Ordinary Decent Criminals

by Lionel Shriver

  “Sorry?”

  “The barest lisp. I never thought about it before.” Estrin pointed at the magazine, cross-legged on the bed. “This poem. It sounds amazingly like you.”

  “You don’t say?” Farrell took the Fortnight and read down the page:

  TWO VOICES

  You go to church, love,

  but your speech swells with a salacious underbelly,

  fingering, dirty; your man the heretic

  dislikes naming parts of the body.

  On the whole he sounds abnormally polite.

  Your suggestions are guttural, up in my ear;

  your man’s, sibilant—

  he has the barest lisp,

  which no one seems to notice

  but me. Your questions pitch in major,

  his in minor key.

  Your invitations reach, grip,

  and pull me in, hands wrapping the back of my neck;

  your man’s drift off, smoke from a chimney,

  the Mournes sinking to mist.

  In the arches of your chest,

  vowels echo in the big Protestant sanctuary

  of a good living congregation.

  Yet for all your man’s haranguing,

  the preaching of the unconverted,

  emphasis with wine so spit flies,

  his i’s remain diffident, e’s whispered secrets

  between pews at Mass.

  Your consonants dig in,

  the heels of heavy boots;

  his are light-footed

  and leave no print.

  You will explain the difference

  as between confidence and uncertainty.

  For me the difference is shape:

  you aim straight out.

  So much of your man dips back in again—

  he talks while he inhales.

  He curves forward and withdraws,

  to pierce himself with s’s,

  corkscrew. Most of all you want to know

  why I care—shape? I lie by an arrow.

  I curl by a spiral prick.

  I ask which is better designed

  to uncork me.

  Roisin St. Clair, 1988

  “Don’t see it.” He tossed it on the spread.

  “Right. You’re the one who hears his voice on the radio and ‘feels nothing.’ I guess you feel nothing when you read about it, too.”

  “I don’t think about myself as much as you do. I’m not interested.”

  “Who’s Roisin St. Clair?”

  “Haven’t a clue,” said Farrell. And that was the truth.

  Estrin kept a regular regimen: alternate days she weight-trained; on the others, she ran ten miles. She was allowed one day off a week she did not always take.

  There were variations. While in top form she could average a 6:35 mile, her time would inch up or down and served as an interesting barometer: slower, she could be sure of getting a cold, or she was depressed. Estrin was rarely certain when she was depressed and had to check her watch, just as some people will to confirm it’s nighttime when others can simply notice it’s dark.

  Lately her time was slow.

  Further, while the amount of weight she pressed would edge up through the season, with those inexplicable spurts and plateaus characteristic to the sport, her speed and form varied a fair bit: the rapidity with which she brisked from one station to another, the crispness of her pull, the grace with which the slabs of iron rose and fell on the Multigym. These daily differences gave each workout a color, her life an emotional profile—the bench press was her analyst’s couch.

  Over the years, the nature of the regimen had also varied. Some winters she’d swim, mix in wind surfing or sculling, but that there was a regimen of some kind, and a vigorous, even fanatic one, had not changed since her early teens. As a result, even when she’d first gotten her period it was irregular and rare, and since fifteen she’d taken a progesterone supplement to menstruate.

  Like Farrell, she was not a team player. She would never enter organized marathons, weight competitions, or swim meets. She would not even play doubles tennis. And while she preferred racket sports to the drearier lap and clang of more isolated disciplines, she could never rely on squash because she could never rely on another person.

  It had been almost four years now since Estrin had been back to the States, and one of the ugly revelations of that last visit had been the athletic revolution overtaking her country, obsession with fitness now demoted from an element of personal to national character. Estrin ran in Philadelphia to find a splatter of purple joggers suddenly underfoot, like droppings. Worse yet, a gaggle of female weight lifters in pink tights had roosted in her local gym, so unsettling the atmosphere that she switched to swimming that season, before she hopped a plane for Israel and left the whole unpleasantness behind altogether.

