Always (61 page)

Suze stood up and blinked. I went to her and said, “Good, that’s good.”

“Yes,” she said.

“You can stand with the others now. You did well. Stand with the others. ” Dornan was already up and in position, the class was clapping. I stood by him a moment. “Avoid the next one’s shoulder if you can.” He nodded. I returned to my place. “Next,” I said. “Sandra.”

The class started to call out encouragement but she smiled and strolled to her edge of the mat as smooth and cool as a cup of cream and the yells clotted and died. In the silence she looked at Dornan, nodded, and stepped onto the mat. He didn’t make her wait.

She jumped to one side and with eerie precision kicked his left knee out from under him. He went down like a stunt horse in a cavalry charge. I could have sworn I saw a hint of a smile on her face in her split-second pause, but then she fell to her knees, raised both hands as though to God, and slammed two elbows down on his spine. Axe kicks are a more efficient use of power, but without body armor, even those blows might have paralyzed Dornan.

He patted his helmet. She stood, looked down, then deliberately balanced and gathered herself.

“Sandra!” I shouted, just in time to spoil her aim slightly, and the axe kick she’d aimed for exactly the same spinal target missed and hit his ribs instead. “Dornan, move away. Move away.” He didn’t move. “Sandra.” She turned. She was definitely smiling. “Sandra, it’s done. Over.”

“Over,” she repeated.

Dornan stirred. She turned back.

“Sandra, it’s done. You did it.”

“Done.” She watched Dornan pull himself into a ball, and then uncurl and haul himself to his feet.

Light glinted off the Perspex eye protection. I couldn’t see past it. I moved to one side, stepped closer. His eyes were a little wider than usual but didn’t seem panicky. I raised my eyebrows. He nodded, I nodded back. I had no idea what I would have done if his courage had failed him, or the padding.

“Next. Nina.”

Dornan was getting wilier, or perhaps Nina had been shaken by Sandra’s performance, but he managed to get his arms around her waist and lift her from the mat for a moment, “No,” she shouted. “No, no, no, no,” and struggled, futilely, until Pauletta yelled, “Three-year-old, three-year-old, ” and “No!” Nina said, with ragged gravitas, and made herself a dead weight until he sagged and she could get her feet on the ground and shove backwards with all her strength. They both went down, after which the usual panic blows followed in a hail of no, no, no’s and at some point he slapped out.

The rite of passage continued. One by one they stepped up, lashed out, and were led off the mat in a triumphant daze: Pauletta, who laughed maniacally through the whole thing; Jennifer, who cried before she’d even begun; Therese, who dispatched the lumbering Dornan with a neatly executed elbow to the side of the head, followed by a foot sweep, followed by a stamp on his knee: disabling, but not lethal. Katherine, of course, began and ended with kicks, and Kim was the only one who used a palm strike—which clearly took Dornan off guard. Christie, though, was the best of all. She let herself be grabbed by the shoulders, then simply fell backwards and hurled him over her head. He was patting his helmet before she even stood up. She stood up grinning. She knew she’d done well. She knew they all had.

Brief silence, then pandemonium: shrieking, laughing, more tears, hugs. On the other side of the room, Dornan lumbered to the bench, started to sit down, and changed his mind. He tugged at his helmet. I wandered over.

“All right?” I said.

He got the helmet off and held it under his arm, like a fencer. He breathed for a moment. “You owe me, but you know that.” Then he grinned. “Though it is nice to make so many women happy. If I’d known that all it took to worm my way into a woman’s heart was to let her beat the shit out of me, my early life would have been very different. Help me with all this nonsense.” As soon as his gloves were unstrapped, he yanked them off and tucked his hair behind his ears.

“That kick to your ribs didn’t hurt?”

“It’s nothing,” he said, then straightened suddenly, got a twinkle in his eye, and his brogue thickened, “nothing in service of helping these lovely ladies.”

They had regained their awareness of the room beyond their own triumph and had noticed that the evil space alien was a not-unattractive male.

“Oh, my goodness,” said Jennifer. “Are you all right?”

“Perfectly fine. In the peak of health.”

“Bet we scared you, hey?” Nina said.

"Absolutely. Terrifying.”

