Always (63 page)

“You have obviously spent a lot of time researching this. I appreciate your concern.” I picked up my spoon.

“Aud, Kick’s life may be measurably shorter than yours. She will need a lot of . . . help as the years progress.”

“Not necessarily. There are people who, ten years after diagnosis, are absolutely no worse than they were before.”

“And those people are unlikely to get worse. Yes,” Eric said. “All true, but—”

“But are you prepared to wait ten years to see?” my mother said. “Aud, she is ill. You will always be the strong one, the healthy one. Partnerships should be equal. You can protect her, yes, but shouldn’t she also be able to protect you?”

Kick, protect me?

“It is more than likely that you will come to resent her because of that, and she you for being healthy.”

I skimmed a spoonful of liquid from the surface of my soup. My hand was trembling. Interesting. I breathed gently. The trembling stilled. “It’s already been pointed out to me that illness is not pretty, it’s not romantic, it’s not easy.” My spoon jerked, and dumped congealing soup back in the bowl with an audible plop. The spoon slid under the warm liquid and one perfect globule shone on the white tablecloth. The same reddish brown as drying blood. “I understand what I’m doing.”

“Do you? Illness can crush hope. It can crush intention . . .”

A server appeared with a fresh spoon, but I shook my head and gestured for him to take the bowl away.

“. . . times when illness can be bigger and stronger than we are.”

I focused on that perfect brown-red hemisphere on the white tablecloth. It was slowly sinking into the linen, spreading, losing its shape and focus.

“Aud?”

“There’s always something,” I said. “Unless we brick ourselves up in a box. There is no perfect security. You plan to the best of your ability, and then you improvise. Sooner or later there’s always someone or something bigger or faster or stronger than you. You just do the best you can, and when you run into trouble, you get help.”

My mother was studying me. In the subtle lighting, she seemed older than she was, and more powerful. “Is that what happened with your throat?” she said.

A fish knife lay by my right hand. I picked it up and turned it in my fingers, heavy and cool. It was silver, burnished with the tiny cuts of a thousand dishwashings. “I got my throat cut because I was tired, and careless, and afraid. Because I didn’t understand that when you run into trouble, you get help. You ask your friends, and family, for their support.”

Her eyes were aquamarine and fathomless.

“You are adult,” she said. “We will leave the matter there. I trust your judgment. I ask only that you do judge and don’t jump blindly. When you choose, you will have my absolute support.” She didn’t have to make extravagant vows. If I chose Kick, she would accept us without reservation and never remind me of this conversation by word or deed; she would close over it like the ocean over a swimmer’s head. I remembered Julia on the fjord, saying,
. . . a land that doesn’t know compromise . . . black or white, yes or no, on or off.
My mother’s soul was still Norwegian, in a way that mine was not.

The next course was Dungeness crab with beets, two ingredients—like the lentils and cherry compote—I would never have dreamt of putting together, but that worked perfectly.

She and Eric were not looking at each other but I could tell that, in the way of some couples, they were intensely aware of each other’s body language and were exchanging a private communication. I drank the last of my wine.

“In honor of our last night,” Eric said, “I believe we should have something special from the wine list.”

He consulted the sommelier, and between them they decided on a 1983 Château Margaux, which was brought up from the cellar with great ceremony. Eric gestured for me to taste.

I held the glass to the light. The wine was the color of an ancient garnet, something set long ago in a barbaric Anglo-Saxon brooch, acquiring depth and gravity through the ages. It unfurled in my mouth like a cloud.

“I think she likes it,” Eric said, and the sommelier poured. “It will be hard to find wine like this in Oslo,” he said sadly.

Servers, moving as soundlessly as though they were on oiled wheels, brought us a cèpes and game confit tartlet, topped with foie gras, which dissolved on my tongue. We ate with concentration, and sipped the Margaux, for several minutes.

“How is the wine?” our server asked.

“Lovely,” my mother said.

