A Theory of Small Earthquakes Page 6

  Alison’s real writing career wasn’t going any better. Zoe’s relentless encouragement, which often made Alison feel more harassed than encouraged, did keep her sending out submissions. But she was collecting rejection letters, not readers.

  “I love writing,” she told Zoe one Friday night over beers and oozing slices of Zachary’s stuffed pizza. “But I think I’d love it even more if anyone ever read what I wrote.” Alison sprinkled red peppers on her slice. “Besides you, I mean,” she added before Zoe did.

  “Why don’t you try journalism?” Zoe asked. “You’re so good at those profiles you write for work. And you’re always saying poetry and fiction aren’t political enough.”

  Alison swallowed a mouthful of mozzarella and wondered why she hadn’t thought of that herself. She’d been writing for the company newsletter, mostly stories about the activists who ran PMC’s client organizations. She liked doing the interviews, and her boss and clients were always happy with the results. Maybe she could use her PMC clips to get assignments from newspapers and magazines the way she’d used her Oberlin Review clips to land the job at PMC.

  “I’ll try it,” Alison said. She waggled a finger at Zoe. “But don’t start bugging me about pitching the damn New Yorker. I’m going to start small.”

  “Promise.” Zoe lifted her beer, Alison lifted hers, and they clinked glasses. “But you will try The New York Times, right?”

  Alison started sputtering. Zoe laughed. “Kidding,” she said.

  Suddenly the table shuddered. Plates rattled. Their beer glasses tilted, sloshed, and righted themselves. The walls creaked. The chatter stopped. At the next table, a man grabbed a toddler out of the high chair beside him, hugging her to his chest. “Earthquake,” several people said into the silence.

  And then it ended. There was a hushed pause, a waiting, a breath held.

  Gradually the din resumed. The pizza makers went back to slamming oven doors. The greeter called out the next name on the list.

  “Hey, that was our first earthquake,” Alison said. “Shouldn’t we have a kiss to celebrate?”

  Zoe didn’t look like a person who wanted a kiss. She looked like a person who wanted to disappear. Her face was pale. Her eyes were big and round.

  In their three years together, Alison had never seen Zoe so scared. Alison didn’t know what to do for her, what to say. In an instant, the earthquake had shaken them into each other’s roles.

  “Do you know the theory of small earthquakes?” Alison asked, hoping to distract Zoe from her panic.

  Zoe didn’t seem to have heard her.

  “They say each little earthquake releases pressure from the fault line,” Alison said, “which makes a big one less likely. So that was actually a good thing.”

  “Not to me,” Zoe said through clenched teeth.

  “I’m taking you home.” Alison threw a twenty-dollar bill on the table, walked around the booth, and pulled Zoe to her feet.

  Alison remembered lying in her narrow dorm room bed with Zoe, talking about the move to California. Alison kept coming up with what-ifs; Zoe kept shooting them down. There were good jobs for writers in the Bay Area, Zoe reassured her. They would find a great place to live. They were moving to Berkeley, not marrying Berkeley. And then Zoe hoisted herself up onto one elbow and looked down at Alison. “You’re safe with me,” she said. “I’m the one you want to be with in a crisis.”

  Alison had let Zoe swaddle her in that blanket. And now Zoe was the one who needed swaddling.

  Alison came up with a list of story ideas that overlapped with the research she did for her job. She went to the library and gave herself an immersion course on writing and selling magazine pitches, tearing through stacks of books and trade magazines.

  She mailed her pitches with copies of her PMC clips to every alternative newspaper in the Bay Area: the Berkeley Express, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Pacific Sun, the Berkeley Monthly, SF Weekly, even the Point Reyes Light. When the editors didn’t call her, she called them. When they dodged her calls, she wrote to them again. Finally, the Berkeley Monthly paid her $100 for an essay about the spiritual aspect of recycling. Two weeks later, the San Francisco Bay Guardian assigned her a $250 update piece on Bay Area abortion clinics. New clips in hand, she sent bigger, broader pitches to national magazines.

