Always (25 page)

“City or county council vote. Most of the time they just rubber-stamp the recommendations of a zoning committee chaired by one councillor and half a dozen civil servants. They will usually indulge in a pro forma public meeting before formulating their recommendations. For high-visibility issues, though, the individual councillors will make up their own minds. That is, they’ll let interested parties make it up for them by means of campaign contributions, promises of future development dollars, and public and behind-the -scenes support for the councillors’ pet projects.”

“Buying votes—that simple?”

“Pretty much.”

“The way of the world,” my mother said. “Favors for favors. For example, that’s one of the reasons I’m here: the Norwegian government’s licensing agreement with a large software company is ending shortly and there are interesting new parameters to explore, particularly relating to security. I’m talking to the executive team purely informally, as a favor to the Labour Party.”

I forgot the zoning issue. “The party, not the government?”

She nodded.

Party politics operated only in the domestic arena. “You’re thinking of going back to Norway.”

Her face smoothed into that automatic pseudo-candid expression all career diplomats—all politicians—learn, but then she paused and glanced at Eric. He shrugged: your daughter, your decision. She took a deep breath. “Yes.”

“What have they offered you?”

“The Ministry of Culture and Education. For now.”

“Well, well, well.”

“What?” Dornan said, looking from me to Else to Eric and back again. “What?”

Eric took his wife’s hand. “Aud has just discovered that her mother has greater ambition than she knew.”

“You’re aiming for the top,” I said.

“Yes.” Now that she had made up her mind to tell me, she seemed quite calm about it.

“What’s your timetable?”

"Move back later this year, assume the junior cabinet position next year, then ...”

“Madame Prime Minister.” We all looked at each other. “But why?”

“Victor Belaunde,” she said. “Do you remember?”

It had been a long time, but Belaunde, onetime Peruvian ambassador to the UN, had been quoted in our household all through my childhood. My mother was very fond of quotations.

I said from memory, “When there is a problem between two small nations, the problem disappears. When there is a problem between a big country and small country, the little country disappears. When there is a problem between two big countries, the United Nations disappears.”

“It’s even more true today than it was then. Norway needs to be bigger. We have work to do. But the sense of importance must come from inside. That’s what I want to do.”

“You want to change the world.”

She didn’t deny it.

Dornan looked around the table, shook his head, and said, “It’s genetic.” Which everyone seemed to find funnier than I did.

“Aristotle,” Eric said, with the air of a magician producing a rabbit from the hat. “Humans have a purpose in the world, and that purpose is to fulfill their destiny.”

“Destiny is a pretty creepy word,” Dornan said, and then, with a disarming smile, “depending on the context.”

“Quite so. There again, Aristotle also said that greatness of soul is having a high opinion of oneself.”

“Yes,” Dornan said in his best Trinity debating voice, “but do we believe him or Socrates when it comes to moral action? Socrates declared that it’s impossible to know the right thing and not do it. Aristotle, on the other hand, asserted that one can have the knowledge but fail to act because of lack of control or weakness of will.” He was enjoying their surprise. “Straw poll: Aristotle or Socrates?”

“Aristotle,” said Eric.

“Aristotle,” my mother said, but more slowly.

They looked at me. “Socrates,” I said. “Because it’s all about what you mean by ‘knowledge.’ And ‘the right thing.’ ”

They looked interested.

“There are hierarchies of knowledge. It depends on which you privilege: somatic knowledge or extra-somatic. If you tell a child the fire will burn if she sticks her hand in the flame, she’ll only believe you if she knows what hot means.”

“You mean like the razor?” my mother said.

“Razor?”

“You were seven, or perhaps eight—old enough, anyway, to have had more sense—and you found a razor blade on the turf at York races, and picked it up, and I said, ‘don’t touch it, that’s sharper than any knife,’ and you just couldn’t help yourself, you had to see how sharp it was. You tested the edge on your thumb and bled all over your new shoes.” She turned to Dornan. “We had to spend half an hour in the first-aid tent until she stopped bleeding.”

Dornan grinned. I looked at my thumb.

