Under the Rose Read online

  Which brings me to a final point you might just grasp. I might xerox it on three hundred and sixty-five scraps of paper and send you one daily and then one chance day it just might – might – connect. It’s this: I don’t live to fuck, Kiki. I fuck to live. It’s an aid, a prop. Listen: I’m not being outrageous for kicks, just trying to tell you that I’m thirty-five years old and look more. They were packed years. I’m not the girl you disapproved of at seventeen with a somewhat scuffed-up face. I’m a different person. That girl ignored your advice. She took the risks you rightly warned her against. She got burned. Right? You were right then but – watch it, Kiki, here’s the surprise: that makes you wrong now. Because people who’ve stayed carefully out of the fire and people who’ve been through it are not the same. They’re a different race and Sam’s my race and you’re not. So you can’t advise me and I can’t talk to you and I’m getting off this train at the next stop and getting the next one back to the ville lumière where I shall flame like a salamander until I go up in smoke.

  And I wish to Joe & Co. I had some more lovely Hine, because I bloody need it. Wonder will the buffet be open at the next station?

  Because don’t think I think it’s going to be easy. I’m terrified.

  Pop Goes the Weasel

  Tom, flat on his back, was using pain to quell his memory. His arms ached. Above him teetered a weight which he must not let slip. In his mind it was now a boulder. Of basalt. Or limestone. Not that it mattered. What did was the muscle-pain. Grittily, he savoured that. You had, he believed, to conquer yourself so as later, if need be, to tackle the world. His pupils accepted this. Most of them. Only Rafael, missing the point, had once asked if Tom was thinking of the next world.

  Raffo could get things a tad wrong, indeed was in jail just now enforcing Tom’s principles with excessive zest. He had wreaked mayhem on a pair of badasses. Fellow students said Tom shouldn’t blame himself if Raffo lacked flexibility.

  ‘He takes the American dream too much to heart!’ they decided. ‘Listen, he takes karate too much to heart.’

  ‘And the movies!’

  ‘It’s being an immigrant.’ Gary was the class intellectual. ‘If you psych yourself up to adapt to a whole new culture, you’ll keep looking for challenges. Raffo wanted to be like those knights in the blow-ups on our dojo walls, Tom. Dragon-slayers! They must have impressed him as a kid. They’d have been some of the first things here he saw.’

  Rafael had been in Tom’s karate class since his family brought him to LA from Mexico at the age of ten. He’d been the first Hispanic to join and the only one to stay.

  Tom, while he had nothing against Hispanics, had a test question for them. ‘Ever hear of a bunch of Mexicans,’ he’d ask, ‘who lay claim to California, Texas and everything in between? They call it Atalanta or something like that. Do you know about them?’

  No one said they did, but Tom went on putting his question. He wanted any mad Mexicans on whom he might stumble to know their cover was blown.

  He didn’t get to put it though to Rafael’s Mom. She was a Spanish-speaker, brown as gingerbread who, one day twenty years ago, simply appeared at Tom’s door with little Rafael, his baby sisters and a basketful of cakes in the colours of the Mexican flag. Raspberry, cream and pistachio! Pure cholesterol! Tinted sugar sifted from the basket; alien smells polluted the dojo and Tom couldn’t have said which of his powerful personal taboos was the most acutely violated. A baby started to cry. Soothing it, the gingerbread Mom opened her blouse, thrust her cakes at Tom, and pointed to little Rafael. ‘This one’, she said, ‘want study karate. Give me no peace. All day watch your class. From there.’ Popping one tit into the baby’s mouth, she pointed to an apartment balcony overlooking the dojo, then said something to the boy in Spanish, perhaps that he should show what he could do.

  Tom expected shyness, but there was none.

  ‘Kiai!’ yelled Raffo, while performing a creditable middle-level sword-hand block in back stance. A natural! Then he did the splits. An uncle had promised to pay for his lessons.

