Love and Other Natural Disasters (20 page)

"Well, we should go," I
said. I stood up and ruffled Jacob's hair. "You take it easy on Uncle
Charlie."

Jacob looked over at Jon. "Do
you have to go? Both of you?"

"Don't you remember? I'm
surprising your mom. If I don't go, how will she get there?"

"When are you coming
back?" he asked Jon.

"You've got the calendar,
buddy. You can look at it with Charlie." I could practically see the lump
in Jon's throat. "Okay, give me a hug."

They hugged, and then Jon followed
me toward the front door. "Could you just give me a minute so I can look
in on Liv?" he asked.

"Of course."

I got my jacket from the front
closet and waited by the door until he came back down the hall. Then, as the
door closed behind us, Jon said, almost more to himself than to me, "I just
can't look back. Every time, I know that if I look back, I'm going to lose
it." He walked straight to the car, where he unlocked the passenger side
for me.

Once we were both inside, I saw he
was taking deep breaths. "Are you okay?" I asked.

He tried to smile, but succeeded
only in looking more pained. "It just gets me, you know. No offense to
your brother, but you don't know what it's like having to leave my kids there
with another man raising them, having Liv respond more to Charlie's voice than
mine."

"It's not permanent."

"Sometimes it feels like a
preview. You know, if I can't make this work"—he gestured between
us—"eventually there'll be another man raising my kids."

I didn't know what to say, and he
started the car. "So where are we going? Maybe just one hint?" I said
with forced brightness.

Jon tried to play along. "How
about—it's something living?"

"Something living," I
mused.

He gave me more clues and I
continued guessing, and the time passed pleasantly enough. Finally we arrived
in the Richmond neighborhood of San Francisco, sometimes called New Chinatown.
The streets were packed, signs were multilingual, and the air smelled like a
fish market.

"I give up," I said.
"Where are we going?"

He smiled and said, "Follow
me."

I did, and soon we were standing in
front of what, on the outside, looked like just another market. But I read the
sign (in English), and it was an aquarium.

"There's that wall in the
bedroom that would be perfect for a tank," Jon said. "I thought maybe
we could find some circling fish. You could give them names. I remember it
always bothered you that those fish died without names."

I looked at him sideways for a long
moment; then I started to smile. He grinned back.

"Let's go inside and see what
they've got," he said. "It said on the Web site that they've got
twenty thousand gallons of water in there, whatever that looks like."

The aquarium was narrow, but
extended much farther than you would have guessed from the outside. There was a
strange blue cast to the light. It was slightly lurid, like we were on the set
of a low-budget horror film. Closest to the door were shelves with clear
plastic cups, each containing one fish.

"I wonder why they're in cups
like that, instead of the tanks." I leaned in for a better look.

"Maybe they're fighting
fish," Jon said, "and they can't be kept together. Or maybe they're
just the ones that sell the fastest." The sign above informed us they were
$2.99.

"This one's pretty." I
pointed to a sleek purple fish, and he darted away violently enough to shake the
cup. "A little skittish, though."

We walked along the side of the
store slowly, gazing in
at the tanks that were
embedded in the walls, like
Hollywood Squares.
"These are
cool," I said, pointing at a tank full of black fish that each had about
three white spots apiece. "They're sort of elegant, like Audrey Hepburn,
if she were a fish."

"They're a little high society
for me," he said. "But hey, they're your fish."

I peered into the various tanks.
One was filled with "Upside-Down Cats": fish that were swimming with
their fins on top, eyes on the bottom.

"Those are some confused
fish," Jon said. "Ever felt like that?"

I laughed. "Never."
"Me either."

Jon was trying out tricks on the
fish, and his favorite was to close his fist, move it close to the tank, and
then open his palm suddenly. The more nervous fish immediately scattered to the
back. We noticed that the
Bala
sharks (in three
different tanks for small, medium, and large) ran away according to size, with
the largest holding their ground.

I spied a tank of small red
lobsters. Not much bigger than clams, I didn't
realize
the red would
look like caviar attached to an otherwise ordinary lobster.

"It's like someone went crazy
with the
BeDazzler
! Beads, sequins, you can do it all
from home," I intoned like a commercial announcer.

Jon laughed, then seized upon the
green spotted puffers, fish that appeared to be wearing green leopard coats.
"PETA would throw paint on these guys."

Meanwhile, I'd fixed on the balloon
molly fish. They were tiny, half the size of my thumb, and some were gold, some
black, and some iridescent, with diaphanous dorsal fins. They all seemed
friendly, hovering
ai
the very front of the tank,
their goggle eyes seemingly trained on me. They waggled their bodies rapidly
while their mouths hung open, like a gossipy sewing circle.

"They seem sort of taken with
themselves," Jon commented. "Like a bunch of fat bankers."

"I guess that's what's cool
about fish. You can project all sorts of stuff on them."

We continued to move down the row
of tanks in a leisurely way, commenting on fish with funny names (like the
bubble gum cichlids, in lime, lemon, and orange) or interesting behaviors (the
blue torpedo sharks that were nosing their way slowly up and down the sides of
the tank as if blind). Lost in the activity, we relaxed with one another. Now,
this, I'd missed.

But we didn't see any fish acting
as the circling fish had; we didn't see any plain silver fish at all, in fact.
In the back were large, freestanding tanks. There was one filled with the showstoppers:
clown fish, butterfly fish, and angelfish, darting here and there, in electric
colors (orange, purple, yellow) with distinctive patterns (stripes, polka dots,
zebra). They never paused in their swimming to regard us.

