“Every day when one’s mind and body are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease or committing seppuku at the death of one’s master.” —Yamamoto Tsunetomo
Jen sat in bed for a long time after finishing the first chapter of Zen for Times of Crisis. She didn’t feel like reading any further just yet. Thomas Fo’s story of abandoning his acting career read like an episode from her own life. It motivated her to focus on her task here, despite her discouraging encounter with Rob last night.
She had gone to bed feeling like she had failed at her new life before it had even begun. After reading Fo’s chapter, she reminded herself of everything that she was supposed to be doing in Michigan, none of which included finding a boyfriend. Quite the contrary. She had come to focus on herself, to shed her old life, to find some space and some peace so she could focus and think.
And for one other reason, she thought, with a grimace, wrapping her arms around her stomach. She hadn’t wanted to think about it. With Becky and Paula to distract her, she had almost succeeded in forgetting all about it.
She remembered Fo’s words. “Even as I write, the tapes stand facing me…a reminder of the life I once lived, and of why I must never return to it.”
Today is the day, she resolved. Today I will think about all the things I haven’t wanted to think about. There was one thought in particular that she had been evading for weeks and weeks; now was the time to confront it.
“I think I’m pregnant,” she said aloud. She started a bit, surprised at hearing the words that she hadn’t even shaped in her head until now. She had been nauseous every day for weeks, and her period still had not returned. And here she was in Michigan, thousands of miles from home, in a place where a baby could grow inside of her without, she had hoped, any attention or notice; that was truly why she was here, she told herself, relieved to finally admit the truth. But admitting it didn’t make her future any more known. She decided that this uncertainty would not haunt her any longer; today she would discover her future.
With new drive, she rose from the bed, quickly dressed herself in sweatpants and a t-shirt, and found the keys to Paula’s mother’s SUV. It was her first time driving in Michigan; Paula and Becky had done all the driving until they left, and yesterday Jen had walked into town and gotten a ride home from Rob. Maneuvering such a large vehicle felt strange to her at first, but soon she got used to it and was able to appreciate how it smoothed out the bumps of the uneven road into town.
She parked in front of the drug store, scanning the sidewalk for paparazzi, but she didn’t see any; apparently the food co-op was their main point of attack.
Safely inside, she walked straight to the back of the store, to the aisle marked “contraceptives,” which, she remembered from her earlier visit to this store, seemed to be shorthand for any paraphernalia necessary for dealing with sex or its consequences. Alongside the condoms and spermicides, there were plastic bottles of neon-colored lubricant, a few containers of flavored “body paint,” ointments for reducing the discomfort of genital herpes, and, next to those, the pregnancy tests.
Jen spotted the box labeled “Know For Sure,” her favorite name of all the brands, and grabbed it quickly from the shelf.
Carrying it low in her hand with the label facing in towards her thigh, she began to search the store for the other embarrassing item she needed: magazines. She remembered seeing them in passing as Paula whisked her around the store, but couldn’t recall where exactly.
She passed through the long row of greeting cards, and then, next to those, found the rack of magazines. She was pleased to see that they had a decent selection covering topics from music to golf to knitting. Right in the center of the top shelf she found the section she was looking for, a large spread of celebrity magazines with more titles than she had known existed. Only one of them mentioned her on its cover. She perused the tables of contents in the other magazines—rolling her eyes at how inevitably difficult it was to find the contents page amongst the pages and pages of advertisements—and discovered three other magazines containing short articles about her.
The real tabloids, the ones with the pixilated photographs on cheap newsprint, were on a shelf at the bottom, near Jen’s feet. She knelt down to sort through them and found two that featured her on the cover, though neither as the main story. Flipping through the other tabloids, she found three more stories about herself.
She walked to the counter, where a single cashier, a blond, pimply-faced boy who was most likely a MNCMU student, awaited her. Blushing, she placed her assortment of purchases on the counter: a neat pile of four celebrity magazines, five trashy tabloids, and topping the stack like a cherry on a sundae, the pregnancy test. She had thought about adding some other purchases to dilute these embarrassing items, but she could not imagine how many bottles of shampoo and multivitamins it would take to distract the cashier from such a preponderance of humiliation.
Jen’s inclination was to bow her head as the cashier scanned the magazines and placed them into a plastic bag, but instead, she attempted to make eye contact with him. After all, he was only a kid, and he probably wouldn’t even notice what she was buying. But his shy smile and refusal to return her gaze convinced her that he did indeed notice, and that he couldn’t wait to report this exciting news to his friends.
It doesn’t matter, she told herself, as she walked out the door with her shameful bag wrapped around her wrist. The whole point is to confront the things that embarrass me. But she could feel her face glowing hot and red and she returned to the SUV, and she was certain that everyone on the sidewalk was staring at her.
Back at the lake house, she placed the magazines and the pregnancy test on the coffee table. Then she made some tea, taking a long time tidying up the kitchen and washing a few dishes that were in the sink. Finally, when she could find no further diversions, she carried her cup of tea into the living room and sat down cross-legged on the floor next to the coffee table. She would start with the magazines, she decided, and then the tabloids. Then, when she could stand no more of her public persona—the thing she had been trying to avoid for years, that she had moved to Michigan to escape—she would move on to the pregnancy test, and then finish the rest of the magazines, after which her project of self-knowledge would be complete for the day.
The top magazine on the pile had a two-page spread near the middle devoted to Jen’s yoga injury. There was a large photograph of her being rushed out of the health club lobby, clutching an ice pack to her side. “Addicted to Asanas,” the headline read, and below that, “The ‘health’ routine that’s tearing Jen’s body apart.” A smaller inset picture on the opposite page showed a picture of Jen with her long hair, taken at the height of her fast she was fairly certain, looking emaciated and haggard as she wrapped her arms around herself on a Los Angeles sidewalk.
Jen winced in embarrassment as her hand reached down reflexively to slap the magazine closed. But she pulled it back to her tea cup, took in a long, calming breath through her nose, and vowed to fulfill her plan of reading the article, and all the articles about her, all the way through.
“On the big screen, Jen appears to be the model of physical fitness, with that lean physique that many women try to emulate through their own diet and exercise regimens. However, as so often happens in Hollywood, Jen’s slender figure comes at a price—and now those close to Jen worry that her extreme lifestyle might be destroying her health.
“Hollywood insiders have noted that Jen’s appearance has gone from skinny to scary as her weight has plummeted in recent months.
“Physician Camilla Jones confirmed that Jen broke her rib after fainting during a yoga class. ‘The fracture was a direct result of Jennifer being dangerously underweight,’ said Jones, who treated Jen at the scene of the accident.
“Students in the yoga class found themselves unwitting witnesses to the shocking mishap. ‘She just turned white and fell over,’ said a woman who was doing yoga next to Jen at the time of the injury. ‘It was really freaky.’ The woman described Jen’s disheveled appearance during the class, noting that her hair and clothing were messy and that her face looked tired.
“The yoga teacher supervising the class, who is also a personal friend of Jen’s, cited concerns about Jen’s health, agreeing that ‘Jen has been engaging in some rather extreme dietary restrictions.' A dietitian who has not worked with Jen personally speculated that she may have been practicing one of several ‘cleanses’ that have become popular with celebrities eager to lose weight.
“One well-known actor who is a frequent visitor to Jen’s house discussed possible reasons behind Jen’s weight loss. ‘She’s been having a rough time,’ said the actor, who did not want to be named. ‘There has been some tension between Jen and her best friend, and it’s causing her a lot of stress.’
“Other friends speculate that Jen may be distraught over the ending of her brief relationship with Skipper Engels, the San Francisco based pornographer who has been rumored to have involved Jen in an illicit party scene of drugs and prostitution, although those close to Jen claim that these rumors have been exaggerated. ‘Jen’s not into that kind of thing,’ said a friend who has known Jen since childhood.
“Whatever the reason, one thing is clear: Jen’s weight is dangerously low, setting a bad example for girls and young women who idolize her. ‘Jen’s unfortunate experience breaking her rib should send a message to her fans, and all women who seek to maintain an unreasonably low weight,’ said the dietitian we consulted. ‘We all want to be thin, but when we go to extremes to get there, we are hurting our bodies more than helping them.’"
Jen had been eager to get to the end of the article so she could close the magazine, but now that it was over she just sat and stared at the words on the page. She felt angry and embarrassed that this was how she would appear to the public, as a neurotic anorexic who was a bad role model for women.
That’s not fair, she said to herself, grasping for the explanation of why not, exactly. I wasn’t on a diet, she said to herself; it was a fast.
Still, she had to concede that to most of the public, this distinction would be meaningless. In fact, nothing in the article was untrue; the information was simply presented through a filter. Still, it was a filter that Jen highly disliked.
How could that doctor say those things to the press, she asked herself? Jen remembered the imposing woman at the health club, lecturing her about her bone density as she sat clutching ice to her broken rib. Despite the doctor’s rather cold, clinical manner, Jen had trusted her, felt instinctively that this outsider, the only African American and the only woman over forty in the class full of gym princesses, had her best interests in mind.
And Paula, who was supposed to be her friend, and Chase—and even Becky seemed to have given a statement. Jen fumed for a moment, vowing to confront her friends as soon as she got a chance to call them up in LA.
But truthfully, she knew how the reporters had gotten their quotes, through bombarding their so-called informants and startling them into speech. She thought of the reporter at the co-op: “What do you think about Bradley’s baby?” If Rob hadn’t intervened, who knows what she would have said. She could just imagine one of them barging into Paula’s yoga class, asking “Don’t you think Jen has been engaging in extreme dietary restrictions?” with Paula’s affirmative nod interpreted as “agreement.”
Tired of looking at the skinny picture of herself, Jen finally closed the magazine and pulled one of the tabloids over. This one had a headline that promised to be more lighthearted: “Jen to Her Pimp Boyfriend—It’s over!” There was a photograph of Skipper at a party, wearing the same yellow cowboy shirt he had worn at the bar with her. She was startled to see his face, and realized that she had forgotten what he looked like, aside from a vague caricature of a scrawny rag doll in flamingo shorts. The article also featured several unflattering pictures of Jen appearing to be screaming or crying, although she was pretty sure the photographers had just caught her in a yawn or a sneeze.
“After discovering Skipper in the arms of yet another woman, Jen finally decided enough was enough and told the infamous pimp to leave her Los Angeles mansion, where he had been living for the past month during their brief, tumultuous affair.
“‘Things were pretty crazy over there,’ said a neighbor, describing the scandalous orgies that Skipper held at Jen’s house several times a week. ‘Limousines would be pulling up at all hours of the night. There was always loud music and all these naked girls running around outside everywhere.’
‘It’s no wonder Jen would get sick of that,’ the neighbor added.
“Other neighbors said that Jen had been seen fighting with Skipper outside the house, and that she had frequently stormed away in tears. ‘It was pretty obvious it wouldn’t last,’ said Jen’s housekeeper.”
Jen was almost done with her second article. This isn’t so bad, thought Jen, although her hands were shaking and the room seemed to be spinning slightly. In fact, reading such flagrant lies helped her gain perspective on the previous, more accurate article. Both articles are interpretations, she thought, and neither one is the truth. Heartened, she read the final lines in the tabloid.
“Although the two have split, Jen’s troubles may not be over yet. Jen’s friends fear that she is carrying Skipper’s baby. ‘That would be a true nightmare,’ said a mutual friend of the actress and the pimp. ‘Neither one of them is fit to be a parent.’”
Jen sucked in a sharp breath and looked up at the box lying on the coffee table. “Know early, and Know For Sure,” it said. Yes, she thought. It was time to know. She took the box into the bathroom, feeling every bit as humiliated as the only other time she had used one of these tests, when she was nineteen years old and terrified of having to have an abortion, though now she was a grown woman who had every intention of keeping the baby. Really, there’s no reason to be mortified by this process, she thought angrily; you’d have to find out somehow or other.
While she waited for her little plus or minus sign to appear, Jen passed the time by reading another tabloid article: “Jen Hires Assassin to Take out Bradley.” The photograph illustrating this story—one of Bradley looking nervously over his shoulder, the other of her whispering into the ear of an ominous man in a dark suit who happened to have been a lawyer from the divorce, though the article didn’t identify him—made Jen think of Bradley again and wonder if his girlfriend was really pregnant.
It would be so odd, she thought, if we had babies at the same time. She wondered whether the babies could be friends, once they were a little older, and whether she and Bradley could also become friends when they were both parents. She had heard that the birth of a child could negate all kinds of longstanding hostilities, could unite estranged families and heal wounded friendships. Maybe the adorable innocence of a tiny baby would purify the foul murk hanging between her and her ex-husband.
She still had three minutes left, according to the clock on the living room wall. She looked back down at the article. “Furious at rumors that he has impregnated his girlfriend, Jen vowed to take revenge on her movie-star ex, but friends never suspected that she would go to these extreme lengths. We spoke with a hit man who says that Jen paid him fifty-thousand dollars in cash to ‘do what you have to do,’ as she put it.”
When she went to the bathroom and picked up the little white stick, the mark was as clear and dark as fresh ink: minus. That meant no baby. “No baby,” she said aloud. She wondered whether she should make an appointment with a doctor to get a second opinion; but she also knew that two months into a hypothetical pregnancy, the results were pretty reliable.
She walked back into the living room and stood by the coffee table. She stared at the stack of magazines and tabloids, her project for the rest of the day. She looked down at the article still open on the table. “Jen would do anything—and I mean anything—to keep Bradley from having that baby,” it said. She bit her lip and sat down on the couch.
Well, she told herself, with a sigh, now I really have no excuse to skip taekwondo tonight.
Chapter 25
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Monday, May 11, 2009
23. Wearing its Ugliness
Ugly, some will say.
The toad wears its ugliness
Like a holy robe.
—Thomas Fo
We live in a culture that encourages us to identify with those aspects of ourselves which are the most superficial, fleeting, rooted in artifice.
We have all been taught to recognize certain facets of this ugly truth. We know that “the media” influences us, sending us so-called “hidden” messages, although truthfully they are quite flagrant, telling us that to be attractive, desirable, worthwhile, we must follow certain standards and norms that are largely determined by the media and the advertisers who finance their productions. We are warned of this deception on a daily basis, more often than not by the very media that propagates it. We know that that these standards are senseless illusions, and yet we cannot stop ourselves from heeding them. We purchase new, fashionable clothing, and throw out our out-of-date clothing while it is still perfectly serviceable. We wear makeup and bathe ourselves in cancer-causing sunlight to tan our bodies. We monitor our food intake, purchasing specially-prepared “low calorie” meals that are engineered to taste like they are full of fat and sugar. We identify ourselves with our possessions—our clothing, cars, computers, cellular phones—worried that a vehicle that is supposed to take us where we need to go is “not stylish enough,” “lacks character,” “doesn’t stand out.” We know, on some level, that this way of thinking is self-involved, shallow, false, and yet we feel it is a guilty pleasure. We enjoy the vanity of our self-deception, comforted by our ostensible recognition of our own hypocrisy.
