Enlightenment for Idiots

by Anne Cushman

  When I’d been practicing Ashtanga about six months, I noticed a new guy in class. You couldn’t help noticing the men, of course—stripped to the waist, their muscles flexing, their skins shining with sweat. Even if I didn’t know their names, I knew the intimate territory of their bodies: the smell of their armpits and their breath, the placement of their moles and tattoos, the way their bellies hung over the top of their shorts, whether they powered through the prescribed series like guided missiles or meandered as if they were taking a stroll in the park. This one was more the guided-missile type—thin and wiry, with bands of muscles sliding under his skin. He had dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, a beaklike nose, and lips that pursed into a half kiss when he concentrated. His arms were brown but his chest was pale and hairless, lending him the illusion of vulnerability, like a turtle out of its shell. When he rolled out his mat in the corner next to mine, I could smell his musky sweat, a blend of skunk and lemons.

  All that week, we flowed through the series side by side, linked in an intricate, intimate dance. His breath hissed in lockstep with mine. Tattoos of snakes writhed down his arms. After the final chant, we’d both sit quietly, eyes closed. When I’d get up to leave, he would still be sitting there, his torso tapering in a bony V down to his bare legs folded in full Lotus.

  That weekend I sat at my usual table at the Bookends Café, drinking a chai and scribbling in my journal. I looked up to see the guy from yoga walking up to my table, wearing a leather jacket, with a Nikon hanging from his neck.

  “I need a model for a photo series about a yogini who falls in love with a feral cat,” he said, looking me over. “Are you interested?”

  “I hate posing for pictures.”

  “You just have to be yourself.” He set the camera down on the table and gestured to the waiter.

  “That’s the hardest thing of all,” I said.

  His name was Matt, he told me as I drank another chai and he drank a double espresso. He was a freelance travel photographer for a stock photo house, just in town for a couple of months between gigs. He had just gotten back from six weeks in India. Next month he was off to Bogotá. In between he was shooting a series of artsy calendars distributed by a small press in San Francisco. The yogini cat romance would be one of them: twelve months of an unfolding photo essay, cat pose morphing into cat love with no interruption.

  “So is this supposed to reveal the spiritual side of cats?” I asked.

  “More like the animal side of yoga. At least the way we do it in America. You don’t know yoga at all till you’ve been to India. This stuff they’re doing here—it’s just glorified gymnastics.”

  “So why are you wasting your time with it?” I asked, annoyed.

  He grinned at me. “It’s a good way to meet girls.”

  I took another sip of chai, trying to resist being charmed. Outside of yoga class, he didn’t strike me as particularly attractive: His face was too craggy, his body too thin, and there was something obscurely unsettling about his pale eyes fringed with dark lashes.

  “Yeah, yoga classes are full of girls. Most of them are more beautiful than I am. Lots of them do better yoga. Why do you want me for this calendar?”

  “That’s the problem. They’re all too beautiful. You look at them doing yoga and all you see is their hair and their breasts and their personalities and their designer yoga wear. I need a model who disappears into the poses.”

  I set my cup down, too hard; chai sloshed over the edge and into the saucer. “So you’re saying you chose me because I have no breasts and no personality and bad outfits?”

  He tipped back in his chair and regarded me. I realized what was odd about his eyes: One of them was gray and the other was green, giving his face an oddly unbalanced look, as if I were talking to two different people at the same time. “Look. Do you want to do this photo shoot with me, or don’t you?”

  WE SHOT THE calendar later that week near a pond in Golden Gate Park where the cat liked to hang out—a giant gray tabby named Bigfoot with a tattered ear and a limp, a park cat belonging to everybody, or nobody. He was an uncooperative subject. He’d disappear into underbrush, climb high into redwood branches. Sometimes we sat by the pond for hours, just waiting for him to turn up. A waterfall sluiced down the rocks behind us, drowning out the sound of traffic from a nearby road. The air smelled of damp earth and redwood needles. I brought picnics for us to share—crusty sourdough bread, Stilton and Brie, sweet juicy tangerines. Some days the cat never showed at all. “Couldn’t you have found an indoor cat to photograph?” I asked Matt. He looked at me and raised one eyebrow. “What kind of yogini would fall in love with an indoor cat?” he asked.

