Fault Lines

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “I will,” he said back, into my tangled hair. I felt his tongue touch my eyelids, and knew that he tasted the salt.

  “I will, always.”

  10

  If you have been married a long time to the same person, the most profoundly disorienting thing that can happen to you is to wake beside someone else. No matter what you have done in the night with the new person, no matter how you felt about that, those first moments beside another body are an earthquake in the soul. It’s because sleep is the deepest place we go besides death, I thought, lying immobile beside T.C.’s long, still body in the cold room. You come up out of the deepest place totally vulnerable. In those free-floating moments a familiar body beside you is your only anchor to life. I lay very still, listening to T.C.’s even breathing, afraid to move, afraid of what might flood over me and sweep me away. The deepest I have ever gone and the nearest I have ever been before to lost is in sleep, until last night, I thought. I was that deep and that lost last night. I don’t feel like I can ever get myself back.

  I was paralyzed with pure, fresh guilt, the awful and total guilt of the child certain of his irredeemability, and with the loss of anyone who could conceivably be Merritt Fowler of Atlanta, Georgia, wife of Pom, mother of Glynn. I wanted those familiar definitions back so simply and terribly that I scrambled silently out of the disheveled bed and pulled on my scattered clothes and ran on tiptoe to the door, still holding my shoes and socks. I did not look back at T.C., and when Curtis came to the door of the tower room and whined anxiously at me, I whispered through stiff lips, “I can find my own way this morning. Stay Curtis. Carpe diem.” And with that I was out and gone, slipping hastily on the dew-slick steps, my feet and heart numb, racing through the cool, pearly dawn for the lodge and a shower. Hot water; hot water will bring her back, I said over and over under my breath, witlessly. I’ve got to get her back. But then, stopping still on the gravel path down to the lodge, I cried aloud, “Oh, T.C.!” I doubled over as if in pain, and then ran on, toward the woman I had lost somewhere in the air between Atlanta and this place. Better her than no one; better anyone than that.

  There was no fog this morning, and the great trees were still at their tops, and the silence was thick. If birds sang I could not hear them. The air at ground level was much warmer than the tower room had been, and when I gained the dark, stale lodge my feet were no longer numb. I ran through the rooms flipping light switches, stopping only to put on coffee, and then tore through my airless bedroom and into the shower.

  I stood there for a long time, near scalding water beating down on my body, running down my face, sluicing through my hair, scouring my mouth and nose and ears and closed eyes. I scrubbed; I washed every part of me in the French pine soap Caleb Pringle had put out. I brushed my nails and the bottoms of my feet with a little, wooden-handled brush, and opened my mouth to let the hot stream run down my throat. It felt warm and clean down to my stomach, but it stopped there. The cleansing heat did not reach the dark place in my groin where this new woman lived. I could not wash her away and wept in the water like a child because of that, my tears swirling away down the drain to meet some creek or river hidden among the redwoods. When I finally got out of the shower I was as red all over as a boiled lobster, and except for the secret cave where last night had been born, the old Merritt was back.

  My busybody mind moved fast to boot out the sick, sticky guilt, and I realized only later that I was talking aloud.

  “Okay. It happened and it felt fantastic and it’s over. I’m not going to beat up on myself, because I loved it. There’s no sense pretending I didn’t. But now I’m going home. I’m going to go get Glynn and get T.C. to take us to the airport in San Francisco and we’ll just wait there until we can get a plane. I’ll try once more to get Laura through Stuart, and then she’s on her own. I can’t wait for her. I’ll make T.C. understand about this, and I’m not even going to call Pom. Whatever he’s got going back there with what’s-her-name, he can do it someplace other than my house. If Mommee’s not out of there, I’ll take her someplace myself. I’ll tell Amy to go fuck a duck. I’ll get Ina back. Maybe Glynn and I will go to a spa or something, or take a cruise, or maybe I’ll see if Crisscross can find me some freelance work, or better than that, a real job. I’ll bring the dogs in the house and let the rats take over if they want to. All of that; whatever. But I’m going to do it now.”