"These must be the popular kids
in school," Jon said. "Yeah, they don't seem to care that we're
here." "So I guess the question is, are you picking your fish for
beauty or love?" When I didn't answer immediately, he added, "If I
had to guess, I'd say you're in it for love. I'd say you're going to bypass
these guys."

He was right, but I didn't answer
immediately. It was a charged moment, which he broke by moving toward the next
tank. I felt how much I wanted to stay close to him in that second, so I joined
him, and there we stood in horrified, paralyzed fascination. Inside were the XL
clown trigger,
Miniata
grouper, and
Mappa
puffer. There was something terribly engorged about
them, as if the smaller fish they used to be were inside wanting to get out.
They were like fish wearing fat suits, and all three of them were pop-eyed and
yearning. The
Mappa
puffer was a bloated creature,
black-and-white flecked, with a great yawning mouth. The
Miniata
grouper was a pale salmon and white, with what looked like four grotesque
incisors that he exposed constantly. And the clown trigger was the piece de
resistance: mostly black, a mishmash of stripes, dots, and leopard, with a
mouth that was ringed in bright yellow and then further outlined with white.
But the minute they saw us, they all rushed forward (in so far as they could
rush, given their girth), mouths opening and closing like Beaker's from the Muppets.
We moved, they moved. There was no mistaking it: they were into us.

"With these fish, it's all
about the personality," Jon said.

"Definitely." I finally
turned away from their imploring faces. Do fish have faces? Maybe I wasn't
ready to be a fish owner.

After a cursory examination of the
entire wall of goldfish, various in their shapes, sizes, and colors, Jon said,
"We've been through the whole place. Are there any you really want to take
home?"

"No, I guess not." I felt
disappointed. I'd wanted to fall in love.

"We didn't see the circle
fish. Maybe they can special order them or something. Do you want me to
ask?"

"This was a nice idea," I
said, reaching out and putting my hand on Jon's arm. "It's okay if we
don't actually get fish."

He looked down at my hand, then
into my eyes. "I want you to have them."

"I guess there's no harm in
asking, then." He flagged down one of the workers, a young Asian guy with
a blocky build and a flattop haircut. "Hey. What do you need?" he
asked, bored but not unfriendly.

"We're looking for these fish
we used to know," Jon started. "We don't know what kind of fish they
were. They were sort of long and thin and silver, or maybe gray, and they just
circled each other all day long." Jon glanced at me. "Did I get that
right?"

I nodded, loving the "we"
and that he'd remembered the details so many years later. It felt like
confirmation of something.

"Huh," the guy said.
"You're saying they
circled
each other?"

"One would sort of hang there
in the water," I said, holding one hand straight out like a shelf,
"and then the other would circle." I rotated my other hand around.

He laughed. "Weird. I don't
know any fish that do that. Unless they're dying."

"But they did it for months.
Could they be dying for months?" I asked.

"Well, either that or
mating."

"For months?" Jon said.

"Like I said, I've never heard
of it." He shrugged. "You looking for anything else?"

Jon turned to me. I shook my head
no. "Thanks for your help," Jon said.

I felt deflated. It was like I'd
started to believe that if we found the fish, it would be a sign.

Sensing my mood shift, Jon said,
"We can try another aquarium. I mean, we know those fish exist. How old
was that guy? Twenty-two? We'll find some old guy with whiskers and a T-shirt
that says 'Fish are my life,' and he'll know."

Before I could stop myself, I'd
leaned in and kissed him. It took a second for his surprised eyes to close, but
it was the first legitimate kiss we'd shared in months.

I backed away, and he said,
"Did you really just do that?"

I gave a shaky laugh. "I think
so."

"I knew it! All the girls melt
for aquariums." We both laughed. He took my hand. "You want to go get
some dinner? Now that I'm here, it seems sort of evil, but I'd planned to take
you to this really good seafood restaurant with an ocean view. We can go
somewhere else, if you want."

"Maybe I'm evil, too, but that
sounds really good." We started reminiscing during the ride to the restaurant,
and once we were seated at a table overlooking the water, the conversation was
smooth as rails. We shared a bottle of wine, and I felt myself giving way to
him. I could practically see my love for him resurrecting, taking on color and
dimension right there in front of me.

I wasn't used to much alcohol
anymore, and maybe Jon wasn't, either. As we were sharing a chocolate torte
with raspberries, gazing into each other's eyes, and I was thinking how long it
had been since I'd had sex and how that might soon be changing, I found myself
saying just what I meant: "Tell me you never loved her." Jon froze,
with his fork halfway to his mouth. "If you never loved her, I want you to
come home with me tonight."

He looked down at the table.
"I really need an answer." "It's not that simple."

"Oh, my God. I think I might
be sick." I leaned my forehead against the heel of my hand.

"Eve, please. Don't do this
tonight. Not tonight. I love you. Do you hear me? I love you."

"But you love her, too."
When he didn't say anything, I could taste my shrimp scampi. "At least
therapy's made you honest. You wouldn't admit that before."

"It's a different kind of love
that I feel for Laney. Felt for Laney," he corrected himself. "How is
it different?" "You're my wife."

"I think
you only love me because you have to, because I'm the mother of your children.
I think that if everything else was equal, you would be with Laney."

"That's not true."

"Do you love me like you used
to, Jon? Like when we first met?" I hated how desperate I sounded.

"You don't love me like you
did when we first met."

"No, I love you more. Do you
love me more than you used to?"

He was starting to sweat, never a
good sign. "I love you differently, but just as much."