The First Bad Man (8 page)

She blinked a few times. “I don’t really know what you’re talking about, but I’m not interested in that kind of thing.” She pressed her knuckles to her forehead and then dropped her hand suddenly, with a surprising exasperation. “Have you done this before? With the contracts and all that?”

“No,” I said quickly. “A friend told me about it.”

“You’re talking about this with people?” Her knee was bouncing frantically.

“Not a friend. A therapist. It’s completely confidential.”

Her anguish seemed to level out. She was gazing at the remote control from afar. I handed it to her and she brushed her fingers over the rubber buttons a couple times.

“Is there anything else we need to . . . ?”

“I think we pretty much covered everything,” I said, trying to remember what had been established. She nodded gruffly and turned on the TV.

CHAPTER FIVE

It wasn’t obvious how or why to fight, now that we had formally agreed to. A few times she seemed to be about to start something and then she’d change her mind. And obviously I couldn’t initiate—that would be perverse. The whole thing, if it was a thing, made less and less sense as the days went by, and became more and more embarrassing. I began going to the office as much as possible, yelling, “Informal visit!” as I entered so I wouldn’t violate my work-at-home status. Carl gave me some Thai hot sauce to give to Clee. “Have you eaten spicy food with her yet? You have? Isn’t she something else?” I nodded mutely and left the bottle in the trunk of my car.

The next morning Clee was in the kitchen when I needed to be in the kitchen and thus we were both in the kitchen at the same time. The air was taut. She dropped a lid and stiffly picked it up again. I coughed and said, “Excuse me.” This was ridiculous; it was time to annul the agreement and move on.

“Listen,” I said, “neither of us—”

“Go like this,” she interrupted, holding her hand over the right side of her face. I mirrored her, squinting in case there was a slap or a punch coming.

“That’s what I thought,” she said. “One half of your face is way older and uglier than the other half. The pores are all big and it’s like your eyelid is starting to fall into your eye. I’m not saying the other side looks good, but if both sides were like your left side people would think you were seventy.”

I put my hand down. No one had ever talked to me like this before, so cruelly. And yet so attentively. My eyelid
was
starting to fall into my eye. My left side had always been uglier. Some real thought had gone into this little speech—it wasn’t just careless hostility. I looked up at her overly plucked eyebrows and wondered if I could throw some words together about the crass ignorance of her own face and then I saw her hands; they were rubbing the fuzzy legs of her pants with great agitation and her mouth was hanging open. This humiliating little ode had gotten her revved up, she was yearning to strike, and as she registered the fear in my face her body seemed to load itself, to wind up. My forearm deflected her hand with a loud smack.

I ENTERED OPEN PALM WITH
big bouncing moon steps, saying, “Hello hello hello!” Our first tussle under the new agreement had been long and dirty and had taken us into all the rooms of the house. I can-canned and popped, not just to defend myself but out of real anger, first at her and then at people
like
her, dumb people. I popped her for being young without humility, when I had had so much humility at her age—too much. I bit and almost broke the skin on her forearm. When she shoved me against my own desk I head-butted her and everyone else who wasn’t capable of understanding how nuanced I was. She assaulted me as only a person born to a lifetime of martial arts training can. Succinctly. There was not even a second when I thought I was gaining on her. After about thirty-five minutes we took a moment to recover; I drank a glass of water. When we started up again my skin was tender, bruises were already forming, and every muscle was shaking. It was nice, deeper and more focused. I felt my face contorting with a wrath I didn’t recognize; it seemed out of scale for my species. This was the opposite of getting mugged. I’d been mugged every single day of my life and this was the first day I wasn’t mugged. At the end she quickly squeezed my hand twice: good game.

I swished through meetings with a secret, raw, achy feeling that made me lighthearted and hilarious; everyone thought so. Organizing the annual fundraiser for Kick It was usually so stressful that I just clawed through, hurting feelings right and left. But everything was different now—when Jim stupidly suggested a live musical act instead of a DJ, I said, “That’s interesting!” and let it sit. Then later I circled back and asked a few gentle questions that inspired him to change his mind. Then I said, “Are you sure? It sounded like such a fun idea,” and I pretended to play invisible maracas, which was actually taking my new way a tad too far. But this, something in the ballpark of this, was who I really was. When I laughed it was the low chuckle of a wise person, no hysteria, no panic.

