“What else?” said Suze. “How do you get the eyes?”
“Like this,” Christie said, “ha!” and did an uncoordinated imitation of Bruce Lee doing bui tze, the shooting fingers.
“You could,” I said, “but it’s hard to be accurate with that move.” And if she missed, she’d break her fingers. “There’s an easier way. All of you: point your index finger at me.”
“Left or right?” Katherine.
“Whichever you’d use to point at something. Now bend it down a little. Tuck the tip of your thumb underneath your index finger’s middle joint. Keep your finger and thumb joined together like that and pretend to tap on someone’s window with it. Put some play in the wrist, whip it back and forth—like Jennifer—so your hand looks a bit like a chicken pecking at something.”
They all had it.
“Now peck the center of your palm. Go gently.”
They did, over and over.
“Now imagine what that would do to an eyeball.”
“Like popping gum,” Kim said admiringly.
“Eeeuw.” Jennifer flung both hands away from her. “I couldn’t do that!”
“Anyone else?”
“I’m not sure,” Therese said, troubled.
“I could do it, no problem,” said Suze. “Yeah.”
I considered them. “Self-defense isn’t magic,” I said. “In any kind of real fight, unless you cold-cock someone from behind with a pipe, you will get hurt. No matter how good you are, things go wrong. Adjust to that now: nothing goes to plan, ever. You’ll get hurt, and you’ll have to hurt them. But you mend. And what happens to them isn’t your problem.”
All rather disingenuous, of course, given the demographics of attacks against women, but at the beginning it’s important to keep things simple and not scare them to death.
“In the next class we’re going to role-play a little. We’ll learn how attackers think and what they look for, and what you can do about that. Meanwhile, I’d like you to do something for me before the next class. Make a list of all the reasons you wanted to learn self-defense in the first place. All the things you or your mother or your friends worry about. Put them in a column. In the column next to them put what you’d be willing to do to your attacker to stop it. So, for example, decide if you would rather be raped than feel the rapist’s eyeball burst all over your hand. Decide if you would rather blow someone’s head off with a twelve-gauge shotgun rather than let them pinch your backside. Decide whether you’d be willing to let a teenager torture your cat instead of dislocating her shoulder, whatever. It won’t be easy. But think about it as clearly and fully as possible, and decide. ”
TWO
I WOKE EARLY, STILL ON ATLANTA TIME, SHOWERED, REREAD BETTE’S FAX, SAW her note at the end, and called. I was shunted straight to her voice mail, which surprised me. Bette was almost always at work. It’s how I imagine her: behind her big teak desk, lizard brown and stick thin, chin wattles hidden by pearls, her Prada and Chanel suits always two years out of date. Seven years ago she had looked sixty-five; she still did. I dialed her home number and she picked up on the first ring.
“Aud? Well, hell, somebody call Ripley’s. You did as I asked for a change.” Her incongruously lush, Lauren Bacall voice was always startling. “You signed those papers I gave you last week?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I haven’t decided.”
“I spent a hell of a lot of your money making those adoption papers watertight. Sign or not, you’re getting a bill.”
I ignored that. Laurence had probably paid her already.
“Well, you talked to OSHA yet?”
“I haven’t even had breakfast yet.”
Silence, one of her go-for-broke silences. I knew what was coming.
“So. When you going to get around to telling me about that envelope from Norway?”
“Bette…”
“Now don’t ‘Bette’ me, not this time. I didn’t trouble you with it last year because your friend just died. I didn’t trouble you with it when you came in for your year-end taxes because you still looked thin and peaky. I didn’t even trouble you with it last month, when you were here to talk about your will and power-of-this and power-of-that, because of that mess with your student. But, look, sweetie, it’s been a year—”
“Not quite.” Not until the seventeenth.
“—you’re looking good again, and I need to know just what it is I’m holding in my safe. It smells bad, for one thing.”
The day I had written that letter, had bled all over the envelope, Julia had still been alive. Twelve hours earlier she had sat on my lap in her blue dress… Or had it been grey? And I couldn’t remember how she’d worn her hair.
I heard the faint tick-tick that meant Bette was fiddling with her big clasp earrings, which also meant she was frowning.
“It was a kind of insurance. I don’t need it anymore.” Most of the people named in the letter were now dead.
DORNAN AND I ate breakfast in the hotel’s huge dining room cantilevered out over Elliott Bay. There wasn’t much to see; the bay was draped in low cloud and fine rain like mist. I ate bacon and eggs and sausage. Dornan, tourist book on one side and maps on the other, crunched happily on toast. His fireplace, he said, had a remote control, and someone had thoughtfully provided a teddy bear. “Of course, I didn’t find it until I crawled under the covers, when I got the fright of my life.” I added a little salt to my eggs. “Do you have a bear?”
“I have little rubber ducks in my shower.”
“I went for a walk this morning. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a proper morning. Bless the time difference. Did you know there’s a nice park near here? And dozens upon dozens of little espresso carts selling latte and Frappuccino—Frappuccino in this weather.”
It would be in the high sixties today, about twenty degrees cooler than in Atlanta. I ate some more sausage.
“What do you want to do? It’s not the sort of day to play tourist in the outdoors,” he said.
He had lived most of his life in summers like this, in Dublin, and I had grown up in Norway and England. But I’d been in Atlanta since I was eighteen, and Dornan only a few years less. Sometimes the body acclimatizes so thoroughly that we forget things have ever been different.
“I have some business. We could meet for dinner. You?”
“I consulted the very nice concierge, who tells me that once you’re downtown you can ride the buses for free.” Free was a magic word for Dornan. “I thought that if I might persuade you to drop me somewhere I’d spend the day doing my research: eating and drinking and absorbing whatever it is that makes Seattle… well, whatever it is.”
The name of the very nice concierge turned out to be Pascalle, and after breakfast she told me that, yes, the Audi A8L Quattro I had ordered had arrived twenty minutes earlier, and here were the keys.
THE AUDI felt like a banker’s car: beautifully machined, competent but not compassionate, giving the driver a sense of admiration but not involvement. The six-speed transmission had very sensitive shift-mapping, matching revs on the downshifts, moving for an instant to neutral and selecting the lowest gear. It was almost as seamless as a manual transmission. I switched briefly to the hybrid manu-matic, then switched back. Too fussy. So was the MMI, the multimedia interface. I turned off the navigation and turned on the radio. Rain spattered the windshield and was automatically wiped away. I rolled up all the windows except the one on the driver’s side.
THE OCCUPATIONAL Safety and Health Administration deals mainly with employers, the leaseholders rather than owners of any particular piece of real estate. The offices of Region Ten, OSHA, were on Third Avenue. The lobby was the kind one would expect of an office building in any big city, hard floors, steel-doored elevators, people carrying briefcases. But every other person walking across the echoing space carried a go cup, and business attire was casual, Eddie Bauer slacks speckled with rain. Many, I guessed, had used public transport and then walked. In my Armani suit I cut through the crowd like a hammerhead among trout.