Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

“No wonder so many people jump,” I said, shutting my eyes to it for a moment. “It makes you feel like it’s going to get you anyway, so why put it off?”

“I’ve always thought people jump because it’s such a San Francisco kind of thing to do,” T.C. said. “Eccentric and showy and probably very beautiful all the way down. Nothing mundane about it. No dull overdoses. No tacky guns. Laid back, kind of, but effective.”

“Why do I get the feeling you don’t like San Francisco a whole lot?”

“I don’t not like it, exactly,” he said slowly, looking over at the spectacular headlands where Sausalito and, beyond it, Tiburon lay gleaming in the sun like toy villages flung down by a giant’s child. He wore a faded red anorak this morning, mottled with what looked to be bleach spots and ripped on one pocket. The red was wonderful with the dark skin and the beard and hair, I thought; the latter so recently washed that it still had damp comb tracks in it. I even liked the bleach spots and the tear; anything newer or better cared for would have seemed effete. I liked everything about T. C. Bridgewater this morning. Somehow he seemed to own the bridge and the wind and the vast emptiness as surely and comfortably as he owned the old Jeep. I wished suddenly that he would stop the Jeep in the middle of the bridge and kiss me again. The thought was so clear and shapely and so alien to me that I felt myself redden and hastily sought out things about him to dislike.

He’s as self-absorbed as a child, I thought, and if you put him down anywhere else but those mountains he’d be as clumsy and ludicrous as an aborigine in Paris. I can just see him at the Driving Club.

It didn’t work, of course; I could see him at the Driving Club. After all, he had been more surely born to that world than either Pom or I. And the self-absorption fit him like an animal’s unconscious sense of itself.

“Shit,” I said under my breath, and moved closer to the door of the Jeep.

“But?” I said aloud.

“But it just seems…I don’t know. Extraneous. Like a stage set, or a perfect architect’s model. I know people live and work here, and get married and have children and are happy and sad and die and all that, but I can’t seem to picture it. It’s a tinker-toy town.”

“Don’t let Tony Bennett hear you say that.”

“Are you kidding? That poor son of a bitch probably hates San Francisco like he does the IRS. Probably goes back-stage and throws up every time he has to sing that song.”

I laughed and he looked over at me and squeezed my hand and said, “You look nice this morning,” and we bowled off the bridge and into Martin county, my hand tingling.

“It’s probably some of the most gorgeous countryside I’ll ever see,” I said chattily, as he cut over to Highway 1 toward Muir Beach and the Golden Gate Recreational Area. “I wonder why I don’t feel about it like I do the redwoods? You’re right about the city; somehow it doesn’t have much to do with the way I feel about this part of the country. I mean, I’d love to spend some time in it, and I know I’d like a lot of the people, but somehow I just want to get back into the wild stuff.”

I knew that I was babbling. I knew that he knew it. I took a deep breath.

“T.C.,” I said, “I think you’d better kiss me one more time and get it over with so I can stop waiting to see if you’re going to do it. I’m not behaving at all like myself.”

He laughed aloud and drew me to him with one arm and kissed me long and hard, without stopping the Jeep or even swerving it. When he let me go my mouth felt warm and numb, and I could feel my whole body melt into relaxation. The silly, stilted tension went out of the morning. Another sort entirely crept in.

“Thank you,” I said.

“You’re very welcome,” he said. “I was going to do that, but I thought I’d wait till we were standing on firm ground, so if you slapped me I wouldn’t wreck us. If you like it I could stop now and do it some more—”

“Drive, fool,” I said. “I’m not even going to ask how you can do that at fifty miles an hour and not even swerve.”

“First thing you learn on the Delta. Whatever you’re going to do, you learn to do it in a car, because that’s where we spend half our lives. I didn’t know how to kiss a woman standing still till I got to college.”

“I can imagine it was a considerable handicap,” I said. I did not want to dwell on whom he kissed in college, or how, and so I changed the subject.

“If you’re going to show me earthquake country, shouldn’t you start in San Francisco?” I said. “Laura said there was still a lot of damage down around the marina, and where that bridge collapsed.”

“I will if you really want to see it,” he said. “But I’ve never thought that that stuff really belonged to the earthquake. I mean, it had more to do with people and where and how they build their structure than it did with anything the earthquake did. See, the Loma Prieta hit way up in the Santa Cruzes; only it happened so deep down that there’s nothing much to see up there except some sheared-off redwoods. It’s the deepest earthquake ever recorded in this part of the country. The shock waves traveled out from the epicenter and took out whatever they hit while they were still active. There are three kinds, the compressional waves that make the first big thump when the quake hits; we call them P waves because they’re the primary ones. The second one is the S wave, and it comes in a rolling, side-to-side motion; it’s the secondary wave. It’s called a shear wave, too. The last is the surface wave. It travels slower, along the surface of the earth, and it’s the largest. It finishes up what the first two don’t get. In the Loma Prieta, there wasn’t anything much in the way of human habitation, relatively speaking, until the waves got to Santa Cruz and then San Francisco. If there hadn’t been cities there, nobody much would have noticed the quake. Do you see what I mean? The quake is its own entity. It’s not San Francisco’s quake or L.A.’s. Damage in a city is arbitrary, because if there was no city there wouldn’t be the damage.…I don’t think I’m making much sense. But see, it’s like, the land under the marina is fill. It was literally filled with dirt and stuff to create usable land. Lots of the debris Loma Prieta uncovered turned out to be debris from the big one in 1906. That kind of land is porous and when the waves hit it, it acts just like gelatin. It’s like…we did that, not the quake. The city did itself in, so to speak. A quake is a wild thing, and it’s born in elemental wildness, in the crust of the very earth. What sits on that crust is us, not it. It’s not a popular point of view, as you might imagine. I’ll take you by the worst of it when we come back, if you still want to see it.”

I thought of the awful images from the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, of the fires in the night and the collapsed buildings, like folded accordions, and the terrible flattened bridge. I thought of dry land turning to rolling Jell-O, of the terror that must engender.

“No,” I said. “I don’t think I want to see what a quake can do to a city. But I can see why it’s not a popular point of view. Lord, T.C., you sound like you’re in love with them—the earthquakes. Like you’re rooting for them, somehow.”

He looked briefly at me, and then back at the road and the heaving sea beside it.

“I guess I am,” he said. “I know there’s something in an earthquake that speaks to me like nothing else ever has. Maybe it’s not that I’m in love with them, exactly; it’s just that I need to know what all that is about.”

“And you don’t yet?”

“No. Not yet.”

“You weren’t in the Loma Prieta, then?”