A tug plowed by, heading south, upriver, tight and rolling and muscular, cocky as a rooster. Its engine throbbed but the stink of diesel was whipped away by the breeze. Silver flashed in its wake. Salmon.
In the other direction, downriver, near the geese, more movement made me turn.
“Look,” I said, and she lifted her head.
A green-backed heron came in to land, like an inexpertly piloted Cessna. She sat up. “If a stunter dived that badly she’d be fired.”
“Not as graceful as you,” I agreed. “I watched Tantalus.”
“That old thing?” But she sounded pleased.
“You dive like a cormorant.”
She smiled but didn’t say anything. The wind began to pick up. Another heron slipped and slid through the air and splashed tail- and feetfirst into the shallows right in front of me. It plunged its ugly, ancient-looking beak into the opaque water but missed whatever it had been after. Disgusted, it took off again, flapped heroically for a moment, and finally hauled itself into the air, legs dangling.
“I had no idea they were so clumsy. And small. It was a heron, right? I always thought they were bigger.”
“Great blue herons are big.”
“And what’s that?” She pointed.
“A grebe, I don’t know what kind.” And then I was seeing wildlife everywhere, and naming it for her: a kingfisher, some kind of coot, more fish, a bumblebee humming over the mossy grass, a ladybug snicking its wings in and out as it crawled across the back of the bench. I knew that the shallows would creep with crabs and be bobbled with oysters, that the smell of rot meant that living things grew here and then died. And I knew why people would pay a million dollars for a condo in an industrial district.
Kick slid close again, laid her palm against my cheek. Small, cool hands. I turned. Her eyes were very grey. She leaned in and kissed me. “Sometimes your face looks like something carved a thousand years ago.”
I ran my hands over her shoulders, down her arms, around her waist. The muscles in my thighs and back strained and trembled. She was shaking, too, but although her pupils were big, I realized it was with cold as much as desire. I untied the cardigan knotted around her hips, lifted her with one arm, and pulled the cardigan free with the other. I breathed fast. “Put this on,” I said.
While she pushed her arms into the sleeves and tugged I watched the sky. The clouds had grown denser, firming from Styrofoam to incised stone, subtly colored, chiseled and layered and polished. “It’s beautiful,” I said.
She buttoned with her left hand, laid her right on my thigh. “Isn’t Atlanta like this?”
I shook my head. “In Atlanta, in May, the sky is always blue. Later in summer there are storms in the afternoons, and for an hour or so there are clouds overlaying a sky the color of pink grapefruit, but this . . . it’s like intaglio-cut stone.” I pointed. “There. Mica. And amethyst. Rose quartz. Carnelian, and, look, see that grey? That’s what natural, uncut diamond looks like.”
“Kiss me,” she said.
I did, and I wrapped my hands around her tiny waist, then slid them around the swell of her hips, pulled her to me. Her bottom was warm and luscious. I cradled her cheeks, ran my hands back to her waist, dipped my fingers under her waistband. Our mouths were wide. Another tug hooted.
I looked at the grass, decided there were too many goose droppings, and sighed.
She pulled away, grinning, as though she knew what I was thinking. “Oh, well,” she said, “nice park anyway.”
“Glad you like it.”
“I had no idea it was here. Be nice if it was more private, though.” She laughed to herself as she straightened her clothes.
“There’s a woman called Corning who wants to pave all this over with condos.”
“Will you buy one?”
“No.” She shivered again, and I put my arms around her. “Because I’m not going to let her build them.”
She started kissing me again, then stopped. “What time is it?”
“About four o’clock, I think.”
“Shit. I have a—I have to run.” She kissed me again. “Meet you at the house? Around seven?”
AT AIKIDO, the sensei wasn’t there. Mike was leading the class. It was informal and boisterous. I made people fly, and flew in my turn.
Afterwards, as we swept and wiped the dojo, Mike and Petra separately invited me to the Asian Art Museum to see a new display of Chinese art— Mike in a whatever kind of way, and Petra shyly. I declined but suggested they go together, and managed not to smile at their consternation.