But these daily acts of self-deception represent just one tiny fragment of the grand artifice that is our culture. Just as our government exposes its small injustices so that the public will not delve into the unfathomable depths of true injustice, just so, we recognize our small acts of shallowness but not the more profound void of self-knowledge that they represent. Noticing the pleasure I take in my expensive new cell phone, I can chastise myself for my own superficiality, without ever noticing that my deeper thoughts and beliefs are just as cheaply bought as a gadget in a store.
Who am I? What is the purpose of my life? Our society gives me answers to these questions. I am a man, a young man, a hip man, a man with a good job, a man with credibility. My purpose is to work, to do my job well, to be productive, to contribute to my company, to impress my friends and coworkers with my wit and competence, to find a wife, to raise a family who will carry on my name once I am gone. And my goal is to stay alive, to live as long as I can, and to die old, and rich, and respected.
There was a time in my life when these answers were sufficient for me. These are the years I think of as “the trance,” when I was involved with the mesmerizing narrative that my culture fed to me. These were the days when, in more ways than one, I was an actor.
I became an actor at the age of fifteen. My family moved to a new town, and I didn’t have any friends at my new high school. Every day at school, I fantasized about leaving, dropping out, escaping back to my old neighborhood. But there was one shining beacon that kept me coming back to school each day: Joanna. She was in not one but two of my classes, English and art, so I got to see her more than once each day. She was beautiful, with huge eyes and long legs, but that’s not why I liked her. I liked her because she was weird and artsy, always dressed in funny, mismatched outfits that looked incredible on her. In class, I pretended not to notice her, but in reality I was a detective, scrutinizing every scrap of her conversations that I could manage to scavenge, trying to deduce how to win her heart.
One day she turned to her girlfriend sitting behind her and asked, “Are you trying out for the play?”
Thus began my acting career. I showed up at the tryouts, trying my hardest to look nonchalant, like I had no particular motive other than wanting to be in a play. I got cast in a small role. I was sure Joanna would be the star, but she got a comic role as an old lady, her beauty smothered in layers of heavy bustles and age makeup.
Alas, love was not to be between us. But from my role as “king’s steward number two,” I learned a valuable lesson: acting is not just an activity but an identity. When I saw how the drama students stuck together, how they created their own little hierarchies, how I could ascend those hierarchies merely by observing and mastering whatever behaviors and affectations were “cool” to them, I felt I had uncovered the great secret of life. Here was a discrete social ladder that I could quantify, whose perimeters I could see clearly, and all I needed to do was read the signs and move ahead. What adolescent doesn’t long to discover the path to popularity, to finally gain some feeling of agency and control over the social order that oppresses us all? Unfortunately, in most social groups, these systems are obscure, tricky, the path riddled with boulders and rickety bridges and false starts leading nowhere, all in order to prevent those at the bottom from ever reaching the heights of power held by those at the top.
But the world of acting was different. Reality for the “drama nerds” was heightened, exaggerated, a heady, enhanced, performative existence. Every gesture, every mannerism was premeditated, carefully crafted for the greatest effect. Where normal life seems often seems murky and unsystematic, the life of an actor is art, and art can be understood and mastered if only the student is attentive enough.
I pursued the study of my new identity with heroic diligence and patience of the sort most teachers can only fantasize about from their students. I learned the gestures, the facial expressions, the vocal flourishes that made me irresistible to directors and actresses, and anathema to my male rivals, who all wanted to befriend me nonetheless, in the tradition of “keeping your friends close and your enemies closer.” The calculated lifting of one sardonic eyebrow drew swoons from girls in black slippers and berets. I won the lead role in every play, or better yet, for reasons of female attention, the villain. I was the king of my small world, the biggest fish in my pond. And it was all automatic, as though I were following a script—play the part, say the right lines, and everyone will cheer and applaud.
Before I continue, lest you think I have some particular grudge against actors, it is crucial to note: acting is no more false than any of the other activities and subcultures through which we develop and define ourselves. But it happens to be a perfect microcosm of real life, since it is life aestheticized, and so it is for me both the representation and the object of representation, my view of life and my particular life circumstance.
Once I had built my identity as a thespian, there was no escape from the track I had set myself upon. I enrolled in a special university program for “dramatic studies,” and everyone told me that acting was my calling, my passion. I always felt strange when people said this to me, because frankly, I wasn’t exactly sure what passion was. I had become pretty adept at feigning passion—both onstage and off—and I had some guesses about how it might feel. It should make a person feel alive, I thought, and completely present. And that’s not how I felt at all, ever. I felt that I was always following a script, playing a role, doing what was expected, what was fitting, so much so that I had no idea of what I actually wanted, what I was meant to be doing, who I truly was.
After college, I began to get “work,” as they call it, mostly parts in commercials. I hated selling things. I had always hated sales, hated the idea of convincing people to buy things they didn’t need. I fancied myself a minimalist at the time, a posture that fit in neatly with both my poverty and my artsy persona. And yet I performed dutifully, immaculately, because that was my job. I acted my heart out in service of blue jeans, facial tissue, dishwashing detergent, fast food. Each day, I hoped against hope, brought me closer to that sitcom job that would elevate me beyond the drudgery of thirty-second spots and inane catch phrases, to the status of a respectable actor. This misery was only temporary dues-paying, I told myself; and so I paid my dues with gusto, proving my dedication by treating the absurd dialogue with dead serious professionalism.
And yet, I could not bear to watch these commercials that I poured all of my expensive dramatic training into. I was given recordings of each one to use in my portfolio. The cassette tapes lay in neat piles at the back of my closet, where I could forget their incriminating existence.
Once at a bar, I told an attractive woman that I was an actor, but when she asked me what I’d been in, my tongue stuck like glue in my mouth; I could not bring myself to tell her that my most recognizable work had been a lucky series of advertisements for “The Diamond Discount Specialists.”
When I finally realized, one fateful night at a sad, lonely party, that my entire life was an act, that I was always performing, that I couldn’t turn it off, that there was no “me” beyond that script whose lines I dutifully parroted with all the empty bravado that I used for my acting roles, I decided it was time to discover who I truly was. The first step, I knew, was to confront that most hated side of myself, the commercial actor. And the very next morning, I pulled every one of the cassette tapes from my closet, blowing off the dust that had accumulated from months and years of neglect. I placed them in a single, precarious stack on the floor of my small studio apartment. They reached from the ground to well over the top of the television set.
I sat on the floor for a long time, staring in horrified apprehension at the evidence of my shame. Would I be able to stomach this physical manifestation of the misery that comprised the last five years of my life?
My hands shook as I took the first tape off of the stack and placed it into the VCR. As it played on the television, I watched myself drinking beer with “the guys,” sitting on couches in a sitcom-style living room, the setting itself mocking my dreams of an actual weekly television show.
When it ended, I ejected the tape and inserted another. And then another. Images of my face flashed across the screen, me laughing, frowning, working hard, holding hands with my “girlfriend” (although I had not maintained anything close to a committed relationship since high school), playing tennis. Married with a small child. Comforting an elderly relative. Enjoying a delicious hamburger dripping with orange-colored sauce.
They were every bit as horrible as I had imagined. In fact, they were worse. Watching these familiar, trite little scenes, I was able for the first time in years, or possibly ever, to regard myself honestly, to see myself as others would see me. What I saw on the screen was not a great actor. Instead, this man in the commercials was...normal. A normal part of everyday society. A mascot celebrating convention, complacency, and good old-fashioned American consumerism.
If I were to die tomorrow, I told myself, this would be the sum of my achievements. This is what I would leave to posterity. My life would be judged by this. I felt sick to my stomach.
I watched one hundred and thirty-eight commercials that day. It took four hours to get through them all, switching the tapes after every thirty or sixty seconds.
When I had removed the very last tape from the VCR, I felt weak and drained. I carried all the tapes to my closet and stacked them in the back again, eager to hide them away. An hour later, I put all of the tapes into garbage bags and placed them in the apartment dumpster downstairs. Then, in the middle of the fretful, sleepless night that followed, I rose from my bed and went back downstairs in my pajamas to rescue the tapes from the dumpster. Rather than putting them back into the closet, I stacked them in a tall pile against the wall of my living area, where I could never, never forget their existence. Even as I write, the tapes stand facing me, now in my study, a reminder of the life I once lived, and of why I must never return to it.
I will never act again, I said to myself, as I stacked each ugly black tape against my blank white wall. And I was, at last, free.
Chapter 24:
http://kickoutofyou.blogspot.com/2009/06/24.html
The toad wears its ugliness
Like a holy robe.
—Thomas Fo
We live in a culture that encourages us to identify with those aspects of ourselves which are the most superficial, fleeting, rooted in artifice.
We have all been taught to recognize certain facets of this ugly truth. We know that “the media” influences us, sending us so-called “hidden” messages, although truthfully they are quite flagrant, telling us that to be attractive, desirable, worthwhile, we must follow certain standards and norms that are largely determined by the media and the advertisers who finance their productions. We are warned of this deception on a daily basis, more often than not by the very media that propagates it. We know that that these standards are senseless illusions, and yet we cannot stop ourselves from heeding them. We purchase new, fashionable clothing, and throw out our out-of-date clothing while it is still perfectly serviceable. We wear makeup and bathe ourselves in cancer-causing sunlight to tan our bodies. We monitor our food intake, purchasing specially-prepared “low calorie” meals that are engineered to taste like they are full of fat and sugar. We identify ourselves with our possessions—our clothing, cars, computers, cellular phones—worried that a vehicle that is supposed to take us where we need to go is “not stylish enough,” “lacks character,” “doesn’t stand out.” We know, on some level, that this way of thinking is self-involved, shallow, false, and yet we feel it is a guilty pleasure. We enjoy the vanity of our self-deception, comforted by our ostensible recognition of our own hypocrisy.
But these daily acts of self-deception represent just one tiny fragment of the grand artifice that is our culture. Just as our government exposes its small injustices so that the public will not delve into the unfathomable depths of true injustice, just so, we recognize our small acts of shallowness but not the more profound void of self-knowledge that they represent. Noticing the pleasure I take in my expensive new cell phone, I can chastise myself for my own superficiality, without ever noticing that my deeper thoughts and beliefs are just as cheaply bought as a gadget in a store.
Who am I? What is the purpose of my life? Our society gives me answers to these questions. I am a man, a young man, a hip man, a man with a good job, a man with credibility. My purpose is to work, to do my job well, to be productive, to contribute to my company, to impress my friends and coworkers with my wit and competence, to find a wife, to raise a family who will carry on my name once I am gone. And my goal is to stay alive, to live as long as I can, and to die old, and rich, and respected.
There was a time in my life when these answers were sufficient for me. These are the years I think of as “the trance,” when I was involved with the mesmerizing narrative that my culture fed to me. These were the days when, in more ways than one, I was an actor.
I became an actor at the age of fifteen. My family moved to a new town, and I didn’t have any friends at my new high school. Every day at school, I fantasized about leaving, dropping out, escaping back to my old neighborhood. But there was one shining beacon that kept me coming back to school each day: Joanna. She was in not one but two of my classes, English and art, so I got to see her more than once each day. She was beautiful, with huge eyes and long legs, but that’s not why I liked her. I liked her because she was weird and artsy, always dressed in funny, mismatched outfits that looked incredible on her. In class, I pretended not to notice her, but in reality I was a detective, scrutinizing every scrap of her conversations that I could manage to scavenge, trying to deduce how to win her heart.
One day she turned to her girlfriend sitting behind her and asked, “Are you trying out for the play?”
Thus began my acting career. I showed up at the tryouts, trying my hardest to look nonchalant, like I had no particular motive other than wanting to be in a play. I got cast in a small role. I was sure Joanna would be the star, but she got a comic role as an old lady, her beauty smothered in layers of heavy bustles and age makeup.
Alas, love was not to be between us. But from my role as “king’s steward number two,” I learned a valuable lesson: acting is not just an activity but an identity. When I saw how the drama students stuck together, how they created their own little hierarchies, how I could ascend those hierarchies merely by observing and mastering whatever behaviors and affectations were “cool” to them, I felt I had uncovered the great secret of life. Here was a discrete social ladder that I could quantify, whose perimeters I could see clearly, and all I needed to do was read the signs and move ahead. What adolescent doesn’t long to discover the path to popularity, to finally gain some feeling of agency and control over the social order that oppresses us all? Unfortunately, in most social groups, these systems are obscure, tricky, the path riddled with boulders and rickety bridges and false starts leading nowhere, all in order to prevent those at the bottom from ever reaching the heights of power held by those at the top.
But the world of acting was different. Reality for the “drama nerds” was heightened, exaggerated, a heady, enhanced, performative existence. Every gesture, every mannerism was premeditated, carefully crafted for the greatest effect. Where normal life seems often seems murky and unsystematic, the life of an actor is art, and art can be understood and mastered if only the student is attentive enough.
I pursued the study of my new identity with heroic diligence and patience of the sort most teachers can only fantasize about from their students. I learned the gestures, the facial expressions, the vocal flourishes that made me irresistible to directors and actresses, and anathema to my male rivals, who all wanted to befriend me nonetheless, in the tradition of “keeping your friends close and your enemies closer.” The calculated lifting of one sardonic eyebrow drew swoons from girls in black slippers and berets. I won the lead role in every play, or better yet, for reasons of female attention, the villain. I was the king of my small world, the biggest fish in my pond. And it was all automatic, as though I were following a script—play the part, say the right lines, and everyone will cheer and applaud.
Before I continue, lest you think I have some particular grudge against actors, it is crucial to note: acting is no more false than any of the other activities and subcultures through which we develop and define ourselves. But it happens to be a perfect microcosm of real life, since it is life aestheticized, and so it is for me both the representation and the object of representation, my view of life and my particular life circumstance.
Once I had built my identity as a thespian, there was no escape from the track I had set myself upon. I enrolled in a special university program for “dramatic studies,” and everyone told me that acting was my calling, my passion. I always felt strange when people said this to me, because frankly, I wasn’t exactly sure what passion was. I had become pretty adept at feigning passion—both onstage and off—and I had some guesses about how it might feel. It should make a person feel alive, I thought, and completely present. And that’s not how I felt at all, ever. I felt that I was always following a script, playing a role, doing what was expected, what was fitting, so much so that I had no idea of what I actually wanted, what I was meant to be doing, who I truly was.
