Isabel Allende - Ripper

Three days later, unable to get Indiana out of his mind, Ryan turned up at the Holistic Clinic just to see the woman with the bicycle. She was the polar opposite of the usual subjects of his fantasies: he preferred slim Asian women like Jennifer Yang, who besides having perfect features—ivory skin, silken hair, and a bone structure to die for—was also a high-powered banker. Indiana, on the other hand, was a big-boned, curvaceous, good-hearted typical American girl of the type that usually bored him. Yet for some inexplicable reason he found her irresistible. “Creamy and delicious” was how he described her to Pedro Alarcón, adjectives more appropriate to high-cholesterol food, as his friend pointed out. Shortly after Ryan introduced them, Alarcón commented that Indiana, with her ample diva’s bosom, her blond mane, her sinuous curves and long lashes, had the larger-than-life sexiness of a gangster’s moll from a 1970s movie, but Ryan didn’t know anything about the goddesses who’d graced the silver screen before he was born.

Ryan was somewhat surprised by the Holistic Clinic—having expected a sort of Buddhist temple, he found himself standing in front of a hideous three-story building the color of guacamole. He didn’t know that it had been built in 1940 and for years attracted tourists who flocked to admire its art-deco style and its stained-glass windows, inspired by Gustav Klimt, but that in the earthquake of 1989 its magnificent facade had collapsed. Two of the windows had been smashed, and the remaining two had since been auctioned off, to be replaced with those tinted glass windows the color of chicken shit favored by button factories and military barracks. Meanwhile, during one of the building’s many misguided renovations, the geometric black-and-white-tiled floor had been replaced with linoleum, since it was easier to clean. The decorative green granite pillars imported from India and the tall lacquered double doors had been sold to a Thai restaurant. All that remained of the clinic’s former glory was the wrought-iron banister on the stairs and two period lamps that, if they had been genuine Lalique, would probably have suffered the same fate as the pillars and the doors. The doorman’s lodge had been bricked up, and twenty feet lopped off the once bright, spacious lobby to build windowless, cavelike offices. But as Ryan arrived that morning, the sun shimmered on the yellow-gold windows, and for a magical half hour the space seemed suspended in amber, the walls dripping caramel and the lobby fleetingly recovering some of its former splendor.

Ryan went up to Treatment Room 8, prepared to agree to any therapy, however bizarre. He half expected to see Indiana decked out like a priestess; instead she greeted him wearing a white coat and a pair of white clogs, her hair pulled back into a ponytail and tied with a scrunchie. There was nothing of the sorceress about her. She got him to fill out a detailed form, then took him back out into the corridor and had him walk up and down to study his gait. Only then did she tell him to strip down to his boxer shorts and lie on the massage table. Having examined him, she discovered that one of his hips was slightly higher than the other, and his spine had a minor curvature—unsurprising in a man with only one leg. In addition she diagnosed an energy blockage in the sacral chakra, knotted shoulder muscles, tension and stiffness in the neck, and an exaggerated startle reflex. In a word, he was still a Navy SEAL.

Indiana assured him that some of her therapies would be helpful, but that if he wanted them to be successful, he had to learn to relax. She recommended acupuncture sessions with Yumiko Sato, two doors down, and without waiting for him to agree, picked up the phone and made an appointment for him with a Qigong master in Chinatown, five blocks from the Holistic Clinic. It was only to humor her that Ryan agreed to these therapies, but in both cases he was pleasantly surprised.

Yumiko Sato, a person of indeterminate age and gender who had close-cropped hair like his own, thick glasses, a dancer’s delicate fingers, and a sepulchral serenity, took his pulse and arrived at the same diagnosis as Indiana. Ryan was advised that acupuncture could be used to treat his physical pain, but it would not heal the wounds in his mind. He flinched, thinking he had misheard. The phrase intrigued him, and some months later, after they had established a bond of trust, he asked Yumiko what she had meant. Yumiko Sato said simply that only fools have no mental wounds.

Ryan’s Qigong lessons with Master Xai—who was originally from Laos and had a beatific face and the belly of a Laughing Buddha—were a revelation: the perfect combination of balance, breathing, movement, and meditation. It was the ideal exercise for body and mind, and Ryan quickly incorporated it into his daily routine.

Indiana didn’t manage to cure the spasms within three weeks as promised, but Ryan lied so he could take her out and pay for dinner, since by then he’d realized that financially she was bordering on poverty. The bustling yet intimate restaurant, the French-influenced Vietnamese food, and the bottle of Flowers pinot noir all played a part in cementing a friendship that in time Ryan would come to think of as his greatest treasure. He had lived his life among men. The fifteen Navy SEALs he’d trained with when he was twenty were his true family; like him they were inured to rigorous physical exertion, to the terror and exhilaration of war, to the tedium of hours spent idle. Some of his comrades, he had not seen in years, others he had seen only a few months earlier, but he kept in touch with them all; they would always be his brothers.

Before he lost his left leg, the navy vet’s relationships with women had been uncomplicated: sexual, sporadic, and so brief that the features of these women blurred into a single face that looked not unlike Jennifer Yang’s. They were usually just flings, and when from time to time he did fall for someone, the relationship never lasted. His life—constantly on the move, constantly fighting to the death—did not lend itself to emotional attachments, much less to marriage and children. He fought a constant war against his enemies, some real, others imaginary; this was how he had spent his youth.

In civilian life Ryan was awkward, a fish out of water. He found it difficult to make small talk, and his long silences sometimes seemed insulting to people who didn’t know him well. The fact that San Francisco was the center of a thriving gay community meant it was teeming with beautiful, available, successful women very different from the girls Ryan was used to encountering in dive bars or hanging around the barracks. In the right light, Ryan could easily pass for handsome, and his disability—aside from giving him the martyred air of a man who has suffered for his country—offered a good excuse to strike up a conversation. He was never short of offers, but when he was with the sort of intelligent woman he found attractive, he worried so much about making a good impression that he ended up boring them. No California woman would rather spend the evening listening to war stories, however heroic, than go clubbing—no one, that is, except Jennifer Yang, who had inherited not only the infinite patience of her ancestors in the Celestial Empire but also the ability to pretend she was listening when actually she was thinking about something else. Yet from the very first time they met among the sequoias in Samuel P. Taylor State Park, Ryan had felt comfortable with Indiana Jackson. A few weeks later, at the Vietnamese restaurant, he realized he didn’t need to rack his brains for things to talk about; half a glass of wine was all it took to loosen Indiana’s tongue. The time flew by, and when he checked his watch, Ryan saw it was past midnight and the only other people in the restaurant were two Mexican waiters clearing tables with the disgruntled air of men who had finished their shift and were anxious to get home. It was on that night, three years ago, that Ryan and Indiana had become firm friends.