THE HOUSE cooled and darkened. We lay under her duvet. My face hurt from smiling. She butted my hand, like a cat; I stroked her head. There were no lights on in the house, and in the long, northern dusk her hair gleamed, dark and light, layered, sometimes pale and silvery like bamboo pith, sometimes heavy and dark, like freshly split pine. “Wood,” I said. “That’s what your hair reminds me of.”
“You think my hair’s like wood?”
“I love wood.” I rolled onto my stomach and stroked her hair, over and over, rounding over the back of her head, feeling the sleekness, like the oak finial of a three-hundred-year-old baluster that has been polished by twelve generations of hands. Figured oak. That was it, exactly.
She rolled onto her stomach, too, so that we were lying next to each other like eight-year-olds looking over the edge of a cliff. “So you know a lot about wood, and about herons and oysters. You didn’t learn that in the police.”
“I wasn’t always in the police.” And I told her of growing up in Yorkshire and on the fjord, in London and in Oslo, while my mother worked her way up the political and diplomatic ladder. Of my travels in the wild parts of the world, working on my cabin in North Carolina: the trees, the birds, the wood.
“It sounds beautiful,” she said. “My parents had a cabin in the North Cascades. It was hot and dusty—dust everywhere. Jesus. It’s basically a desert out there. But that’s where I learnt to ride. Do you ride?”
“I do.”
“English saddle, though, I bet.”
“That’s how I learnt. But I can ride western.”
“I can ride anything. With or without a saddle.”
I can cook anything. I can ride anything. Simple statements of fact. “Even bulls and broncos?” I stroked the small of her back, very gently, running my palms over the tiny hairs there.
“Anything. When I was a kid, I did stunt riding of things like ostriches and goats and llamas. I’ve ridden elephants and alligators and, once, even a very large dog.”
Her backbone was entirely sheathed in smooth muscle. I ran my fingertips down the soft skin. The slanting light threw fillets of muscle into sharp relief. What Kick was saying suddenly registered, and I paused. “When you were a child?”
“It’s a family thing. My mother did stunts. My uncles do stunts. One of my brothers is a stunt rigger. My sister did makeup. My father, in case you’re wondering, is in trucking. How old were you when you learned to ride?”
“Eight. Or maybe nine.”
Downstairs her phone began to ring.
“Pony or horse?” The machine beeped, and someone with a deep voice started leaving a message.
I thought about it. “Pony, I suppose.”
“You suppose? What was his, or her, name?”
“I haven’t a clue.” The voice stopped and the phone machine beeped again.
“You must remember. That moment when . . . You really don’t remember? ”
“I don’t really remember learning things.” I cast my mind back to being a girl, nine, on a pony on the moors; twelve, my mother and the WAR study; a year or so later in Yorkshire’s West Riding, a horse. “Judy,” I said. “One of my horses was called Judy. When I was twelve or thirteen. She was a hunter. Fifteen hands. Her mane was very pale. A bit like yours.” I ran my hands through her hair. “Yours feels better.” I pushed it away from the back of her neck, which I kissed, then some more, and swung my leg over her so that now
I sat in the small of her back, like a soft saddle.
“Um,” she said. I reached around and took a plump breast in each hand. She groaned and began to move.
LATER, she said, “Let’s eat pizza.”
When she went downstairs to find the number, I wrapped myself in a sheet and stood by the window. Eastwards, the radio towers on Queen Anne Hill blinked with red navigation lights. I heard her taped voice in the background, then the beep and deep voice of the replayed message. The sun was setting on the other side of the house, drenching the western slope. The stairs creaked as she came back up.
“You’re doing that noble statue thing again,” she said. She wrapped her arms around me from behind, rested her head between my shoulder blades. “What’s so interesting?”
I nodded at the hill, at the sunset reflecting from the windows on Queen Anne in the growing dusk. “They look like campfires. Like an army camped in the hills above Troy.”
Her arms were tight. We stood there a long time. I wondered who had left the message.
Eventually, she stirred. “Get dressed,” she said. “It turns out I have an early appointment tomorrow, so I’m going to kick you out after we’ve had pizza.” She smiled, but it was brief and distracted. “We’ll do something tomorrow. ”
“Good.”
