Always

FIVE

I WOKE AT NOON ON SUNDAY WITH MY MUSCLES STEADY AND MY MIND GATHERING speed, cold and clear as a bobsled in its ice run. I got out of bed without having to think about it, called room service without referring to the number listings, and ordered breakfast—fruit and cheese—without a hitch.

The shower fittings were solid nickel-plated steel, heavy and cool. I twirled taps, watched the steam curl up from the tile floor. Even the water smelled different from the water in Atlanta; no heavy chlorine tang.

The water pressure was strong, the shower like a fizzing drill on my skin. I soaped thoroughly, found the light blue stain of small bruises on my inner upper arms, where the police officers had taken a grip, a scrape on my left shin and three tiny cuts on my right ankle, like paper cuts. I’d probably never know where they had come from.

Hard white tile, as in a hospital room. I increased the hot-water flow and my goose bumps went away.

My mother had moved me here while I was unconscious and had no say in the matter. But the Edgewater was a dark and damp place. Despite its moneyed smugness, the Fairmont was lighter and brighter, and my room accessible only via the door, not the water. So I’d stay. I didn’t need Suzanne anymore, so she could go.

I toweled my hair dry, smoothed moisturizer methodically on my back, and shivered—as I hadn’t for more than six months, since the nerves healed—when my hand ran over the bullet scar on the underside of my left arm.

AT THE breakfast table by the bar, Suzanne did her best to take it philosophically. “Well, I guess it’s good that you’re feeling better. I mean, it is good, definitely.” She looked around wistfully while I wrote her check, and indeed the suite looked beautiful: thick glass tabletop gleaming in the sunshine, flowers vivid, Barber playing on the Bose.

I signed the check, handed it over. “I’m sorry about the lack of notice, but I’ve added a bonus.”

When she saw the amount, her pupils, clenched tight against the bright sunshine, expanded briefly. She folded it and put it in her pocket.

I stood. “Do you have more work lined up?”

“Oh, well, I work through an agency. It’ll be okay.” She touched her pocket unconsciously, and stood. “I’ll be okay.”

Even in Seattle I imagined it wasn’t too easy to get work as a private nurse with pink hair and a nose ring. I doubt my mother would have hired her if it hadn’t been a middle-of-the-night emergency.

She shrugged. “Well, hey, time to pack.” She gave the silk upholstered sofa one last pat and went into her room.

I set up my laptop on the table and opened Rusen’s spreadsheet, the employment information. It looked as though he’d been thorough.

No one knows for certain if it was Einstein who said, Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler, but it is a useful guiding principle. This wasn’t, as the police appeared to think, a one-off grudge or a prank. There had been trouble with my property for two years. The trouble had continued with Hippoworks Productions. The drugging incident meant more trouble. It seemed entirely possible that there was some kind of connection. Also, as William of Ockham said, pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate. And Kick had seen no strangers on the set.

Hippoworks LLC had two partners, Rusen and Finkel, and two permanent employees, both of whom worked at their Culver City office in California. For the Feral production, they employed about four dozen others on a contract basis. They were nonunion contracts, but at scale, with the exception of Sîan Branwell, who, being the star, had a few extra clauses and a bit more money. The end-date of her contract surprised me: less than a week away.

I scrolled to Kick’s information. Not much: addresses, references, a City of Seattle business license for Film Food, plus a notation that Rusen had checked her bond and insurance information and had two outside references on file. I opened a Web search bar and typed in KUIPER, VICTORIA K, and got several dozen hits, all relating to Film Food. Her website was rudimentary: a few menus, contact information, a professionally shot photo of Kuiper in white coat and hat, knife in hand and smiling self-consciously.

I changed the search to KICK KUIPER, and this time got several thousand hits. IMDb had a list—a long list—of her films. Stunt! had a cover interview with “Top Diving and Driving Artist ‘Kick’ Kuiper” from four years ago. The picture was of a woman in a red harness suit smiling brilliantly, bright with that reckless shine that comes only from riding a wave of adrenaline to survival. The caption read “Kuiper on the set of Tantalus.” I remembered that film. The action hero had been too old for the actress. The action scene with the actress had been good—Kick’s scene, I now realized.

There was also a smaller piece, about a year later, another interview, with Kick saying, “Hell yes, I’ll be back. The docs say the pins will be out in a month. Two months after that I’ll be as good as ever.” She sounded like a character from a fifties western, not like Kick at all. I backtracked, and found the news item—reported in Variety and Hollywood Reporter, even a one-liner in EW—about the fall that went wrong. I paid the subscription fee for the first two and read the articles.

“It’s pretty much a miracle she survived at all,” Benton “Buddy” Nels told us. “You fall from a hundred feet and you have to land right, you have to hit that sweet spot. You miss it and the bag flings you sideways at a wall or the sidewalk, hard, and real fast. Like shooting an egg from a catapult. You just break.”

And break Kuiper did, cracking two vertebrae and several ribs, and shattering her pelvis and right hip. Fortunately she landed on dirt that had just been dug over and fluffed for a horse-fall scene minutes earlier.

“They’re saying it was the dirt that saved her, and I understand that, but that’s not the whole story. Beyond that, there’s her superb physical condition. And beyond that, hell, I can’t explain it. There must’ve been some angel looking out for her that day.”

The word miracle cropped up three times, along with unbelievable and inexplicable.

