A Theory of Small Earthquakes Read online

  She wrote pitches for investigative features. She wrote short stories and poems. She sent them to magazines and literary journals, using PMC as her return address. She had a big success almost immediately: her first assignment for Ms. magazine, about the hundreds of American preschool teachers who’d been accused of abusing the toddlers in their care.

  Alison felt she’d been airlifted into someone else’s city, someone else’s life. She was eating in restaurants instead of cooking with Zoe, taking Muni to shop at unfamiliar stores, walking to work instead of taking BART. There was no car key on her keychain, no emergency contact name in her personnel file. She spent her days buried in work at her office. She spent her nights alone.

  When she needed to talk, she had conversations with Zoe in her head. She wondered why she felt so numb if she’d done the right thing. “You’re still in shock,” she imagined Zoe answering. She wondered if she and Zoe could be in each other’s lives again someday, and she heard Zoe telling her to take it one day at a time. The irony was not lost on Alison. When she cried, missing Zoe, the memory of Zoe comforting her was the only thing that helped.

  Mark called to say the Cypress Heroes revision looked good. There might be some last-minute tweaks, but he was approving her $3,000 payment. He asked if she wanted to meet him at the M&M on Friday night to celebrate. He sounded pleased and surprised when this time she said yes.

  As the evening wore on, she saw that he really did want to get to know her, and he really did want her to know him. When he asked about her parents, Alison answered briefly and turned the question back on him. He teased her about interviewing him, then ordered another round of Irish coffees and started talking. He told her that his parents still lived in the New Jersey suburb, a few miles from where Alison grew up, where they’d raised Mark and his younger brother. He talked about his brother, who’d married a South African woman and moved there to be with her. Alison asked if he missed his family. He said emphatically that he did not.

  He told her about the two years he’d spent after college as a Peace Corps volunteer in Peru and about the Peruvian woman he’d fallen in love with and almost married. He reminisced about the newspapers he’d worked for in Dallas, Atlanta, and Sacramento before he’d landed at Mother Jones.

  Alison liked the way Mark talked. He was articulate but plainspoken. He seemed sincere. Unlike most men—and women, for that matter—he was neither self-aggrandizing nor self-deprecating. He kept circling back to Alison, asking her questions, probing her gently. His interest didn’t make her feel invaded, the way Zoe’s so often had.

  “I don’t want to pry,” he said as they were finishing their second drinks. “But if there’s anything you feel like telling me about your . . . relationship situation, I’d love to hear it.”

  “It’s over,” Alison said.

  Mark looked ready to be sympathetic, or angry, on her behalf. He didn’t fall all over himself telling Alison what he “knew” she must be feeling, the way Zoe used to do. He hung back, taking his signals from her. And that made her move toward him.

  “It’s hard,” she said.

  “It would have to be. Do you think it was the right thing to do?”

  “I do.” Alison grimaced. “Most of the time.”

  “For your sake, I’m sorry,” Mark said. “But I’m not going to pretend this is bad news for me.” He shoved their empty glasses aside and leaned across the cracked marble table. In the murky darkness of the wood-paneled, smoky bar, she saw the flash of his smile.

  He took her face in his hands and kissed her. “Ready to go?”

  He tossed a twenty onto the table. They walked outside and faced each other beneath the bar’s awning, light rain pattering above their heads.

  “Will you come home with me?” he asked.

  “I thought you’d never ask.”

  Mark laughed. He put his arm around her and led her to his car.

  They sped across the city on slick November streets, rain pelting the windshield, Mark’s right hand stroking her left thigh. Alison’s lust dissolved in a churning wave of nausea. She knew what the problem was. Having sex with someone who wasn’t Zoe was one thing. Laughing with someone else—that was leaving Zoe behind.

  Alison slept till nearly noon the next morning. Nausea hit her when she opened her eyes. Too much happening too fast, she thought. Ending it with Zoe. Living in a dump. Starting with someone else. No wonder she felt ill.

