Tales from the Yoga Studio

by Rain Mitchell

  He swims over to the side of the pool and starts bobbing up and down, then emerges, bit by bit, until his whole too-tall, too-skinny, too-wonderful body is standing behind her chair, dripping onto the ceramic tiles surrounding the pool.

  “Don’t get too close,” she says.

  He responds to this by reaching down, cupping her breasts in his hands, and kissing the top of her head. “Too close?” he asks.

  “Nah,” she says. “Just right.”

  “You are indeed.” He runs his hands up her arms. “Look at this muscle tone.”

  “Chataranga, baby,” she says.

  “Maybe I should join you.”

  “That would work out well,” she says. “With your schedule. Anyway, you’d probably be a natural and be able to do everything I’ve stumbled my way through, and I’d end up resenting you for it. Plus you’d need an extra-long mat.”

  “I couldn’t share yours?” He leans down and whispers into her ear, something about last night.

  She sighs and says, “I agree, it was.”

  She’s not sure exactly what he said, but the tone was unmistakable, and last night was wonderful. So here’s yet another thing that amazes her. They’ve been married for almost four years now, and while that admittedly can’t compete with her parents’ thirty-five-year marriage, compared with the relationships in her past, this is major long term. And she’s still astonished by the way their passion for each other can go through these dips that feel like the boring end of a movie that’s gone on too long and then emerge, so hot and urgent, so fresh and surprising, it is as if it’s the first time they’ve made love and are discovering each other’s bodies all over again. It almost makes her think that the long break they took after she miscarried served some useful purpose. It’s hard to imagine it could get better than it was last night, but even if there’s a cooling off, it doesn’t matter. There’s the love and tenderness she feels for him that will persevere and sustain them until passion returns.

  Maybe she should take him to yoga. The classes are fun, but the real pleasure is feeling opened up in some internal way that is almost as addictive as the feeling of flexibility. All those “chest opening” poses that sounded like bullshit to her when she started are paying off.

  “How’s the script?” he asks.

  She happens to know he read the script one night last week when it was sitting on the dining room table. He’s a voracious reader, and even though he has zero interest in pop culture and very little in movies in general, he is an amazingly good script reader. He has an intuition for problems in structure and the tone of dialogue that never ceases to surprise her. But he won’t give an opinion without first asking her hers. He wouldn’t agree with her just for the sake of it, but he’d keep quiet rather than contradict her.

  “It’s much better than I was expecting,” she says. “I thought it was going to be some dreary indie kind of script with too many characters and no tension. But the scenes really move. And it’s funny. For some reason, I didn’t figure the woman who wrote it had such a good sense of humor.”

  “The one from yoga?”

  “The same. So, okay, your turn. I know you read it.”

  “It held my interest,” he says. “It made me laugh. All the characters seemed to be more or less lying all the time, which I would guess would be very fun for an actor.”

  How does he know that? It would surprise her if he’s ever told an outright lie in his life, and she knows for a fact he’s never done any acting.

  “You should have been a director,” Imani says.

  “Too much responsibility,” he says. “I’d rather do heart surgery on little kids.”

  “I’m not completely sold on the role—black actress playing nightclub singer with troubled past. A little bit of a stereotype, don’t you think?”

  Glenn wraps his shoulders in a towel and sits at the bottom of Imani’s lounge chair and starts rubbing her insole. “I assumed you’d be playing the girlfriend.”

  “That’s not what she said.”

  “I’m sure she could be talked into it.”

  When Becky Antrim shows up for their yoga date, she sits across from Glenn and starts teasing him about his bathing suit. Becky flirts with Glenn outrageously, mostly, Imani can tell, because she doesn’t find him remotely attractive. It’s completely safe, and she does it to flatter Imani about her choice in men more than to flatter Glenn. Becky goes for the most obvious types—the pretty, bad boys who have “heartbreaker” written all over their faces. One of these days, Imani is going to sit her down and have a long talk with her. After a class, when Becky is loose and maybe a little bit vulnerable. Glenn has a former college roommate whose wife left him a year ago, and Imani thinks he’d be perfect for Becky. He’s thirty-two, short, black, good-looking but not too; plays sax amazingly well; and is trying to make a go of it with a jazz quartet. A yoga fanatic on top of it all. Basically, he’s the guy Imani would have made in the lab for herself back when she didn’t know a thing.

