Tales from the Yoga Studio (31 page)

F
or the past week or so Katherine has been trying to convince herself that, ultimately, Lee will not leave Edendale, no matter how much financial sense it makes for her to sign a contract with YogaHappens. Once you hack your way through the saunas and the towels and the frills, the corporate feeling of the place is downright creepy. And in her own quiet way, Lee has always had a rebellious streak. When she comes into work first thing on Monday morning and tells Katherine she wants to talk with her in her office, Katherine is fully expecting her to say that she's changed her mind and has sent the men from YogaHappens back where they belong.

“I wanted to tell you first,” Lee says.

“Okay.”

“I've signed the contract with YogaHappens.”

Surprisingly, Katherine feels numb. Probably, underneath her hopes, this is exactly what Katherine knew was coming. She looks at Lee and doesn't say anything.

“I know you don't approve. . . .”

“It's not up to me to approve or not, Lee. You've made that clear.”

“Don't make it sound so cut-and-dried.”

“Well, isn't it?”

“If it were up to me, I would have thrown them out the minute they approached me. You know that.”

“To be honest with you, I'm not sure I do. And I suppose it isn't really any of my business, but if it isn't ‘up to you,' who is it up to? It's your business. It's your life.”

“I can't make unilateral decisions, Kat. I've got the kids. I've got Alan.”

Alan. There's a joke. The idea that Alan might make a decision that in any way took Lee into consideration, or anyone other than himself, is completely far-fetched.

“And please don't look at me like that. Alan's going to be moving back in.”

The only good thing that Katherine can see in this little announcement is that Lee doesn't make it with any particular joy in her voice. She just reports it as if it's a simple business plan, which may be exactly what it is.

“When was that decided?”

“We went over everything, we went out to dinner, I signed the contract, and then . . . we decided.”

Katherine can tell from the look on Lee's face and the oddly apologetic tone in her voice how this went down.
Oh, Lee
, she wants to say,
please don't do this.
Alan basically blackmailed her into signing with the promise of returning home. Katherine hears music and looks out of the office door and into the yoga room, where Barrett is practicing with one of the interns. Hearing Lee's news makes Katherine happier than ever that, whatever mistakes she's made and continues to make, at least she isn't basing all of her choices on a man.

“If it's what you want, Lee, then it's probably for the best.”

“We need to talk about you, too. Since we won't be using the studio anymore, we're probably going to sell the building. It isn't the best time, but Alan and I don't feel like being landlords.”

There's a little voice inside Katherine advising her to tell Lee what she knows. It only seems fair, after all. But the last thing she needs is to complicate her own life. And besides that, the messenger always gets blamed.

“I probably wouldn't want to be one myself,” Katherine says. “It's tough enough
having
a landlord.”

“I've talked to a real estate agent, and there's a building about two blocks from here with an office that would be ideal for you. They've been trying to lease it for a while, so I'm guessing they'd negotiate on the rent. It's close to the fire station. I don't know if that would be awkward or not.”

“There's no reason it would. Conor's stint in Silver Lake is up. He's in a different part of the city altogether.”

“Where? ”

“I didn't ask.” She can't blame Conor for turning off like he did when he saw Phil at her house. But it would have been nice if he'd waited a couple of days and then called her and asked her to explain herself. Not that that would have been perfect, either. Katherine hates people who fuck up and then ladle out bowl after bowl of excuses, and she's never been able to dish out explanations in that way, even when she knows she's in the right. Conor had his heart broken once. He's protecting himself. She knows about trying to spare yourself more pain—even if doing so hurts like hell.

Katherine gets up to leave, but she doesn't want to walk out of Lee's office with this bad feeling hanging in the air. She turns to Lee and says, “I won't stay upset about this for long. I promise. I owe you everything, Lee. My life, when you come down to it. So if this is what you've decided, I hope it works out the way you want.”

She can see into the yoga room, where Barrett and the intern are taking turns spotting each other as they do flips. Barrett is wearing a girly little T-shirt and her hair in pigtails. Katherine wonders if she's heard the news that Alan is moving back in with Lee, and if so, how she feels about
that.

I
mani is sitting beside her pool watching Glenn swim laps in his green Speedo, a bathing suit that manages to be both sexy and nerdy at once. She's bought him different kinds of swimsuits—and suggested he just go in without one—but he picked up the habit of wearing Speedos on the swim team at Dartmouth and he's not about to give it up. It obviously recalls his athletic glory days and makes him swim a little more aggressively. Dartmouth College. It couldn't be more perfect.

If Imani had been able to go into a laboratory and assemble the pieces of her Ideal Man, she would have ended up with a guy who was, in every possible way, shape, and form, absolutely
nothing
like her husband. Where to begin? It might be easiest to start with “A.”

Age:
Glenn is forty-three, which makes him sixteen years older than her. She'd never really paid attention to the age of her boyfriends, mostly because all the men she went out with had always been within sight of her own age at the time. When she had thought about such things, she'd thought there was something marginally creepy about women who went out with men a good deal older than them. Like, why not just wear a sandwich board advertising your unresolved father issues?

Height:
At six foot three, Glenn is officially in the too-tall category in her book, almost a full foot taller than her and looming above her whenever they appear in photos together. She knows this is supposed to be sexy and signify masculinity and power and—let's be honest—a big dick, but she was always drawn to guys under six feet, the ones with the compact little soccer-player bodies, the perfect round little butts. It's more convenient that way—you can kiss them without having to ask to have the draw-bridge lowered. And the proportions of their bodies work better aesthetically, are almost always more the Greek ideal.

Weight:
Glenn is, by almost any standard, skinny. She's not into chubby, but guys who can wolf down anything they want as often as they want without ever gaining a pound are annoying and inconsiderate and make
you
look fatter. There's a reason von Sternberg surrounded Dietrich with plump actresses in
The Blue Angel.

Profession:
God knows Imani never wanted to marry an actor. She's dated her share of that breed. If they're less successful than you, it's an impossible and doomed situation, and if they're more successful than you, you can't trust them, and it's equally impossible and doomed, just in a different way. But a pediatric surgeon? She usually preferred to date men she thought weren't
quite
as smart as she is. Always best to have the upper hand there.

Race:
Let's just say that even though black men are, on the whole, a
pain in the ass
, usually carrying around a chip on their shoulders and pathologically commitmentphobic, she has to admit she's always melted under the gaze of a brother's big brown eyes. All that warm, open, steamy sensuality. And, mostly, just an immediate feeling of a connection and shared larger experience, no matter how different their backgrounds. Not exactly what she feels with a WASP from Columbus, Ohio.

More? Oh, how about the fact that the guy doesn't watch TV, not counting a few playoff sporting events? Or that he likes (she can barely bring herself to say the name) Jimmy Buffett?

But why go on? The truth is, nothing about their relationship makes sense in eHarmony terms, and yet everything works. She just plain old
adores
the guy, and being married to him has made her feel as if her life is right on every level. Maybe for the first time ever.

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.