piece of broken glass away with the toe of her sandal and tugged at the waistband of her husband’s boxer shorts, fingering the damp skin trapped under the elastic. “Was that the biggest earthquake you’ve experienced?” she asked.
“Nineteen eighty-nine was far worse. This one was hardly a blip in comparison.”
In the eight years that Claudia had lived in Los Angeles, she had been in a few earthquakes, but only little ones that vanished almost as soon as you noticed them. She would read the newspaper predictions—CALIFORNIA HAS MORE THAN 99% CHANCE OF A BIG EARTHQUAKE WITHIN 30 YEARS—with morbid anticipation. Back in Wisconsin, they’d had tornadoes and blizzards, but those marched in with trumpets blaring, giving you at least a few minutes to brace yourself and barricade the windows. A California earthquake had always seemed to her a more glamorous kind of natural disaster, an abrupt and thrilling narrative shift. She’d been waiting for this moment since she moved here for film school, and now that it had finally arrived and been deemed only adequate by the native, she was disappointed.
“Well, it felt big enough to me,” she announced, as his fingers tugged at the skirt of her dress. She ran her hands up his bare back, riding the knobs of his spine. “For a moment there I thought the house might collapse and crush us both.”
“Silly girl.” His voice was low and phlegmy, his eyes winched shut. Water dripped on her face from his hair, still wet from his shower. “We weren’t ever going to die.”
“And if we had? Isn’t this the moment when we’re supposed to take stock and decide whether we’d be satisfied with our lives had we just met an untimely death?”
He wiggled a hand between her thighs. “Well, would you?”
She considered the question, distracted by his fingers. She let herself go limp and still Jeremy’s body held her upright against the doorframe: She felt secure here, as if an anchor were tethering her, keeping her from drifting off into unsafe waters. “Yes,” she said. “I’d be OK with dying today.”
His hand stopped moving as he mulled this over. “That’s morbid,” he said. “But sure. I’ll go with you, if we must.”
The exchange hung there between them, lingering one tick of the clock too long.
“Though I’d rather put it off until after my movie premieres tonight, if you’re trying to figure out the best time to do me in,” Claudia finally added.
“Then I’ll call off the hired assassins,” he offered, deadpan, and she laughed, and the adrenaline took over again and they did it right there, amid the broken wineglasses and smudged linoleum, ignoring the ringing cellphones and the car alarms going off up the block; everything heightened by the sense of crisis averted, and the two of them together inviolable against even the motion of the earth.
After they finished, Jeremy disappeared into the living room as Claudia readjusted her dress and surveyed the damage in their kitchen: three wineglasses lost, a framed postcard on the floor, the handle broken off the mug in the sink. Above the stove, the botanical watercolors that they picked up at a flea market had tipped askew. In the plaster above the door, a fresh crack spidered across the wall. She reached up and put her finger in the raw gash, pried off a powdery chunk of plaster, and crumbled it in her hand. Patching the walls: another item she could add to that endless to-do list. The plaster walls were original to the house, which was built long before the days of Sheetrock; just as the plumbing that occasionally spat rust-colored water was original, along with the brick fireplace clogged with fifty years of soot, and the vintage O’Keefe & Merritt stove missing one of its orange Bakelite knobs, and the wood floors with gouges from the sofas of the previous owners, and the dubious gravity heater in the bedroom floor, which, with the turn of an ancient key, belched hot air from an open flame positioned precariously underneath the house. Their home was in a constant state of decay that they seemed incapable of arresting.
But Claudia adored this house with an irrational passion: Perhaps it wasn’t the palatial Barbie Dream House she’d fantasized about when she was a little girl, but it was hers, an irrefutable sign pointing to her status in the world, a manifestation of the fact that she’d achieved something worth noting. They had seen at least twenty houses before they’d bought this one three