“Evelyn,” said Rudolph, “look at this.” She blinked back sleep and squinted at the cover of a magazine called Inside Kung-Fu, which Rudolph waved under her nose. On the cover a man stood bowlegged, one hand cocked under his armpit, the other corkscrewing straight at Evelyn’s nose.
“Rudolph!” She batted the magazine aside, then swung her eyes toward the cluttered night-stand, focusing on the electric clock beside her water glass from McDonald’s, Preparation H suppositories, and Harlequin romances. “It’s morning!” Now she was mad. At least, working at it. “Where have you been?”
Her husband inhaled, a wheezing, whistlelike breath. He rolled the magazine into a cylinder and, as he spoke, struck his left palm with it. “That movie we saw advertised? You remember — it was called The Five Fingers of Death. I just saw that and one called Deep Thrust.”
“Wonderful.” Evelyn screwed up her lips. “I’m calling hospitals and you’re at a Hong Kong double feature.”
“Listen,” said Rudolph. “You don’t understand.” He seemed at that moment as if he did not understand either. “It was a Seattle movie premiere. The Northwest is crawling with fighters. It has something to do with all the Asians out here. Before they showed the movie, four students from a kwoon in Chinatown went onstage—”
“A what?” asked Evelyn.
“A kwoon — it’s a place to study fighting, a meditation hall.” He looked at her but was really watching, Evelyn realized, something exciting she had missed. “They did a demonstration to drum up their membership. They broke boards and bricks, Evelyn. They went through what’s called kata and kumite and…” He stopped again to breathe. “I’ve never seen anything so beautiful. The reason I’m late is because I wanted to talk with them after the movie.”
Evelyn, suspicious, took a Valium and waited.
“I signed up for lessons,” he said.
She gave a glacial look at Rudolph, then at his magazine, and said in the voice she used five years ago when he wanted to take a vacation to Upper Volta or, before that, invest in a British car she knew they couldn’t afford:
“You’re fifty-four years old, Rudolph.”
“I know that.”
“You’re no Muhammad Ali.”
“I know that,” he said.
“You’re no Bruce Lee. Do you want to be Bruce Lee? Do you know where he is now, Rudolph? He’d dead — dead here in a Seattle cemetery and buried up on Capital Hill.”
His shoulders slumped a little. Silently, Rudolph began undressing, his beefy backside turned toward her, slipping his pa jama bottoms on before taking off his shirt so his scrawny lower body would not be fully exposed. He picked up his magazine, said, “I’m sorry if I worried you,” and huffed upstairs to his bedroom. Evelyn clicked off the mushroom-shaped lamp on her nightstand. She lay on her side, listening to his slow footsteps strike the stairs, then heard his mattress creak above her — his bedroom was directly above hers — but she did not hear him click off his own light. From time to time she heard his shifting weight squeak the mattress springs. He was reading that foolish magazine, she guessed; then she grew tired and gave this impossible man up to God. With a copy of The Thorn Birds open on her lap, Evelyn fell heavily to sleep again.
At breakfast the next morning any mention of the lessons gave Rudolph lockjaw. He kissed her forehead, as always, before going to work, and simply said he might be home late. Climbing the stairs to his bedroom was painful for Evelyn, but she hauled herself up, pausing at each step to huff, then sat on his bed and looked over his copy of Inside Kung-Fu. There were articles on empty-hand combat, soft-focus photos of ferocious-looking men in funny suits, parables about legendary Zen masters, an interview with someone named Bernie Bernheim, who began to study karate at age fifty-seven and became a black belt at age sixty-one, and page after page of advertisements for exotic Asian weapons: nunchaku, shuriken, sai swords, tonfa, bo staffs, training bags of all sorts, a wooden dummy shaped like a man and called a Mook Jong, and weights. Rudolph had circled them all. He had torn the order form from the last page of the magazine. The total cost of the things he’d circled — Evelyn added them furiously, rounding off the figures — was $800.
Two minutes later she was on the telephone to Shelberdine.
“Let him tire of it,” said her friend. “Didn’t you tell me Rudolph had Lower Lombard Strain?”
Evelyn’s nose clogged with tears.
“Why is he doing this? Is it me, do you think?”
“It’s the Problem,” said Shelberdine. “He wants his manhood back. Before he died, Arthur did the same. Someone at the plant told him he could get it back if he did twenty-yard sprints. He went into convulsions while running around the lake.”
Evelyn felt something turn in her chest. “You don’t think he’ll hurt himself, do you?”
“Of course not.”
“Do you think he’ll hurt me?”
Her friend reassured Evelyn that Mid-Life Crisis brought out these shenanigans in men. Evelyn replied that she thought Mid-Life Crisis started around age forty, to which Shelberdine said, “Honey, I don’t mean no harm, but Rudolph always was a little on the slow side,” and Evelyn agreed. She would wait until he worked this thing out of his system, until Nature defeated him and he surrendered, as any right-thinking person would, to the breakdown of the body, the brutal fact of decay, which could only be blunted, it seemed to her, by decaying with someone, the comfort every Negro couple felt when, aging, they knew enough to let things wind down.
Her patience was rewarded in the beginning. Rudolph crawled home from his first lesson, hunched over, hardly able to stand, afraid he had permanently ruptured something. He collapsed face down on the living room sofa, his feet on the floor. She helped him change into his pajamas and fingered Ben-Gay into his back muscles. Evelyn had never seen her husband so close to tears.
“I can’t do push-ups,” he moaned. “Or situps. I’m so stiff — I don’t know my body.” He lifted his head, looking up pitifully, his eyes pleading. “Call Dr. Guylee. Make an appointment for Thursday, okay?”
“Yes, dear.” Evelyn hid her smile with one hand. “You shouldn’t push yourself so hard.”
At that, he sat up, bare-chested, his stomach bubbling over his pa jama bottoms. “That’s what it means. Gung-fu means ‘hard work’ in Chinese. Evelyn”—he lowered his voice—“I don’t think I’ve ever really done hard work in my life. Not like this, something that asks me to give everything, body and soul, spirit and flesh. I’ve always felt…” He looked down, his dark hands dangling between his thighs. “I’ve never been able to give everything to anything. The world never let me. It won’t let me put all of myself into play. Do you know what I’m saying? Every job I’ve ever had, everything I’ve ever done, it only demanded part of me. It was like there was so much more of me that went unused after the job was over. I get that feeling in church sometimes.” He lay back down, talking now into the sofa cushion. “Sometimes I get that feeling with you.”