  For back when she was thirteen, Estrin had been looping the football field when the rest of the junior high was bingeing fish fingers. She began weight-training at twenty with her first motorbike, needing upper body strength to control the machine. She’d been the only woman in her university weight room, and the men were resentful. It took months to win them over, until, eyeing her diligence from a station away, they granted her a grudging respect—the boys even seemed a bit proud of her by the time she left. The point being, she had not picked up weights from admiring Cher plug Jack La Lanne. Then, Estrin figured this happened to eccentrics in the States all the time: suddenly the entire country is playing Go, wearing your Kenyan kikoi, collecting Fiesta ware; you and your innocent, solitary interest in kayaking is suddenly engulfed by 250 million people doing nothing else. You’re on your yearly trip down the Colorado, but this summer there are collisions with slick, expensive shells, problems with campsites. So do you quit? Do you allow these nouveau kayakers to crowd you out of a hobby you’ve nurtured since you were ten? That was America: it would swallow you. Because how could an obscure thirty-two-year-old traveler point to an entire country and claim, “You don’t understand! They’re imitating me!”

  So Estrin decided this was one more test. Tolerantly, she would allow her culture to borrow her fixations, confident that in the long run it would give them back. She would wait the country out, sharing, in her maturity, her weight rooms with the girls who read magazines. Sooner or later an article would tell them to do something else and she’d have the place to herself again.

  For Estrin could not afford to give up athletics out of any transitory rebellion. She did not know quite why she worked her body so hard, but she did know sport was a linchpin of sorts, and if it was ever pulled, every discipline in her life would collapse.

  Because Estrin might have quit men, countries, and her entire family, but never a ten-mile run. Once tied, the battered gray shoes took over. Sometimes the shoes ran ahead. Though inside she might feel tired, a separate energy burned from underneath her. It seems she was blessed or burdened with a body that would exhaust itself well after Estrin herself; the body would overtake and outlast her. Aging to herself by the day, it mocked her in the mirror with its sleekness and impatience. Sacked out with a whiskey late at night, she would puzzle at the withers twitching her lap. For while Estrin felt the imminent approach of some interior end point, the dumb animal was romping mindlessly on. She wondered what it would be like in the years to come, trapped in this horsy, quick, restless creature, dragged from corner to corner like a surly aunt on holiday, taken touring the town when she would rather stay by the fire and drink.

  However, much as she might relate to her own body as a pet, it was a beloved pet, and continent to continent she depended upon its constancy, its recognizable Braille rippling under her fingertips, its bravery in bad weather, and whatever it was that took over the knotted shoes and would not relinquish until the gate closed back behind them over an hour later, she suspected this was the real Estrin Lancaster, what Farrell would claim you had no business having a relationship to because it was you. Estrin might have her bad days, or even bad whole
countries, but as long as the animal did not falter, finished its course, and never skipped a station in the weight room, the stars did not realign, the earth might tremble but never shook her off the planet altogether. Estrin would accuse herself of petty vanity if it weren’t something more reverential, even more religious than that, for an eclipse of her calves would surely plunge her into black, heathen despair.

  I suppose raising a barbell or two is one of the few things you’ve actually accomplished.” Dial tone.

  Estrin turned red, rammed a musty towel in her pack, remembered shampoo. This was the story now: baiting hostility sandwiched with florid romance, neither of which seemed true. Last week he’d given her a book on the Soviet Union. She was not sure which of them he was trying to punish.

  Estrin had chosen two hours in the gym over an increasingly rare dinner with that man. He understood perfectly well why she couldn’t skip weights, and that was what made him so angry: how dare any girl be as inflexible as he was.

  Today there was something curiously unpersuasive about her preparations.

  Likewise, when she marched through reception, dressed brusquely, and pocketed her locker key down the hall, Estrin felt papery. She had the nagging feeling of having forgotten something; though she’d dutifully remembered soap, socks, ID, she seemed to have forgotten why she was here.