  “Where are you girls headed today?” Glenn asks.

  “Your wife is taking me up to Silver Lake,” Becky says. “She’s bringing me to some yoga class she’s been keeping to herself for a while now. After all I’ve done for her. You should come, Glenn. Lots of pretty girls in tight outfits sticking their butts in the air.”

  “I’d only have my eyes on one,” he says.

  “I’m flattered,” Becky says, “but not in front of your wife, please.”

  Lee knows that sooner or later she’s going to have to call her mother and tell her the news that Alan is moving back in and that things seem to have settled down. For some reason she’s been resisting doing it, but because the house is quiet—the kids are at a friend’s and Alan is at the studio getting ready to play harmonium in her class this afternoon—she decides to place the call.

  Bob answers the phone. Her stepfather is one of those blustery guys who’s always clearing his throat. Maybe he has chronic sinus problems or something along those lines—to complement the chronic “social” drinking—but Lee always feels as if he just likes to punctuate his speech with annoying interruptions, so you have to wait to hear what he really wants to say.

  “Mm-hmm, Lee. It’s good to hear your voice. Your . . . mm-hmm . . . mother tells me you’re getting a divorce.”

  Ellen married Bob after Lee went off to college, so it’s not as if they’ve ever had a close relationship, but he has a way of being only interested enough in her life to be judgmental. He never gets the facts right, and she’s not sure he’d retain them if he did.

  “No, Bob. Alan just needed some time alone to get work done.”

  “Well, I suppose we all need that, as long as that’s what . . . mm-hmm . . . he was really doing.”

  “Yes, Bob. That’s what he was really doing.”

  “I am glad to hear it, honey.” He says this in a truly sweet voice, the one he uses to make toasts at holidays, the one she hears when (infrequently) he gets sentimental and teary. Then he clears his throat and adds, “You keep telling yourself that.”

  “Is Ellen around?”

  “I’ll get her for you. Come . . . mm-hmm . . . visit us, Lee. We need some help with this B and B bullshit of your . . . mm-hmm . . . mother’s.”

  Bob calls out to Lee’s mother in a loud and gruff voice. Although Ellen always tries to portray him as a gentle man, he usually seems openly hostile to Ellen. “It’s your daughter. I said it’s Lee! It’s Lee, for Christ’s sake. How do I know? Something about her husband.”

  “Lee, honey? Are you all right?”

  “Yes, Mom. Everything’s fine. I just called to say hello. How’s it going there?”

  “Oh, honey. I know you probably won’t believe me, but it’s going very, very well. We’ve started work on the house and it’s full speed ahead. I did a little cleaning, and I bought some extra sheets and everything. We’re going to turn the old rec room down in the basement into a dorm accommodation. Doesn’t that sound like fun? I hadn
’t been down there in years, what with that odor and everything, but it’s cozy. We’ve got a ton of mattresses on the floor we bought from a motel that went out of business.”

  “Okay.”

  “Well, don’t make it sound like that, Lee. We had a mold remediator in last week for a couple of hours to deal with the walls and the seepage. And I had Bob spray all the mattresses with Lysol. The more people we can pack in down there, the more money we’ll be able to raise to renovate the guest suites upstairs.

  “And Laurence and his ‘friend’ have sanded and polyurethaned the floor of the barn. It looks so beautiful and professional, honey. You’d be so proud of me. It’s turning into a real spiritual haven here.”

  “I’m glad you’re moving ahead with it, Mom.” Lee is getting a bad feeling about the whole conversation. Her mother’s voice has that tone of hurt and anger that always signals problems.

  “I know you’re not, but it’s a nice little hobby for me. Try not to feel threatened by it, honey. I’m only doing it so I can put aside money to leave to the twins. It’s all for you.”

