Alan seems to have run out of the ability to listen to these guys any longer, and for the first time in weeks, she feels as if the two of them are truly in sync. Maybe it was a good thing to invite these two in.
“So how much are you offering for the studio?” Alan asks.
Sinew and Fireplug grind to a sudden halt and look at each other. This, apparently, was not on their script.
“We’re not interested in the studio,” Fireplug says. “Not one of the YogaHappens Experience Centers is under eight thousand square feet.”
“I’m not so sure, Chuck. I think the studio in Santa Monica is only six thousand.”
“Could be right. What do I know? I’m just the finance guy.”
“What Zhannette and Frank are interested in,” Sinew says, “is you, Lee. And you, Alan. What we want . . .”
“. . . is to offer you an exclusive contract.”
Sinew: And you might have heard . . .
Fireplug: . . . that Zhannette and Frank insist that everyone at YogaHappens is very well paid.
Sinew: It’s not about their own profits.
Without turning or moving, without even seeing him, Lee can feel Alan stiffening on the sofa beside him.
“But before we get into the details,” Fireplug says, “we want to discuss some of the information you gave us. You’ve got some mighty eccentric bookkeeping there, Lee.”
Katherine first came to Lee’s studio two years ago and started renting her massage room a year after that. While she loves the feeling of the place and the way she feels when she walks in the door—a little protected from the harsher realities of the world—she’s lost her ability to actually see it. Which is one of the bonuses of bringing Conor in; seeing it through his eyes, it’s almost as if she’s looking at it for the first time.
In its previous incarnation, the building was the showroom of a rug dealer. There was lots of open floor space when Lee and Alan bought the storefront—back in the days when Silver Lake was affordable and Alan had sold a song to a movie—and most of it was carpeted. Lee and Alan took it all up (Katherine’s seen the before and after photos), revealing hardwood, which Alan refinished. Why he doesn’t settle into carpentry and handyman work, something he’s really good at and occasionally seems to enjoy, is a mystery to her. The first thing you notice, especially if the sun is shining—and it usually is—is the warm honey color of the floors.
“It’s great,” Conor says. “My place back in Boston had floors like this. I hate to think what I did to my lungs sanding and laying down the polyurethane.”
Flooohz. “I guessed you for a DIY kind of guy.”
“I like projects. You have enough projects lined up, you stay out of trouble.”
Katherine wonders how to read this. When people talk about staying out of trouble, it usually means they spent a substantial amount of time in trouble at some point or other. If Conor follows the stereotype of big Irish guys from Boston, that probably means too many hours spent drinking in sports bars and maybe getting into fights on the sidewalk after closing hours. Although there’s something so gentle about him—unbelievably sexy on someone his size—it’s easier to imagine him breaking up fights than starting them.
“It’s tough for you to stay out of trouble?” she says.
“You ask an awful lot of questions, you know that?”
“I do. It’s a bad habit. You avoid answering an awful lot of questions, you know that?”
He winks at her and puts his hand on the small of her back. “So where do you do your magic?”
“Let me show you the studio first.”
Chloe is behind the reception desk, talking at full volume on her iPhone. Chloe teaches one of the sunrise flow classes at 7:00 a.m., three days a week. She’s a bartender on weekends at a club in West Hollywood, and, because her mother runs a boutique agency in Los Feliz, she’s studying to get her real estate license. It’s such a crazy combination of interests and professions, it all makes sense somehow. She’s a terrific teacher with a devoted following of early risers, but her in-class patter tends to be heavy on metaphors that sound connected to her other pursuits. “Bend at the waist and let your body pour down over your legs, like a warm, dark liquid pouring over ice, slowly melting out all the tension and stress.” “Pull back your shoulders and open up your chest like you’re opening your front door and welcoming in the universe. I call this ‘open house pose.’ ” She had a boyfriend for a while, then a girlfriend. Now she’s single, one of those truly bisexual people who fall in love without any apparent preference for gender. That must make life either very easy or extremely complicated.
Odd that she’s here at this time of day, but no point in trying to break into what sounds like an intense conversation with her mother. Her mother, who shows up at the studio from time to time, is one of those creepily driven people who seems to calculate how much time you’re worth before she’s willing to engage with you. Still, you have to admire her for setting up a successful business. She and Chloe act more like sisters, and there are times when Katherine envies the closeness of their relationship. She hasn’t talked to her own mother in six years.
In the studio, Conor looks almost comically out of place, slouching a little as if he’s intimidated, the way men often do when they walk into a yoga studio for the first time. “Great view,” he says. “So show me some of your tricks, lady.”
“They’re not tricks, Mr. Ross. They’re poses. Or asanas, if you want to get fancy.”
Having said that, she looks him in the eyes and drops down onto the floor. She pops up into a perfect forearm balance, then lowers her feet to the floor behind her and presses up with her hands so she’s in a deep back bend. And then, just because she can’t resist, she walks her hands in and slowly unfurls to standing.
“Whoa!” Conor is laughing and holding up his hands in front of his eyes. “Don’t do that again. You scared the shit out of me!”
