Fatigue Artist

1

The Tai Chi teacher has barely changed in seven years. It’s still hard to tell his age—a youngish old man or an old young one—except that over time he’s developed something of a pot belly. He carries it proudly, for beneath its layers, deep in his center, is the tan tien, field of the elixir, he says through the interpreter, where the chi gathers, the vital energy enhanced by breath, to flow through the body, strengthening bones, animating flesh. Like many Chinese terms, chi is hard to define: the presence of chi in the body, the teacher tells us, is what makes the difference between life and death.

He does seem to have very resilient bones, as far as I can tell through his jeans and T-shirt (in winter he wears a flannel shirt and on very cold days an old gray down jacket), but his general appearance is not muscular but soft, a compressed softness like a bale of rags which, coming at you unexpectedly, could send you reeling.

He addresses the class in Chinese, giving his instructions through the interpreter. You’d think after years in New York he’d use English, but no. I guess for his purposes he doesn’t need it. He teaches mostly by example and, except for the anecdotes, his instructions tend to be laconic, though I suspect not quite as laconic as the interpreter makes them.

They take less time in English, and as a result I don’t quite trust the translation.

Continue, he says after bidding us good afternoon. He never says, Begin. Always Continue.

Again, he says after one round of the form, and this time paying attention to breathing. Make the breath thin, long, quiet and slow. Start with slow. Sink the weight into the legs. Be heavy. Continue. All this through the interpreter, of course.

So we start all over again. It’s easy to sink and be heavy since my body, these last few weeks, feels like sand in a sack. We’re in the park at five-thirty—despite my exhaustion I ordered myself out like a drill sergeant—a dozen of us plus the teacher and the interpreter, practicing amidst the trees, near the sunny playground, not too many children at this hour; the swings wobble in the hot breeze while beyond us the river drifts lazily down from the resplendent bridge. Morning and late afternoon we’re here, not all of us each time, for few people can manage to come twice a day or even every day. For a flat fee we come as often or as seldom as we choose—it’s all the same to the Tai Chi teacher. He accepts our money with the air of accepting a gift (thank you is one English phrase he feels comfortable with) and apparently keeps no records, though who knows, he may have detailed ledgers at home, wherever his home is. As in a play, the cast changes but the spectacle remains the same. Breathe, sink, feel the feet rooted in the earth, stay balanced, over and over.

I used to watch, enthralled, from the living room window when Ev and I first moved into the apartment overlooking the river: a motley group of all ages, mostly in shorts or jeans but a few in business suits, their jackets and attaché cases on a nearby bench, doing a slow-motion dance in unison, yet not quite a dance. A ritual, a meditation, I didn’t know what. One afternoon I went down to see for myself and followed along as best I could. Every few moments, as we held a posture, the teacher would come around to fix us, adjusting a shoulder or arm or hip, rounding out sharp angles, uncurling tense fingers, the interpreter following along. The body moves in one piece, head, shoulders and torso in line, he’d say, or The foot clings to the pull of gravity like iron to a magnet, or Most important of all, relax, no hard force. It was habit-forming. I even thought I might learn Chinese by exposure and by matching what I heard with the interpreter’s English, but that, alas, didn’t happen. Other things happened. My leg muscles hardened, my feet sank roots deep in the earth. I began to move like a cat, and like a cat could anticipate the movements of others, but out of vanity I resisted letting my stomach droop into a pot belly.

The second time I came, the teacher demonstrated push hands—the martial art aspect of Tai Chi—with an advanced student. Face to face and standing very erect with one leg placed forward, their hands before them at chest level, palms together, they bowed to each other. Then they stepped closer, and deftly shifting their weight from one leg to the other, began to touch at the forearms and elbows, turning slightly now and then. Nothing much seemed to be happening—mostly I felt their intense absorption. Suddenly the student tottered forward; the teacher reached out an arm to break his fall. They did this several times. The student never seemed disconcerted but smiled and began again. The teacher remained impassive.

Yield, he said to the student. Stop relying on strength. Just try to adhere and stay balanced. You will fail many times. It doesn’t matter. You are making an investment. You’re investing in loss.

Righto. No complaints whatsoever, the student said, and everyone laughed as if at some private joke.

