22. Without My Permission

“Nobody can hurt me without my permission.” –Mahatma Gandhi

Jen felt queasy as they dropped Master Park off at his car. She had eaten a large plate of noodles and dumplings, a full portion of beef and pork, ostensibly to gain Master Park’s approval. But as she used her fork to lift the last few noodles that she couldn’t quite get with her chopsticks, she felt that she could have eaten a whole second plate of food, as Rob and Master Park had already proceeded to do.

Rob drove Master Park all the way back to the Snail Plant to pick up his car, which was not parked in the large, remote garage, but along the side of the road, a block down from the visitors’ center. Jen recognized the run-down sedan that had passed her this morning as she walked down the dark, forested road that led into Cone.

“We’ll see you tomorrow,” Master Park said to her as she took his place in the passenger’s seat.

Rob waited politely for Master Park to unlock his car before turning his own car around to head back into town. “Are you sure you want to drive me home?” asked Jen, feeling guilty for making him shuttle her around all day like a taxi. “I live all the way in Cone.”

“I know,” said Rob, confirming Jen’s suspicions. “And you were going to walk home? Are you crazy?”

Noticing Jen’s accusing glance, he explained, “I talked to Master Park in the morning. He told me he passed you on the road. I couldn’t believe you were going to walk to the Snail Plant.”

“It’s not so far,” Jen protested.

“Of course it is,” said Rob. “You wouldn’t have gotten home until midnight.”

Jen herself had anticipated this possibility when she had planned the trip this morning; she hadn’t been sure how long the walk would take, but she figured time was a plentiful commodity here in her new life with no schedule or responsibilities.

“That would be okay,” Jen said.

“Look,” said Rob authoritatively. “I know this isn’t Los Angeles, but we do have crime here. People get attacked. You can’t just go walking down dark roads by yourself.”

Jen didn’t answer. This was the first time he had acknowledged any awareness of her past life. She didn’t like men being protective of her, but she had to admit that he had a point. It was twilight now, and it would soon be night. The air outside the car was growing chilly, and she was grateful to be safely inside of his car rather than trudging along the side of the road.

When they reached the far end of Main Street, Rob turned onto the road into Cone. The twilight faded to darkness on the forest road, the trees casting flickering shadows across the windshield as they drove.

“So, you’re going to come to class?” Rob asked.

“Yeah,” said Jen, a bit too brightly, not wanting to reveal her nervousness. “I think it will be good for me.” Her voice trailed off at the end of her statement, as she realized that it might be understood to refer to her health, which was, according to her soon-to-be teacher, a horrible reason to study taekwondo.

Rob evidently recognized the source of her hesitation. “Don’t listen to Master Park,” he said apologetically. “It’s not that dangerous. He’s had way more injuries than average. He used to do some kind of really dangerous fighting in Korea.”

“What made it so dangerous?” Jen asked.

“He hasn’t really explained it to me,” said Rob. “And I haven’t wanted to ask him too much about it. I think he had some traumatic experiences back there.”

Rob paused for a moment, giving it some thought. “He might have been in the army,” he added in a speculative tone.

Jen nodded. “So, you haven’t gotten injured?” she asked.

“From fighting, but not from taekwondo,” he replied. “Most of my serious injuries have been from boxing and wrestling.”

“You do all that?” Jen asked, impressed.

“A little,” said Rob. “I train with the MNCMU teams. I broke my nose boxing, twice, and I messed up my jaw. And I tore tendons in my back and my ankle pretty bad when I was wrestling, and I broke my wrist once.”

He stopped for a moment, as if trying to remember why he had embarked upon this conversational direction. “So anyway, taekwondo is a lot safer than that,” he concluded. “I mean, it’s mostly just bruising, and the occasional broken ribs, but they’re not too big a deal.”

At the mention of broken ribs, Jen winced, sucking air loudly through her teeth.

“What’s wrong?” Rob asked.

“Nothing,” she said, not wanting him to know about her own broken rib. If Rob told Master Park about her injury, she might not be allowed to participate in the class until it healed fully. Becky had said that bones always took at least six weeks, so she still had two more to go. She held her hand protectively over her own rib but didn’t say anything further.

