Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

“What was that?” I whispered back, licking the crackling of dried sweat at his temple. It tasted of him.

“You know it was last night, and just now,” he said. “You know it was you. You know you aren’t going to stay. And I can’t go. Don’t make me say that again, either.”

I lay against him, sadness like a glacier around my heart. I tried for lightness.

“T.C., you’re going to have to find some more accessible stars to hitch your wagon to,” I said.

“Not after that day, not after last night, not after this morning. You can’t go back, even when you can’t go on, either. Don’t settle, Merritt. Don’t ever settle. Life’s too short.”

I was silent against him. Around us the heat shimmered, the day hummed. Presently I said, “T.C., what are we lying on?”

He moved his buttocks experimentally.

“Just offhand I’d say I’m lying on pinecones and maybe a dried squirrel turd. If you don’t know by now what you’re lying on, all has been for naught.”

I laughed, suddenly happy. With T.C. it was always going to be the laughter that made me whole, set me free.

“No, I mean what is the earth? What kind of rock?”

“What are the stars? What is the earth? What are you doing, running your sun lines? Finding your boundaries?”

“I need to know all the way where I am, down to the core of the earth, up to the edge of the universe. I need to fix you in this firmament. I need to fix me in it.”

He eased out from under me and pulled up his shorts.

“I hope some rosy-cheeked scoutmaster with an overbite hasn’t got the field glasses of his entire troop trained on us,” he said wryly. “They’ll grow up never screwing at all. Okay. These are almost exactly the words of a U.S. Geological Survey guy I met up here and asked the same question, almost the only person besides you who’s never laughed at me about this earthquake stuff. ‘The primary rock in the Big Basin area is Butano sandstone. It was formed in the lower to middle Eocene, forty-three to fifty-seven million years ago. It’s light-gray to buff, very fine-to-coarse-grained arkosic sandstone in thin to very thick beds, interbedded with dark gray to brown mudstone and shale. The amount of this mudstone and shale varies from ten to forty percent. This particular formation is about three thousand meters thick and typically dips ten to thirty degrees toward the southwest. Arkosic sandstone is a feldspar-rich, coarse-grained sandstone typically derived from granite. Most of the Sierra Nevada range in California is formed of granite older than eighty million years. This rock, our rock, would have been formed when the Farallon oceanic plate was diving northwestward toward Japan. That is to say, these sediments would have eroded off an arc of volcanoes like those found today in Japan, and the Aleutians, even the Cascades. To the southwest of Big Basin, the dominant rock is the Santa Cruz mudstone, which was formed in the Miocene, five to twenty-four million years ago, and is brown and gray to light-gray, buff, and light yellow shale and mudstone with minor amounts of sandstone.’ Will that do?”

“Yes,” I smiled. “It’s somehow very satisfying to know that. Did you memorize it?”

“I did. I asked him to write it down, and he did. It felt important to know that. It was important to him, too; I keep meaning to look him up again.”

I nodded.

“T.C., can we spend the whole day naked?” I said presently.

“Aren’t you the greedy little minx! Are you this greedy back home?”

Suddenly I could laugh about Atlanta and the house on the river, all of it.

“No. At home I’m…I guess you’d say I’m grateful.”

He whooped with laughter, rolled over and over with it, choked, gulped, breathed hard, laughed some more.

“‘Please, sir, can I have some more?’” T.C. mimicked both me and Oliver Twist. “Shit, Merritt, if you don’t take anything else back with you, take this fine greediness. Demand, by God. Don’t settle !”

“Nossir.”

“To answer your question, sure, we can spend the whole day naked. First we’ll go swimming. I know the perfect place for a hot day. Then we’ll go home and take naps. Then we’ll screw. Then I’ll show you my toys. Then we’ll screw. Then we’ll cook that bouillabaisse, or else throw it out before it poisons us. Then we’ll screw. Then I’ll play my tapes for you, and maybe a little slide guitar, and then we’ll—”

“How both the busy little bee improve each shining hour,” I said contentedly. “Do you think we might be a trifle overextended for one day?”

“Well, we could cut out the swimming and the naps and the bouillabaisse, but not the—”

“Enough. Let’s start off and see how far we get. Can we do it all naked?”

“Why not? Curtis ain’t gon’ tell. Forrest would if he could, but he can’t. You’re right. No hurry. Save some for tomorrow. We’ve got lots of time.”

I looked up at him from where I lay on my back, mutely and with pain.

“We’ve already had more than lots of people ever have,” he said softly, kissing the tip of my nose. “For all you know, it might be days and days before Laura comes back. Don’t count, Merritt. Carpe diem.”

“Carpe diem,” I whispered. Above us the sun finally broke free from the entangling tops of the redwoods, and rode full into the sky.

Ever since college, there has been lodged in my mind a passage from (I think) The Odyssey , chronicling a time on the voyage when Odysseus and his men drifted in perfect peace and harmony through sunny blue seas, before fresh winds, through land and water so beautiful that I cannot recall any details, only a golden wash of honey-sweet sun and warm crystal water where dolphins played and time itself sang lazily in the scented wind, stopped and still. I remember from it only a sense of lazy perfection, but it is such a strong impression that since that time it has been the standard against which I measure perfect days.

“What a perfect summer day,” someone will say, and I will think of that passage, and of course, the day in question pales. How could it not? Or, “This has really been a day to remember,” and that time on Odysseus’s journey will spring to mind, and I will think, “Not bad, for mere mortals.”

The comparison had never spoiled any real days for me, but it has always been there, even though the grownup part of my mind knows full well that such days do not come to human beings.

But that day came close. It came very close. At the end of it I was able to whisper, in the pine-smelling dark of T.C.’s veranda, “Eat your hearts out, you smug Greek bastards,” and mean it. Oh, it was such a day, it really was. A pinnacle day, a ball bearing on which a life turns.

When at last we picked ourselves up from the Butano sandstone and the pine needles and dust, it was close to eleven, and the heat was formidable. But it was dry heat, not the thick, wet heat of home, and instead of draining, it soothed us to sleepiness and indolence. All that day I felt heavy-lidded and sweetly weighted in my limbs, needing to reach out frequently and touch T.C. languidly on whatever part of him was nearest, to lean my head against him, to slouch against him, to feel his weight take mine.

We tied our clothing together and hung it around our necks and, wearing only our shoes, ambled down the dwindling path beyond the lodge, deeper and deeper into the red-woods, winding steadily down. Even in the deepest shadow, where moisture still clung and we walked in a green darkness, it was hot. By the time we reached T.C.’s secret swimming hole, we were both lightly sheened all over with sweat. Only the smallest and most arbitrary breezes reached here, but when they did, they felt so purely sensual and fine on my body that I found myself thinking I really must look into nudism.