They continued, and soon I saw that it was the teacher’s drawing back slightly, yielding to the weight brought to bear on him, which threw the student off balance. When they were finished they faced each other once more with palms touching and bowed.

The teacher turned to the group. What was the most important posture in what you have just seen? He nodded at me.

The bow, I said.

It was the right answer. After that he always favored me. He gave me a slim book outlining the philosophy behind Tai Chi—a physical expression of Taoism—with diagrams of the postures so I could study the basics. He told me to read the Samurai’s creed at the back of the book. This was puzzling because I couldn’t see what I might have in common with a Samurai warrior, but I read it anyway. I have no principles; I make adaptability to all things my principle, it said, among other things.

Now he nods to me, to do push hands with him. I step forward and we bow. I’m quite relaxed since I know from experience that I cannot overcome him; strength and effort are of no avail and are to be shunned in any case. I also trust that he’ll break my fall.

We continue. I stagger and reel a couple of times, but nothing much is happening. What’s the matter today? he asks through the interpreter. Very little chi.

I have no energy. I’m feeling very tired. As if I have a perpetual flu, but I don’t trouble the interpreter with that. He translates into Chinese, and I have to trust that he’s repeated my words, or some facsimile of my thought.

Relaxed is good, but not limp. Like a cat, alert, vital, in a state of readiness. Don’t resist but try to sense my energy and stick to it. Continue.

I try harder. I even try pushing him though I know it’s futile. Wherever I apply my weight, he is suddenly not there. It’s like grappling with a shadow. I press, and his substance vanishes, he’s elusive, he’s elsewhere. I keep stumbling through the space he’s vanished from and he catches me before I fall. He regards me with disapproval.

I’m investing in loss, I attempt to joke.

You’re investing in nothing, he says, and we bow.

At the end he makes a little speech. "My fellow students, the chi of the ancient Tai Chi masters was so powerful that they could repel an attacker with a look alone. They didn’t even need to use their bodies. The energy was all concentrated in the glance." He glances my way and indeed I find myself stepping back slightly, at which he smiles. The interpreter never smiles.

The class is over and breaks into small chatty groups. I sit down on a bench next to a new woman, Grace, who’s come only once or twice before. She’s rubbing her calf muscles. I know how she feels; it’s quite hard on the legs at first. It never really eases but you get used to it. A student once asked when his legs would stop hurting. Never, said the teacher. If your legs stop hurting, then it’s not Tai Chi.

It’s all a matter of discipline, isn’t it? she says. I thought it would be easy because I’m used to that kind of discipline in what I do, but this is different.

What do you do?

I’m a performance artist. She’s slightly older than I, mid-fortyish, a holdover from the late sixties, dressed all in black, with short dark hair nicely streaked with gray. Soho, I bet. Gay, I bet, from something carefree and staunch in the way she moves and speaks.

Oh, my stepdaughter is very involved in performance art at school, I tell her. She’s always describing the bizarre projects her group does. Do you do theatrical pieces?

Not exactly. What I do is more a cross between theatre and visual arts. But really the best thing is to erase the line between the two. Erase all the lines. Forget the idea of a product, a beautiful object. Lots of times we don’t come up with any products. We might just take a piece of ordinary life out of context and exaggerate it. She pulls off her sneakers and curls her legs under her on the bench. For instance, someone I know lived in a cage without speaking to anyone for a year. He also lived outdoors for a year. He’s into tests of psychological endurance but he’s also doing social commentary. Like about homeless people, you know?

Living outdoors by choice is different from being homeless, though, don’t you think?

Sure. That’s what makes it art. It’s a metaphor for a real condition, not the thing itself. It calls attention to the condition. By the way, and she lowers her voice, doesn’t this guy speak any English at all?

It doesn’t seem so. Except thank you and good-bye.

She looks dubious. I bet he understands what we say. He looks very tricky. I’ve heard some of these Taoist guys do magic. Has he shown you any magic?

I shake my head, no.

I don’t know, Grace goes on. I heard this was great but frankly I haven’t the faintest idea what it’s about, all these people paired off and sticking to each other like he says, pushing each other around and feeling each other’s energy.

Don’t worry about it. It takes months even to begin to do what he’s asking.

