Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

I loved him in that moment, tenderly and without tension.

“Your wife is a damned fool, T.C.,” I said, and this time he did not answer me.

When we reached the tower, he carried the cooler up for me and then whistled to Curtis.

“You need to be left alone now,” he said at the door. “And I need to check the equipment. I think we’ll eat outside; it’s going to be a terrific night. Probably cold later on, with so little wind. The stars will be phenomenal. I’ll make us a fire then, and play you some Earl Hooker. I’ve got one of the very few albums he ever made. Slide guitar; there’s nothing like it. I’ve been trying to learn it, but I can’t even come close. Go on, Merritt, and tend to your business. You’re as jumpy as a flea on a griddle. Pity to waste good bouillabaisse on a nervous woman.”

I smiled at him, my heart hammering with confusion and a kind of gathering anticipation, as though some interior engine had revved up a notch, moving me closer to an inevitable conclusion that I could not name.

“I won’t be long,” I said. “Mommee has probably burnt down the clinic. Fix me a drink and I’ll be right down.”

He and Curtis left, and I approached the telephone and sat down on the edge of his bed, looking at it. I knew, without knowing how, that this call would forever after divide time for me, but I did not know how that might happen. I did not want to pick up the receiver, to dial the house on the river—my house; why could I not think of it as that?—and wait for the fragile lines between it and this tower to solidify, to reshape reality.

“I could just forget it,” I said to myself. “If T.C. had, I’d never know about this call. I don’t strictly have to do this; if it had been an emergency he would have called back.”

But I did have to do it, and so I pulled the phone toward me and looked out over the sweep of trees undulating away toward the sea, their tops going pink in the darkening sky now, and dialed my house, and sat back to wait, stretching my legs out before me on the bed.

The phone rang and rang, with the hollowness that always means no one is at the other end. I looked at my watch; after nine now, back home. Was he at the clinic this late? Out with the African team and their charismatic leader? Despite my nervousness, the burring phone annoyed me; I had been primed for this connection. I started to hang up, and then the phone was lifted, and a voice said, “The Doctor is in,” and laughed.

It was a rich, low voice with, somehow, the dark of loamy earth and the scent of sunny grass in it: a woman’s voice. I knew who it was, even though I knew also that I had never heard her speak when she was at the clinic before, much less seen her. I did not move or breathe. I could not seem to think of any words. I could not hang up, either.

“Terry?” she said finally, “I’m sorry we’re running late. Pom’s in the shower now. You all go on and we’ll meet you in twenty minutes max.”

I said nothing. I still did not breathe.

“Is that you, Ter?” she said, and very slowly and gently I put the receiver back in its cradle. For a long while I simply sat there on T.C. Bridge water’s bed, watching the pink fade from the sky and the silhouettes of the redwoods darken against it, their needles like brush strokes of India ink. I thought how easy it would be simply to crawl under the Chief Joseph blanket and slide into sleep. To sleep, and sleep, and speel.

When I finally stood up, it was just a few minutes before full dark. The tender shaving of a new moon, almost transparent, rode above the trees and a great star bloomed above it, the first I could see. My ears rang and I could feel my pulse beating in my throat and wrists, but there was a tickle of senseless laughter at the corners of my mouth, too, and down deep and low in my stomach, the slow heating of the iron core. I took a deep breath and ran my fingers through my hair. I could see no mirror in the room, but my hair felt wild, and my cheeks, when I laid my cold hands on them, flamed as if with fever. I was suddenly conscious of the vast loneliness around me, of the amplitude of space and the relentless coming on of unbroken night, and felt a flutter of the cold, old fear I had felt on the bridge this morning. Had it really only been this morning? Suddenly I wanted light and sound and the smell and touch of T.C., just those things and nothing else. I ran down the long, steep steps in one swoop, without seeming to touch the railing. My entire body was light with the fear. It was only when I reached the boards of the veranda that I realized that I still clutched the blanket, trailing it after me.

He was drowsing on the sofa, covered with a pile of blankets and a sleeping Curtis, one hand laid against his bearded cheek, one brushing the floor beside him. He had good hands, long and brown and strong. Warm hands. I wanted to feel them on me as I wanted air to breathe. I stood, trying to get my breath, looking at him. He woke as though he felt the look. Curtis lifted his head, too.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I didn’t talk to him. A woman answered. I know who she is. It was probably nothing. I couldn’t say a word; finally I just hung up. I feel like such a fool…”

I slowed and stopped.

He said nothing, only lay propped on one elbow, looking steadily at me.

“I want to rescind the time-out, T.C.,” I said. “Can I do that?”

After a long moment, he said, “This is my cue to tell you that I don’t take advantage of ladies whose husbands have just shit on them. But I can’t do that, because I’ll take you any way I can get you and be grateful for whatever changed your mind. I’m not going to have one iota of regret afterward, but if you think you are, you’d better tell me now.”

“No regrets,” I said. “I mean that, T.C. No regrets.”

“Then,” he said, sitting up and holding out his arms to me, “come here to me. Come here and let me love you. It’s time somebody did it right.”

And, shivering and beginning, without knowing it, to cry, I let the blanket fall to the deck and went into his arms.

Much, much later we lay in his bed upstairs with the stove throwing dancing red shadows around the room and only the incredible silver starlight pouring down on us from the skylight, a cold, old radiance. We had not eaten the bouillabaisse; I had not, after all, cooked it. We had not listened to Earl Hooker. He had not shown me his earthquake equipment.

There is a popular song: “I want a man with a slow hand.” Lying in the crook of his arm, letting my breathing slow, finally, to normal, I thought of that song and felt my body flush all over at the words. A slow hand. Yes. T.C. Bridgewater had, among other things, a slow hand. Our coming together had been as soft and slow and without urgency as the warm, deliberate ripples in a tide pool. Only at the last had the urgency come crashing in, a scalding, red-black tide from the open sea that took me down with it, far, far down, so that I could only hear the sounds I was making, and that he was, as if from the bottom of an ocean. When I swam at last to the surface, he was laughing. I began to laugh, too. In all the times that I had made love with Pom, I could never remember laughing. Pom’s love was like Pom: intense, focused, very, very direct. T.C.’s was utterly different, and like T.C. himself. Indolent. Inventive. Teasing to the point of near madness.

Slow.

I loved it. My whole body glowed with it, as if I had been scrubbed all over inside and out with hot water and warm oil. I laughed in it, cried out in it, opened all of myself to take it and give it back; tasted it on my tongue and breathed it in as deeply as if it had been pure oxygen. As soon as it was ended I begged for more and got it. By the time we had stumbled upstairs into the bed, I was so sated with it that I could not lift my head from his arm.