Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

“You don’t hold with masturbation either?”

“ Au contraire . It’s the opiate of the solitary. I just don’t hold with it in the middle of the road. Me and Mrs. Patrick Campbell.”

“I know what you mean,” I said. “I loved the naturalness of Lady Chatterley’s Lover , but Tropic of Cancer seemed awfully self-absorbed to me.”

“I should have known you’d go for the lady and the gamekeeper,” T.C. grinned. “Do any similarities to present circumstances present themselves? I’ve been practicing a Northumbrian accent, but so far it has eluded me—”

“Yeah, right,” I said, grinning at him drowsily. The sun and quiet were doing their work and I was powerfully, indolently sleepy as well as hungry. “Nevertheless, I love it that this was Henry Miller’s hidey hole. I like him better for knowing he needed one. Are you going to open that basket or should I just wrest it from you?”

We sat on the sun-warmed steps until the shafts of light leaned to the west and the warmth began to steal out of the air. He had made sandwiches of a delicious, chewy focaccia bread and crab and avocado, and brought grapes and chèvre that he said was made in a valley near the Big Basin. We ate them and drank the cool white wine and presently there was nothing left of any of it. I could barely hold my heavy eyes open.

“Okay. We’ve had lunch and it is now now,” T.C. said. “I await your pleasure.”

He sat opposite me, his long legs sprawled down the stairs, the leaning sun glinting off the mended glasses. He had not touched me since Point Reyes and did not move to do so now. I knew that he would honor my time-out. It made me feel safe and comfortable with him, sun-and food-stunned, boneless and caught fast in this moment. That there was a tight, fine wire of tension between us, somewhere far down, did not bother me. I had time to explore that or not, all the time in the world.

“I have to sleep,” I said. “Later…later I’ll make dinner for you, if you’ll let me; I got some stuff in Palo Alto yesterday, and it doesn’t seem like Laura’s going to come back anytime soon to eat it. Just let me go home and take a nap and then we’ll have a long dinner and then it will be now again, and who knows about that? But I need a bath, and I ought to call Glynn, and I really have got to sleep. Will you come to dinner?”

“I don’t go down there,” he said. “Not much; only when I have to. But I’ll take you up on dinner if you’ll cook it at my place. I’ve got the essentials for that. I’ll play my blues for you, and if you’re really respectful and ask me nicely I’ll show you some of my equipment. Earthquake equipment, I mean; get that look of panic off your face.”

“That was not panic. That was awe and wonderment. Okay for dinner, if you’ll come help me tote the stuff up to your place. It’s the makings for a kind of bouillabaisse.”

“Done,” he said, and reached down to me and pulled me up, and we walked back to the Jeep, brushing the dust and grit of Henry Miller’s staircase off our rumps.

When he came to help me carry the food up, it was just past six, and I had slept hard and showered and felt cool and clean and preternaturally clear-headed. The golden haze of the past twenty-four hours was gone.

“I need to tell you now that I’ve decided that the time-out has got to be permanent,” I said, not looking at him beside me on the path. He said nothing, merely grunted amiably, and shifted the Styrofoam cooler in his arms. Behind us Curtis capered and nosed wetly at the backs of our knees, puppyish in his relief that his person had, after all, come back.

“I mean, I thought about it hard, and it isn’t fair to you or me,” I went on, as if he had argued with me. “And it would be terribly unfair to Glynn, and to Pom, too. He’s done nothing but good for people all his life; I can’t just…lie out here in bed with you while he’s down at the clinic until all hours, or slogging through another boring dinner to try to get some more funds—”

“I can see your point,” T.C. said affably.

“I mean, think about Glynn,” I continued, as if he had not spoken. “She needs a mother, not a…an—”

“Don’t do that, Merritt,” he said rather sharply. “Don’t call yourself names, don’t categorize yourself. You were going to say adulteress, weren’t you? I’m not going to listen to that . Maybe, just maybe Glynn needs to know what a full, whole, real woman is; maybe she needs to know what joy is; but that’s neither here nor there. If you say time-out, time-out it will be. I’m not going to argue with you. It’s enough that you want to. And I know that you do, even if you don’t.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t want to,” I said rather sullenly. “I couldn’t say that after the way I’ve behaved, could I?”

“If you’re determined to be Hester Prynne I can’t stop you,” he said with what sounded close to laughter under his voice. “But you haven’t even earned your A yet, so why don’t you let up on yourself? Speaking of Glynn, she called while you were asleep. I almost forgot.”

“What did she say? Is anything wrong?”

“Absolutely nothing, unless you consider a trip to the mall for a movie and some shopping a calamity. I myself would. Relax. Her friend’s father is taking them. She’s having a great time. She said cool four separate times. There was much giggling and squealing in the background. I gather she isn’t starving; her mouth was definitely full of something.”

“Did she…did she ask about Laura? Or about me, what I was doing?”

“Nope. She was fully as concerned about her elders as any sixteen-year-old on her way to the mall would be. She did, however, ask about Curtis.”

I let my breath out in a long, slow sigh.

“It sounds okay,” I said. “I should be glad she’s having such a good time. But I feel guilty, too; I’ve hardly thought about her in twenty-four hours—”

“For shame. What a terrible mother you are. You’re right to deny yourself the pleasures of the flesh. But I draw the line at mortifying it. If we can’t screw, at least we can eat. Are you a good cook?”

I didn’t answer. I was aware, suddenly, of how prim and presumptuous my little speech had sounded.

“T.C., listen, I’m sorry if I sounded like the church lady,” I said. “I can be awfully stuffy sometimes. It’s just that when I woke up from my nap I needed some…context or something, needed to know where I fit, and where I fit is back there. If you think that means that I don’t want to, you know, do that with you, you’re wrong. I want that very much, but I’m not going to do it. I’ll try not to be all over you for the rest of the night. And yeah, I am a good cook. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”

He stopped on the trail and turned, and traced the line of my mouth with his free hand, looking serious and sleepy-eyed. My mouth flamed with heat, and I swallowed hard and turned my head away.

“I understand,” he said softly. “It’s okay. The pull of home is one of the strongest in the world. E.T., phone home. Shit. I almost forgot about this, too. A guy called you this morning before I came to pick you up, but I don’t know who it was. I was downstairs, and the machine got it. The storm last night fried the machine again, so all I could make out was ‘just tell her I called.’”

“What kind of voice? What kind of accent?” I said, more sharply than I meant.

“Couldn’t tell for the static. I’m sorry. I really did forget. You can call when we get up to the tower. It would be your husband, wouldn’t it?”

“Probably. I ought to check in; you know, I told you his mother has been very ill.”

“You don’t have to justify calling your husband to me, baby,” he said gently.