  Six months later, Alison had an impressive collection of new rejection letters. She was convinced that the problem was her lack of time, that she could get the assignments she wanted if she weren’t squeezing writing in around her job, around the time she wanted to spend with Zoe—and, more problematically, the time Zoe wanted to spend with her. Although she often stayed up half the night painting, Zoe fussed and tugged at Alison when she tried to write on weekends. She had to choose between keeping Zoe happy and putting more energy into getting published. Freelance writing practically guaranteed disappointment. Zoe guaranteed joy.

  Alison decided to stop working on weekends. She had a lifetime of writing ahead of her. But she didn’t know how long this good life with Zoe would last.

  7.

  berkeley

  1986–1988

  Alison came home from work and plucked the mail out of the wicker basket beneath the slot in the front door. She sifted through the thick pile of junk mail, some of which she’d produced.

  Campaign packets from Jesse Jackson and Michael Dukakis: hers. Fund-raising letters from the Sierra Club (hers) and the Pacific Center for Sexual Minorities (a rival agency’s). Bills from PG&E, Waste Management, Pacific Bell. And a letter for Zoe from Anthony Meier Fine Arts in San Francisco.

  Zoe’s key turned in the lock. Alison handed her the envelope. Zoe ripped it open. “I got a gallery.” She grabbed Alison. “I got a gallery!”

  “Congrats, babe. But how’d that happen? You told me you’d given up.”

  Zoe dragged her into the kitchen. They sank into their chairs. Zoe’s cheeks were shiny and pink. “I didn’t want to tell you I was still trying. I felt like such a loser. All those rejections. My paintings getting splattered with grease in pizza parlors . . .”

  “So when you said you were home, painting,” Alison said slowly, “you were really in San Francisco, meeting with gallery owners?”

  “It only happened a few times.” Zoe laughed. “Listen to us! I was just trying to surprise you. We’re acting like I was having an affair!”

  If she could lie to me about this, Alison thought, she could lie to me about anything.

  “Aren’t you happy for me?” Zoe asked plaintively. “It’s a new gallery, really avant-garde. They want my whole Chernobyl series.”

  “Of course. It’s great news.” Alison forced a smile.

  “Champagne!” Zoe cried. “We must have Champagne.” She grabbed the car keys. “Back in a flash,” she said, flying out the door.

  She wasn’t really lying, Alison told herself. She was just trying to surprise me.

  Selfish bitch, Alison heard her mother saying. This is Zoe’s big moment, and you can’t let her have it. All you care about is yourself.

  Alison went to the leaded-glass built-in that flanked the fireplace and pulled out their special thrift store cut-glass flutes. She carried them to the freezer, shoved aside the iced-over packages of ham hocks and phyllo dough, and made a bed for them on a pair of Nancy’s Yogurt containers full of Zoe’s lentil soup.

  Zoe burst through the front door, brandishing a sweating bottle of Veuve Clicquot. She popped the cork and filled the flutes.

  “To the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” she said, lifting her glass.

  “To your gallery.”

  Zoe shook her head, rolling her eyes. “Not the gallery, goofball. You.”

  Alison stared into her flute, mesmerized by the perpetual font of perfect, tiny bubbles.

  “To the best thing,” Zoe said again.

  “The best thing,” Alison repeated. Bumping against each other, their glasses made a sweet tinkling sound.

  Flush with extra cash, Zoe mad
e an appointment with a socially responsible investment adviser at Working Assets in San Francisco. She asked Alison to come along.

  The adviser told Zoe to buy a house and invest the rest. Bay Area real estate prices, he said with no apparent sense of irony, were going through the roof.

  “Let’s buy the cottage,” Zoe said as she drove them home across the Bay Bridge.

  “The cottage is falling apart,” Alison said. “And I don’t have money for a down payment.”

  Alison heard herself and shuddered. When had she started sounding like her mother, negative about everything, fearful of anything new? When had she stopped saying yes to Zoe?

  “The money doesn’t matter,” Zoe said. “I’ve told you a million times. What’s mine is yours.”

