A Theory of Small Earthquakes Read online

  She imagined telling her mother that she and Zoe were having a baby. And shuddered at the thought.

  Market Street reverberated with the booming sounds of demolition. Construction crews were everywhere. Cranes dangled over the Ferry Building. Wrecking balls tore holes in the Embarcadero Freeway. Excavators swallowed the debris in huge bites. Men in orange jumpsuits, construction helmets, and yellow earmuffs jackhammered the fractured sidewalks. The jaws of garbage trucks chomped chunks of cement.

  A young man approached Alison as she waited for the light to change. “Weed, crack, H,” he muttered. “Spare change,” begged a woman who stank of urine.

  Some things haven’t changed, she thought, stepping over two people sleeping in the doorway of the nondescript five-story office building that matched the address on the invitation in her hand. She checked her reflection in the murky brass elevator doors, adjusted the shoulder pads of her brown linen blazer. She opened the top two buttons of her jumpsuit, the ones Zoe had buttoned up. She unbuttoned a third.

  The elevator deposited Alison into a crowded office suite roaring with conversation. A young woman in a red and black Mother Jones T-shirt offered her a plastic tumbler of wine. Alison hadn’t had a sip of alcohol since her first insemination. She took a cup off the tray.

  Taking a long swallow, she looked around the room. She saw the shockingly handsome Mother Jones editor in chief, rumored to be a ladies’ man, talking to his brother, a well-known filmmaker whose work appeared on PBS.

  In the middle of the animated crowd she saw MJ’s founding editor, who kept the magazine afloat with the fortune he’d inherited. Was that dapper man in the white hat, white suit, and white shoes really the famous author she thought he was?

  I don’t belong here, Alison thought. Even the nobodies looked like somebodies. These people were the chosen few, San Francisco’s literati: real writers, filmmakers, and editors, not imposters like her.

  The wine-serving woman offered Alison another glass. She drank it quickly. And noticed that a man was watching her from across the room.

  A handsome man. A tall, blond, sexy, Jewish-looking man with a strong jaw, an angular face, and a hooked nose. His lips were full and shiny, as if he’d been kissing someone all night.

  His mouth curved into a smile. He walked toward her with an urgent tilt to his body. His eyes were almost as blue as Zoe’s.

  “Mark Miller.” He extended his hand.

  “You’re Mark! I’m Alison Rose.”

  “I was hoping that was you.” Mark let go of her hand, reluctantly it seemed.

  They faced each other in awkward silence. “It’s weird working with writers over the phone,” Mark said finally. “I’ve done a dozen stories with one freelancer who lives in Seattle. We talk every week, but I’ve never seen his face.” He ran a hand through his tangle of blond curls. “I’m glad to have the pleasure of seeing yours.”

  “I’m hoping you also had the pleasure of reading my first draft,” she said.

  “Ouch.” Mark grinned at her. “I know I’m late with your revisions.”

  “So . . . we’re talking about fixing the piece, not killing it?” Alison laughed nervously. “If I sound totally insecure, it’s only because I am.”

  “No reason to be. Your draft is very good.”

  “Really?” Alison’s body slumped with relief. Or was that the wine? Or was it a different feeling entirely?

  “We’re always swamped around here. But with the office moving this week and all . . .” Mark shrugged.

  A man with a shaved head, trim moustache, and Mother Jones T-shirt squeezed past them. “Hey, Leo,” Mark said. “Meet Alison, my newest writer. Alison, Leo’s a senior editor here.”

  “You wrote the piece on the Menendez brothers,” Leo said. “I read your draft. Very powerful.”

  “That’s great to hear.” Alison was starting to feel a bit less like a loser.

  “Your writer’s glass is empty. Why don’t you buy her a drink?” Leo said to Mark. “Nice to meet you,” he said to Alison, and he went off to talk to someone else.

  “I’ve been remiss.” Mark cupped Alison’s elbow in his hand and walked her to the makeshift bar across the room.

  Alison meant to say that she’d had enough. But then she was nodding and taking a gulp of the wine Mark had handed her. He stood close to her, his shoulder touching hers. Alison felt dizzy. And exhausted. She needed to lie down.

