Always (24 page)

We stood. Petra hesitated just a fraction before turning away and bowing to the student on her left, which left me with Mike.

Mike knew what he was doing. When he took my wrists, his arms were relaxed. It was clear he was ready to deal with a complete beginner or a master. I swept my right hand up and left down, stepped back smoothly with my left foot, then scissored my arms and sent him flying into a forward roll. He rolled like a big cat and came up grinning. I grinned back.

This time when we knelt, sensei beckoned me onto the mat to be his
uke,
and held out his left wrist. I grasped it in my right, careful to grip with my little finger, which so many people forget. We didn’t look into each other’s eyes, not yet, because this was for the class, not between us, but he paid me the courtesy of not holding back when he whipped me into
kotegaeshi,
and I had to twist in midair and break-fall to save my wrist and ribs, and when he flipped me onto my stomach, he moved fast and not gently and he not only put me in a wrist pin but locked out my elbow and braced my upper arm against his thigh to torque my shoulder at an uncomfortable angle. I slapped. When I stood, the row of kneeling students were sitting very straight, eyes wide, except Mike, who was grinning even harder.

This time when we paired, Petra didn’t hesitate.

She was light and whippy but I took particular care to guide her neatly. “Wow,” she said, when she came up. Her eyes were wide-set and hazel, under straight brows. “Your energy is, like, really clear.”

I smiled and held out my other wrist, and she took it. It was like playing with a lariat: twist this way, twist that way, and everything is neatly coiled on the floor and perfectly still, with no more ability to get up and move without permission than a piece of old rope.

She held her left wrist out, and I took it with my right, and she frowned in concentration, turned her left hand over and out, stepped back with her left foot, pulled her elbow close to her body, put her right hand over mine and turned. I went down, but in real life I would simply have moved behind her on the diagonal, put my hand up, and kept turning until she was unbalanced and I could flip her over my hip. Or I could have twisted faster in midair and turned out of the wrist lock. But I went down, and waited patiently until she decided which way to step over me to flip me onto my stomach. A bit more fiddling and she had me in a decent shoulder pin.

I got up and took her wrist again, but this time before she moved, I said, “Spread your fingers. Just imagine it for a moment, then do it.” She frowned again. “Relax your shoulders. Imagine you can do this perfectly, and then do it.”

She did. She beamed. Held her left wrist out eagerly.

“This time, with your right hand, guide mine, turn it as though you’re rolling a fat sausage over in the air.” She did, and it gave a tighter, faster torque to the wrist lock. This time I wouldn’t have been able to do anything but go down.

“Cool,” she said.

The dojo was not air-conditioned. Soon everyone was glowing with sweat. Mike was drenched. Every time he rolled, sweat spattered the mat.

The tense student, whose name turned out to be Chuck, was hard to work with. It was like dealing with a panicked deer. When he was
nage,
he would begin a technique, then stop and say, “Shit, shit, no, no, let me try again,” pleading as though I were a judgmental father who would beat him for any mistake. I found myself moving very, very slowly, breathing loudly so that he would take an unconscious cue from my respiration rate and slow his own, and keeping my face quite still. Once or twice I found myself trying not to get between him and the light in case he bolted.

The grey-haired man was Neil, and although he was competent, it was clear he was not well. His cheeks acquired a faintly purple tinge and he ran out of breath very quickly, and had to rest every now and again. Everyone seemed used to that.

We knelt again. Sensei surveyed us, paused, and said, “Free play.” Electricity rippled down the line of students. Petra and Jim moved regretfully off the mat and sat to one side. Free play is not for beginners.

Chuck, Mike, Neil, the two men I hadn’t worked with, and I ranged in a circle around sensei, Mike looked around, nodded, said
“Hei!”
and Neil charged at sensei, and then flew through the air in a tucked ball, and one of the anonymous students ran and was flung on his back, and then Chuck, whom sensei stepped to meet so he couldn’t collapse with fear before making contact, and then Mike, who rolled backwards, then me. I ran without breathlessness, smiled as the currents brushed and I described an elegant spiral and rolled out and was on my feet again even before Neil came charging in once more.

