Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

“I can’t let her run all over California by herself, Laura. Be reasonable.” My heart was thumping with annoyance and something else I did not want to examine.

She was silent again, and then she said, “She’d be with me. What you mean is, you can’t let her run all over California with a crackhead actress. I haven’t done a line or had a drink in years, if you’re keeping score. Besides, you could come, too. See my world. I’d love that, Met. I’d love to show you what draws me, what makes me real. I’ve always wanted to; I’ve always thought that if you could just see it, you’d understand…you might see who your daughter is, too, or who she could be. You might even see what you are. You might like what you see.”

“Oh, Laura! I have family—”

“I thought we were family,” she said softly. She kept her eyes on the road and the mountains. They were darkening, casting long blue shadow fingers over the earth. Reaching for us in the red car.

She looked over at me then.

“Aren’t we three here just as much family as your four back there?” she said.

“Pie, please understand—”

“Oh, I do,” she said. She did not speak again.

I was silent, too.

We swept over a rise and down into the vast, mountain-ringed bowl of a valley. Its flat bottom was steeped in shadow like tea, but light still limned the peaks of the mountains, and the sky over them was going silvery. On our left and right stretched huge fields of what looked at first to be strange, stylized, prehistoric birds, all in frenetic motion. They ran in orderly rows that reached to the base of the mountains. I drew in my breath, and then saw that they were propellerlike wind-mills, all running in place before an unseen wind.

I exhaled in pure delight. Laura looked over at me and smiled.

“I know,” she said. “They never fail to knock me out, no matter how many times I pass them. They’re driven by convection, the hot air rising from the bottom of this valley where the mountains hold it in. It’s like someone has literally planted the wind.”

I smiled at the lovely little turn of phrase, forgetting completely that I was angry with her.

“What are they for? What do they do?”

“Power. They can light this desert up for a hundred miles. Back when the big quake up at Big Bear Lake took out all the power these guys went right on working.”

“Quake…Lord, that’s right,” I said, remembering the strange weather and the talk of storms and sinister atmospheric phenomena and the renegade climatologist on TV. “Y’all are supposed to have the big one any minute now. No way am I going to let Glynn stay out here with that hanging over you—”

“Jesus, Met, we have them all the time, little ones, and none of them ever turn into the really big one. Northridge was the Big One; everybody says so. We barely felt Big Bear, and it wasn’t far. If you’re thinking about that wacko scientist, you might remember how the New Madrid business turned out. You’re just reaching, now.”

And I took another deep breath and let it out, and was quiet, because that’s just what I was doing.

You can see Palm Springs a long way away. It is a great swathe of green, a dense emerald prayer rug, flung down in all the tawny, wild-animal colors of the desert. I found it hard, when it came into view, to look away. Palms, jacarandas, hibiscus, lantana, and a great many other exotic flora for which I had no name yet, formed bowers and islands in the almost continuous velvet carpet that, Laura said, was a network of golf courses without parallel in the United States. These were spotted with flashes of silver and blue: ponds, water holes, lakes, and the swimming pools of hundreds of hotels and villas, all catching the last of the sun. In the shadow of the mountains, and up in their steep foothills, lights were beginning to bloom. It looked like a Fabergé village or a particularly glittering Disney theme park.

“Where are the people?” I said. There seemed to be no cars moving on the arrow-straight toy roads that bisected the green.

“At cocktails. Or getting ready for cocktails. Or in some cases getting over the ones they had at lunch,” Laura said. “This is the hour of the dressing drink.”

“What do you do if you don’t drink?”

“Oh…eat. Make love. Garden, if you are so undistinguished as not to have a gardener. Bicycle or run; it’s too hot to do it any other time, except early morning. Ride the tram.”

She gestured ahead, and following her hand I made out a miniature railway snaking up a mountainside, with a tiny tram toiling slowly up it, toward the pink-gold light just receding from the peaks. I thought that what you saw from the top at this hour must be incredible.

“That looks like fun,” I said. “Have you ever been up to it?”

“Believe it or not, I haven’t. It’s sort of like New Yorkers and the Staten Island Ferry. But we could go tomorrow. Glynn wants to.”

“The plane I want leaves at noon,” I said. “I don’t think we could make it if we did the tram.”

“There’s another one at six.”

I did not answer her. The teasing, singsong note I remembered from her childhood was back in her voice. It made me want to shake her and hug her close at the same time. I did not need for Laura to revert to childhood; I had enough on my hands with one agitated child.

Laura swung off the freeway and onto a narrower road. It ran for a time through low, sculptured buildings where fairy lights bloomed on outdoor patios and cobbled streets twisted off into the blue shadows of other buildings. There were people here; strolling in and out of shops, sitting on terraces sipping drinks, jostling and crowding in the canyonlike streets. The buildings were adobe, I supposed, and bleached by the fading light; they reminded me more of Casablanca or Tangier than the American West. Then we were through the cluster and Laura nosed the car up an even narrower road that seemed to climb straight into the roots of the mountains.

Buildings here were low and many-leveled, climbing with the earth. Lights starred some of them. At the end of the road, where the mountains jutted straight up into a rock cliff, lay the carved white cluster of Merlin’s caves that I remembered from her photographs. They were beautiful, but seemed somehow inimical to life. Where would you put your garbage cans in this place? Where would you hang your wet bathing suits, air your rugs? Where would you park your car? When we swung around behind, I saw where: a long, low, white, stable-like building with twisted log supports housed a scattering of Mercedeses and Jaguars and BMWs. There were one or two more Mustang convertibles like Laura’s, gleaming in the dusk. Some of the spaces were empty, but Laura stopped and stared at one that was not. The dusty back end of what appeared to be a late seventies Pontiac protruded from it.

“Shit. Somebody’s company has got my space,” she said. “Everybody knows not to do that; now I’m going to have to call around and catch whoever it is, and they’re going to give me all that crap about not knowing their guests were parked there and…oh, it’s Stu! Oh, good! Or at least I hope it’s good. Damn him, he knows I’m going to have to park in the driveway now. It embarrasses him for people to see that wreck he drives—”

“Who is Stu? I’m surprised Glynn let him in. She knows better,” I said uneasily, thinking that I was not exactly thrilled to have Glynn left alone with one of Laura’s men friends. My mind swiftly built Stu from the air: lithe as a panther, snakehipped, ponytailed and earringed, teeth bleached the white of bones and flashing in a tanned face, jeans riding low, and shirt unbuttoned to show the gold chain nestled in the thatch of chest hair. The gold chain holding the key to Laura’s condo.