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as Mariana’s. Ines’s alarmingly bare shoulders gave her a fragile but dignified look. Inside the puckered satin, her breasts were small as if shrunken.
    The shadowy socket where her right eye should have been gave her face a squinting asymmetrical cast like a female face in a Picasso painting. Yet you could see that Ines had been beautiful, once; and had retained the image of that beauty even now.
    What a strange couple they were: the bristly-white-haired woman so short, and so petite; the former husband so much larger, looming over her. Ines did suddenly seem, despite her air of frantic gaiety, considerably older than Austin.
    And Mariana saw that yes, Austin must have known about Ines’s missing eye, for he showed no surprise, still less alarm or concern, at the ghastly sight of the empty socket; in fact he’d barely glanced at Ines’s festive face, turning quickly to Hortensa, with a similarly hearty/impersonal greeting and a handshake.
    Hortensa made no effort to appear friendly, or even very animated. Neither she nor Austin hugged the other or brushed lips against cheeks. Mariana was impressed with the sulky girl’s resistance to Austin’s charm. She thought She is immune to the man and wants him to know.
    It was an old sour relationship, Mariana supposed. Austin and Hortensa were linked by marriage, or had once been—obscure relatives thrown together with nothing to say to each other.
    Drinks? Would they like drinks? Briskly Austin ushered his guests into the living room, urging them to sit down on the long white-leather sofa facing the view of the city in the distance, the Bay and bridges. In fading sunlight the Golden Gate Bridge shimmered just barely visible.
    â€œAh! As always— espectacular ! If there is no worry—shall I say this?—of el terremoto .”
    Ines remained on her feet speaking lightly, laughing. Mariana knew that el terremoto meant the earthquake and that this subject stirred in Austin, as in other longtime residents of the San Francisco/Berkeley area, a predictable sort of dismissive laughter.
    â€œWell—it will take more than el terremoto to move me from here.”
    Mariana had the idea that this was an old issue. Many times, far too many times, the wife and the husband had spoken of it, and always the husband would make the same offhanded reply.
    â€œMariana, dear—what of you?”
    â€œYes? What?”
    â€œDoes el terremoto not frighten you, a little?”
    Mariana tried to think. It was a fact, she’d given little thought to the possibility of an earthquake in this precarious hillside dwelling. As she’d given little thought to the possibility of a fire, a flash flood, landslide.
    â€œMariana is not an alarmist, Ines. She is a practical person—she knows to live here, now .”
    This was the first time anyone had ever spoken of Mariana as practical . And in the third person, in her hearing, as if she were a very young child or in some way incapacitated.
    Perhaps it was a fact, Mariana accepted the possibility of an earthquake in this beautiful place as a feature of her marriage. She was so very grateful for the marriage, a mere earthquake could not dissuade her.
    â€œI haven’t thought of it, I guess . . . I . . .”
    Mariana’s voice trailed off lamely. How weak Ines and Hortensa must think she was, this new, young wife of Austin’s!
    When he’d joined them a few minutes before, Austin had greeted Mariana with a distracted sort of affection. All the while he’d been staring in Ines’s direction without exactly looking at Ines, as one might look in the direction of a blinding light without daring to confront it head-on.
    Now he glanced at Mariana with a sharp crease of a frown between his eyebrows, as if he had but a vague idea who this person was, and why she was in his living room with his exotic Spanish ex-wife.
    Gracelessly Hortensa had lowered her weight onto the sofa, at an end