After college, I began to get “work,” as they call it, mostly parts in commercials. I hated selling things. I had always hated sales, hated the idea of convincing people to buy things they didn’t need. I fancied myself a minimalist at the time, a posture that fit in neatly with both my poverty and my artsy persona. And yet I performed dutifully, immaculately, because that was my job. I acted my heart out in service of blue jeans, facial tissue, dishwashing detergent, fast food. Each day, I hoped against hope, brought me closer to that sitcom job that would elevate me beyond the drudgery of thirty-second spots and inane catch phrases, to the status of a respectable actor. This misery was only temporary dues-paying, I told myself; and so I paid my dues with gusto, proving my dedication by treating the absurd dialogue with dead serious professionalism.
And yet, I could not bear to watch these commercials that I poured all of my expensive dramatic training into. I was given recordings of each one to use in my portfolio. The cassette tapes lay in neat piles at the back of my closet, where I could forget their incriminating existence.
Once at a bar, I told an attractive woman that I was an actor, but when she asked me what I’d been in, my tongue stuck like glue in my mouth; I could not bring myself to tell her that my most recognizable work had been a lucky series of advertisements for “The Diamond Discount Specialists.”
When I finally realized, one fateful night at a sad, lonely party, that my entire life was an act, that I was always performing, that I couldn’t turn it off, that there was no “me” beyond that script whose lines I dutifully parroted with all the empty bravado that I used for my acting roles, I decided it was time to discover who I truly was. The first step, I knew, was to confront that most hated side of myself, the commercial actor. And the very next morning, I pulled every one of the cassette tapes from my closet, blowing off the dust that had accumulated from months and years of neglect. I placed them in a single, precarious stack on the floor of my small studio apartment. They reached from the ground to well over the top of the television set.
I sat on the floor for a long time, staring in horrified apprehension at the evidence of my shame. Would I be able to stomach this physical manifestation of the misery that comprised the last five years of my life?
My hands shook as I took the first tape off of the stack and placed it into the VCR. As it played on the television, I watched myself drinking beer with “the guys,” sitting on couches in a sitcom-style living room, the setting itself mocking my dreams of an actual weekly television show.
When it ended, I ejected the tape and inserted another. And then another. Images of my face flashed across the screen, me laughing, frowning, working hard, holding hands with my “girlfriend” (although I had not maintained anything close to a committed relationship since high school), playing tennis. Married with a small child. Comforting an elderly relative. Enjoying a delicious hamburger dripping with orange-colored sauce.
They were every bit as horrible as I had imagined. In fact, they were worse. Watching these familiar, trite little scenes, I was able for the first time in years, or possibly ever, to regard myself honestly, to see myself as others would see me. What I saw on the screen was not a great actor. Instead, this man in the commercials was...normal. A normal part of everyday society. A mascot celebrating convention, complacency, and good old-fashioned American consumerism.
If I were to die tomorrow, I told myself, this would be the sum of my achievements. This is what I would leave to posterity. My life would be judged by this. I felt sick to my stomach.
I watched one hundred and thirty-eight commercials that day. It took four hours to get through them all, switching the tapes after every thirty or sixty seconds.
When I had removed the very last tape from the VCR, I felt weak and drained. I carried all the tapes to my closet and stacked them in the back again, eager to hide them away. An hour later, I put all of the tapes into garbage bags and placed them in the apartment dumpster downstairs. Then, in the middle of the fretful, sleepless night that followed, I rose from my bed and went back downstairs in my pajamas to rescue the tapes from the dumpster. Rather than putting them back into the closet, I stacked them in a tall pile against the wall of my living area, where I could never, never forget their existence. Even as I write, the tapes stand facing me, now in my study, a reminder of the life I once lived, and of why I must never return to it.
I will never act again, I said to myself, as I stacked each ugly black tape against my blank white wall. And I was, at last, free.
Chapter 24:
http://kickoutofyou.blogspot.com/2009/06/24.html
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
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
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
Friday, March 27, 2009
21. Fall the Sword
“In the application of your principles you must be like the pancratiast, not like the gladiator; for the gladiator lets fall the sword which he uses and is killed; but the other always has his hand, and needs to do nothing else than use it.” —Marcus Aurelius
The white uniform, the crisp, starchy jacket, the floppy pants, the black belt—it reminded Jen of a karate movie. But she supposed that when Rob’s teacher was wearing it, it was a taekwondo uniform.
Even in this new set of clothes, Jen recognized the man easily enough, first because of his distinctive eyeglasses, and second because he was the only Asian person she had seen during the entire week she had spent in North Middleton, aside from a few students on the campus.
“Master Park,” said Rob. “This is Jen.”
“Nice to meet you formally,” said Master Park, extending his hand between the bars of the gate to shake hers.
“Do you mind if we watch the class?” Rob asked. “We’ll stay back here, so we don’t distract anybody.”
Jen wondered why the men would be distracted by Rob, but then remembered that it was she who would be the distraction. Despite her recent run-in with the paparazzi, she had felt invisible all day, her first day alone in a town where she didn’t know anybody at all. Even if people recognized her, none of them would notice if she had a heart attack in the house or drowned in the lake; no one would come looking for her. Not knowing anybody is like not existing, she thought.
“Anyone can watch through the gate,” said Master Park, turning his back. “No permission required.”
“Thanks,” Rob called after his teacher, who was already walking towards a group of students who Jen could hear conversing inside the courtyard, although they weren’t visible to her.
It was a decidedly poor vantage point. They could only see a few of the students at a time, easy to spot in their bright yellow jumpsuits, through the small break in the branches. Jen wished that she could have come inside the courtyard, where she could see the entire class at once. She was curious about how many people were in the class, and their ages, which she couldn’t discern at this distance, and most importantly, whether they were all, as it appeared from the small but ever-changing sample in her range of vision, men.
Rob narrated the class as they watched, their heads bowed close together, peering through the bars of the fence.
“First they stretch,” he said, and sure enough, the men were bending over one leg, the other leg, the center. In their sunny yellow outfits, the flexible men looked like graceful flowers, folding into themselves as though closing their petals for the night. Jen could see a couple of other men struggling to bend forward, looking more like rusty door hinges that didn’t want to bend.
“Do you wear that yellow thing?” asked Jen, wondering if it were some kind of taekwondo uniform. The bright color wouldn’t do much for his olive complexion, Jen thought disapprovingly.
“I used to,” he said.
“Oh,” said Jen, confused. She mustered up all of her limited martial arts knowledge. “Is it like a belt? Did you move up to a different color?” It made sense to force the beginning students to wear that horrible yellow, she thought; it would be a good incentive to improve. She wondered what color outfit he wore. Black, she supposed, since he had been doing it so long. That would look nice on him. Or maybe white, like the pants and jacket Master Park was wearing.
“What?” he asked, sounding startled. Then he laughed. “Oh, no, it’s not for taekwondo. Those are the Snail coveralls. Everyone in the plant wears them.”
“I didn’t see anyone else wearing them,” said Jen, feeling stupid now for her mistake.
“Anyone else where?” he asked. “Have you seen any other people around here?”
Come to think of it, she hadn’t. Both times she walked the grounds of the Snail Plant, it had been a barren ghost town. Within this courtyard, hidden behind rows of shrubs and tree branches and iron bars, was the only sign of human life she had encountered within miles of the plant, apart from the people she came here with. That’s what so creepy about this place, she realized, wondering why she hadn’t noticed it before—no one on the streets or sidewalks.
“No,” she said.
The men had finished stretching. Now they were doing what seemed to be an endless series of jumping jacks. Jen felt out of breath just watching them.
“There are tunnels between all the buildings, underground,” he said. “It keeps people from having to walk outside in the winter.”
“But it’s not…” said Jen. Rob interrupted her before she could point out the obvious: that it was a beautiful spring day, the kind of day that would motivate someone to take an extra-long walk outside for no good reason at all.
“You’re not allowed to wear the coveralls outside the plant,” he said. “So no one walks outside. Everybody enters at the employee parking garage, which is probably a mile from here, and then they get on moving walkways underground.”
“Why can’t they wear them outside?” Jen asked.
Rob didn’t answer her question; instead, he pointed his finger through the bars. The men were doing what looked like a violent little dance, stepping rhythmically and kicking in the air.
“Look,” he said. “Hyeong.”
“Huh?” she asked. The men were lined up and moving in formation now, like fighter jets. They walked to one side, punched, kicked, moved to the other side, punched and kicked again.
“Those are forms,” he said.
“Oh,” said Jen, who had no idea what he was talking about. It looked like some kind of practice fighting, like that stuff men did all alone in a field at sunrise in kung fu movies. Spartan, lean men with plain, functional clothing and ponytails; Jen could envision the scene exactly, although she couldn’t remember having actually watched a movie like that.
“Do any women do this?” Jen asked.
“Of course,” said Rob, his indignant tone suggesting that this was a ridiculous question. Then he suddenly seemed to recognize the motivation for her inquiry. As the students moved first left, then forward, then right, the leafy window revealed a few of the yellow jumpsuits at a time, and then a few more, and then a few more—all inhabited by men.
“Oh,” he said, as though conceding a point. “Well, mostly the young women do. There aren’t too many older women who keep up with it.”
Jen wrinkled her nose and let out a resentful harrumph, presuming that by “older,” he meant something around her own age, the age of adults who would work in a factory.
“You know what I mean,” he said. “They get married and have kids, and usually if anyone keeps training after that, it’s the husbands.”
Jen expressed her dissatisfaction with this attempted defense by remaining silent. The space between the trees was empty now, but Jen could still hear the men talking quietly. She wondered if class was over.
“It’s not just the women; a lot of the men quit, too. Anyway, not a lot of women work for Snail. The testosterone runs pretty high in there.”
As if to illustrate this point, two of the men came flying out into the clearing, one’s foot arching through the air, the other backing up so that the foot missed his nose by a few inches.
“Oh my god,” Jen gasped, startled.
“That’s not as bad as it looks,” said Rob quickly. “It’s just point sparring. They don’t kick very hard. The ground is concrete so you don’t want to fall on it.”
“No, I guess not,” said Jen, as the first two men moved out of her range of vision and two other men appeared, engaged in almost the same motions as the first two, the retreating man leaning back to avoid the advancing man’s foot.
“Do they just kick each other in the head?” Jen asked.
“No, in the stomach and legs,” said Rob matter-of-factly.
“Isn’t that dangerous?” Jen asked.
“No,” said Rob. “Worst case, you break your nose or your rib.”
Jen lowered a hand defensively to her own right rib, which was still tender if she poked at it. She remembered how easily it had snapped, without her even realizing what had happened. She wondered if the men’s ribs were much stronger than hers, or if they just didn’t actually get kicked very often. After all, of the two kicks she had seen so far in this class, neither one had reached its target.
Jen and Rob watched the men kicking each other in the head, and, as promised, in the stomach and legs as well for another fifteen minutes or so. She saw a few of the kicks actually connect with the men’s heads or stomachs, but, once they landed, Jen understood Rob’s point; the kicks that looked so aggressive flying through the air seemed to lose their power just at the moment of impact, bouncing cheerily off their targets like friendly slaps on the back. Maybe this wasn’t so scary, Jen thought, although she still wouldn’t want one of those kicks to hit her healing rib.
Finally Jen heard men’s voices joking and laughing all at once, and it appeared that the class was over. “Let’s wait for Master Park,” said Rob. The teacher appeared at the gate a moment later, now in jeans and a t-shirt, carrying a stuffed messenger bag strapped across his chest. He unlatched something that Jen couldn’t see inside of the gate and swung it open.
Rob let out a gasp. “You’re leaving by the gate?” he asked with exaggerated incredulity.
“Don’t tell,” Master Park replied, closing it quickly behind him. He turned to Jen, and said, “I can’t stand those stupid tunnels.” He turned back to look at Rob. “Tea?” he asked.
“I need to take Jen home,” said Rob, turning towards her. “Unless you want to come have some tea. Are you done here? I’m sorry, you didn’t get to see much at all.”
I saw exactly what I came to see, Jen thought, but she couldn’t say it aloud. “I’ll come back again,” she said. “I’ve got lots of time.”
Rob drove the three of them back into town, Jen sitting quietly in the back while the two men talked about classes and belts and fighting in the front seats. She had almost fallen asleep when they reached their destination, an ornate building near the university. It had the deep red walls and squat, bento-box shape that Jen associated with suburban Chinese restaurants.
“This is the only decent place to get tea in North Middleton,” said Rob, as he held open the tall, enameled door.
“Owned by my student,” said Master Park, walking into the dark, windowless room heavy with decorative linens and tapestries on the walls.
A cheerful-looking teenager was waiting to great them, but he was interrupted by a long-haired man with a blond beard and a Chinese-style suit who rushed from the back of the tea house to greet them with a small bow. “Master Park,” he said. “You want your regular table?”
“Thank you, Ken,” said Master Park, following the blond man towards the back of the restaurant, with Rob and Jen walking behind them.
Even though it was mid-afternoon, the restaurant was packed with students, identifiable not only by their youth but by the open textbooks and notepads that they had scattered across their tables. It seemed odd to Jen that they would come to a restaurant to study; then again, as she walked between the tables, she noticed that most of them held no food but only large pots of tea. A few of the students had snacks on their tables, small plates of dumplings or little Chinese tea cakes. Some were not studying but catching up with friends over their tea and food, speaking in rapid, over-caffeinated streams of words, as though they had far too much to cover during such a short event as a lunch date.
As Master Park walked by, all of the students looked up from their homework to greet him cheerfully. Choruses of “Hi Master Park” awaited him at each table from athletic-looking young adults. Master Park smiled and waved silently at each table, beaming down proudly at the students.
“All my students,” he said, as they arrived at a table at the very back of the restaurant, and Ken handed them each a menu. “So good, they study all the time.”
Jen wasn’t sure whether she should open the menu in her hand. She was starving after her long walk and minimal lunch; still, she didn’t want to be the one who suggested getting some food with their tea. She always felt nervous eating around men, especially ones she didn’t know very well. She looked hopefully at Rob and Master Park. If they ordered Chinese food, it would be served family style, and she could eat some without having to choose anything for herself. But if they put the menus down and just ordered tea, she would just have to eat later on; there was no way she was going to request food if they didn’t want any.
She was relieved to see both of the men open their menus. She opened her own menu and began to glance distractedly over the pages. She was too tired to focus well, and she wasn’t intending to order anything, but still, some vegetables would be nice.
She flipped through the pages, remembering that Chinese menus normally relegated the vegetarian dishes to the back. Something seemed strange about the menu; she didn’t recognize anything on it. She saw a page that seemed to be all Chinese words, written out in English letters: tie guan yin, shui xian, dahongpao.
She looked at the top of the page, which said “China.” What kind of menu is this, she wondered. She flipped to the front page of the menu, where the name of the restaurant read “Camellia Teahouse.”
So this wasn’t a restaurant at all, Jen thought, a little amused at her own disappointment; normally, when she wasn’t quite so famished, she liked tea places much more than restaurants, with their heavy, unhealthy food and everyone judging her order and appetite.