“A big guy like you? You’re easy to scare!”
And then, payback for showing off, proving that it’s the little, unpredictable things that get you in life, she trips over her own feet as she’s walking toward him. He’s at her side in half a second, holding her by her biceps.
She looks up into his eyes. “I did that on purpose,” she says. “Just to see if you’d catch me.”
“I have amazing reflexes,” he says. “And I’m happy to see you’re human after all. In the middle of that contortion, I was starting to wonder.”
Contohtion.
“I am so, so human,” she says. “You have no idea.”
His hands slide down to her waist, and he leaves them there. “I like human,” he says.
It’s stupid, really. She doesn’t know him at all. Knows almost nothing about him, in fact. But she sees some kind of honesty or trustworthiness or something in those beautiful eyes of his that makes her feel more happy and open (welcome in, universe!) than she’s felt in a long time.
“I really, really hope you mean that,” Katherine says.
He bends down and kisses her on the mouth, his arms completely encircling her body, and Katherine feels such gratitude, she hears herself sigh, the way she sighs after doing ten sun salutations in a row.
She’s so lost in the moment, she doesn’t realize that the little knocking sound she’s hearing isn’t her heart, but Chloe, tapping lightly on the glass door to the studio. When Katherine makes eye contact with her, Chloe opens the door just a crack.
“Ummm, I hate to break it up,” she says, “but I’ve got a class in half an hour.”
Katherine laughs. “Don’t worry. We were about to leave anyway. Mr. Ross is a client. This is strictly professional.”
“It looks it! What profession?”
“Where’s Barrett? ” Katherine asks. “I thought she was on the desk this afternoon.”
“She’s taking care of Lee’s kids. They went out to the park, and she called to ask me to fill in. I guess Lee and Alan are having some meeting with their accountants or s
ome businesspeople. They didn’t make it clear.”
Katherine feels her stomach drop. She’s getting a strong feeling this has something to do with YogaHappens.
“Did she say when she’ll be back?”
“She said she’d let me know. It all sounded a little mysterious.”
Not mysterious enough, as far as Katherine’s concerned.
Since Lee has prescribed so much down time, Graciela has been visiting her mother out in Duarte more often. Depending on the time of day, it takes her between an hour and an hour and a half to drive each way. It’s not like she loves being in the car, but she’s moving, and at least she’s not sitting around the apartment bickering with Daryl and putting all her energy into trying not to eat. If she starts gaining weight on top of everything else, she’s really going to be miserable.
She tells herself this is the reason she’s been spending so much time with her mother, but there’s so much more to it than that. Her stepfather died of lung cancer eight months ago, and her mother, never the world’s cheeriest person, went into a depression. She spends most of her time sitting in front of the TV watching soap operas on Telemundo or, as she’s doing right now, talking back in Spanish to the complainants on Judge Judy.
“¡Tas mintiendo, perra!” she scoffs.
Graciela has taken it upon herself to clean her mother’s little house, one room each visit. She figures that by the time she’s worked her way through the whole place, her mother might be feeling better and actually appreciate her efforts. And tendon problems or not, it’s a hell of a lot easier than sitting with her mother and listening to her tell Graciela that she hates the way she dresses, that she looks like a puta, that she’s going to hell. Her mother wants her to get a job, to give up dancing—which she seems to equate with being a stripper—and to get married. Graciela has two brothers who can do no wrong in her mother’s eyes. Maybe if they came to visit her once in a while, her mother would cheer up some. Graciela doubts either one of them has been to see her since the funeral. Hardly excusable, since, last she heard, neither one of them has full-time employment.
She puts away the last of the cleaning supplies in the kitchen closet and goes out to the cramped little glassed-in porch where her mother spends almost all of her time.
“I have to get going, Mama,” she says. “I don’t want to hit traffic.”
Her mother nods at the screen and says, “Esta mujer es una mentirosa.”
According to her mother, everyone on television is a liar. Maybe she has a point, but it’s hard not to view this as part of her mother’s rejection of everything in life right now and feeling that somehow or other, she’s a victim of everyone who crosses her path.
“I cleaned the guest room today,” Graciela says. “The closet, too. I’m taking some of Heberto’s clothes to a men’s shelter downtown.”
“I wanted you to clean my room,” her mother says. “You don’t listen to me.”
Maybe it’s the yoga, but lately Graciela has gotten much better at letting these kinds of comments slide. You can’t control what other people do in life, but you can control your response to it.
“I’ll come back next week and start on your room, okay, Mama? I brought some meals I made for you and put them in the freezer. All you have to do is put them in the microwave.”
Her mother turns her eyes to her slowly and says, “You never could cook the way I can cook.”
Graciela bends down and kisses her mother on the forehead. “I’ll see you next week.”
So many streets look identical in Duarte, it’s almost impossible not to get lost, even after all this time. Graciela makes a wrong turn getting on the thruway and ends up in a little hard-luck neighborhood that’s maybe one of the most depressing places she’s ever seen. The sun is too bright, there’s trash blowing in the hot wind, and she has no idea how to get out of here. Right behind the houses, she can see yet another mall of big-box stores looming. But she’s not giving in to it. She’s not giving up and letting the sneer on her mother’s face undo everything she’s done to get as far as she’s gotten.