Something caught my eye: a report a year before her accident from BusinessWeek, about product liability and various industry insurance rates. There was a thumbnail photo of Kick, noted stuntwoman Victoria “Kick” Kuiper, and a quote from her about why she wasn’t planning to sue the makers of her harness. “Stunts are dangerous,” she said. “***t happens.” I followed the link and found that that time it had been a broken scapula.

All that work, all that risk, and now she cut fruit for a living. Maybe she was good at it, but did it ever make her smile like the sun?

I looked up. Suzanne, eyes tired and cynical, held out the check. “You forgot to date it.”

I took it. “So I did. Do you have—” She handed me a lime green plastic pen. “And what is today’s date?”

“May seventeenth. Holy shi—I mean, are you okay?”

“Absolutely. Yes, fine.”

I watched as though from the wrong end of a telescope while she picked up the piece of splintered pen that had skittered across the glass-topped table. Where I had snapped it, the lime green plastic had turned milky pale, like the sepals that protect new tree blossom in spring.

“My apologies for that,” I said. “I will of course reimburse you for the damage.”

“It’s a pen,” she said, and bent to pick up the rest of it from the carpet. I got another from the laptop case, took off the cap, tested it on the back of the check. Blue. I turned the check over, aligned it carefully with the edge of the table, and wrote in the date. My hand didn’t shake. I capped the pen, returned it to the bag, refused to look at the photo of the woman who still smiled because she hadn’t lost anything.

“Excuse me,” I said, and stood. “Please see yourself out.”

I stood with my back against the bedroom wall until she left, thinking nothing.

I WALKED TO the waterfront. Waves slapped and seagulls squabbled, as at any other beach, but traffic fumes wafted over the grass. It was crowded with smiling people wearing sandals and shorts, even though it was only in the mid-sixties, and they seemed unreal, though I couldn’t put my finger on why. I walked north, to the Seattle Aquarium, but I remembered pictures from the guidebook and couldn’t bear the idea of being trapped beneath the surface with marine otters swimming ceaselessly from one side of their tiny concrete tank to another. I kept going north, the water to my left. Past the Edgewater— I wondered what Dornan was doing today; I should call him and invite him to move to the Fairmont—past the Pacific Science Center, which on another day would be interesting, and on through Seattle Center, the theater district. At some point I found another park with fewer people. Instead of gulls, this one was full of crows. One strutted along the path in front of me. In the sunshine its feathers shone with a dull, oily sheen, as though carved from slate.

I watched the water and the sky, where cumulonimbus massed on the eastern horizon, zinc and pewter.

After a while, I headed back south and then east, down more of a gradient. For the first time that day I found myself panting slightly. A few days, Loedessoel had said. I slowed, and breathed more easily.

South again, Boren Avenue, Howell Street, where the city began to look like any inner urban wasteland: empty blocks, patched pavement. In Atlanta the air would have felt heavy and tired; here it was light and capricious, as contradictory as the waterfront park.

It was as I was walking past a low, industrial-looking building with the unlikely name of Re-Bar that I realized I was being followed: a white man sixty or seventy yards back. About forty, my height, casual dress, not an athlete but moving easily enough. Usually I was the one doing the following. I stopped, and pretended intense interest in the sign that said, Open at Eight. The man slowed, took out a phone. I shook my head at the sign in mock regret, and started back south, but slowly, hoping he would close the gap. He didn’t.

A professional, which made it unlikely I had been picked at random. Which raised a very interesting question. Was he connected to the people who were steering the warehouse mess, the people who were systematically reducing its value? Time to start getting answers.

I turned, as though going back to something I’d just seen. Once again, he slowed. I kept walking. He stopped. He put his phone away.

I ran at him.

After a split second, he ran, too. He ran with concentration, no backward glances, no tension in his shoulders, but I began to cut the distance. Fifty yards. Forty. My lips skinned back in a grin. Thirty. Soon we’d find out what was going on. Twenty. Then we hit a hill. In five seconds I was breathless and in fifteen he was gone.

It took me half an hour to get back to the hotel. No one followed me. I wasn’t sure what I would do if they had. I thought of the laptop as I’d left it: Kick’s smile as brilliant as burning magnesium. I’ll get it back for you, I’d said. No one could ever give her that back.

THE CONCIERGE, whose name was Benjamin, was African-American, which surprised me, and I realized what had seemed so unreal about the crowds by the waterfront, and nearly everyone I had seen in Seattle so far: they had been ninety-five percent white, with a handful of Asians and a sprinkling of Hispanics and Native Americans. Nothing like Atlanta, where more than half the population was black.

I introduced myself. He smiled—he had a tiny birthmark just to the left of center on his bottom lip—said he knew who I was, and asked how he could help me this morning.

I didn’t like the idea of anyone knowing my name.

“I’d like to arrange for the delivery of a large floral bouquet, today. Special delivery, if necessary.”

“Certainly.”

“Whatever’s in season will be fine.”

“A particular occasion?”

“A thank-you.”

“Formal or informal?”

“Formal. And a note, to read, My apologies once again for the disturbance. Thank you for your kindness. Best wishes, Aud Torvingen.”

“Return address?”

“No.” And that was that.

I DELETED the search results and Kuiper’s picture flicked out. I read Rusen’s file for five minutes, then closed it. I hadn’t even been able to understand that Seattle was almost wholly white. There was absolutely no point scanning a document in the hope of spotting an anomaly. I simply didn’t know the city well enough. I shouldn’t have come. In Atlanta, I knew law enforcement and criminals, journalists and politicians; I understood the lines running between money and power. Here, I knew nobody; nobody knew me.

