Strong Motion (12 page)

By the water’s edge her colleague Howard was playing with the dog, tapping her behind the ears with alternating hands while her head thrashed back and forth. Louis still didn’t believe there had really been an earthquake. “Would a house around here be wrecked?”

“Depends on what you mean by wrecked,” the woman said. “You have a house?”

“It’s my mother’s house. My ex-grandmother’s house, which you couldn’t possibly care less about, but she was the person who died in the earthquake last week.”

“No! Really?” Concern became the woman better than amusement did. “I’m very sorry.”

“Yeah? I’m not. I hardly knew her.”

“I’m really sorry.”

“What you sorry about?” Howard asked her, coming up from the water.

The woman indicated Louis. “This . . . person’s grandmother was the one who died in the April 6 event.”

“Bad luck,” Howard said. “Usually, small earthquake like that, nobody dies.”

“Howard is an expert in shallow seismicity,” the woman said.

Howard squinted into the white sky as though wishing this description of him weren’t accurate. He had a hairstyle like half a coconut.

“What about you?” Louis asked the woman.

She looked away and didn’t answer. Howard slapped the dog on the muzzle and fled, taking crazy evasive action as the dog pursued him. The woman backed away from Louis, her smileyness assuming a leave-taking chill. When she saw that he was following her, a flicker of alarm crossed her face and she began to walk very briskly. He buried his hands in his pockets and matched her footsteps with his own. He had a faint predatory interest in this small-boned female, but mainly he wanted information. “There really was an earthquake?”

“Yes, uh-huh. There really was.”

“How’d you know it was up here?”

“Oh . . . instruments plus an educated guess.”

“So, and what’s causing these earthquakes?”

“Rupture of stressed rock along a fault a few miles underneath us.”

“Can you be a little more specific?”

She became smiley and shook her head. “No.”

“Are there going to be any more?”

She shrugged. “Definitely yes if you’re willing to wait a hundred years. Probably yes if you wait ten years. Probably not if you leave here in a week.”

“It doesn’t mean anything to get two earthquakes in a row like this?”

“Nope. Not particularly. In California it might mean something, but not here. I mean, of course it means something; but we don’t know what.”

She spoke as though she wanted to be precise for precision’s sake, not for his. “As a rule,” she said, “if you feel an earthquake around here, it’s happening on a fault that nobody even knew was there, at some peculiar depth, in the context of local stresses that are pretty much anybody’s guess. You have to be a fundamentalist minister to make predictions right now.”

The white hairs she had ran across the grain of the darker hair, lying on top of it rather than blending in. Her skin was cream-colored.

“How old are you?” Louis asked.

A pair of startled and unamused eyes came to rest on him. “I’m thirty, how old are you?”

“Twenty-three,” he said with a frown, as if a calculation had yielded an unexpected result. He asked her what her name was. “Renée,” she said grimly. “Seitchek. What about you?”

In the parking lot Howard was stepping on the belly of a delighted Jackie and the bearded Caucasian was leaning against a ridiculous automobile, a low-slung late-seventies sedan with a bleached and peeling vinyl roof and rippling white flanks, gray patches of reconstruction, and no hubcaps. It was an AMC Matador. The bearded Caucasian had a long face and red lips. The lenses of his glasses were shaped like TV screens, and the cuffs of his jeans were tucked into the tops of brown work boots. Simply because she had stopped by his side, the half-full glass of Renée’s attractiveness became half-empty.

The Matador apparently belonged to Howard. “You need a ride someplace?” he said to Louis.

“Sure, maybe to my house.”

“If I were you,” the bearded Caucasian said, “I’d go back right away and make sure everything’s OK.”

Renée pointed at Louis. “That’s what he’s doing, Terry. He’s going right back.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” Terry said. “That’s all I’m saying.”

Renée looked away and made a face. Howard unlocked the car, and Louis and Terry got in the back seat, sinking ankle-deep into pizza cartons, Coke cans, and sportswear. The car radio came on with the engine. It was playing a Red Sox game.

“Where’s the dog?” Renée said.

Howard shrugged and put the car in reverse.

“Howard, wait, you’re going to run over it.”

