Nora Jane (34 page)

Little Freddy eyed Nora Jane while she considered his offer. “Okay,” she said at last. “You can have part of the PowerBar
but not all of it. You can have one third of it now and the rest when you finish your class.” She pulled the PowerBar out
of her bag and showed him how much she would break off if he agreed to the deal. He climbed down from the bench and went to
her and began to step into the denim trunks. Sylvia finished tying her shoes, still laughing and smiling at Nora Jane.

“Enjoy them while you can,” she said. “They grow up so fast. Then they’re gone and you have to pretend you don’t miss them.”

Then Berkeley moved. Not just the concrete slab that held the athletic club but the whole town moved, slanting to the east,
and then it moved again and then it stopped. Nora Jane grabbed Little Freddy and pulled him to the floor. Sylvia dove beneath
a sink. The other women in the dressing room began to moan. A group of three women beside the private lockers were moaning
as a group.

“That’s a big one,” Little Freddy said. “I want my PowerBar. You said I could have it. It’s bad to break your promise.”

Nora Jane sat up and handed him the bar. “Are you all right?” she asked Sylvia.

“I’m okay. Should we stay here or go out in the main area? I mean, aftershocks.”

“There’re no windows in here. Not much to fall.”

“But the lockers,” a woman called out. “Could they fall?”

“They didn’t,” Nora Jane answered.

“It was built to specs,” Sylvia said. She stood up and began to take charge. “We’re okay. That wasn’t a big one. We’re all
right here. Let’s just stay here a few minutes and not panic. Does anyone have a phone?”

Nora Jane got one out of her bag. “Let me call my husband, then I’ll give it to you. I have two girls at school. Surely they’re
okay.” She pushed a button and Freddy Harwood answered at the bookstore. “I’m okay here,” she said.”I’m at the club. Call
about the girls. I need to let other people use the phone. Call me back when you can.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m in the locker room. We’re going to stay here for a while. I won’t leave.”

She handed the phone to Sylvia, who called her husband, then handed the phone to the other ladies and they made calls but
none of their calls went through. The lines were getting jammed.

Little Freddy was sitting on the floor eating the PowerBar. Nora Jane got another one out of her bag and offered it to Sylvia.

“Half,” Sylvia said. “He’s making me hungry. What’s his name?”

“Frederick Sydney Harwood. I’m Nora Jane. We own Clara Books. On Telegraph Avenue.”

“I go there all the time. Sylvia Kullman. I’m glad to know you. I see you working out although why you bother with your body,
I don’t know.”

“To be healthy,” Nora Jane replied. “I like to do it. It feels good. I think about all the carpenters and cowboys and people
who do real work and how fine and strong their bodies always are, compared to people who sit at desks all day and screw up
their minds with thinking and selling things.”

“I’m afraid it’s vanity with me,” Sylvia replied. “My mother was injured in a face-lift situation so I won’t do any surgery.
I have to do it with exercise and so I do. Sometimes I like it but I think it’s mostly vanity.”

One of the three moaning women had gone around the corner to the sofas where the young women nursed their babies and had opened
the door to the main room of the club. A woman was screaming in a distant room. Screaming her head off. Screaming like there
was no tomorrow.

Then the second shock shook the building and the woman began to scream even louder.

“A hysteric,” Sylvia said. “It doesn’t sound like pain.”

“We should go home now,” Little Freddy said. “I want to go to my own house.”

“Let’s get on your shoes,” Nora Jane answered. “There could be broken glass anywhere. You have to wear your shoes.”

“Let’s make our way to the lobby,” Sylvia suggested. ‘At least let’s move to the nursing sofas and get near the door to the
lobby. There’s nothing in that area to fall, is there?”

“The glass table with the flower arrangement.”