Jen felt a little nervous as she directed Rob down the dark road to the lake house. She was pretty sure now that he wasn’t a kidnapper. But she had the looming feeling that when he dropped her off, he would try to kiss her. It’s silly, she thought. I just met him. But she could feel that strange, familiar energy filling the car, the communication between two bodies speaking to each other in their preverbal language that superseded all the wordy logic of the conscious mind.

Kissing him was probably a bad idea, she reasoned. This was only her first day on her own in Michigan. She was supposed to be sorting things out, and she needed to be alone. That was why she had come here in the first place, to be by herself. But she knew without a doubt that if he kissed her, she would kiss him back. There was no use denying things your unconscious mind wanted, she thought; it was like trying to reason with a grizzly bear. Your arguments might be flawlessly crafted, but the bear would always win.

Anyway, she told herself, there was no need to be so pessimistic all the time. Here she was with this man whose company she enjoyed. There was no reason to expect that he wanted anything more than to help out a new friend, just as he had already helped her repeatedly throughout this day. And if he did try to kiss her, would that really be so bad?

No, she thought; actually, it would be nice.

When Rob pulled into the driveway of the house, just behind the SUV that Jen was so reluctant to drive into town, he stopped the car’s engine. As soon as the headlights were turned off, Rob’s face disappeared into the enveloping darkness of the forest. He reached up quickly and switched on the small interior light, which gave him the appearance of a grainy black-and-white photograph.

“It was really great to spend this time with you,” he said. “I needed something good to happen.”

He sounded as though he were alluding to some specific reason why he needed it. Jen waited to see if he would elaborate. When she realized that he wasn’t planning to say more, she asked, “Why?”

“It’s been a frustrating week,” he said.

“What happened?” she asked him.

He put one hand to his forehead, so that his face was blocked from her view by the sleeve of the sweatshirt he had pulled on after they left the tea house. “This is going to sound really stupid,” he said.

“No,” said Jen. She found herself touching his arm. She was a little startled by her own forwardness, although his sleeve saved her from the embarrassing intimacy of contact with his skin. “It’s not stupid,” she said, hoping that whatever he was about to say wouldn’t contradict her statement.

“I’ve been trying to get in a fight,” he said.

She pulled her arm back. “What?” she asked incredulously, wondering if he were joking. She wanted to laugh, but she was afraid it would make him upset.

“For the last three weeks,” he continued. “And I can’t get anyone to fight me. Everyone in North Middleton knows me. Nobody wants to fight me, even people I can’t stand. There are a few guys I’ve trained with who I’m sure hate my guts. I always figured they’d love to fight me. But I try to get them to attack me, and they just back down.”

He sighed heavily and ran his hand through his hair. Then he sat up straight and looked at Jen.

“Ever since those reporters showed up, I was just waiting for them to come in the store so I could get one of them to throw a punch. They don’t know me. I figured if I looked like I was about to get violent with them, they’d start something. But no, they just backed away, just like everyone else.”

“Why didn’t you just punch that one reporter first?” asked Jen. “He was standing close enough to you.” She still didn’t understand his motivation, and she certainly didn’t think it was a good idea to assault the paparazzi, but if he was trying to get into a fight, that certainly would have been an ideal opportunity.

“Yeah, but that’s not what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to use your aggression to goad them into making the first move, so you’re justified in defending yourself.”

“What do you mean, ‘supposed to’?” Jen asked.

“According to this book I’ve been reading,” he said. “It’s called The New Aggressive Male.”

“What’s new about him?” asked Jen. She wondered if the quality of aggressiveness could change over the years; it seemed pretty timeless to her. She would expect that the new male would want to be less aggressive.

“It’s an updated version,” he replied. “Because of terrorism.”

Jen snorted disdainfully. She hadn’t meant to; she just forgot herself for a moment. Rob turned to look at her, and she erased all signs of derision from her face, hoping that he would think she was just sniffing. After all, she had no right to mock his choice of reading; at this very moment, Zen for Times of Crisis lay in the backpack at her knees.

“Anyway, that’s not the part I’m reading,” he said, evidently recognizing her derision.

“What part are you reading?” she asked.