  Outside the passenger window, Alison saw a freighter gliding slowly along the gray surface of the bay. Stacked with bright squares of red, green, yellow, and blue shipping containers, the ship looked like it was made of Legos.

  “It matters to me,” she said.

  “You’re impossible, you know that?”

  Alison heard the wheels turning in Zoe’s brain. “Here’s what we’ll do,” Zoe said as they passed the turnoff for Treasure Island. “I’ll cover the down payment and the renovations. You can make the mortgage payments. After a few years, we’ll be even. We can split everything after that.”

  “You’re impossible, you know that?” Alison teased, stalling.

  “Poor you. It’s rough, isn’t it, letting me take care of you?”

  Yes, Alison thought. It is.

  “Think about it,” Zoe said. “We’ll buy a lawn mower. Fight about sink fixtures. Just like real married people.”

  But we’re not real married people, Alison thought. And we never will be. “Look! A heron.” She pointed to a gangly snow-white bird poised on one matchstick leg in the marshy mud flats alongside the freeway.

  “That’s an egret, Alison.” Zoe only called her Alison when she was angry. It didn’t happen often. “And don’t change the subject. Why wouldn’t you want to buy a house with me?”

  “I don’t know,” Alison said.

  They fell into an uneasy silence driving east on University toward the hills, past the Leaning Tower of Pizza, past Berkeley Indoor Garden, where the pot growers bought their supplies, past the Santa Fe Bar and Grill, the new Jeremiah Tower restaurant in the old railroad station.

  As the Volvo idled at a red light, Alison watched parents and kids spilling down the steps of the Berkeley Montessori School. The moms clutched their children’s hands and their dimpled finger paintings and lunchboxes and jackets, calling to each other over their kids’ heads, planting kisses on their children’s cheeks.

  I want that, Alison thought. She felt a stab in the region of her heart.

  She wanted the pain to stop. She wanted her dread of the future to stop. She wanted to stop living in two realities, the yes now and the looming no.

  Maybe if she loved Zoe the way Zoe loved her, without hesitation or reservation, she’d feel the certainty, the lightness, the happiness that Zoe felt.

  “Okay. Let’s do it,” Alison said.

  Their landlady was delighted to sell to them, and no wonder. The inspector they hired found dry rot, termite damage, a leaking roof, clogged galvanized pipes, and an eighty-year-old electrical system in dire need of repair. Then there was the mess of the garden. Armed with the inspection report, their Realtor haggled the price down from $220,000 to $169,000.

  On July 4, 1988, exactly four years after their move to Berkeley, Zoe wrote a check for the down payment. Just like real married people, they listed themselves on the deed as equal owners.

  Alison’s instinct proved right. Saying yes to Zoe, buying the cottage with Zoe, made her feel more secure, more in love, happier with Zoe than ever.

  They took a celebratory shopping trip to the Ashby Flea Market, needing nothing, wanting a souvenir of this magic time. They found it leaning against the wheel of a vendor’s pickup truck: a gilt-edged, etched antique mirror.

  “It’s gorgeous, babe!” Zoe exclaimed.

  They stood hip to hip, looking at themselves in the hazy, age-blotched glass. Was it the mirror’s distortion, Alison wondered, or was she starting to look like her mother?

  “It’s kind of blurry, actually,” Alison said.

  “Wait till we’re old and wrinkled. We’ll be glad to miss the details.” She ran her hand up Alison’s back, drizzled her fingers through Alison’s hair. Alison pulled away. Zoe never seemed to notice or care if people knew they were gay.

  “How much?” Zoe asked the old black man who was selling the mirror.

  “Twenty dollars,” he said.

  “Ten. The glass is all messed up.”

  “If you were as old as that mirror, young lady, you’d be all messed up too.”

  Zoe smiled at him flirtatiously. “Fifteen.”

  “Deal.” The man squinted at them. “This thing’s heavy. You ladies got a man to help you lift it?”

  Zoe threw her arm around Alison’s shoulders. “What on earth would we need a man for?”

  Alison winced. She and Zoe carried the mirror to their car.

  Zoe’s gallery sold one of her Chernobyl paintings. The owner asked to see more of her work.