  She felt a wave of nausea. Oh God, she thought, what if I am pregnant?

  She leaned past Mark and put her wine glass down on the bar. Mark put his hand on her arm. His touch burned her skin.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “I’m getting over the flu,” she lied. “I’m a little out of it.”

  “Want to take a walk around the block? Get some air? It’s a nice night for once.”

  Alison nodded woozily. Mark put his wine down. Alison noticed he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. They walked out of the office without saying goodbye to anyone. They rode the elevator to the lobby in tense, charged silence.

  And then they were walking through the Mission in the warm darkness and they were talking. Talking and talking about the magazine business and whether the Menendez brothers would get life or be executed for killing their parents, and whether it was better to live in the East Bay or in San Francisco, where Mark lived, and why Mother Jones had moved, and how the Mission District was changing, and where the Latinos were going when their landlords raised their rent and yuppies moved in. Their conversation was a little vacation for Alison: they never even mentioned the earthquake.

  “I could use an adult beverage,” Mark said as they climbed Noe Street, bent against the steep hill. “I live two blocks from here. And I pour a mean chardonnay.”

  Alison reached for the thought of Zoe, almost grasped it. Did it slip beyond her reach? Or did she push it away?

  “Sounds good,” Alison said. What are you doing? she asked herself.

  Mark put his arm around her.

  Alison didn’t say, I’m a lesbian.

  She didn’t say, I have a girlfriend.

  She didn’t say, My girlfriend thinks I’m pregnant and she might be right.

  She said, “I can’t spend the night.”

  12.

  san francisco

  October 1989

  They stumbled onto the stoop of his Victorian and they kissed. Not Zoe’s lips. She felt him hard against her thigh. A man. His tongue in her mouth, his hands on her back, on her ass. His face was sandpaper not velvet. Don’t think about Zoe.

  “Come inside with me.” Mark’s voice was as rough as his face. He wasn’t gentle like Zoe. He didn’t want. He needed. Don’t think about Zoe.

  He fumbled with the front door and pulled her to his bed. He didn’t ask. He took her. He wasn’t like Zoe. Her hands were everywhere on him, and nothing felt like anything she knew. His hard ass not Zoe’s soft ass. His arms, the hair on his arms, his shoulders, the hair on his back. His hands were everywhere on her.

  He was in her. It felt good, so good. It hurt. It hurt and she wanted more. “Oh God,” she gasped. He asked if he was hurting her. She covered his mouth with hers. She didn’t want to hear him. She didn’t remember men.

  Breathing hard, he moved his mouth down her body. “Let me make you come,” he whispered. “No,” she said. That’s for Zoe. She pulled his head back to hers. His noise wasn’t Zoe’s rolling gentle moaning. It was hard, his thrusting, and she liked it. He huffed and he grunted and he came.

  He rolled onto his back and pulled her to him. They were one big wet blob of sweat. He put his hand between her legs. She pushed it away. She glanced at the clock on the nightstand. The numbers were glowing red. 11:20. I told Zoe I’d be home early. She’d take a cab. Fifty bucks, but if she hurried she could be home by midnight. Midnight wasn’t so bad.

  Wait. The bridge was closed. BART was the only way home, and the trains stopped running at midnight.

  “I’ve got to get to BART.”
Alison jumped up and started collecting her jacket, jumpsuit, bra, panties, socks, and shoes from around the room.

  Mark rolled out of bed and pulled on his Levi’s. “I’ll drive you home.”

  Alison shook her head. “The bridge . . .”

  “Oh, Jesus. Right.” He tugged a T-shirt over his muscled shoulders. “Let me walk you to the station, at least.”

  Alison brushed her lips across his forehead. “I’ll be fine,” she said, and she left.

  Standing at the front door of the cottage in the dark, her guilty heart hammering, Alison prayed that she’d find Zoe asleep.

  She crept down the hall to the bedroom. Zoe was splayed across their bed, snoring softly. Alison stifled a sigh of relief. She desperately wanted a shower, but she couldn’t risk waking Zoe. So she scrubbed herself at the kitchen sink with a loofah in one hand and a mirror in the other, examining her body for evidence. Blessedly, she found none. She put on the pajamas she’d taken to wearing lately and slipped into bed.

