“What a perfect summer day,” someone will say, and I will think of that passage, and of course, the day in question pales. How could it not? Or, “This has really been a day to remember,” and that time on Odysseus’s journey will spring to mind, and I will think, “Not bad, for mere mortals.”
The comparison had never spoiled any real days for me, but it has always been there, even though the grownup part of my mind knows full well that such days do not come to human beings.
But that day came close. It came very close. At the end of it I was able to whisper, in the pine-smelling dark of T.C.’s veranda, “Eat your hearts out, you smug Greek bastards,” and mean it. Oh, it was such a day, it really was. A pinnacle day, a ball bearing on which a life turns.
When at last we picked ourselves up from the Butano sandstone and the pine needles and dust, it was close to eleven, and the heat was formidable. But it was dry heat, not the thick, wet heat of home, and instead of draining, it soothed us to sleepiness and indolence. All that day I felt heavy-lidded and sweetly weighted in my limbs, needing to reach out frequently and touch T.C. languidly on whatever part of him was nearest, to lean my head against him, to slouch against him, to feel his weight take mine.
We tied our clothing together and hung it around our necks and, wearing only our shoes, ambled down the dwindling path beyond the lodge, deeper and deeper into the red-woods, winding steadily down. Even in the deepest shadow, where moisture still clung and we walked in a green darkness, it was hot. By the time we reached T.C.’s secret swimming hole, we were both lightly sheened all over with sweat. Only the smallest and most arbitrary breezes reached here, but when they did, they felt so purely sensual and fine on my body that I found myself thinking I really must look into nudism.
I said as much to T.C., who laughed and said he didn’t want anybody else but me looking at him bare-assed.
“Why not?” I said. “You have a wonderful body. I do, too. I wonder why I never thought I did before. Right now I don’t care who sees this magnificent body, and I don’t know why you do, either.”
“Have you ever seen an old movie called The Enchanted Cottage?” he said, tracing the line of my hipbone with a fingertip. “Where those two supposedly ugly people look perfect and beautiful to each other, as long as they stay in the cottage? I think that’s happened to us. Anybody else seeing us would point and laugh and holler, and then call the cops. We’re a walking pair of skeletons, two long, bony middle-aged loonies flitting buck naked through the redwoods, patting each other. Don’t kid yourself. Life is real and life is earnest.”
“Bull. You no more believe that than I do. Life is perfect. You want to stop a minute and jump dese bones with dem bones?”
“Wait a while. We’re here. Look, right through those laurels. Let’s see what happens to dese dry bones in water.”
It was a deep little pool of dark water, cupped in rock and thick with giant ferns, green and swaying as a tropical kelp bed, where a small silver creek fell from a ridge and paused before running on. The embracing rocks were huge and flattened and gray, and the tops of them lay in sun, but the lichened sides lay in shadow, and where they cradled the pool was far down and bearded with the ferns. Over them the great trees leaned close, so that only the peculiar shafts of thick golden light reached the forest floor and the water. The silence and stillness was so complete that only when we parted the curtaining laurels and stood on the rocks did we hear the sturdy chuckle of the creek and the little falls.
“Oh, Lord. Oh, how magical. What is this place? Does it have a name?” I breathed.
“I think it has some pedestrian name like Smith’s Creek, or something. I did know, but I forgot. It’s not on the park maps, I don’t think; I’ve never seen anybody else down here. I hereby name it Merritt’s Creek. You want to go in?”
I did a foolhardy thing; I scrambled down a rock, found a level place, and dove into the dark water. Only later did I think that I might have broken my neck. An older, deeper part of me knew the pool would take me gently.
“I’m in,” I gasped against the breath-stealing cold. “What’s keeping you?”
He dove in, a long flash of brown in a sun shaft, and when his seal-sleek black head bobbed up beside me, he gasped, “That was stupid. I don’t ever want you to do anything like that again.”
“You did the same thing.”
“I knew it was deep and free of rocks and logs. You didn’t.”
“Well, somehow I did. Maybe water talks to me like the stupid fault does to you. Don’t preach at me, T.C. I’m not a child.”