  Hoping food would help, she woke Mark and told him she was starving. He seemed to hear the urgency in her voice. Twenty minutes later they were in a booth at a dim sum dive on Twenty-Fourth Street, a quick walk from his place.

  Mark tapped a passing waiter on the shoulder. “Could you bring us some pot stickers right away?” he asked. “Then we’ll order the rest.”

  The waiter nodded curtly and kept going.

  “I’m not sure I can wait for pot stickers,” Alison said.

  “I’m afraid I’ve done all I can do for you, food-wise,” Mark said lightly. Zoe would have charged into the kitchen to get me something to eat right now, Alison thought. And I would have paid for her heroics, one way or another.

  It struck Alison that she hadn’t just left Zoe. She’d left her old self, too. She got to be whoever she wanted to be with Mark. She got to make this thing with him whatever she wanted it to be.

  The waiter brought glasses of water. Mark ordered the rest of their meal.

  “You feel like telling me about your ex?” Mark asked.

  Alison started composing a careful answer in her head. And then she realized that being a new person meant she could say whatever she wanted to say, however she wanted to say it. How unfair it was: Zoe’s love had given Alison the confidence to be herself without Zoe.

  “We met at Oberlin six years ago,” Alison said. “We moved to Berkeley together.”

  “What’s his name?” Mark asked.

  If it’s going to make him go away, Alison thought, I’d rather he go now. “Her name.”

  “Your ex is a woman?”

  Alison tensed. “Is that a problem for you?”

  “Are you hoping it is?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Mark took a sip of tea and put the cup down. “You put out some seriously mixed messages, Ms. Alison Rose. ‘Come closer, go away.’”

  The waiter set a platter of steaming dumplings between them. “Saved by the pot stickers,” Mark said.

  He forked two dumplings onto her plate. She devoured one, scalding her mouth. She took a long swallow of water and gulped down the other one.

  “What’s her name?” Mark asked.

  “Zoe.” It hurt to say her name. It was like conjuring Zoe, making her watch Alison eat brunch with a guy she’d been fucking all night.

  “Have you been with men before?”

  “Nothing serious.”

  “So Zoe’s the only one you’ve really loved.”

  Alison nodded, disturbed by the sound of Zoe’s name on Mark’s sexy lips.

  The waiter brought a platter heaped with noodles and bok choy. Alison was instantly queasy again.

  “Are you okay?” Mark asked. “You look kind of green.” He handed her a cup of tea. His hand, his wrist, his arm were covered with coarse blond hairs. Man registered in Alison’s brain, a tiny electric shock.

  “Not really,” Alison answered, and she went to the ladies’ room.

  While she drank her first cup of coffee at her desk each morning—no Zoe to nag her about caffeine anymore—Alison pored over the Chronicle rental ads. Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco. It exhausted her trying to pick a city, let alone a neighborhood, let alone a house, an apartment, or a room. Since she’d left Zoe, everything exhausted her. She chalked it up to spending sex-soaked nights with Mark.

  Alison’s lust astonished her. Her body seemed to be making up for all the years she’d gone without a man. She’d had great sex with Zoe right up to the end. But all those sweet kisses and caresses, all that merging and bonding, hadn’t given
Alison the forceful ferocity she couldn’t seem to get enough of now.

  Nothing felt better to Alison than Mark’s cock inside her. And nothing seemed stranger to her than his cock when it wasn’t. Sometimes she’d reach between his legs and freeze, shocked by what she found. Lying next to him as he slept, she’d sneak peeks, trying to befriend the thing in repose. Soft, fat, and curled in its nest of dark blond hair, like a freshly dug-up worm. Stiff with piss first thing in the morning, ruthless, cavalier. Shrinking, sticky with semen in postcoital retreat—a criminal slinking off with the loot. Alison was working on cultivating unconditional affection for Mark’s penis, one phase of her project to cultivate unconditional affection for him.

  When they made love, Mark didn’t wait for her to say what she wanted or how she wanted it. He didn’t smother her or pull her back from where she went alone. He wasn’t trying to prove how connected or present he was. He was in it for the pleasure of it—not just hers but his own.