She wondered why she had thought it was a restaurant. It’s the building, she decided. A tea place in Los Angeles would never look like this. For starters, it would be called a tea bar, to show that it was a fun and hip place to be. Also, everything in the tea bar would be light-colored and translucent, lots of glass bricks and wide windows, the exact opposite of the dark wood and windowless walls surrounding her. A tea bar, she realized, catered to people just like her, people who wanted their food and drink to be light, airy, disembodied. That would make a pretty small customer base in the Midwest, Jen thought. Instead, this tea house seemed to cater to—she looked around at the patrons again—college-aged martial arts students.
This is a strange place, thought Jen. She had a lot to learn.
A young waiter, who looked like he had probably been culled from the regular clientele, appeared at the side of the table. “Hi Master Park!” he said, enthusiastically.
“Hi Chad,” said Master Park. Then he turned to look at Jen across the round table. “You like green tea?” he asked her.
“Sure,” said Jen. Actually she hadn’t drunk green tea in years. She remembered it tasting bitter, like raw leaves. She wasn’t about to argue, though. She had just been about to accept whatever food they ordered, so she could certainly accept their choice of tea. Still, she had been hoping for a nice, bracing cup of black tea; that would be perfect right now.
Master Park grabbed Rob’s menu from the table and lifted Jen’s from her hands. “Sencha,” he said to the waiter.
“Yes, Master Park” said the waiter. “Anything else?”
Jen waited, hoping he would order one of the snacks that she had seen on the other customers’ tables. She wondered where they were in the menu. She hadn’t seen anything listed that sounded like food.
”Not right now, thanks,” he replied, handing the menus to the waiter, who bowed and retreated back to the kitchen as Jen sat watching, helpless to stop this refusal of sustenance.
“So,” said Master Park, crossing his hands on the table in front of him. “How did you two meet?”
Relieved at the distraction from her hunger, Jen recounted the story of her afternoon. She felt shy, but she was happy to have something concrete to talk about. She described the reporters and photographers factually, without making any mention of why they were following her.
While she talked, the waiter returned with two teapots and three small cups. He placed a transparent glass pot on the table, then filled it with steaming water from a stainless steel one. Through the glass, Jen could see the water turning a pale celery color as it softened the tea leaves.
The most exuberant part of her narrative was Rob’s heroic deflection of the reporter in the produce section. “He just started walking towards the guy,” said Jen. “And the reporter just backed out of the store, like someone was pushing him.”
Master Park lifted the tea pot and poured tea into the three little cups. He passed one to Rob and another to Jen. He pulled his own cup close in front of him and wrapped both hands around it, as though warming them on a cold night.
“Robert is my top student,” he said in a matter-of-fact voice. Jen looked over at Rob, and thought that his face appeared a bit flushed, although it might have just been from the hot tea or the dim lighting.
“Everyone in this town is scared of him,” Master Park said. "People who don’t know him are scared of him, just from looking at him. They can feel his energy and they know not to mess with him.”
“Master Park,” said Rob, now clearly embarrassed and trying to interrupt him.
“Shush, shush,” said Master Park, waving his hand dismissively at Rob. “Your modesty is not necessary.”
Rob didn’t say anything, but Jen could hear him exhale loudly through his nose, like a secret sigh with no accompanying facial expression.
Then, perhaps to spare Rob any further embarrassment, Master Park changed the subject. “Are the yellow belts ready for Saturday?” he asked Rob.
“They seem pretty strong,” said Rob. He turned to Jen, and, by way of explanation, said, “Belt test.”
Jen tried to listen as they talked, quietly sipping her green tea. It actually tasted pretty good, she thought. Still like leaves, but in a clean, astringent way that reminded her of lemon even without lemon in it. It was hard to pay attention, with so many words she did not understand—in Korean, she guessed—and other words that were in English but meant nothing to her, words that seemed to describe kicks and punches.
She watched Rob make a punching gesture with his hand to demonstrate some move he was concerned about. What if he had turned out to be a kidnapper, she thought? He could have killed her with his bare hands without breaking a sweat. The most dangerous man in North Middleton, and she just hops in the car with him, no questions asked. She never would have taken a ride from a stranger in Los Angeles. Stupid, she chastised herself. Alone in this new town, with no one looking out for her, safety was more important than ever.
Master Park turned towards her suddenly. “You’re very quiet,” he said. “What are you thinking about?”
“I’d like to come to your school,” said Jen. Once again, she did not recognize her own intentions until she heard herself say them aloud. It was becoming a daily occurrence, and she wondered briefly what it meant, and why she was so lacking in self-knowledge.
Master Park took a small sip of his tea and held it in his mouth for a long moment before swallowing it. “Why?” he asked, bluntly, his question sounding more rhetorical than inquisitive.
Jen hesitated. So I can fight off kidnappers, she thought, but she didn’t want to say it that way in front of Rob, who she feared might take it personally.
“For your health?” asked Master Park, taking another sip of his tea.
Rather than try to explain her thoughts, Jen opted for the expected answer, her old habit for avoiding confrontation. She nodded passively in agreement.
“Humph,” growled the teacher, dismissively, slamming his empty cup decisively on the table. “That’s a bad reason. Taekwondo is terrible for your health.”
“Really?” Jen blurted out incredulously, surprised to be hearing this from the teacher. She looked over at Rob, who was rolling his eyes ever so subtly upward, as though he had heard some version of this conversation many times before.
“Of course,” said the teacher with a cynical, joyless chuckle. “You know people will be kicking you in the face, right?” He laughed again. “Look—broken nose. Broken wrist. Broken rib.” He pointed at the injured parts of his body as he named them. “Torn ACL. Two knee surgeries.” He tapped his head with one finger. “Four concussions.”
“Oh,” said Jen, unsure whether she was supposed to express some kind of sympathy or act impressed. “Well, I don’t know if I want to be fighting.” She had watched the men in the courtyard; most of what they were doing didn’t seem like it would cause her to break anything. She wasn’t sure what the next step up in intensity and danger would be after that, but she figured she’d stop before she reached it.
“Everybody fights,” said the teacher. “You’re not going to study and not fight.” Before Jen had a chance to respond, he said, “Now you know, you won’t do taekwondo for your health, okay?”
“Okay,” said Jen.
“So,” said the teacher, scanning his eyes over Jen’s body. “What are you doing for your health? You look very unhealthy.”
She wasn’t sure how to answer. She had actually felt exceptionally healthy during the last month since she had broken her rib. She had been eating more, putting on a little weight, getting lots of sunshine and fresh air. She knew she must look bedraggled at the moment, and perhaps a little sunburned, she thought, lifting her hand to the back of her neck, which was warm.
“You’re too skinny and pale. Somebody kicks you, you’re going to break in half.” He thought for a moment, putting his hand over his mouth and narrowing his eyes. “Hmm…You eat meat?” he asked.
Again, she didn’t know what to say. She didn’t prefer to eat meat, although she wasn’t technically a vegetarian. She avoided red meat in particular, which always made her feel like she had overeaten, even if she ate just a little bit of it. But she had been expecting Rob and Master Park to order Chinese food with meat, since that’s what men usually did, and she would have gladly eaten some, if only a very tiny portion.
“If you come to my class, you have to eat meat,” said Master Park. “No vegetarians allowed.”
He paused and squinted at something on the wall above Jen’s head. She turned and saw that the food specials for the day were posted on an erasable whiteboard above her head.
“I’m going to order food,” he said.
“Good, I’m starving,” said Rob. “Get noodles.”
Master Park called the waiter over and placed an order: noodles with spicy beef, pork dumplings, and crispy green onion pancakes. Jen saw steamed broccoli on the menu, her favorite, but she didn’t dare ask Master Park to order it.
”You’ll come to class tomorrow night,” he said to Jen, when the waiter had left. “Six thirty, beginner’s class.”
Tomorrow seemed awfully soon; she felt that she wouldn’t be ready yet, although she had no idea what she would need to be ready for exactly. Still, Master Park’s pronouncement sounded confrontational, like a challenge. It’s a dare, she thought, to see if I’m serious. He doesn’t think I’m actually going to show up.
She remembered her last month in Los Angeles, when she had gone to yoga classes twice each day, building the strength and flexibility to do all kinds of poses she never would have thought possible, despite the fact that she was barely eating anything at the time. I’m serious, she thought angrily. This guy has no idea how serious I am.
“Okay, sounds good,” she answered nonchalantly, but she stared confrontationally into Master Park’s eyes as she said it.
Her throat felt a little scratchy as she spoke, and she noticed that she was a little lightheaded. I’d better not get sick, she thought, because I’m going anyway. Even if she had pneumonia, there was no way she was going to miss that class.
Chapter 22:
http://kickoutofyou.blogspot.com/2009/04/22-without-my-permission.html
The white uniform, the crisp, starchy jacket, the floppy pants, the black belt—it reminded Jen of a karate movie. But she supposed that when Rob’s teacher was wearing it, it was a taekwondo uniform.
Even in this new set of clothes, Jen recognized the man easily enough, first because of his distinctive eyeglasses, and second because he was the only Asian person she had seen during the entire week she had spent in North Middleton, aside from a few students on the campus.
“Master Park,” said Rob. “This is Jen.”
“Nice to meet you formally,” said Master Park, extending his hand between the bars of the gate to shake hers.
“Do you mind if we watch the class?” Rob asked. “We’ll stay back here, so we don’t distract anybody.”
Jen wondered why the men would be distracted by Rob, but then remembered that it was she who would be the distraction. Despite her recent run-in with the paparazzi, she had felt invisible all day, her first day alone in a town where she didn’t know anybody at all. Even if people recognized her, none of them would notice if she had a heart attack in the house or drowned in the lake; no one would come looking for her. Not knowing anybody is like not existing, she thought.
“Anyone can watch through the gate,” said Master Park, turning his back. “No permission required.”
“Thanks,” Rob called after his teacher, who was already walking towards a group of students who Jen could hear conversing inside the courtyard, although they weren’t visible to her.
It was a decidedly poor vantage point. They could only see a few of the students at a time, easy to spot in their bright yellow jumpsuits, through the small break in the branches. Jen wished that she could have come inside the courtyard, where she could see the entire class at once. She was curious about how many people were in the class, and their ages, which she couldn’t discern at this distance, and most importantly, whether they were all, as it appeared from the small but ever-changing sample in her range of vision, men.
Rob narrated the class as they watched, their heads bowed close together, peering through the bars of the fence.
“First they stretch,” he said, and sure enough, the men were bending over one leg, the other leg, the center. In their sunny yellow outfits, the flexible men looked like graceful flowers, folding into themselves as though closing their petals for the night. Jen could see a couple of other men struggling to bend forward, looking more like rusty door hinges that didn’t want to bend.
“Do you wear that yellow thing?” asked Jen, wondering if it were some kind of taekwondo uniform. The bright color wouldn’t do much for his olive complexion, Jen thought disapprovingly.
“I used to,” he said.
“Oh,” said Jen, confused. She mustered up all of her limited martial arts knowledge. “Is it like a belt? Did you move up to a different color?” It made sense to force the beginning students to wear that horrible yellow, she thought; it would be a good incentive to improve. She wondered what color outfit he wore. Black, she supposed, since he had been doing it so long. That would look nice on him. Or maybe white, like the pants and jacket Master Park was wearing.
“What?” he asked, sounding startled. Then he laughed. “Oh, no, it’s not for taekwondo. Those are the Snail coveralls. Everyone in the plant wears them.”
“I didn’t see anyone else wearing them,” said Jen, feeling stupid now for her mistake.
“Anyone else where?” he asked. “Have you seen any other people around here?”
Come to think of it, she hadn’t. Both times she walked the grounds of the Snail Plant, it had been a barren ghost town. Within this courtyard, hidden behind rows of shrubs and tree branches and iron bars, was the only sign of human life she had encountered within miles of the plant, apart from the people she came here with. That’s what so creepy about this place, she realized, wondering why she hadn’t noticed it before—no one on the streets or sidewalks.
“No,” she said.
The men had finished stretching. Now they were doing what seemed to be an endless series of jumping jacks. Jen felt out of breath just watching them.
“There are tunnels between all the buildings, underground,” he said. “It keeps people from having to walk outside in the winter.”
“But it’s not…” said Jen. Rob interrupted her before she could point out the obvious: that it was a beautiful spring day, the kind of day that would motivate someone to take an extra-long walk outside for no good reason at all.
“You’re not allowed to wear the coveralls outside the plant,” he said. “So no one walks outside. Everybody enters at the employee parking garage, which is probably a mile from here, and then they get on moving walkways underground.”
“Why can’t they wear them outside?” Jen asked.
Rob didn’t answer her question; instead, he pointed his finger through the bars. The men were doing what looked like a violent little dance, stepping rhythmically and kicking in the air.
“Look,” he said. “Hyeong.”
“Huh?” she asked. The men were lined up and moving in formation now, like fighter jets. They walked to one side, punched, kicked, moved to the other side, punched and kicked again.
“Those are forms,” he said.
“Oh,” said Jen, who had no idea what he was talking about. It looked like some kind of practice fighting, like that stuff men did all alone in a field at sunrise in kung fu movies. Spartan, lean men with plain, functional clothing and ponytails; Jen could envision the scene exactly, although she couldn’t remember having actually watched a movie like that.
“Do any women do this?” Jen asked.
“Of course,” said Rob, his indignant tone suggesting that this was a ridiculous question. Then he suddenly seemed to recognize the motivation for her inquiry. As the students moved first left, then forward, then right, the leafy window revealed a few of the yellow jumpsuits at a time, and then a few more, and then a few more—all inhabited by men.
“Oh,” he said, as though conceding a point. “Well, mostly the young women do. There aren’t too many older women who keep up with it.”
Jen wrinkled her nose and let out a resentful harrumph, presuming that by “older,” he meant something around her own age, the age of adults who would work in a factory.
“You know what I mean,” he said. “They get married and have kids, and usually if anyone keeps training after that, it’s the husbands.”
Jen expressed her dissatisfaction with this attempted defense by remaining silent. The space between the trees was empty now, but Jen could still hear the men talking quietly. She wondered if class was over.
“It’s not just the women; a lot of the men quit, too. Anyway, not a lot of women work for Snail. The testosterone runs pretty high in there.”
As if to illustrate this point, two of the men came flying out into the clearing, one’s foot arching through the air, the other backing up so that the foot missed his nose by a few inches.
“Oh my god,” Jen gasped, startled.
“That’s not as bad as it looks,” said Rob quickly. “It’s just point sparring. They don’t kick very hard. The ground is concrete so you don’t want to fall on it.”
“No, I guess not,” said Jen, as the first two men moved out of her range of vision and two other men appeared, engaged in almost the same motions as the first two, the retreating man leaning back to avoid the advancing man’s foot.
“Do they just kick each other in the head?” Jen asked.
“No, in the stomach and legs,” said Rob matter-of-factly.
