Consequences of Desire

The Night of Love

The Night of Love Anderson read in the newspaper, nine months after the earthquake , that the local hospital was swamped with women giving birth. He imagined a mob of these women, all in labor, pushing and shoving to get in the hospital doors, and he remembered Coral's refusal to sleep in the bed—how they had sat up talking for hours before collapsing together on the rug in front of the fireplace, where an aftershock arrived with uncanny timing at the climax of their lovemaking, a shiver normally unsettling but rendered almost subliminal by the intensity of their endeavor. He imagined couples scattered throughout the surrounding hills, all in the sweaty grip of ardor, as if in thrall to the same dark fantasy of apocalypse, a splitting of the earth to swallow them and deny them another chance to experience this earthbound passion. He smiled. The unexpected increase in population, the pressure on schools, on public services, effects of a force so reckless and unforeseen as to be miraculous. Coral, with her literal mind, preferred to think in boring terms of geology, while Anderson sailed off on a voyage of irony in which the mysterious power of nature mocked the genuflectionof humankind before the altar of technology. Irony, he decided, was the mischief of an evolution that had blessed and damned him with the ability to feel and think at the very same moment, conflicting activities as inseparable as the smoke that mingles above different portions of a fire. To the lower forms of life, he thought, what is simply is, has nothing to do with what might have been, what The Night of Love 57 could have been, what is illuminated not by the sun but the light of intellectual fervor.Thus, the general destruction had made him happy, even as specific reports of loss had twanged an empathetic string, squeezed his throat, and stung his eyes. "Coral," he said, having digested the newspaper item and enjoyed the attendant fantasies. "I've got to get somebody out to fix the chimney." Nights had lengthened and grown colder; rain would soon arrive, producing the chill that only a decent conflagration in the fireplace would keep at bay. The bricks from the section of chimney above the roof had produced a thunderous symphony in their tumble and slide across the shinglesto the eaves, from which they had plunged in a staccato of thuds to the rosemary bed below, their fleeting shapes across the window creating in Coral's hyperactive mind the idea of bats. Anderson regretted that he hadn't witnessed this spectacle. After convincing himself that all was stable he had collected and stacked the bricks, but when he called up masons he discovered that the few not busy for the rest of their lives were proposing to charge a fee just to come out and view the damage. Coral, whose embrace of feminist principles did not encompass any desire to be involved in such matters, had agreed with his decision to wait until things settled down, until most of the damaged chimneys around were rebuilt and the masons affronted by the idea of one more job would be happy to estimate the work for free. Anderson regarded her with the eager reserve of a teenager, thinking of the hiss and flicker of a fire and her body unwrapped like a gift in his arms, but outside in the dusk he felt a silly, irrational panic. The earth was molten, he realized, with the uneasy feeling of having failed to grasp, until that moment, the actual breadth of a fact he had always known. The ground was simply a floating crust and for a moment, walking the perimeter of the house and gazing up at the ragged stub of the emasculated chimney, he felt a jiggling sensation, as if the ground wasn't even substantial enough 58 The Consequences of Desire to be called a crust but was the skin of a colossal pudding. He reached the stair to the deck that hung outside the living room, level with the tops of trees that leaned against the steep slope of the hill, and he felt, on something human-builtand unnatural, safer. "I talked to Pete," he said, referring to their neighbor whose house was out of sight but not of earshot to the southwest, directly at the spot where the sun in its slow southerly collapse now...