“There’s only one subject. That’s the trouble. I used to have a personality. What am I now?”
“Try to understand it’s over.”
“I’m down to pure dumb canine instinct.”
“Life is going on. People are going about their business.”
“No, they’re not. Not the same way. Just because they don’t walk around moaning.”
“There’s nothing to moan about. It’s finished.”
“Doesn’t mean they’re not preoccupied. It’s been less than a week. There are tremors all the time.”
“Growing ever smaller,” he said.
“Some are not so small. Some are definite attention-getters.”
“Change the subject please.”
They were standing just outside the school entrance and Kyle was watching a group of children climb aboard a bus for a trip to a museum outside the city. She knew she could count on the English Boy to be exasperated with her. He was dependable that way. She always knew the position he would take and could often anticipate the actual words, practically moving her lips in unison with his. He brought some stability to dire times.
“You used to be lithe.”
“Look at me now,” she said.
“Lumbering.”
“I wear layers of clothing. I wear clothes and change-of-clothes simultaneously. Just to be ready.”
“I can’t afford a change of clothes,” he said.
“I can’t afford the dry cleaning.”
“I often wonder how this happened to me.”
“I live without a refrigerator and telephone and radio and shower curtain and what else. I keep butter and milk on the balcony.”
“You’re very quiet,” he said then. “Everyone says so.”
“Am I? Who?”
“How old are you by the way?”
“Now that we’ve spent a night together, you mean?”
“Spent a night. Exactly. One night used up in huddled conversation.”
“Well it helped me. It made a difference really. It was the crucial night. Not that the others have been so cozy.”
“You’re welcome to return, you know. I sit there thinking. A lithe young woman flying across the city into my arms.”
The children waved at them from the windows and Edmund did a wild-eyed mime of a bus driver caught in agitated traffic. She watched the lightsome faces glide away.
“You have nice color,” she said.
“What does that mean?”
“Your cheeks are pink and healthy. My father used to say if I ate my vegetables I’d have rosy cheeks.”
She waited for Edmund to ask, What did your mother used to say? Then they walked for the time that remained before afternoon classes. Edmund bought a ring of sesame bread and gave her half. He paid for things by opening his fist and letting the vendor sort among the coins. It proved to everyone that he was only passing through.
“You’ve heard the rumors,” she said.
“Rubbish.”
“The government is concealing seismic data.”
“There is absolutely no scientific evidence that a great quake is imminent. Read the papers.”
She took off the bulky jacket and swung it over her shoulder. She realized she wanted him to think she was slightly foolish, controlled by mass emotion. There was some comfort in believing the worst as long as this was the reigning persuasion. But she didn’t want to submit completely. She walked along wondering if she was appealing to Edmund for staunch pronouncements that she could use against herself.
“Do you have an inner life?”
“I sleep,” he said.
“That’s not what I mean.”
They ran across a stretch of avenue where cars accelerated to a racing clip. It felt good to shake out of her jittery skin. She kept running for half a block and then turned to watch him approach clutching his chest and moving on doddery legs, as if for the regalement of children. He could look a little bookish even capering.
They approached the school building.
“I wonder what your hair would be like if you let it grow out.”
“I can’t afford the extra shampoo,” she said.
“I can’t afford a haircut at regular intervals, quite seriously.”
“I live without a piano.”
“And this is a wretchedness to compare with no refrigerator?”
“You can ask that question because you don’t know me. I live without a bed.”
“Is this true?”
“I sleep on a secondhand sofa. It has the texture of a barnacled hull.”
“Then why stay?” he said.
“I can’t save enough to go anywhere else and I’m certainly not ready to go home. Besides I like it here. I’m sort of stranded but in a more or less willing way. At least until now. The trouble with now is that we could be anywhere. The only thing that matters is where we’re standing when it hits.”
He presented the gift then, lifting it out of his jacket pocket and unwrapping the sepia paper with a teasing show of suspense. It was a reproduction of an ivory figurine from Crete, a bull leaper, female, her body deftly extended with tapered feet nearing the topmost point of a somersaulting curve. Edmund explained that the young woman was in the act of vaulting over the horns of a charging bull. This was a familiar scene in Minoan art, found in frescoes, bronzes, clay seals, gold signet rings, ceremonial cups. Most often a young man, sometimes a woman gripping a bull’s horns and swinging up and over, propelled by the animal’s head jerk. He told her the original ivory figure was broken in half in 1926 and asked her if she wanted to know how this happened.
“Don’t tell me. I want to guess.”
“An earthquake. But the restoration was routine.”
Kyle took the figure in her hand.
“A bull coming at full gallop? Is this possible?”
“I’m not inclined to question what was possible thirty-six hundred years ago.”
“I don’t know the Minoans,” she said. “Were they that far back?”
“Yes, and farther than that, much farther.”
“Maybe if the bull was firmly tethered.”
“It’s never shown that way,” he said. “It’s shown big and fierce and running and bucking.”
“Do we have to believe something happened exactly the way it was shown by artists?”
“No. But I believe it. And even though this particular leaper isn’t accompanied by a bull, we know from her position that this is what she’s doing.”
“She’s bull-leaping.”
“Yes.”
“And she will live to tell it.”
“She has lived. She is living. That’s why I got this for you really. I want her to remind you of your hidden litheness.”
“But you’re the acrobat,” Kyle said. “You’re the loose-jointed one, performing in the streets.”
“To remind you of your fluent buoyant former self.”
“You’re the jumper and heel clicker.”
“My joints ache like hell actually.”
“Look at the veins in her hand and arm.”
“I got it cheap in the flea market.”
“That makes me feel much better.”
“It’s definitely you,” he said. “It must be you. Do we agree on this? Just look and feel. It’s your magical true self, mass-produced.”
Kyle laughed.
“Lean and supple and young,” he said. “Throbbing with inner life.”
She laughed. Then the school bell rang and they went inside.
She stood in the middle of the room, dressed except for shoes, slowly buttoning her blouse. She paused. She worked the button through the slit. Then she stood on the wood floor, listening.
They were now saying twenty-five dead, thousands homeless. Some people had abandoned undamaged buildings, preferring the ragged safety of life outdoors. Kyle could easily see how that might happen. She had the first passable night’s sleep but continued to stay off elevators and out of movie theaters. The wind knocked loose objects off the back balconies. She listened and waited. She visualized her exit from the room.