I picked my last toasted hazelnut from the plate with my fingers and ate it. They were waiting to see where I’d take the conversation. “I’ve been contemplating buying an oil painting. I wonder what a Norwegian would think of it.”

My mother raised her eyebrows, and her thought was as clear as sunlight. “I know,” I said, “but I haven’t lived there for a very long time.” They waited attentively. “It’s a big painting, of a woman. She’s . . . not fully clothed, exactly, but covered. But it’s clearly from a particular tradition. It reeks of high art, the artist as savant, dedicated only to improving upon his talent at the expense of all else. No concession to the group. No acknowledgment of the Jante law.” The almost fanatical Norwegian obsession with social and cultural equality.

A different server refilled our glasses. “How are you enjoying it?”

“Delicious,” Eric said, and the server gave us all an approving nod before gliding away.

“It sounds fascinating,” my mother said.

Our tartlet crumbs were replaced by lobster with white asparagus and perigord truffle, and yet another server took the opportunity to drift over and ask if we were enjoying the wine.

We drank in tiny sips. It lasted us through the lobster, the guinea fowl mousseline, the palate-cleansing spice-infused pinot sorbet, and finally the squab with chanterelles and caramelized turnip. It was beautiful food. I found myself longing for rough bread and homemade hummus, with cole slaw falling off all over the table and Kick smiling in satisfaction, knowing just what would please me. In my imagination I smiled back at her, then found I was smiling down at her, because she was in a wheelchair.

THE NEXT DAY,
I didn’t call Kick, I didn’t call Dornan, I didn’t call Rusen and Finkel. I left my phone at the hotel and walked to the gallery.

I CONTEMPLATED
Antique Dressing Table.
The woman was a study in contradiction. Clothed only in a thin silk robe and open to the gaze of the viewer, she remained inaccessible, enigmatic, hidden. Her expression was secretive. It conveyed a sense of someone leading a supremely autonomous inner life, yet—and I couldn’t work out how the painter had made this so clear—she was vulnerable. Perhaps it was the eyes, focused far beyond the viewer, or the fact that there were no lines in her face. An innocent, or perhaps a victim past caring. It could have been her hands, one lying on top of the other in perfect repose, or complete resignation.

So flimsy, just daubs of oil on thin canvas.

“Beautiful, isn’t she,” said the sales associate who had nodded earlier. “Would you like me to arrange a private viewing? I find that a few moments alone with the lighting just right can help a person make up her mind.”

I WENT TO
the dojo, where I worked until I sweated. I found myself working with Chuck, who flinched every time I laid hands on him.

If Chuck didn’t relax, he might fall wrong, break his back or his neck. I began to feel horribly responsible.

I threw Chuck too hard. I apologized. He shied at my voice.

I took a shower, and was just getting dressed when people started to arrive for another class.

I put one of the communal
gi
s on and went back out to the mat.

I WALKED TO
Pioneer Square, consulted the piece of paper Bernard had given me the other night, the address of the woodworkers’ collective.

In the square, I found myself staring at a twisted metal column.

“Pergola,” said a homeless man with muddy green eyes and bright blue Gore-Tex jacket. “Fell down in the earthquake.” He looked about forty, though he could have been a lot younger. “Spare a dollar?” But then his pupils dilated and he stepped back. “I know you. You’re crazy. Stay away from me. You stay away.”

A pioneer, one who hadn’t wanted to dance.

“No, no, you keep your money.”

There was a handwritten card on the door of the woodworkers’ collective.
Back in an hour.
It was neatly printed, and hung exactly in the center of the glass, but it didn’t say when the hour had begun or would end.

I could see a sideboard and a carved screen, and a dining table. I put my hands against the glass like blinkers, and squinted. Fine work. Better than anything I could do. But I could learn. It was a collective. I could talk to the artisans. I could buy the furniture and learn from them.

From one moment to the next, I couldn’t breathe. My lungs just wouldn’t work. The ground wasn’t shaking, the air wasn’t shimmering, there were no drugs in my system, but I couldn’t breathe.