He spat water and grinned.
“Today you are. Are we having our first fight?”
The water felt wonderful all of a sudden, the deep, aching cold gone, the lingering soft chill effervescent against my body. Looking down, I saw that he and I both were outlined with tiny, silvery bubbles.
“No,” I said. “I feel too good for that. Look at the bubbles. It’s like swimming in champagne, isn’t it?”
I swam up against him, backing him against a submerged rock. I pressed my body against his, feeling the water take it away, pressing it back. There were subterranean currents, though from where I could not tell. The slight resistance was profoundly sensual.
“Have you ever done it in champagne?” I said against his chest.
“I’m good, but I’m not that good,” he said ruefully. “Ask me again sometime when I’m not neck deep in ice water.”
“You may be sure that I will.”
We swam until the cold began to make our arms and legs rubbery, and then we crawled out and lay on the sun-heated rocks, breathing in the silence and the smell of the woods, feeling the sun’s red weight on our eyelids. We lay there until the water’s chill dried to silky coolness and that turned to heat and then to the slight stickiness of sweat.
“Lunchtime,” he said finally, and we got up and stretched and looked at each other.
“Better put our clothes on,” he said. “People still drive down this road occasionally, as far as the lodge, just to see where it goes. Unless you want to shock the Kleinfelder family of Ottumwa, Iowa, out of their leisure suits.”
“Nah, I’m for your eyes only. The Kleinfelders will never know what they missed.”
Back at the tower the sun smote the earth where the trees had been thinned out, and I heard for the first time that old master sound of summer, the lazy hum of cicadas in the encircling forest. I closed my eyes and for an instant was home beside the river. Then I opened them and shook my head. That was for later. That was for another lifetime, or a past one.
We ate lunch on the shabby veranda, under the canvas awning T.C. had rigged up. He brought bread and Brie and some leftover grapes back when he returned from checking the answering machine, and a couple of bottles of cold white wine.
“I can count on the fingers of one hand the days that have been too hot to stay up there, but this is one of them,” he said. “Today we spend right here.”
Curtis had staked out a cool spot under the water spigot where the earth was splotched with dampness, and thumped his tail in welcome, but did not indulge in any unnecessary welcoming frolicking. He went back to panting his doggy grin. T.C. pointed, and I saw Forrest’s shifty jet eyes glittering from a terra-cotta pot with a lush crop of thyme in it. T.C. held out his arm and snapped his fingers, but Forrest preferred the damp earth and the sheltering thyme, and only twinkled his snout slightly.
“Did you know that in New Guinea they eat your cousins, you dirty rat?” T.C. told Forrest. “God-awful big things called Capas, or something. You’re lucky there are no New Guineans around. You’re already seasoned with thyme.”
“Do I have to keep these clothes on?” I said. “I miss the sight of your naked magnificence, and I’m hot as if it were August in Atlanta.”
“Shuck right out,” he said. “Just let me set up the screen here. If the Kleinfelders come by, it’ll give us time to get dressed. I go around without clothes a lot in hot weather, and once
a park ranger caught me naked as a jaybird, lying down here reading The Prince of Tides.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. He asked me how it was going and I said pretty good, and he drove on down the road. Don’t ever try to wear The Prince of Tides as a loincloth, though.”
He unfolded a tattered burlap screen that leaned against the tower base and set it up around the sofa and chairs and upended cable spool that served as a coffee table. I was out of my clothes in an instant, tossing them into one of the rump-sprung chairs. He sat back on his heels, smiling at me.
“Come here,” he said, holding out his arms, and I walked over and into them. His face came just to my waist. He buried it in the space between my ribs, and took a deep breath and let it out again.
“You smell like clean water and woods dirt,” he said, and I could feel his mouth against my skin when he spoke. He kissed my stomach, and my navel, and moved his lips down and down, and I felt my legs go boneless once more, and warmth bloom in the pit of my stomach.
“Care for a nooner?” I murmured.