You know what the pairs remind me of? The couple-tied-together piece. That was a while ago. The guy who lived outdoors had himself tied to another artist. For a whole year they had an eight-foot rope looped around their waists, with about four feet of slack between them. The woman was into Zen. She was a nun for a while, too.

Was that performance art, being a nun?

I think so. But I’m sure she was a sincere nun. That’s the whole idea.

Odd, I comment, that a nun would have herself tied to a man for a year.

Oh, she wasn’t a nun anymore, at the time. Besides, it wasn’t the way you’re thinking. Just the opposite—the discipline part was that they weren’t allowed to touch for the whole year. They had to do everything together, cook, shop, walk the dog, go to the movies, you name it, without touching. They kept a chart of the times they accidentally touched. They had everything in the apartment arranged so they could manage. The desks were near the kitchen so one could cook while the other worked. He did more of the cooking. He was very good at Chinese dishes.

What was the point?

The point? Grace stares at me in surprise. It’s about awareness. Training the mind. You begin to notice all the daily little things—where the borders are between people, and where they can connect or merge. Plus the dynamics of gender in domestic life. They did it for so long that it became their real life. Of course, there were a lot of places they couldn’t go, and they decided not to sleep with other people—more trouble than it was worth, I suppose. Personally—Grace sighs—I think the greatest danger would be getting bored to death with each other.

Not necessarily. Not if they weren’t bored with each other to begin with. I can imagine a couple of people I could be tied to and never get bored, I say.

You are the only person, Q. told me so many times, who never bores me. You never know, I said. Someday I might. No, he said, never. And what would happen if I bored you? I asked. It’s academic, he said. It could never happen.

The couple tied together, says Grace, didn’t complain about being bored, but they did say they dreamed a lot.

Did they dream of being alone or of touching?

I don’t know. That’s a good question.

The teacher, who’s been chatting with a few students, passes by. Good-bye, he says in English, and the interpreter adds, perhaps on his own, He hopes you feel better next time, Laura. Eat watercress.

Watercress? Okay. Thanks a lot. See you soon.

I don’t see how you could ever defend yourself on the subway with Tai Chi, says Grace as we trudge up the hill, away from the river. Always yielding? How would it work with a mugger? Do you think you could do it?

Probably not. But I’m not in it for self-defense. The teacher says it’s the one martial art you have to know very well in order to use. Otherwise it’s a risk.

I’ll bet. Some performance artists are into risk. They design dangerous projects to make a point. There was a show downtown where a man covered the floor with broken glass and slithered through it on his belly with his hands tied behind his back.

Did he have clothes on?

She gives a throaty laugh. Yes, I’m pretty sure. You have to realize, the whole thing is a metaphor.

I get it, yes. I can imagine other projects performance artists might try as metaphors: surgery, or at least a prolonged hospital stay. Divorce. Getting fired. It’s a fertile field for anyone with imagination. Everything, seen in the proper light, can become a metaphor. The trick is finding, or being found by, the right ones.

I dropped my keys on the way in. That’s the latest symptom: things leap from my hands. Mostly small slippery things, bottle caps, paper clips, the pen, as I write this, but often larger things as well—magazines or socks or fruits I’m squeezing at the open-air market. Thoughts, too, slide from my grasp, but that’s another story.

The very next morning, it was a commonplace glass from Woolworth’s. I had groped my way from bed to the kitchen, cursing the car alarm just below my window, and was about to pour some juice when the glass wantonly escaped, to plummet three feet through the air. The instant it took to reach the floor was time enough, even in my stupor, for me to envision the results. The thud and smash, shattering me awake. I’d reach for the dustpan and brush above the sink and sweep up the chips around my slippered feet. Shuffle into the pantry for the electric broom—I could hear its ominous rumble waiting to be summoned into existence—and let it suck up the shards that elude the brush. Even so, I’d keep from walking around barefoot for a while, to be quite sure. I thought of the man Grace mentioned, who slithered on his belly through broken glass. For art’s sake. Obviously I wasn’t daring enough for the avant-garde.

I’d have to warn the others in the house not to walk barefoot... wait, there were no others in the house. Ev, my husband, was dead and had been so for more than two years, though when half-awake I tend to forget this, then promptly remember not so much with grief any longer as with astonishment. His children, my stepchildren, Jilly and Tony, don’t visit very often (Tony almost never, to tell the truth), and when they do they naturally wear shoes.