“You were saying?” Eric said.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, think of religion. If you believed, really and truly, that you would spend eternity burning in hell for having sex with your brother’s wife, you wouldn’t do it.”

“Unless you couldn’t help it. And if you’re nineteen and in the grip of powerful hormones, you’re next to helpless. Reason might not exist.”

“Yes, but while you’re feeling the rush of hormones, at that moment, you know—physically, somatically—that having the sex is the right thing. It doesn’t matter what your frontal cortex is trying to tell you. Except that I sound as though I think our minds and our bodies are separate things, and they’re not.”

Before I got myself even more muddled by trying to explain how I thought of the layered brain—the limbic system not under conscious control, the cerebral cortex being a lightly civilized veneer over everything— Dornan stepped in.

“So,” he said, with a Groucho Marx eyebrow waggle, “if Aristotle is right, are we to believe that (a) most politicians are weak, or (b) uncontrolled, or (c) just not smart enough to know the right thing?”

“Politicians are like con men,” my mother said. “They persuade themselves to believe ridiculous things, and then pursue them in all sincerity.”

Startled silence.

“Which is why powerful people need people they love by them, to say the unwelcome thing, to help them believe what is right.”

It was the first time I had heard her use the word
love.
We had never said to each other,
I love you.
When I was little, it had never occurred to me to believe otherwise. By the time I was old enough to wonder, I would not make myself vulnerable enough to ask.

Over after-dinner drinks we talked about politicians, and family members and lovers who had damned or saved them, and Eric paid the bill, and we walked outside and stood on the dock for a while. Dornan and Eric moved down the ramp a little, and a Canada goose waddled fatly behind them, hoping for a handout.

My mother and I watched the water. It was the blue-black of an old-fashioned Beretta that someone had oiled lovingly for twenty years. It heaved lazily, constantly, and the reflected boat lights smeared and ran like Day-Glo paint.

My mother and I watched the water for a while. “You didn’t say what you thought of my plan for national politics.”

“Eric seems as though he would be willing to say the unwelcome thing. I would, too.”

“Thank you,” she said, “I would listen.” And I imagined us clasping hands in the dark, though neither of us moved.

AS I GOT OUT OF THE CAR AND STARTED UNLOADING THE TRUNK, THE SLANTING
sun turned my windshield to gold. It wasn’t just the light, it was a faint dusting of pollen. Yesterday there had been one minute less than twelve hours of daylight, today one minute more; it was twenty degrees warmer than the past week; tomorrow there might be rain: spring gamboling as senselessly as a new lamb.

I opened the basement door with difficulty at 6:01. That familiar scent of dust, competing perfumes, and carpet.

“Sorry I’m late,” I said, and kicked the door shut behind me.

“What the hell is all that?”

"Swords,” I said, dropping one bag, “or maybe they’re lightsabers, it’s hard to tell.” I dropped another bag, the one full of T-shirts and the sponges and the red ink, and set down the cheap gas station cooler. I pulled one of the plastic toys, lime green, from the first bag and examined it. “No, it’s a sword. A cutlass, I believe.”

“This has got to be a lightsaber,” said Pauletta, picking up another and holding it like a shocking pink banana.

“Let me see. No. It’s meant to be a
katana.
”

“A what now?”

“
Katana.
Japanese sword.” A hollow plastic imitation of the one I had at home, with a braid-wrapped ray-skin hilt and signed tang and a blade that shone like watered silk.

“I think I’m pretty safe in saying that is not a sword.” Nina pointed at the white polystyrene cooler.

“Take a look inside.”

She toed off the lid and peered in. “Water pistols.”

“Unfilled,” I said. “Two volunteers to fix that.” Suze and Christie won the privilege and practically ran from the room. “And a volunteer to kick the cooler to bits.”

Katherine and Tonya decided they could manage that between them, and did. The polystyrene squealed and squeaked. I half expected Nina to say, “Scream, sucker,” in an action-hero voice but she just watched. Perhaps she didn’t like mysteries, perhaps it had been difficult for her last week admitting, even to herself, that she’d been assaulted.