They peered out their respective windows, trying to locate the dog. Louis took it upon himself to get out and look behind the car, the exhaust pipe of which was putting out blue-black clouds of the foulest smoke he’d ever smelled a car produce. It coated his respiratory tract like some poison sugar. He got back in the car, reporting no dog.

“This is Louis, incidentally,” Renée explained to Terry from the front seat. “Louis, this is Terry Snall and Howard Chun.”

“You’re all seismologists,” Louis said.

Terry shook his head. “Renée and Howard are the seismologists. They’re real high-powered.” There seemed to be a back-handed message here, Terry either not really believing the other two to be high-powered or else implying that to be high-powered was not the same as to be a worthwhile person. “Renée told me your grandmother died in last week’s earthquake,” he said. “That’s awful.”

“She was old.”

“Howard and Renée thought it was a nothing earthquake. They were saying it was no good. They wanted it to be bigger. That’s how seismologists think. I think it’s terrible about your grandmother.”

“Yeah, we don’t, Terry. We’re glad she died.”

“I’m not saying that.”

“What do you think he
is
saying, Howard?”

Howard turned the steering wheel obliviously, the car chugging and rumbling like a ferry boat. Louis looked out the back window, expecting to see the dog, but the lot the trash barrels guarded was completely empty now.

. . .
Two balls and two strikes
, the baseball announcer said.

“Two balls and one strike,” Renée said.

. . .
The two-two pitch
. . .

“The two
-one
pitch,” Renée said.

Ball
three,
three and two. Roger had him oh and two and now he’s gone to a full count
.

“One strike, airbrain. Three balls and
one
strike.”

. . .
Scoreboard has it as three balls and one strike
.

. . .
Bob
, the color man said,
I think it is three and one
.

Renée turned off the radio in disgust, and Terry remarked, ostensibly to Louis: “Nothing’s ever quite good enough for Renée.”

In the front seat Renée turned to Howard and made a gesture of utter bafflement.

“I wonder if they felt the earthquake at the ballpark,” Terry said.

“Yeah, I wonder,” Renée said. “They’re playing in Minnesota.”

“Left at the sign,” Louis told Howard. He hardly recognized the road they were on as the one down which he’d jogged.

“Where you wanna go next?” Howard asked generally. “Try Plum Island?”

“We better head back,” Terry said.

“What a drag,” Renée said.

“No death and destruction,” Terry said.

“No sand blows is all I meant. Although it’s true,” she said to Louis, “that we feel some ambivalence about destructive earthquakes. They’re like cadavers, full of information.”

Her articulateness was getting on Louis’s nerves. He pointed out the stone Kernaghan gate, and Howard hardly slowed the car as he started to turn. Then he slammed on the brakes and wheeled hard to the right, the car skidding almost sideways back onto the road. A black Mercedes swung out of the gate and swerved around them and sped off towards Ipswich. It was driven by a man Louis recognized as Mr. Aldren. Very belatedly, Howard applied the horn.

“See if you can kill me,” Renée said, pressing with one hand on the windshield and sliding back on the seat cushion she’d been thrown from.

A strange and new and not entirely unpleasant sensation came over Louis as they drove up the hill and he saw, as these students were seeing, the money the estate represented. It was a sensation of exposure but of satisfaction too. Money: it says: I’m not nobody. The awed silence in the car held until the house and its party hat came into view and Renée laughed. “Oh my God.”

“You ought to come inside,” Louis said on a wealthy man’s impulse. “Have some food, see some damage.”

Terry was quick to shake his head. “No thanks.”

“No, no,” Louis insisted. “Come in.” He was thinking how unwelcome his mother would find these visitors. “I mean, if you’re at all curious.”

“Oh, we’re curious,” Renée said. “Aren’t we, Howard? It’s our business to be curious.”

“I just hope no one’s hurt,” Terry said.

Not until Louis had opened the door and ushered everyone inside did he realize how little he’d believed there’d been an earthquake. And what he felt most strongly, as he stopped in the front hall, was that he was seeing the work of an angry hand. The minister who’d said that God was angry with the Commonwealth; the Haitian who’d believed there was an angry spirit in the house: he saw what they were getting at, for a force had entered the house while he was away and had attacked it, pulling a piece of plaster from the dining-room ceiling and flinging it onto the table, where water from broken vases had soaked the plaster brown. The force had thrown open the doors of the breakfront, toppled anything more upright than horizontal and scattered china polyhedra across the floor. It had yanked on paintings in the living room, trashed the bar and opened cracks across the walls and ceiling. The room smelled like a frat house on a Sunday morning.

