“You’d do that?” he asked, horrified. “That gal looked like a small pumped-up man with boobs slapped on.”
I shrugged. “I don’t want to spend the time training. It takes months to get ready for a competition. Plus, I’d have to camouflage all the scars, which I think would be impossible. But that was what Del wanted to do, train and compete. Develop himself to his full potential, was the way he put it.” I’d watched Del stare at one of his muscles for a good five minutes, wrapped up in his own reflection to the exclusion of the other people in the gym.
“I think I could have lifted what he had on the bar,” Claude said, a question in his voice. He rinsed off the plates and put them in the dishwasher. “It came to two hundred ninety pounds.”
I thought Claude was flattering himself, though I didn’t say so out loud. Claude seemed to have a fair body, but he did not exercise and hadn’t as long as I’d known him. “Bodybuilding isn’t exactly like competitive weight lifting,” I said. “Training for a competition, some people use somewhat lower weights and lots of reps, rather than really heavy weights and a few reps. That was probably Del’s highest weight.”
“Reps?” Claude said cautiously.
“Repetitions.”
“Would he be lifting so much by himself? Del wasn’t that big a man.”
“That’s what I don’t understand,” I admitted, retying my New Balances. “Del was so careful of himself. He wouldn’t risk pulling a muscle or getting any injury this close to the competition. Surely he had a spotter. He told Bobo he was expecting someone.”
“What’s a spotter?” demanded Claude.
“A spotter is a buddy,” I said, having to define a term so familiar to me I’d forgotten a time I hadn’t known it. “A workout partner. If you don’t have someone to spot for you, you would have to ask whoever was working at the gym…” I could tell from Claude’s frown that I wasn’t being precise. “It’s someone who stands there while you’re doing the hardest part of your workout. That person is there to act as your safety net: hand you the weights, or the bar, take them when you’ve finished your set, cheer you on, grab your wrists if they start to weaken.”
“So you won’t drop the weights on yourself.”
“Exactly. And to help you do those last few you need to finish your set.”
“Example.”
“Like if I was doing forty-fives, and that was my top capability or close to it, I’d lie down on the bench holding the dumbbells, and the spotter would stand or kneel at my head, and when I was pushing the weights up, if my arms started to shake, the spotter would grab my wrists and help me keep them steady.”
“Forty-fives?”
“Two forty-five-pound dumbbells. Some people lift using the bar and adding weights, some people use different-weighted dumbbells. I happen to prefer dumbbells. Del liked the bar. He thought he got better chest development.”
Claude looked at me thoughtfully. “You’re telling me you can lift ninety pounds with your hands?”
“No,” I said, surprised.
Claude looked relieved.
“I can lift a hundred ten or a hundred twenty.”
“You.”
“Sure.”
“Isn’t that a lot? For a woman?”
“In Shakespeare it is,” I said. “At one of the bigger city gyms, probably not. You’d have a bigger pool of weight trainers.”
“So how much would a man serious about training be able to do?”
“A man about Del’s build, under six feet, about one hundred seventy? After intense training, I guess he’d be able to lift maybe three hundred twenty pounds, more or less. So you can see strength wasn’t Del’s sole goal, though he was very strong. He wanted exceptional muscular development, for the look of it. I just like to be strong.”
“Hmmm.” Claude thought about the difference. “So you knew Del?”
“Sure. I saw him almost every morning at Body Time. We weren’t particularly friendly.” I was wiping off the table, since I had to go to work in ten minutes.
“Why not?”
I thought about it while I rinsed out the dishrag. I wrung it and folded it neatly and draped it over the divider between my sinks. I stepped across the hall to the bathroom, washed my hands and face, and slapped on a little makeup for my self-respect. Claude leaned against the kitchen doorframe to watch. He was waiting for an answer.
“Just… nothing in common. He was from here, had lots of family, dated a hometown girl. He didn’t like blacks, he didn’t like the Notre Dame football team, he didn’t like big words.” That was as close as I could come to explaining.
“You think enjoying living in a small town is wrong?”
I hadn’t meant this to be an analysis of my worldview.
“No, not at all. Del was a good guy in some ways.” I looked at my face, put on some lipstick, shrugged at my reflection. Makeup didn’t change the face underneath it, but somehow I always felt better when I’d used it. I washed my hands and turned to look at Claude. “He was harmless.” Right away I wondered what I meant. But I was too taken aback by the expression on Claude’s face to think it through right then.
Claude said, “I’ll tell you something strange, Lily. There weren’t any fingerprints on that bar where there should have been. There should have been lots, where a man would normally grip the bar. Del’s should have been on top. But there weren’t any. There were just smears. And you know what, Lily? I don’t think you’d put on your makeup in front of me if you had any serious interest in me.”
He stopped at the front door to deliver his parting shot. “And, I’d like to know, if Del Packard was in the gym by himself, how he turned out the lights after he died.”
It was a day that had started out worst and moved up to merely rotten.
I was cleaning in a spirit of anger, and the results were not harmonious. I dropped papers, got paper cuts when I picked them up, slammed the toilet lid down so hard that a box of Kleenex plummeted from a flimsy rattan shelf in the travel agent’s bathroom, vacuumed up a few pushpins at the base of the bulletin board, and developed a full- blown hatred for the poster of a couple on the deck of a cruise ship because they looked so simple. They looked like they could say, “Gee, we really get along well. Let’s go to bed together!” and it would actually work.
I was glad this was my last job of the day. I locked the door behind me with a sigh of relief.
On my way home, I detoured to Marshall’s dumpy rented house. He’d offered me a key when we began “seeing” each other, but I had refused. So he had to stagger to the door to let me in, and stagger right back to the ancient plaid couch he’d scrounged from a friend when he’d separated from his wife. I put his Body Time key ring on the equally dilapidated coffee table, and went to sit on the floor near him. Marshall was sprawled full length and obviously felt lousy. But he wasn’t groaning, and his fever was down, I thought as I touched his forehead.
“Can you eat yet?” I asked, not knowing what else I could do for him.
“Maybe some toast,” he said in a pitiful voice that sounded very odd issuing from his extremely muscular throat. Marshall is one-quarter Chinese. He has skin that’s just between pink and ivory, and his eyes and hair are dark. His eyes have a bit of a slant, just a hint. Other than that, he’s Caucasian, but since he’s a martial arts teacher he enjoys emphasizing the Oriental fraction of his heritage.
“Please,” he added, even more pitifully, and I laughed.
“Mean,” he said.
I got up and found his whole-wheat bread and waved a butter knife over it, toasted it dry, and brought it to him with some water.
He sat up and ate every crumb.
“You’re going to live.” I took the plate from him and carried it to the sink. I would coddle him to the extent of loading his dishwasher, I decided.
Afterward I returned to sit by the couch. He’d slid down to his original position. He took my hand.
“I guess I will live,” he admitted, “though for a few hours I didn’t want to. And finding out about Del, God! Who would have thought Del would be dumb enough to drop a weight on his neck?”
