Pronoun Problems: A Novel About Friendship, Transgender and (eventually) Ninjas

20 - Aftershocks

January, 1994

It was early on a Monday morning in my apartment when I woke up and rolled on top of Samantha. The bed shook violently as I held her tight, my body pressed against hers, her head thrashing from side to side, as she cried out, over and over, rising in pitch and intensity.

But not for the reason you're thinking.

It was an earthquake. Samantha was panic-stricken and I was doing my best to calm her down, to make her feel safe. "You're all right!" I shouted above the deafening rumble of ruptured fault lines. "You're OK! Everything's fine!" It was meant to be soothing, but my own terror, combined with the dryness in my throat made me sound demonic.

This was the Northridge Earthquake — 6.7 in magnitude with the fastest peak ground velocity ever recorded — and in the next twenty seconds it would kill sixty, injure thousands, cost tens of billions in property damage and, more important from our viewpoint, alert Samantha's parents that she and I were sleeping together.

That would be many hours later, when telephone service was finally restored and Samantha got through to her worried parents to tell them that she was unhurt. "It was so scary! Thank God I was at Aaron's place!"

The temblor had struck at 4:30 a.m. and Carol, my future mother-in-law, realized the implication of her daughter's words a second before her husband did, just long enough for her to suck air through her teeth.

Samantha was twenty-nine at that point and we were engaged, so it seemed odd that this was at all scandalous, but Vic was old-school Italian Catholic and didn't believe in premarital sex. For women, anyway. He was rather circumspect about his own history.

Vic was the kind of guy who would have — had we been the same age — beaten me up in high school. The first time Samantha dragged me to her family's Christmas Eve party — fifty boisterous and very drunk Italian-Americans — Vic asked if I liked calamari and when I said I didn't, he made me eat it anyway, while everybody laughed.

"I'm glad you're OK, Sammy," Vic said. There was now a chill in his voice and it would remain there until our wedding day.

I held Samantha until the room stopped shaking, and then a little more until she stopped shaking. The fierce rumble had subsided, replaced by distant car alarms and barking dogs. It was pitch dark in the room. My flashlight had been on the night stand, but it could be anywhere now and I went looking for it, groping blindly in the dark.

"You guys OK?" Tom called out from the other side of the apartment.

"We're fine," Samantha called back.

I snapped open the shades on my picture window — intact, luckily — and then shielded my eyes as starlight poured into the room. This was completely unexpected. I had never seen more than a handful of cheerless stars in the fallow Los Angeles sky, but now with the power out and the city lights extinguished it was dazzling, the whole galaxy sprayed across the night sky. It was an awesome and unsettling feeling, standing there naked, the universe blazing above my head, a fragile, untrustworthy planet below my feet.

Then came the aftershocks, both literally — the unnerving tremors that made us freeze in place as our few remaining unbroken dishes rattled in the cupboard — and figuratively — blindsiding Tom with the surprise announcement that I would be moving in with Samantha, a year earlier than we had planned.

Originally, she wanted to wait until we were married for us to live together, but after the trauma of Northridge, she could not bear to sleep by herself anymore. So we found an apartment in fashionable Studio City — it's basically North Hollywood, but with fewer Armenian gangs — and gave notice to our respective landlords.