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- Story Listed as: Fiction For Adults
- Theme: Drama / Human Interest
- Subject: Loneliness / Solitude
- Published: 02/15/2021
Earth Movements
Born 1960, F, from San Carlos de Bariloche, ArgentinaStanley pulled the door open, unsurprised to find Jane standing on the threshold, exactly under the light bulb, as if to avoid retreating into invisibility of habit. She walked in, as a woman of no importance will, not stylishly, sighing that all was well. Bodily functions, instincts, feelings, everything under control, ready to serve. Something primal flashed through the dank air and collapsed like a soap bubble. The unhappy ghost of a flag of truce fluttered in its wake, filling the void.
Jane’s handbag landed where it always did. Her pallid fingers - slightly the worse for wear - combed back lustreless strands of hair. Stanley shut the door, then turned and waited comfortably. A burning lamp rested on a bookcase whose contents seemed fixed by dust and boredom of times past.
A hint of tenderness slipped into Jane’s voice:
“And you? Feeling OK?” She wore black, and no lipstick on her lips or varnish on her fingernails, certain in her mind that make-up underscores age. Black might drown her flaws in a tranquil sea of resignation, and was an all-purpose colour, good for funerals or cocktail parties.
Stanley led her into the airless dining-room, grim with an oval table sitting eight. “Drink?” Not waiting for an answer, he poured out a cherry brandy. Jane never drank anything else.
They walked to the window, hand in hand. It was uphill work to get to the bedroom. Jane had taken off her wedding-ring -the first stage of their Thursday routine- outside in the hall, and dropped it inside her handbag.
“A bit chilly now, isn’t it?” he offered, after a while. They embraced. It was already growing dark. The bed appeared more enticing.
Later on, they talked a little.
“How’s the old begar?”
She resented that, but answered tritely: “Bad-tempered, filthy-mouthed, tight-fisted.” She ran out of fitting adjectives.
“He gives you a hard time.”
“Yes.”
It was Stanley’s turn now. He chatted about his scrap metal business, while she eyed him pensively. The nakedness, the hunger, whatever had drawn them together, vanished into formless words that seemed to thicken the air like corn flour in insipid soup. Love is like lightning, Jane thought wearily: the world lights up for a few seconds, but nothing’s left to show for it afterwards.
While talking shop Stanley always waxed solemn. He would’ve preferred to lay out for others the true guide to action. He would’ve liked to say: “I’d rather conquer myself than conquer fortune”. Or something like that, Jane believed. But he invariably tripped over his own words and wound up in a dialectic maze, a misunderstood philosopher. His blunt toes told the same story, mutely. Jane hated them.
“What time is it?” she dared interrupt him, sitting up and covering her breasts. Stanley never looked at them. Hers was a reflex movement, perhaps some leftover childhood modesty, maybe a conscious desire to conceal the flaws of middle-age - or both.
Stanley only objected, on principle, to her leaving him now. He was always fiercely critical of other people’s timetables. Yet he knew that if he embarked on an argument with this woman, she’d wind up in a fury, or God knows what, and he’d be waiting alone on Thursday afternoons till she was in a mood for conciliation. Meanwhile, she’d be visiting her widowed sister instead. The pattern of how her mind worked was as fixed as her passion for black clothes. Stanley shut up.
Jane felt that he ought to know by now that she must clock in at eight, before her husband began to miss her. She got up out of the rumpled bed and began to get dressed -no sense in staying another moment- when suddenly the floor seemed to shoot up towards her and she fell over violently, bringing down the bedside lamp with her. Blood trickled around her ear and over her shoulder.
From down there, wherever she was, since the walls didn’t appear to be in their usual place either, Jane observed vaguely that the vulgar chandelier had begun to swing like a crazy pendulum, rattling loudly. She pointed at it with difficulty, her arm covered in gravel, thinking how ugly it was, anyway, and so full of itsy-bitsy polygons, or whatever it was you called those glass crystals.
Unbelievingly, she thought she heard Stanley mutter, from far away: “It’s an earthquake... the Big One!” And then the thundering noise, louder than a thousand night lorries, the kind that passed under her bedroom window; that’s to say, back there in the state housing development beside the freeway, where her husband surely was working himself into a rage, with the aid of cans of beer and the resentment of mindless years.
All this Jane thought, or thought she thought, while Stanley ran over in his mind the things one ought to salvage at moments like this: his driving-license, for one, and perhaps that photo of his dead wife that he always hid in the wardrobe when Jane visited. He was trying desperately to reach out in the incredible, moving darkness for something, anything.
The rumble of the night lorries was worse than deafening now, the air full of dust, objects falling, shattering, a smell of gas, surely not, was it? Oh, Lord! Yes, and in a few more seconds -an instant in eternity, really- a gargantuan shudder, no, not a shudder, much more than that, they were falling now, falling falling ... and the searing flash was perhaps the last thing either of them felt or saw.
The rest is on the news, in other countries, far away, where people -some of them lonely, too- go about their lives without any earth-shattering events, like Jane and Stanley had done. People who pause to look at T.V. flashes, relieved by the soothing knowledge that earth movements are not likely to occur in their part of the world… well, you can’t be sure of everything, can you? But no, those things happen far away, always, in remote mountain villages, or else on beautiful, colossal islands like New Zealand and Japan.
And of course in L.A., which had apparently sunk under the sea like a proud, modern Atlantis; and the whole of California was now some sort of serpentine island reef, a groaning monster of mind and matter seeking a new identity and a new domain. That’s what the T.V. announcers appear to be trying to get across, in any event, but these flash broadcasts blow things up a lot, it’s to do with the ratings, better see what the evening papers say.
That is, if the world as we know it is still around by this evening, come to think of it. An earthquake like that one could, I imagine, have a similar effect to a giant meteor crashing on to our planet. There’s a gritty wind blowing up and the sky appears to be darkening over…
The end.
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