Alec seemed to be fingering a chain of evidence: here the fight he and his father had, here his father’s startled look that his son could so caustically talk back to him. Alec was simply hurt that his father turned away from him, that when Stuart rejected his earlier liberalism to return to the warm comfort of the fold, he left his son’s children outside in the chilly zero.
Buried in the past were all those hurtful things that Alec had almost entirely forgotten—such as that when Gina was finishing her schooling she’d once known someone named Timmy, known him much too well.
The quake struck like a hammer drop, centered near Santa Cruz, its shock waves radiating outward for hundreds of miles. The shifting occurred on the Loma Prieta Fault; this was part of the same splintering system that includes the San Andreas and the Hayward, the strike-slip fault that ran directly beneath the Baxters’ house.
That was October 17, 1989. The clockwork of events might have been constructed differently , might have sprung out and dinged and been plotted to produce a different result. Alec might have been at the ball game at Candlestick Park, might have taken his son Peter with him. He loved this boy so much it made Alec much too vulnerable to loss.
They might have gone with his partner, Carlo Empy, who had tickets, might be stuck there in the darkened stadium with fifty thousand others, phones and bridges down or clogged and no way to get word home to Gina and Cecily. They might have driven there and have parked and gone in and might have therefore lived, but it was also conceivable that they would be running late since they were with Carlo, who ran late. Carlo was half Italian. They might have been rushing to the game and so just hitting the upper deck of the Bay Bridge when the slab fell in. They might have hit the connector just there where it pancaked, at the I-880 interchange, killing forty-two people. The Cypress Structure stood only two or three minutes from Alec and Carlo’s Fourth Street offices. Before that day, no one knew such a thing as the “Cypress Structure” even existed.
This would have happened because Alec had Peter with him, Peter had psychic vulnerability, might be charged, even, in the particular way that draws lightning down. Alec was meant for nothing, he often thought, aside from keeping his children safe in this shifting world.
Alec would have taken his son to the Bay Bridge World Series game—he seemed to need to repeat this for weeks to anyone who would listen—except his father had just died and Alec was just back from his trip east, was home without eating or sleeping, was bordering on near exhaustion. “You don’t border on near exhaustion, Alec,” Gina mentioned in bed one night. “That’s like your saying dethawed when you mean defrosted.”
He made only the slightest little grunt.
“You might begin to feel a whole lot better,” Gina was going on to say, “if you went out and got a little strenuous exercise. You need to eat more greens, lose a few pounds. You need to drink more water and a lot less coffee.”
Alec was lying in bed with his hands behind his neck studying the shifting gray geometries of shadow and deeper shadow on the ceiling. These came from moonshine caught in the light well he placed at the center of the house. Light invaded each upstairs room at night by falling through the transoms in luminous Rothko-like floating rectilineals. He was guilt-wracked, vexed. Just when Alec relaxed, settled in to witness the many and very obvious pleasures of his life, a word or phrase (such as Timmy, the fucking boychik, such as Despite his better nature, my father had come at the end to perfectly despise the goyim) would bubble up to punish him.
“Know what Voltaire said when they told him he was killing himself with coffee?”
“What?” Gina asked. She was falling asleep.
“I was born killed.”
She made some small sleepy acknowledgment. “Know what U.S. Grant’s last words were?”1 Alec asked. He was a specialist in this kind of knowledge for which he had yet to find any real application. Gina’s breaths slowed, evened out; she was lost to him. Who or what was it Gina dreamed of these days?
Never mind, he told himself, I’ll go find someone else to tell.
5
Celestial Elevations
HE HAD KISSED another woman once, someone he hadn’t yet known well enough. Anna Bell-Shay was shy, squirrely, a close friend of their neighbor Veronique. Anna and her husband had come to dinner a couple of times at Carlo and Julie’s. She was a writer, a poet, one of the vague women Alec thought of as being members of the Horizontal School.
He’d found Anna sitting outside on a low stone wall at the party of friends in the neighborhood. This was after the earthquake when whatever held Alec attached to the earth had begun to let loose of him. For a week or ten days when rescue teams were still pulling living people out of the rubble, everyone exhibited a great capacity for joy. People were talkative, briefly united by the shared catastrophe that seemed to reach so deeply into every aspect of their lives. This was later in November, the Bay Bridge had been reopened, things were settling back: modern life again began to atomize.
It was a big party on a mild night. She had excluded herself and was sitting alone in the quiet dark, drinking wine and staring in through the big window of the dining room at the crowd around the buffet table.
Anna and her husband had the lookalike marriage Alec called the Bub and Sis, like a type of deli sandwich. Each was tall and blond, each had a wide angular face, strong, purely American features. Her eyebrows were so pale they scarcely showed. This was an endogenous marriage, like that of first cousins, rare in California, more common in the East.
Bub was of one type Alec actively despised—Columbia had its share of these. They were feckless, good-looking, rich—they never balanced their checkbooks. Blue-eyed, ankles tanned, they golfed, went sockless, came mewing around women who seemed to like them, though what was the exact appeal? Bub, in Anna’s case, was a musician who taught at Mills. She was clearly too smart for him. He was charming, nothing more. At dinner Alec had been bored and more than a little annoyed that men of this type exhibited such ease in getting good-looking women.
Anna patted the spot on the low wall beside her. Alec sat. It had been a clear fine day and still was warm enough that they could sit comfortably outside. The evening was peaceful; light through the window pooled on the flagstone and moss just beyond their feet. Neither felt moved to speak. The clouds above were still brightly lit, but here below in the shadow trail of the house next door, they were sequestered by the quiet and by the gathering darkness.
The sun was going down and the last light glinted like hammered copper along the rippled glass of the upstairs windows. This was a big hills house, a Maybeck, brown-shingled, effortlessly perfect and of its time. That he be half as good as Maybeck or Julia Morgan was all a man might really hope for. Birds were screaming raucously. This was only a few blocks below Descartes—Alec had come out the kitchen door to see if there was a way to sneak home by going over a back wall or up the path past Indian Rock. He could go home and sit in his car for a little while, read a couple of paragraphs of physics—this was the end of the eighties, so he’d have been reading A Brief History of Time, which was simply too difficult. Or he might go home and listen to the ball game on the car radio, drive back down to get her. He could be gone an hour before Gina even missed him.
“Nice party,” Anna said.
“Tip-top.”
Each fell silent once again.
“Actually,” she said. “I left because I couldn’t really stand another second of listening to the sound of my own voice.”
“That’s the one good thing about smoking cigarettes,” he said. “It gets you bounced right out of a place like this.”
“Do you have a cigarette?”
“I don’t smoke.”
“Neither