“Let’s move it.” Sylvia led the way around the corner to the nursing alcove, which was near the door to the main lobby. The
others followed. There was a glass-topped table on a thick pedestal near the door. Nora Jane and Sylvia moved the flower arrangement,
then picked up the glass top and set it on the floor. “Upper-body strength,” Sylvia said. “I told my husband it would come
in handy. He thinks I’m nuts to work out all the time. He’s jealous.” They shoved the beveled glass tabletop underneath the
coatracks, and Nora Jane dumped a basket of wet towels on top of it. They moved past the nursing sofas and pushed open the
door to the lobby. It adjoined the racquetball courts and the basketball court and the aerobics and yoga rooms. Men and women
were herded into small groups in the lobby. The glass walls of the racquetball courts were intact, and two of the trainers
were passing out bottles of Gatorade and trays of health food snacks, Luna Bars, PowerBars, peanut butter bars, and homemade
raisin cakes. People were talking on cell phones and looking subdued. Two young women were nursing babies on a large flowered
sofa. Little Freddy made a beeline for that activity. “Titties,” he whispered to Nora Jane. “Titty babies. Them not big like
me.” He burrowed his head in her legs and she sat down and took him into her arms. Weaning had been very hard on Little Freddy.
Just the thought of titties drove him wild with deprivation. There was nothing on earth he liked as much as sinking his mouth
onto his mother’s sweet, milk-filled teats. His lost paradise, his Shangrila.

“You’re a big boy now,” Nora Jane told him. “You have chocolate milk in a paper carton with a straw.”

“Yes,” he said mournfully. “That’s what I do.”

A young trainer, one of the fifteen or sixteen men at the club who was in love with Nora Jane, that is, deeply smitten, not
just in constant appreciation of her startling, luminous beauty, stopped beside the sofa to ask if she was all right.

“Who was that screaming?” Nora Jane asked. “Was someone hurt?”

“A woman fell on one of the treadmills. She skinned her knee. Jay Holland, the eye doctor, was up there and took care of her.
He’s got her in Beau’s office. There were three doctors on the machines, a radiologist, an eye surgeon, and an internist.
I guess this is the place to be if an earthquake hits. The little guy seems happy. He didn’t cry?”

“He was eating a PowerBar. He loves to eat.”

“Did you see that demonstration at the Democratic convention? With those nuts protesting breast-feeding? They said it caused
unhealthy oral fixations. I thought it was a joke, but then the cops arrested some of them.”

“I didn’t see it. I guess we have enough crazies in California now. I guess we’ve reached our limit.”

“There is no limit. They keep coming. Anyway, I thought of you when I saw that on television. I thought you’d get a kick out
of it.”

The owner of the club had come out into the center of the lobby and was holding up his hands. “There could be other aftershocks.
The police have asked us to stay here for another hour or so. Traffic is going to be horrific everywhere anyway. You can take
mats into the aerobics or yoga rooms and do stretches, none of you stretch enough, admit it, or you can use the basketball
court but we don’t want anyone upstairs near the machines. Snacks and drinks are on the house. Jeff will get a television
going in the snack bar if you want to see it on television. We think there are forty-six people in the dub and fourteen three-
to four-year-olds. If your children are okay, take them into the playrooms and let them play together. No one was in the pool.
There was only one injury and it’s being treated. Let the trainers know if you need help. It’s ten forty-five. Let’s shoot
for staying in the building another hour.”

People began to wander off into various activities. Sylvia invited Nora Jane to stretch with her in the yoga room and Little
Freddy agreed to go into the nursery to play with the other children.

The third shock hit just as Little Freddy was settling down with a Lego game. His friend Arthur was sitting beside him. When
they felt the floor and table move they started laughing so hard they couldn’t stop. “It’s a big one,” Little Freddy yelled.
“Get on the floor.”

“Titty babies,” he whispered to Arthur to make him even more hysterical with laughter. “Them are titty babies.”

Nora Jane and Sylvia had just unrolled their mats when they felt the third shock and they felt it roll and took it. Then they
got up and went to the nursery to see if Little Freddy was all right. He and Arthur were still sitting at the table laughing
their heads off.

“We could learn from that,” Sylvia said.

“I do,” Nora Jane replied. “It’s a new world. I never had a boy.”

“You sing opera, don’t you?” Sylvia asked. It was an hour later. People were beginning to fan out into the parking lot to
find their cars. “I know Anna Hilman, the director at San Francisco Place. She told me about your voice. She heard you sing
last year at the benefit. She said it was divine. I wish I’d been there. The reason I’m bringing it up is that we are having
a fund-raiser in December and I wondered if we might persuade you to sing for us. It’s national. I mean, you’d have to go
to New York. It’s going to be in the Metropolitan Opera House. We want to take San Francisco talent with us so it won’t be
all East Coast. Would you even consider doing it? We’d pay your expenses, with your husband, of course. I have a house on
Park Avenue, actually. You could stay with us if you don’t have a hotel you like.”