Days from now I’d be seeing slivers glinting from corners, sharp reminders that if not for the fortuitous slant of light, a misstep might have sent them journeying through my bloodstream to pierce a vital organ. Heart, lungs, liver, spleen and kidneys are the vital organs in Chinese medicine, the Tai Chi teacher says, each corresponding to one of the primal elements—fire, metal, wood, earth, and water, respectively, which came into being out of nothingness through the coupling of yin and yang—and to a primal emotion: joy, sadness, anger, will, fear. I could ill afford that sort of damage.

All this I foresaw as the glass plummeted to the tile floor where, happily, it didn’t break (cheap and sturdy) but bounced twice, rolled a few feet—the floor in this old apartment building is slightly sloping—and halted at the edge of the refrigerator. At that instant the car alarm abruptly ceased.

A good omen. I’ve been worried lately about the things dropping, the supernatural exhaustion, the hypersensitivity to noise, not to mention the more mundane signs—sore throats, headaches, stomach cramps. . . . Oh, and not minding the heat. Everyone complains that the weather is tropical, unbearable, but I haven’t noticed except in a mental way—I hear bulletins on the radio, I check the thermometer. It’s because I myself am so hot. Not my skin, especially, but inside. No sudden waves of heat such as my former editor, Gretchen, a case of early menopause, would describe when she phoned to prod me about my books, but a steady heat steaming out from the center with each thump of my heart, clouding me with mist. Feverish people say they’re on fire, but I feel like the cauldron itself, containing a stew—those vital organs—that simmers dully along. Or like a bag of sand left out in the sun. Between the outside weather and the inner is no disparity; the weather is merely my projection. They say illness makes you solipsistic, the world a mere projection or translation. If this is illness. It could be any number of things. I’m not eager to find out.

Pathetic, to take so unremarkable an incident as a good omen. Superstition is a symptom, too.

Friends who’ve noticed my symptoms tell me to go to a doctor but I’m reluctant. Not only for the obvious reason, that he or she—but it seems usually to be he, doesn’t it?—might find something really wrong. My previous visits have been a powerful deterrent. Our private conversations, as Joel Cairo says in The Maltese Falcon, which I saw last month with Tim, have not been such that I am anxious to continue them.

Nine or ten years ago, I must have been thirty-one or so, I consulted a doctor, let’s call him Dr A., about some white specks on my tongue. They were disturbing out of all proportion to their size, the tongue being the organ by which we taste and speak, take pleasure and shape language. Moreover, the mouth is the gateway for the breath, which is palpable spirit and is also the place where we live, notwithstanding Freud. A few small specks on the tongue can be as uncomfortable as a grape-sized lump on the hand, with which we write and grope our way through the world, or on the foot, which gives blessed mobility.

Stick out your tongue, said Dr. A., and I became a child again.

He was very tall and straight, with a military bearing, so although I was in the higher seat, a large leather chair, and he on a small stool, we were face to face. Quite close, our knees nearly touching. He was older than I, with a pink Buddha-like face, a huge bald dome of a head with a fringe of dark hair, and serene gray eyes that seemed too static, trancelike, as he studied my tongue.

I’m afraid I must ask you a very odd and perhaps embarrassing question, he said, and paused to allow me time to retract my tongue and prepare myself. It is this. Have you sucked any strange penises lately?

I was unprepared. I had to control the urge to giggle into the looming pink face. They’re all strange to us girls, was the response that sprang to mind, but that would never do.

No, I said truthfully.