  “How was it?” Zoe murmured. She fell back to sleep before Alison had time to compose her first lie.

  Someone was making love to Alison. Not Zoe. A man. A man was making love to Alison and it was good. So good.

  “Babe.”

  Not making love to her. Shaking her. “You’re having a bad dream.” Zoe’s voice was furry with sleep. “You were moaning. Are you okay?”

  “Fine,” Alison said. Did I say his name? she wondered. She rolled to her side of the bed, where she’d been sleeping since she and Zoe had stopped spooning through the night. She lay there coiled with tension, waited for Zoe to fall asleep.

  Alison was drenched in sweat and lust and remorse. She opened her eyes, then closed them again. If I keep sleeping, maybe it won’t have happened. But there was no waking up from this nightmare. No undoing what she’d done.

  “Did you have fun at the party?” Zoe asked again the next morning. They were out together for the first time since the earthquake, having brunch at their old hangout, the Brick Hut Café.

  “Yup.” Alison salted her tofu scramble, walking a tightrope, the thin line of truth.

  Zoe looked at her, waiting for more. “How’s your omelet?” Alison asked.

  “Not as good as they were before.”

  During their first Berkeley years, the lesbian-collective-owned Brick Hut was the second-best part of Alison and Zoe’s Saturday routine. They’d make love all morning, then drive across town, drunk on hunger and orgasms, and slide into a booth just before the closed sign was hung on the door. They’d sit staring starry-eyed at each other, sipping the Hut’s muddy coffee, reeking of sex, surrounded by lesbian couples doing exactly the same thing.

  Today they’d arrived at the Hut before nine. Today there were no smitten gazes. Alison fidgeted with the salsa jar, the jam pot, the cream pitcher, dreading Zoe’s questions, avoiding Zoe’s eyes.

  “You got in so late,” Zoe said. “You know how nervous I get these days.” She laughed self-consciously. “I had a hard time falling asleep.”

  “Sorry. I couldn’t find a pay phone.” Lie number one.

  Zoe shrugged. “You’re my girlfriend, not my babysitter. It’s not your fault I’ve been so insane.”

  How could I not be Zoe’s girlfriend? That’s who I am. “I don’t like to worry you,” Alison said.

  Zoe spooned strawberry jam onto her croissant. “You didn’t drink, did you?”

  “Of course not.” Lie number two.

  Alison looked around at the lesbians snuggling at the tables for two, the groups of lesbians laughing in the booths. I won’t be welcome here anymore, she thought. Bile bit the back of her throat.

  “Be right back,” she said, sliding out of the booth.

  Zoe brightened. “You’re peeing more than usual. That’s a great sign.”

  Alison stared at herself in the soap-splattered bathroom mirror, seeing the person she’d been the day before, the person she’d been for the past six years. That person would have teased Zoe, or kissed Zoe, told her to get off her case. But today’s Alison was filled with a strange and distant tenderness for Zoe—as if she’d already taken a few steps back and could see the wonderful things about Zoe that she’d miss.

  Zoe had her Big Decision face on when Alison came back to the table. “I’m thinking I’ll go back to my studio tomorrow,” Zoe said, “and see if I can work.”

  “That’s great, babe.” The sooner she gets better, Alison thought, the sooner I can go. And then she remembered the pictures in the paper that morning, the view from Zoe’s studio windows: the crumpled Cypress overpass, now a shrine of votive candles and plastic-wrapped photographs and supermarket bouquets. “You sure you’re ready for that?”

  “Sitting around counting aftershocks isn’t helping. And believe it or not, I have an idea for a new series.”

  For Zoe’s sake, for her own, not necessarily in that order, Alison was glad to see a glimmer of the old sparkle in Zoe’s eyes. And imagining Zoe as she used to be made Alison’s chest ache. Was she about to make the worst mistake of her life? Had she already made it?

  Nothing’s been decided, Alison told herself. All she’d done was fuck a guy for one night. If she still wanted her beautiful life with Zoe, she could have it. Zoe wouldn’t ever need to know. “Promise me you’ll go home if you don’t feel good at your studio,” Alison said. “And promise me you won’t look out the windows on the Cypress side.”