  Alison loved the raw honesty of Mark’s desire. After they came, when she lay in his arms, she wasn’t counting the minutes until he let her go. She found herself wanting more with him—more coming, more cuddling—which made her realize how wearing it had been, wishing Zoe would be satisfied with less.

  Mark got her sarcastic sense of humor; he had one of his own. She felt like a slightly smarter, funnier version of herself when she was with him. He gave her abundant proof of his attraction to her, but he didn’t talk about her looks all the time the way every other man—and Zoe—had.

  She and Mark did the same kind of work, had the same politics, liked the same foods. They wanted the same amount of closeness and space. Mark’s emotions didn’t rise and fall with Alison’s. When she was upset, he didn’t come after her, probing and prying the way Zoe had.

  “Is sex as good with me as it was with Zoe?” Mark asked Alison one night. They were tangled in postcoital collapse, their heads having landed, somehow, at the foot of the bed.

  “I told you. I don’t want to talk about her.” Alison grabbed two pillows off the floor. She tucked one under her head, offered the other to Mark.

  “You were with her for years. You’re probably still in love with her. Don’t you think that’s relevant to me? To us?”

  Alison wondered whether he was turned on by the idea of her and Zoe, if he’d use whatever she told him to juice up his sexual fantasies. The thought of it made her queasy. Again.

  “Do you think about her a lot?” Mark persisted. “Do you miss her?”

  If he really wants to know, Alison decided, I’ll tell him. “I think about her all the time. I miss her all the time, the way I’d miss air if air went away.” She squeezed her eyes shut, fighting tears. “She was the best friend I’ve ever had.”

  “Then why did you leave her?”

  “That’s all I’m going to say.”

  “It scares me, the way you feel about her.”

  Was this a new thing, Alison wondered: a man admitting to being scared? Had men changed during the years she’d been with Zoe? “You wouldn’t want me to talk about you with someone else, would you?”

  Mark propped himself up on one elbow and looked down at her. His eyes were luminous in the dark. “I don’t want there to be anyone else. For either of us. I want to see where this goes. We can’t do that if we’re dating other people.”

  How did this happen, Alison asked herself. I’m in a relationship again.

  “I’m not dating anyone else,” she said.

  “And you won’t, as long as we’re together?”

  She waited for regret or claustrophobia to clobber her. Instead she felt soothed, settled, relieved. She liked this man. She liked the way he held her. Sweetly but not cloyingly. Close but not too tight.

  “And I won’t,” she repeated, “as long as we’re together.”

  Mark leaned over and they kissed a long, lingering kiss.

  “Now that that’s settled . . .” Alison traced Mark’s ear with her fingertip. He shivered. She felt him getting hard again. “I need a favor. Can I stash a few boxes in your garage till I find a place to live?”

  “Of course. Anything else I can do to help?”

  Mark wasn’t offering too much, more than he really wanted to give. He wasn’t outthinking her, telling her what she needed, then needing to be rewarded for giving it to her. Alison was free to ask him for anything because he was free to say no.

  “Can I borrow your car this weekend?” she asked.

  “I need it on Sunday,” he answered. “But Saturday’s fine.”

  Alison dialed her old phone number at noon on Monday, when Zoe was likely to be at her studio. There was a new outgoing message on the answering machine. “Please leave a message for Zoe after the beep.” She’d never known Zoe to make such a humorless message. She’d never heard Zoe’s voice sound so flat.

  “It’s me,” Alison told Zoe’s machine. “I hope you’re okay.” This had to be the weirdest phone call of Alison’s life. “I need to come get my stuff. If you’ll tell me when the best time would be, and where you’ll leave a key, I’ll be in and out as fast as I can. Call me at work, okay? Thanks.”

  The next morning Zoe left a message on Alison’s PMC voice mail. Hearing Zoe’s voice felt like hearing her own. Zoe had called at 2:00 AM and she sounded like she’d been crying. All she said was, “I’ll be out of the cottage on Saturday from ten to four.”