“Don’t mind if I do,” he said, and got up and pulled me with him onto the deep old couch. Slow: Once again it was all slow, all delicacy and tasting and teasing, all slow-spreading like spilled honey. Then the plunging dark. When I had found my way back, T.C. was laughing and Curtis was whining and barking and nosing at us with a cold, frantic black muzzle.
T.C. reached over and patted him, and gradually he stopped his fussing, looked at us reproachfully, and went back to his spot under the spigot. He lay there with his nose on his paws, gazing at us unblinkingly.
“Curtis is as good as saltpeter in college mashed potatoes,” I said ruefully. “I’d rather do it in front of a nursery school class.”
“Curtis never saw people carrying on like that before. I guess he thought I was killing you, or vice versa.”
“You can’t tell me you’ve never done this with anybody else,” I said. “If you try to tell me I’m the first one I’m going to pour cold wine on your not-so-private parts.”
“I’ve never done it here,” he said, not smiling. “Of course you’re not the first; I’ve been up here a long time, and celibacy is not my thing. But every time before I’ve taken…whoever it was…down there. To the lodge. Impresses the hell out of them and spares me the business of waking up beside somebody I don’t know and having to make small talk and all that. You’re the first for up here. You’ll be the only one.”
“I thought you didn’t like the lodge, and didn’t go down there,” I said. I said. I was absurdly pleased, pleased almost to tears.
“I don’t, and I don’t go down there except to screw. I’ve never had any qualms about that. That’s what the place is meant for, screwing. And it’s easy to get them to leave down there. That’s the other thing it was meant for. Leaving.”
“Why is it different with me?” I said, running my hand over his body from his collarbone to his knees. I felt him stir again and smiled sleepily at him.
“Because I love you,” he said matter-of-factly. “You know that. Don’t fish. Because I love you, and I haven’t any of them. And I won’t, anybody else. This place is only for you, besides me.”
I put my face down into his neck and shut my eyes and lay there, fitted to him from face to feet. I felt him sigh, and then only the soft rise and fall of his breathing. I blinked and let the tears that had gathered on my lower lashes run onto his chest. If he felt them, he gave no indication.
“I love you, too,” I whispered. “I do love you. I don’t know what that makes me. I don’t know where I can go from here with that.”
“You don’t have to go anywhere,” he said into the side of my face. “It doesn’t make you anything, except Merritt who loves T.C. right here and now. Feel it all, be it all, do it all, and then leave that lady here with me. That lady can’t breathe in any other air but this air. I’ll take care of her; I’ll keep her for you. When you go back you’ll know she’s always here, up here in the redwoods with me. Always with me, Merritt.”
“Oh, God, why can’t I just stay? Why can’t I—”
“I’ll make a deal with you. You can think precisely one day ahead. You can plan tomorrow right down to the nanosecond; we can do anything on earth you want; there’s nothing we can get to in a day that we can’t see; nothing we can’t do. But after that you have to cut it off. No planning any further ahead. No looking any further ahead. And then when tomorrow’s done, we’ll take another day and you can plan that one. Who knows how far we’ll get? You’ve only been here three days. Not even that. We could have…who knows how long? Enough to last a lifetime, enough to love a love. But I won’t waste any of it worrying about the length of it. Is that a deal?”
“It’s a deal.”
“Fine. Then what do you want to do tomorrow? There’s a lot I’d love to show you, a lot I know you’d love to see—”
“Tomorrow…let’s screw a whole lot tomorrow,” I said. “And between times let’s go get you some proper glasses frames. There must be an oculist in Palo Alto. That tape is driving me crazy.”
“They’re just drugstore glasses. There’s a drugstore down in Boulder Creek. Anything else we need to get? You aren’t going to get pregnant or anything, are you?”
“I wish I could,” I said fiercely. “I wish I could. But no. I’m on the pill; I’ve got plenty left.”
“Well, you don’t need to worry that you’ll catch anything from me. I’m fine that way. I’ve had all the tests.”
“It never even occurred to me that you wouldn’t have,” I said.
The sun moved around to the west so that its burning fingers found us, and we moved the sofa around until the shade swallowed it. Then we set the food out on the spool-top table and ate until there were no crumbs left, not a swallow of wine. Curtis had a morsel of Brie and Forrest nibbled a grape, and then all four of us lay back in the dim heat and slept like forest creatures.