Perhaps I could do something about that.

BENJAMIN LOOKED UP. "Ms. Torvingen. More flowers?”

“No. Something else.” He smiled, to indicate that he was sure that whatever it was, it was within his capabilities. I wondered where concierges went to school to learn that responsive, intelligent attentiveness. “This is my first visit to Seattle and I don’t know a soul. I was hoping you might help me overcome that.”

“Of course.” Face still open, still attentive, but eyes speculative. “Perhaps you could be more specific.”

“This evening I’d like to relax privately here at the hotel in the company of someone attractive and discreet.”

“Attractive and discreet. Certainly.” I could have been asking to rent a car. “Should your companion have any specific attributes?”

I pondered. “I require a certain level of maturity. A grown-up.” Someone who paid attention to the world.

He nodded courteously. “What time would it be convenient for him— or her?—to visit?”

It was about two-thirty. “I’d like her to be here as soon as possible.”

“Very good. And for how long would you like the pleasure of her company? ”

How does one time such things? “Perhaps she should be prepared to devote the entire afternoon and evening.”

“I’ll make arrangements and fax them to your suite.”

WHEN I GOT back to my suite, paper was churning silently from the fax machine: Four-hour sessions max. available, $1,100 per. Poss. negot. consecutive sess. at time of payment—cash preferred, credit card accepted. Meeting scheduled 4:30 pm.

One hour and fifty minutes from now.

I turned my laptop on again, and opened the e-mail from Luz.

I just finished a book by Lloyd Alexander have you read any? They’re okay but not as good as Narnia I borrowed them from my friend Natalie.

Had she mentioned Natalie before?

Natalie says they’re for kids but I might like them, she’s also lent me one called Eragon that she says is excellent. I read the first page but then Aba told me to turn the light out and not read anymore tonight so I’m writing to you instead.

Perhaps I should write to Adeline about the need to explain the spirit as well as the letter of the law when making suggestions to Luz. Adeline still thought of the computer as a complicated typewriter. It wouldn’t occur to her that with the lights off, Luz could send e-mail, surf the Web, work on her LiveJournal, add to her Sims family. It was doubtful that she knew Luz and I talked to each in any other way than the stiff little thank-you notes Adeline made her write, fountain pen on lined paper—Thank you very much for paying for my new dresser and desk. They are mission style, stained medium oak, and will be very useful when I do my homework—and then included with the progress report she dutifully sent every month, a list of expenses, church events, and health or educational matters. The handwritten notes were grammatically perfect. I suspected Luz wrote a rough draft and Adeline then went over any mistakes and had Luz copy it out in her best hand. Perhaps that’s something I should be doing with these e-mails.

But it was Adeline’s role to correct Luz’s grammar and tend to her manners, not mine.

It doesn’t matter what she calls you, Mama or Tante or Aud, if legally you are her mother, somewhere inside she will one day expect you to behave as one.

But what did that mean, exactly?

IN MY mother’s suite, the afternoon sun fell against the eastern corner of the sitting room and spilled over the carpet and up the legs of the coffee table. It flashed on her wedding ring, white and yellow gold, geometric Italian design, and the enameled Norwegian flag pin in her lapel. She was talking about her day: meetings at Microsoft, a tour of the Nordic Heritage Museum in Ballard, and an honorary marshal spot in the Syttende Mai independence day parade. She saw me looking at the flag. “I forgot to take it off,” she said, and pulled it casually from the silk. She dropped it on the table and cradled her coffee, and continued her account of all the Americans celebrating their Norwegian heritage, eating polse and ice cream, the children wearing bright red bunad, the Sons of Norway with their heavy banners and the fiddlers dancing behind them. Every now and again she would pause, and wait for me to add something, and when I didn’t, she would go on.

Every now and again, too, she tilted her head. She knew I’d come to talk to her about something.

Help me, I wanted to say. Talk to me about how it was. Tell me about family.

“…realize that today is short notice, but perhaps tomorrow? If you’re well enough.”

Dinner. “Yes, tomorrow would be fine. Thank you.”

“And your friend, would he like to come?”

“I’ll ask him.” It was quarter to four. I had to get cash. “Yes, probably.”

She put her cup down, smoothed her dress. “Good. Tomorrow it is, then. Although if you don’t have plans for tonight… ?”

“I have plans.”

She nodded, and we stood, and I was struck by how she moved. She wore a dress—not a suit, not a gown, but a dress—and she was happy. She was tired and a little tense, but underneath it all she was at home with herself in a way I’d never thought I’d see. When I was a child, I had dreamt of how she might be in a perfect world—the grin, the hug, the surprise trip to the zoo, the maternal mysterious knowledge of my innermost secret desire for a ham sandwich or chocolate biscuit—but I’d never imagined this lightness, a woman who finally had some air folded into her mix, who had risen like a fairy cake.

“I’m…” But there wasn’t time. “Thank you. I’m happy for you. It’s good to see you.”

She laid her hand on my upper arm briefly—her fingertips touched the hidden scar. “Audhumla.” The giant cow from the beginning of the world, who was made of frost, and licked the frost from stones. I had forgotten. She had first called me that when I was five, and she had found me sucking the creamy ice that had risen from a milk bottle left on the doorstep at dawn and frozen. Then she had laughed. Now she didn’t.