She takes a deep breath and retraces her steps in her mind, figures out how to get onto the thruway. Once she’s speeding back to town, she decides to call Stephanie again. Her phone is still turned off and her voice mail is full. She wishes she knew someone else to call to ask about her, but they’re not really close and Stephanie’s never even mentioned other friends. Graciela has her address entered somewhere in her phone. The only thing that makes any sense is to stop at her apartment and see what’s going on.
Stephanie lives on Sweetzer, right off Melrose. Even though Graciela has spent her entire life in L.A. and therefore should know better, she always assumes that anyone working in the movie business must be doing pretty well and living with the kind of glamorous frills that are out of her reach. Especially someone like Stephanie, who talks about her connections to People with Names. Not bragging, but just because that’s what her life is like.
Graciela Netflixed Silver Linings shortly after she met Stephanie. She would have liked more plot and maybe one love story that ended happily, but it had Ellen Page, Jean Smart, Sam Rock-well, and a two-second cameo by Johnny Depp. It was about a WASP family in the Midwest—as far from Graciela’s background as you can get—but there was something in the (dysfunctional, of course) relationship between Ellen Page and her mother that Graciela identified with so closely, she couldn’t get the movie out of her mind for days. It’s how moved she was by it that made her put Stephanie on a pedestal. Not a superhigh one, but even so. Apparently she wrote a lot of it, and you have to admire someone who can create anything that makes you feel that much. It’s talent.
So she’s surprised when she pulls up at Stephanie’s address and sees that it’s a pretty ordinary three-story white brick building. There’s something a little untamed about the hibiscus and bougainvillea bushes in front. She tries Stephanie’s phone one more time, knowing she’s not going to pick up, and of course she doesn’t.
“Like she’s going to answer the door,” Graciela mumbles to herself, but gets out of the car anyway.
She rings Stephanie’s buzzer and—big surprise—there’s no response. Graciela figures that if she were Stephanie, she’d hit the thing a few more times, but even though she’s driven all this way, it seems too rude. She stands there for another minute, but she can’t make herself do it. For all she knows, Stephanie is out of town or running around arranging meetings. Or maybe she sees Graciela’s number pop up and doesn’t take the call. But that wouldn’t explain the phone being turned off and the messages being full, and on top of that, Graciela is pretty sure the buzzer is not sounding inside an empty apartment. She can feel it. Sometimes she has an extra sense for things, something she really can’t explain.
As she’s about to leave, Graciela spots through the glass a young, blond woman coming down the staircase from the second floor. The woman opens the door and steps outside and Graciela realizes with a shock that in fact, she’s not young at all. Ancient might be more accurate. The blond hair is a brassy gold, combed and teased into a big bubble and sprayed stiff. It could be a wig, but in Graciela’s experience, most people try to make wigs more convincing than this. Despite having an unlined face, the exposed skin of the woman’s chest and arms (she’s wearing a tank top, so there’s a lot of exposed flesh) is freckled and as rumpled as a bedsheet. There’s a lot of jewelry, too, sort of heaped on in layers, so you can’t really tell where one bracelet ends and the next one begins.
“You looking for somebody?” the woman asks. Nice, but at the same time, suspicious.
“I have a friend who lives in the building, but she’s not answering her bell.”
“Well, maybe that means she’s not at home,” the woman says, more suspicious than nice this time. She turns around to make sure the door has locked behind her, and that’s when Graciela notices that she has a yoga mat slung over her shoulder.
“I love your yoga bag,” Graciela says. “I
just started doing yoga.”
This perks her up, and she instantly turns chatty. “Good for you, honey. Keep it up. I been doing it for twenty years now. It’s how I stay in such great shape.” She flexes a slack arm. “Bikram, four times a week, one hundred eight degrees. I been the exact same weight since I turned twenty. How much do you think I weigh?”
Graciela is not taking that bait. “I’m really bad at that,” she says. “It’s like guessing the temperature. I never know.”
“A hundred and two pounds. A hundred and three if I’m premenstrual.”
Premenstrual?
“Nobody can believe it when I tell them I’m forty-seven.”
As a matter of fact, Graciela doesn’t believe it, either. Reverse the numbers and they might be in the ballpark.
“My friend who lives here got me into yoga,” Graciela says. “She does it all the time.”
The woman adjusts a tangled mass of gaudy necklaces. “Bikram wants me to get my teacher certification, but who has time? And let me tell you, I have three daughters I been trying to get into it for years. Not interested. They’re at boarding school. The bills!”
“My friend is Stephanie Carlson. You don’t know her, do you?”
“Stephanie! She lives next door to me. She wants to put me in a movie, but I’m sick of acting. Too much pressure. I love her. I’m glad she got rid of that boyfriend.”
“Really? ” Graciela has known Stephanie for about four months now and she’s never once mentioned an ex to her. Maybe it wasn’t a serious relationship.
Tales from the Yoga Studio Page 8
