Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

T.C. reached over and patted him, and gradually he stopped his fussing, looked at us reproachfully, and went back to his spot under the spigot. He lay there with his nose on his paws, gazing at us unblinkingly.

“Curtis is as good as saltpeter in college mashed potatoes,” I said ruefully. “I’d rather do it in front of a nursery school class.”

“Curtis never saw people carrying on like that before. I guess he thought I was killing you, or vice versa.”

“You can’t tell me you’ve never done this with anybody else,” I said. “If you try to tell me I’m the first one I’m going to pour cold wine on your not-so-private parts.”

“I’ve never done it here,” he said, not smiling. “Of course you’re not the first; I’ve been up here a long time, and celibacy is not my thing. But every time before I’ve taken…whoever it was…down there. To the lodge. Impresses the hell out of them and spares me the business of waking up beside somebody I don’t know and having to make small talk and all that. You’re the first for up here. You’ll be the only one.”

“I thought you didn’t like the lodge, and didn’t go down there,” I said. I said. I was absurdly pleased, pleased almost to tears.

“I don’t, and I don’t go down there except to screw. I’ve never had any qualms about that. That’s what the place is meant for, screwing. And it’s easy to get them to leave down there. That’s the other thing it was meant for. Leaving.”

“Why is it different with me?” I said, running my hand over his body from his collarbone to his knees. I felt him stir again and smiled sleepily at him.

“Because I love you,” he said matter-of-factly. “You know that. Don’t fish. Because I love you, and I haven’t any of them. And I won’t, anybody else. This place is only for you, besides me.”

I put my face down into his neck and shut my eyes and lay there, fitted to him from face to feet. I felt him sigh, and then only the soft rise and fall of his breathing. I blinked and let the tears that had gathered on my lower lashes run onto his chest. If he felt them, he gave no indication.

“I love you, too,” I whispered. “I do love you. I don’t know what that makes me. I don’t know where I can go from here with that.”

“You don’t have to go anywhere,” he said into the side of my face. “It doesn’t make you anything, except Merritt who loves T.C. right here and now. Feel it all, be it all, do it all, and then leave that lady here with me. That lady can’t breathe in any other air but this air. I’ll take care of her; I’ll keep her for you. When you go back you’ll know she’s always here, up here in the redwoods with me. Always with me, Merritt.”

“Oh, God, why can’t I just stay? Why can’t I—”

“I’ll make a deal with you. You can think precisely one day ahead. You can plan tomorrow right down to the nanosecond; we can do anything on earth you want; there’s nothing we can get to in a day that we can’t see; nothing we can’t do. But after that you have to cut it off. No planning any further ahead. No looking any further ahead. And then when tomorrow’s done, we’ll take another day and you can plan that one. Who knows how far we’ll get? You’ve only been here three days. Not even that. We could have…who knows how long? Enough to last a lifetime, enough to love a love. But I won’t waste any of it worrying about the length of it. Is that a deal?”

“It’s a deal.”

“Fine. Then what do you want to do tomorrow? There’s a lot I’d love to show you, a lot I know you’d love to see—”

“Tomorrow…let’s screw a whole lot tomorrow,” I said. “And between times let’s go get you some proper glasses frames. There must be an oculist in Palo Alto. That tape is driving me crazy.”

“They’re just drugstore glasses. There’s a drugstore down in Boulder Creek. Anything else we need to get? You aren’t going to get pregnant or anything, are you?”

“I wish I could,” I said fiercely. “I wish I could. But no. I’m on the pill; I’ve got plenty left.”

“Well, you don’t need to worry that you’ll catch anything from me. I’m fine that way. I’ve had all the tests.”

“It never even occurred to me that you wouldn’t have,” I said.

The sun moved around to the west so that its burning fingers found us, and we moved the sofa around until the shade swallowed it. Then we set the food out on the spool-top table and ate until there were no crumbs left, not a swallow of wine. Curtis had a morsel of Brie and Forrest nibbled a grape, and then all four of us lay back in the dim heat and slept like forest creatures.

When we woke the shadows of the trees across the space that the tower occupied were longer and going blue. The heat still clung to the earth, but some of the red fever had gone out of it. I woke with sweat in the creases of my chin and elbows, my hair loose and sticking to my neck, feeling stunned and cross and gummy. I lay there thinking longingly of a shower, and only then noticed that T.C. was not beside me on the sofa. Curtis was gone, too, and Forrest’s eyes no longer glittered in the thyme pot. I sat up and scrubbed my eyes with my fists and looked around.

T.C., dressed only in the khaki shorts and barefoot, knelt under the shake-roofed shed across the yard, peering intently at what I supposed to be his earthquake equipment. His toys. Curtis lay supine beside him, eyes closed. I got up, stretching and smacking my lips around the stale taste in my mouth, and wandered over to look over his shoulder. There was a small cylindrical affair fixed to a board, with paper around it and a pen clipped to a small rod over the cylinder, and beside it a larger device, or perhaps it was two of them. One was a round black object set into a terra-cotta saucer and sunk flush into the earth. Over this, a kind of tripod held a large, square sheet of metal onto which was affixed a coil of some sort. T.C. was looking at some squiggles on the paper apparently made by the pen. I had no earthly idea what any of it was, but I could tell that the cylinder that held the paper was a cardboard Quaker Oats canister. The whole affair had a kind of endearing boy’s treehouse look to it, ingenious but hard to take very seriously. Beside it, T.C., with his hair hanging in his eyes and the mended wire spectacles riding on the tip of his nose, looked so like an overgrown preteen that I laughed and reached over and ruffled his hair, loving him simply and wholly.

“Can T.C. come out and play?” I said.

He looked up at me and grinned.

“Want to see my stuff? I made it myself. Works pretty good, if I do say so.”

“It’s going to be lost on me, but sure. Tell me about it. What’s that thingummy you’re looking at?”

“That’s a drum recorder. First things first. This thing here”—and he touched the square sheet of metal and set it swinging slightly on its spring—“is part of a geophone. A geophone is the actual sensor that converts ground motion into a weak electric signal. Taken together, the whole business adds up to a rudimentary seismograph. See, I took a big hi-fi speaker and took the coil and magnet out, and fastened the magnet to the ground. It’s fixed; it moves with the earth. Then I attached the coil to that sheet of metal, for mass, and hung it by the right kind of spring over the magnet. When the ground moves, the magnet will move with it, but the mass will stay still where it is for a second because it has some inertia. The relative motion that occurs then generates a weak electric current that can be amplified and recorded, and that shows that waves from an earthquake are being recorded. See?”

I nodded, though I didn’t.

“Okay, now the drum recorder. As you can see, I made this one out of an oatmeal box. I’ve mounted it on a central shaft there, and I use that little motor to make the cylinder rotate every fifteen minutes. Then I hooked up that amplifier there to amplify the signal from the seismometer and connected that up to a pen-motor that converts the signal and rotates the pen. See there? It draws a line mounted on the paper. That tracks earth movement nearby. In the old days they used to darken the paper with soot from a kerosene lantern turned way up high, and the pen would scratch a line in the soot, and they’d roll the drum in thin shellac to fix the soot on the paper. The pen isn’t all that much improvement, but this way I don’t burn up my toys.”