ROOM SERVICE had called and left the champagne. I counted out eleven one-hundred -dollar bills, and then again, and left the two slight stacks next to each other on the sideboard. I stowed the rest in the drawer beneath the TV, with the remote. Now I had half an hour to shower, and arrange the furniture and lighting. The welcoming ambience wasn’t strictly necessary, and might not make any difference to the end result, but I wished to acknowledge that although my companion might be bought and paid for, she was a human being. It seemed only polite.

AT 4:32 , there was a confident knock on my door.

“I’m Isabella,” she said, in a voice like myrrh, and I let her in.

She took it all in—the chilling champagne and two glasses, my bare feet and still-damp hair, the lack of underwear beneath silk shirt and trousers, the closed inner drapes in the sitting room and the bedroom door standing ajar and showing a hint of shadow and candlelight—in one sweeping glance, and said, “Thank you,” when I offered to take her wrap. It slid from her bare shoulders into my hands like an offering. Her skin smelled of heat and spice. I carried the light wrap to the closet, and took my time hanging it.

The cash was gone when I returned, both piles.

She looked out over the city while I poured the champagne, and when I sat on the sofa, she sat at my feet as though it were the most natural thing in the world, and laid her hand on my thigh.

“Aud,” she said, “it is very good to meet you,” and I wanted to believe her. Her eyes were sunlit honey. Summer eyes. Nothing to do with frost or snow or death.

“It’s very good to meet you, Isabella,” and then I couldn’t think of anything else to say, because her hand had started to stroke my thigh, almost absentmindedly, and she was looking at me as though I were her queen.

“Aud, it’s an unusual name.”

“Yes.”

“Are you visiting from another country?”

It felt like it.

“Aud. Am I pronouncing it right?”

“Yes. It’s Norwegian, after Aud the Deepminded. She founded Iceland.”

“Iceland,” she said. “I hear it’s a beautiful country. Contradictory. Ice and glaciers and molten lava. And hot springs.”

And so controlling of its citizens: only certain things on television, certain names legally allowed.

“You have such lovely muscle here, such strength.” She stroked down, paused thoughtfully, stroked up, ending just a fraction higher than she’d started. Her cheekbones shimmered, as though gilded. Through the thin silk of my trousers her hand was warm and alive. “Do you like to work out?”

“Um?”

“You work out?”

“Yes.”

She propped her cheek on her fist and went on stroking. “Swimming? Or perhaps some other kind of sports.” She knelt like a handmaid, eyes never leaving mine, waiting for a signal. “Tell me what kind of sports you like.”

“Competitive.” I tried to organize my thoughts but she was calling heat from me as effortlessly as flame from a lamp, and my mind was drowning.

She bent and pushed off her shoes—her scalp was white and clean, her hair smelled of attar of roses—then leaned across me for the champagne. Her breasts plumped warmly on my legs for a moment and then she topped up my glass. I should be doing that. I should be doing all sorts of things. But all I could focus on was her hand.

“Your champagne,” I said. “Don’t you like it?”

“It’s delicious, a very good choice. But this evening is for you. I’m here to make you happy.”

She rested her palm, very gently, on my belly. If I let her, she could make me very happy. All she had to do was turn her hand and her fingers would brush between my legs. I took her wrist, and I meant to put her hand away, to say something, to explain, but I couldn’t help it, I turned it palm up and leaned forward and kissed it.

She arched, until her throat was inches from my mouth. “Tell me what you want,” she said, and I watched myself take her head in my hands and kiss her. I hadn’t meant to, but then I found her mouth hot and sliding under mine and I couldn’t stop. I folded down next to her and, hands still in her hair, eased her flat on the carpet and knelt over her. She reached for my leg and tugged, gently, insistently, until I lifted it, and straddled her. Her dress rode up over smooth, golden legs and a tight curving belly. She was small in my arms, and her heart beat as fast as a rabbit’s.

She reached up and brushed my left nipple through the silk very lightly with the back of her hand, and I groaned. She blinked at me, very slowly, and touched my top button, and undid it, and touched the next one, and unfastened that, and the next, and I didn’t stop her, and she freed my left breast and held her palm beneath it, not touching, until I lowered my breast to it; and she drew her hand down another inch. Again I bent, until my breast was three inches from her mouth. She moved her hand. Her breath was feathery, her lips red.

“Give it to me,” she said, “make me take it,” and opened her mouth.

I wanted to stop. I wanted to weep. I wanted to make her take my whole breast in her mouth and slide off my trousers and straddle her naked belly, hot and soft.

Someone knocked on the door. She went very still beneath me.

“Aud, it’s me.” Dornan.

I couldn’t think. I felt dazed, too hot and swollen for my clothes.

“Aud?” He knocked again.

I sat back on my heels and took a ragged breath, and then another. I fastened a couple of buttons. Isabella closed her mouth and ran her hands through her hair. I breathed some more and stood.

Isabella sat up. “I don’t do couples.” She pulled herself onto the sofa and tugged her dress into place.

Dornan knocked again. “I’m not going to go away until I know you’re all right.”

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand—her lip gloss smelled the way all makeup does, waxy and womanly—and walked to the door and opened it.

“I’m sorry,” Dornan said, walking in. “I should have remembered earlier. ” I closed the door mechanically. “We were in a bar in Ballard, and these men came in dressed as Vikings. So I said, What’s going on? And someone told me it was Syttende Mai, and I said, What’s that when it’s at home? And they said, May the Seventeenth, Independence Day, and so I thought of you, and how you must be feeling, so I…”

He saw the champagne, the two glasses, and stopped, puzzled. Then he noticed the woman on the sofa with smudged lip gloss and no shoes, and turned to me and took in my half-buttoned shirt, my still-flushed cheeks, and swollen eyelids.

