Skin and Bone

David Walton

You take my skin,

I take your bone.

You take my bone,

I take your life.

—precept of Shotokan Karate

Tuesdays they practiced upstairs in the women’s gym, and sometimes there he felt it, if he’d done particularly well that night, into April and May after it started staying light later and the windows could be open—the oneness with the stance you were supposed to feel, a loosening of muscles and easing of the pain, not a diminishing of it exactly, but going beyond it, into an almost druggy transcendence where colors, shapes, the surfaces of things became abstractions of themselves. Thursdays, and Saturday mornings during wrestling season, they practiced downstairs in the fencing/volleyball room, where there were score markers and notices all over the walls, and street sounds coming through the windows, high, frosted-glass windows flush up to the ceiling, with chicken wire embedded in the glass and some elaborate crank mechanism for opening and closing them that ran down the side of the wall. Upstairs they were at the back of the building, looking out onto a wooded hillside, with stretch bars and full-length mirrors, and enough floor space for separating the beginners from the advanced groups.

Tuesday, ironically, was the night Emil led practice—ironic because Emil was the one Tim considered the most rootbound of the blackbelts, a stocky, and for all his conditioning, somewhat chunky graduate student in either mathematics or physics, with a bright, unflagging smile and a sparse tuft of sandy hair curling out of the hollow of his throat. “I want you to improve,” he would tell them as he went around correcting postures. It had been Emil the winter before who, with the flu and a temperature of 102, came in anyway, just to prove he could overcome it, running four miles outside barefoot by himself before practice, and then leading the club through five hundred side-thrust kicks, five hundred side-snap, at least a thousand roundhouse kicks, ending the evening with fifteen minutes in kibadach—all low leg exercises, Tim noted. This was just about the time Tim was starting to get over the trouble he’d been having with his knees.

“This is crazy,” he told Dietz.

“This is what you gotta do,” Dietz told him, “if you want to be ready for special training.”

The special trainings were a recent innovation, weekend-long retreats held bi-yearly on the campus of a community college outside the city, three and four intensive two-hour practices a day, with special surprise sessions thrown in at five in the morning—a little like hell week in the fraternity, Tim was thinking, watching it all from a detached perspective, the mounting enthusiasm, the growing rigor of the practices as the big time drew near, the pressure on everybody to sign up, go along. “If anybody doesn’t have the twenty dollars,” Emil told them after two separate practices, “I’ll give him the money out of my own wallet.” And then afterward, the esprit, the camaraderie, the casual ostracism of those who hadn’t gone by those that had.

(Around this time, too, a move was on to federate the different clubs around the country, accompanied by a five-dollar raise of dues and, by the appearance, at fifteen dollars a copy, of the English translation by the American head of the school of the founder’s autobiography, which required all the stances to be revised downward, and for the last three months the brownbelts were every five minutes breaking off practice to run over to the coatracks to consult a copy on some point of dispute.)

It was a Tuesday, three weeks before spring special training, that Esther appeared. She walked in five minutes before time for practice to start, crossing the floor with solemn, self-contained steps, her brown belt over her shoulder. She put her bag down by a pillar, tied on her belt, and stretched, walked out to the middle of the floor and breathed and stretched, sank down into a full split, turned left, and then right, and then over into a plow, which she held, unmoving, until the call came for bowing in.

A nice sense of theater, Tim thought.

She wore a gi of a lighter fabric, a couple of shades whiter than those of the club, the jacket loose fitting, accentuating the slimness and narrowness of her line. She was around twenty-four or -five, tall, around five-nine or five-ten, with brown hair parted down the center and clipped behind her ears with bow barrettes of red and yellow molded plastic. Sparring, she went through some stylized breathing routine, giving out a growl every time she made a punch. The first time Tim stood up to her, he broke up, which infuriated her. After each set of punches, she rehearsed back over the final one to herself, as if to imprint its deficiencies on her mind.

Mr. Shuri was there to supervise that evening, a distinction in itself, and after bowing out, he raised a hand for further courtesy.

“Tonight back from former Europe pretemper Esther Hardy.”

He heard later that she was a remote descendant of British novelist Thomas Hardy, another nice touch, Tim thought. She was a past member of the club returning after two years in Europe, where she’d trained with Didier, who was a former fellow or esteemed former pupil of Mr. Shuri’s. Every eight or ten words Mr. Shuri lapsed into a shrugging inarticulacy, a little gathering in and back that was more expressive, more lucid finally than any words could be. What came across most was the gentilesse of the man, a sense of good meaning and design—though a certain part of that Tim had concluded had to be written off to simple inscrutability. For a long time he’d been thinking he was telling them to “Excel! Excel!”, a suitable enough exhortation, he’d thought, until he realized that what he really was saying was, “Exhale! Exhale!”

Called upon herself to describe her experiences abroad, Esther was similarly inaudible, speaking out of a modesty that confined itself to whispers. Tim passed the time scanning the new beginners’ group, sprawled out across the lower end of the floor, gaping at her as if a berserk had been set down into their midst—figuring out which of this assorted rape bait and bully fodder would be the ones most likely to stick it through, which ones would prove the real aficionados, measuring the distance between them and his own beginners’ class of two years ago, many of whom, and of the three or four classes since then, had long since passed him by. She was a carpenter, had apprenticed to a cabinet maker in Belgium.

“She’s trained in France,” Dietz told him afterward in the showers, “she trained in Spain, she’s trained all over Europe. She trained with Didier.” Dietz’s tone said that while he recognized that her commitment was strong, he could never take any woman’s commitment fully seriously. “They wouldn’t let her apprentice here so she went over and did her apprenticeship there and now she’s suing the union.” His tone said he thought she was a troublemaker.

“The training in Spain is mostly overcoming the pain,” Tim suggested—but Dietz had his head under the shower and probably didn’t hear that. Dietz wasn’t large but he was powerfully built, and he worked exceptionally hard. He could bring his leg up and hold it alongside his head, and was the only one of the brownbelts Tim considered really able to do the roundhouse—although the fact that he could see him doing it probably suggested that he wasn’t doing it properly, the true level of technique, the blackbelt’s level of technique, being always undetectable. A fringe of dark hair, smoothed down by the water, outlined the curve of his buttocks, hard, almost grotesquely rounded buttocks, his whole body firm and sharply articulated, as if he’d been conceived on a heroic scale and then reduced down to everyday size. He snapped his head back and shook it side to side doggy style, spraying water the width of the enclosure.

Tim said, “I had this dream last night where there was this temple on the beach, a training school, and all the rocks were painted, and the principal design was this big mouth eating pussy. And all the acolytes were ambulatories, cripples.”

Dietz, taking this for a confidence, returned it with one of his own, “I’ve been going without sleep lately, just to see how long I can do it. You know, if you don’t sleep you don’t need to sleep at all. It’s just a habit people get into. I’ve made it four days so far.”

In the past he’d confided similar projects to Tim, like his method for curing a fear of heights by climbing a 40-foot stepladder a step at a time while reading Descartes’ Rules for the Regulation of the Mind, or his conviction that old age and death are the products merely of inattention, the toxins entering the body at the first age of maturity, twenty-one, twenty-two, the age he was coming into now, and the thing to do was never to let your guard down and allow them to get in in the first place. He was convinced he was going to live forever, he was a fanatic, that one element of fanaticism, Tim recognized, recognizing it as what was missing in himself, the feature that led him to excel.

He took his time dressing, taking slow pleasure in the buttoning of a button, the tying on of a shoe, waiting until now, until he was about to leave the building, to make his visit to the water fountain. Ten short sips and no more. Not to put too much cold water on the stomach so shortly after practice. Just inside the door the three Buckley kids were waiting for their father to come get them, the younger of the girls, Little Eva, the infant prodigy and sweetheart of the club, a brownbelt at age nine—and it was said that Mr. Shuri was holding her back for fear of advancing her too early. Under the shadow of her example the other girl and the younger brother, both of them bespectacled and hopelessly awkward on the floor, were taking on more and more of a whipped appearance, hanging listlessly against the sides of the Coke machine, while she stood up straight and tall at the door, bidding a smiling good-night to each person as they went out.

“Good practice.”

“Good practice.”