  Elated, Zoe decided she finally deserved a real studio. She combed the Oakland Tribune classifieds and found a warehouse space she liked. Before she signed the lease, she wanted Alison to like it, too.

  As they drove south on Martin Luther King Jr. Way, the Victorians got more decrepit, the liquor stores and storefront churches more prevalent, the cars older and rustier, the bass beats booming from their open windows more explosive.

  Their cottage was only a mile and a half north of the Berkeley–Oakland border, but Zoe and Alison rarely crossed the Oakland line. Mostly poor, black, and residential with a wasteland of a downtown, the city didn’t have much to draw people like them.

  Zoe parked in front of a graffiti-splattered, three-story brick building. “It’s not much on the outside,” she said, “but wait till you see the space.”

  “Can’t wait,” Alison sat in the passenger seat looking around, in no hurry to leave the car.

  A person of indeterminate gender slept in a nest of rags in the doorway. Butting up to the warehouse was a weedy vacant lot full of rusted car axles, shredded tires, and jagged chunks of cement. On the corner, a group of men leaned against the liquor store wall, tipping brown paper bags to their mouths. The row of hundred-year-old Victorians across the street with boarded-up windows looked like a lineup of old people, closing their eyes to whatever might happen next.

  “You think it’s safe to leave the car here?” Alison asked.

  Zoe frowned, opened the passenger door, and ushered Alison past the mound in the doorway. The gloomy lobby smelled even worse than it looked.

  “The elevator’s huge,” Zoe said. “And so’s the space. I’ll be able to make big paintings again.” She punched a big red button. Above their heads, gears and pulleys creaked and groaned.

  “Couldn’t you have found a studio in Berkeley?” Alison asked.

  Zoe pinched Alison’s cheek. “What’s wrong, Miss Politically Correct Ad Exec? You scared to hang out in the ’hood?”

  The freight elevator announced itself with a crash of metal against metal. Zoe rolled up the door. “Next stop, women’s lingerie, women’s shoes, woman’s studio.”

  Two stories up, the elevator wheezed to a stop. Zoe pulled Alison into a football field–sized room. Dust motes danced in shafts of muted light. Bare redwood rafters and dangling metal warehouse lights trailed necklaces of gray dust.

  Alison followed Zoe to a wall of floor-to-ceiling industrial windows blanketed in grime. “The light will be great in here as soon as I get these windows washed.” Zoe rubbed a small patch clean. “I’m pretty sure you can see the Bay Bridge from here.”

  Zoe whirled around the room, her parachute pants billowing, her Chinese silk slippers skipping across
the filthy floor. “I’d be crazy not to take it, right?”

  “Crazy,” Alison said.

  At first the change was subtle, predictable. Of course the kitchen didn’t smell of Zoe’s cooking anymore when Alison came home from work. Of course their bed wasn’t made, the feather pillows un-fluffed, the sweetheart roses on their nightstand shedding petals, the hearth a dark, empty hole. Zoe wasn’t home all day anymore. Sometimes she didn’t get home until eight or nine. When she did, she was quieter than she used to be, less effusive. She went to bed early. Often, she went to bed alone.

  Alison reminded herself what Woody Allen had said in Annie Hall, her favorite movie: relationships are like sharks; they move forward or they die. She reminded herself that change was good or at least inevitable. She fought her fear that buying the house with Zoe had been a mistake, that Zoe had her now and didn’t need to court her. She reminded herself that she used to crave time alone. She told herself to use the time well. She struggled to silence her mother’s voice scolding, Why would she buy the cow when she can get the milk for free? (Was there still milk involved, she wondered, when there were two cows in the relationship and no bull?)

  If Zoe wasn’t home by seven or eight, Alison would defrost a container of her soup from their freezer, take a bowlful to her office, and work on a query letter, or research a story idea, or play with a poem. Sometimes Alison sank deliciously into the solitude. Sometimes she was listening hard for Zoe’s key in the front door.

  Fighting loneliness, beating back the beginnings of panic, one night when Zoe went to bed early, Alison went with her.