“Isn’t that dangerous?” Jen asked.
“No,” said Rob. “Worst case, you break your nose or your rib.”
Jen lowered a hand defensively to her own right rib, which was still tender if she poked at it. She remembered how easily it had snapped, without her even realizing what had happened. She wondered if the men’s ribs were much stronger than hers, or if they just didn’t actually get kicked very often. After all, of the two kicks she had seen so far in this class, neither one had reached its target.
Jen and Rob watched the men kicking each other in the head, and, as promised, in the stomach and legs as well for another fifteen minutes or so. She saw a few of the kicks actually connect with the men’s heads or stomachs, but, once they landed, Jen understood Rob’s point; the kicks that looked so aggressive flying through the air seemed to lose their power just at the moment of impact, bouncing cheerily off their targets like friendly slaps on the back. Maybe this wasn’t so scary, Jen thought, although she still wouldn’t want one of those kicks to hit her healing rib.
Finally Jen heard men’s voices joking and laughing all at once, and it appeared that the class was over. “Let’s wait for Master Park,” said Rob. The teacher appeared at the gate a moment later, now in jeans and a t-shirt, carrying a stuffed messenger bag strapped across his chest. He unlatched something that Jen couldn’t see inside of the gate and swung it open.
Rob let out a gasp. “You’re leaving by the gate?” he asked with exaggerated incredulity.
“Don’t tell,” Master Park replied, closing it quickly behind him. He turned to Jen, and said, “I can’t stand those stupid tunnels.” He turned back to look at Rob. “Tea?” he asked.
“I need to take Jen home,” said Rob, turning towards her. “Unless you want to come have some tea. Are you done here? I’m sorry, you didn’t get to see much at all.”
I saw exactly what I came to see, Jen thought, but she couldn’t say it aloud. “I’ll come back again,” she said. “I’ve got lots of time.”
Rob drove the three of them back into town, Jen sitting quietly in the back while the two men talked about classes and belts and fighting in the front seats. She had almost fallen asleep when they reached their destination, an ornate building near the university. It had the deep red walls and squat, bento-box shape that Jen associated with suburban Chinese restaurants.
“This is the only decent place to get tea in North Middleton,” said Rob, as he held open the tall, enameled door.
“Owned by my student,” said Master Park, walking into the dark, windowless room heavy with decorative linens and tapestries on the walls.
A cheerful-looking teenager was waiting to great them, but he was interrupted by a long-haired man with a blond beard and a Chinese-style suit who rushed from the back of the tea house to greet them with a small bow. “Master Park,” he said. “You want your regular table?”
“Thank you, Ken,” said Master Park, following the blond man towards the back of the restaurant, with Rob and Jen walking behind them.
Even though it was mid-afternoon, the restaurant was packed with students, identifiable not only by their youth but by the open textbooks and notepads that they had scattered across their tables. It seemed odd to Jen that they would come to a restaurant to study; then again, as she walked between the tables, she noticed that most of them held no food but only large pots of tea. A few of the students had snacks on their tables, small plates of dumplings or little Chinese tea cakes. Some were not studying but catching up with friends over their tea and food, speaking in rapid, over-caffeinated streams of words, as though they had far too much to cover during such a short event as a lunch date.
As Master Park walked by, all of the students looked up from their homework to greet him cheerfully. Choruses of “Hi Master Park” awaited him at each table from athletic-looking young adults. Master Park smiled and waved silently at each table, beaming down proudly at the students.
“All my students,” he said, as they arrived at a table at the very back of the restaurant, and Ken handed them each a menu. “So good, they study all the time.”
Jen wasn’t sure whether she should open the menu in her hand. She was starving after her long walk and minimal lunch; still, she didn’t want to be the one who suggested getting some food with their tea. She always felt nervous eating around men, especially ones she didn’t know very well. She looked hopefully at Rob and Master Park. If they ordered Chinese food, it would be served family style, and she could eat some without having to choose anything for herself. But if they put the menus down and just ordered tea, she would just have to eat later on; there was no way she was going to request food if they didn’t want any.
She was relieved to see both of the men open their menus. She opened her own menu and began to glance distractedly over the pages. She was too tired to focus well, and she wasn’t intending to order anything, but still, some vegetables would be nice.
She flipped through the pages, remembering that Chinese menus normally relegated the vegetarian dishes to the back. Something seemed strange about the menu; she didn’t recognize anything on it. She saw a page that seemed to be all Chinese words, written out in English letters: tie guan yin, shui xian, dahongpao.
She looked at the top of the page, which said “China.” What kind of menu is this, she wondered. She flipped to the front page of the menu, where the name of the restaurant read “Camellia Teahouse.”
So this wasn’t a restaurant at all, Jen thought, a little amused at her own disappointment; normally, when she wasn’t quite so famished, she liked tea places much more than restaurants, with their heavy, unhealthy food and everyone judging her order and appetite.
She wondered why she had thought it was a restaurant. It’s the building, she decided. A tea place in Los Angeles would never look like this. For starters, it would be called a tea bar, to show that it was a fun and hip place to be. Also, everything in the tea bar would be light-colored and translucent, lots of glass bricks and wide windows, the exact opposite of the dark wood and windowless walls surrounding her. A tea bar, she realized, catered to people just like her, people who wanted their food and drink to be light, airy, disembodied. That would make a pretty small customer base in the Midwest, Jen thought. Instead, this tea house seemed to cater to—she looked around at the patrons again—college-aged martial arts students.
This is a strange place, thought Jen. She had a lot to learn.
A young waiter, who looked like he had probably been culled from the regular clientele, appeared at the side of the table. “Hi Master Park!” he said, enthusiastically.
“Hi Chad,” said Master Park. Then he turned to look at Jen across the round table. “You like green tea?” he asked her.
“Sure,” said Jen. Actually she hadn’t drunk green tea in years. She remembered it tasting bitter, like raw leaves. She wasn’t about to argue, though. She had just been about to accept whatever food they ordered, so she could certainly accept their choice of tea. Still, she had been hoping for a nice, bracing cup of black tea; that would be perfect right now.
Master Park grabbed Rob’s menu from the table and lifted Jen’s from her hands. “Sencha,” he said to the waiter.
“Yes, Master Park” said the waiter. “Anything else?”
Jen waited, hoping he would order one of the snacks that she had seen on the other customers’ tables. She wondered where they were in the menu. She hadn’t seen anything listed that sounded like food.
”Not right now, thanks,” he replied, handing the menus to the waiter, who bowed and retreated back to the kitchen as Jen sat watching, helpless to stop this refusal of sustenance.
“So,” said Master Park, crossing his hands on the table in front of him. “How did you two meet?”
Relieved at the distraction from her hunger, Jen recounted the story of her afternoon. She felt shy, but she was happy to have something concrete to talk about. She described the reporters and photographers factually, without making any mention of why they were following her.
While she talked, the waiter returned with two teapots and three small cups. He placed a transparent glass pot on the table, then filled it with steaming water from a stainless steel one. Through the glass, Jen could see the water turning a pale celery color as it softened the tea leaves.
The most exuberant part of her narrative was Rob’s heroic deflection of the reporter in the produce section. “He just started walking towards the guy,” said Jen. “And the reporter just backed out of the store, like someone was pushing him.”
Master Park lifted the tea pot and poured tea into the three little cups. He passed one to Rob and another to Jen. He pulled his own cup close in front of him and wrapped both hands around it, as though warming them on a cold night.
“Robert is my top student,” he said in a matter-of-fact voice. Jen looked over at Rob, and thought that his face appeared a bit flushed, although it might have just been from the hot tea or the dim lighting.
“Everyone in this town is scared of him,” Master Park said. "People who don’t know him are scared of him, just from looking at him. They can feel his energy and they know not to mess with him.”
“Master Park,” said Rob, now clearly embarrassed and trying to interrupt him.
“Shush, shush,” said Master Park, waving his hand dismissively at Rob. “Your modesty is not necessary.”
Rob didn’t say anything, but Jen could hear him exhale loudly through his nose, like a secret sigh with no accompanying facial expression.
Then, perhaps to spare Rob any further embarrassment, Master Park changed the subject. “Are the yellow belts ready for Saturday?” he asked Rob.
“They seem pretty strong,” said Rob. He turned to Jen, and, by way of explanation, said, “Belt test.”
Jen tried to listen as they talked, quietly sipping her green tea. It actually tasted pretty good, she thought. Still like leaves, but in a clean, astringent way that reminded her of lemon even without lemon in it. It was hard to pay attention, with so many words she did not understand—in Korean, she guessed—and other words that were in English but meant nothing to her, words that seemed to describe kicks and punches.
She watched Rob make a punching gesture with his hand to demonstrate some move he was concerned about. What if he had turned out to be a kidnapper, she thought? He could have killed her with his bare hands without breaking a sweat. The most dangerous man in North Middleton, and she just hops in the car with him, no questions asked. She never would have taken a ride from a stranger in Los Angeles. Stupid, she chastised herself. Alone in this new town, with no one looking out for her, safety was more important than ever.
Master Park turned towards her suddenly. “You’re very quiet,” he said. “What are you thinking about?”
“I’d like to come to your school,” said Jen. Once again, she did not recognize her own intentions until she heard herself say them aloud. It was becoming a daily occurrence, and she wondered briefly what it meant, and why she was so lacking in self-knowledge.
Master Park took a small sip of his tea and held it in his mouth for a long moment before swallowing it. “Why?” he asked, bluntly, his question sounding more rhetorical than inquisitive.
Jen hesitated. So I can fight off kidnappers, she thought, but she didn’t want to say it that way in front of Rob, who she feared might take it personally.
“For your health?” asked Master Park, taking another sip of his tea.
Rather than try to explain her thoughts, Jen opted for the expected answer, her old habit for avoiding confrontation. She nodded passively in agreement.
“Humph,” growled the teacher, dismissively, slamming his empty cup decisively on the table. “That’s a bad reason. Taekwondo is terrible for your health.”
“Really?” Jen blurted out incredulously, surprised to be hearing this from the teacher. She looked over at Rob, who was rolling his eyes ever so subtly upward, as though he had heard some version of this conversation many times before.
“Of course,” said the teacher with a cynical, joyless chuckle. “You know people will be kicking you in the face, right?” He laughed again. “Look—broken nose. Broken wrist. Broken rib.” He pointed at the injured parts of his body as he named them. “Torn ACL. Two knee surgeries.” He tapped his head with one finger. “Four concussions.”
“Oh,” said Jen, unsure whether she was supposed to express some kind of sympathy or act impressed. “Well, I don’t know if I want to be fighting.” She had watched the men in the courtyard; most of what they were doing didn’t seem like it would cause her to break anything. She wasn’t sure what the next step up in intensity and danger would be after that, but she figured she’d stop before she reached it.
“Everybody fights,” said the teacher. “You’re not going to study and not fight.” Before Jen had a chance to respond, he said, “Now you know, you won’t do taekwondo for your health, okay?”
“Okay,” said Jen.
“So,” said the teacher, scanning his eyes over Jen’s body. “What are you doing for your health? You look very unhealthy.”
She wasn’t sure how to answer. She had actually felt exceptionally healthy during the last month since she had broken her rib. She had been eating more, putting on a little weight, getting lots of sunshine and fresh air. She knew she must look bedraggled at the moment, and perhaps a little sunburned, she thought, lifting her hand to the back of her neck, which was warm.
“You’re too skinny and pale. Somebody kicks you, you’re going to break in half.” He thought for a moment, putting his hand over his mouth and narrowing his eyes. “Hmm…You eat meat?” he asked.
Again, she didn’t know what to say. She didn’t prefer to eat meat, although she wasn’t technically a vegetarian. She avoided red meat in particular, which always made her feel like she had overeaten, even if she ate just a little bit of it. But she had been expecting Rob and Master Park to order Chinese food with meat, since that’s what men usually did, and she would have gladly eaten some, if only a very tiny portion.
“If you come to my class, you have to eat meat,” said Master Park. “No vegetarians allowed.”
He paused and squinted at something on the wall above Jen’s head. She turned and saw that the food specials for the day were posted on an erasable whiteboard above her head.
“I’m going to order food,” he said.
“Good, I’m starving,” said Rob. “Get noodles.”
Master Park called the waiter over and placed an order: noodles with spicy beef, pork dumplings, and crispy green onion pancakes. Jen saw steamed broccoli on the menu, her favorite, but she didn’t dare ask Master Park to order it.
”You’ll come to class tomorrow night,” he said to Jen, when the waiter had left. “Six thirty, beginner’s class.”
Tomorrow seemed awfully soon; she felt that she wouldn’t be ready yet, although she had no idea what she would need to be ready for exactly. Still, Master Park’s pronouncement sounded confrontational, like a challenge. It’s a dare, she thought, to see if I’m serious. He doesn’t think I’m actually going to show up.
She remembered her last month in Los Angeles, when she had gone to yoga classes twice each day, building the strength and flexibility to do all kinds of poses she never would have thought possible, despite the fact that she was barely eating anything at the time. I’m serious, she thought angrily. This guy has no idea how serious I am.
“Okay, sounds good,” she answered nonchalantly, but she stared confrontationally into Master Park’s eyes as she said it.
Her throat felt a little scratchy as she spoke, and she noticed that she was a little lightheaded. I’d better not get sick, she thought, because I’m going anyway. Even if she had pneumonia, there was no way she was going to miss that class.
Chapter 22:
http://kickoutofyou.blogspot.com/2009/04/22-without-my-permission.html
Thursday, March 5, 2009
20. Being More Paranoid
“Hannah Arendt says she escaped from Germany by being more paranoid than her friends. She read detective novels. She believed in conspiracies. They said she was crazy, but then Hanna died in 1972 in her own bed.” —Tony Kushner
Once she had finished her muffin and tea, Jen sat for quite a while, staring down at the table. She was supposed to fetch Rob from his cash register so he could give her a ride to the Snail Plant. It had seemed like an appealing idea when he had offered—not having to walk past all those photographers and reporters yelling at her about Bradley reproducing—yet now, faced with the reality of interrupting her benefactor as he worked, Jen felt needy and embarrassed. She considered just surreptitiously walking out on her own to save him the trouble of driving her. It would be good practice for her to ignore the reporters, and good self-discipline to continue with her plan of walking to the Snail Plant. It seemed so far away, though, and she had come so far already. Maybe she would just walk home instead.
Of course, these speculations were silly. There was no way she could sneak out now, having already accepted the offer of a ride. She would never be able to speak to Rob again after that, and he was supposed to be her first friend in North Middleton. But maybe she could go to the register and tell him that he didn’t need to bother, that she would just walk. A ride from him would be a good time to make conversation, but she was exhausted, mentally and physically, and didn’t feel up to the task of making a good first impression.