Outside there were still a few people sitting on the railing and on the wall along the bottom of the steps waiting for their rides. As he came down the steps, Tim could hear Oster describing someone, apparently from another school, who “held his fist against his chest, and just turned it like that, and he was flat out on his ass.” There was an active cornball element running through the club, evidenced in a lot of breathless stories about men wrestling the horns out of live bulls with their bare hands, and a lot of sly little jokes with shindigs in the punch line. It was still light, still mild outside, the evening carrying over into it something of the balminess of the day, the first good day almost of the season. A slow April and chill rains the first week of the month had retarded the budding, and now it was as if the whole world was in bloom simultaneously, the evening fragrant with surreptitious possibility, the kind of evening where opportunity has its thumb out on every street corner. From behind a building on the other side of the street a voice called out and another answered, not quite coalesced into voices yet, more still manifestations of a mood, the row of maples across the street, each with the bulb of a streetlamp in back of its shrub, a trail of glittering starbursts leading in even diminution into the darkness of the park.

He’d left his car at the bottom of the park next to the coal memorial, but took a more roundabout route up the golf course and over the ridge, along the rim of a wooded hillside that paralleled Cornwallis Avenue. Just over the crest of the ridge was an old estate that for the past several years had served as an arts and handicraft center, and in the summers as headquarters for the park mimes. The main building had recently been torn down, but the foundation walls and a section of formal gardens were still intact, bordered on the right by a line of five semiruined archways, in the intervals of which were mock arches in which there were stone benches. In the shadow of the second of these there was a figure, a pair of figures were standing. Automatically he shifted his bag around to his back and angled out to the left, mediating a course between the arches and a clump of lilacs on his other side, gauging as he moved how many steps it would take to land a lunge punch into that evergreen, a side-snap to the trunk of that tree, elbows close, arms loose at his sides, taking quick, purposeful steps. Just beyond the arches was the opening of a drive that led down the hillside to the street. It was here he was making for.

Halfway down the hill, where the drive made a sharp turn just before dropping to the street, a figure in a blue jersey, that he hadn’t spotted until he was right on top of him, turned out of the bushes zipping up his fly.

“Hey, good lookin,” Tim said as he was going by, “whatcha got cookin?”

That slowed him down. He was a young guy, about twenty-two or -three, not too tall but nice built, slim built, with dark hair and a bushy mustache.

“Hey, what’s happening, hey, you got a match? You live around here? Say, you wouldn’t happen to have the time, would you?”

The young guy laughed and said, “Na, hey, I’m down here waiting for my bus, I just came up to take a leak is all.”

Tim took a step in, then back.

“Hey, you need a ride? hey, come on over here a minute, I’ll give you the world tour.”

“Na, hey,” the young guy said, “that’s all right, I’m too busy right now.” He took a couple of steps down the hill, but didn’t quite break away.

“Hey, hey, nice arms, umm, like those big arms. Hey, hey, walk over here a minute, take a walk over here, I’ve got something I want to ask you.”

“Na, hey.” The young guy laughed and rubbed his stomach under his jersey, but in the end said, “That’s okay, I gotta meet my bus,” and went on down the hill.

For a while Tim hung around the edge of the streetlight—once he looked around and saw him standing there, and then didn’t look around again. He let two buses go by. Perhaps neither one of them was his. Tim walked back to the top of the hill, where the same two figures were still standing in the shadow of the arches, and another one now along the side of the foundation wall, which he reconnoitered, and as he returned to the head of the drive he caught sight of a figure in a blue jersey cutting up into the trees just this side of the turn. Tim was right behind him.

Afterwards they sat on the trunk of a fallen tree sharing a smoke.

“How come you’re like that?” the young guy wanted to know now.

“It’s my nature,” Tim told him. “It’s how I am.”

“I mean, were you always that way? Didn’t you ever try it with a girl?”

Tim started to give a very exact answer to that, but he wasn’t waiting for that. “You know I’m not putting it down. I figure for everyone’s fair pair. I’m just wondering how it started is all. Was it something went wrong with a girl? Or what?”

“It’s how I am,” Tim told him. “It’s what I am.”

He knew what was called for, though—if it was in you, you’d have known it by this time, if it was coming out, it would have shown itself by now. People can be all sorts of things, do all kinds of things, without it affecting what you basically are.

“I just can’t figure it,” the young guy said, and went back down the hill shaking his head.

Still, it wasn’t a response Tim minded necessarily, as responses go, himself as the exceptional, the unprecedented encounter, the gratification of such basic requirements, the craftsmanship of gratification, his own special satisfaction. He walked taller now, up the hill and across the gardens, where the same three figures were still situated

cho-cho-chuckala
with a rink-link-rucklaba

over the crest of the ridge, the tips of the downtown buildings just visible above the top of the next hill, half the width and half the height of its plane, and that half again the width and slant of the slope spread out below him, the silhouette of the clubhouse on his right matched with some shrubbery on his left, a tree a little past that with two smaller trees a little farther down on the other side, mass for line, ground with sky, his steps in perfect pace with the evening.

Esther’s return prefigured a series of changes in the club, most of them coinciding with the close of the school term, when the three university clubs telescoped down to one to practice together for the summer. The third weekend of May was spring special training, followed in ten days by the spring qu test, in which Oster and Little Eva again failed to receive blackbelts, after which came a series of year-end parties, opulent potluck spreads heavy on zucchini and bulgur, where everybody stood around flexing their fingers back and trading stories of favorite practices.

(About this same time, too, the move to federate the clubs necessitated a permanent dojo in the city, which, once found, had to be cleared out, sanded down, and revarnished, and this in turn necessitated a closer affiliation with the black club, the one fee-paying, non-university branch of the school in the city, which resulted in some talk—though subdued, since the university clubs had their own black members—that the clubs were being taken in by the blacks, the clubs providing the material and better part of the labor so that the blacks could have their own place to practice in their own part of the city. In short, a politics began to develop, which Tim, who cared no more about it than to avoid any impression of avoiding it, relished as yet another dimension in the substratum absurdity of the whole enterprise.)

Three days before the start of special training, Esther cut off the tip of her finger on a band saw and was told by her doctor that she wouldn’t be able to practice for at least three weeks.

“These things are brought to us,” Tim suggested, “as a way of keeping us from taking our commitments too seriously”—but she failed to find any merit in that point of view.

In the summertime they practiced outdoors on the Tech lawn, a long grassy concourse set inside a neat symmetry of buildings and walks. At the lower end the lawn dropped off into a deep wooded ravine, on the far side of which rose three squat cylindrical towers, the A, B, and C dorms of the St. Vincent’s campus, dubbed by the students Ajax, Babo, and Comet, and it was possible to chart the progress of the second hour of practice by the passage of the sun, nudging the upper righthand corner of the left-hand tower, down a steep trajectory to a point about a third of the way from the bottom of the center tower, to disappear, about the time they were finishing sparring and starting kata, into a blaze of amber refraction. The lawn for those final fifteen or twenty minutes was a network of chartreuse highlights against a field of verdant black, the shadows of their maneuvers stretching fifty, sixty yards, almost to the row of hedges that ran across the front of the porch of the Architecture Building.

Tim hated it, though. However deserted the campus might be, there was always a steady stream of stragglers filing by, each one of which invariably had to stop and ponder and point. He had living room muscles, calisthenics muscles, a thick trunk and arms and then spindle legs and something of a paunch. Moreover he always sweat a lot. Even before warm-ups were through, his gi would be marked down the back with damp spots, and after every sequence he’d be having to be pulling up and retying. One night a little black kid’s dog, excited by all the shouting, bit him on the back of the thigh.

A week before special training, a couple of weeks after Esther had returned, another former member, a blackbelt named Paul, came back to the club after two years in the army, where he’d been stationed in Salt Lake City and for a time had trained at the central dojo in Oakland.

It intrigued Tim, once he discovered they had both started in the same beginners’ group, had left the club at around the same time, and now were returning within a couple of weeks of each other, how little apparent attention they paid each other. At first he thought it was some buried competitiveness, a case of some long-standing antagonism, but there was no real evidence of that, their dealings were all cordial, just uninterested; rather, he decided finally, a typical example of like oblivious to like.

Paul was around twenty-four, not tall, about five-eight or five-nine, with straw blond hair cropped close and parted straight back the side; the army looked superimposed over a face that was basically boyish and fair, apple cheeks, a few light speckles of beard dotting the mustache line and around the point of the chin—all of which made the ferocity of his approach that much more intimidating. At first Tim thought he was only extending himself as a way of regratiating himself back into the group, or of setting an example for special training, but after a week had passed since special training, after two and then three weeks had gone by, and after he heard that it wasn’t after Paul got out of the army that he’d trained in Oakland, but while he was still stationed in Salt Lake City, driving 500 miles each way every weekend to sleep on the bare floor of the practice room, he knew he was in the presence of a true believer.