  Later, Tom wrapped up the unwholesome cakes and drove with them to a distant litter bin. He didn’t want anyone’s feelings hurt, but neither did he relish the smells which lingered in his dojo until he got at them with Listerine. Next day Raffo joined the class and, some years later, got his black belt. Since then, several more years had passed, and pupils from Tom’s first junior karate class had now had their black belts so long that the fine Japanese silk had worn thin, and the belts were turning white. About ten old pupils still trained though, turning up three times a week – it had once been six – and Rafael had been one of the most faithful until last month when an unathletic-looking judge sentenced him harshly on the grounds that having a karate black belt was the equivalent of being armed. The guy reminded Tom of his own uncles from Salt Lake City. Stiff! Dry! Convinced of their rectitude. Years ago, two of them had come out here to LA for three days, looked down their lean Wasp noses at California, then turned and gone home. Tom got the impression that he, like the state, had been considered and found wanting. On that occasion, however, no judgement was pronounced.

  ‘Remember, Tom,’ Gary reminisced, ‘how awful Rafael’s accent used to be? Martin kept making fun of it until Rafael punched him in the mouth. He broke two teeth and Martin’s Mom threatened to sue vou.’

  ‘I told her to go right ahead.’

  ‘Yeah!’ The class enjoyed the memory.

  ‘Martin’s Mom was quite something!’

  ‘So was Martin!’

  ‘Remember how we were all set to testify that he was a mean S.O.B who had it coming?’

  ‘Martin was worse than an S.O.B. He was a small sadist. What you never saw, Tom, was what he got up to when you turned your back. Especially during sparring.’

  ‘His Mom wouldn’t let him train with us after that.’

  ‘But when he was sixteen he came back.’

  ‘That’s right! She couldn’t stop him then and he’d grown into an acceptable guy!’

  ‘Fairly acceptable.’

  ‘Rafael had taught him a lesson!’

  Wham! Nostalgically, Tom dreamed of evils which could be simply knocked out. Flattened! Murdilized! Up-p again! Wondering if he’d heard a bone crack, he steadied the weight. His arms buckled. Effortfully, he raised them once more. As a professional chiropractor and martial artist, he knew how much too much to demand of his body.

  ‘Push beyond your threshold,’ was his motto.

  In his fantasy the weight was a boulder which could slip, set off an earthslide and block the entrance to a cave from which fugitives had started to emerge. A girl had got out, but something had happened to the man behind her. His face was muzzled in blood, and one of his eyes, veined like a rare orchid, hung as if from a stem.

  ‘Aa-uuu-wwawwagh!’ Tom’s anguished bellow surprised himself.

  Embarrassed, he assigned it to a predator deep in the cave. Dragon? Cyclops? No, a giant earth worm. Tom had watched a video once in which a lovely, white-skinned gal changed every night into one of those. The story was by the same guy who wrote Dracula. Tom tried to remember his name. Gram, was it? Or Bram? Bram Something? Bellowing again, he congratulated himself on having had his dojo soundproofed. At one time he’d had forty students, and when they all yelled ‘kiai’ the building shook. Neighbours complained that it sounded like the start of the big LA quake. So Tom called the sound-proofers.

  Deep in the cave, something phosphorescent glowed. Tusks? Slime? Were the fugitives all safely out? ‘Ninety-nine!’ Tom let sink then raised his barbell one last time. ‘A hundred!’ Replacing it, he gave a high sign to a movie poster on the wall which showed a man hefting a rock. The man’s muscles jutted. A girl, wearing the stone-age equivalent of a bikini, was creeping fearfully from a cave, and you could tell that the man would now lower the rock, corral the evil inside and join her in the sunshine. Tom’s fantasies usually stopped there.

  Today he held onto them, letting his mind flit th
rough a medley in which the stone-age gal turned up in the Star Trek episode he’d watched last night. Slivers of reality knifed coldly in, making him shiver even as he stepped under the hot shower. Again he saw the dangling eye.

  It was Jim’s.

  Tom, embracing numbness, turned off shower and thought-stream, extracted a karate gi from a cottony pile smelling mildly of himself, put it on, took a quart of plain yoghurt from his office fridge and sat down to eat. The stiff sleeves creaked and he felt bolstered by routine. No point ringing the hospital yet. They’d said not to. Jim was in intensive care. Tom who hadn’t cried since he was a kid felt a hardness in his throat.