  “What I like about photography,” Matt said as we waited for the cat on a park bench by the pond in the long afternoon shadows, “is the way it makes me pay attention to everything. It’s a lot like yoga, that way.” He held his camera in his lap, his fingers playing with the lens cap. “I mean, here we are, sitting here all day, just studying the movements of a cat. Our whole agenda suspended in favor of his. It’s incredibly intimate. I’m closer to that cat right now than I am to anyone in the world.”

  “Funny to think what a different day we’d be having if you were shooting a calendar about a woman who falls in love with a dog.” I picked up a tangerine and began to peel it. “We’d be tramping around through the bushes right now, finding dead things to sniff at. Or throwing a soggy tennis ball up and down a field.”

  “Well, to start with, I wouldn’t be spending the day with you. I’d have cast some other woman. You are definitely a cat person.”

  “I do like cats.” I pulled off a section of tangerine and popped it into my mouth. “There’s always something wild about them. You can’t entirely domesticate them.”

  “See? Perfect casting. You’re in love with him already.”

  “I don’t fall in love that easily.”

  He reached out and picked up my hand, began running his hands lightly over the knuckles. “Don’t worry. Neither do I.”

  That night we did the final shoot, me and the cat curled up together on the queen-sized loft bed in Matt’s studio apartment in the Mission, where we’d transported Bigfoot in a carrier baited with sautéed chicken livers. To create the effect of candlelight, Matt had hung lights all over the room, screened off in layers of translucent orange plastic—I was astounded at how much light it took to create the illusion of darkness. Just outside the frame, the fringes of the room were filled with rolls of duct tape, reflectors, extra gels. Matt shot in extreme close-up, the camera almost caressing my skin. Bigfoot lolled on the sheets, sated with liver into temporary quiescence.

  Looking back later, I found it hard to remember where the photos stopped and the sex began. Although it was our first time together, it was strangely familiar—the rush of our breath in each others ears, the perspiration on our skin, the musky body smell, the way we lay together afterward, spent, our bodies humming. It was almost as intimate as yoga class.

  “You really should go to India,” he told me, sometime past midnight. We were lying naked in a tangle of sheets, candlelight flickering on our skin. The candle was fixed to a plate on the floor next to his futon; an incense stick was stuck in the melted wax, the same sweet sandalwood we burned in class. “It would change your whole yoga practice.”

  “Tell me what it’s like,” I said, just to keep him talking. I wanted to keep him awake with me for as long as possible in this bubble of intimacy, before we collapsed into separate worlds of sleep and woke up in the glare of sunlight to the sour smell of each other’s breath and the awkward realization that we didn’t really know each other at all.

  “I’ll show you.” He rolled over, grabbed a folder off the floor, and began spilling pictures across the bed. I picked up one: a naked man with matted dreadlocks past his waist, covered with a film of gray powder. His forehead was marked with three orange vertical stripes. A garland of bones hung around his neck.

  “This is a sadhu,” M
att told me. “It’s a yogi who’s given up everything—his home, his family, even his name. See that gray powder all over his body? That’s ash from a funeral pyre.”

  “Why does he put it on himself?” I pulled the blankets tighter around my own naked breasts.

  “To remind himself that he’s going to die.” He pushed aside the sadhu and picked up another picture: a tree trunk festooned with orange silk. “And look—this is the Bodhi Tree. I meditated right in this spot, right where the Buddha himself got enlightened. This is an actual leaf from that tree.” He reached for a journal lying beside his bed and opened it carefully. Between the pages lay a heart-shaped leaf, dried to translucence, its veins as delicate as a spiderweb. He held it out to me, but I shook my head. I was afraid to touch something so fragile, even when it seemed to be freely offered.