  I sensed that if I stopped I was lost, and so I put on shorts and a clean T-shirt I found in my dresser drawer, and combed my wild, wet hair severely back and knotted it on my neck. I had not worn it this way since Los Angeles, I remembered; since then it had flown free. I looked briefly into the mirror and saw a thin, white woman with prominent copper freckles and ridged cheekbones and blank eyes, and looked hastily away. I did not look again. I drank a quick cup of coffee and slipped into sneakers and went out into the brightening morning, banging the door behind me.

  It was already hot. The birds had started up, but only sporadically, and sounded muffled, as if through fog. But there was no fog. Still, the tops of the huge trees were indistinct. The day was cloudless, but it was not clear. I had scarcely gotten past the empty garage before I felt sweat start under my arms and at the edges of my hair. In the heat and scuzziness, the redwoods that had soothed and solaced and enchanted me looked flat and bleached, as if they were paper cutouts left too long in the sun. Home, it was time to go home.…By the time I had reached the big turn in the road, I was trotting fast.

  I met him there. I stopped abruptly, simply staring at him. I had not heard him coming down the road, and I don’t think he had heard me, either. His eyes widened in the darkness around them, and he stood still, too. For a long moment neither of us spoke. I could not hear any other sounds except my own quick, light breathing.

  He wore faded khaki hiking shorts and a blue Oxford shirt, and he too had scrubbed himself; droplets clung to his beard and hair. His legs were long and brown and muscled; I remembered the feel of them, their strength and their warmth, and felt the red start in my neck. He stood with his hands straight down beside him, looking at me. Then, tentatively, he raised one of them toward me and said, “Merritt. I missed you. I woke up and found you gone and thought you had…left.”

  “I can’t do that with you anymore, T.C.,” I said, and stopped because my voice simply faded out. I stood there, staring, the separate parts of his face burning themselves into my brain, but not, somehow, adding up to a face. His eyes, his hawk’s nose, his mouth…

  With dizzying speed the eyes and nose and mouth assembled themselves and it was T.C.’s face and his body and I ran straight into his arms, throwing my own around his with more strength than I thought I had. He made a soft, choked noise into my hair, but he did not speak. I rubbed my head back and forth into the hollow of his neck; I pressed myself against him, scrubbing my body against his; I all but climbed him as I would a tree.

  “Yes, I can,” I cried fiercely, “and I have to, and I will, right here. Right here, T.C.! In the daylight, on this road, in this gravel, under these trees, right now, please, please—”

  “God,” I heard him whisper, “God. I was so scared you’d left me—”

  “Now!” I said, and bit his bottom lip and jerked my arms loose from his and tore at the buttons of his shirt, at the fly of the shorts. “Goddamn it, T. C. Bridgewater, now!”

  And we did it there on the hot, dusty path with our shorts caught around our ankles and the cross, startled jeers of a pair of jays overhead, and our own words and cries rising up into the still trees as if to set them whispering, swaying. Last night’s dizzy plummet into heat and red darkness took me again, and I lost myself again, and felt the exact, precise moment when he lost himself, too. Just at that instant, just then, the earth moved beneath us and seemed to wheel over our heads and into the sky. By the time it had stopped rolling and shivering, we were loose and tangled and emptied out, still joined, beginning to laugh crazily.

  “By God, how did you like that?” he
said breathlessly. “Can I say it? Did the earth move for you?”

  “Damn Hemingway for making that a cliché,” I whispered, trying to get my voice to work, aware that I had ridden another earthquake like a wild horse and was not, this time, in the least afraid. I wished, even, that the earth would move again. But it did not, and gradually the birdsong came back, and the trees came into focus, and still we lay there, neither of us wanting to loosen ourself from the other.

  Finally, though, I moved, and lay myself along the length of him, feeling his long body pressing itself into the earth beneath me.

  “Was that a big one? It wasn’t, was it?” I said.

  “Nope. Same as we’ve been getting for a couple of weeks now. There wasn’t anything unusual on my stuff this morning, except a little more recorded action. Curtis and Forrest both present and snoring. Nope, that was just a reminder. Sort of a ‘that’s nothing; look what I can do.’ It really adds a hell of a fillip, though, doesn’t it? Were you scared?”