The first of June Emil left to work for 3M in Connecticut for the summer, and Paul took over the Tuesday night practice. June was muggy and hot, and around the middle of the month there was a four-day stagnation alert. “Take it little easy tonight,” Paul would tell them, “air’s bad tonight, work more for form than strength tonight”—but so provocative were these words leaving his lips, so anathema even the idea of giving anything less than the fullest effort, that before the first half hour was out he was calling for deeper punches, higher kicks—“Faster! Harder!”—the brown-belts at his instigation going around with their belts off, swatting ass—“Lower there! Try there!”

Tim stopped going to Tuesday night practice. He’d been having trouble with his knees in February and March, with the wrap bandages and the needles into the kneecaps. He started spending Tuesday evening on the living room floor, the same span of time, the full two hours, stretching, limbering, form-building exercises.

By this time, though, Paul’s spirit had so permeated the club that it colored even those practices he didn’t personally lead. Here the ethic was to extend yourself, to push beyond your capabilities. By ignoring the pain of your body, you overcame your weakness; by being master over yourself, you became master over your opponent. He simply stood for the established creed.

“Suppose you’re standing at the bus stop some night,” Paul would tell them at the end of a practice, “you’re walking down a dark alley and five guys jump you”—throwing little grins back over his shoulder, as if to choruses of accolades called to him from the shrubbery and the trees.

It was a function, finally, of it being summertime. Emil was away, Dietz was away, for the last two weeks of June Esther was in Nova Scotia, Ed Able was busy getting married, the brown-belts were in a rapture of dedication anyway. Amoto, who made a career of inscrutability, also made a career of letting things go by him.

One night Tim saw him kick Sominex, who nobody else even bothered with anymore, just casually as he was going by him, like you’d kick a piece of cardboard out of your way on the street.

“You kicked him,” Tim said.

“No talking in line. Down there.”

“You kicked him. You kick your students?”

“He was cheating. Mr. Shuri kicks his students when they don’t try hard enough. No talking in line.” With three quick maneuvers he circled around Tim, swatting shoulder, rump, thigh—“Lower stance! Down there! Try there!”—and continued on down the line.

Cheating—it was a moral issue with him. What Tim thought afterward that he should have told him was that a gentleman doesn’t need coercion to lead, a gentleman leads by quiet persuasion and example. But he could see a direct confrontation wasn’t going to be the way to deal with him.

For the final fifteen or twenty minutes they did kata, ritualized combat routines designed for countering four, six, or eight opponents, three lines of eight spread across the grass, each member in turn counting out the steps. Most of the others counted in Japanese, “Ich… nee… sun… chee…,”  but Tim considered this an affectation.

“One… two…”

“Louder.”

“Three…”

“More forceful, louder.”

Tim stopped counting.

“You put into your voice the force you expect your body to show. Go through again.” Paul was at the end of the first row facing front, and hadn’t yet looked around.

Timing his pause, Tim said, “I don’t understand. You’ll have to show me.”

Without a moment’s hesitation, Paul was around and back through the lines. “You put into your voice…” He gave Tim a shove hard with both hands against the chest, sending him back a step or two, “the spirit you want the others to show in their movements,” turned and walked back to place. “Go through again.”

That was the last time for three weeks Tim went to practice. He counted through again, no louder really than before, and this might have been seen as having held his ground, and at the end neglected to give the command yasume to return to natural stance, which might be construed as a further act of defiance, though the fact was he’d simply forgot. He spent some considerable time afterward thinking through all he might have done or might have said—while feeling pretty much that the fact that he was thinking this much about it at all was reason in itself to be pulling back for a while.

It was not, he felt fairly convinced, any added element here, any case of the repressed impulse acting itself out as aggression. No Prussian officers hiding here. Paul was attractive, insofar as peak conditioning and an unassailable self-esteem in the prime of life could make any man attractive, though a little too clipped, a bit too close-chiseled for Tim’s taste. It was in fact because he felt free of any motive in the case that he felt free in challenging him at all—at the same time recognizing that any move he made at this point would have to be construed as a challenge, that to opposing him there was no alternative except to be pulling back.

Lacking the customary male incentives, he lacked too the traditional masculine regard for stamina and will, and with it, any feeling of shame at not doing any more than he absolutely cared to do. Knowing perhaps better than any of them here the practical value of these skills—the virtue, for instance, of knowing how to deal with four or six opponents in a tight place—he valued still more his own right of choice, the right to choose the exact extent and nature of his commitment. It was a matter, simply, of whether he could let himself be pushed.

There was more certainly to it than that, and he did see that nevertheless he would be backing down, and that there might be consequences to that more debilitating, more overriding finally than any action he might take, but it was because he did see that that he saw the futility of taking any action at all. Driving through Singer Oval one afternoon, he spotted Paul ahead of him on his motorcycle, stopped at a red light. He was over a lane and right up to the light, his gi strapped in a tight, anonymous bundle on the rack behind him. It was Wednesday, Tim remembered there was a special blackbelt practice on Wednesday afternoons, and for as long as they sat there, for maybe a full half minute, he never looked around or saw Tim, and the moment the light changed started immediately up, looking neither right nor left—and it occurred to Tim that he wouldn’t see, that in his mind there was probably no antagonism even existing. So confident was he of the integrity of his every move, that he would interpret any opposition merely as a sign of weakness, and out of tolerance, perhaps, out of his own idea of generosity, simply overlook it.

Tim set out as soon as it was getting dark, coming in on the river road through Elco, a swing around Riverside Park and past the Elco bluffs, where sometimes hitchhikers stood along the catch-fences hunting rides out to the dance bars in Dithridge and Clarksville. It was the Sunday after Fourth of July. The Fourth had fallen on a Tuesday this year, at the pinnacle of a week of mild and cloudless days, but three or four days ago the weather had turned hot, and the air started piling up and piling up until now it was a tangible factor in all transactions, shrouding any object larger than a fire hydrant in a stale grayish mist, blurring the lines of movement—through the market strip, where the forklift operators were working barechested tonight, a right on Calley and down Carlson a couple of blocks onto the Eight, a diagonal overlapping of two long rectangles of blocks looping the bus station at one end and Schwabb Park at the other, with the lower end of Alliance and part of Ninth forming the long-bar, and two or three blocks along the river end of Oriel the crossbar, across Alliance and up Liting past the two churches and around the park, with an optional cut down the alleyway back of the Sholes, and then back down Philadelphia and the upper end of Alliance, a circuit of maybe twenty or twenty-five blocks in all.

On the newspaper stand at Philadelphia and Alliance two guys with their shirts off and beer cans in their hands were harassing the traffic, and it was a sign of the evening that there were some who were taking this for an invitation and were slowing down and hurriedly turning around for another pass by.

In the doorway of Guiding Light the Elastic Trick, a tall, scrawny, unattractive kid, so named for his propensity to mold into whatever contour he leaned against, who he didn’t think anyone ever picked up, was standing horribly beaten and bandaged, the whole left side of his face swollen and discolored, but still out at his accustomed spot as usual, as if in warning, as if in some obscure form of reproach.

At Ninth and Philadelphia the man next to him at the light was rubbernecking all around—though at what or after what he wasn’t sure. A good part of this same route was shared by the downtown hookers and their trade, and at two or three points crossed the stadium and the Hoit Hall traffic, and this time of night there was always a line of cars along the farther side of the park waiting for the bookkeeping shift at Dollar Bank to let out, and it was one of his recurring fantasies of these travels that he might one night make a chance turn and lock in with one of these, end up in some new part of the city with a new life, new habits and drives.

As he drove along he caught, as he frequently did, a perceptual tic, certain dominant features, certain doorways and sections of block standing out, like a stage set made up from a few representative props, or more, like a computer enhancement in which all background irrelevancies have been bled out. For a long time he’d been hearing people talk about Pancherello’s, going down to Da Paunch, and always wondered where this Pancherello’s was, until one night he found out it was on Alliance next to where he would have had to go by it probably a hundred different times, and it was another one of his recurring fantasies that he passed over these routes invisible, a life that left no tracks, a foolish and, he knew, finally just careless point of view.

