Song of Fire

—

The year I lived with J. was the year that everything changed. We had only known each other for six weeks when he started talking about getting an apartment together. I was content in San Francisco. It was where I had developed a network of friends, where I worked, where I collaborated with other musicians to produce concerts of original music. J. wanted to live somewhere on the Peninsula to ease his commute to Silicon Valley. He said if we didn’t move in together, we would likely not be able to see each other much.

I pondered whether I should commit myself to developing a relationship with him or break it off. Our friendship was characterized by physical interests: the outdoors, hiking, sports, sex. I could enumerate the ways in which he wasn’t the right match for me. He didn’t like to read. He wasn’t critically reflective about the world. He watched cartoons and kept a collection of cutesy stuffed animals. But hadn’t he told me he loved me? Surely his interest in living together meant he was serious and committed. Then there was the way he rested his hand on my knee while driving. I was tired of dates that went nowhere and men who were ambivalent. So why not?

At the end of January we found an apartment in San Mateo, twenty miles south of San Francisco, within walking distance of the train station — which was important since I didn’t own a car. The weekend of the move, I held a garage sale at the apartment building I was leaving. When he picked me up at the end of the day, his mood was surly, and we started arguing about something inconsequential. After we had returned home, I tried to talk about what had happened, but he neither wanted to understand what went wrong nor was willing to accept even partial blame. He dismissed me like some irksome child.

I left the apartment to walk off my frustration. When I returned, he had showered and dressed. Looking into the bathroom mirror while combing his hair, he announced that he was going out to a night club by himself. “Just to socialize and make friends,” he said. Frantically I begged him not to go. He at last consented, but I understood the victory was not mine, and the entire episode left me drained and depressed, afraid of what was to come.

Deep in the earth, the strain builds, rock pushing against rock year after year, until it finally gives way in a moment of seismic fury. The land rips and tears, splits and buckles. The shaking reaches into every sinew and cartilage and bone and doesn’t stop until it has upended everything in your world.

The weeks passed. At night, J. would fall asleep holding my hand. We assembled a dining room table, and then an entertainment console, working together to interpret the instructions and identify parts. Now put panel 3A into slot F. Yet our relationship seemed fragile, susceptible to any number of hostile forces. He was always commenting on the beauty of men and trying to start conversations with strangers. When I tried to share my feelings and get reassurances of his commitment, I received no direct answers. I could tell myself that we each had different ways of expressing love. Didn’t he say our moving in together should be proof of his commitment? Then the next day he would say he never promises anything. The harder I tried to understand him, the more enigmatic he became, an unfamiliar language without a Rosetta stone.

The baffling contradictions kept me off guard. On days when he was insensitive — such as when I overheard him tell a friend that we were just roommates — I thought about leaving. But it was his physicality that made the idea of leaving difficult: the arm slung over my side while sleeping together, the smell of his neck, the dark hair on his calves giving way to the smooth, brown skin of his thighs. I told myself it would be easier to stay than to seek an apartment again and move.

In the spring I flew to Arkansas to visit Joan. When I returned, I found a hair in the bedsheets that did not match either of us. An unfamiliar voice called on the phone asking for him. I finally confronted J., and he admitted that he had met someone at the beach. He explained that he loved me but wasn’t sexually attracted to me. That unexpected revelation was like stumbling into a parallel universe where the familiar laws of physics didn’t apply. How had I even ended up here? If his announcement explained some things, it left me utterly confused about others. I moved into the second bedroom. When J. and his new friend left town for the weekend, I stayed up all night writing a new composition for cello and piano, Movements of Circles. In the second movement, the winding, lyrical melody struggles three times to ascend toward resolution, tension accumulating before each collapse back down to the bass register. It was the most direct expression of emotional pain I had ever written.

I got a new job with better pay working for a community college and bought a car. J. dropped his new friend after several weeks, but others followed. My few attempts to date and find intimacy were disastrous. I remained emotionally connected to J. and, like a dog, waited at the table for tidbits of love to fall to the floor. In this tenuous way, the summer passed into fall.

One cloudless October day, during the waning warmth of Indian summer, I was getting ready to leave work when the phone rang. I lingered for a moment at the office door, debating whether or not to answer it. After the second ring, I walked back to my desk and picked up the phone, a decision that perhaps saved my life. A colleague on the other side of campus requested some material and we agreed that I would leave it in an envelope for her to retrieve later at the building entrance. Just as I hung up, the ground started shaking, accompanied by a low rumble. I looked up and saw the fluorescent light fixtures jiggling. At first I wasn’t scared — I’d been through the big 1971 Simi Valley earthquake in junior high — but then the lights exploded with a surge of electricity, emitting sparks and a flash of blue light, while a cubicle divider came crashing over beside me with startling violence.