  “No,” I said dreamily, resting my cheek against his damp chest. I could feel his heart slowing. “This time I wasn’t scared. Maybe what people should do in earthquakes is…that.”

  “I’ll call the U.S. Geological Survey right now and get them on it,” he said. “Wow. Now I’ve only got two wishes left.”

  “What wish were you granted? What are the other two?”

  “The one that was granted was to make love to you in an earthquake,” he said. “That’s a new wish. The other two are to be in a really big one and never to leave this place. But if I had to pick one, I’d pick the one I just got.”

  “Did it feel like you thought it would?”

  “It felt like…yeah. What I thought it would. Actually, I’ve felt something like it before. It’s the reason I’m up here, the reason behind everything.”

  “Will you tell me? Can you?”

  “I’ll try. I want you to understand it. It’s the why of me, I guess,” he said, but for a while he did not go on. I lay there, warmth from him and seemingly from the very earth beneath him seeping into my arms and legs, making them heavy and boneless and at the same time weightless. I did not think I had ever felt so totally, perfectly in harmony with the world around me, strange though it was. The frantic, fractured woman of the early morning was gone.

  “I told you I’d never been in a big one, but I’ve been in a sort of big one,” he said slowly. “Big enough to do more than rattle a few dishes. Two or three people died in Oakland when a parking deck collapsed. It was while I was at Berkeley that time; you remember, I told you about the convention, and how I came to find the tower and all? Well, the day before that there was a quake centered on the Hayward, up around Rogers Creek. I was walking across the campus when it hit. I’ve never felt anything even remotely like that before. It was as if…I came alive for the first time in my life. Really alive, in every cell and atom and follicle—there was a totality about it that just eclipsed everything else I’d ever known or dreamed of knowing. It was like, for the first time in my life, I was whole. There was a whole me there and I’d never even really known I was incomplete. I remember reading somewhere that when the Loma Prieta hit, some kids on the campus at USC Santa Cruz just spontaneously jumped up and started dancing in a circle. I did that, too. Before it stopped I was capering and whooping like a crazy man, like I was possessed. And I was. When it stopped, and I knew I wouldn’t feel it anymore, I understood for the first time how ol’ Ronnie Reagan must have felt in that god-awful movie when he said, ‘Where’s the rest of me?’ I knew that after that, until I felt it again, there’d only be part of me walking around. It was then that I knew I’d have to come out here. When I got up into the Big Basin the next day I found exactly where. It’s just a matter of waiting now.”

  He stopped and looked up at me keenly, waiting for me to speak. I could not find anything to say. Finally I said, “I wish you could find something that would…complete you, make you whole…that didn’t mean death and misery to other people.”

  For the first time since I had known him I saw real anger in his eyes, and a quick, dark grief, and he became, for that instant, someone I did not know. I pulled away reflexively and he pressed me back again, hard.

  “Don’t take this away from me, Merritt,” he whispered fiercely against the side of my face. “I’m going to lose the only other thing that ever did it for me.”

  “What was that?” I whispered back, licking the crackling of dried sweat at his temple. It tasted of him.

  “You know it was last night, and just now,” he said. “You know it was you. You know you aren’t going to stay. And I can’t go. Don’t make me say that again, either.”

  I lay against him, sadness like a glacier around my heart. I tried for lightness.

  “T.C., you’re going to have to find some more accessible stars to hitch your wagon to,” I said.

  “Not after that day, not after last night, not after this morning. You can’t go back, even when you can’t go on, either. Don’t settle, Merritt. Don’t ever settle. Life’s too short.”

  I was silent against him. Around us the heat shimmered, the day hummed. Presently I said, “T.C., what are we lying on?”

  He moved his buttocks experimentally.

  “Just offhand I’d say I’m lying on pinecones and maybe a dried squirrel turd. If you don’t know by now what you’re lying on, all has been for naught.”

  I laughed, suddenly happy. With T.C. it was always going to be the laughter that made me whole, set me free.

  “No, I mean what is the earth? What kind of rock?”

  “What are the stars? What is the earth? What are you doing, running your sun lines? Finding your boundaries?”