“But I don’t know my schedule. I’ll call you.”
LESSON 9
APRIL. OUTSIDE, NUTHATCHES SANG AND AZALEAS BLAZED ON EVERY LAWN. INSIDE, we all sat on the scratchy blue carpet that smelled less new now, and ten women stared at their copy of the list of general pointers, specific dos and don’ts and miscellaneous hints I’d given them the week before Lake Lanier.
I knew the list. I looked at the women. We’d had a week of solid sunshine since I’d seen them in their bathing suits. A few—Suze, Therese, Nina—were showing the first hint of the gilding common to middle-class Atlanta white women in summer. Many were in short sleeves. Sandra wore short sleeves for the first time, too; things must be going through one of those periodic honeymoon periods at home. She felt me looking at her— she had the sensitivity of a prey animal—and looked back. Her eyes did that brilliant shining thing, trying to share some message that couldn’t be put into words, and I made a mental note to visit Diane at the Domestic Abuse Alliance sometime in the next couple of weeks and chat. From my early days in uniform I knew that simply asking Sandra would send her scuttering back into her burrow, but whatever she was trying to tell me was getting more urgent.
“I’d like to say a word about appropriate clothing. This carpet will take the skin off your knees and elbows when you fall. Soon we’ll be trying out some moves where you will be making contact with the floor. From now on I’d advise long sleeves and long pants. Also, from next week, I’d like us all to be working in bare feet.”
Those who worried about their feet would now have a week to take care of them before exposing them to the world. “Before we set the papers aside, are there any questions?” Shuffling of papers. Silence. Two months ago I would have said the list was entirely self-explanatory, but I had learnt that silence was a bad sign. “Page one, then. The first principle: See them before they see you. Remember the gunfighter metaphor. The Kroger exercise. ”
“Don’t stand and blink in the light,” Jennifer said, fast and loud, in a star pupil voice.
“Yes,” I said. “Don’t draw attention until you know what’s going on. It’s one of the most important maxims on the list. It’s connected to many of the simple dos and don’ts on page two.” Flip, flip of pages. “Take the corner wide. Never get in your car without looking. Don’t walk by large shrubberies—”
“Don’t walk under an overpass!” Jennifer said.
“Yeah, jeez,” Pauletta said, momentarily forgetting her list. “There’s this overpass right by my mother’s that I park near and walk under every day. And these big-ass bushes along the sidewalk. But then I read this thing and got to thinking.”
I nodded. “In England in the early eighties, the Yorkshire Ripper used to stand against a corner wall—or on an overpass—and when women walked past, he’d bash them on the head with a paving stone.” It was something I’d never been able to drill into my rookies those years Denneny had asked me to supplement their academy training: when you blow into a building expecting trouble, gun out, don’t forget to look up. “Always look,” I said. "Not looking never saved anyone. Don’t look at the ground while you walk.”
“And in a public place sit with your back to a wall and facing the door.” Tonya.
“Or facing the majority of the room,” I said. "It depends. For example, if it’s a place where people come and go and tend not to stay long—a coffee shop, a laundromat—you would face the door. If it’s a restaurant or bar or club where people may be for several hours, you would face the majority of the room.”
“And,” Tonya said slowly, “I guess you could even maybe say that’s kind of connected to the information thing, on page four.”
“It is. But maybe you’d like to explain that to the rest of the class.”
“I don’t know, exactly. So, okay, someone can walk into a bar all smiley and nice and then after four hours of Jim or Johnnie they get mean as a junkyard dog. So what you see at one point, the information you’ve got, isn’t the information you get later. Information . . . changes.”
That was a subtle realization, one I hadn’t bothered to set down. Tonya was beginning to connect the dots.
“Huh,” said Suze. “Information changes. Okay. But I like this list of practical stuff, at the end.”
That was the miscellany that didn’t fit anywhere else.
“Don’t hit bone with bone. Be the hammer, not the nail.” She made a swinging-mallet gesture. “I seriously dig that.” She turned back one page. “And I like these, too, these general sorts of . . . These Zen-type things. Like, you don’t have to be nice, you don’t have to be polite.”
