'Why did he have to have a relationship? I know of no relationships he had in town or anywhere else. Why do you keep asking that?'
'Because most people have one, even if only of a fleeting sexual nature. And he seems to have had none. That's maybe a little unusual. If you don't know anything, you pay attention to the unusual.'
'Well, why do you keep asking me?'
'I keep asking everyone. You're just the one that's here.'
'Well, I find it very boring,' Rikki Wu said.
'Okay. We'll turn our attention to more exciting stuff,' I said.
'Would you like to see me do a one-armed pushup?'
'Can you really do that?' she said.
'As many as you'd like.'
She relaxed. We were back in the realm of the physical. This was her turf.
'You must be very strong,' she said.
'But pure,' I said.
'And kind-hearted.'
'Perhaps you will show me sometime, when we are not in so public a place.'
'I could meet you at the gym,' I said.
She frowned. Maybe I wasn't as funny as I thought I was. Or maybe she didn't have much sense of humor. Probably a Chinese thing. I ate some dim sum. She drank some tea. The dim sum wasn't very good. But there was plenty of it.
'Do you work out?' she said.
'Sure,' I said.
'I do too. Do you have a trainer?'
'No, I muddle through on my own.'
'I have two,' she said.
'My CV specialist, and Ronny, my strength and conditioning coach.'
'CV?'
'Cardiovascular,' she said.
'I train with them every day.'
'Well, it seems to be working,' I said.
'Yes. You should see my body,' she said.
'Yes, I should.'
She laughed. It wasn't an embarrassed laugh. But it was an uneasy one, as if she feared her own sexuality and where it might lead her. She stood. For lunch she had consumed two cups of green tea. I stood.
'I have to go to my body-sculpting class,' she said.
'Sometime you must show me that pushup.'
'One arm,' I said.
'Ask Ronny if he can do that.'
She laughed. I gave her my card.
'You think of anything useful, call me,' I said.
'Perhaps I will,' she said.
The waiter appeared with her coat and held it while she put it on.
'Lunch is taken care of,' she said.
She turned and walked to the door. The waiter followed her, and when she got to the door, he opened it, and popped her umbrella open and held it over her head until she took the handle from him and walked out. I'm not sure she ever saw the waiter.
CHAPTER 12
It was a bright day in Concord. The sky above the old house was the kind of bright blue that you see in seventeenth-century Dutch paintings. The sun was strong and pleasant and the foliage was turning color.
The grounds around the house seemed to have been landscaped by Tarzan of the apes. Bushes, vines, saplings, weeds, decorative plantings run amok, all looped and sagged around the house, clustered in front of it, clung to it, and concealed far too much of it.
'This is ugly,' Susan said. She had on jeans, and sneakers, and a lavender tee shirt with the sleeves cut off. Sweat had darkened the tee shirt. Sweat ran down her face under the long billed Postrio baseball cap. A sheen of sweat defined the small, hard muscles in her forearms.