For a while he followed a station wagon with the license I-DAD—#I dad?—and then another one with a bumper sticker that read HELP ENSHRINE USS LAFFEY DD 729. He cut down the alleyway back of the bus station, where sometimes under the streetlights at the little cross-streets that connected to Oriel there would be somebody waiting, or along the fence that ran around the bus lot. These were the badlands now, a dismantled badlands, tucked into three or four vacant lots, a row of loading docks at the rear of three or four adjacent buildings, the field of derelict boxcars on the other side of the bus lot. There was a gap between the two fences just wide enough to squeeze through (“No chubbies, please,” somebody had written down the side of one of the poles in fingernail polish), and one by one the last summer the cars had been broken into, until there had been one point in August it had been possible to walk across boards spread between the doorways of five of these, with a short leap into the sixth, into an absolute blackness where you’d never know what you might encounter, or had encountered. Coming back from here one night, he had met a skinny black man standing at the opening with a knife in his hand, and just shifted a little to one side, his feet a shoulder width apart and hands open and out a little from his sides, looked straight at him and said, “You come at me holding that knife, best you be sure that knife isn’t holding onto you”—and it’d worked, either that had been too complicated for this guy to comprehend, or he’d comprehended it well enough, because he didn’t make a move, just stood there as if he was under an enchantment, while Tim edged around him and out the opening.

But tonight there was nobody there, nobody on the steps of the two churches on Liting, no one on the wall in front of the bus station pretending to be between buses.

He parked around the corner from the all-night McDonald’s on Litchfield. The movie houses on Alliance were newer and better attended, but he preferred this one just after Litchfield turned one-way, where you could be stopping off a minute on your way back from the bars in Duquesne Square, on your way back to your car, on your way to pick up coffee at McDonald’s.

A bell jangled on the door as you came in. There was nobody behind the change counter, and inside all the lights were on, the booths were being swept out—Tim turned around and walked back out again. With the blacklights on, these places had a kind of gutter romanticism that was almost appealing, but with real lights on it was totally impossible.

He walked up to the corner and down the other side of the street, pausing to examine the store windows. Every so often somebody would come by and stop outside the theater, as if trying to figure out what this could be, and then, with a kind of investigative resolve, march on inside, or go a few steps by and then suddenly, as if an invisible giant hand had reached out and plucked them up, wheel around and dart inside.

He waited about ten minutes and then went back inside. The blacklights were on now, the coin man back behind his counter, the doorbell jingled as he came through the door. You entered through a small foyer done all in red and black, red shag carpet and red flock wallpaper, and a pair of black leatherette couches, the change counter a basement bar with alternating diamonds of red and black—“Her,” the counter man was saying to somebody on the phone, “I wouldn’t fuck her with your dick”—through a bead curtain into a long, high-ceilinged room that might at one time have been an actual theater: the walls were needlessly high, almost as high again as the height of the booths, and up near the ceiling on the farther wall were a couple of what looked like projection slots. The walls, ceiling, the ducts and pipes running along the ceiling were all painted black, the floor black tile. Whatever the broom had swept up had left a few damp stains up the middle of the aisle.

Four of the booths had lights on, and Tim stood sorting through his change until their occupants emerged, two of them men he’d seen come in while he was standing outside, and a businessman type with an attache case and a newspaper folded up under his arm, and then a pudgy black kid who took a slow time deliberating between booths and after two or three went on out the door.

The doorbell jingled, and Dubonnet, who he’d known from the old Troy Hill days when he first came to town, walked in all smiles, in white shoes and a pair of light pants that showed butter yellow under the blacklights.

“How do?”

“How do.”

He went around and checked the peepholes, then came over and joined Tim.

“Aren’t we looking spiffy this evening,” Tim told him.

Bonnie, pleased, went into a little flurry of revelations, “I was having dinner over at my sister’s and we were having stuffed pork chops, and um-um I-want-to-tell-you, and they were all sitting down to play cards but I was feeling kinna sleepy, so I thought I’d just stop off a minute here on my way home, what is it, dead?”

“Dead,” Tim nodded.

“It was dead the other night in here. They’re all going up now to that new place on Gower, you know the one with the double booths and the cushion seats, you been up there yet?”

Tim hadn’t.

“Um-um. This in here anymore, you know the other night in here some guy jumps out of the booth at Ron while he’s coming around checking the booths, slugs him on the head with a pipe rolled up in a newspaper, and runs out the door. And cops in here, maybe you noticed those two in the station wagon along the side of the building when you came in, that’s why I never come in here anymore.”

This came out in bits while he was strolling up and down the aisle, but when he saw that Tim wasn’t going to be encouraged to leave, he settled down beside him.

“It’s dead.”

“Dead,” Tim nodded.

“Oh, then. And have you seen this new one they have now with the battery that goes inside your pocket, and when you get wet, the current—”

“Shocking,” Tim said.

The doorbell jingled, and they separated and drifted down to opposite ends of the aisle. The curtain parted and a young kid with a wispy mustache walked in, not bad but a little soft looking, with a giveaway fussiness—looking all around, like he’d always wondered what one of these places could be like.

“It’s dead.”

“Dead.”

“Last week I’m driving home from here, and I see these two young guys, well, you know I don’t usually stop for a hitchhiker, least of all when there’s two at a time, but these ones were dressed nice, though you could tell they’d been drinking—”

His fingers fluttered around the corners of his mouth, the nails with their clear lacquer yellow and luminous in the blacklight.

“And this one says to me, You mind if we light this joint? And I say, Go right ahead, as a matter of fact I might even try some myself, and the one that’s in back kind of has his knee up against the back of the seat, so that when I reach back with the joint I figure if he doesn’t—”

The doorbell jingled and a middle-aged man wearing a slicker raincoat buttoned to his neck came in carrying a shopping bag. Tim had wandered down to the far end of the aisle, and as he was turning to walk back, the young kid, who he’d almost forgotten about, motioned to him from inside the doorway of one of the booths. He moved aside to let Tim past him, easing up onto the stool and leaning back until his head came to rest against the wall. He dropped a quarter into the slot.

A black plumber working under the sink in coveralls was being pestered by a negligeed housewife. He was only trying to do his job, but she just wouldn’t leave him be. The young kid edged in to get a closer look.

“Where’re you from?” he asked Tim.

“Ah, Spillway, Spillway.” Tim slipped his hand around the back of his neck, tracing a fingertip along his hair line.

“And did you go to school in Spillway?”

“School in Spillway? Ah, yeah, yeah, school in Spillway.”

“And when you were in school, did you ever play hookey from school?”

About this time Tim started to remember he’d met this particular kid before.

“And when you played hookey from school, and you got caught, what did they do to you?”

“Scusez.”

Tim squeezed by him and back out of the booth, and a minute later, when he emerged and walked by Tim, neither of them showed the least sign of recognition.

The doorbell jingled and an incredibly tall, incredibly skinny, incredibly black boy in scarlet basketball silks and stripe-matched socks and one of these strap-on beaks that all the black queens were liking this year walked in, walked all the way down to the end of the aisle, turned around, and walked back out again, followed almost immediately by another, shorter, very muscular, and equally dark number in skin-close white jeans and a white temptation top, who did likewise. It was show night tonight. Up at the head of the aisle an old man was standing coughing, and had maybe been standing coughing for as long as he’d been there, single, dry, dislocated coughs, one every ten or fifteen seconds, while the man in the slicker raincoat, who had what looked like three or four more coats buttoned up underneath that, was going around very conscientiously reading all the signs and munching on something crunchy that he had to dig around for in the bottom of his bag.

The signs were of three varieties: commercial blacklight posters tacked up around the walls just under the ceiling, cosmic space-girls and copulating abstracts; next to the doors of the booths one or two small denominational signs, 2 BOYS 1 GIRL, TWO + ONE = FUN, FUN WITH BLACK & WHITE; and accompanying these, handpainted title signs that Arthur the nightshift man made, BIG BANANA and MAGIC MOUTHS, HUMAN SANDWICH subtitled DOUBLE JOINTED, BAR TEND HER and COCKTAILS FOR TWO, COCK and TAILS in different colored letters, with little beds and WOW signs painted in the corners. These last apparently were thought to have talismanic powers, because there were as many as nine or ten of them tacked around some of the doors. He was leaning against the side of one of the booths picking at the corner of one of these, and as the doorbell jingled just lifted his head, as Paul came through the curtain.

Just inside he paused, and there was a second or two before his eyes started to pick out details, when Tim could have slipped inside one of the booths and been passed by unseen, and that he didn’t afterwards had to seem, in however dim a way, to have been deliberate.