“I see,” he said. “I find I’ve been foolish.” He spoke slowly, in the educated, guarded accent he hadn’t used with me for years. “It seems I’ve been making unwarranted assumptions. Well. I apologize for the interruption and will be out of your way as soon as I may.”

He nodded politely to Isabella, gave me a distant, measuring look, said, “I really don’t understand you at all,” and left, stepping briskly.

Isabella ran her hands through her hair again, then picked up her champagne glass and took a hefty swallow.

I hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign and locked the suite tight. For the first time since her wrap had slid into my hands and her smell had punched into my brain, I could think, and I did. “A friend,” I said. “I’m very sorry about him bursting in like that. Please finish your champagne and let me pour more.” In her world, unplanned interruptions no doubt tended to have dangerous repercussions, and I needed her relaxed and willing to take a risk. “You’re safe with me. You can leave anytime you like. However, I’d like the chance to make it up to you, if I may. We could talk a little, and relax, and later I’ll order us dinner, if you’re willing.”

“I would love to talk,” she said, with only a fractional pause. Whatever it took to make me happy. Twenty-two hundred dollars was a lot of money, and satisfied customers were more likely to return. She patted the seat beside her. “Sit with me.” The myrrh was back, the promise of damp skin and tumbled sheets and hoarse cries in the dark.

I sat, and sipped, and she took my hand and held it, and looked at me with those honey and amber eyes.

“Let me help you relax,” she said.

“You’ve had a fright. I feel bad about it. You’re not under any obligation.”

“But I want to. Being with a woman is different. Special. It’s not like a job, not at all. It’s pure pleasure.”

It was a lovely fiction, and she told it so well. She read the temptation in my face and smiled.

It’s nonsense that the eyes are the gateway to the soul. The smile tells all. Broken people can lift the corners of their lips and crinkle the skin around their eyes, but the center is always missing: the tiny muscles at their brows and beneath the eyes, at the curve and bow of mouth, the hinge of the jaw. The smile is empty.

I lifted her hand, put it gently on her lap, and let go. “I don’t want sex,” I said. “I want information.”

She looked at my hard nipples and then between my legs where the silk was dark, and laughed. She put her arm along the back of the sofa. “Certainly we can talk first, if you like.”

“I’ll rephrase. I will not have sex with you. I want information.”

“What do you want to know?” She touched the back of my neck. You know you want me, her hand said, and I’m paid for.

I stood up. “Excuse me one moment.”

I closed the bedroom door behind me, found underwear and jeans. Even while I pulled them on, part of me was listening, heart beating high, hoping she would tap on the door and I would open it to say no, and she would kiss me and crawl onto the bed, and then lift her face from the sheets and turn back to look at me, and I wouldn’t be able to help myself. I might even be able to make her feel good. What was so wrong with that?

And now the extent of my self-delusion was obvious and pitiful. The lack of underwear, the open door—good manners, yes, put Isabella at her ease, yes, lull her suspicions so she would give me what I needed. Give me what I needed. A way to have sex without guilt: She made me do it, Officer, I couldn’t help myself.

But that wasn’t the point. The point was that Seattle as a city was closed to me. I needed a way in.

I laughed at myself, fastened every button, and went back in.

“Five thousand dollars,” I said. "You give me a name and address, and anything else I need to talk to the man or woman who sets things up for you.”

“I’m an independent.”

Perhaps that’s what she liked to pretend, but a hotel with a client list like the Fairmont would not deal with a random service provider. They preferred the reassurance of organization; the kind of people who could short-cut my search for whoever was trying to devalue my real estate. “Who gets a cut of your price?”

She didn’t like that. “It’s a referral fee.”

I opened the drawer under the TV and pulled out a brick of cash.

“Five thousand, cash, on top of the twenty-two hundred I’ve already paid, and not a soul will know the information came from you.” Which meant no one would take their cut.

“Thank you, no.”

After what had occurred between us, I couldn’t bring myself to force her.

AFTER SHE had gone, I tidied away the champagne, blew out the candles, and stripped naked. I could smell my own need.

I placed my feet exactly, put my palms together, and reached for the ceiling. I breathed out, slow and controlled, and reached some more, until two vertebrae popped and settled, then I bent to the floor, palms flat, and breathed four smooth breaths, six seconds in, seven seconds out. I began the slow-motion movements of a tai chi form.

When I was done, I began again, even more slowly. And again, until sweat coursed down my body.

THEY WERE ALL THERE. ALL EXCEPT SANDRA APPEARED HAPPY AND RELAXED: glad for it to be spring at last, finding it easier to travel to a strange part of the city now that it was no longer dark when they arrived, now that they no longer had to be afraid when they got out of their cars.

“Sit for a minute,” I said, and they folded to the floor with varying degrees of ease. Sandra moved more carefully than usual. I wondered what color her torso was. “Let’s talk about fear.”

“Let’s not,” Nina said, and though she was smiling, as usual, she wasn’t joking.

“Fear,” I said, and waited. “What is it?”

“There’s all kinds,” Kim said. I raised my eyebrows. “Like scary movies are good.”

“But being pulled into your supervisor’s office is bad,” Tonya said.

“And worrying that you’re being followed.” Katherine, of course.