As the shaking intensified, I thought of a mustang bucking wildly at a rodeo. Was the earth trying to shake something off its back? A section of bookshelves tilted and fell, spilling law books across the floor toward my feet. Anything tall that was oriented parallel to the quake’s north-south motion toppled, yet, oddly, nothing on the desks seemed to move. Only fifteen seconds passed, but it seemed to go on for minutes. When the shaking stopped, people emerged from their offices; fortunately, no one was injured. My hands were trembling as if the quake had entered my body. Outside, the abandoned old house next to our building — a relic that the college had inherited when it bought the property from the orchard farmers who originally owned the parcel of land — was still standing, but I noticed the upper portion of its stone chimney had toppled onto the path that I usually took to my car. Rubble was piled in a heap like a grave mound. If it hadn’t been for that phone call, I likely would have been passing right next to the chimney when the quake struck.

Driving home, the traffic was crawling on the freeway since a section of road had buckled. The crack continued through a sound wall, splitting it apart and leaving a jagged gap. A pall of dust hung in the air, shaken up from the earth. The destruction seemed spread out randomly. When I at last arrived home, nothing in our apartment had been disturbed, although a mile away a hotel had partially collapsed. J.’s stuffed animals were all standing, sheet music was open on the piano, dishes remained secure in cupboards. The only sign that something was out of the ordinary was the wall clock, stopped at 5:04. As dusk fell, the streets vanished into complete darkness. In the light of a flashlight, we ate leftovers removed from the defrosting refrigerator. We played songs on the piano until the light from the flashlight dimmed, then went to bed. He consented to sleep with me. All night long, sirens wailed in the dark, and small quakes continually shook us. But I felt so happy, briefly, when he reached over during one of the stronger aftershocks to caress my chest.

In the morning I was awakened by a ringing phone. It was Linnea, relieved to finally get through, asking if we were alright. She said Mom had seen the earthquake while watching the World Series on television and had been worried all night, hoping to get word, but the phones had been out. “They keep showing the same burning building over and over,” Linnea said. “She’s convinced that San Francisco is in ruins.”

I turned on the television now that power had been restored and watched reports of the devastation: the flattened Cypress freeway in Oakland, the Pacific Mall in Santa Cruz in ruins, toppled apartment buildings in San Francisco’s Marina District. We were able to drive up the Peninsula and catch BART into downtown San Francisco, where we transferred to a bus that took us to my former neighborhood in the Marina. I felt like one of those Victorian ladies in the sepia photos from 1906, dressed in bustles and petticoats and out for a day of disaster sightseeing. I needed to see what had happened to those streets where I used to walk.

The coexistence of the mundane with the extraordinary was disorienting. A couple of blocks from my former apartment building, the third story of a building had slid down onto the street like the top tier of a wedding cake dropped by a startled caterer. Sections of broken pavement had burst up to form barriers that ran across the street — the burrowing of giant gophers. Yet nearby, everything on the surface seemed normal. Busses were running. Traffic lights changed from green to yellow to red as if it were just another day.

Three weeks later, Movements of Circles premiered at a concert in San Francisco. The audiences for these concerts had been dwindling since the high point when I premiered my musical setting of Linda Gregg’s The Ghosts Poem. Perhaps fifty people were now in the audience: essentially the composers, the performers and a scattering of their friends. Movements of Circles was a disaster. The cellist was out of tune and could not keep up with the more skillful pianist, mangling the notes and rhythms, the strings wheezing like a sick cow. I fled as soon as the concert was over, returning home to a darkened apartment. Sometime after midnight, I was awakened by the sound of J.’s key in the door. I could hear someone else’s voice, unfamiliar, a murmuring of words too softly for me to make out. They went into his bedroom and closed the door. I lay there for several minutes, my heart pounding and my stomach churning. I decided I could bear it no longer, as I had done on previous occasions. I got out of bed and knocked on his door, asking him to please go somewhere else. I pleaded for his understanding. But he refused. So I went into the kitchen to collect whatever crockery I could find and began throwing it at his door: plates, pottery, all those dishes that the earthquake had not touched. One after another, they hit his door and shattered, falling to the floor in jagged chunks. At last, exhausted, I fell into bed. Shortly thereafter, I heard them leave.

I resolved to move out — what I should have had the strength to do months earlier. I found an apartment in San Francisco, where I slowly began to recuperate from the damage J. had done to my self-confidence. As far as composing classical music, it no longer held any interest for me. Something had shifted. The landscape had been altered. I thought of the weeks and months devoted to writing music, painstakingly copying out parts, hiring musicians, just for a single concert attended by perhaps fifty people who applaud politely, then the piece is shoved into the back of a drawer, forgotten. It hardly seemed worth the effort.

That December, I went hiking in the Santa Cruz Mountains with a friend. We wanted to see the epicenter at Loma Prieta, that “dark hill” that is the tallest point in the mountains and was the origin of so much destruction. What we found were some trees that had snapped at their bases and some fissures perhaps three inches wide. Nothing extraordinary that matched the drama of the event itself. Nonetheless, it was sobering to stand there and think about how much had been altered during those fifteen seconds. We paused at the spot respectfully in silence, then headed back along the trail.

For Christmas I bought myself a new set of dishes. I stayed in contact with J. for several months into the new year. The craving for his companionship created aftershocks each time I saw him, but they gradually diminished until one day I realized I no longer loved him, and I let him go.

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(photo: J.K. Nakata, U.S. Geological Survey)