Nora Jane wasn’t answering, so Sylvia went on. “I don’t mean to ask you on a day like this but I thought you might want to
do it. It will be on C-Span. I don’t even know if you are interested in Planned Parenthood.”

“Of course I am. I just never sing in public. It just isn’t something I enjoy doing. I’ve done it five or six times in the
last few years, but proving I can do it doesn’t make me like it. My grandmother was a diva. She taught me, years ago in New
Orleans. Somehow it has always been part of my love for her, not something I want the world to hear.”

“Anna said you sing like an angel. She said you had a really astounding range.”

“I do. It’s a gift. I’ve almost never studied or used it. I took from Delaney Hawk for two years. Sometimes I go over and
sing with her for a month or two, but that’s about it. I like being a housewife and a mother.”

“That’s lovely, Nora Jane. Commendable in this day and age. Well, think about my offer. I might even be able to get an honorarium.
If you get interested, call me.” Sylvia handed her a card and smiled and left and Nora Jane took Little Freddy by the hand
and walked out to her Volvo and put him in the back in his car seat and got into the driver’s seat and started driving. She
had been in a fine mood, glad the earthquake was a small one, glad to spend time with a star like Sylvia, feeling good, and
now she was feeling bad. The world was always reaching out and wanting things from her that she didn’t want to give.

There had been no home for Nora Jane when she was young. Her father was dead and her mother drank. Only when she was at her
grandmother Lydia’s house was life beautiful and quiet. All Nora Jane wanted in the world was to keep the world quiet and
good for her children. She didn’t want fame, she didn’t want applause, she didn’t want half the money Freddy gave her and
put in her name and put in bonds and stocks and accounts for her. All she wanted was for the days to pass in peace and the
people she loved to be safe.

Is there no way they’ll let me alone? she thought. All I ever wanted was to keep this one thing to myself, this music Lydia
gave to me, the Bach and Scarlatti and, oh, the Puccini. She began to sing an aria from
Tosca
and Little Freddy raised his voice and sang with her,screaming at the top of his lungs to match her high notes and beating
his legs on the car seat with power and joy.

Five days went by and Nora Jane avoided the weight room at the club because she didn’t want to run into Sylvia. Once or twice
she brought up the subject of the offer to her husband, Freddy, or her daughters, but they were busy with their own thoughts
and didn’t seem to want to discuss her quandary at any length.

“It’s up to you,” Freddy kept saying. “If you want to do it, I’ll go with you and support you in any way I can. If you don’t
want to, just tell her so.”

Then a letter came in the mail from the national office of Planned Parenthood inviting her formally to participate in the
program and offering her five thousand dollars and her expenses and a dress designed especially for her by Geoffrey Beene.
He would send someone to take measurements and consult with her about her taste in color and fabric.

“I’m going to do it,” Nora Jane declared and put the letter in front of Freddy at the breakfast table. “I am doing it for
Planned Parenthood and for the dress. I’ll give back all the money I don’t spend. I might have to spend some on lessons with
Delaney for a few months. I want to work something up. A tenor from the Met will be there and they think Christopher Parkening.
I have to do this, Freddy. I can’t turn this down. This fell in my lap. Grandmother would want me to do this. She would want
me to sing at Lincoln Center.”

“Are you sure? Absolutely sure?”

“Yes, I think I am.” She stood in the light from the windows, with her beautiful face screwed up into a terrible imitation
of courage and Freddy loved her so much he could not breathe.

“Then say yes. When is the performance?”

“On December the eleventh.”

“We’ll take the kids and spend a week and do Christmas things.”

I
N
1996
THE GROUP LED BY ABU SAAD
had killed a writer named Adrien Searle as part of the cleansing that surrounded the Salman Rushdie shame. Now more killing
must be done. Blood revenge, blood for blood, life for life. If blood doesn’t flow, men never learn.