“The Goliath at Six Flags is kind of cool.” Suze.

“But thinking you might have cancer isn’t.” Nina.

Silence. “And all these things are fear?”

“Well, yeah.”

“How are they different?”

“Some are good, and some are bad.”

“Why?” Blank looks. “All right. How do you feel when you’re afraid?”

“Frightened,” Nina said in a duh voice.

“How do you know you’re frightened?”

They all stared desperately at the carpet, saying with their entire beings: don’t like this, won’t go there, la la la.

Finally Christie offered, “I shake.”

“Yes,” I said, “and probably your mouth goes dry.”

“Damn,” said Kim, “that’s right.”

“It’s the same for everyone. Fear is a physical response to real danger, immediate danger. It’s glandular and fast as lightning. There’s nothing you can do about it.”

They looked appalled.

“But fear isn’t the enemy. Fear is your friend. It tells you the truth about what’s going on. In that sense, it’s a bit like pain.”

“Pain is not my friend,” Therese said.

“Reliable messenger, then. We don’t always want to hear what it’s got to say, but once it’s arrived, it doesn’t pay to ignore it.”

Pauletta was frowning. “That’s it? I paid good money to hear you say we’re gonna get hurt and scared and there’s nothing we can do about it?”

“That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that when you’re in danger, your glands release all kinds of hormones that are instructions your body cannot disobey.”

“So some guy scares us and we run shrieking down the alley, that what you’re saying?”

“No.” I put on my earnest, friendly face. “One of the most important hormones involved in the fear response is adrenaline. Its prime function is to shunt power to necessary systems, basically to make sure you’re ready to fight or run or both. So, Christie, when you tremble, that’s adrenaline flooding your long muscles, your arms and legs, with power. If you’re not running or fighting, you shake, like a shuttle trembling at the launchpad.”

“I’m not a shuttle,” Kim said. “I start to shaking, and the next thing I do is pass out.”

“For real?” Pauletta said.

“Once. Went down, whap, like someone broke my legs. Busted my teeth out on the ground.”

“No shit?”

“Just baby teeth. Loose anyhow.” She shrugged.

Jennifer was breathing far too fast for it to be healthy, and her upper lip glistened. “You pass out? But if you pass out, you’re helpless…. I’m going to buy a gun,” Jennifer said. “I am. A big, big gun.”

“Guns don’t help,” Sandra said. The whole class looked at her.

“Okay,” I said. “All right. I’m going to tell you what happens and what can happen when we’re scared. And then I’m going to show you some ways to get around some of those things. No one has to pass out with fear ever again—”

“You said there’s nothing we can do about it.”

“—and no one has to buy a gun.”

Now I had their attention.

“Fear is an emotion, a glandular reaction. It’s physical. It affects what we do, how we think, and how we feel. Fear is the body’s response to an understanding of real and immediate danger. Remember those key words: real and immediate. Your glands flood your body with a variety of hormones, like adrenaline. Adrenaline instructs your body to rev up the parts and processes essential for you to fight or run, and to shut down the nonessentials. So, for example, the capillaries in your face close, making you go pale. Your digestion—from saliva production to excretion—turns off, so your mouth goes dry.”

“Is that why I get sick to my stomach?” Tonya.

“Yes. You get queasy because your stomach, usually churning away constantly, essentially freezes. Your heart and respiration rates go up—your heart pounds, you feel breathless—to get oxygen, lots of oxygen, to the long muscles of your arms and legs, getting you ready to respond at your maximum. Fear is a good thing.”

“But getting scared isn’t.” Pauletta was stubborn.

“There’s nothing good about being in danger, no.” Except that it means you’re not yet dead. “But fear, when you are already in danger, is a good thing. Adrenaline also affects the way your brain works.”

“Panic,” said Jennifer, nodding.

“Not necessarily. What happens in times of real and immediate danger is that your unconscious brain, a kind of emergency expert system, takes over. Panic is a system conflict. It’s what happens when your conscious and unconscious brain fight.” And melt down, and all sense just runs and hides. That had happened to me for the first time last year, in New York. Tonya was saying something. “I’m sorry.”

“I said, like a robot trying to compute when the scientist says, I always lie.”

Nina made robot-in-a-loop motions, like something from a bad 1980s music video. The tension was beginning to ease.

I blinked. “Yes. Very good. Just like that. And just as a robot in these stories is always naïve, our conscious mind can be, too. It can persuade itself of things an idiot child wouldn’t believe.” I shook off memories of last year. “I’ll come back to that, because it’s important.” It was the heart of everything, but I couldn’t get there from here. “For now, I’d like you to think a bit more about what fear is and where it comes from.”

I stood. They watched warily as I walked to the back of the room and my satchel. Tension was high again. I retrieved the packet of blank three-by -five index cards and the box of Sharpies and handed them out.

“On this card I want you to write the one thing you’re afraid of, that you hope taking this class will help with.”

“Small card, big pen,” Nina said.

“That’s because I want you to keep it short. And add, at the bottom right, a simple yes or no, in answer to this question: Have you ever been assaulted? By which I mean physically or sexually attacked.” There were a dozen ways to define assault, but for my purposes, that would do. “You won’t be reading these aloud, and I don’t know your handwriting, so be honest, be specific.”

Caps popped as they came off and the air filled with Sharpie scent— Tonya sniffed hers meditatively; she’d have a headache later—there were lots of faraway looks, some scribbling. Sandra’s pen moved vigorously but never touched the paper.