“Do you really want us here?” Renée asked Louis.

“Of course.” He had his duties as a host to consider. “Let me show you the kitchen.”

Howard stood on one foot and leaned to look into the living room, his other leg hovering in the front hall for balance. Terry, very ill at ease, stuck close to Renée, who said quietly, “You see what living on the epicenter does.”

There was less evident damage in the kitchen: some broken jars, some paint chips and plaster on the floor. Louis’s father, standing by the sink, was delighted to meet the three students. He shook their hands and asked them to repeat their names.

“Where’s Mom?” Louis asked.

“You didn’t see her? She’s taking pictures for Prudential. I recommend you don’t try to clean anything up before she’s done. In fact, Lou,” Bob added in an undertone, “I don’t think she was even conscious of doing it, but I found her helping some stuff off the shelves in the living room. Ugly things, you know.”

“Of course,” Louis said. “Good idea.”

“But what a day!” his father continued in a louder voice. “What a day! You all felt it, right?” He addressed the four of them and all but Louis nodded. “I was in the back room, I thought it was the end of the WORLD. I clocked twelve seconds of strong shaking on my watch.” He pointed at his watch. “When it started, I felt the whole house
tense
, like it had got
wind
of something.” His hands flew and twisted in the air like wheeling pigeons. “Then I heard this booming, it felt like a freight train going by outside the windows. This feeling of
weight
, tremendous
weight
. I could hear all sorts of little things falling down inside the walls, and then while I sat there looking—in all modesty, I wasn’t the least bit afraid, I mean because it felt so natural, so inevitable—I sat there and I saw a window just
shatter
. And just when I thought it was over, it all
intensified
, wonderful, wonderful, this final climax—like she was coming! Like the whole earth was coming!”

Bob Holland looked at the faces around him. The three students were listening to him seriously. Louis was like a white statue staring at the floor.

“I guess you people must know,” Bob continued, “that there’s a whole history of earthquakes in New England. Were you aware that the Native Americans thought they caused epidemics? That made a lot of sense to me today, that idea of disease in the earth. They were scientists too, you know. Scientists in a very profound and different way. You want to hear about superstition, let me tell you there was a woman in these parts in 1755, her name was Elizabeth Burbage. Minister’s daughter, a spinster. The Godfearing citizens of Marblehead—he-he! Marblehead!—tried her as a witch and drove her out of town because three neighbors claimed she’d had foreknowledge of the great Cambridge earthquake of November 18. Sixty-three years after the Salem trials! Regarding an act of God! Marblehead! Wonderful!”

Louis was too mortified to keep track of people during the next few minutes. He opened the refrigerator and persuaded Renée and Howard to accept apples. His father began to repeat his story, and just to get him out of sight Louis followed him back to the room where his adventure had occurred. Here Bob reconstructed the twelve seconds of shaking second by second, insight by insight. He was as high as he ever got. The shattering windowpane in particular had seemed to him a quintessential moment, encapsulating the entire story of man and nature.

When Louis finally broke away, he found that Terry and Howard had gone outside, Terry to sit in the back seat of the car and Howard to sit on the hood, eating his apple smackingly. Renée? Howard shrugged. Still inside.

Louis found her in the living room, talking to his mother. She gave him her now familiar smiley smile, and his mother, who wore a camera on a strap, conveyed her now equally familiar unwillingness to be disturbed. “Maybe you can excuse us for a minute, Louis.”

He executed an ostentatious about-face and went and sat down halfway up the stairs. His mother and Renée spoke for nearly five more minutes. All he caught was the cadences—long hushed utterances from his mother, briefer and brighter repetitious noises from Renée. When the latter finally appeared in the front hall, she looked up the stairs. Louis was hunched and motionless, like a spider waiting for a fly to hit his web. “I guess we’re going now,” she said. “Thanks for having us in.”