  “I promise,” Zoe said.

  You’re like any other sleazy, cheating, lying husband, Alison heard her mother saying. Or was that her own voice in her head?

  On Monday morning, Alison was settling in at her desk at PMC when the phone rang. “How are you, Alison?” Mark asked in a low, intimate voice that made her insides roil. “I wanted to call you this weekend. Then I realized I only have your number at work.”

  Alison wished she could give Mark her home number. She wished it was a year earlier and that she and Zoe were still happy forever.

  “Friday night . . . that was amazing,” Mark said.

  Alison felt Mark waiting for her to agree, but she couldn’t speak.

  “I guess we’re going to do this backward,” he said finally. “First we have wild, passionate sex. Then I call to ask you out on a date.”

  “Actually,” Alison said, “first we had an editor–writer relationship. I don’t think we can have both, do you?”

  “You wouldn’t be the first writer in history to date her editor.”

  Silence hummed between them.

  “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

  Alison took a breath. “I’m at the end of a long relationship,” she said slowly. “I should have told you.”

  This time Mark was silent. “Yeah,” he said. “You should have.”

  “I’m really sorry.”

  “Sorry we slept together? Or sorry your relationship’s ending?”

  “Both,” Alison said. “Neither. I’m not sure.”

  “Then there’s hope.”

  “You’re persistent.”

  “I’m turning thirty next year, Alison. I’ve dated a lot of women.

  What happened between you and me the other night was . . . different. Big. It felt like something important could come of it. So I’m not giving up.”

  Suddenly Alison’s desk shuddered. The picture of her and Zoe on Haight Street on their fifth anniversary toppled off the shelf. Someone yelled, “Everyone under your desks!”

  Alison dove onto the floor, squeezing herself into the small space.

  “It’s just a little aftershock,” Mark said. Alison was surprised to find the receiver still at her ear. “It’s over,” he said. “You okay?”

  “Scared,” Alison admitted. She realized she’d been so focused on Zoe’s earthquake fears that she hadn’t paid any attention to her own. She crawled out from under her desk and sank into her chair.

  “I just assigned a piece on the politics of seismology,” Mark said. “The odds of another big quak
e right now are actually lower than they were before Loma Prieta.”

  His voice, his certainty calmed her, made her eyelids heavy. But Alison had been in this movie before, and it didn’t have a happy ending. “That’s the difference between writers and editors,” she said. “Writers know a lot about the few things we write about. Editors know everything about everything.”

  “Hardly,” Mark protested, sounding pleased.

  “I have a meeting in a minute,” Alison lied.

  “I’ll let you go.” Mark’s voice was lighter now, more distant. “Oh, and I wanted you to know that we’re really pleased with your Menendez piece. I’ll be calling you with another assignment soon.”

  “That’s so great, Mark. Thanks. And I’m sorry that—”

  “Nothing to be sorry for, Alison.”

  If you only knew, Alison thought.

  13.

  oakland

  November 1989

  Zoe went back to her studio. She hung velvet drapes from the windows that faced the demolition site.

  Making art seemed to be good for Zoe. Her face was less drawn, her limbs hung more loosely, her need for reassurance was easing. That was the good news. The bad news was, she was back to obsessing about the pregnancy. Every night she X’ed out that day on their kitchen calendar. She’d drawn a red circle around November 17, the day Alison would be taking a pregnancy test if she hadn’t yet gotten her period. “Are you nauseous?” she asked Alison every morning. “Are your breasts sore?”

  Alison was doing a countdown of her own. Her period was due on Halloween. When it came, if it came, she’d be out of excuses to delay the inevitable. If her period didn’t come, would she stay with Zoe, raise a child with Zoe? She didn’t know.

  In the living room, they’d hung a poster of Einstein and his quote, “You cannot simultaneously prepare for and prevent war.” How could Alison simultaneously prepare to leave Zoe and prepare to raise a child with her? She couldn’t. So the row of X’s marched across their kitchen calendar as Zoe waited for good news, and Alison just waited.