  “I need to know all the way where I am, down to the core of the earth, up to the edge of the universe. I need to fix you in this firmament. I need to fix me in it.”

  He eased out from under me and pulled up his shorts.

  “I hope some rosy-cheeked scoutmaster with an overbite hasn’t got the field glasses of his entire troop trained on us,” he said wryly. “They’ll grow up never screwing at all. Okay. These are almost exactly the words of a U.S. Geological Survey guy I met up here and asked the same question, almost the only person besides you who’s never laughed at me about this earthquake stuff. ‘The primary rock in the Big Basin area is Butano sandstone. It was formed in the lower to middle Eocene, forty-three to fifty-seven million years ago. It’s light-gray to buff, very fine-to-coarse-grained arkosic sandstone in thin to very thick beds, interbedded with dark gray to brown mudstone and shale. The amount of this mudstone and shale varies from ten to forty percent. This particular formation is about three thousand meters thick and typically dips ten to thirty degrees toward the southwest. Arkosic sandstone is a feldspar-rich, coarse-grained sandstone typically derived from granite. Most of the Sierra Nevada range in California is formed of granite older than eighty million years. This rock, our rock, would have been formed when the Farallon oceanic plate was diving northwestward toward Japan. That is to say, these sediments would have eroded off an arc of volcanoes like those found today in Japan, and the Aleutians, even the Cascades. To the southwest of Big Basin, the dominant rock is the Santa Cruz mudstone, which was formed in the Miocene, five to twenty-four million years ago, and is brown and gray to light-gray, buff, and light yellow shale and mudstone with minor amounts of sandstone.’ Will that do?”

  “Yes,” I smiled. “It’s somehow very satisfying to know that. Did you memorize it?”

  “I did. I asked him to write it down, and he did. It felt important to know that. It was important to him, too; I keep meaning to look him up again.”

  I nodded.

  “T.C., can we spend the whole day naked?” I said presently.

  “Aren’t you the greedy little minx! Are you this greedy back home?”

  Suddenly I could laugh about Atlanta and the house on the river, all of it.

  “No. At home I’m…I guess you’d say I’m grateful.”
<
br />   He whooped with laughter, rolled over and over with it, choked, gulped, breathed hard, laughed some more.

  “‘Please, sir, can I have some more?’” T.C. mimicked both me and Oliver Twist. “Shit, Merritt, if you don’t take anything else back with you, take this fine greediness. Demand, by God. Don’t settle!”

  “Nossir.”

  “To answer your question, sure, we can spend the whole day naked. First we’ll go swimming. I know the perfect place for a hot day. Then we’ll go home and take naps. Then we’ll screw. Then I’ll show you my toys. Then we’ll screw. Then we’ll cook that bouillabaisse, or else throw it out before it poisons us. Then we’ll screw. Then I’ll play my tapes for you, and maybe a little slide guitar, and then we’ll—”

  “How both the busy little bee improve each shining hour,” I said contentedly. “Do you think we might be a trifle overextended for one day?”

  “Well, we could cut out the swimming and the naps and the bouillabaisse, but not the—”

  “Enough. Let’s start off and see how far we get. Can we do it all naked?”

  “Why not? Curtis ain’t gon’ tell. Forrest would if he could, but he can’t. You’re right. No hurry. Save some for tomorrow. We’ve got lots of time.”

  I looked up at him from where I lay on my back, mutely and with pain.

  “We’ve already had more than lots of people ever have,” he said softly, kissing the tip of my nose. “For all you know, it might be days and days before Laura comes back. Don’t count, Merritt. Carpe diem.”

  “Carpe diem,” I whispered. Above us the sun finally broke free from the entangling tops of the redwoods, and rode full into the sky.

  Ever since college, there has been lodged in my mind a passage from (I think) The Odyssey, chronicling a time on the voyage when Odysseus and his men drifted in perfect peace and harmony through sunny blue seas, before fresh winds, through land and water so beautiful that I cannot recall any details, only a golden wash of honey-sweet sun and warm crystal water where dolphins played and time itself sang lazily in the scented wind, stopped and still. I remember from it only a sense of lazy perfection, but it is such a strong impression that since that time it has been the standard against which I measure perfect days.