“Oh, like you ever are,” Pauletta said.
“Shut up.” Suze pointed about halfway down the page. “If someone abuses you, make them stop. If you’re inside their reach, that means they’re inside yours. If they want one hand, give them both. But I like the last page best. The simple stuff, where you just tell us what to do.” She turned to it. “Protect your neck. Don’t kick higher than the knee if they’re still standing. Yell fire, not help.” She looked up. “But I kind of don’t get some of those completely.”
“Or at all?” Pauletta said.
“Then I’ll explain,” I said. “Lists down. Everyone stand. Tonya, Kim, Katherine, help me with the mats.” We carried the four big mats from their place against the wall and to the middle of the floor. “First, I’ll demonstrate why you should never kick higher than your own knee.” I gestured for Suze to join me in the center. “Come here and try to kick me in the stomach.”
She stood about eight feet away. “You remember I play soccer, right?”
“Yes.” I patted my stomach.
“Just don’t sue me.”
She did that semi-skip followed by a short run-up that all soccer players do, and launched her right foot squarely and at speed for my diaphragm.
I stepped back, caught her ankle and jerked—though slowly enough that she understood she was going down and could take precautions. She thumped back on the mats hard. I gave her a hand up. She stretched cautiously. “They don’t do that on the field.”
“No.” I turned to the class. “Even for a trained soccer player, kicks are slow and the direction and target are obvious. Your attacker has plenty of time to get out of the way and take countermeasures. Kicking high will unbalance you. So if you decide to go for a kick, and your attacker is standing, aim for the knees, shins, instep, Achilles tendon. If your attacker is on the ground, go for the spine or head.”
“Not the nuts?” Tonya.
“Most men are supremely conscious of their testicles. It’s a strike they expect—unless you’re already down and they’re standing, or unless you’re already in their ar
ms. Suze, you up for more demonstrations?”
“Sure.”
“Stand there, as though you’d just knocked me to the ground.” I knelt before her in an approximation of a woman clubbed to her knees. “From here, you’d go for the genitals with the forearm swing.” I made a fist and swung my whole arm through a vicious arc between Suze’s legs, pulling the blow at the last second. “That’s a strike that’s difficult to defend against. Most men, when they see a woman on her knees, don’t expect it.”
“Wonder why,” Nina said.
I unfolded and stood. “Next we’ll look at what I mean by, ‘If they want one hand, give them both.’ Suze, grab my wrist. Tug a little, as though you’re trying to drag me off somewhere.” I resisted for a split second, just long enough to get her to pull harder, then moved straight at her, aiming a slow-motion palm strike at her nose with my free hand.
“They want my left wrist so badly, I’ll be generous and throw this one in for free.”
“ ‘If they want one hand, give them both,’ ” Suze said to herself, and nodded. She grinned. “I like that.”
“It’s unexpected, which comes under an item on page two: use their expectations against them. Suze, wrap your arms around me from the front. Good. Now, watch. See how I’m sliding my right leg back about a foot. I’m taking my weight on the left foot and moving my center of gravity just a few inches away from my attacker, who then has to follow. I’m using the attacker’s expectations against him.”
“His balance,” Tonya said, “right?”
“Yes.”
Tonya, face lighting with understanding, said, “I get it.”
“I don’t,” Kim said.
Tonya would explode if she couldn’t talk, so I nodded for her to go ahead.
“Look, see how he, she—Suze. See how Suze thinks Aud’s pulling away, and how Suze starts tipping off balance. So Aud could strike Suze now, while she’s off balance. But she didn’t, and now Suze is reacting by pulling back harder. And the legs are opening, too.” She looked at me. “That’s what you were waiting for, right?”
“Yes.” She was beginning to see patterns, learning how to think. “First of all, Suze had to widen her stance, which means opening her legs. Now she is yanking me towards her, so any strike I make at this point is helped along by the momentum of my attacker. So here is where I would strike up and forward with my right knee. Suze, step aside a moment.”
Always Page 30