  Alison made her first trip across the newly repaired Bay Bridge, white-knuckling the wheel of Mark’s car, afraid of another earthquake and afraid of doing what she was crossing the bridge to do.

  Her own restoration and the bridge’s seemed to be keeping pace. The new section of the upper deck was not quite level with the old; the car bounced scarily as it crossed the seam between the two. Coming off the bridge, she saw a row of cranes like a flock of orange egrets looming over the Cypress demolition and construction site. Just like me, she thought. Out with the old, in with the new.

  She drove east on University Avenue, a route she’d driven ten thousand times. Berkeley seemed to be returning to its pre-earthquake self, plywood windows replaced with glass, red-tagged houses with cars in their driveways again, bricks from fallen chimneys cleared from sidewalks, streets, and roofs. Thanks to the sixties, she thought, Berkeley knows how to deal with chaos and rubble.

  Alison turned left onto Grant Street and parked in front of the cottage. Her greatest hope and fear had been that Zoe would ambush her, but the Volvo wasn’t there.

  Nor were the falling-down pickets, replaced, now, by a spiffy redwood fence. The top of each plank was sculpted into the shape of a tulip, a daisy, or a rose.

  The new gate was firmly upright, perfectly plumb. Alison lifted its oiled black-steel latch and let herself in. The wild front yard that she and Zoe had loved, and watered, and cut roses from and otherwise ignored had been transformed. Gone were the curling vines of volunteer nasturtiums, the woody clumps of overgrown rosemary and lavender, the tea rose swallowing the tottering lath wall. Now a boxwood hedge marched around a geometric grid of manicured flowerbeds. A miniature wooden bridge arched over a curved, dry streambed—no river, just river rocks.

  Alison couldn’t imagine boundaryless Zoe living within that orderly, boring landscape. Had she hired a boring gardener? Taken a boring lover? This rebuke of a garden meant that Zoe was moving on.

  For a moment Alison wished she’d taken Mark up on his offer to help her collect her stuff. But then she imagined him emptying the closet she’d shared with Zoe, in the bedroom she’d shared with Zoe, asking Alison which shirts, pants, and shoes were hers and which were Zoe’s. Biting her lip, Alison followed the freshly raked gravel path to the door.

  It felt wrong to fish Zoe’s key out from under a glazed ceramic planter she’d never seen before, to be an intruder in the happiest home she’d ever known. Alison stood in the entryway, feeling the echoing emptiness of the house.

  The living room was unchanged. A new series hung in the hallway where Mammary
Lane had been—charcoal drawings of the crushed Cypress overpass, cars and bodies sandwiched between layers of concrete and steel.

  Alison’s office was Zoe’s now, her desk replaced by a drawing table, a clamp-on lamp, and a rolling cart stacked with trays of art supplies. Alison’s things had been shoved against the wall. She picked a paintbrush off the drawing table, ran her finger over the soft mink bristles, feeling Zoe’s hair. How did this happen, she thought.

  She saved the heart of the house for last. But yes, there was the kitchen, and there were the pots and pans scarred by the meals she and Zoe had cooked and eaten together. There was the boom box whose music they’d danced to, the Champagne flutes they’d clinked in celebration, the food-splattered cookbooks on the shelf above the stove. The 1989 Sierra Club calendar taped to the side of the fridge was still open to October, even though today was December first.

  Alison read the notes scribbled on the days of her former life—some in Zoe’s squiggly lettering, some in Alison’s tidy hand. On October 17, the day of the last insemination, the day of the earthquake, Zoe had written “4 PM—Insem.”

  In the box for October 24, Alison had written “6 PM—MJ Party.” She wouldn’t have believed when she wrote it that she was going to have sex that night with a man.

  October 31, the day Alison’s period was due, was circled in red. She flipped the page to November and saw that she’d circled the twenty-first. She counted the weeks again. And realized that November 21 had come and gone. Her period was ten days late.

  It’s stress, she told herself. She and Mark had always used condoms, except for that first time. And she’d had her period on Halloween—the period that ended her effort to have a baby with Zoe. The period that ended them.