She slid her book into her backpack and stood up, preparing to go tell Rob something—either that she was ready for her ride or that she did not need a ride, although she hadn’t decided yet which she would say. But before she opened her mouth to speak, his “this lane closed” sign was up and he was pulling his apron over his head, folding it in one quick movement, and tucking it somewhere under the counter.
“Ready,” he said, walking to the door and holding it open for her. All right then, thought Jen; no decision necessary. She thanked him silently for sparing her the awkwardness of having to tell him she was ready to go.
As she walked through the open door, she saw the photographers jump to attention and begin snapping pictures from the sidewalk just past the edge of the co-op’s front yard. Crap, she thought. She usually tried to avoid being photographed with men, because she hated the headlines so much. She could imagine what these ones would say: Jen’s secret flame…The new boyfriend Jen doesn’t want Bradley to know about…Jen’s cashier Casanova. Instinctively, she ducked her chin to her chest so that her face was blocked by the visor of her baseball cap.
Then she remembered her new philosophy of not caring what the photographers and reporters thought. Was she ashamed to be seen with this man who had gallantly come to her rescue twice today, first by chasing the reporters out of the store and now by driving her away from here? Raising her head proudly, she followed Rob down the garden path to the parking lot. The photographers followed them, creeping down the sidewalk sideways like crabs and snapping photographs, until Rob stepped abruptly off the path and began walking towards them, slipping between a metal sculpture of a rosebush and a real, living rosebush covered with pretty yellow roses.
At the sight of him approaching, the photographers scattered, backing off the sidewalk and into the street without even looking out for approaching cars. One man almost dropped his camera, catching it awkwardly in midair and sending some important-looking plastic part bouncing across the pavement.
Again, thought Jen. He just walks towards them and they back away, terrified. She wondered how he did it. That would be a good topic of conversation, she thought. She would need lots of things to talk about during the ride. Even if it only took ten minutes, that would be a long time to sit in awkward silence.
Rob turned his back on the photographers, returned to the path, and continued on towards the parking lot. Jen followed him to a small black sedan. Rob opened the passenger side door open for her and closed the door behind her before letting himself into the driver’s side. Inside, the outdated upholstery and paneling showed that the car was probably fifteen years old, but everything was immaculately tidy and clean.
“They’re going to be waiting for us in their cars,” Jen said, as Rob began to back out of the parking space and into the open lane between the parked cars. From here, only a bit of the street was visible, the rest obstructed by trees and the side of a house. But Jen knew that as soon as they pulled out onto the street, the black SUVs would be waiting to follow them, the frightened reporters emboldened by the protective metal walls of their vehicles.
“Yeah, I thought of that,” said Rob, tilting his head to look in his rear view mirror.
Jen waited for him to angle the car towards the exit to the street, wondering whether he would try to race them or ignore them and drive normally. But instead of backing up, he turned the car in the opposite direction, driving down the row of cars towards the far end of the parking lot. There was nothing in this direction but a concrete wall. Jen expected the car to stop, given this obstacle, but it continued moving, until Jen was sure that they were about to crash into the wall. She gasped and thrust her hands out against the dashboard.
“Sorry,” said Rob, veering abruptly to the right, where a small, unpaved alley lay hidden behind the dumpster at the end of the row of cars. It was like a magic portal had opened, a doorway from nowhere. Jen was further amazed when, just before the alley came to a dead end, Rob turned onto another tiny invisible street, this time on the left. It was an extremely narrow road that butted up against houses and driveways, one of those strange little alleys that cuts through the middle of a city block.
Driving through these secret internal pathways reminded Jen of that children’s ride at Disneyland that staged the entire story of Peter Pan by winding through an impressive series of giant-seeming rooms, all packed into a building so tiny that you could walk its perimeter in under a minute. Every time it seemed like the ride had come to the end of its line, like there was no more room to move onto, a wall would transform into a door, and onward the passengers would go. It had amazed Jen the first time she rode on it, even though she was eighteen years old then. On the rare occasions that she had been coerced into visiting the amusement park since then, the Peter Pan ride was the only one she cared to go on; the unreal use of space never ceased to astound her.
Jen and Rob emerged from their secret passageway onto a back street lined with houses, much like the street that the co-op was on. Jen had lost her sense of direction a bit, but she guessed that this street was parallel to the co-op’s street. Rob turned left, and then made the first right, leading in what seemed to Jen to be the opposite direction of the Snail Plant. He’s probably just circling around to get onto Main Street, Jen thought, waiting for the familiar terrain to appear. But he kept driving down the small back street, farther and farther from the Snail Plant and from the only roads that Jen knew in North Middleton.
She felt panic surge up in her body as she realized that this man, this virtual stranger, might not be driving her to the Snail Plant at all. She had thought he was helping her escape, but she might in fact have led herself into far worse danger. She glanced surreptitiously at her door and saw that it was unlocked. If necessary, she could wait until he slowed down and then jump out. She would have to leave her backpack, though, she thought in consternation; she had foolishly put it on the back seat of the car. She moved her hand slowly toward the door handle, not wanting to alarm him into activating the automatic door lock.
“Where are we going?” she asked, trying to sound casual, but her high pitch and shaky voice revealed her panic.
Rob glanced quickly over at her. She lowered her hand to her lap, hoping he hadn’t noticed it on the door handle.
“This is the back way,” he said. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you nervous. I figured we’d better lose those guys, though.”
His voice sounded a bit strained now, as though he were upset but trying to appear calm and comforting. Jen calculated what this might mean: either he was a nice guy and she had made him feel bad for scaring her, or he was a kidnapper, and he knew that she was onto his plan to abduct her.
Trying to calm down, Jen reminded herself that at least four photographers had taken her photograph leaving the co-op with Rob. Everyone inside the co-op had seen them together. So if he were really about to commit some horrendous crime, he would never get away with it. As she envisioned the scene of her funeral, she took some comfort in thinking of him locked away in solitary confinement, “for his own safety,” because everyone, everywhere would know about his crime. Jen murdered by grocery store psycho, the headlines would read, and not just in the trashy tabloids, either. This would be national news. Her funeral would be covered in all the papers. Becky and Paula would be bravely holding back their tears, swearing to avenge her death.
But this whole scenario made no sense, she reasoned. Rob seemed far too smart to commit such a stupidly planned crime. He was much more the sociopathic type; he would plan his crime carefully, and pride himself on the air-tightness of his alibi, the fact that no one would ever suspect him. No, she was quite certain, he could not be abducting her, at least not right now.
Jen looked over at Rob and felt suddenly comforted. His earnest blue eyes were fixed on the road, squinting in a worried expression. He was nice, she remembered. He didn’t look like someone who was trying to kidnap her. He’d been her ally all along, come to her aid to scare the photographers away. Repeatedly she had snubbed and ignored him, and here she was doing it again. He was going out of his way to drive her to the Snail Plant, and she hadn’t spoken one word to him except to question his choice of route.
She resolved to make conversation, no matter how scared she was. If she was going to die, she could at least die with good manners, she reasoned.
Trying to think of something to say, she remembered the question she had wanted to ask him earlier. “How did you do that?” she blurted out, as though this were just a natural part of the lively conversation they were supposed to have been having all along.
“Do what?” he asked. Jen thought he sounded a little relieved, probably that she had finally ended the awkward silence.
“Make those reporters back away like that,” she said. “You just walked towards them and they got scared and left.” Describing the event aloud, she suspected that the topic was more significant to her than simple small talk. “I need to learn how to fight people without touching them like that,” she added, only recognizing the truth of her statement, her need for self-defense, as the words left her mouth.
“Oh,” he said, laughing sheepishly. She looked over at him. She hadn’t seen him laugh yet; his eyes crinkled nicely. “I guess that’s one way of putting it.”
She could tell that this cryptic response was meant to deflect the question, but she wanted an answer. It wasn’t “one way of putting it”—it was a fact. She had seen it with her own eyes. The reporters had cowered visibly at the sight of him approaching. “How would you put it?” she asked, trying to sound inquisitive but not too confrontational.
“He thought I was going to hit him, so he backed away.”
“So it’s a trick,” said Jen. “You made him think you were going to hit him.” She understood that; it was acting. You needed to be convincing, to make the person believe you were a threat.
“No, it wasn’t really a trick,” he said. “I was actually planning to hit the guy.”
He sounded serious. But maybe he had a dry sense of humor. Jen looked over at him to see if he was smiling, but his face was as calm and impassive as ever.
“You weren’t really,” said Jen.
“Sure I was,” he said.
“No, you can’t hit them,” said Jen.
“Of course I can,” he replied.
Before she became completely exasperated, Jen reminded herself that she was in Michigan, where how to deal with paparazzi was probably not a requisite social skill for everyday life.
“If you hit them, they have you arrested,” Jen explained, in an urgent tone, as though he would need to put this information to use in the next few minutes. Which, come to think of it, wasn’t entirely impossible. “And the other ones take pictures so there’s no way you’ll get off. And then they sue you. And they would sue the co-op, too. ”
“I don’t care,” he said. “If one of those guys comes near you while I’m around, I’m going to punch him.”
Wow, thought Jen, laughing silently in her own head so she wouldn’t hurt his feelings. He’s chivalrous. She felt embarrassed to be coming into town and making all this trouble for this sweet, naïve guy, who had evidently decided it was his job to protect her.
“What if it’s the woman?” Jen asked.
“I’ll hit a woman if she deserves it,” he replied immediately. Then he added, “But not as hard.”
She remembered his shirt, the taekwondo shirt she had noticed a few days ago. Maybe he was into fighting, like those kids in the schoolyard. Although Jen didn’t remember either of them throwing any punches, now that she thought about it. All she remembered was that one kick, the one that knocked the loser onto the ground. It seemed like the fight had gone on for a few minutes; something else must have happened besides that one kick. She replayed the scene in her head, but she didn’t remember any other attacks, no punches or kicks or shoves or anything. It didn’t make sense.
“Do you go around hitting people a lot?” she asked Rob.
“No,” he said, “not at all.” Then, in a voice that sounded almost sad, he added, “People usually just back away first.”
The car was approaching a large intersection, where the road grew wide and angled off in several directions. Rob slowed the car and guided it around the sharp turn to the right. They emerged onto a broad street that looked familiar to Jen, and in a moment she knew why: it was Main Street, right up near the Snail Plant.
“Wow,” said Jen. “You really were taking me here.” She hadn’t meant it to come out quite like that; she just couldn’t contain her surprise that the winding, remote-looking road had dumped them out just where she was headed.
“That way’s faster, no lights,” he said, politely ignoring her implication that she suspected he was kidnapping her.
A minute later, Jen could see the pinkish fortress of the Snail Plant looming up ahead on both sides of the street.
“Is there anyplace particular that you need to go?” Rob asked, slowing the car down.
“Do you know where that visitors’ center is?”
“Sure,” he said. “On the next block.” He sped up again.
Jen was surprised that he readily knew the location of the odd little welcome area she had visited with Beck and Paula. The plant seemed so isolated and impenetrable to her. She wouldn’t have imagined that average residents of North Middleton knew their way around it. Then again, maybe everyone had been to the visitors’ center; they probably took field trips there in grade school, she reasoned.
As he pulled the car to the side of the road, parking in what seemed to be the exact spot where Becky had parked earlier in the week, he asked, “So, what are you doing over here?”
Considering his earlier reticence, Jen hadn’t expected him to ask this rather personal question. Still, she had given some thought to her answer, back when he had offered her the ride, just in case he asked. She had decided that telling him her true purpose at the Snail Plant would make her sound crazy.
“I’m just looking around at different parts of town each day,” she said. “To get to know my way around, since I just moved here.”
“Right,” he said, in a knowing voice, as though this was what he expected her to say. Maybe he figured she was studying for a role, she thought. That would be a logical reason for a Hollywood actress to take up residence in a tiny midwestern town. They probably all think that’s what I’m doing, she reasoned.
“Do you want me to wait for you?” he asked.
“Oh, you don’t need to do that,” she answered automatically. Really, it was enough that he had driven her here; that was a big favor for someone he had never formally met until an hour ago. Once she said it, though, she remembered how long the drive out here had been. What had possessed her, she wondered, to think she could walk all this way?
“It’s a long walk back,” he said. “It’ll take a couple of hours just to get to the co-op.”
Again, the thought flashed into Jen’s head that he knew where she was staying. After all, she wouldn’t necessarily have to walk past the co-op; for all he knew, she might live somewhere close to here. Although she hadn’t seen anything like a house anywhere nearby. Maybe everyone lived in the other part of town.
The clock on Rob’s dashboard read one forty-five, and last time she had been here right around two o’clock. She never would have made it on time to see the Snail army training. And was she really going to walk the whole way home? She still hadn’t eaten anything for lunch but that bran muffin. She could do it, she assured herself, if she needed to. It was just walking, after all; a person could always walk, no matter how tired they were. She imagined forcing herself to trudge, mile after mile, back into town, where she would have to find someplace other than the co-op to get a little food, and then, after that, more walking, back to the lake house, maybe even in the dark, down that long forest road. Thinking of this horrible journey gave her an idea.
“Do you want to come walk around the plant with me?” she asked. She wasn’t sure if the question was too forward; she didn’t want him to feel obligated. He might have someplace he needed to be, maybe even back at work. Then again, he was the one who had offered to wait around.
“Oh,” he sounded surprised, and pleased. “Sure, if I won’t bother you.”
“No,” said Jen. “It would be nice if you’d come.” She smiled warmly at him, and he smiled back, looking happy. Finally, Jen felt she had shown him her appreciation properly.
They got out of the car and walked over to the little garden in front of the visitors’ center. Jen wasn’t sure what to do with herself. She needed to make her way over to the gate where she had seen the strange men doing exercises. But she couldn’t look like she knew where she was going. She had told Rob she was just visiting the Snail Plant to get to know the town, so she couldn’t very well go marching into a back alley like Nancy Drew on a mission. She would have to make it look like an accident.
Meanwhile, she would need to fake some interest in the visitor’s center, since she had specifically asked to be driven here. She pretended to read one of the historical plaques, the one closest to where she happened to be standing. It was titled, “Forays into Mining.”
“Anything interesting?” asked Rob. He was keeping a respectful distance from her, standing a few feet away with his hands shoved into his pockets. He was wearing the t-shirt with the yin-yang symbol on the back, one of the ones she had admired earlier in the week.
“Not really,” she replied, although she hadn’t actually been reading it. Instead, she had been thinking of how long she would need to stay in the garden before she could suggest that they take a walk around the building.
“Look at this,” Rob said, pointing at a tall, metal sculpture that Jen hadn’t even noticed among the plaques and garish flowers. It was an abstracted figure of a warrior, pieced together with disconnected panels of twisted copper, so that his body seemed to be exploding outward from the center.
“It was made by a famous artist, Todd ‘Oggy’ Osterberg. Have you heard of him?”
“No,” said Jen, feeling a little embarrassed that she knew the names of very few famous artists.