“Everyone else, stretch out and warm up.” They were doing that, and the cooler was a pile of jagged polystyrene splinters by the time Suze and Christie got back with the loaded guns. Christie’s hair was wet and the back of Suze’s T-shirt was sticking to her spine. Clearly they’d felt obliged to test-fire a couple.

They settled into stretching with the rest. “Today we’re going to talk about weapons: guns, knives, sticks, and swords. What they can do, what you do if faced with one.”

Several laughed, some nervously. Weapons weren’t made of Day-Glo plastic; plastic couldn’t hurt them. Right?

I picked up the shocking pink
katana,
twirled it like a baton, then balanced it on my index finger, thinking. “Who thinks they can stab my hand with this?”

“Me. You bet,” said Kim. I tossed it to her. She caught it on the blade. A martial arts class would have stopped everything to explain about taking the weapon seriously, treating it with exaggerated respect, but that was not what I was after.

From the bag I took two large white T-shirts, a sponge, and a bottle of red ink. I pulled one of the T-shirts over my head, then poured a little red ink into the sponge. “Give the sword back a minute.”

I squeezed the wet sponge around the sword below the hilt and pulled the blade through my fist so that it gleamed redly. I gave it back to Pauletta, then wrapped the second T-shirt around my hand like a cartoon bandage and held out my hand.

“Stab this. Leave a big bloody mark in the middle.” I stepped back a little. She edged forward. I edged back.

“No fair. Keep still.”

“If someone was standing opposite you with a sword, or a knife, or a gun, would you stand still?”

“Then how can I stab you?”

“Good question.”

She charged, stabbing madly, and I moved away, and she missed. She looked mortified.

“It’s very hard to hit a moving target—with a blade, or a bullet.”

I gestured for her to give me the sword. The ink was dry; I leaned it against the wall, picked up a water pistol.

“Who wants to have a go at shooting my hand with the gun?”

“I’ll do that,” said Suze.

“Choose your weapon.”

She picked an orange-and-red ray gun and held it in two hands, like a TV cop.

“What kind of gun is it?”

“A big one,” she said with relish.

“Anyone, give me the name of a handgun.”

“SIG-Sauer P210,” Therese said. “Or a Smith and Wesson 627, if you prefer revolvers.”

Everyone looked surprised, or perhaps impressed. I certainly was.

“That’s a heavy gun,” I said.

“Nearly three pounds, unloaded. But it takes eight rounds.”

“How many’s the other one got?” Suze asked her.

“The Sig? Eight in the magazine, one in the chamber.”

“Then that’s what this is.”

“All right,” I said, and stood about ten feet away. “Shoot me.” I sounded like something from a bad porn film.

Suze took a wide-legged stance, aimed, and I waved the T-shirted hand very slowly to one side just as she began to squeeze.

“Shit.” She squirted again. I made the wave a lazy, three-dimensional figure eight. She began to swear and pump furiously with her index finger and I simply walked up to her, still waving one hand, though a little more randomly, and took the gun away.

“Of course,” I said to the class, “I doubt I’d be as calm if that were a real gun. Then again, with the noise and the weight and only nine bullets, she probably wouldn’t have been as accurate.”

“She missed!” Pauletta said.

“Yes. Most people do, most of the time.”

“Handguns are more accurate than water pistols,” Therese said.

“In the hands of an expert, and on the range, wearing ear protection and aiming at a stationary target, yes. In real life, no. A shooter will hit a running target only four times out of a hundred—and even then the bullet is extremely unlikely to find a vital organ. You can improve even those overwhelmingly favorable odds by not running in a straight line.”

“But . . .” Nina said, and couldn’t think of anything to add.

“If someone pulls a weapon on you, keep breathing and start thinking.”

“Start running.”

“Yes, if you can. If you can’t, start asking yourself questions. What weapon is it? What kind of person is holding the weapon?” They all looked monumentally blank. “Ask yourself what they want. If you know what they want, you can make some good guesses about what happens next, where your advantage might lie. So, what do they want?”