I bent at the waist, forced myself to count out five seconds as I breathed in, two as I paused, five as I breathed out, two as I paused. And again.

THE NEXT
day was cool and rainy. I felt every minute of the work I had done in aikido. My muscles were sluggish with fatigue acids. I walked in the rain. I walked to a pier and watched the water. Kuroshio, the black current. I walked to the set. It was deserted, the door locked. I tried to remember what day it was. Sunday?

THE SUITE
was as cold and impersonal as a flatiron. I turned the AC off and sat on the bed. My joints and feet and head ached.

I started the shower, and the rush of water made me realize I was thirsty. I filled the tooth mug under the cold tap. I drank, filled, drank.

The shower was hot. I stood under it a long time. The water smelled of chlorine. I had not noticed that in Seattle before. Perhaps someone had added something to a reservoir. Perhaps my sense of smell was coming back.

I sat on the bed and dried myself carefully. Buckets rattled outside as the housekeeper cleaned something.

Something behind me kicked a bucket. No, a can. The can rattled and bounced down a cobbled alley.
I’m here,
it said,
right behind you.
And then all sound died, everything, even the sound of my heartbeat.

I woke on my back. The room was brilliant with sunshine. It had stopped raining. A housekeeper was banging and clanging in the hall. I felt as though I had a hangover.

I had another shower.

DORNAN ANSWERED
on the third ring. "What did you mean,” I said. "The other day. When you said you didn’t live in Seattle?”

“Well, as you know, Torvingen, I live in Atlanta.” Silence. “Are you quite well?”

“What did you mean?”

“Why do you ask, why now particularly?”

“I’ve been thinking. About things.”

“Things, is it?” I didn’t say anything. “And have you reached any conclusions? ”

“I don’t know,” I said, and hung up.

THE SCENTS
of sweat and mold and deodorant in the dojo’s changing room were briefly overlain by that of fabric softener as I stripped the freshly laundered
gi
s from their rain-wet bags and hung them on the rail. The next newcomer wouldn’t have to wear clothes that stank of anyone else’s sweat. I laid my new
gi
and
hakama,
the black-bloused trousers that
yudansha
are entitled to wear, on the bench.

I took off my clothes and folded them. I taped my left knee. I pulled on the
gi,
then the
hakama,
pulling ties tight, twisting this way then that, loosening, retying. They were stiff and harsh with newness, but despite this, and despite the fact that it had been a long time since I’d experienced the odd combination of tight belt, loose arms, and the swing of cloth around my calves, it felt deeply familiar.

When I went out onto the small mat in my
hakama
to warm up, Mike smiled, but nobody seemed surprised, and this time, when the bell rang, and we assumed
seiza
along the edge of the mat, I took the far left position, and after we bowed and sensei stood, it was me he gestured into the center to be
uke.

I stood opposite him, and took his left wrist in my right. It was a big wrist, flat and hard on top and bottom, with tiny dark brown hairs like wire sickles springing from around the wrist bone. As I gripped, he opened his fingers and I felt the massive tendons on each side expand and stretch my own fingers, opening them.

Kokyu-dosa,
the blending exercise, is the most basic building block of aikido. It is gentle and fluid, and the
nage
does not have to worry about making sure that the
uke
falls well or protects his or her shoulder or wrist or elbow or hip; the
uke
doesn’t fall at all. The best practitioners simply breathe, and step and turn and lift both hands before them as though carrying a lightly balanced tray of tea, and the
uke,
if she keeps hold of the
nage
’s wrist, is twisted to one side and bent forward from the waist, forehead almost to the ground.

But there is beauty in even the simplest movements.

Sensei, Petra had told me, had been practicing aikido for twenty-five years, many hours a day. He was very, very good, but as I matched myself exactly to his strength and force, skin to skin, fascia to fascia, vein on vein, as I felt his wrist joint turn smoothly and his muscles relaxed and open, I understood that he was not great. He had never been hurt, never had his confidence taken away and had to refind it, never, since young adulthood, met anyone bigger, stronger, faster or better trained.