“What’s good in here, anything?”

“There’s a couple over here that aren’t bad, this one here was okay—want to try one?”

“No, that’s all right, I was just seeing what it’s like”—and he turned and walked back out the door.

Tim was right behind him. He hadn’t meant to make a move, rather the opportunity not to make a move, to turn the encounter casual and unmemorable, but he immediately saw that if he left it at this it could only have an opposite effect; so in each step that followed the crucial thing was to avoid the break coming at that particular point, and the only way of avoiding that to push ahead to the next possible step.

Outside the door Paul turned left, Tim alongside him now, and started up the block, neither of them looking at each other or saying a word, not matching each other exactly, they weren’t moving in step, for example, but at a pace too rapid for nonchalance—up ahead he saw a man coming the other way shift out toward the curb. At the corner they both swung another left, and immediately around the corner Paul’s motorcycle was parked, and directly in front of it was Tim’s car. He hadn’t identified the car as Tim’s, and betrayed some surprise when Tim walked over and unlocked it.

Tim smiled blandly and said, “Looks like our paths are crossed this evening.”

Paul nodded, more of a shrug than a nod, and said something about having just come back from the Blue Marble—“except you know that’s really just a neighborhood bar.”

Tim said, “I was just going to say maybe you’d care to stop off and have a beer.”

“You know some places around here that are good?”

“Probably this late on a Sunday night there might not be too many open. But I have some back at my place, we could stop off there.”

Paul had been fitting on his helmet, but now he took it off again and held it under his arm while he deliberated. He was a person who would always give that second or two of consideration to any question he was asked, however trivial. He had a way when he was being serious of pulling down the corners of his mouth and looking over to the side—that was the look he’d wear at thirty or thirty-five. That’s the way our faces change, Tim was thinking, the way we form our faces as much as our faces form us.

Or he’d grow out of it, maybe, grow into his authority, more trusting of the immediacy of his own responses.

“You go on, I’ll follow you.”

It was a fifteen- or twenty-minute drive, across the broad end of downtown and up the Streets Run through a long succession of lights, at each intersection having to slow down and check back, Paul lagging perpetually behind, until after a while Tim stopped worrying about him, for long stretches almost forgetting he was back there, thinking no more about it than to think that whatever happenstance would bring him, happenstance was guaranteed to make right.

Then when they reached the house, as he was kicking down his stands and pulling off his gloves, Paul pointed over the rooftops in the direction of Wilmer, which was only a couple of blocks away, and said, “Twenty-two months ago, and I’d have been sitting over there in one of those desks.”

“Twenty-two months? How old are you now?”

“I’ll be twenty-one in twenty-three more days. I’m in one of these new forty-nine-month programs, where they have you in for seven months and then you’re out for seven months, and the government pays for your training. I start an internship down at Rolinar tomorrow morning.”

Immediately Tim’s whole impression of him changed—his actual appearance seemed to change—what had seemed the man’s too-earnest self-regard revealing itself as the promising boy’s tight-held apprehension at not being taken entirely seriously.

Climbing the walk, mounting the steps to the porch, his eyes were constantly in motion, measuring, checking out. Though still fairly young, he carried in him already the habits of a man of knowledge. He would never walk into any place where danger waited him.

Tim bustled ahead of him—“I’ve had this place for almost two years now, I used to have another place up on Sussman that was bigger than this, I’ve had three places since I’ve lived in the city. This one is really only two rooms, but they’re on two different floors, so you don’t really feel it’s such a tiny place. It’s a two-room duplex, you know?”

Inside the door Paul picked up and dropped one foot and then the other, the remnant of some wintertime stomping gesture, looked around, and said, “Hey, nice place.”

“What can I offer you? Beer? Juice? Something stronger?”

“What d’you have?”

“I have apple juice, grapefruit juice, sorry no orange juice. Bourbon, scotch, a little tequila. Vodka with tonic, white wine. Encino.”

“Bourbon’s fine for me. Ice, little water.”

He went over and sat down on the couch. Tim mixed him his drink and took it over—he was sitting hunched up on the edge of the couch, and reached up to take the glass without lifting his head—and then went around and did the things he did, lit a couple of candles, lit a stick of incense and stuck it into one of the plant pots, put a record on, and as he was passing the couch noticed that Paul’s glass was almost empty and offered him a refill, which he accepted. Then he made a quick trip upstairs, and apparently that was a mistake, because when he came back down and sat down on the couch next to him, he was all clenched up, and his glass was already two-thirds of the way empty, and what he thought was there was something that was bothering him, he’d come here with something on his mind and maybe he could help.

“Is something the matter?” Tim asked him. “Is there anything I can do?”

This triggered off an excited and jumbled response—“Now, I don’t want you to think I’ve been jagging you”—jumping up and immediately sitting back down again—“don’t mean to be, don’t want you to think I’d be jagging you”—the gist of it being that when he’d heard Tim ask him over, what he heard was himself asking girls the same question.

“Well,” Tim said, “you never know what’ll bring ’em.”

Paul leapt to his feet and started pacing the floor. “My mind’s not straight, I’ve had these drinks, I can’t make decisions when my mind’s not straight, I’ve got to have time and think this over, I’m not trying to jag you, though.”

“Don’t mean to be jagging you,” he kept saying. What he was saying was, I’m getting out of here.

“But I don’t want you to think I’ve been jagging you.”

“Wait a minute, wait, wait, wait a minute now, just wait a minute here, what’re you saying, you’re saying you’re walking out of here now?”

“My mind’s not straight, I can’t make these decisions while my mind’s not straight, I’ve had these couple of drinks, I’ve got to have some time to think this over.”

“All right, all right, now, let’s just slow down here a minute now.”

They were both on their feet now, circling each other around the middle of the floor. At a certain point Tim could feel him drawing into himself, consciously taking command of himself, a watchful and then inquisitive look coming into his eyes.

He gave Tim a sidelong look and said, “Do you always talk like that? Take a line like that?”

“Oh, yeah, the quick lip, yeah, yeah, story of my life right there.”

“I mean take a line with someone like that.”

“Oh. Well. Well, see—you see, you put something out in front of somebody and see how they react. As a way of finding out what they are.”

Paul nodded. He’d only been interested in how it worked.

“Don’t you like women at all?” was the next thing he wanted to know.

“I wouldn’t put it like that,” Tim said.

“I’m not putting it down, you understand. Was it something that went wrong with a woman? Or have you always been that way?”

“It’s my nature,” Tim told him. “It’s what I am.”

From that point on though he could see there would be no getting through to him at all. Still there was the actual business of getting him out the door, Paul wanting to recount some incidents that had happened to him hitchhiking in the desert in Utah and Nevada, and then to leave on the note that he was only going to think things over and maybe later on would be back to talk some more, Tim going over to the end of the couch sitting with his knees drawn up, going “I see, yes, that’s right,” and “No, no, that’s all right, no, that’s all right”—until suddenly he just turned and bolted out the door, an abrupt, awkward parting.

For a long time he didn’t make a move, but just sat where he was, on the couch. Paul had been there at the most fifteen, maybe twenty minutes. He’d left the door into the hall a little ajar, and he didn’t think had fully secured the bottom door, either—leaving himself, if only symbolically, a way back in—and Tim knew he ought, as a first step toward putting this whole episode out of his mind, to go down and lock them, but for a long time he didn’t, just sat, his mind empty and lax. He’d been through episodes like this before, situations where he’d supposed too much, where something he’d assumed to be tacit had later been withdrawn, and each time they left him the same way, drained, depleted of all reserves. Unmanned, he thought of it. He told himself that it was only a principle involved here, and not necessarily an indictment of himself personally, or alternately, was only personal, some error of approach, a misstep on his part, that needn’t be read as an entire life judgment, and in any case he’d been honest, had concealed nothing.

