Physics of Sunset. Jane Vandenburgh
a waft of incense, a mood toward a paring down, a spiritual simplifying. Anna wanted to become a Buddhist, but her friend Serene Hoberman was already one and she didn’t want to emulate. Serene made an altar in her bedroom to remind her that every act of sex should carry God within it. Anna imagined her own Zen existence, how she and her daughter could make do on the $423 per month in income she received from an annuity her father left. She wanted a life filled with right action, so unlike the life she currently led. It was wrong, she thought, that she and Charlie bought so much and owned so much and were so dependent on his parents. They had no money of their own. They lived beyond their means because his parents were much too generous, really. Anna needed to simplify, she believed, to get back to whatever was essential. She had never felt so tight, so unloving. There was nothing she needed, nothing she could get herself to even remotely desire, yet she had begun to charge random items to the Amex card, things she could not imagine owning, merchandise she barely recognized after she brought it home.
Anna now sometimes caught herself in rooms into which she could not remember going. She stood at the window of her study, looking east, watching her fingers lying along the windowsill. These fingers trembled slightly. She had come searching for important documents.
She was staring up toward the houses that had been built back into the shadows of the hills. These hills burned completely in 1923 in the fire that raced down the canyon and took half the buildings on the campus. Now the windows of the houses up by the Chakravartys glinted, caught the sunlight, tossed it back at her somewhat knowingly.
Anna studied the hills as if they were more than a lesson in geography—an old volcanic uplift and wear-away, of granite outcroppings and of what was changed by heat and what was laid down by sediment and how over history topsoil ran off those old burns and into the gushing mocha-colored creeks that boiled out into the alluvial marshes rimmed seasonally by fire, and that on these trembling flatlands her house had been built. In an earthquake the ground her house stood on experienced liquefaction.
Anna had come to unreasonably believe there was something to be learned about happiness by studying these hills, that people with good houses somehow had a better chance at decent marriages.
She lost things, bills, money, pages of manuscript. Charlie made love to her. Was there God in it? She couldn’t force herself to pay attention. She had her thirty-ninth birthday, two months later her book was published. She held her breath, listened carefully, but no phone call from Heaven came. Anna felt oddly vindicated, as if she had run for her life through a thunderstorm and had somehow made it indoors, even if she was completely soaked.
“A poet lives nowhere, knows no one,” she said aloud. Someone—another poet—once leaned across two empty chairs at a reading at Black Oak to whisper this to her. Anna turned forty, promised herself she would never write again.
She wasn’t altogether certain she had ever loved her husband or that the man named Charlie Shay was someone she’d ever known or that she would even miss him if he left. She developed the unnerving habit, he said, of distractedly asking “Excuse me?” whenever he spoke to her.
They should have divorced that year. Instead they embarked on a complete remodeling of their kitchen, borrowing tens of thousands of dollars from Charlie’s parents. Their architect was Carlo Empy, the other partner in Alec Baxter’s firm.
3
Bodies at Rest
IT WAS A few minutes after five on a warm October afternoon, the first unremarkable day in that remarkable week, the only one in which Alec Baxter’s whole evening had been laid out pleasurably and he knew just what to expect. The A’s were two games up. Instead of sitting shiva on the cardboard boxes the rabbi dropped off at the house on 219th Street in Queens, instead of observing phone silence, staying home in order to say prayers and light a memorial candle for his father, Alec flew right home. Back at work, he seemed to have forgotten all about it.
A brilliant California day , with the sky towering up into great struts of cumulus. Alec was happy, was walking free, had come out the other side of the worst of the suffering.
He was free, also hungry. He was out on Solano Avenue going into Zachery’s to pick up a couple of half-baked pizzas. He was making his way to Fran and Jerry Bloom’s, who lived above him up the hill on Descartes. It was at the Blooms’ that the members of their two families would convene to eat stuffed pizza, Chicagostyle, and worship in the Church of Baseball.
The streets were strangely empty. Thinking of nothing so much as his hope for a Giants win, he heard the clap of its coming before he even felt it. This was just as he walked through the open door of the pizza shop. It slammed in, faltered, then seemed to renew itself by taking hold of the ground where he was suddenly rooted.
There were two girls at the register, each one gripping the countertop. “Get down,” he ordered them. He bellowed this as if to steady not only them but the entire world. Their open faces emptied of expression—girls with big eyes only staring up at the place where the pendant lights were swaying. These were jokey Tin Man light fixtures, ones hung on long attachments, galvanized, swinging in a perfect description of the waves of shock.
His heart went out to them. All these loud and buoyant girls—were they all to die like this with their hopes unmet? He thought of his own daughter, his son. Parents in Berkeley sometimes dreamed their children’s names, so the children were named with hope for an imagined future—the parents’ own longings and wishes written out in a way that was achingly transparent.
The interior walls were eighteen feet high, the ceiling open to the metal roof, its members cross-beamed by structural steel. There was such a hollow at the core of so much in California that even the word building didn’t necessarily mean what it might have in the East. Stores and even schools were cheaply and idiotically made of unreinforced masonry—these were the very places his wife and children spent half their waking lives. Across the room the ten-foot stacks of cardboard pizza boxes began to shake apart, slick white boxes skewing out across the tile floor, as if an imperious God was giving a demonstration of the verb to undulate. The boxes, two-feet square, tumbled out, strewn like a deck of waxed and magnificent cards.
The floor was cool, smelled of bleach. It was concrete, scored to resemble bricks and dyed Tuscan red, so well waxed it looked like tanned leather. Materials were a matter of life and death to Alec—you could literally die here of the shoddiness of the solid world, of the duct-tape-patched-together life, the one lived on the cheap. Concrete was one substance he ardently loved; this love gave him solace now. Alec let his cheek rest on the floor against the hard chill of it. He loved its pliability, how it started out as such thick liquid to be molded, poured, pressed, shaped, scraped for texture—a stone that could resemble anything, depending on the craftsman’s artistry. Concrete had such flex before it hardened, such give, like a young person’s life. Now it was only the fragile skin beneath which beat the heart of the living world.
The quake boiled for a good fifteen seconds. Plaster, already brittle, cracked. The high walls that had been sheared shook but held. They were stabilized too by the grids of the brick-red metal roof.
Tears had suddenly come to him, began to stream his face. It wasn’t grief that rocked him, rather the keening disappointment that his evening’s selfish pleasure had been so quickly wrecked. What was wrong with him, that his best and truest feelings were left like luggage in the East? It is by losing faith, his father said, that a Jew becomes American.
Alec was alone except for the pizza girls. He was hungry and he was tired; he’d wanted only such a simple thing: to go up to Jerry Bloom’s. Jerry worked at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab. He was a Bronx Science whiz kid, a type of goofy genius—he and Fran always laid out quite a spread. Jews knew a thing or two: the close relationship between loss and gluttony; also, the way you had to bury quickly to get it done before sorrow annihilates.
Jerry always kept a fifth of Stolichnaya in the freezer. The two might have taken that bottle and tiny glasses stuck like thimbles onto Jerry’s big cartoonish fingers and gone alone out onto the deck into the fading light to smoke cigars. They would look out