  “I know, Mom.”

  “Laurence and Corey—or whatever his name is—have already held a couple of workshops out in the barn.”

  The last she heard, the barn wasn’t insulated or heated. “That’s great, Mom. What kind of workshops?”

  “I didn’t interrogate him, honey. He gets very upset if I press too hard. I’m sure they were wonderful. He got a huge crowd both times.”

  “You didn’t go?”

  “No, it was only for men. Anyway, Bob and I go to bed around eleven, so it was too late for us. But that’s enough about my little triumph. Tell me about you. Are you all right? You know how much I worry about you.”

  “I’m fine, Mom. Things are much better now than they were.”

  “I knew they would be, honey. I love you so much, you have no idea. And I have faith in you. I really do.”

  “I know, Mom.”

  “I know you don’t, but it’s all right. I told Bob I knew you’d be better off in the end without Alan. He’s not good enough for you. He never has been, and no one ever knew what you saw in him, besides his looks.”

  “Mom, I think you should know that—”

  “Now don’t get defensive. I just mean we all knew you’d been through a rough time back then—I worried so much—so you got married. Your sister cried for hours when she heard you were going to marry him. ‘He’s a big loser!’ she kept screaming. But she got over it. No one ever thought less of you. You couldn’t expect your sister to come to the wedding with that fever she had.”

  “Mom! I called to tell you that Alan is moving back in.”

  There’s a long silence on the other end of the phone, and Lee hears her mother reporting to Bob. “He’s what? ” Bob shouts. “Well, what do I care?”

  Finally her mother seems to recover her voice. “You know I’ll support you, no matter what, honey. And if you tell people you did it for the kids, they’ll admire you for it. That’s how I explained Bob to people.”

  Katherine unlocks her bike from the railing along the walkway in front of her house and pushes it out to the street. It’s a lazy, quiet Sunday afternoon, and while she kept planning to go out and get some exercise, buy some bagels, go for coffee, pretty much anything to get her out of the house, she spent most of the day in the little extra bedroom where she keeps her sewing machine and fabrics, working on a dress she’s making for Lee. It’s one of the most complicated pieces of clothing she’s ever tried to design, never mind sew, and the more she does on it, the more excited she gets. It’s all black, white, and silver, based loosely on a geometric William Tempest evening dress she coveted the minute she saw it in Vogue. It’s pretty much using every technical skill she has in her bag of tricks and a few others she’s never tried, and unless she messes the whole thing up at the last minute, it could be amazing. A boned bodice. Who knew she was capable of sewing that?

  She’s developed a sort of love for the dress that’s bordering on weird, almost as if it’s a pet, and it’s going to be tough to actually give it away.

  On the other hand, her love for it is connected to her feelings for Lee. She sees Lee in it as she’s sewing it, and she knows she would never have the patience to attempt any of the tricks she’s trying if she thought she was making it for herself. She’s thinking of the dress as a peace offering to Lee or maybe a going-away, good-luck present.

  It’s a warm afternoon, and the streets have the quiet, deserted feel of a holiday. She loves biking at this time of day on a Sunday, when it’s still and balmy and she feels as if she has the whole neighborhood to herself. With the way the air feels against her skin and the way the breeze feels in her hair, she can trick herself into believing that she has no regrets.

  It’s so lovely out, she’s tempted for a minute to skip yoga class and bike and bike, maybe even head to Griffith Park. But Lee said she was going to make an announcement in class today, and although she didn’t specify about what, it’s pretty obvious it’s about the studio closing. Katherine has been at the studio for most of their big changes and improvements and triumphs, and so she figures she might as well be present for this. It’s all a cycle.

  She’s been trying very hard to tell herself that, no matter what, this is a good move for Lee. More money, more prestige, more opportunity to teach without worrying about the business. But she can’t get past the feeling that despite all that, Lee wouldn’t have done it if it hadn’t been to please Alan, to get him back. And that’s okay, she supposes—not Katherine’s business—but would Lee have wanted Alan back if she knew the whole story?