Eventually he did go downstairs and locked up, climbed the stairs to the upper floor and undressed and turned down the bed, leaving the light on over the kitchen sink and the stairway light on, in case Paul should come back by looking to see a light, and even after he was in bed was still half listening—keeping alive as long as possible the possibility he might still be back and this cleared up, deferring as long as possible the official start of his unhappiness, on the chance that some of it might slip by him subliminally. He knew what was in store for him now. It was a two- or three-day process, in which he would have to rehearse back through line for line everything that had been said, or might have been said, or might still be said—for fairly early on he recognized that now he would have to start back to practice again, and that raised a whole new series of contingencies and doubts, so that it wasn’t for another full week that he actually went back, and by then Paul had been dead for nine days. He’d run his motorcycle off a turn on a backcountry road the other side of Clydedale, killed instantly. By this time, details had cooled, and interest shifted to more prodigious aspects, such as him having been killed “instantly,” and having been just twenty-two days short of turning twenty-one, so that Tim was never sure afterward how he’d even determined it was that same night it had happened. He was in the locker room getting dressed for practice, and Mike Houser was describing how he’d driven over there the day before on his bike, and the dumpster, it was a dumpster he’d crashed into, wasn’t even set straight but on an angle with the turn, and “if he’d been just fifteen degrees shorter, or fifteen degrees wider coming around there—”

He’d gone out that night in the state he was in and killed himself.

Tim had killed him—and because he thought that first, before he even knew any particulars of the case, always led him afterwards to feel that he could to some measure discount it in his mind.

At the same time he recognized that this was to be an event totally without consequence, that no connection was likely ever to be drawn to himself, that whatever penalties were to be extracted here were to be entirely out of his own mind.

His immediate thought was only to make it through practice, to show nothing, lining up, bowing in, running through warm-ups, having to follow the others to perform the simplest of moves, down the floor and back, a turn and then back, slipping into a lulling of routine, an easing forgetfulness out of which each second he would have to encounter it, and the next second again fresh from the start—this was what shock is, he was thinking, the confrontation with the thing greater than our capacity to absorb it, so that we must re-encounter and re-encounter it full until the quota can be filled; crossing the floor and picking up his bag and down to the showers and out to his car, climbing the stairs to the upper floor, pausing to spread his gi out over the shower rod to dry, to settle down finally into the spot he’d reserved for himself in his mind, on the floor next to the window in the alcove off the bed.

It was nearly dark, only the water tower on top of the next hill and a low flat building next to it that might be either a hospital or a school all that was still distinguishable against the sky. The window swung in, coming between his back and the wall, so that he had to lean in, his forehead against the sidebar of the frame, his hand gripping the sill. The feeling was of things moving very fast all around him, and he had to hold very tight, and keep very still, if he was to keep track of even a fraction of it all.

It was a thing that was unassailable, there was going to be this thing now in his life that he was going to have to deal with, that by its very nature he was going to have no way at all of being able to deal with. It was like a border he was unable to cross, or more properly a territory he was confined to, where no matter what direction he set out in he was unable to go more than a few steps before he was stumbling and faltering.

At some point in his life he’d come to realize that ordinary rules of conduct were inapplicable in his case, and had turned his back on them, wandering off the common path into an antinomian wilderness, a dark wood from which reason was no guide.

After around midnight the street began to quiet, and from then on each occasional arrival and stir along the block took on a disproportionate significance, the night becoming a perpetual series of accusations and alarms. Around four o’clock he went over and lay down on the bed, on his back with his knees drawn up and the heels of his hands pressed into his eyes, until around six, when he went back to the window to watch the water tower and the buildings around it take shape in the morning light, until it was time to get ready for work, and as soon as he returned home that evening returned to that same spot, to the window, giving himself over to a schedule of remorse, to certain designated postures and hours of the day (so much so that after three or four days the bar of the windowframe had printed a permanent crease across his forehead, and several people remarked on it), giving himself over, almost unwittingly, to endurance, to recovery, to—as he came increasingly to feel it—a blunting, a smoothing over, a compromise, cutting himself off from his ordinary ties and obligations and noting, not for the first time, how easy it is to lapse into the background, how widely our lives may veer and nobody even notice.

One of the curious aspects of the thing for him was a peripheral sharpening—of vision, feeling—for the play of light on the bricks of the sidestreet below, for subtle variations in the changing aspect of the water tower against the sky, as if all the emotion were being squeezed out around the edges. At work he was more deliberate, more painstaking, his judgments surer and more rapidly formed, at practice (for through all of this he continued diligently to attend practice) he felt himself coming nearer the stance, his concentration sharper, his endurance lengthened. After a week or ten days had gone by, he hadn’t so much assimilated as exhausted the feeling, and from then on had to be especially on guard against some casual reference to it slipping out in conversation. At night he encountered it in grossly literal symbolizations in his dreams, giant pointing fingers and crowds that turned their backs on him in the street.

And at times a bitter hilarity seized him—for what was he to think, finally, that so repugnant was his love that even the thought of it was enough to drive strong men to their deaths?

One night as he was coming down the steps after practice, he heard Burger King, one of the St. Vincent brownbelts, talking about going down to Tantoni’s with Paul after practice and shooting burners, more of an intonation than any actual remark, but enough to send him on a chance to Ed Able.

He said, “That’s a little unusual, isn’t it, a blackbelt and a drinker?”—and saw from the response the extent to which this was true.

“There was never anyone more dedicated than Paul Hough,” Ed Able told him. “Paul and I used to live on Frew Street together, and three or four in the morning sometimes, if we couldn’t get to sleep, we’d get up and do two or three hundred front kicks together—”

After that Tim started sorting back through again, certain inconsistencies he’d let slip by him before, those five-hundred-mile-every-weekend drives, and the strange intensity of his whole style. So maybe their paths had been more than crossed that evening after all. If so, it wouldn’t be the first time he’d borne the burden of another man’s demon.

Those three and four a.m. kicking sessions were especially revealing, the two of them tossing on their respective pillows. Hey, Ed. Huhh? Hey, wanna do some front kicks?

After a while he began to feel even angry over it, seeing that whatever the case, it was going to have its change on him anyway, coming in the end to feel, as he had on so many occasions earlier in his life, himself the victim of the affair.

He was lying downstairs on the couch, his arms hanging back over the arm. There had been a shower of sunspots playing over the top of the coffee table and the back of the couch when he first lay down, but now, though an impression of daylight was still hanging in the air, all around the surfaces of the room were black. He scooped up his wallet and keys, turned over some papers that had been lying out on the coffee table—the buzzer sounded twice more before he could reach the bottom of the stairs. He pulled aside the curtain, and saw Esther Hardy standing outside. She had moved a couple of steps back from the door and was looking away to one side. She’d never been here before, and he hadn’t even known she had known where he lived, but different times they’d talked, and a couple of times had gone out to eat with some other people after practice, and he wasn’t entirely surprised to find her here now.

“I didn’t see any light on, I was afraid you probably weren’t going to be here.”

“Oh, no, no, not at all, in fact I’m glad you rang, I sleep this early and then I can’t get any sleep later on. Can I offer you something? I have wine, I could heat water for instant coffee or tea, I have apple juice, grapefruit juice.”

“No, just apple juice’s fine for me.”

First she had to go around and comment on everything. She had a wide, bright, wondering gaze, and listened carefully to everything that was said to her. A bit of this came over as slow-wittedness, a kind of warrior pose—the buffoon manqué—the male counterpart of which he’d encountered various times in the past. She was wearing loose pleated pants, belled all the way up like a gi, and a loose sleeveless sweater. A narrow stripe of suntan ran the length of the back of her arms, arms that were long and uniformly thin, the wrists disconcertingly frail. Her hair was parted down the center and pinned behind the ears in a practical style, emphasizing still more the wideness and directness of her gaze. She was right to emphasize the eyes, they were fine, clear, untroubled eyes, a pale gray with tiny chips of amber and deeper gray sprinkled around the pupils.

She sat on a low hassock, smiling and rolling a glass of apple juice on her knee.

“So, and you live all alone here?”

“Oh, yes, all alone.”

“That must get lonely sometimes, I imagine you’d get very lonely here sometimes.”

“Oh, well, but you know everybody’s got to find their own way.”

She nodded, examined something on her left, something on her right.

She said, “You know, I’ve been watching you lately at practice.”

“Oh? You think I show any future?”

She had to think a minute about that.

“You’re not bad. There are ways you could be very good. There are things you have that you could build on.”

He’d found on these occasions that a direct declaration is always best, that the less angling is done early on, the better chances later for an accommodation.

He said, “You know, I probably ought to tell you, I’m strictly one of the guys.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I’m gay.”

She said, “I thought probably you might be. That was one of the things I wanted to find out.”

He waited to see where she would take this now.

“You know, I actually live very close to here, on the top of Castlemaine near Dobbs. I go by here when I’m going to pick up my lumber, though I doubt if you’ve ever noticed me in my van.”

Still he was waiting to see where she was going with this.