“Time’s up. Cap the pens, please, and pass them back to me.”

“What do we do with the cards?”

“Hand them to Nina.” There was some standing, some timing of the thrust of card from their hand to Nina’s: attempts to disguise who had given what. “Nina, shuffle them and give them to me.”

She did. While they sat down again, I sorted the cards rapidly into the yes pile, three; the no pile, six; and the blank card. I set the cards to one side, facedown.

“According to the 1985 London WAR study, eighty-one percent of women sometimes or often feel frightened at home alone in the daytime. This percentage rises for when we’re outside or it’s night or both.” I looked around the circle, waiting until everyone but Sandra stopped looking at the cards and met my eye. “So what, exactly, are we afraid of?”

Sandra lifted her head. Her face was waxy with intensity, the tiny muscles in her brown irises pulled so tight that in this bad light the plump fibers had an amber sheen. I’d seen a woman look like that once whose boyfriend had their son in a cupboard with a gun against his head. She was ashamed. She couldn’t tell me; she wanted me to know.

“In an earlier class I gave you Department of Justice statistics on the chances of avoiding rape if you fight back.”

“Seventy-two percent if he’s unarmed, fifty-eight percent if armed with a knife, fifty-one if armed with a gun,” said Tonya.

“Many of you expressed surprise at that.” Nods. “That’s because the information we get, every day, from TV and newspapers and online, is all about the rapes that are completed, the lives lost, the pain suffered—preferably with blood and body parts and panicky eyewitness accounts. Why? Because that’s what gets an audience, and the bigger the audience, the more the media can charge for their commercials. More than eighty percent of us spend our lives afraid because that helps soap makers and computer manufacturers sell product.”

“Same old same old,” Nina said. “The military-industrial complex.”

“The capitalist system,” Christie said. I couldn’t have been more surprised if she’d turned purple and exploded. “Someone was talking about this at school last semester. The patriarchy.”

“The patriarchy,” Nina said. “Haven’t heard that word since I did women’s studies in college.”

“They had college back then?” Pauletta said.

Nina ignored her; she was getting excited. “I remember now. Some big feminist, one of those dead ones, said men teach us to be afraid to control us.”

Andrea Dworkin: “We are taught systematically to be afraid. We are taught to be afraid so that we will not be able to act, so that we will be passive, so that we will be women… ,” in Our Blood, though I had no doubt she’s said it in some form or other in all her books. The male conspiracy against women. When it came to the media I had always thought corporate greed was a much simpler explanation.

“It’s been estimated that the media publicize thirteen completed rapes for every attempted but uncompleted rape. If you round up the chance of getting away from an unarmed attacker from seventy-two to seventy-five percent, that means you have a three in four chance of getting away.”

“Or kicking his fucking head in,” Suze said.

“And then if you take the thirteen-to-one completed-versus-uncompleted -rape media figure, it means that the papers and the news underreport fight-back stories by five thousand two hundred percent.”

“Math makes my head hurt,” said Katherine.

“Imagine you’re listening to WSB while you drink your mocha and drive to work. Imagine it’s a slow news day, so you hear about a grand-mother who fought off a rapist with her umbrella. Think about the other fifty-one women who got away.”

Tonya got it. Her eyes shone, and it was a different shine than Sandra’s. “Much of what we call fear is actually worry about imaginary situations, ” I said. “It’s learned. It can be unlearned. When you read about someone being raped, remember the three others who got away. On those rare occasions where you do hear about a woman getting away, remember the fifty-one others who did, too. Better yet, don’t read or listen to that kind of news.”

“Not listen to the news?” Jennifer looked shocked.

“The news exists to make people anxious, so that they keep watching, so that the provider—the website, the network, the publisher—can sell advertising space. But anxiety and worry are not the same as fear. There’s very little useful about them. Worry, or stress, or anxiety are responses to long-term or persistently imagined danger, not real danger, not immediate danger. Horror and dread, again, aren’t usually about the immediate, but about the future: the suspense of waiting for what you think will come. Note that: think. When you lie awake at night and start imagining mad axe murderers or hooded rapists, we’re not smelling them, not hearing them, not feeling the vibration of their footsteps.”

I picked up the cards and turned them over.

“Let me tell you something about what’s written on these cards. The ones with no in the bottom right list fears like ‘being raped,’ ‘being followed, ’ ‘dark places,’ and so on. Do you see any similarities between them?” I waited.

“Horror-movie stuff,” Tonya said. “Kind of generic.”

“Yes,” I said. “The ones who wrote yes were more specific.”

“Like what?” Suze, one of the Nos.

“Waking in my hotel room to find the bellboy exposing himself, my old boyfriend getting drunk and paying me a visit, being beaten with a garden rake.” I looked around the circle of faces. Therese and Kim’s faces were closed, Nina looked particularly detached. “Some of you seem unhappy.”

“You just said we’re afraid of make-believe things,” Pauletta said.

“Those of you who have never been assaulted are worrying about the wrong things. You’ve paid for my advice, so listen to me now. Fear is a good thing, worrying about fear is not. All right. On your feet.”

“What?”

“Up.” I stood. “Stand in a big circle. Good. Fear releases adrenaline. Adrenaline will make your heart pound, and make you pant. It’s the panting that leads to hyperventilation, which leads to passing out. Some people pass out because they’re so frightened, they forget to breathe at all. So if you’re not breathing, start. A good way to do that is to exhale sharply, even if you feel you’ve got no air, and that’ll trigger an inhalation. It’s enough to get you going. But then you have to not hyperventilate. I’m going to show you how.”