“He’s from North Middleton,” said Rob. “Well, actually from just outside. He grew up in a trailer park in Cone.”
Jen suppressed the impulse to exclaim that she, too, was living in Cone. If Rob already knew this fact, as she suspected, he did not give any sign of this knowledge.
“The model for the sculpture was my teacher,” Rob continued.
“Your teacher?” Jen asked. She had a pretty strong hunch what he meant, but he hadn’t said it yet.
“My taekwondo teacher,” said Rob. “Well, he was Oggy’s teacher, too. Actually he was pretty much everybody in North Middleton’s teacher.”
“Everybody who took taekwondo classes,” Jen said.
“Everybody in North Middleton took taekwondo classes,” said Rob. “Well, I suppose not everybody, but a lot of people. Almost everybody. There were eighty-seven students in my ninth grade class, and about sixty of them went to taekwondo.”
“Why?” asked Jen.
“There wasn’t anything else to do,” said Rob. “It’s a little better now, with the university expanding. When I was a kid, the university was a tiny college and everyone in the town worked for Snail. Master Park opened the academy when I was twelve, and it was the most exotic thing anyone in this town had ever seen.”
“Is that why the kids in the schoolyard…”
“Yes,” said Rob.
There was a brief silence. Jen remembered that she needed to engineer her way over to the gate.
“Do you want to walk around a little?” she asked. She headed off down the block before he had even answered. She didn’t want to give him a chance to suggest they go look at some other sculpture in the opposite direction from where she needed to go.
As they walked down the long block towards the intersection, Rob noted other points of interest within the inscrutable pink walls. “There,” he said, pointing to a long expanse of wall on the far side of the street, “is electronics assembly headquarters for construction vehicles.” He pointed at a small row of tiny windows that Jen hadn’t noticed, high up at the top of the building. “There’s human resources,” he said, in a sardonic voice. “They hire you in the only room with windows.”
“How do you know so much about the Snail Plant?” asked Jen. It didn’t seem like the sort of place that would be easy to get information about.
“I used to work here,” said Rob. “For ten years.”
“Ten years?” Jen repeated, incredulously. He didn’t seem old enough to have worked at a factory for ten years before becoming the manager of a grocery store. She would guess he was about thirty, and if he had worked in the co-op for a few years….She tried to do the math in her head, but she couldn’t get it to add up. Maybe he was older than he looked, she speculated.
“That was my first job, when I was sixteen,” said Rob. “As soon as I dropped out of high school. I worked my way up to floor manager in a couple of departments.”
“Why did you drop out of high school?” Jen asked. She knew it was a rude question, but she was curious to know why this seemingly intelligent guy would have left school to work in a factory.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess there didn’t seem like any good reason to finish it. I knew I’d end up working in the factory anyway. Everyone here works in the factory. I still pick up shifts sometimes, when people are sick. I can do most of the jobs, except the really technical electrical stuff.”
They walked a few paces further, and then he added, “Plus I was competing a lot. In taekwondo. It took up a lot of time.”
Jen nodded as though she understood, but she didn’t really. She had been interested in acting during high school, had gone to auditions and done a few commercials. It had taken up a lot of time, and her grades weren’t as good as they could have been. But she had never once considered dropping out of school. In her New York prep school, it would have been scandalous not to apply to college, much less to drop out of school altogether. Jen remembered dutifully filling out her college applications, when all she really wanted to do was become an actress. She had only applied to schools in Los Angeles, she remembered; there was no place else she wanted to be.
They reached the intersection where Jen needed to turn. “What’s down here?” she asked innocently.
“That’s where they store the company vans,” said Rob, pointing at the row of garage doors painted with the Snail logo, on the opposite side of the street from Jen’s gate. “Plus there’s a mechanic down at the end.”
Jen turned, walking a bit ahead of him so that he would be forced to follow her lead.
“What’s in this building?” she asked, pointing up at the wall right next to her, the one that would break in a hundred feet, revealing the secret courtyard.
“That’s public relations,” he said, speeding up to walk beside her. “That’s why the visitor’s center is in there, on the other side.”
“What’s it like in there?” Jen asked. Mainly she was killing time until they reached the gate, but she was also curious what he might know about the mysterious building
“It’s nice,” he said. “Actually, it’s really beautiful. One of the nicest buildings they have.”
Jen was barely listening to him, distracted by her anticipation as they approached the break in the wall, the steel gate that allowed a view of the tree-lined courtyard where the Snail army would be training. Jen looked fixedly at the pink wall on their left, preparing for her feigned discovery of the opening. But before she could begin her performance, Rob had sped up ahead of her.
“Look at this,” he called out, beckoning her to where he stood, one hand wrapped around the gate that she had been intending to lead him to. She rushed over to him, arranging her facial expression to appear surprised and inquisitive.
“What is it?” she asked, joining him in front of the gate. It was hard to see in, past all of the layered foliage. She squinted her eyes and peered through the leafy expanse, hoping to see the men doing their exercises. So far, the spot where her view was the most unobstructed, where the men had appeared last time, was empty.
“This courtyard is my favorite place in the entire plant,” said Rob, grabbing two of the bars high up and lifting himself into a pull-up, before lowering himself back down to the ground. “There are so many trees, you can almost forget you’re in a factory.”
“The trees are really beautiful,” said Jen in a wistful voice. She was disappointed to find the courtyard empty. Even though she knew the men might not be there today, that it might take multiple attempts to spot them again, she had been excited to show her discovery to Rob and to see what he thought about it. Still, they might show up any minute. She would just need to keep Rob here for a little while in case they appeared.
“So you spent a lot of time in this courtyard?” she asked, trying to make conversation.
“I used to have taekwondo lessons in here,” he said, pulling himself up onto the gate a second time, his voice straining with the effort.
“Oh,” said Jen, as understanding began to sweep over her. “Taekwondo.”
“My teacher leads classes for the employees of the plant, three times a week,” said Rob. “Some time in the afternoon.”
“Maybe we’ll see him,” said Jen, weakly, feeling stupid now. The class might be starting any minute, and Jen would have to pretend to be surprised.
“Hey, look!” said Rob excitedly. “It’s my teacher.” He yelled something into the courtyard, words that Jen could not understand. Then he yelled the same thing again, more loudly. Jen still could not see anyone through the thick tangle of leaves.
”What did you say?” Jen asked, looking over at Rob, who had stopped doing his pull-ups and was staring intently through the gate, smiling.
“It was ‘Greetings Master Park,’” he said. “In Korean,” he added.
Jen felt a shadow fall over her face. She turned her head back towards the gate, and almost screamed, startled as she was to see a man standing directly in front of her, on the other side of the iron bars, smiling at Rob. He was an Asian man, middle-aged, unremarkable in his appearance except for his stylish eyeglasses.
“Hello again,” he said to Jen, bending his mouth into the faintest bit of a knowing smile.
Chapter 21:
http://kickoutofyou.blogspot.com/2009/03/21-fall-sword.html
Once she had finished her muffin and tea, Jen sat for quite a while, staring down at the table. She was supposed to fetch Rob from his cash register so he could give her a ride to the Snail Plant. It had seemed like an appealing idea when he had offered—not having to walk past all those photographers and reporters yelling at her about Bradley reproducing—yet now, faced with the reality of interrupting her benefactor as he worked, Jen felt needy and embarrassed. She considered just surreptitiously walking out on her own to save him the trouble of driving her. It would be good practice for her to ignore the reporters, and good self-discipline to continue with her plan of walking to the Snail Plant. It seemed so far away, though, and she had come so far already. Maybe she would just walk home instead.
Of course, these speculations were silly. There was no way she could sneak out now, having already accepted the offer of a ride. She would never be able to speak to Rob again after that, and he was supposed to be her first friend in North Middleton. But maybe she could go to the register and tell him that he didn’t need to bother, that she would just walk. A ride from him would be a good time to make conversation, but she was exhausted, mentally and physically, and didn’t feel up to the task of making a good first impression.
She slid her book into her backpack and stood up, preparing to go tell Rob something—either that she was ready for her ride or that she did not need a ride, although she hadn’t decided yet which she would say. But before she opened her mouth to speak, his “this lane closed” sign was up and he was pulling his apron over his head, folding it in one quick movement, and tucking it somewhere under the counter.
“Ready,” he said, walking to the door and holding it open for her. All right then, thought Jen; no decision necessary. She thanked him silently for sparing her the awkwardness of having to tell him she was ready to go.
As she walked through the open door, she saw the photographers jump to attention and begin snapping pictures from the sidewalk just past the edge of the co-op’s front yard. Crap, she thought. She usually tried to avoid being photographed with men, because she hated the headlines so much. She could imagine what these ones would say: Jen’s secret flame…The new boyfriend Jen doesn’t want Bradley to know about…Jen’s cashier Casanova. Instinctively, she ducked her chin to her chest so that her face was blocked by the visor of her baseball cap.
Then she remembered her new philosophy of not caring what the photographers and reporters thought. Was she ashamed to be seen with this man who had gallantly come to her rescue twice today, first by chasing the reporters out of the store and now by driving her away from here? Raising her head proudly, she followed Rob down the garden path to the parking lot. The photographers followed them, creeping down the sidewalk sideways like crabs and snapping photographs, until Rob stepped abruptly off the path and began walking towards them, slipping between a metal sculpture of a rosebush and a real, living rosebush covered with pretty yellow roses.
At the sight of him approaching, the photographers scattered, backing off the sidewalk and into the street without even looking out for approaching cars. One man almost dropped his camera, catching it awkwardly in midair and sending some important-looking plastic part bouncing across the pavement.
Again, thought Jen. He just walks towards them and they back away, terrified. She wondered how he did it. That would be a good topic of conversation, she thought. She would need lots of things to talk about during the ride. Even if it only took ten minutes, that would be a long time to sit in awkward silence.
Rob turned his back on the photographers, returned to the path, and continued on towards the parking lot. Jen followed him to a small black sedan. Rob opened the passenger side door open for her and closed the door behind her before letting himself into the driver’s side. Inside, the outdated upholstery and paneling showed that the car was probably fifteen years old, but everything was immaculately tidy and clean.
“They’re going to be waiting for us in their cars,” Jen said, as Rob began to back out of the parking space and into the open lane between the parked cars. From here, only a bit of the street was visible, the rest obstructed by trees and the side of a house. But Jen knew that as soon as they pulled out onto the street, the black SUVs would be waiting to follow them, the frightened reporters emboldened by the protective metal walls of their vehicles.
“Yeah, I thought of that,” said Rob, tilting his head to look in his rear view mirror.
Jen waited for him to angle the car towards the exit to the street, wondering whether he would try to race them or ignore them and drive normally. But instead of backing up, he turned the car in the opposite direction, driving down the row of cars towards the far end of the parking lot. There was nothing in this direction but a concrete wall. Jen expected the car to stop, given this obstacle, but it continued moving, until Jen was sure that they were about to crash into the wall. She gasped and thrust her hands out against the dashboard.
“Sorry,” said Rob, veering abruptly to the right, where a small, unpaved alley lay hidden behind the dumpster at the end of the row of cars. It was like a magic portal had opened, a doorway from nowhere. Jen was further amazed when, just before the alley came to a dead end, Rob turned onto another tiny invisible street, this time on the left. It was an extremely narrow road that butted up against houses and driveways, one of those strange little alleys that cuts through the middle of a city block.
Driving through these secret internal pathways reminded Jen of that children’s ride at Disneyland that staged the entire story of Peter Pan by winding through an impressive series of giant-seeming rooms, all packed into a building so tiny that you could walk its perimeter in under a minute. Every time it seemed like the ride had come to the end of its line, like there was no more room to move onto, a wall would transform into a door, and onward the passengers would go. It had amazed Jen the first time she rode on it, even though she was eighteen years old then. On the rare occasions that she had been coerced into visiting the amusement park since then, the Peter Pan ride was the only one she cared to go on; the unreal use of space never ceased to astound her.
Jen and Rob emerged from their secret passageway onto a back street lined with houses, much like the street that the co-op was on. Jen had lost her sense of direction a bit, but she guessed that this street was parallel to the co-op’s street. Rob turned left, and then made the first right, leading in what seemed to Jen to be the opposite direction of the Snail Plant. He’s probably just circling around to get onto Main Street, Jen thought, waiting for the familiar terrain to appear. But he kept driving down the small back street, farther and farther from the Snail Plant and from the only roads that Jen knew in North Middleton.
She felt panic surge up in her body as she realized that this man, this virtual stranger, might not be driving her to the Snail Plant at all. She had thought he was helping her escape, but she might in fact have led herself into far worse danger. She glanced surreptitiously at her door and saw that it was unlocked. If necessary, she could wait until he slowed down and then jump out. She would have to leave her backpack, though, she thought in consternation; she had foolishly put it on the back seat of the car. She moved her hand slowly toward the door handle, not wanting to alarm him into activating the automatic door lock.
“Where are we going?” she asked, trying to sound casual, but her high pitch and shaky voice revealed her panic.
Rob glanced quickly over at her. She lowered her hand to her lap, hoping he hadn’t noticed it on the door handle.
“This is the back way,” he said. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you nervous. I figured we’d better lose those guys, though.”
His voice sounded a bit strained now, as though he were upset but trying to appear calm and comforting. Jen calculated what this might mean: either he was a nice guy and she had made him feel bad for scaring her, or he was a kidnapper, and he knew that she was onto his plan to abduct her.
Trying to calm down, Jen reminded herself that at least four photographers had taken her photograph leaving the co-op with Rob. Everyone inside the co-op had seen them together. So if he were really about to commit some horrendous crime, he would never get away with it. As she envisioned the scene of her funeral, she took some comfort in thinking of him locked away in solitary confinement, “for his own safety,” because everyone, everywhere would know about his crime. Jen murdered by grocery store psycho, the headlines would read, and not just in the trashy tabloids, either. This would be national news. Her funeral would be covered in all the papers. Becky and Paula would be bravely holding back their tears, swearing to avenge her death.
But this whole scenario made no sense, she reasoned. Rob seemed far too smart to commit such a stupidly planned crime. He was much more the sociopathic type; he would plan his crime carefully, and pride himself on the air-tightness of his alibi, the fact that no one would ever suspect him. No, she was quite certain, he could not be abducting her, at least not right now.
Jen looked over at Rob and felt suddenly comforted. His earnest blue eyes were fixed on the road, squinting in a worried expression. He was nice, she remembered. He didn’t look like someone who was trying to kidnap her. He’d been her ally all along, come to her aid to scare the photographers away. Repeatedly she had snubbed and ignored him, and here she was doing it again. He was going out of his way to drive her to the Snail Plant, and she hadn’t spoken one word to him except to question his choice of route.
She resolved to make conversation, no matter how scared she was. If she was going to die, she could at least die with good manners, she reasoned.