When we woke the shadows of the trees across the space that the tower occupied were longer and going blue. The heat still clung to the earth, but some of the red fever had gone out of it. I woke with sweat in the creases of my chin and elbows, my hair loose and sticking to my neck, feeling stunned and cross and gummy. I lay there thinking longingly of a shower, and only then noticed that T.C. was not beside me on the sofa. Curtis was gone, too, and Forrest’s eyes no longer glittered in the thyme pot. I sat up and scrubbed my eyes with my fists and looked around.
T.C., dressed only in the khaki shorts and barefoot, knelt under the shake-roofed shed across the yard, peering intently at what I supposed to be his earthquake equipment. His toys. Curtis lay supine beside him, eyes closed. I got up, stretching and smacking my lips around the stale taste in my mouth, and wandered over to look over his shoulder. There was a small cylindrical affair fixed to a board, with paper around it and a pen clipped to a small rod over the cylinder, and beside it a larger device, or perhaps it was two of them. One was a round black object set into a terra-cotta saucer and sunk flush into the earth. Over this, a kind of tripod held a large, square sheet of metal onto which was affixed a coil of some sort. T.C. was looking at some squiggles on the paper apparently made by the pen. I had no earthly idea what any of it was, but I could tell that the cylinder that held the paper was a cardboard Quaker Oats canister. The whole affair had a kind of endearing boy’s treehouse look to it, ingenious but hard to take very seriously. Beside it, T.C., with his hair hanging in his eyes and the mended wire spectacles riding on the tip of his nose, looked so like an overgrown preteen that I laughed and reached over and ruffled his hair, loving him simply and wholly.
“Can T.C. come out and play?” I said.
He looked up at me and grinned.
“Want to see my stuff? I made it myself. Works pretty good, if I do say so.”
“It’s going to be lost on me, but sure. Tell me about it. What’s that thingummy you’re looking at?”
“That’s a drum recorder. First things first. Thi
s thing here”—and he touched the square sheet of metal and set it swinging slightly on its spring—“is part of a geophone. A geophone is the actual sensor that converts ground motion into a weak electric signal. Taken together, the whole business adds up to a rudimentary seismograph. See, I took a big hi-fi speaker and took the coil and magnet out, and fastened the magnet to the ground. It’s fixed; it moves with the earth. Then I attached the coil to that sheet of metal, for mass, and hung it by the right kind of spring over the magnet. When the ground moves, the magnet will move with it, but the mass will stay still where it is for a second because it has some inertia. The relative motion that occurs then generates a weak electric current that can be amplified and recorded, and that shows that waves from an earthquake are being recorded. See?”
I nodded, though I didn’t.
“Okay, now the drum recorder. As you can see, I made this one out of an oatmeal box. I’ve mounted it on a central shaft there, and I use that little motor to make the cylinder rotate every fifteen minutes. Then I hooked up that amplifier there to amplify the signal from the seismometer and connected that up to a pen-motor that converts the signal and rotates the pen. See there? It draws a line mounted on the paper. That tracks earth movement nearby. In the old days they used to darken the paper with soot from a kerosene lantern turned way up high, and the pen would scratch a line in the soot, and they’d roll the drum in thin shellac to fix the soot on the paper. The pen isn’t all that much improvement, but this way I don’t burn up my toys.”
“Lord, hasn’t it all come further than this?” I said, looking around the shed.
“Oh, sure. For one thing you can just get a PC that has an a-two board. That means analog-to-digital computer. You connect the seismometer to that. I’ve got one upstairs; I just ran the line out the window and down the leg of the tower and buried it underground till I got it out here. This stuff here is just because I wanted to, just because I could. I could have bought a geophone and saved myself a lot of tinkering; you can order them from several weird electronic catalogs in Texas. They use them there to look for trapped oil. Come to that, I could have just bought myself a seismograph, I guess. I haven’t spent much of the old man’s dough. But I got a kick out of doing it this way. Are you impressed?”
Fault Lines Page 32