  Ordinarily the Queen’s weight room felt homey, though it would hardly strike strangers so: neon glaring from two stories high. Rubber tiles flapped on corners, paint chipped from free weights. Handles were missing on the Multigym, and there were never enough cotter pins. Much equipment was jury-rigged, bars bent, benches propped with two-by-fours. The aluminum mirror made you look fat. Men threaded aimlessly between dilapidated stations with no urgency or routine. As weight rooms went, this one was not serious. But Estrin enjoyed the atmosphere here, haggard and outmoded, for since the Green Door, she was refining a taste for the second-rate.

  The mumble was marked with staccato clicks and clangs, sentences with excessive punctuation; barbells pounded the floor as the overambitious couldn’t quite make the press. Usually Estrin found this funny. Tonight it jangled her nerves.

  Officiously, Estrin adjusted the sit-ups board to maximum tilt. She hooked her toes under the padded rod and rested her fingers ever so lightly on her temples, to begin fifty fast, tight tucks. With sit-ups, prefer speed to repetition, and never let up tension until the conclusion of the set.

  But when Estrin rose to her knees, her bluff was called: her eyes widened; the curl slowed, her elbows trembled. When had this ever been so difficult? Ludicrous; she began every workout this way, three times a week, and she’d been at this tilt for a month now. Estrin coaxed herself with normalcy, This is what you are, this is what you always do, without this you are someone else, this is important, and while all she got back was So? Why? Be someone else, then; I’m not sure this is important, she did rouse herself through forty-nine.

  Forty-nine. Estrin looked around her, surprised. Why was the room still upside down? Her toes lost their grip, and she slid toward the floor.

  No major lapse. Forty-nine, fifty, big deal—but that was the point. How hard could it have been to do one more? And very well, it didn’t make any muscular difference, except Estrin Lancaster was a stickler, and if she went for fifty she did fifty, not one shy.

  So the next set, more onerous than the first, she did fifty—a nervous fifty, a hysterical fifty; and on the third determined to do fifty-one.

  She did not. It was fifty and again the stop, so when she clambered off by the aluminum, she glimpsed the bloated image of a complete stranger.

  Estrin shambled to the Multigym with her head at a tilt. There was an explanation. Adjust a few screws in the head, old girl, a bit of tinkering and you’re right as rain. But she slipped the pin in at 24 kilos, feeling a complete fake, and again the first shoulder press was rude. The weight rose with no enthusiasm and would even have mocked her if the nature of the Multigym had not been essentially stoic.

  Beautifully, exquisitely stoic; Estrin had always admired the venerable contraption. She liked to picture it square and mute in this room after hours, austere in the darkness, comfortable in quiet, with no need to lift itself. Masses of metal, like rock, exude a great stillness despite how you might force them to move, and Estrin felt she was violating the eloquence of the iron today by provoking it to squeal absurdly up and down.

  At the station next to her, a scrawny student was wrenching at the seated cable row with far more kilos than he could handle, not exercising his lats at all but his lower back. A sorry performance at which Estrin would ordinarily crack a private smile, but tonight she glowered. Turkeys did not understand the first principle of lifting: Form over Weight. In fact, Estrin had often tried to work this paternoster into a wisdom of wider applications. That it was better to do small things well than big things badly was too mundane, for the insight was grander than that: Form over Weight—maybe best left alone, majestic in its obscurity.

  However, during the next two exercises she watched her own form crumble. Over the bench press, the bar wobbled. Her preacher’s curls were stingy. And the evidence was clear. Ordinarily by now, her veins would have risen, her arms hanging short like a gorilla’s; her wrists would have pumped with blood until her watchband cut circulation to her hand, her skin taut as the rubber of a water baby. But tonight her watch was perfectly comfortable. The veins, if anything, had crawled back to the bone. Her skin was white and dry.