The more truly expert an aikido player is, the more closely movement on the mat during free play resembles the Brownian motion of particles in suspension. Sensei moved slowly across the canvas, flinging bodies random distances, never letting the group close in or a pattern develop. But against six opponents no one can keep that up forever without taking them out permanently, one by one, which is why, generally, only those who aren’t too far from being
yudansha
take part in free play: gradually, no matter how good one is, things start to get just a little ragged, just a little rough. The goal becomes one of
pushing away
rather than guiding. I’ve seen more than one person get hurt in such situations.

Sensei lasted two and a half rounds before the raggedness became serious. He stiff-armed Mike in the center of the chest and he went down with an ashen-faced thump; sensei immediately stood straight and clapped his hands twice. Everyone sagged a little. Neil was gasping; the others were breathing fast. So was I, but not in distress.

Sensei offered his arm to Mike, who came off the mat looking fine.

“Angelo,” he said, pointing to the student with the mustache whom I hadn’t worked with, and we began again. Angelo was ragged after two people: shoulders tense, fists clenched, steps small and abrupt. Sensei let everyone have a go at him before pointing to someone called Donny. Then Neil.

And then it was my turn, and Mike charged first, like a young bear, and I smiled and bowled him neatly into the path of Chuck and they went down in a tangle, and then I turned to help Neil fly, and then sensei ran at me and dived to roll and come at me feet first and I refused the challenge and leapt over him like water bursting over a stone and sparkling clear and bright in the sun, before dipping and rising under Angelo, tossing him up like a whitewater rapid flips a raft, and joy fizzed under my skin as he turned turtle and came down flat on his back and I was spinning, taking Donny into a headfirst fall that would have broken the neck of anyone who didn’t practice falling two hours a day. Blood rushed sweet and hot under my skin and laughter bubbled up through me and I loosed it. It was a lovely day.

DORNAN WORE
black jeans and a jacket and had taken the sapphire out of his left ear.

“What are you smiling at?” he said crossly as we drove north to meet my mother and Eric.

“Not a thing.”

He wriggled uncomfortably, tugged at his jacket cuffs and then his seat belt. I wasn’t sure why he was so tense. He’d already met my mother. She hadn’t eaten him.

“We’re going to be early,” he said.

“Yes.” If you were early, you could check out exits, and crowd choke-and vantage-points before you had to settle down. You could scan the clientele, get a feel for who might do what. Except that when we parked by the massive totem outside Ivar’s Salmon House and went in, my mother and Eric were already at the far side of the enormous room at a table cornered by two picture windows, sitting drenched in the westering sun that poured across Lake Union and turned their chardonnay to bottled summer, but they rose with such glad smiles, such open shoulders and wide hands, that I smiled, too, and felt a jet of the same joy I’d experienced that afternoon.

I walked to the table slowly, absorbing the vaulted space, the forty feet of native canoe suspended from the roof beams, the rounded faces of the Inuit and Aleut servers—not unlike the Sami in the north of Norway and Finland—the deep reds and creams of painted native carvings on the walls. Even the music sounded Sami, too, which made sense when one considered the fact that Alaska and Siberia were separated only by the narrow Bering Strait. The smell of salmon did not fill me with horror.

They had thoughtfully left the two chairs facing the best view, which meant I had to sit with my back to the door, but if I turned in my seat slightly I could watch reflections in the window. There were three possible exits.

We all sat as though we meant to stay: shoulders down, feet flat, back relaxed. To start, everyone but me ordered the clam chowder. I opted for the green salad, on the theory that if I could manage fruit, I should be able to manage green leaves. The chowder arrived first. It smelled like pale, thick brimstone. I swallowed. When my salad came, I found that if I avoided the cheese, it would be edible.

We talked of our day. I told them about aikido, about Petra obviously thinking it was a stigma to work with another woman, about the joy of falling at speed.

Dornan talked of his morning, lunch at a French bistro downtown, the growing franticness of the film production. “Time is getting short. They only have another four days on their star’s contract, and she wants to leave before that. The director is threatening to go, too, and take the stunt actor with him.” Eric wanted to know who the star was, and he and Dornan talked happily about favorite TV shows. My mother and I smiled at each other, and I realized that I was quite relaxed.