  The yoghurt had the clotty texture of a nose bleed, but he ate it anyway for, as health-lore changed, so did his diet. Gone were the days of steaks and pie. Like his Mormon forebears, he looked to the long run, but, giving up on heaven, subscribed instead to news letters on smart drugs and nutrients and, to keep his brain active, took challenging courses in math and the biology of ageing in which he already had a PhD. His aim was to stay healthy until researchers into our DNA cracked the code which tells us to die and reversed the message. He believed this to be imminent.

  ‘I’d hate’, he told students, ‘to be the last man to go!’

  Slyly timed, such remarks let him catch his breath between strenuous routines. Did the guys know, he wondered, and if so did this embarrass them? In the old days, he would have crucified anyone who said a word during training. His own Japanese sensei had run his dojo like a boot camp, and for years Tom, honouring the tradition, stayed inscrutably buttoned-up and dignified. Lately, though, he had been regarding his students as family and sharing his thoughts.

  The change went back to Heppy’s death. Mom’s. Mrs Fuller’s. Her ghostly selves gusted back if he didn’t take measures – and must at some point be dealt with.

  Crumpling his emptied yoghurt carton, he let one bad memory oust another. This morning, out on the boulevard, there had been a five-car pile-up. Sun-blurred after-images floated in and out of focus, hiding then brutally highlighting bone shards puncturing a cheek, Jim’s fierce, extruded eye, crushed metal and a bunch of stunned faces, two of which he knew. A car had been totalled right outside this office while another, somersaulting past the centre divider, burst into flames. Tom, hearing the collision, had rushed out and there was the totalled car wrapped around a lamp post and next to it Jim’s old jalopy with Jim folded into the steering wheel. In the periphery of Tom’s vision, making a getaway in his BMW, was an intact but tight-lipped Martin.

  Martin! Tom got the picture instantly: those assholes had meant to fake it! Holy shit! They’d planned to fake injuries and walk off with the insurance money. Martin must have talked Jim into it. Tom could imagine his spiel: ‘Listen! Listen! Your old lady’s busting your balls. Your car’s worth zip. Just say you have a whiplash neck. We’ll get Honest Tom the Chiropractor to back you up. He’ll believe you and the insurers will believe him. We’ll do it right by his office. The symptoms are a cinch to fake.’

  Jim, a mild, handsome ex-lifeguard with a knee injury, was one of Nature’s fall-guys. Before the knee-injury he had married a gal who kept nagging him to get off his butt and do something. But Jim didn’t see what he could do and had been in here joking miserably about this. She’d made him use their savings as a deposit on a house, and he couldn’t keep up the payments. He’d flunked law school and lost a job as security guard because of his limp.

  Tom, hating to know about scams, averted his eyes from so much that, for a while, his disbelief in ambulance-chasers, snuff-movies and markets-in-stolen-hearts-and-kidneys had equalled that with which other people greeted his hopes of living forever. The difference was that when they had evidence, he bowed to it, which was more than they did to his. This amazed him whose sources included bulletins from the Centre d’Etude du Polymorphisme Humain (CEPH) in Paris where researchers had mapped the human genetic blueprint. Awesomely, human immortality had begun to look attainable and, bafflingly, his students didn’t seem to care. Tom harangued them with wonder. Just last week, Martin’s pale little eyes had blinked impassively while Tom talked right through the limbering-up period.

  Why, he marvelled, were they not ecstatic! Their generation could – Tom delicately stretched his hamstrings – be thirty-plus forever. Didn’t they grasp the privilege? Didn’t they – here he still happily, though still delicately, swung a kick in the air – want immortality? Making imaginary contact, his bare toes trembled at high noon.

  ‘Listen, I’m in my sixties, and I want it!’

  In the training mirror, his levitating self reminded him of a prophet ranting in some souk! Prophet or monk. His crewcut had acquired a tonsure. Or some white, arrowy, Japanese bird.

  ‘Hey,’ someone – Martin? – guffawed in the back row, ‘if nobody dies, the planet’ll get overcrowded. They’ll have to ban sex!’

  ‘Yeah! You’ll have to be castrated!’ Aiming humorous assaults at each other’s groins.

  ‘It should be done now. Aids is the warning!’

  ‘Aids! Yeah! Yah!’

  ‘Don’t touch me, man! Keep your body liquids to yourself!’

  ‘Sex-maniacs should be interned!’

  ‘Or at least banned from the dojo!’

