—
Bonnie changed into her shorts and sports bra and set off toward the beach. She ran five miles in the sand a day, then did a series of calisthenic exercises on the bars at Muscle Beach. It was hardly the grueling training regimen she was used to, but it kept her from going completely soft. She didn’t particularly enjoy having an audience of tourists milling around watching the bodybuilders who frequented the place, but it was cheaper than a gym, and she garnered far less attention than the bulging, bronzed men, pumped up as inflatable pool toys, who spent their days peacocking around the bench presses. She was often the only woman on the bars, certainly the only one who could do one hundred pull-ups in under five minutes, but she was used to that from the boxing gym. She hadn’t played team sports since middle school and had rarely gone beyond surface banter with her sparring partners. She had, she felt, all the social grace of a grizzly bear. On the bars, as in life, she was left to herself—which, she told herself, was exactly how she liked it.
Except since she started training at fifteen, she had never been alone, not really. A boxer in a ring may seem as if they are on their own, but pan back a few feet and their trainer will always be there in the corner, taking every blow with them. A truly great trainer sees as their fighter sees, feels as their fighter feels. And the fighter needs that support, relies on it as completely as a child does a mother. It’s the secret vulnerability at the heart of the sport, that intimate dependence. And yet from this surrender to reliance comes a capacity for individual resilience that’s almost inhuman. Boxers are trained to be all fight, no flight. Bonnie had seen many a boxer knocked flat on her back, but she had never seen one run from the ring. Despite the referee’s instruction at the beginning of every fight to “protect yourself at all times,” boxing required an overriding of one’s deepest natural instincts to protect oneself at all costs. Inevitably, you had to take pain to deliver it.
The first time Bonnie entered a boxing gym, Nicky had been by her side. She was fifteen and Nicky was twelve; their parents had entrusted her to walk Nicky home across the park from school each afternoon while they were at work. Avery had graduated from high school early and was already killing herself with a double course load at Columbia, and ten-year-old Lucky was put in an after-school program while their mom was at work. One afternoon, instead of continuing west from the park to their apartment, Bonnie guided Nicky south with her toward Midtown without a word.
By that time, Bonnie had been watching nothing but boxing movies for weeks, forcing them all to reenact scenes from Raging Bull and Rocky with her. She was obsessed before she ever stepped foot in a ring, but their mother considered the sport barbaric and refused to pay for lessons. It was their father, an amateur boxer in high school, who had come out of a drunken stupor just long enough to slip Bonnie the money and tell her to go try it out sometime. Bonnie had looked up boxing gyms on the school computer and picked the one nearest their apartment, which was how they found themselves outside of Golden Ring, a storefront boxing gym of no major repute.
It was winter and the gym’s big front window was steamed over, the figures sparring and skipping rope on the other side blurred silhouettes. Bonnie stood frozen outside, suddenly too nervous to go in, but Nicky pushed open the door. It was fetid within, steamy and warm. The air was filled with rhythmic hisses, thuds, pops, and staccato slaps. Bonnie stood at the entrance, her eyes racing from person to person. They were all men, all much older than her, all completely absorbed in training; nobody even glanced up as they walked in. Suddenly, a bell rang, and the noise dimmed. Men dropped their jump ropes or broke from sparring to grab water bottles and towels. Now was the time, but Bonnie’s nerve was faltering. Nicky must have known this because she walked over to a tall figure who had just finished jumping rope and peered up at him. His body reminded Bonnie of a panther’s; she could see his muscles ripple under his skin as he moved.
Excuse me, said Nicky. My sister wants to learn to box. Can you teach her?
He smiled down at her, his handsome face streaming with sweat.
She’ll want to talk to Pavel about that.
He nodded at a tall white man leaning against the far wall. Nicky thanked him and grabbed Bonnie’s hand. She pulled Bonnie after her, repeating the request once they reached him. Pavel dismissed the boxer he had been watching on the heavy bag with a nod, then looked down at them serenely. His face was beautiful in its contradictions. A thick neck and delicate, curled ears, a brutish square nose set below dancing blue eyes lined with long black lashes. To Bonnie at that age, he was firmly in the category of old person, though she would learn later he was not yet thirty. He held Bonnie in his gaze for a long moment.
You want to fight? he asked.
His voice, when he spoke, was thickened by a Russian accent. Bonnie nodded without a word. Pavel turned his light eyes toward Nicky.
And you, little one?
I’m going to be a journalist, she said primly. So I’ll just take notes.
Pavel smiled.
You need pen?
Nicky gave him a knowing look and tapped the side of her temple.
It’s all up here.
Pavel nodded to indicate this was fair enough.
Okay, you—he pointed to Nicky. Take notes. He turned to Bonnie. You, come.