“One of the funny things, I felt, one of the things that always stuck out with me about Paul and me in the club, is while we had almost the same history in the club, we started in the same beginner group, and left the club almost at the same time, and were away almost exactly the same time—we even returned with some of the same moves—we were never really friends. Though I always felt there was some special understanding that we had, like there were things about him that I could know that nobody else would ever know, and vice versa.”

In a way he was almost relieved. He’d gone into the kitchen section to put on water or take something out of the refrigerator, but now came back and sat down on the couch facing her, leaning in until his eyes were level with her own.

“I can’t know,” he said to her, “I can’t ever say for certain what extent something I might have said, something he could have interpreted out of anything that happened here might have contributed to what he did that night, but I am certain that nothing I intentionally said, nothing that could have happened here in any way outright figured, on that much I am sure.”

She gazed at him unjudgingly, saying nothing.

“I don’t know to what extent I’m the contributor to, was only the bystander of what was going on inside him, I think in all honesty fairly little. I’ve asked myself the hard questions that I can, and I don’t believe that I am. I don’t in any honesty feel that I am.”

“But you have these doubts,” she said.

“I think I’ll always have doubts, and pay a penalty as high for them as if I were to be sure. But I don’t believe that I am. As far as I can ever know, as truly as I can ever feel, I don’t believe I am.”

“But still you have these doubts.”

“I have these doubts—if I didn’t have doubts, if I was positive, wouldn’t that tell you something there? What better answer could I give you?”

He didn’t quite catch what she said to that.

“You’re heavier,” she said, “but I’m more advanced. My speed up against your strength. We’re about even matched.”

“You want to fight me?”

“In overcoming me, you overcome my suspicions, and vanish your own doubts. Though neither of us can know the truth, the truth will make one or the other of us stronger.”

A second or two went by in which he tried to gauge just how serious she might be—and in which he wasn’t fully able to repress a smile.

“We’ll go over to the new dojo. I have a key.”

“I just have to get my gi.”

He’d left the gi over the shower rod to dry, and first it would have to be ironed. He didn’t have a proper ironing board, and had to clear off one of the tables to use instead. He never quite got around to putting things away, and there were piles of canned goods and packages of light bulbs scattered over the furniture, and little stacks of magazines and correspondence planted around the floor. She shifted back into the easy chair, relocating onto the floor a pile of new, variously colored socks on top of a crumpled store bag that had been sitting on the arm.

He started rinsing out some dishes, “I don’t like to leave my place unless everything’s just the way I want it.”

She nodded, “I must spend twenty minutes on my bench before I start in the morning, and again before I walk away at night.”

He wiped the sink, did some business with the blinds, straightened out a few things on the shelves, all the time keeping up a running dissertation on the virtues of steam cooking, “It’s only lately I’ve been doing almost all my cooking by steamer. It keeps in flavor and cuts vitamin loss. You know, you can cook more ears if you steam your corn instead of boil it, plus you eliminate the danger of splashing. Or squash, I wash ’em, scrape ’em, slice, sprinkle with a little white pepper and grated parmesan cheese. And string beans. And dry fruit—you can save the liquid for a brew with a little brown sugar and powdered cloves.”

She nodded, taking it all in, showing no impatience. She was giving her evening to this.

“How do you feel about women, then?” she finally asked.

“Women, then?”

“You were saying you go for guys, how do you feel about women, then?”

“I like women.” He came back over and sat on the couch. “I don’t dislike women, or resent women. I don’t see myself in any kind of competition with a woman. I think I have an understanding of the kind of conflicts a woman has to deal with, conflicts that probably she is prepared more efficiently to resolve.”

“And have you always felt like this? Was there ever a—”

“Actually,” Tim said, “actually I think it’s the thing I lack that I crave, the essence of a man. Something of a transubstantiation idea in that for sure. In a way, I think it’s a way of making myself more a man.” The forthrightness of this he could see was going a long way toward turning her around, and he wasn’t able to resist adding: “Actually, I think it’s probably even more quantitative than that, a certain quota—a certain yardage I feel I have to cover each month.”

It took her a second or two for the implications of this to begin to settle in, and then he could feel her straightening up in her chair; he could see that as usual he would be paying high dividends for scoring these points. Now she was only waiting for him. After a couple of more minutes of stalling, he gathered up his gi and stuffed it into his bag, and said, “All set!”

Her van was parked out front, a big, anonymous looking Dodge van painted telephone-truck green. She opened up the back for him to see inside—a complete living unit, kitchenette, bunk bed, a table with two fold-down chairs, the joints so painstakingly worked they seemed to be budding from the grain. “This has two burners, this is insulated but not refrigerated, I believe if you’re going to be more than two days away from processed foods, you’d best be prepared to live off the land, this folds down, this opens out.” Fire extinguisher, flares, tools and sundries behind the side panels, blankets, towels, and clothing in tight tubular bundles in back of the ceiling slats—“for added insulation”—a drop-down ironing board that locked into a slot on the back of one of the chairs, even a tiny aquarium built into one wall, all surprisingly frilly and feminine, the bedspread, curtains, and tablecloth a matched gingham check. Her manner, too, was softer now, more easygoing. He realized she’d taken all that business upstairs as confessional, and this was her way of returning it.

“I’ll drive over, you can follow me.”

The new dojo was inside Singer Oval, a four-lane traffic bypass set down around the old east-end shopping district, marooning it from access on every side. After dark it was all but deserted in here, except for an occasional bewildered derelict and a few scattered clumps of bus transfers, grouped tight together like vigils, the long rows of darkened shops, the broad stretches of mall paving, the three churches on one intersection with the rust-concept fountain in the middle, lighted by special crime-deterrent lamps, having the overclarification of a stage set, on which every actual encounter was made muddled and scary.

The dojo was above a florist’s, in a tall green frame building that connected at the rear with a lower, longer gray-shingled building with a slanted roof and no windows. She let them in by a door almost at the end of the other building, leading the way up a steep flight of stairs and down a narrow hallway, and then up four more steps to another locked door, not putting on any lights—“There’ll be enough light from the windows once we get inside to see by.” It occurred to him she must come here regularly, probably every night like this.

They came in the back way, picking their way down a long hallway past stacks of plasterboard and big cans of something, past a couple of small offices and two smaller practice rooms that had been partitioned out of a larger space, through a curtained doorway into the dojo proper, a wide, high-ceilinged room with bare varnished floors and rows of high windows across the left and front walls, that let in, as promised, plenty of light to maneuver by. Around the sides of the room were areas of deep shadow, a pair of hanging ferns silhouetted above the sloping line of the partition, the right wall alternating mirrors with exercise bars. The floorboards were edged with fine lines of light, but inside the mirrors the floor was a solid dark space, blacker than black.

She put her bag down next to the partition and started undressing, fragments of silhouetted elbow and hunched-up back popping out and being quickly reabsorbed back into the darkness behind her. He took his bag over to the end of the row of mirrors and set it down. As she reached her arms back into her jacket, the light caught a bright keyboard of ribs, a narrow, practically flat chest. She was too thin, too tall, her center of gravity would be high, probably too high.

He’d just gotten a new gi, and it hadn’t quite shrunk down yet. The belt was one of these new wear-resistant fabrics that appeared to be knot-resistant as well.

She walked out to the middle of the floor, stretched and bent, brought her elbows then her head to the floor, tried a few practice kicks. He wandered around for a while, as if hunting for just the right place, pushed up onto tiptoes a couple of times, then bent down, brushing his knuckles to the floor.

“We bow in.”

They faced each other and brought their feet together, bowing from the waist.

“Ra.”

“Ra.”

They started circling, easing in and out of stance, moving in a few steps, and then back, keeping always just a step or two outside of striking range, a quick thrust in, and then quickly back, in, and back, the slant of the partition, the silhouettes of the two hanging plants, the left wall of windows passing behind her, then the front wall, the right wall of mirrors, the curtained doorway, and back around to the partition again, the lower of the two plants momentarily situated behind her head like a fantastical bonnet—and it came as a distinct surprise as the first blow struck him, a quick jab to the solar plexus, and immediately she was back and out and circling, hips low, body turned, offering the narrowest possible target of retaliation.

He’d never been hit before. At practice the standard was to deliver the blow with maximum force to a point just short of contact. The two times he’d ever hit anyone himself, one time the Sominex wholly by accident, and once Ed Able in free spar after he’d had his guard down, he’d been led to feel it was tantamount to disgrace, fully half of the club coming up to him afterward to assure him he needn’t feel bad about it. That blow was followed immediately by another a little lower, both of them quick, deliberate lunge punches.