  “You can lose yourself in India.” He propped himself up on one elbow and began lightly tracing the length of my spine with his fingertips, vertebra by vertebra. “You can become someone else.”

  That sounded good to me. I rolled toward him.

  MATT WAS RARELY in town for more than a few weeks at a time. He left for months at a stretch: Peru, Turkey, China, Indonesia. He’d come back burned brown from the sun, thin from bouts with foreign intestinal bugs, on fire with a new and consuming topic, and smelling of mosquito repellent, a smell that clung to his skin even after several showers. Even when we’d been lovers for years, we never moved in together. His place was too small, he told me, and it was true: just a one-room studio, a loft bed with his computer and camera equipment tucked underneath. After we made love, he’d go down there again and work late into the night, shaping his digital images, cropping them, highlighting them, polishing them until they were more real than reality itself.

  In bed with him, my body hummed with a pleasure so intense it was almost painful. His touch hooked up two loose wires inside me, and I was electrified. The more I had of him, the more I wanted; as if in the very act of satisfying my craving, he was carving a deeper and deeper pit of hunger inside me. He was never around long enough to qualify as a boyfriend, a term he said he hated anyway. “Putting labels on things destroys them,” he’d say. But he was never gone long enough for me to write him off. I continued to go out with other guys from time to time, though the relationships rarely went very far—no one could compete with the intensity of my memories of Matt. I assumed he had other lovers, too, though I never asked. For the most part, I was able to tolerate the yearning I felt for him as a kind of background music that threaded through my life. Its very unsatisfactoriness—the sense of always being a little hungry—was what marked it as love.

  “I love how nonattached we are,” Matt sometimes said. I’d nod: Nonattachment—wasn’t that what the spiritual path was supposed to be about? But sometimes when he said it, I’d see myself as an astronaut in a space suit, free-floating high above the green and blue earth, alone in a vast, empty sky.

  THE YOGA CLASS I was teaching was winding to a close. The morning light slanted through steamy window panes. The room reeked of sweat, of skin lotion, of intestinal gas, of vanilla candles. “Lie down on your backs and close your eyes,” I instructed my students, as I walked among them handing out silky eyebags stuffed with flaxseeds. “Let the weight of your body surrender into the embrace of gravity.”

  At the front of the room, I lay down with them in Savasana, or Corpse Pose—the little death at the end of practice that’s supposed to remind you how little control you ultimately have over anything. But my eyes wouldn’t close. I stared up at the squares of off-white acoustic tile, with a tea-colored stain directly overhead from the time the fire sprinklers went on accidentally when a teacher lit too much incense.

  I remembered those pictures of Matt’s spread out on my bed: the sadhu with the necklace of bone; the cows sleeping by the side of the road; the orange-wrapped Bodhi Tree. They were probably packed away in some storage cell—along with the monks at the Shaolin temple in Japan, the artic penguins flapping across the ice…and me, arched in a deep backbend, Bigfoot poised on my belly, his haunches gathered to leap off into space.

  The last time Matt and I had seen each other, three months ago, we’d had a terrible fight. I was in his apartment, watching him pack for another trip: to Alaska this time, to shoot a sled dog race. He was folding gray thermal long johns, rolling wool socks into balls. He was ignoring the telephone, which rang, insistently, every ten minutes—as if, I thought, someone were sitting on the other end of the line watching a clock and saying, In ten minutes you can try him again.

  “How long do you think you’ll be in Alaska?” I asked.

  “Probably just a month or so.” He stuffed a sleeping bag deep into its nylon sack.

  “And when you come back? How long will you be around before you leave again?”

  He slipped a glove onto his right hand, flexed the fingers experimentally, then pulled it off. “Actually, I’m not sure if I’ll come back here right away,” he said. “A friend offered me an apartment in London for a few months. I just have to take care of her fica plant and a couple of Pekinese.”

  Don’t ask. But I did. “What friend is that?”

  “Her name’s Cynthia. No one you know. Just someone I met when I was doing that dolphin shoot in Greece.”