He guided her in front of the big mirror on the back wall, stopping her about six feet away from her reflection. Up close, the glass was coated in a hazy layer of dried sweat, snot, and spit that softened the edges of anyone it reflected. Pavel instructed Bonnie to take a stance. Tentatively, Bonnie separated her feet hips width.
You feel good? Pavel asked.
Bonnie nodded. Pavel extended one thick finger and pushed Bonnie’s shoulder, knocking her easily off-balance. He shook his head.
Not solid. Try again.
Bonnie repositioned her feet, so they were at an angle underneath her hips, and locked her knees.
Solid? asked Pavel, his index extended.
Bonnie nodded again, more confidently this time. Pavel pressed the tip of his finger to her shoulder blade and sent her staggering without effort.
Not solid, he said.
Bonnie glanced over at Nicky nervously. You got this, Nicky mouthed at her. Pavel pointed at the wooden floorboards beneath her.
I want that you place feet shoulder width apart, he said. Now—
He showed her how to relax her muscles, bend her knees, and plant her lead foot flat on the floor, then raise her back heel slightly with her toes planted so she was ready to pivot. At his instruction, Bonnie brought her hands just above her chin and made fists.
Your knuckles, said Pavel, tapping her hands and pointing up. Always to the sky. Now tuck elbows.
He instructed her to balance her weight equally between her front and back foot, then check her stance in the mirror. She could not know it at the time, but he was giving her a more useful lesson on gravity and the body than she had ever learned in school. When she was set up, he pushed her shoulder with his finger again. She didn’t budge. He circled her, nudging from different angles but, with her feet planted as he’d shown her, Bonnie could not be tipped. Pavel crossed his arms and nodded.
Now, you are solid.
Bonnie looked over at her sister in delight. She had found, for the first time in her life, her feet.
—
Bonnie never put much store in the concept of fate, but she knew that she was meant to meet Pavel. It was Pavel who showed her how to move like water in the ring. In contrast to the plant-and-hook technique many other trainers favored, he taught a long-armed jab-and-move style, encouraging his boxers to flow with liquid agility around the ring. This suited Bonnie, whose earlier dance training and natural energy meant she was happiest when ducking, weaving, and bouncing around her opponent. He schooled her on how to slip punches and hit from a distance, how to plant her feet and dance from the ankles up with swift reflexes that were more protective than steel armor.
She could never have known how small the odds were of finding someone willing to even talk to a girl, let alone train her. There were only a handful of good trainers who worked with women in the whole country at that time, let alone in the city. But Pavel had been taught to box back in Moscow by his father, who insisted on training all his children, including his daughter, so Pavel had seen firsthand what a female fighter was capable of. His sister had been a natural, but she’d gotten pregnant young and remained in Russia to marry and raise a family. Pavel, meanwhile, had become a youth world champion, then moved to America to pursue a respectable but not exceptional professional career before a broken eye socket forced him into early retirement. Pavel molded Bonnie into the fighter she was born to be and remained her trainer for the next fifteen years. Until last year, she had lived her entire adult life with him in her corner.
Here is what she could not admit to anyone, not even, for many years, herself: She wanted more from Pavel. She didn’t know when it started, this wanting, but once the seed was planted in her it kept growing until she was like a cracking pot that cannot contain its plant. The truth was that she wanted him everywhere, not just in her corner. The specifics of her wants were not extravagant, but the very fact of them felt enormous. She wanted, for instance, to sit in a dark movie theater beside him and watch something that had nothing to do with boxing, a romantic comedy maybe, or the new Marvel movie. She wanted to prepare her special morning smoothie for him, then sit in silence with him while they drank it. She wanted to watch him brush his teeth. She wanted him to turn in his sleep and reach for her. He had wrapped her hands thousands of times, but what she really wanted was for him to hold hers. Hold her hand! She was like a teenage girl. She sweated even thinking about it.
No one in Bonnie’s life would describe her as a romantic. Between her grueling training schedule and natural inclination toward asceticism, almost every part of her life was in service to toughness. But her heart, her heart remained tender. And she was not completely inexperienced in the world of romance; during her twenties she had, if not relationships, then relations with a handful of men, usually other athletes with whom she made arrangements that ensured each got their physical needs met. She had even engaged in an ill-advised fling with a boxing promoter everyone called Knuckle (his name, in retrospect, should have been the first warning sign). Pavel was married for most of that time to Anahid, an Armenian war photographer who was rarely home and usually, it seemed, narrowly avoiding kidnap. Bonnie had met her a few times and was struck by both her beauty and her steeliness; she was scrupulously polite and seemed to treat most interactions as negotiations in which she was primarily concerned with getting out alive. By the time she and Pavel quietly divorced, Pavel had been Bonnie’s trainer for over a decade.