He’d been knocked out of stance and taken a couple of steps to the side, and as she came in again he continued his sideways movement another step or two, caught hold of her wrist and spun her around, as he let go giving her a side-thrust kick to the rump that sent her sprawling.

Then he went over and tried a technique that Emil had shown them one time, offering her a hand up saying, “Hey, you know you could hurt yourself doing that,” and making a joke out of it. But either he’d kicked her too hard, or, as he was beginning more and more to suspect, she was just void of any sense of humor, because she came up with a side-snap kick to the groin that he just barely blocked, followed by a hard slap across the face.

Immediately she was back and out, circling, her eyes fixed on his—coming immediately back in with another lunge punch. He came up with a counterpunch, more a block than punch, that stopped just short of her nose.

“Don’t hold back. Don’t be holding back.”

She moved in with another slap across the other side of his face, then quickly back and out, circled half around, and then back, her shield arm loose and bobbing, as if teasing an invisible line.

“Come on. Come on.”

Her movements were more economical now—as he made a thrust she moved only a single step aside, quickly returning in with another slap to the other side of his face, then taking only a step or two back, her breathing controlled, her eyes never varying from his own.

“Come on, come on.”

A wearied melancholy began to spread over him, his face burning and streaming sweat, his eyes tearing. He moved toward the center of the floor—twice again she was in, with another slap and then a lunge punch, blows he more acknowledged than fended—taking a position at the center of the floor facing the left wall of windows, his head tilted back, his arms slack at his sides. He could never know if this punishment was merited, but perhaps the only way to lift himself of the burden of it was to endure it to the full.

“Come on.”

He fixed his eyes on the second window from the front, on one of the lower spires of the nearer of the two churches, that had a crescent of rust-sculpture superimposed over its lower half.

“You have to fight me, come on.”

She hit him with a side-thrust kick to the right buttock, knocking him momentarily out of stance. He repositioned his legs a little wider apart, knees slightly bent.

“You have to fight me, you have to fight me.”

She gave him another side-thrust kick hard as she could directly from behind, this time failing to budge him, and then circled around front, pantomiming blows to his face, then gave him several hard slaps back and forth across his face, and then a sharp back-knuckle strike to each nipple that made his gi crack.

“Come on, you have to fight me, come on, you have to fight me.”

At a certain point he began to feel her bringing her anger under control. She was in back of him, had been aiming little nip-kicks at his buttocks and the backs of his thighs, and then for a minute or two there was a gradual slowing down, a barely discernible slackening of blows, and after that he could feel a pattern beginning to develop. She began to scatter her blows, aiming higher, to the shoulders and upper arms, tracing a jersey line along his collarbone, working exclusively with side-snap and roundhouse kicks now, quick, sharp strikes with the stinging edge of the foot, moving around his body in a generally counterclockwise and downward progression to a point just below the knees, a blow to the right side counterbalanced a minute or two later by one to the left, one to the shoulder complemented a few blows later by one to the wrist or hip on the other side. He saw she was going to cover his whole body with blows. Nothing less than that would satisfy her now.

After several minutes of this his entire body was stinging and burning, exquisitely sensitized, radiating specific layers of heat like a thermographic portrait. He began where he could feel precisely where the next blow would fall, could feel her circulating in the darkness, and the exact spot where she would emerge, could feel the spot where the blow would strike, cooling in anticipation, and the corresponding part of her body glowing as she began to make her move, as if she were in orbit, assembling in slow rotation around him.

An opposite succession of shapes, the curtained doorway, the wall of mirrors, the two walls of windows passed behind her, the slant of the partition, her feet gathering in the little threads of light that lined the floorboards, and as she stepped back dispensing them out again, in and back, the two of them closer and then back, as if trying to fit into a single outline, into a mutual stance.

There was a moment’s awkwardness when they first went to touch, where they had to figure out how first to touch, and what they did was to grab elbows and give a shake, and she laughed, for which he was grateful, his prime fear at this point being of it proving all too ethereal. He’d lost his belt and she had shed her jacket somewhere along the way, and for the first time he noticed how flushed she was, her face and neck streaked with sweat.

They took turns holding each other’s shoulder as they stepped out of their gi’s. Then they had to work out a position where neither of them would be dominant, that is to say, neither one of them subordinated, trying it first on their side, but they weren’t able to work their legs out that way, then sitting up face to face—while he could feel the momentum siphoning off, the moment drifting off, and he turned her onto her back and quickly mounted her, fucking her and fucking her and fucking her until the point was effectively moot.

She exuded a faint workmanly odor, that he’d previously associated exclusively as a masculine odor, and there was a certain sense—a certain lack of rhythm in the frenzied parts, where she had the feel of a man. As she turned over on top of him, her arms braced behind his head, breasts pulled almost flat against her chest, her hips taut and almost fleshless under his hands, he could almost imagine her a boy—but they were beyond that now, beyond differences now, it could as easily be her inside him now.

At one point he heard her speak and lifting his head thought he could hear her counting, “Ich… nee…” and felt the laughter welling up, but he suppressed that, pushed beyond that, out into a lengthening clarity where each isolatable shape in the room lay on a separate plane, each at an assigned distance with an absolute value from the next, fanning out in a backward progression counterclockwise around the room. Just as he was beginning to settle into that feeling, he felt himself start to draw over—pulled back, but a moment too late, so that he experienced the moment as a stumble and a loss. She urged him on, responding with a reserve of energy that he wouldn’t have expected, that was hardly sexual—for she made no effort to pretend that this was her moment, too—drawing him closer, tighter, every part of her body that touched his body in motion, no motion at all required of him, drawing him down to a refinement of stillness where even pleasure seemed to lie in suspension.

At the peak, the very sweetest moment, she bent her head and lightly touched her lips to his eyelid, the corner of his mouth, the side of his nose.

Then for a long time they just lay, he on his back with her lying half on top of him, her head inside the crook of his neck. The skin across the top of his thigh was pinched up where she was sliding off him, and her wrist had gotten wedged up under his chin, but he focused on the discomfort of that as a way of fixing the moment, his head back, his eyes open, empty of any motive or idea.

Then gradually over the space of a minute or two, as in these speed-action films where the figure of Adam is formed out of bare dust, or a beautiful woman reverts to a wrinkled crone, the different sections of the room began to align themselves, and without either of them having moved, he could begin to distinguish her body from his own. Then she stirred, lifting up to readjust the position of her leg, and pushed back her hair. He’d gotten his ankle tangled up in one of the gi’s. He tried to shake it loose, then bent down to free it, and when he lay back again, the two of them side by side now, he could feel them matching breaths, aware now of the rhythm and tone of her breathing.

Then they were both up—

“Did you see a—”

“Did you try over by the—”

His whole head and chest were radiating and tender like a sunburn. He’d wear this evening’s entertainments for a few days to come. He wandered out into the hallway to look for a water fountain, and found a utility sink in one of the closets, letting his head and arms hang under the faucet, and then drip for a minute or two, and when he came back, she’d finished dressing and packing her gi into her bag. Seeing him standing there, she gave him a smile, an easy, contented smile, and it occurred to him, for the first time in a number of minutes, that for her all of this had been a combat, and that in her mind she’d probably won. He stood for a moment in the doorway trying to gauge the extent to which this was true, and to what extent it mattered to him.

“You see,” she said as they were coming down the stairs, “it’s just a matter of finding your own way of doing it.”

He had just been thinking that if this was the only way he could do it, that only proved the impracticality of doing it at all.

They came out the front way—there was a push bar on the front door that locked automatically behind you—and just as they were stepping out the door there was a rush and bustle from around the corner. Instinctively they took a step back and began to lower into stance, their shield arm raising—but it was only a couple of black kids, a boyfriend chasing his girlfriend, she pumping high-kneed and shrieking over her shoulder, he loping comically along behind, down the block and around the next corner. They looked at each other and laughed, a little embarrassed, and the easing up of that carried them the rest of the way down the block, but he could see an uncertain moment coming up here when they reached the cars and it came time to separate. But as they came around the corner—swinging wide, in case any vagrant should be lurking around the other side—he decided maybe not. Across the street, through a narrow gap in a low line of hedges, the van and car sat parked, in the nearest, lightest section of the lot, parked two or three spaces apart, so that even as they approached them their paths were diverging, and from here it was only a matter of a few more steps, a smile perhaps, a word or two, and then good-night.