Not even my husband’s, I might have added, which would have been the least strange in the sense of the word I took him to mean—unfamiliar, illicit—since he’s away covering the conflict in Nicaragua. And Q., short for Quinn, the only other man I occasionally sleep with, Doctor A., since you ask (though one doesn’t do that specific act every time, speaking for myself at any rate—it’s hard to say in general and I for one never trust the answers people give on those sex surveys), is in Minneapolis doing a season of repertory with the Guthrie: All My Sons, I believe, and God, I don’t envy him that; Creon in Antigone; something by Moliére, I forget which; and something very current. Besides, flustered as I am at the moment, Doctor A., I can’t even recall whether Q. and I are in a lovers’ phase or a just-friends phase—it changes so erratically. Immaterial anyway. Come to think of it, I just spoke to my husband, Ev, on the phone two nights ago. It’s hard for him to make personal phone calls so I was pleased that he made the effort and succeeded, and although after telling me a little bit about the situation in Managua—very little, you understand, the phones are bugged—he did say something mildly erotic on the order of how he wished he could hold me in his arms that night, while I on my end was thinking more or less the same thing, nothing as localized as sucking penises was mentioned. I didn’t even entertain the notion, in case the power of suggestion has anything to do with my ailment, nor, I would imagine, did Ev, who was preoccupied with the political ferment around him, the kind of volatile situation I presume could take a man’s mind off his penis for a while, though I couldn’t swear to it. Anyhow, that was two days ago and the specks on my tongue had already erupted.

Naturally I didn’t say all this. I know how to behave in a doctor’s office.

Well. Dr. A. pushed back from me on his wheeled stool. I would say it’s probably nothing to worry about. Chances are they’ll disappear as mysteriously as they came. He stood up and turned to his desk with a slight air, I think, of disappointment.

Oh, dear, had he been hoping for a good story? Did I let him down? So sorry, try me another day, I might have said.

In a few days the specks did go away as mysteriously as they had come and I regretted visiting Dr. A., whose odd question would now have a permanent and unwelcome place in my memory, the data bank, as my friend Mona calls it with disapproval. The visit confirmed my instinct not to consult doctors but rather to wait.

Years later, just after Ev was killed, I developed a bad sore throat. I waited and waited but it didn’t go away. It got worse. People—my on-and-off lover Q., my stepdaughter Jilly, my cousin Joyce—urged me to see a doctor. It might be strep, it might lead to something worse. I was a brand-new widow and everyone wanted to take care of me. Oh, all right, I agreed. But Dr. A.? After that odd question? For two days, while my throat worsened, I debated whether to return and risk being asked other odd questions (yet how much odder could they be?) or go elsewhere, flying to evils that I knew not of. In the end I decided on Dr. A., unwisely, you may think, but when feeling sick one isn’t wise. He couldn’t possibly remember my tongue, I reasoned. He probably wouldn’t even remember me after eight years—so many patients, so many tongues, who knows how many odd questions. And this was a plain sore throat; innocent children get sore throats all the time.

Of course he remembered me, said Dr. A. genially, and as he sat on his wheeled stool and examined my throat he asked how I had been in the intervening years, to which I could reply only with a gagging noise. No way to tell him my husband had been shot to death in the interim. No inclination either. Dr. A. had the same entranced gray eyes and Buddha-like expression, though unlike Buddha he had visibly aged; his skin was not so pink and babyish any more. As he retrieved some fluid from my throat on a cotton swab, I felt pleased with myself. I would find relief, come away with a prescription like a sensible person. I had not been daunted by a question perhaps posed in the line of duty, however gracelessly.

He walked across the room to put the fluid on a slide. With his back to me he said, I not only remember you but I remember that the last time you were here I had occasion to ask you a very odd and possibly embarrassing question. Do you remember?

I certainly do.

I might have added that today his odd question would be even less pertinent, since Ev had died two months earlier, killed on a Bronx street in a drug bust. A bystander, more or less. And Q.? Well, yes, Q. had turned up a few weeks later. He walked in with a suitcase and a bag of groceries, all the foods he knew I liked, and stayed for a month. He warmed the bed, but the love we made for that month was of the consoling kind. Q. managed everything, solicitous, treating me like a bereft child; no question of much on my part. I was passive until the last moments when I would erupt in tears as well as pleasure. Q. was magnanimous as only he can be, especially when nothing much is expected of him. Despite the irritation at my marriage he had shown on and off over the years, he was in no hurry to appropriate me now that I was free, the way, when a New York City parking space becomes free, the next occupant is already waiting, motor humming, to slide in before it cools off. Long ago, when I was in love with Q. in a less ambiguous way, I had had fantasies that if Ev were to disappear (God knows I never envisioned him shot, I just thought he would tire of me), Q. would rush to my side as the Prince rushed to Sleeping Beauty or Snow White or countless others, sweep me up on his horse and carry me off, even though I was neither sleeping nor held captive. But this didn’t happen, and after a while I stopped imagining or wishing it. I tried to live my divided life.