But how long would it last? By lunch my limbs had stopped pulsing; she was too skilled to ever really hurt me. At the end of the day I sat in the bathroom stall and swallowed experimentally—my globus wasn’t back yet, but the levity, was it still there? I tightened my shoulders and bowed my head, coaxing anxieties to the surface. The chaotic mess of the house . . . really not that big a deal! Phillip? He wanted my blessing—mine! Kubelko Bondy? My eyes fell on the gray linoleum floor and I wondered how many other women had sat on this toilet and stared at this floor. Each of them the center of their own world, all of them yearning for someone to put their love into so they could see their love, see that they had it.
Oh, Kubelko, my boy, it’s been so long since I held you.
I lowered my elbows to my knees and dropped my heavy head into my palms.

So it was nice to be apart, to quiver in the afterglow, but after the afterglow it was time to fight again. Now that the globus had softened, I had a new awareness of my whole body. It was rigid and jumpy and not that fun to be in; I’d never noticed because I’d never had anything to compare it to. That week we did it every morning before she went to work. On Saturday we did it and then I went right out; once I felt loose and tingly, I didn’t really want to be around her anymore—we had nothing to say to each other. I bought a persimmon-colored blouse that I could picture Phillip loving and wore it right out of the store. I got my hair trimmed. I flitted around the city either turning heads or else walking by heads just as they were turning. I ate a pastry made out of white flour and refined sugar and watched the couple next to me feed each other bites of omelet. It was hard to believe they played adult games but most likely they did, probably with their coworkers or relatives. What were other people’s like? Perhaps some mothers and fathers pretended to be their children’s children and made messes. Or a widow might sometimes become her own deceased husband and demand retribution from everyone. It was all very personal; nobody’s game made any sense to anyone else. I watched seemingly dull men and women zooming past in cars. I doubted they all had written contracts like Ruth-Anne, but some did. Some probably had multiple contracts. Some contracts had been voided or transferred. People were having a good time out here, me included. I waved down the waiter and ordered an expensive juice drink even though there was free water with free refills. Did I still feel loose? Yes. Was it fading? Only a little. I had hours to go.

It was dark when I pulled into the driveway. She was standing on the porch; I didn’t even have a chance to put my purse down. She slammed the door behind me and pressed down on my shoulders with a leveling force. I buckled, collapsed to my hands and knees, keys clattering to the floor.

But most nights we didn’t do anything. I cooked, took a bath, read in bed; she talked on the phone, watched TV, heated her frozen meals. We ignored each other with a feeling of fullness and ferment. Phillip texted (KIRSTEN WANTS YOUR PERMISSION TO DO ORAL. ???! NO PRESSURE. STANDING BY UNTIL YOUR GO-AHEAD) and I felt no animosity. Oh, Kirsten. Maybe she was our cat for the past one hundred thousand lifetimes, always on the bed, pawing around in the covers, watching us. Congratulations, kitty, you’re the girlfriend this time—but I’m still in charge. I felt limber and generous. Phillip was working through something—that’s how I might put it to a close friend, in confidence. I’d permitted him to have an affair with a younger woman.

You’re so brave, you have such faith.

This is nothing. We
’ve seen fire and we’ve seen rain
,
I’d reply, quoting the song
.

Of course, it was more of a preaffair, since we weren’t together yet, at least not in the traditional sense, not in this lifetime. And the fire and rain, that was still to come. Also: no close friends to speak in confidence to. But I held my head up when I saw the postman and I waved at my neighbor—I initiated the wave. I even struck up a conversation with Rick, who was walking around in special shoes that punctured the grass.

“I’d like to pay you,” I announced, “for all your hard work.” It was lavish, but why not.

“No, no. Your garden is my payment. I need a place for my green thumb.” He held up his thumb and looked at it fondly, then his expression clouded, as if he’d remembered something awful. He took a deep breath. “I brought your trash cans out last week.”

“Thank you,” I laughed. “That’s a big help.” It
was
a big help, I wasn’t even lying. “If you don’t mind, you could do that every week.”

“I would,” he said quietly, “but I don’t usually work on Tuesdays.” He looked at me with nervous eyes. “Wednesday is trash day. I usually come on Thursdays. If you are in danger, please tell me. I will protect you.”

Something bad was happening, or had already happened. I picked a blade of grass.

“Why were you here on a Tuesday?”

“I asked you if it was okay, if instead of the third Thursday of this month I came on a Tuesday. Do you remember?” He was looking down now, with a red face.

“Yes.”

“I had to use the bathroom. I did knock on the back door before I came in but no one heard me. Never mind, it’s your private business.”

Tuesday. What did we do on Tuesday? Maybe nothing. Maybe he didn’t see anything.