  Feinting and dodging, kicks snapped, punches were pulled and white sleeves furrowed the air like paper darts. Rowdiness was how Tom’s class stopped him wasting paid-up time in talk. Only rarely, in retaliation, did he assign them five minutes’ squat-kicking – high kicks from a low squat, like dancing Cossacks – then, when he had them winded, return to his topic.

  Doing this had once drawn a taunt from a flagging Gary – less fit than he liked to pretend: ‘Tom! Know why immortality appeals so much to you? It’s because you don’t live life! You save it up.’

  The verbal punch to the gut took the others’ breath away. How could it fail to in a dojo devoted to the values of Southern Cal? The hush, compounding unease, lasted until Gary, in a manœuvre learned from Tom who trained actors to perform it in movies, floored a phantom assailant, then whirled to demolish other lurkers – among them, surely, an unworthy self?

  Tom was flummoxed. In what way did he not live? How? What could Gary mean? The attack was the more hurtful because Tom liked to be joshed. Lately, aiming to Americanize karate, he had tried to behave less like a sensei and more like a genial uncle who attended students’ graduation parties and welcomed them back after their divorces – matrimony tended to interrupt training.

  As a chiropractor, treating the unfit among them, he no longer nagged when their flesh proved softer than his own. Jim was one of these, a slack, needy man whom Tom should have protected. He should have warned him against Martin who last June had made some startling admissions right here in the dojo.

  It was just before class. The day was hot and the door to the boulevard had been left open to cool the place down. Suddenly a collision – like a small try-out for this morning’s – happened so close that the men catching the breeze had a ringside seat.

  ‘Hey! Look!’ Gary had been a rubberneck since he was ten.

  ‘Diosito!’ Rafael reverted to Spanish.

  ‘Faked!’ decided Martin after a quick glance. ‘Half of all accidents are.’ Then he told how teams of bogus victims, paramedics, lawyers and doctors – ‘or’, with a foxy grin at Tom, ‘chiropractors’ – divvied up insurance money. Later, privately, he offered to cut Tom in, as he was apparently in a position to do. There was a lot, ‘And I mean a lot,’ said Martin, to be made. ‘If you don’t grab it, others will.’

  Tom was less shaken by the dishonesty which he knew to be rampant than by Martin’s failure to see how genuinely he, Tom, cared about honour. Karate, he always scrupulously taught, was as spiritual as it was physical. It was why he had chosen, decades ago, to perfect himself in an art which, at the time, few Americans understood. ‘Kara’ – ‘empty’ – referred not only to the fighting man’s hand but to his need to empty his inner self of ego, leaving
it as straight, clean and hollow as a green bamboo shoot. Clearly, despite years of training, this message had not reached Martin. Was the fault Tom’s?

  Had he, softening, let his own egotism back in? Undeniably, he had mellowed and was sometimes startled to recall a self who had favoured interning peaceniks and keeping fags and women in their place. These aims baffled him now – which did not mean that he thought right the same as wrong.

  ‘Stop right now!’ In a panic of refusal, he tried to shut Martin up. ‘Stop! You mustn’t say things like that around the dojo!’

  ‘OK then! Have it your way!’ Shrugging, Martin opened the door of Tom’s office in which this talk had been taking place. ‘Well,’ he exclaimed. ‘Just look who’s outside!’ Amused, he tilted his chin towards the car park where Gary was clearly on the watch. ‘Your protector’s worried, Tom! Afraid I’ll stir you up and get you really mad. Give you a stroke maybe? I’m still the badass in this Castle of Virtue!’

  Tom was mad. Stung, he warned, ‘I ought to turn you in. How do you know I won’t? Ten years ago I would have.’

  ‘Ten years ago I wouldn’t have told you.’

  Tom turned that over in his mind. Martin had intuition: a thing you had to respect. Seeing idealism die, he had adapted and that, like it or not, was evolution. It was how humanity survived. He’d surely survive better than Gary who couldn’t see beyond the tip of his own argument. Words, to Gary, were only words and films films. He and Tom battled over this and last Monday, when Tom was probing the significance of the videos he had watched over the weekend – Batman, which he’d seen for the tenth time, and Bladerunner – Gary had cut in with a ‘Tom, those are films! That’s all they are!’