In any event, my tongue was fine today and my sore throat, however painful, felt ordinary—unless it was punitive, my own retaliation for sleeping with Q. so soon after my husband’s violent death. But I hadn’t suffered much guilt while he was alive, so it didn’t follow. . . . Well, never mind all that. An antibiotic would do the trick.

I didn’t say any of the above to Dr. A. Indeed, I spoke not another word, quite as if my once-offending tongue had been cut out. I listened to his instructions about the antibiotic, accepted the prescription from his cool, dry hand, and left. In a week I was better. I resolved never to return to Dr. A. and perhaps not to any doctor ever again.

WHY NOT GO BACK TO BED FOR A WHILE, I thought after I drank the juice from the sturdy glass. I see the bed as my true home, my home within a home. Whoever invented it deserves as much renown as the inventor of the cotton gin or the steam engine, those inventions taught in school. People have always stretched out spontaneously on anything handy, yes, but I mean the combination of elements forming the bed itself. The raised platform, which makes climbing in a decisive event. The mattress and box spring, inspired notions lovingly wrought. The feather pillow and the quilt are to repose what champagne and chocolate mousse are to diet. Amazing, really, that such luxurious sensuality is available to all strata of society, except of course the homeless who swarm the local streets and sleep God knows where, niches, doorways and sections of Riverside Park they’ve appropriated as campsites. Even so, many of them drag around shopping carts stuffed with puffy bedding.

My bed, a modest double, nothing kingly or queenly, has become more than a haven or refuge. It’s a lover. At my most exhausted moments I sense it reaching toward me like the vibrations of the universe, for the Tai Chi teacher says the universe is a great system of vibrations we draw to us by our feelings: fear draws fear, love draws love. I almost hear the bed whispering to me to come, the way you might feel a lover longing for you miles away, and I come readily, falling onto the waiting mattress, firm but yielding as an accomplished lover, the strong coils beneath the stuffing like reliable bones beneath the flesh. I lie down as eagerly as did the princess worn out from her wanderings, except under this mattress is no irritating pea. No, the bed is a perfect and perfectly welcoming lover. The pillow sinks benignly under the weight of my head and rises mildly around my hair. I pull the sheet over me to be utterly surrounded, voluptuously embraced. It folds coolly around my legs as a lover’s skin may be cool at first touch, but it quickly warms up from my body’s heat, creating a tube of warmth. As the bed presses gently along the length of me, I let go. Every cell yields to the embrace which of late I find satisfying like no other. Totally understanding, the bed accepts that I have nothing to offer but warmth, which I have in abundance. I need not respond or embrace in return. The bed seeks nothing for itself—its pleasure is to wrap me in pleasure.

I WAS ROUSED by the sound of the door opening. Tim. Since I gave him a set of keys last month, I’ve had to get used to that sequence of sounds all over again, the key slipping into the shaft, metal grating against metal, the door thrusting past the wooden frame. His arrival and the light filtering through the drawn shades told me it was early evening. Slept the day away. Just as well—things pick up for me around twilight. My blood stirs and moves a bit faster. I hauled myself up to greet him.

Standing in the hall, tired and apparently dazed by the heat, his tan suit jacket slung over his shoulder in the manner of middle-aged professionals in summer, Tim held beside him, like a cane or a crutch, a five-foot-high narrow gray object, curved at both ends, with two holes cut out as if for eyes.

What is that?

What does it look like, Laura?

It looks like the bumper of a car.

It is the bumper of a car. Your car.

What is it doing here?

I guess you haven’t seen your car lately. I passed it as I was coming up the street, and this had fallen off.

How?

Oh, probably during the daily stampede to park by two o’clock, someone backed into you, and your car being the piece of junk it is, this fell off.

I ignored the insult to my car, which I’m fond of, a little white Geo which Tim says resembles, in looks and performance, a golf cart. "When I moved it around one-thirty there was someone in front of me with a few feet to spare. I wonder how this happened. Luke would have let me know