Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

I am somebody’s wife. And he is more than a world away.

“You’re allowed second thoughts about all this, you know,” T.C. said, seeming to catch my thought. “Even third and fourths. All you have to do is call time out and things can stop right here. I would never frighten or hurt you.”

“Then I guess…time-out,” I said. I felt flat and depleted, oddly bereft, and on top of it all was a cold, seeping guilt, a stain. It seemed to reach across the continent from the house by the river to this rutted, alien road in a stunted forest of pine, live oak, and madrone: the very burrow of the snake. I missed the delight and silliness of the morning and the night before like you miss warmth and food, like you miss light in sudden darkness. The shame I felt was a very poor substitute, but it was a strong one.

“What’s the matter?” he said sympathetically. “Flashback? Little blast from the past?”

“How did you know?” I said dully.

“I used to get ’em, too. Right in the middle of something transcendent—and I don’t mean sex; I haven’t really had any of the transcendent kind out here—I’d feel this cold, wet tentacle reaching out from home, reminding me that I was a sorry, self-indulgent hound who had run off and left his responsibilities and didn’t deserve to feel so damned good. Mostly it happened out of the redwoods. What we need to do is get you back up there.”

“No, I want to see all this,” I said dutifully, though I didn’t. I just wanted to snatch up my daughter and my sister and get on a plane home, where, even if things weren’t so great, they were my things. Total unfamiliarity is only exhilarating for so long. After that it becomes like a dreadful amnesia of all the senses.

I looked over at T.C. He gave me back a half-smile, waiting.

“So how did you handle it?” I said, for obviously he had settled the flashback problem long before.

“Decided I didn’t want to be a sorry, guilty hound any longer. I wanted to be the new guy, the one who felt fresh joy and aliveness every morning, who went to sleep smiling, hardly able to wait for the next day. I wasn’t going back, anyway; I knew that. Why keep the old sad sack around? It’s like any policy; it gets very real after you practice it for a while.”

“Carpe diem, huh?”

“Yeah. I wasn’t kidding when I said it was the only valid way to live. For me, anyway. Probably for you, too, if the last day or two have been any example. You’ve bloomed like a flower. You know that’s true.”

“And while I’ve been blooming like a flower my husband has been back home working his fanny off for the sick and the poor, and my daughter’s been seduced by a Jacuzzi-brained film director to do a porno flick—”

“Would any of that have changed if you’d sat around up here racked with guilt and hating the redwoods? How would it have changed? Look, Merritt, the lady you are back home is the one who deals with that stuff, and better than anybody involved deserves, as far as I’m concerned. The one who’s out here…she’s the one I’m getting to know and coming to care about a whole, whole lot. That was then, as the kids put it so inelegantly. This is now. This is here. The Merritt Fowler I kissed last night and hope to kiss again very soon is not the one who plays altar to her husband’s saint and puts diapers on his mother and worries herself sick about an anorectic teenager. The one I kissed last night and hope to kiss again soon loves my woods and my dog and looks like a gypsy and laughs like a loon and eats like a longshoreman, and kisses me back like it feels fantastic. That’s not to say the first one isn’t valuable. It’s just that the second one is so much more—complete. I think. Am I wrong?”

“No…”

“Then stop worrying about it. Enjoy the day and the Point and whatever you feel like enjoying. If it’s not me, that’s okay. The time-out still stands till you call it off.”

The cold tentacle from home let go its grip abruptly and well-being flooded back. I did not have to take this any further than I wanted to. He was right. There was an enormous lot to savor about this day, to taste and explore and wriggle my toes in. It did not have to include touching him again unless I wanted to. I did not know yet whether I did or not. If I did…well, there was a lot of day left.

“Next thing I know you’ll be handing me an apple and telling me to take a bite; what could it hurt?” I said.

“No. Next thing you know you’ll be standing at the edge of the earth looking off it and, if I’m not wrong, seeing something you’ll never forget. And the next thing after that is lunch. I brought it with me. I know just the place for it.”

“And…after that?”

I could not seem to stop flirting with him. Was that the name for it? Whatever you called it, it was something that came from a part of me I had not known I had. I could not recall flirting with anyone in my life. Pom and I had been beyond that from the beginning, beyond the giddiness of discovery and into the urgent business of assuaging need almost before we knew each other. I wondered suddenly if I had ever known much more than the feel of his body and the shape of his need. I wondered if he had known more of me than the shape of my body and my ability to fill his gaps.

But it has sustained us, I said to myself. Many, many marriages have run on thinner fuel than that. It has fulfilled us. It has been what we both needed.

But not anymore.

The thought was as clear as if someone had spoken it aloud to me. And I knew it was true. If I went on with this day as it had started out, if I went on with this man, then an entirely different sustenance would be required. Forever after I would need other things.

Then find them. Go home and renegotiate. Redefine. Or simply stay here, the voice said. Isn’t that what’s at the bottom of all this? The thought that you might just stay? Or the thought that you might not?

We had been walking as I had been listening to the voice. Now we were back at the Jeep. T.C. opened my door and handed me up into the front seat.

“Anything after lunch is then instead of now and will be dealt with when we come to it,” he said. “And you’ll call the shots. Are you flirting with me, Miss Scarlett?”

And again I laughed, because he had so accurately read me.

“Why Captain Butler,” I drawled, “I do believe that I am.”

We drove out of the forest and onto a vast, undulating prairie. Yellow, red, and purple wildflowers blew in the steadily increasing wind like the pennants of miniature armies. The wind increased, gusting so that it rocked the Jeep and moaned around the plastic side curtains. Soon we parked and headed down a cypress-bordered footpath. The fog flew before us, revealing wind-battered dairies and huddling herds and not much else. Near the tip of the cape the wind was so strong that we struggled to walk against it. I would have fallen before it if T.C. had not kept an arm around me. the fresh, cold air was heavy with droplets, whether from the vanishing fog or spray I did not know. But I tasted salt and knew that they were born of the sea. When we broke through the cypress windbreak that guarded the path out to the tip of the cape, it was to meet the sun as it finally vanquished the fog and lit what looked like the entire western sea to sparkling foil blue. I felt the breath go out of my lungs in a gasp.

There was virtually no limit to the tossing water, or the sky that swept down to meet it, or the rushing blue air around it, or the sun riding overhead. There was land behind us and beneath our feet, but everywhere else we were drowned in a world of water and space. Steps led tortuously down to a lighthouse that rode a ledge below us, seeming to be borne up by the hollow boom of the surf far, far below. Gulls and cormorants wheeled and banked in the thermals over the water, and far down the cliff two specks soared.