Trying to think of something to say, she remembered the question she had wanted to ask him earlier. “How did you do that?” she blurted out, as though this were just a natural part of the lively conversation they were supposed to have been having all along.
“Do what?” he asked. Jen thought he sounded a little relieved, probably that she had finally ended the awkward silence.
“Make those reporters back away like that,” she said. “You just walked towards them and they got scared and left.” Describing the event aloud, she suspected that the topic was more significant to her than simple small talk. “I need to learn how to fight people without touching them like that,” she added, only recognizing the truth of her statement, her need for self-defense, as the words left her mouth.
“Oh,” he said, laughing sheepishly. She looked over at him. She hadn’t seen him laugh yet; his eyes crinkled nicely. “I guess that’s one way of putting it.”
She could tell that this cryptic response was meant to deflect the question, but she wanted an answer. It wasn’t “one way of putting it”—it was a fact. She had seen it with her own eyes. The reporters had cowered visibly at the sight of him approaching. “How would you put it?” she asked, trying to sound inquisitive but not too confrontational.
“He thought I was going to hit him, so he backed away.”
“So it’s a trick,” said Jen. “You made him think you were going to hit him.” She understood that; it was acting. You needed to be convincing, to make the person believe you were a threat.
“No, it wasn’t really a trick,” he said. “I was actually planning to hit the guy.”
He sounded serious. But maybe he had a dry sense of humor. Jen looked over at him to see if he was smiling, but his face was as calm and impassive as ever.
“You weren’t really,” said Jen.
“Sure I was,” he said.
“No, you can’t hit them,” said Jen.
“Of course I can,” he replied.
Before she became completely exasperated, Jen reminded herself that she was in Michigan, where how to deal with paparazzi was probably not a requisite social skill for everyday life.
“If you hit them, they have you arrested,” Jen explained, in an urgent tone, as though he would need to put this information to use in the next few minutes. Which, come to think of it, wasn’t entirely impossible. “And the other ones take pictures so there’s no way you’ll get off. And then they sue you. And they would sue the co-op, too. ”
“I don’t care,” he said. “If one of those guys comes near you while I’m around, I’m going to punch him.”
Wow, thought Jen, laughing silently in her own head so she wouldn’t hurt his feelings. He’s chivalrous. She felt embarrassed to be coming into town and making all this trouble for this sweet, naïve guy, who had evidently decided it was his job to protect her.
“What if it’s the woman?” Jen asked.
“I’ll hit a woman if she deserves it,” he replied immediately. Then he added, “But not as hard.”
She remembered his shirt, the taekwondo shirt she had noticed a few days ago. Maybe he was into fighting, like those kids in the schoolyard. Although Jen didn’t remember either of them throwing any punches, now that she thought about it. All she remembered was that one kick, the one that knocked the loser onto the ground. It seemed like the fight had gone on for a few minutes; something else must have happened besides that one kick. She replayed the scene in her head, but she didn’t remember any other attacks, no punches or kicks or shoves or anything. It didn’t make sense.
“Do you go around hitting people a lot?” she asked Rob.
“No,” he said, “not at all.” Then, in a voice that sounded almost sad, he added, “People usually just back away first.”
The car was approaching a large intersection, where the road grew wide and angled off in several directions. Rob slowed the car and guided it around the sharp turn to the right. They emerged onto a broad street that looked familiar to Jen, and in a moment she knew why: it was Main Street, right up near the Snail Plant.
“Wow,” said Jen. “You really were taking me here.” She hadn’t meant it to come out quite like that; she just couldn’t contain her surprise that the winding, remote-looking road had dumped them out just where she was headed.
“That way’s faster, no lights,” he said, politely ignoring her implication that she suspected he was kidnapping her.
A minute later, Jen could see the pinkish fortress of the Snail Plant looming up ahead on both sides of the street.
“Is there anyplace particular that you need to go?” Rob asked, slowing the car down.
“Do you know where that visitors’ center is?”
“Sure,” he said. “On the next block.” He sped up again.
Jen was surprised that he readily knew the location of the odd little welcome area she had visited with Beck and Paula. The plant seemed so isolated and impenetrable to her. She wouldn’t have imagined that average residents of North Middleton knew their way around it. Then again, maybe everyone had been to the visitors’ center; they probably took field trips there in grade school, she reasoned.
As he pulled the car to the side of the road, parking in what seemed to be the exact spot where Becky had parked earlier in the week, he asked, “So, what are you doing over here?”
Considering his earlier reticence, Jen hadn’t expected him to ask this rather personal question. Still, she had given some thought to her answer, back when he had offered her the ride, just in case he asked. She had decided that telling him her true purpose at the Snail Plant would make her sound crazy.
“I’m just looking around at different parts of town each day,” she said. “To get to know my way around, since I just moved here.”
“Right,” he said, in a knowing voice, as though this was what he expected her to say. Maybe he figured she was studying for a role, she thought. That would be a logical reason for a Hollywood actress to take up residence in a tiny midwestern town. They probably all think that’s what I’m doing, she reasoned.
“Do you want me to wait for you?” he asked.
“Oh, you don’t need to do that,” she answered automatically. Really, it was enough that he had driven her here; that was a big favor for someone he had never formally met until an hour ago. Once she said it, though, she remembered how long the drive out here had been. What had possessed her, she wondered, to think she could walk all this way?
“It’s a long walk back,” he said. “It’ll take a couple of hours just to get to the co-op.”
Again, the thought flashed into Jen’s head that he knew where she was staying. After all, she wouldn’t necessarily have to walk past the co-op; for all he knew, she might live somewhere close to here. Although she hadn’t seen anything like a house anywhere nearby. Maybe everyone lived in the other part of town.
The clock on Rob’s dashboard read one forty-five, and last time she had been here right around two o’clock. She never would have made it on time to see the Snail army training. And was she really going to walk the whole way home? She still hadn’t eaten anything for lunch but that bran muffin. She could do it, she assured herself, if she needed to. It was just walking, after all; a person could always walk, no matter how tired they were. She imagined forcing herself to trudge, mile after mile, back into town, where she would have to find someplace other than the co-op to get a little food, and then, after that, more walking, back to the lake house, maybe even in the dark, down that long forest road. Thinking of this horrible journey gave her an idea.
“Do you want to come walk around the plant with me?” she asked. She wasn’t sure if the question was too forward; she didn’t want him to feel obligated. He might have someplace he needed to be, maybe even back at work. Then again, he was the one who had offered to wait around.
“Oh,” he sounded surprised, and pleased. “Sure, if I won’t bother you.”
“No,” said Jen. “It would be nice if you’d come.” She smiled warmly at him, and he smiled back, looking happy. Finally, Jen felt she had shown him her appreciation properly.
They got out of the car and walked over to the little garden in front of the visitors’ center. Jen wasn’t sure what to do with herself. She needed to make her way over to the gate where she had seen the strange men doing exercises. But she couldn’t look like she knew where she was going. She had told Rob she was just visiting the Snail Plant to get to know the town, so she couldn’t very well go marching into a back alley like Nancy Drew on a mission. She would have to make it look like an accident.
Meanwhile, she would need to fake some interest in the visitor’s center, since she had specifically asked to be driven here. She pretended to read one of the historical plaques, the one closest to where she happened to be standing. It was titled, “Forays into Mining.”
“Anything interesting?” asked Rob. He was keeping a respectful distance from her, standing a few feet away with his hands shoved into his pockets. He was wearing the t-shirt with the yin-yang symbol on the back, one of the ones she had admired earlier in the week.
“Not really,” she replied, although she hadn’t actually been reading it. Instead, she had been thinking of how long she would need to stay in the garden before she could suggest that they take a walk around the building.
“Look at this,” Rob said, pointing at a tall, metal sculpture that Jen hadn’t even noticed among the plaques and garish flowers. It was an abstracted figure of a warrior, pieced together with disconnected panels of twisted copper, so that his body seemed to be exploding outward from the center.
“It was made by a famous artist, Todd ‘Oggy’ Osterberg. Have you heard of him?”
“No,” said Jen, feeling a little embarrassed that she knew the names of very few famous artists.
“He’s from North Middleton,” said Rob. “Well, actually from just outside. He grew up in a trailer park in Cone.”
Jen suppressed the impulse to exclaim that she, too, was living in Cone. If Rob already knew this fact, as she suspected, he did not give any sign of this knowledge.
“The model for the sculpture was my teacher,” Rob continued.
“Your teacher?” Jen asked. She had a pretty strong hunch what he meant, but he hadn’t said it yet.
“My taekwondo teacher,” said Rob. “Well, he was Oggy’s teacher, too. Actually he was pretty much everybody in North Middleton’s teacher.”
“Everybody who took taekwondo classes,” Jen said.
“Everybody in North Middleton took taekwondo classes,” said Rob. “Well, I suppose not everybody, but a lot of people. Almost everybody. There were eighty-seven students in my ninth grade class, and about sixty of them went to taekwondo.”
“Why?” asked Jen.
“There wasn’t anything else to do,” said Rob. “It’s a little better now, with the university expanding. When I was a kid, the university was a tiny college and everyone in the town worked for Snail. Master Park opened the academy when I was twelve, and it was the most exotic thing anyone in this town had ever seen.”
“Is that why the kids in the schoolyard…”
“Yes,” said Rob.
There was a brief silence. Jen remembered that she needed to engineer her way over to the gate.
“Do you want to walk around a little?” she asked. She headed off down the block before he had even answered. She didn’t want to give him a chance to suggest they go look at some other sculpture in the opposite direction from where she needed to go.
As they walked down the long block towards the intersection, Rob noted other points of interest within the inscrutable pink walls. “There,” he said, pointing to a long expanse of wall on the far side of the street, “is electronics assembly headquarters for construction vehicles.” He pointed at a small row of tiny windows that Jen hadn’t noticed, high up at the top of the building. “There’s human resources,” he said, in a sardonic voice. “They hire you in the only room with windows.”
“How do you know so much about the Snail Plant?” asked Jen. It didn’t seem like the sort of place that would be easy to get information about.
“I used to work here,” said Rob. “For ten years.”
“Ten years?” Jen repeated, incredulously. He didn’t seem old enough to have worked at a factory for ten years before becoming the manager of a grocery store. She would guess he was about thirty, and if he had worked in the co-op for a few years….She tried to do the math in her head, but she couldn’t get it to add up. Maybe he was older than he looked, she speculated.
“That was my first job, when I was sixteen,” said Rob. “As soon as I dropped out of high school. I worked my way up to floor manager in a couple of departments.”
“Why did you drop out of high school?” Jen asked. She knew it was a rude question, but she was curious to know why this seemingly intelligent guy would have left school to work in a factory.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess there didn’t seem like any good reason to finish it. I knew I’d end up working in the factory anyway. Everyone here works in the factory. I still pick up shifts sometimes, when people are sick. I can do most of the jobs, except the really technical electrical stuff.”
They walked a few paces further, and then he added, “Plus I was competing a lot. In taekwondo. It took up a lot of time.”
Jen nodded as though she understood, but she didn’t really. She had been interested in acting during high school, had gone to auditions and done a few commercials. It had taken up a lot of time, and her grades weren’t as good as they could have been. But she had never once considered dropping out of school. In her New York prep school, it would have been scandalous not to apply to college, much less to drop out of school altogether. Jen remembered dutifully filling out her college applications, when all she really wanted to do was become an actress. She had only applied to schools in Los Angeles, she remembered; there was no place else she wanted to be.
They reached the intersection where Jen needed to turn. “What’s down here?” she asked innocently.
“That’s where they store the company vans,” said Rob, pointing at the row of garage doors painted with the Snail logo, on the opposite side of the street from Jen’s gate. “Plus there’s a mechanic down at the end.”
Jen turned, walking a bit ahead of him so that he would be forced to follow her lead.
“What’s in this building?” she asked, pointing up at the wall right next to her, the one that would break in a hundred feet, revealing the secret courtyard.
“That’s public relations,” he said, speeding up to walk beside her. “That’s why the visitor’s center is in there, on the other side.”
“What’s it like in there?” Jen asked. Mainly she was killing time until they reached the gate, but she was also curious what he might know about the mysterious building
“It’s nice,” he said. “Actually, it’s really beautiful. One of the nicest buildings they have.”
Jen was barely listening to him, distracted by her anticipation as they approached the break in the wall, the steel gate that allowed a view of the tree-lined courtyard where the Snail army would be training. Jen looked fixedly at the pink wall on their left, preparing for her feigned discovery of the opening. But before she could begin her performance, Rob had sped up ahead of her.
“Look at this,” he called out, beckoning her to where he stood, one hand wrapped around the gate that she had been intending to lead him to. She rushed over to him, arranging her facial expression to appear surprised and inquisitive.
“What is it?” she asked, joining him in front of the gate. It was hard to see in, past all of the layered foliage. She squinted her eyes and peered through the leafy expanse, hoping to see the men doing their exercises. So far, the spot where her view was the most unobstructed, where the men had appeared last time, was empty.
“This courtyard is my favorite place in the entire plant,” said Rob, grabbing two of the bars high up and lifting himself into a pull-up, before lowering himself back down to the ground. “There are so many trees, you can almost forget you’re in a factory.”
“The trees are really beautiful,” said Jen in a wistful voice. She was disappointed to find the courtyard empty. Even though she knew the men might not be there today, that it might take multiple attempts to spot them again, she had been excited to show her discovery to Rob and to see what he thought about it. Still, they might show up any minute. She would just need to keep Rob here for a little while in case they appeared.
“So you spent a lot of time in this courtyard?” she asked, trying to make conversation.
“I used to have taekwondo lessons in here,” he said, pulling himself up onto the gate a second time, his voice straining with the effort.
“Oh,” said Jen, as understanding began to sweep over her. “Taekwondo.”
“My teacher leads classes for the employees of the plant, three times a week,” said Rob. “Some time in the afternoon.”
“Maybe we’ll see him,” said Jen, weakly, feeling stupid now. The class might be starting any minute, and Jen would have to pretend to be surprised.
“Hey, look!” said Rob excitedly. “It’s my teacher.” He yelled something into the courtyard, words that Jen could not understand. Then he yelled the same thing again, more loudly. Jen still could not see anyone through the thick tangle of leaves.
”What did you say?” Jen asked, looking over at Rob, who had stopped doing his pull-ups and was staring intently through the gate, smiling.
“It was ‘Greetings Master Park,’” he said. “In Korean,” he added.
Jen felt a shadow fall over her face. She turned her head back towards the gate, and almost screamed, startled as she was to see a man standing directly in front of her, on the other side of the iron bars, smiling at Rob. He was an Asian man, middle-aged, unremarkable in his appearance except for his stylish eyeglasses.
“Hello again,” he said to Jen, bending his mouth into the faintest bit of a knowing smile.
Chapter 21:
http://kickoutofyou.blogspot.com/2009/03/21-fall-sword.html
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