“Just the more general stuff,” he said. “About how to stand up for yourself and get what you want. And about fighting; there’s a lot about fighting in there. I really should have read it years ago. Master Park says my greatest shortcoming is that I’m not aggressive enough. He’s right, I’m not.”

“How do you mean?” asked Jen. He seemed pretty aggressive to her, what with his looking for fights and trying to punch out reporters. How much more aggressive did he need to be, she wondered?

“Oh, in a bunch of ways,” he said, his voice heavy with self-contempt. “It’s my main problem with fighting. Since everyone I train with is less experienced than me, I have to hold back constantly. When I need to really hurt somebody, I can’t do it.”

“When do you need to hurt somebody?” Jen asked, confused.

“I lost my last two fights,” he said. “Not in taekwondo; in boxing.”

“You do boxing fights?” she asked, surprised. He had just told her he did “a little” boxing. She wondered how much would count as “a lot.”

He nodded. “Anyway, I could have beat both those guys. With the last guy, I had so many openings, but I didn’t go for the knock-out. I knew I needed to, but…” He trailed off.

“But what?” asked Jen. “Did you feel bad for him?”

“No,” he said. “I felt bad for his mother.”

“Aw,” said Jen, sentimentally.

“It’s not a good thing,” he cut her off. “I heard his family was in the crowd. I thought of his mother seeing her son get hit in the eye, watching all that blood run down her son’s face.” He paused and interrupted his own story: “Foreheads bleed a lot,” he explained. “And I just didn’t want to hit him at all.”

Jen winced; the way Rob described it, even she felt bad for the guy’s mother, even though she had no idea who this anonymous boxer was.

Rob continued. “And worse than that, I thought, ‘Why am I punching this guy? He never did anything to me.’ I thought it was an absurd, disgusting spectacle, like dogs fighting in a pit.”

“Well,” said Jen, trying to understand his perspective, “It is kind of like that, isn’t it? I mean, it would be a little crazy not to feel like that sometimes. You’re human.”

“No,” said Rob insistently, the urgency in his voice communicating that Jen couldn’t comprehend the logic of his world any more than he could understand why one should never pick fights with the magazine reporters. “You can never, never feel like that. If you feel like that, you’ll lose.”

“It’s okay to lose sometimes,” said Jen. She had often told herself this when she didn’t get a part she wanted in a movie, or when she had gotten the part and the movie had been a flop. Nobody can win all the time. Everybody loses. She knew it wasn’t a particularly convincing or comforting sentiment.

He sighed again, sadly. “No,” he said, “It’s not okay. But you’re very sweet to think that.”

He reached his hand out and placed it on her knee. With a thrill of nervous excitement, she realized that the moment had arrived. And there it was: he leaned in to kiss her. She still couldn’t see him very well under the weak car lamp, but she could smell the freshly-laundered scent of his shirt. She felt his mouth on hers, and the rough scratchiness of his beard against her cheek.

Her mind began to race. What did this mean? Was she going to be dating him now? She had just moved here; she wasn’t sure if she wanted to be dating somebody right away. She needed Rob to be her friend, not her boyfriend, she thought, desperately. She had just decided on a new pastime, and here she was messing it up. She didn’t want to start at the taekwondo school this way, as some girl who was dating the top student; how horrible! She began to panic, unsure if she were about to ruin all of her lofty plans for her new life in Michigan.

Relax, she told herself, remembering her yoga training, although she hadn’t been to a formal class since the day she broke her rib. She was letting her mind race much too far into the future, rather than enjoying the present moment. With Rob’s hand on her thigh, his arm pressing against hers, his tongue tracing the inside of her lips, there was a lot to enjoy. Stay in the moment, she told herself, and found with pleasurable surprise that she could do it, that she could immerse herself in her senses and forget all about her plans and what this new development might mean.

Suddenly, just as Jen was beginning to feel a little excited and happy, Rob pulled his head back. She opened her eyes and saw the silhouette of his face starting straight forward towards the windshield.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“I’ve got a kid,” he said.

“What?” she asked him, unsure if she had heard him correctly. He had told her quite a bit about his life over the last few hours they had spent together; none of it had implied that he was a parent. It seemed like an awfully unromantic thing to bring up just now.

“I have a son,” he repeated.

