Her hand stopped on his shoulder. She wasn’t sure she’d heard him right, his voice was so muffled. “That I’ve never used all of you?”
Rudolph nodded, rubbing his right knuckle where, at the kwoon, he’d lost a stretch of skin on a speedbag. “There’s still part of me left over. You never tried to touch all of me, to take everything. Maybe you can’t. Maybe no one can. But sometimes I get the feeling that the unused part — the unlived life—spoils, that you get cancer because it sits like fruit on the ground and rots.” Rudolph shook his head; he’d said too much and knew it, perhaps had not even put it the way he felt inside. Stiffly, he got to his feet. “Don’t ask me to stop training.” His eyebrows spread inward. “If I stop, I’ll die.”
Evelyn twisted the cap back onto the Ben-Gay. She held out her hand, which Rudolph took. Veins on the back of his hand burgeoned abnormally like dough. Once when she was shopping at the Public Market she’d seen monstrous plastic gloves shaped like hands in a magic store window. His hand looked like that. It belonged on Lon Chaney. Her voice shook a little, panicky, “I’ll call Dr. Guylee in the morning.”
Evelyn knew — or thought she knew — his trouble. He’d never come to terms with the disagree-ableness of things. Rudolph had always been too serious for some people, even in South Carolina. It was the thing, strange to say, that drew her to him, this crimped-browed tendency in Rudolph to listen with every atom of his life when their minister in Hodges, quoting Marcus Aurelius to give his sermon flash, said, “Live with the gods,” or later in Seattle, the habit of working himself up over Reverend Merrill’s reading from Ecclesiastes 9:10: “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might.” Now, he didn’t really mean that, Evelyn knew. Nothing in the world could be taken that seriously; that’s why this was the world. And, as all Mount Zion knew, Reverend Merrill had a weakness for high-yellow choir-girls and gin, and was forever complaining that his salary was too small for his family. People made compromises, nodded at spiritual commonplaces — the high seriousness of biblical verses that demanded nearly superhuman duty and self-denial — and laughed off their lapses into sloth, envy, and the other deadly sins. It was what made living so enjoyably human: this built-in inability of man to square his performance with perfection. People were naturally soft on themselves. But not her Rudolph.
Of course, he seldom complained. It was not in his nature to complain when, looking for “gods,” he found only ruin and wreckage. What did he expect? Evelyn wondered. Man was evil — she’d told him that a thousand times — or, if not evil, hopelessly flawed. Everything failed; it was some sort of law. But at least there was laughter, and lovers clinging to one another against the cliff; there were novels — wonderful tales of how things should be — and perfection promised in the afterworld. He’d sit and listen, her Rudolph, when she put things this way, nodding because he knew that in his persistent hunger for perfection in the here and now he was, at best, in the minority. He kept his dissatisfaction to himself, but occasionally Evelyn would glimpse in his eyes that look, that distant, pained expression that asked: Is this all? She saw it after her first miscarriage, then her second; saw it when he stopped searching the want ads and settled on the Post Office as the fulfillment of his potential in the marketplace. It was always there, that look, after he turned forty, and no new, lavishly praised novel from the Book-of-the-Month Club, no feature-length movie, prayer meeting, or meal she fixed for him wiped it from Rudolph’s eyes. He was, at least, this sort of man before he saw that martial-arts B movie. It was a dark vision, Evelyn decided, a dangerous vision, and in it she whiffed something that might destroy her. What that was, she couldn’t say, but she knew her Rudolph better than he knew himself. He would see the error — the waste of time — in his new hobby, and she was sure he would mend his ways.
In the weeks, then months that followed Evelyn waited, watching her husband for a flag of surrender. There was no such sign. He became worse than before. He cooked his own meals, called her heavy soul food dishes “too acidic,” lived on raw vegetables, seaweed, nuts, and fruit to make his body “more alkaline,” and fasted on Sundays. He ordered books on something called Shaolin fighting and meditation from a store in California, and when his equipment arrived UPS from Dolan’s Sports in New Jersey, he ordered more — in consternation, Evelyn read the list — leg stretchers, makiwara boards, air shields, hand grips, bokken, focus mitts, a full-length mirror (for heaven’s sake) so he could correct his form, and protective equipment. For proper use of his headgear and gloves, however, he said he needed a sparring partner — an opponent — he said, to help him instinctively understand “combat strategy,” how to “flow” and “close the Gap” between himself and an adversary, how to create by his movements a negative space in which the other would be neutralized.
“Well,” crabbed Evelyn, “if you need a punching bag, don’t look at me.”
He sat across the kitchen table from her, doing dynamic-tension exercises as she read a new magazine called Self. “Did I ever tell you what a black belt means?” he asked.
“You told me.”
“Sifu Chan doesn’t use belts for ranking. They were introduced seventy years ago because Westerners were impatient, you know, needed signposts and all that.”
“You told me,” said Evelyn.
“Originally, all you got was a white belt. It symbolized innocence. Virginity.” His face was immensely serious, like a preacher’s. “As you worked, it got darker, dirtier, and turned brown. Then black. You were a master then. With even more work, the belt became frayed, the threads came loose, you see, and the belt showed white again.”
“Rudolph, I’ve heard this before!” Evelyn picked up her magazine and took it into her bedroom. From there, with her legs drawn up under the blankets, she shouted: “I won’t be your punching bag!”
So he brought friends from his kwoon, friends she wanted nothing to do with. There was something unsettling about them. Some were street fighters. Young. They wore tank-top shirts and motorcycle jackets. After drinking racks of Rainier beer on the front porch, they tossed their crumpled empties next door into Rod Kenner’s yard. Together, two of Rudolph’s new friends — Truck and Tuco — weighed a quarter of a ton. Evelyn kept a rolling pin under her pillow when they came, but she knew they could eat that along with her. But some of his new friends were students at the University of Washington. Truck, a Vietnamese only two years in America, planned to apply to the Police Academy once his training ended; and Tuco, who was Puerto Rican, had been fighting since he could make a fist; but a delicate young man named Andrea, a blue sash, was an actor in the drama department at the university. His kwoon training, he said, was less for self-defense than helping him understand his movements onstage — how, for example, to convincingly explode across a room in anger. Her husband liked them, Evelyn realized in horror. And they liked him. They were separated by money, background, and religion, but something she could not identify made them seem, those nights on the porch after his class, like a single body. They called Rudolph “Older Brother” or, less politely, “Pop.”