Their chests rose and fell with rapid, shallow breath.

“Stand in a stable, comfortable position. Push your tongue up into the roof of your mouth and clamp your back teeth together. This will control your jaw and neck muscles, in case you’re shaking, and also, if you get hit on the jaw, it’s less likely to break. Keep your back straight.” Their notion of straight was pitiful. “Try to feel your spine in one long line, like a plumb line. Don’t stick your chin in the air because that will put a strain on your vocal cords, which we’ll need nice and relaxed for later.” Though there was a good physiological argument, too, for lifting the chin: it reduced the emotional response and promoted blood flow to the frontal cortex. But one thing at a time. “Keep your shoulders down. Not only does that look more confident and relaxed but it reduces muscle tension and therefore speeds any emergency response. Breathe through your nose, breathe deep from the diaphragm. Feel your belly swell. Put your hand on your stomach. There.” I walked around, adjusting posture. “Make that hand move out. Your chest should hardly move at all. In through the nose, deep and slow, your belly swells. Out, a long gush through the mouth. In, deep and slow, and out. In. Out.”

Their faces grew pink.

“Now that you’re breathing nicely and there’s no more danger of passing out, it’s safe to address some of the other fear symptoms. If your arms and legs are trembling, but you don’t yet know if you should run or fight, try clenching and relaxing them. If your mouth is really dry, open your mouth slightly—if it’s safe to do so—and run the underside of your tongue over your bottom front teeth. That should make your mouth water. Do this for a few seconds, and swallow a couple of times, and gradually the dryness will go away and your larynx will relax. So now we’re ready to use our voices.”

Ten pairs of shoulders rose. Well, they were going to have to get over that.

“Voice is an important body weapon. In its way, it’s as useful as a kick or punch. Voice can embarrass or frighten a potential attacker. It can summon help, give warning, and say no, loudly and clearly. It can give you confidence, and deafen your attacker, actually damage an eardrum. Voice can immobilize an attacker or potential attacker for a split second.” Therese made a slight huh of skepticism. I started walking around the inside of the circle. “Voice increases the power of any physical move you might make because it helps you focus your attention and your strike. Voice depends very much on the way we breathe. Make the voice come from deep down, as though it’s from your thighs and stomach, not your throat and head. You want a deep, explosive sound.” I stopped in front of Therese. “Like this:

“Huut!”

The sound slammed into her face and blew her backwards. Her arms pinwheeled. I resumed walking while she shook her head and pulled herself together.

“Spread out just a little. We’re going to do some squats.” I demonstrated. “Slow and easy. Breathe out through your mouth as you go down, in through your nose as you come up. Down, out.” The less self-conscious made a kind of ooourff as they went down. “Up, in. Down, out. Up, in. Now a little faster. Down!” More oourffs. “Up. Down! Good. Let me hear some noise now. A deep sound, a boom. Feel it blast out of you, like a train from a tunnel. Ooosh! All together. Ooosh.” The entire circle dropped, like a falling hoop. Half made a noise. “Up, and in. And oosh.” More of the hoop sounded. “And up and in and oosh.” Gaps in the hoop only from Jennifer and Katherine and Sandra. “And up and in and oosh!” Katherine sounded. Not much, but something. The circle was almost closed. “Up and in and oosh! Up, in, oosh!” An uncertain ooh? from Jennifer. Almost. “Up and in and oosh!” Jennifer’s ooh firmed and strengthened. Katherine was as loud as the rest. “Up and in and oosh! Louder. Ooosh! Louder. Ooosh!” I walked around, breathing, booming, listening. And there, at last, a thin, hesitant sound, wavering like a ghost. “Louder. Ooosh!”

The hoop dropped, the sound flared up, unbroken, like a ring of fire. My face stretched in a fierce grin: you breathe, you make a noise, the next thing you know you’re talking back, and then, next time he thinks about hitting you, you leave.

Ooosh.

Ooosh.

Ooosh.

“Louder! Blow your attacker into the back of next week. Use that fear, use that anger. Louder. And up, and in, and one last time. Ooosh!”

The sound was tremendous; I felt it through the soles of my feet. If there had been a window, it would have rattled.

“Yes!” Suze said, pumping her arm.

Everyone was grinning. Tonya turned away briefly, but not before I saw the sparkle on her cheeks. Sandra looked as though she had seen God.

“Whoo!” Kim said. “We kicked ass!”

The basement door opened.

It was like watching a pride of lionesses lift their dripping muzzles from the belly of the dying zebra and zero in on the giggling hyena.

The face of the long-haired woman in the doorway went white. Classic fear response. The scent of mass-produced incense, and the whine-and-tinkle of Crystal Gaze’s sound system—three women with nasal problems singing Om-mani-padme-hum—drifted into the basement. The woman swayed, clutched for the doorknob, missed, nearly fell.

“Breathe,” Nina advised.

Everyone laughed. The woman in the doorway looked as though she might cry. I recognized her from behind the cash register upstairs. “How can I help you?”

“I, uh.”

“Breathe, honey,” Nina said again.

We all waited politely. “You, uh, that is, the customers were wondering…” She didn’t seem to know how to proceed.

“Were we too loud, honey?”

“Yes. Loud. You were loud.”

“They heard you upstairs,” I told everyone. “Through the concrete and the floors and over the sound system.”

“Excellent!” Christie said.