“That’s okay,” she said, quickly. “I don’t mind.” Maybe, she reasoned, he was worried about getting involved with somebody. It must be stressful seeing somebody new, knowing your child would detest anyone you brought home. She had certainly hated everyone her parents had dated when she was little, she remembered. He must have some rule that he wouldn’t kiss people until he told them about his son.

“I mean,” he stuttered. “I’m still with his mother.”

“Oh,” said Jen, leaning back into her seat and pulling her hand instinctively to her injured rib.

“We don’t get along at all. It’s a horrible relationship. We’re only together for Apollo’s sake.”

“Apollo?” Jen asked, incredulously. “That’s your son’s name?”

“His mother picked it,” said Rob quickly. “It’s an old family name.”

Jen’s head spun as she tried to sort out what this all meant. She wondered how much more there was to the story, what else he wasn’t telling her. “Are you married?” she asked.

“No, nothing like that,” he said. “We live together. Her parents own the apartment.”

Before Jen could think of how to respond to this startling new information, Rob let out a muffled, anguished noise that sounded like a sob and lowered his head to his hands. He sat that way, holding his head between his hands, for a long while. His back shook a little, and Jen wondered if he were crying. Normally the appropriate thing to do would be to put her hand on his back, to comfort him. But given the circumstances, she did not want to touch him. Instead she sat mutely, watching him as though from a great distance, like he was a character on a movie screen rather than a living person sitting inches away from her.

Staring at his trembling back, she felt increasingly bitter and queasy. In fact, she felt far worse than earlier today, when she had learned that Bradley’s girlfriend might be pregnant. At least she had preemptively distanced herself from that situation, placing thousands of miles of physical and emotional space between herself and her ex-husband. And after all that well-reasoned strategizing, she had stumbled unknowingly from the frying pan to the fire, into the lair of another predator of her emotions and energy.

I’m done, she thought. This is the last time. Celibacy, she thought, grimly—Paula was right about it. She stopped looking at Rob and stared at the windshield instead. She could barely make out the dim outline of the SUV parked just in front of them, her own reflection hovering over it like a ghost.

“I’m so sorry,” Rob said finally, without lifting his head, in a voice that let Jen know that he was indeed crying, or at least doing that not-quite-crying thing that men often did when they didn’t want to bawl outright. “I shouldn’t have gotten you involved in this.”

“That’s okay,” Jen found herself saying, to her own dismay. Why was she excusing him, she wondered? He was the one who had kissed her; now she had to comfort him because he was cheating on his girlfriend? The world is a horrible, backward place, she thought miserably.

“It’s that book,” he said, lifting his face to look at her. “It says to follow my instincts, to go after things that I want…” His voice trailed off, and Jen wondered if he were embarrassed to have referred to her as a “thing.” Even in the dim car light, she could see that his eyes were puffy and bloodshot. “I’m really not like this. I’m usually a really nice person.”

“I believe you,” Jen said, now just trying to appease him. The weight of the day was pressing down upon her now, and she was suddenly exhausted. She just wanted to get out of this car and into the relative comfort of her rickety new bed. She would say anything, whatever it took to extricate herself from this conversation, to get out of this car and into the house. It would be cold and dark now, but at least she would be alone.

“I don’t want you to hate me,” Rob said. He sniffed loudly. He’s really crying, Jen thought, with a disinterested kind of disdain. “I mean, I like you a lot. I felt this kind of connection with you ever since I first saw you at the co-op.” He sniffled again and wiped his nose on his sleeve. “It’s really important to me that we can be friends.”

“Sure,” said Jen, in a deadpan tone that reflected her insincerity. “We’ll be friends.”

Rob smiled wanly and put his hand on her knee. She recoiled inwardly, but she did not brush his hand away. “You promise?” he asked.

“I promise,” said Jen.

Half an hour later, she lay between the chilly bed sheets in the same dirty clothes she had worn into town. Images swirled and blended together in her head—Rob, Bradley, Bradley’s baby, Rob’s son—until they became just a blur of disturbing images and she could not tell one from the other. She didn’t cry. The dark stillness of the house seemed to erase every last emotion from her body until she had no feelings left at all.

Chapter 23:
http://kickoutofyou.blogspot.com/2009/05/23-like-holy-robe.html