Looking across the room she saw her own perplexity reflected in the face of Finn, who was scowling, frowning, scribbling, then wildly staring into space. Finn could be a math genius when he bothered, so he surely wasn’t fazed by the problems set by Mr. Tennyson, which were easy: Alida had worked out all three in less than five minutes. She knew “poor Finn” had his own difficulties with human algebra, so maybe he was working on a baffling equation parallel to her own. Whatever it was, he seemed to be in a state of mental torture, and for the first time ever she found herself actually sympathizing with Finn. Then he caught her eye and pulled his Tasmanian-devil face at her. Boys!
8
WALKING THE FIVE BLOCKS from the Acropolis to the King County Adminstrative Building on Fourth Avenue, Tad assured himself that he was simply doing what any sensible citizen would do, which was to check out the facts. Besides, he envisioned the Office of Vital Statistics — obviously named by someone with either a good sense of humor or none at all — as a Dickensian warren of musty files and papers, the dead stacked in their hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, organized, alphabetized, at rest. Tad felt he could do with their company for a while — an act of self-mortification that might be good for his soul.
The office was a disappointment, not Dickensian at all, just the usual motley of computer terminals, copiers, microfilm viewers. The dead — at least, the recently dead — had gone digital and couldn’t lend Tad the solace of their society.
He filled in the form, stating his Reason for Inquiry as “genealogical research.” He wrote in the name of Charles Ong Lee, his date and place of death (November 25, 1999, in Seattle), paid $17.50 in cash, and ten minutes later was in possession of a copy of the certificate. Here was the unlucky social worker. “Cause of Death: blunt trauma to head and torso incurred in single-vehicle automobile incident.” He hadn’t gone far in his life, this Mr. Lee. Born in Tacoma on February 13, 1974, he’d traveled about forty-five miles north to Shoreline, then met his death on the road between the two.
Tad folded the certificate and put it in his wallet. Heading back to the apartment, he resolved to take his time before making his next move, which would need more rehearsal and stagecraft than he could possibly manage on this gray, penitential morning. As he walked, he muttered to himself, “Eliminate the sins and hindrances that I have accumulated by disparaging the Dharma since the beginningless past. Eliminate the sins and hindrances. Eliminate the sins and hindrances….” It sort of seemed to work.
THE PILATES STUDIO on South Main looked to Lucy like a dominatrix’s well-appointed dungeon. Walled on three sides by floor-to-ceiling mirrors, it was furnished with gruesome implements — the Reformer, the Half-Trapeze Bed, the Ladder Barrel, the Tower, the Ped-a-Pul. Huffing and groaning, half a dozen other clients, male and female, were being punished by trainers in spa pants and black hoodies.
The first check from GQ, for preliminary research and expenses on the Vanags piece, had come through. Lucy was spending $280 on a month’s worth of weekly Pilates classes to try to get herself in shape. She nearly backed out of the deal when she saw the bodies in the studio, most of whom would’ve looked good on the frieze around a Grecian urn. Wearing her old sweats, she felt painfully self-conscious, a dandelion among the orchids, but took comfort from the sight of a sturdy red-faced woman in her fifties who was being tortured on the Reformer by a gay-looking Adonis. If she could go through with it, surely Lucy could.
“Find your abdominals,” said Lindsay, Lucy’s trainer. “Suck them in as if you’re pulling them out through your back.”
All very well for Lindsay to issue this impossible command: she was a dancer, sore at having just lost her job in the corps at Pacific Northwest Ballet. Lucy wasn’t sure she even had abdominals anymore, and though she sucked and sucked, all she achieved was a very modest diminution of the intractable mound that was her stomach.
“This is like cellular. Your body feels things even if your mind refuses.”
I don’t do woo-woo, Lucy thought, spouting air like a breaching whale.
“But it was turning into a really hostile work environment for me,” Lindsay said. “They brought in this new woman as ballet master — Martha Slater, a control freak and a total bitch. Okay, now we’ll do circles.”
Circles meant Lucy opening her legs and waving them round and round, exposing her crotch to the world.
“Wider!”
Wider still and wider, Lucy felt as if she was posing for beaver shots. She stared resolutely at the ceiling to avoid catching her reflection in the mirrors.
“But after like six years at PNB, to get canned like that was such a bummer I could’ve offed myself when I heard.”
“I know,” Lucy gasped. “It’s awful. It’s happening to everyone. The d-d-d-downturn in the economy…”
“Anchor — don’t arch—your sit bones!”
Wearily, Lucy rearranged herself.
“Knees in tabletop!”
At least she could now keep her legs together.
“Your sit bones make you focus on your core. Now you have to say to yourself, ‘My core is strong and solid.’”
And that, Lucy thought, was her abiding problem. It was her mother’s perennial accusation that she had no core, that she was an insipid sopper-up of other people’s feelings and opinions, by which she meant in the first instance that Lucy spent far too much time listening to her dad. Though she fought her mother fiercely, Lucy had always been depressingly conscious that she might have a point. On down days, she wondered if perhaps it was her lack of core that had led her into journalism — a trade where a good listener, a human sponge, could hide her secret corelessness behind a bold-type byline. Every opinion she held was provisional, and a smart remark by someone else could alter it in a heartbeat. She was instinctively reluctant to “commit”—to men, to salaried jobs, to causes, to ideas. To remain not entirely sure of where she stood had become a lifelong habit, almost a principle. As to this core business, if core meant some unique and irreducible essence of self, Lucy was as unsure of that as she was of most things. But she was absolutely certain that if she did have a core, she wouldn’t find it in a Pilates studio with her fucking “sit bones.”
So they talked about the ballet company, Lucy drawing Lindsay out. By the end of the hour, after the agonizing “hundreds,” Lucy could’ve written a feature on the tribulations of being a dancer in the corps — her pay, her many diets, her smoking to stay thin, her tendonitis, her shallow hip sockets, her hamstrings, her cheating boyfriends, her shrinking dream of making it to principal. At twenty-four, Lindsay was as grimly experience-hardened as a forty-year-old. Did she really say to herself, and mean it, “My core is strong and solid”? Maybe so — and, if so, lucky her. Not sure of what the form was here, Lucy tipped her twenty bucks at the end of the session, which Lindsay, looking grateful but furtive, tucked inside her sports bra for safekeeping.