John Irving - Until I Find You

He was paired instead with a Portuguese woman in her forties, Mrs. Machado, who informed him that her grown children had moved away, leaving her unprotected from the random assaults of her ex-husband. According to Mrs. Machado, she was forced to keep changing the locks on her apartment. Her ex-husband still held her accountable for her wifely duties, even though she was no longer his wife. Because he repeatedly returned to her apartment, either to force sex upon her or beat her up, Mrs. Machado was learning to fight.

For not dissimilar motives, the women in Krung’s beginner class were particularly interested in mastering the high-groin kick. (In Jack’s case, this meant that Mrs. Machado kicked him in the area of his chest and throat.) In the opinion of the former Mr. Bangkok, the high-groin kick was “impure”; yet Jack and the women in Krung’s beginner class had reasons beyond the purity of kickboxing for mastering a high-groin maneuver. If he was going to be bullied by older boys, Jack was not opposed to learning a high-groin kick.

Mrs. Machado was a challenging sparring partner. A short, heavyset woman with coarse, glossy black hair and pendulous, low-slung breasts, she blocked most of the boy’s kicks with her ample thighs, or by turning sideways to him and receiving his kicks with her wide hips. And as short as she was, Jack was shorter. He was four feet, eight inches tall and weighed seventy-five pounds. Mrs. Machado was five feet two and weighed one-fifty. She could kick a lot harder than he could.

“You’d be better off wrestling her,” Chenko advised Jack. “You just don’t want to end up underneath her.”

Chenko respected Krung and the more skilled kickboxers in the gym, but he had contempt for the women in Krung’s beginner class—Mrs. Machado included. She was a hard kicker, but she wasn’t very agile. In Chenko’s opinion, Mrs. Machado could never defend herself from her ex-husband by kicking him. She would have to cripple him with the first kick; if she missed her mark, the fight would be over. Chenko thought that Mrs. Machado would be better off learning to wrestle.

As for Jack’s eventual self-defense, Chenko believed that the boy would have scant success defending himself—either kickboxing or wrestling—until he grew a few more inches and put on another fifty or seventy-five pounds. “I don’t see that your mom is getting her money’s worth yet, ” Chenko told Jack—this was when Jack and Mrs. Machado had been kicking each other for about a week.

But wasn’t it Mrs. Oastler’s money? (She was getting her money’s worth, Jack suspected.) Leslie Oastler would drive him to the gym on Bathurst Street before his mother was out of bed in the morning. Jack was there all day. He kickboxed with Mrs. Machado, he hopped on one foot for five minutes at a time, he stretched and stretched—the objective being to kick consistently above your height at shoulder level without losing your balance.

Jack rolled out the mats with Chenko, and disinfected them, and wiped them dry. He brought clean towels, fresh water bottles, and oranges cut into quarters to the kickboxers and the wrestlers. When the Minskies came in the midafternoon, Jack sat at matside with Chenko and watched Boris and Pavel pummel each other. They were both about Mrs. Machado’s weight, but lean—two very tough taxi drivers in their late twenties or early thirties. Chenko had the worst cauliflower ears, but Boris and Pavel had similar no-necks with little more than scar tissue for eyebrows, and the Minskies’ ears were unmatched lumps of dough—barely more recognizable (as ears) than Chenko’s.

The wrestling Jack learned was rudimentary—much of it defensive. A Russian arm-tie and front headlock, a three-quarter nelson and a cross-face cradle. On top, Boris had a mean cross-body ride; from the feet, Pavel had a good duck-under, a better arm-drag, and an outstanding ankle-pick. Chenko was a high-crotch man, but Boris and Pavel preferred an outside single-leg. Chenko liked the lateral drop, but only if your opponent was close to your height. There was no one Jack’s height in the Bathurst Street gym. In wrestling, he had no actual opponent—he just drilled the moves repeatedly with Chenko, Pavel, and Boris.

Occasionally, after Mrs. Machado had landed her best high-groin kicks in the area of Jack’s chest and throat—especially when she’d knocked his wind out—he could persuade her to “roll around” with him on the wrestling mat. She was the wrong height for the lateral drop, but Jack could ankle-pick her all day, which Mrs. Machado found frustrating—and when he managed to get her down on the mat, he could keep her down with a cross-body ride. She couldn’t get away from him.

To be fair, Chenko taught Mrs. Machado a snap-down; when she snapped Jack down on all fours, he couldn’t get away from her. (She would just lie on the boy with her seventy-five-pound weight advantage, breathing heavily.) “Ha!” she would cry, when she got him down—the exact same exclamation Mrs. Machado favored when she landed her best high-groin kicks.

If Jack was making any progress in defending himself, he had no accurate means of testing it. At the end of the day, Emma would relentlessly attack him—on the living-room couch or rug, or in her bedroom or one of the guest bedrooms, two of which Jack and his mom occupied for the summer. Now seventeen, Emma was both taller and heavier than Mrs. Machado. Emma could destroy Jack. Nothing he had learned worked with her, which was a sizable blow to his confidence.

In mid-June, Mrs. Oastler sent Emma to what she described as a weight-management program in California. “The fat farm,” Emma called it. Jack never thought of Emma as fat, but Mrs. Oastler did. Emma’s self-esteem may have been further undermined by Alice’s slim and attractive appearance, although Alice was by no means as small as Leslie Oastler.

It was a two-week weight-loss program—poor Emma—during which time Mrs. Machado was hired to give Jack dinner and be his babysitter until his mom and Mrs. Oastler came home (usually long after Mrs. Machado had put the boy to bed). Thus Jack’s kickboxing sparring partner and occasional wrestling opponent became his nanny—Lottie’s unlikely replacement.

At his appointed bedtime, Mrs. Machado and Jack would spar a little—no full contact, “no finishing the moves,” as Chenko would have said—and Mrs. Machado would put him to bed with the door to the guest-wing hall open, and the light at the far end of the corridor left on. Before he fell asleep, Jack often heard her talking on the telephone. She spoke in Portuguese—he assumed to one or another of her grown children, who had moved “away.” They must have been living somewhere in Toronto; given the length of these conversations, they were surely local calls. Not infrequently, the calls ended with Mrs. Machado in tears.

Jack would fall asleep to the sound of her crying, while she padded barefoot through the beautiful rooms in the downstairs of the Oastler mansion—her feet occasionally squeaking on the hardwood floors as she pivoted sharply on the ball of one foot while raising her kicking foot above shoulder level. At such times, Jack knew that Mrs. Machado was kicking the shit out of her imagined ex-husband—or some other assailant. After all, he was familiar with the exercise—including the sound of the footwork.

On one of the first warm nights of the summer, near the end of June, Mrs. Machado was crying and pivoting and kickboxing loudly enough for Jack to hear her over the ceiling fan. (The Oastler mansion was air-conditioned, but not the guest wing—Jack and his mom had ceiling fans.) For the warm weather, Alice had bought Jack several pairs of what she called “summer pajamas”—namely, his first boxer shorts. They were a little big for him.