“Snails,” Rick said.

Tuesday was the morning she cornered me on the floor. I resisted in a defensive huddle position, my wide butt high in the air.

“I need snails.” He was trying to switch topics. “For the garden. The African kind—they aerate.”

If we hadn’t heard him, it could have only been because Clee was yelling verbal harassments.

“I’m in no danger, Rick. It’s the opposite of what you’re thinking,” I said.

“Yes, I see that now. She’s your . . . it’s your private business.”

“No, it’s not private, no, no—”

He began to trip away, stabbing the grass with his special shoes.

“It’s a game!” I pleaded, following. “I do it for my health! I see a counselor.” He was scanning the yard, pretending not to hear me.

“Four or five will be plenty,” he called back.

“I’ll get seven. Or a dozen. A baker’s dozen—how’s that?” He was shuffling along the side of the house to the sidewalk. “One hundred snails!” I called out. But he was gone.

SUDDENLY I WAS CLUMSY. WHEN
Clee covered my mouth and grabbed my neck in the hallway, I couldn’t fight back because I didn’t want to touch her. Before every raw impulse there was a pause—I saw us through the homeless gardener’s eyes and felt obscene. Being outside society, he didn’t know about adult games; he was like me before I met Ruth-Anne, thinking everything that happened in life was real. The next morning I left the house early, but avoiding her caused other problems. A migraine-level headache blossomed; my throat pulsed threateningly. By noon I was frantically trying to concoct a more clinical way to fight, something organized and respectable, less feverish. Boxing gloves? No, but that gave me another idea.

I staggered down the block to the warehouse; Kristof helped me dig through our old stock.

“Do you want VHS?”

“When did we stop doing scenarios? Was that 2000?”

“Scenarios?”

“Like a woman sitting on a park bench and all that. Before self-defense as fitness.”

“Those are all pre-2002. Are you putting something together for the twentieth anniversary?”

“Yes?”

“Here’s a bunch from ’96, ’97—is that good?”

COMBAT WITH NO BAT
(1996)
started with an attack simulation called “A Day at the Park.” A woman in espadrilles sits down on a park bench, rubs suntan lotion on her arms, takes a pair of sunglasses out of her purse, and unfolds a newspaper.

I pushed aside Clee’s purple sleeping bag and perched on the couch, my purse beside me. I pulled out my suntan lotion. Clee watched from the kitchen.

“What are you doing?”

I slowly finished rubbing in the lotion and pulled out my sunglasses.

“You attack right after I take the newspaper out,” I whispered. I opened the newspaper and yawned the way the woman had yawned on the tape, a little theatrically. Her name was Dana something, she used to teach on weekends. She didn’t have the abs or the charisma of her successor, Shamira Tye; I doubt we even paid her. Clee hesitated, then sat down beside me. She put her arm around my shoulder sooner than the attacker on the DVD had, but like him she breast-grabbed, so like Dana I elbow-jabbed, yelling, “No!”

She tried to pull me to the floor, which wasn’t in this simulation but it was in the next one, so I skipped ahead.

“No! No! No!” I screamed, pretending to knee her in the groin. I jumped to my feet and ran away. Because there wasn’t far to run I ran in place for a few seconds, facing the wall. And then jogged a little longer to avoid turning around. The whole performance was quite ridiculous. I pulled off the sunglasses and peeked back at her. She handed me the newspaper.

“Again.”

We did that one two more times and then I tried to walk us through “Lesson 2: Domestic Traps,” which takes place in a kitchen. I felt silly throwing fake punches but Clee didn’t seem to care that we weren’t really fighting; she sneered and harassed me with a new thuggy swagger. On the DVD Dana’s attacker wore a backward baseball cap and said things like
Hey, baby
doll
, or
C’mere, sweetcakes
. In “Lesson 3: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Front Door,” he purred,
Yum, yum, yum
from the shadows. Of course Clee didn’t say any of these things but I could sort of guide her toward his basic blocking with Dana’s flinches and looks of horror, and on a cellular level Clee knew exactly what to do—she’d seen hundreds of demonstrations like this before the age of five.

After an hour we were exhausted but unbruised. She squeeze-squeezed my hand and gave me a long, strange look before we went our separate ways. I shut the bedroom door and rolled my head. The migraine was gone; my throat was soft. I didn’t feel euphoric, but I knew this could work. If only Rick had seen “Domestic Traps” instead of whatever it was we were doing before. This wasn’t anything, just a re-creation of a simulation of the kind of thing that might happen to a woman if she didn’t keep her wits about her.