did the watch trick again. “I’ve got to go.” He waited for the wine dealer to get out the door with his load. “Look. You said you needed to be out by tomorrow.”
“You put that on your Craigslist ad?” Lily nagged.
“I’m willing to help.” The man pulled out his checkbook, scrawled a figure and his signature. He ripped off the check and handed it to Vicky. She glanced at the amount and tore it up.
“See?” she said to Lily. “I have things under control.”
The Evolution of Love Page 9