  For weeks now, Katherine has been struggling with this—as a good friend, shouldn’t she tell Lee what she knows? But she keeps coming back to the resolution to simply focus on herself, and let Lee and Alan’s marriage follow its own course.

  She pedals up to the back of the studio and lashes her bike to the fence near the office window. Alan appears in the doorway, wearing a pair of expensive little gray yoga pants and a tank top. How is it, she wonders, that someone with such a great body, beautiful hair, and those strong, chiseled features can be so physically unappealing to her? For all the trouble she’s made for herself and other people through her life, Katherine has never been even remotely attracted to married or otherwise-engaged men. Well, not counting the infamous guy she was in love with for six months. But she didn’t know he was married, and she dumped him as soon as she found out.

  “Beautiful day,” he says. “Coming to class?”

  “That’s the plan,” Katherine says.

  “Lee will appreciate that,” he says. “She’s kind of emotional about the announcement and all. And I’m doing the live music.”

  Katherine doesn’t say anything to this. There’s a little edge in Alan’s voice that makes her feel as if he’s goading her, trying to get her to say something so he can make a comment. Not buying into it, thanks.

  “She told me you’re not thrilled about our decision.”

  Katherine shrugs. “It’s not my business, Alan.”

  “Well, it seems to me you’ve gotten into our business before. I haven’t ruled out the idea of having my lawyer do a closer audit of the books, you know.”

  “I wish you would,” Katherine says. “Ease your mind once and for all.”

  “I would have done it sooner, but it’s not cheap.”

  “From what I hear, Lee is going to be making enough to cover lots of extra expenses.”

  “Lee isn’t the only one making money in this family, Katherine.” He leans in toward her and his long hair swings out from behind his ears. The hair and the expensive tank top and all the other vain little touches really don’t go well with anger and pettiness. “So get it right. And I’m sorry you’re going to lose your massage space, but I’m sure you can find another. Especially if they don’t find out what you really get paid to do in there.”

  When Katherine first opened her practice at Edendale, she used t
o pay her rent by giving massages to Lee and Alan. It had been Lee’s suggestion, and even though Alan was against it, he made use of her services more than Lee did. Although it’s something she’s tried her best to forget, she had to fend off Alan’s naked advances more than once. She finally took out a loan so she could pay rent and refused to book him. The whole request for “release” from male clients is so common—like, Oh, poor me. Look at this problem I’ve got. Help me out!—she’s bored with it by now and knows how to handle it by making a joke and defusing the situation with humor. But especially galling was Alan acting as if she owed it to him as part of their deal.

  “I don’t get paid to do that,” she says. “You didn’t know? I do it for free. Unless the idea of touching the guy makes me feel like throwing up.”

  “You know what your problem is? ” he says. “I don’t think you like men at all. You should just come out and get it over with. You’re in love with Lee.”

  “Well,” she says, and slings her pack to her shoulder, “that makes one of us.”

  Alan stomps back into the studio and then storms back out like the petulant child he is. “And don’t leave your bike back here. It clutters up the patio and the YogaHappens guys might be around this afternoon, and I don’t want it looking like shit back here.”

  She could just leave the bike where it is and he’d keep his mouth shut, probably for fear she’d go to Lee. But the thing is, once you get in the habit of owing people nothing, you get addicted to it. She unlocks the bike and sits sidesaddle on the seat and coasts out to the sidewalk. She locks it to one of the street signs—out of view of the studio, Alan, okay?—looping the chain through both wheels. She pats the bicycle seat and says, “Now you be a good girl and don’t go anywhere. I’ll be right back.”

  Lee is so rattled and agitated by the phone call with her mother that she arrives at Edendale ten minutes later than she planned. She can see that there’s a crowd assembled in the yoga room, and she can hear Alan playing, warming them up, in a sense. He claims not to like the harmonium—it’s perfect for classes, but not terribly versatile—but he took to it quickly, and when he starts playing, he seems to lose himself and go into a trance. Listening to the haunting, repetitive sound of the instrument, students in classes seem to go inward as well.