“Did we hurt you?” Therese wanted to know.

“My pride, possibly. I had no idea ladies could be so fearsome.” Brilliant smiles all around. “You astonished me.”

“We had a good teacher,” Christie said.

“Indeed?” Dornan gave me a wink, as if to say he saw I was glowing under a bit of flattery as much as anyone else in the room. “Oh, indeed. Yes.”

“And we really didn’t hurt you?” Kim seemed a little disappointed.

“I’d have to get out of all this padding to find out.”

“Did you like that palm strike I gave you?” she said.

“Blinded and surprised me,” Dornan said, though if I’d had to bet it would be to the effect that he couldn’t remember one blow from another. “Took me completely off guard.”

“And my knuckle strike?” Tonya said.

“Ah, now that I remember very clearly. Like a bolt from heaven. My life quite passed before my eyes.”

He was troweling it on. Any minute they’d realize that. “No doubt Dornan would really appreciate the opportunity to get out of that extremely uncomfortable suit.”

“Oh, my, yes indeed.” “Oh, you poor thing.” “We mustn’t keep you.” Good southern women, they said all the right things while still managing to look crushed: they had not yet had the chance to refight their battles.

“But no doubt he’d be willing to rejoin us for a debriefing?”

“No doubt, ladies, no doubt.”

It would give me the chance to debrief them properly, after which Dornan could twinkle at them and make them feel mighty. They’d done well. They deserved every ounce of their triumph. Meanwhile, though, it wouldn’t do any harm to lead them through another round at the punch bag, refining what they’d learnt in the heat of their personal battle.

ON SET KICK WAS ENTIRELY PROFESSIONAL AND IMPERSONAL. "THE FIRST STEP
is to visually inspect the air bag, both before and after inflation.” I wondered if I hid my feelings so well when I was teaching.

She lifted this piece and that of the deflated bag, talking about the sensitivity of the plastic to temperature change and how it must always, always be checked. “One stunter died a few years back when they flew his air bag out to Portugal in an unpressurized cargo bay. The cold, high altitude changed the physical properties of the material and the vents didn’t hold. Dead as a stone.”

Then the compressor thudded for fifteen minutes and we walked solemnly around the Model Seventy once again. She moved smoothly.

“Now we test it from the tower. It’ll test the camera orientation, too.”

Again, there were three cameras. One to the side, one on top, one directly behind the bag to focus on the falling object as it fell. Once they were set up to Rusen’s satisfaction, she borrowed one of the props manager’s clothing dummies, carried it to the top of the tower. Then she came back down, handed me a very heavy grocery bag, and said, “Follow me.” Climbing the scaffolding steps with the bag made me aware of the pull of humerus from shoulder socket, the compression of cartilage in my knee and ankle joints, the smooth lubrication of synovial fluid around my hips. We are such delicate machines.

It was surprisingly crowded at the top with the two camera operators. Everyone but me was wearing a headset. I nodded. They nodded back.

Kick took several sets of ankle and wrist weights from the bags and wrapped them around the dummy’s limbs and waist. Some of them had been carefully sewn together to be long enough. Then she cinched me into a harness, standing close to check the fit—the impersonal touch was disorienting—clipped a line to the D-ring at my waist, jerked it to be sure, then did the same for herself. I eased one strap, tightened another.

We picked up the dummy, carried it to the edge of the platform.

“Clear,” she said conversationally, then, for the benefit of people on the set without earphones, she shouted, “Stand clear below.” Then she turned to me. “Follow my swing. Let go at the top, don’t try to push it.” She waited for my nod, and we began to swing. “On three. One”—swing—“two”— swing—“three”—release, and the dummy sailed up and out in a rapidly climbing curve, seemed to pause, then plummeted in an almost straight line to the bag, which hissed and sagged and caught the dummy safely in the center of its sweet spot. Whistles and general applause from below—I saw the flash of Dornan’s grin.

“Of course a body, a person, falls differently,” she said, and unhooked her safety line. “With an active leap and flailing arms it’s more of an overhand, egglike curve. It takes a little longer, and it’s easier for the camera operators to follow.”

“Do they know that?” They seemed barely out of film school. We unbuckled our harnesses. I resisted the urge to help her.