  It was not until the wide-grip pull-downs, though, that Estrin began to confess this was not simply an off day. Help me, she implored, and to whom? Oh nuts, I am not halfway through. She kneeled on the mat and crossed her ankles behind her, exhaling as she pulled the bar to the back of her neck, but while she had always rather relished the implicit supplication of the position, in the past she had knelt and bowed her head to grace, to power, to concentration, to excellence, to lifting more and more weight with all the more impeccable form, to the Great Protestant God of Dissatisfaction, tonight she was Catholic, confessional: Forgive me, Father, for I have sacrificed, for nothing. Hours and hours I have entered this room to spend the precious energy of my life for nothing. To raise iron and not children or standards or even roof beams, metal which will fall back to the floor when I am gone. Father, I run for nothing. I run toward nothing. I have only understood flight, I have never run to anyone’s arms. Father, sometimes I’m sick and still won’t stop running, and I shit myself. Farrell did, too, but he was trying to stop people from murdering each other, and I shit myself for nothing. I have caught myself on, Father, as they say in Belfast. I lift weight without mass.

  The iron bullion clanged back to the stack from three feet up the cable. The entire room paused in its reverberation and turned to the American. She was still on her knees, rubbing her hands; the bar swayed crazily over her head. They watched as one of their regulars stumbled to her feet. Usually Estrin tossed her damp hair from her face and bounded from the room with a salute, joking about having earned her pint. Tonight she looked down. She scuffled. Wasn’t the wee Yank, someone commented, a bit poorly?

  The cap was off the Bush before the coat was off her back.

  “When you pick up that glass, what are you reaching for?” Estrin had once asked Farrell. “Peace? Excitement? Death?”

  “Effect,” he considered. “Of what kind? Well, that hardly matters.”

  So in its expression of nonspecific desire, drinking was almost abstract. It struck her that the cult of alcohol was not all bad. Its belief in resort was still a faith of sorts. Estrin poured another short. Convinced there was no comfort, she wouldn’t bother.

  Distractedly, Estrin crumbled soda bread. The loaf was stale, and somehow this cinched finishing the whole hunk. Eating the bread made her feel bad. That was the idea.

  Estrin moved on to the raspberry preserve, scooping it out by the fingerful, toward the bottom of the jar having some difficulty with her knuckles jamming around the neck; she lic
ked them clean. The more reasonable approach to these foods would have been to spread the raspberry on the bread, but that would have been civilized indulgence and this was abuse.

  Though in a small kitchen, Estrin pipped from counter to sink like a dried pea in a Lambeg drum. She killed the Horlicks malt powder, but scrounged little else—dry muesli; the plain flour took considerable swill. Trouble was, no fudge brownies lurked in her cabinets. In groceries, Estrin blinkered past butter icing to carrots. So she poked at treacle and hoisin sauce straight from the tins, the combination gratifyingly horrific. Until finally she remembered the Stilton cowering in the hydrator.

  Unwrapped, the cheese wafted and drove Estrin back: an ambivalent food. There was something repulsive about Stilton—its rind of festering blue-green and weak pink, so redolent of decay; its smooth, rich meat so sickly sweet, but veined with corruption, edibly spoiled. Stilton is insoluble, opaque. She could never eat enough of the cheese because she didn’t understand it. She sliced it surgically with a sharp knife into thin specimens, laboratory slides. Every slab disturbed her more than the last, which ensured she cut the next. There was something wrong with Stilton and there was something wrong with a taste for it and there was something wrong with Estrin, so Stilton was the ideal food. Bridging liking and not-liking, the flavor suggested revulsion was a form of appeal. She finished the cheese.

  Estrin opened the refrigerator three more times. A piece of lemon pickle gave her acid indigestion. She was still hungry. She would stay hungry, too. Standing at the sink spooning malted milk was like trying to fill one hole by filling another, so that every time she looked at the hole she wanted plugged, it was as empty as before. What’s interesting is that knowing full well that the malted milk was landing in the wrong hole did not stop her from shoveling it in anyway, because when afflicted with this gnawing emptiness, you have to do something, even if it is wrong.

  Confused, Estrin wandered to the living room. It was hopelessly early, only seven o’clock. The kitchen safari had taken, maybe, twenty minutes. While she could limp through a light dinner with Farrell from 8 p.m. to closing, it was possible to consume three or four thousand calories in a quarter of an hour. How much your whole life was, as Farrell would say, trappings.