We talked of Eric’s day at Spherogenix and then Encos, the companies’ focus on bioengineering specific immune-system proteins. He sounded urbane and relaxed, but it was clear he was passionate on the subject.

“You’re a scientist?” Dornan said.

“I have an M.D., but I don’t practice.”

“Why is that?”

He paused. “I was twenty-five. I was a doctor. Patients would put their lives in my hands and trust me to help them. I found myself unwilling to play God. I don’t mind playing business but people’s lives . . . I was afraid.”

I had been wondering why he didn’t practice, and Dornan had simply asked.

“Are you still afraid?” he said.

“No. Or at least I don’t think so. Plus I’ve come to see that negotiating development licenses ultimately affects many people’s lives. It’s different, though. Doing so at one remove.”

The difference between squeezing someone’s warm neck with your hands and launching a smart bomb from two miles up. I nodded.

“Plus,” he said, “I get to have lunch with all the big-shot investors, mostly famous CEO-type people.”

Else laughed. “But what he really likes is the people the famous CEOs attract.”

He smiled at her, then at me and Dornan. “I admit it. I like the shallow glitz.” And he and Dornan talked about the relationship between celebrity and big business, and when the conversation morphed back into a discussion of what was going on with Seattle biotech, I watched a cormorant airing its wings on one of the dock pilings.

“But of course a lot depends on a proposed South Lake Union real estate development project.”

I focused. “Real estate? How does that tie into biotechnology?”

“One of the city’s major developers is trying to get various concessions from local government—a spur from the proposed light rail line, relaxed commercial/residential zoning, and so on—in order to essentially create a biotech hub on the lake’s south shore.” I tried to visualize the area: the northern edge of downtown, then I realized that those were probably its lights shining across the water. “If he succeeds, then half the people I’m talking to would relocate, at favorable lease rates and certain city and county-level tax breaks. But in order to assure those favorable terms, they would in turn have to make concessions, commitments to employment levels, diversity quotas, environmental controls, and so on.”

Something in my brain began to tick.

“Naturally, all this affects pricing and long-term product viability, which are my major areas of concern.”

“So if the city’s getting less tax money, why is it a good thing?” Dornan said.

“Hubs are good because they attract other businesses. Like, for example, software nexuses in Silicon Valley and here in Seattle.”

“Coffee,” Dornan said, nodding. “Tully’s, Starbucks, Seattle’s Best.”

“Exactly.”

“Also beer and tea and chocolate,” he mused. “Seattle’s Best Chocolate, Dilettante, Fran’s, Red Hook, Stash, Tazo—though those might be Oregon, now that I come to think of it.”

All delivery mechanisms for nice, respectable drugs; all things that would get a Scandinavian through the winter.

“That’s the way it seems to work,” Eric said. “Once an industry perceives that the business climate is favorable, that the employee base has the right education, that others will travel to a particular city in order to take employment there, then it will relocate. Others follow.” He made a rolling motion. “It snowballs.”

“Ah.” Dornan nodded wisely. “Fashion.”

Eric laughed. “Of course. Though they’d hate to admit it.”

The cormorant launched itself from its perch and flew out over the water.

“Zoning,” I said. “Is it hard to change?”

“Not as hard as it should be,” my mother said.

“It depends,” Eric said, with a glance at her. “There are some good arguments for keeping zoning flexible. But perhaps there’s a particular reason you asked?”

“My warehouse.” My mother looked at me. Dornan looked at his wineglass and sighed. “I was thinking of selling it, only now I discover that that’s exactly what someone wants.” And I explained what I believed had been happening. “This morning I found out my agent has run off, and taken my files and a few others with her. Her assistant tells me that she’d been negotiating to purchase several properties along that stretch of the Duwamish, all industrial property. Only he couldn’t figure out why, who she was negotiating for, or who would be interested in it. So I was just thinking, maybe she’s found a way to change the zoning. How would she go about that?”