“They will when Buddy gets here.”

We climbed down, a lot easier without the weights, and started the compressors pumping the bag full again.

“Sandwiches?” Dornan called from the craft-services table. He gave the impression of wearing an apron, though he wasn’t.

“Later,” Kick said.

We sat cross-legged on the floor while we waited. She looked around, at the quietly humming set. “We’re pretty much set. Buddy’ll want to test the bag himself, but essentially we’re good to go.”

“I thought you said most serious stunters had their own bags and own air-bag people.”

“I used to be Buddy’s air-bag woman. He coordinated on
Tantalus.
He trusts my bag work. He’ll walk in here, we’ll get it in one take. Two at most, then I’m free for a couple of days. I can take care of . . . things.” Maureen. Her brothers.

The air compressor clicked off, and on, and off again.

At eye level, the bag looked huge. She reached out and patted it. It shivered like a big square jellyfish.

“Buddy’s not here,” I said.

“He will be.”

“Yes,” I said. We admired the bag some more. “Is it calling to you?”

“Yes.”

“Insurance aside, would you be up to it?”

She snorted. “It’s only forty-two feet.”

“It occurs to me that you don’t need insurance to jump if it’s just for fun.”

She looked at the bag some more.

“And the cameras could probably do with the practice. Save Buddy having to do two takes.” She didn’t say anything. “How long’s it been?”

“Long time.”

“You—”

“Hush,” she said. “Stop there. Stop. Give me a minute.” She uncrossed her legs and leaned back on her hands, tipping her head to take the measure of the fake office building. She folded over her legs, chest touching knees, stretching out her hamstrings, breathing easily. She straightened, looked at the tower again, began to fold back, then jumped to her feet so fast I didn’t see the transition. She seemed different, burlier. “Roland!” One of the cameramen poked his head cautiously over the lip of the tower. “Live rehearsal!”

There was a moment’s silence, in which several crew stopped mid-hammer or mid-yammer, then Roland said, “You want us to load?”

“Film for three cameras? You and whose fucking checkbook? Rehearsal, I said.”

Einstein once called quantum entanglement—when the quantum states of two objects have to be described in reference to each other even though the individual objects are spatially separated—“spooky action at a distance. ” He believed that it was impossible to use this entanglement to transmit information. Einstein had never been on a film set. I didn’t see anyone leave the building to go get Finkel or Rusen, I didn’t see anyone pick up a phone, but by the time Kick got to the top of the tower, they were both there, watching.

I stood twenty feet from the bag, two feet behind the camera dolly, in direct line-of-sight to the tower. She would look as though she were falling right at me. Dornan stood a little to my left. He looked worried.

She came to the lip of the platform, in safety harness and headset, stood wide-legged for a moment, then sat, feet dangling. She adjusted her headset, appeared to be saying something. The camera operator squinted and made some adjustment. Rusen came over, they conferred. Rusen took the operator’s headset a moment, looked up at the figure on the tower, said something, listened, nodded, said something else, grinned, and gave the headset back.

“Okey dokey,” he said loudly. “Everybody, keep still. Try not to make any sudden moves or loud noises.”

You can’t distract her now, I thought. She sees nothing, hears nothing but what is to come.

And she did that trick again, stood so fast I didn’t see her get up, and her headset was gone, and she was unbuckling her harness, and it was like watching a quarter horse, stripped of its tack, roll in the dust and stand and remember what it meant to be alive. She stood motionless, and I knew her nostrils would be flared, her heart thumping like a kettle drum, that she would be testing the air for unexpected currents, rocking imperceptibly on her feet, feeling the delicate articulations of the talus, the anklebone: the ends of the tibia and fibula, the heel bone, the rays of the metatarsals. So much work for one bone, sliding back and forward on its springy ligament. Less delicate, in comparison, than a horse’s paten.

She was already going to that place, the heart-stopping moment when the world pauses, then resumes as a crystal dream. She was like the horse running, running around the corral, getting up speed before heading towards the fence, gathering itself, listening to its own rhythm, nothing but the heart, nothing but the blood, nothing but the breath. Bit and bridle forgotten, iron shoes now weightless, ribs working like bellows and arteries wide open.