At the far end of the hall, in the cage, two of the club's professionals were sparring under Vic Anselmo's eye, and the sound of it โ breath, canvas, the padded percussion of gloves โ ran under the class like a river under a road. Vic stood with his arms folded and his whistle on its lanyard resting against his chest, fifty-five years old, grey at the temples in a way that had arrived all at once the year he turned fifty, and built like the middleweight he had once been, gone slightly to seed in the manner of a good field after harvest. He had owned the club for nineteen years. He had been a professional in an era when the sport's purses were paid in envelopes and its medical provision was a bucket, and he ran Bayou City with the grim tenderness of a man who had decided that if young people were going to do this dangerous thing, they were going to do it in a room where somebody senior was watching and the ice machine worked.
The class ran its hour. Ladder drills, angle exits, the fencing lunge adapted for people who were not allowed to lunge with a blade and had to be taught that the principle โ distance is a decision, not a fact โ survived the translation. Sabine taught in the mixture she had settled into over six years, English first, French surfacing when she was pleased or exasperated, which the regulars had learned to read like a barometer. When the hour ended she sent them to water with the same benediction she always used.
"Your feet are the only honest part of you," she said. "Everything above the ankle is public relations. Go and drink. Class Thursday, same time. Bring your rumours, not your doorbells."
"Coach," Marcus said, towelling his neck, falling in beside her as the class dispersed toward the coolers and the benches, "I gotta ask. With respect. The lunge thing. The fencing thing. In a real fight, a guy's not gonna stand there and let you slide around measuring. He's gonna come and get you. Both hands. Sooner or later somebody has to actually be somewhere, you know? You teach us how to not be there. Who teaches us how to be there?"
"Dale teaches you how to be there," Sabine said. Dale Okafor was the club's wrestling coach and had the forearms of a man who had moved furniture professionally in a previous life. "I teach you the rent on being there. Every position costs. Standing still in range costs the most. You are a wealthy man, Marcus, you can afford it longer than most. But not forever."
He grinned at that, unbothered, a man receiving a weather forecast for a picnic he fully intended to hold anyway. "Dancing," he said, "is still dancing, coach."
"And drowning," Sabine said, "is still swimming, once, badly. Thursday. Bring the dogs trained."
He laughed all the way to the water cooler.
Priya Nair arrived for the nine o'clock open mat with her hair in a braid that had already begun to escape itself and a physio's bag over her shoulder that contained, among other things, resistance bands, a lacrosse ball, and a paperback novel with a cracked spine that she read in eight-minute increments between rounds. She was thirty-one, a physiotherapist at a clinic two blocks away and a jiu-jitsu purple belt of genuine and unshowy quality, and she had been Sabine's first friend in Houston: she had watched her, in her first month at the club, spend twenty minutes alone on the far mat doing footwork so slow it looked like a film buffering, and had said, "Either you are very lost or very good, and I can't tell which, and it's bothering me."
"Very lost," Sabine had said. "But beautifully."
They trained together on open mat in a way that had settled, over the years, into a language of its own. Priya's game was pressure and patience from the top, a slow argument made with body weight; Sabine did not grapple to win so much as she grappled to rehearse distance with her whole body, and Priya, who understood her better than anyone else in the building, would narrate as she worked.
"You are doing it again," Priya said that morning, from inside Sabine's guard, forearms braced, patient as geology. "You are fencing at me with your legs. I can feel the measuring. It's insulting. I'm a person, not a distance."
"You are a distance," Sabine said, "with opinions."
"Flirt."
They worked until the timer, and then sat against the wall with their legs out and their backs against the padding while the open mat churned on around them, and Priya unwrapped the tape from her fingers with her teeth in a way her own patients were forbidden to do.
"You're quiet," Priya said.