  A sleek blonde in a thong bikini lies on a white sand beach, sipping a gin and tonic. I said nothing.

  Matt gave me a sideways grin. “Amanda. She’s twenty-five years older than me. She was the dolphin trainer. She really is just a friend.”

  “I’m sure she is. Otherwise you wouldn’t have mentioned her.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Is this an issue? Because there are some friends of yours I could grill you about.”

  The phone rang again, and the answering machine clicked on. I looked at Matt. “Go ahead. Turn up the volume. I dare you.”

  “Amanda. Stop it.”

  I walked over to the machine and slid the volume lever up to the top. A man’s voice came on: “…so anyway, if you want to pick up the memory card, it’ll be in the store behind the counter. Just give me a call when you’re coming over. See you.”

  “You see,” said Matt, flatly. He stepped to the phone and switched off the ringer. “Okay if I turn this off? Or do you want to keep monitoring my calls?”

  I sat down on the bed. “Oh Matt, I’m sorry. It’s just…It’s getting really hard to have you coming and going like this. I’m twenty-nine. We’ve been doing this for almost four years. Do we really want to go on living like college kids the rest of our lives?”

  “You’ve known from the time we met that my work is the most important thing in my life. It’s how I know I’m alive. It’s how I make a difference in the world. I’m not going to give it up for anyone, not even you.”

  “I’m not talking about giving anything up. I’m talking about adding something.”

  “So what exactly is it that you want me to add?”

  A diamond ring? My name tattooed on your belly? A promise you’ll be here tomorrow? I didn’t say anything.

  He sat down on the bed next to me. “Look. Maybe if you had something you cared about as much as I care about photography, you wouldn’t need me so badly.”

  “I do. I have my yoga practice.”

  “Great. So when you start feeling like this, why don’t you go stand on your head or something instead of getting on my case?”

  “Okay, fine.” I stood up. “There’s a class in a half an hour. See you when you get back from London.”

  “Oh, come on, Amanda.” He caught my hand and pulled me down again. “I’m sorry. That didn’t come out right.” He put his arm around me and pulled me close. “Look. I love you. You know that, right? There’s no one else I feel this way about.”

  “I know. I love you, too.” With his touch, I could feel the tight ball of anxiety in the center of my chest begin to relax. Maybe he was right; maybe I was making a big deal out of nothing. Maybe this was just another opportunity to let go of my a
ttachment. Yogis let go of all kinds of things: their clothes, their families, their houses, their past. Maybe my relationship with Matt was a kind of spiritual practice, the modern equivalent of sitting naked in a ring of fire under a blazing sun with a boulder balanced on your head. He kissed my neck and pulled me down onto the bed. My fear began to melt into the familiar dance of skin, hands, and mouth.

  With no ring to introduce it, the answering machine clicked on again: a woman’s voice, British, very young, choked with rage and tears, as close as if she were sitting on the foot of the bed, watching us. “Goddamn it, Matt. Where the hell are you? Why the fuck aren’t you calling me back?”

  I pulled away. Matt rolled on his back and looked at the ceiling.

  “Cynthia?” I asked.

  Matt didn’t look at me. “Cynthia’s daughter.”

  LYING ON MY back in Savasana, I could hear the hum of traffic from the street outside, the clang of a garbage truck backing up. In one corner, a student was gently snoring.

  How had my relationship with Matt gone so awry? Like my life, it had teetered on the brink of being something good, then diverged in such tiny increments that I couldn’t say exactly when it went off course. I had graduated from college poised for something big that was just about to happen. Suddenly I was almost thirty, and it hadn’t happened yet.

  I sat up and reached for the small Tibetan bell by my mat, ready to ring it and call my students back to the world again. I took a deep breath, willing my voice to be soothing and steady—as if I’d been lying there communing with my inner light, rather than communing with my screwed-up past.

  Enlightenment for Idiots. Maybe this book would be the magic portal to the life I really wanted.