Tales from the Yoga Studio (24 page)

By the time she and Phil walk up to the house, it's dark out, and the lights of the city down below are spread out like a glowing blanket. She always leaves a light on, so when she comes home, the shingled cottage has the same magical welcoming feel it did when she first saw it. She pushes her bike across the walkway, with Phil behind, and locks it to the railing. She should probably bring it inside, but it's hidden from the street by the leaves of an overgrown bird of paradise, and it's just easier.

“I forgot how sweet this place is,” Phil says, peering over the side of the walkway to the steep hillside below.

“It is that,” Katherine tells him.

Technically, there's no way she should be able to afford the rent on a place like this. But the house was owned by a divorced woman in her late fifties who died of breast cancer, and it's tangled up in the messy settlement of her estate. The woman's son is renting it to her and gave her a deal because he thinks she's hot (he lives in Los Feliz and comes around unannounced every once in a while to check up on her in the hopes, she suspects, of catching her sunbathing) and, more to the point, because she agreed to rent it without a lease, furnished, with the understanding that she might have to move out with no more than a week or two notice.

Despite falling in love, Katherine came close to not renting it. She didn't want to fall in love with a place she was destined to lose, and on top of that, it seemed a little too spacious and wonderful for . . . well, for her. The kind of place that probably ought to go to a nice couple, maybe with a kid. Or maybe two gay guys with great taste and a well-behaved dog. Not to
her
, in any case.

Lee was the one who talked her into taking it, and for the past two years, the house has been one of the great sources of consolation in Katherine's life.

“Yo,” Phil says when she turns on the light in the living room. “You've done some big cleaning in here.”

“Not really. Just no boyfriends coming around to mess things up.”

After she kicked Phil out of her life, she
did
do some cleaning. Some
big
cleaning. She actually unpacked more than she had in all the time she'd been in the house until then. She rearranged the furniture and put some of the pieces she didn't like into storage. She uncluttered it and made it feel like home. Her home. She even bought a sewing machine (thirty-seven dollars on Craigslist) and made curtains for her bedroom. Who knew she hadn't completely obliterated everything her grandmother had taught her about sewing back in that previous life of hers? Once she decided to stop courting disaster with a series of bad boyfriends—Phil, for example?—she discovered she loved having everything orderly and clean, the counters spotless and the huge windows with a view of the reservoir sparkling. And not because she's expecting anyone to show up to inspect the place, but because that's how
she
likes it.

“Have anything to drink?” Phil asks.

“Water, juice, and, if you make it yourself, coffee.”

“That's it?”

“Sorry. I finished the last of the milk with my Cheerios this morning.”

“Oh, I get it. Still on the wagon.”

“I'm an addict, Phil, and yeah, aside from the very occasional joint, I'm happy to say I've been sober for two years now. Your move to Seattle didn't send me rushing for bad stuff.”

“Jesus, Katherine,” Phil says. “I know you think I'm a big loser, but don't pretend you're not happy to see me. Just a little bit?” He sidles over to her and presses himself against her suggestively. “Just a little bit? Not Romeo and Juliet, but we had a few good times, didn't we?”

For her, the “good times” they had together served pretty much the same function as the drugs—a way to numb out any thoughts or feelings she didn't care to deal with. And one or two hours of Phil's lean and hungry charms, if you could call them charms, certainly did make it near impossible to think of anything else. It was when she realized she actually could deal with the feelings, live through them and get past them, without any substances or distractions, that she stopped returning Phil's calls.

So what does it mean that she actually invited him here tonight?

“You look so fucking good in this skirt,” he says, sliding it up higher and running his hands up her thighs. “Oh, man, I forgot how smooth your legs are. Silk,” he whispers into her ear.

Katherine's a big girl and she knew what she was getting into, but she didn't exactly know how she'd feel about it when she got it. She backs away from him a little and says, “Speaking of cleaning up, Phil, I've got some towels in the closet outside the bathroom just in case you want a shower.”

He lifts his arm up and sniffs. “Got a little sweaty walking up here, huh? I thought you liked that.”

“Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't.”

She leads him toward the bathroom, past the guest room that she's emptied of furniture altogether and made into a little yoga and meditation room. Her mat is in the middle of the room and there are some pillows against the wall. She's in here every morning when the sun comes through the windows and warms up the floor.

Phil struts into the room and stands on the mat, folds his hands into an approximation of prayer. “
Namaste
, baby,” he says.

“Don't, Phil. Just don't.”

“Hey, what? Am I insulting your spiritual trip? I thought fucking was your religion.”

He lifts up his right foot, trying for something like tree pose, and falls out. Not pretty. It looks kind of pathetic, really.

“To hell with it,” he says.

When he's in the shower, Katherine faces it head-on. Having him come to the house is more or less the same thing as using again. Go numb, don't deal with it, block it out. She shouldn't have lit up the joint, either. It was all part of the little pity party she's been throwing for herself the past couple of weeks. Poor Katherine can't deal with a little accusation of financial misdemeanor. Can't deal with a decent, respectable guy showing some interest. Can't face the possibility that he might disappoint her or, way, way worse, that she might disappoint him. She didn't really think he'd hook up with Graciela, but seeing them together made her realize he belonged with someone like her, some sweet girl he could bring home to his family, someone who was guaranteed not to have any skeletons popping out of her closet or showing up in her shower at the most inconvenient times.

Except really, brushing off Conor is just the coward's way out. The
old
Katherine's way of dealing with things. Or not dealing. Trying to control everything when in fact she's just being out of control in a different way. And it isn't as if she's been able to get him out of her mind anyway.

She goes into her meditation room and looks out at the lights of the city, benign and gentle from up here. All those people going about their lives, making their own mistakes, angry or happy or lonely. Funny how there's really only one person she wants to be with right now, and he isn't in the shower. She pulls her phone out of the pocket of her skirt. At least she didn't delete his number. She'll call. She'll be a grown-up. As soon as she gets rid of Phil.

He comes out into the living room, conspicuously naked except for the towel he's using to dry his hair. “Great shampoo. Tea tree or some shit like that?”

“Phil,” she says. She takes the towel out of his hands and wraps it around his waist. “I don't know how to say this to you, but . . .”

“Aw, fuck me! Are you gonna tell me I came all the way up here for nothing?”

“I'm sorry. It's been kind of a strange year for me, and I'm trying to keep myself together.”

“Spare me the therapy session, okay? You really are messed up, Kat, you know that?”

“I do know that, Phil. But I'm working on it.”

“Whoopee shit.”

“Your clothes in the bathroom?”

“Yeah. ‘Here's the door, what's your hurry.' You could at least suggest we watch TV.”

“I don't have one.”

“What a bitch.”

She knew they'd get back to that sooner or later.

“You owe me, Kat. I'm taking the rest of that fucking shampoo. It's the least you can do.”

When he goes back into the bathroom, Katherine hears footsteps on the walkway outside. And then her bell. Lee sometimes drops over at this hour, on her way from the studio.

Except it isn't Lee, it's Conor. Not his usual grinning self, but stern in the yellow glow of the light beside the door. Katherine feels a wave of calm disappointment wash over her. She has the worst timing in the world. It's always been this way. Maybe she could dash out of the house with Conor. But no, that wouldn't work.

“Mr. Ross,” Katherine says, resigned to the disaster about to occur. “Passing through the neighborhood?”

“I just saw Graciela,” he says. “Since you wouldn't return my calls. To try and figure out what happened here. Are you going to let me in?”

“Let me call you tomorrow,” Katherine says. “It's not the best moment.”

“Come on, Brodski. Let's get this settled.”

That's when Phil walks up behind her, hair wet, shirtless, holding the bottle of shampoo. “Not tea tree,” he says. “It's black fucking walnuts. Who's this guy?”

“I rang the wrong bell,” Conor says.

L
ee has never had the teaching equivalent of stage fright. She's never lost her place in front of a class or found herself wondering what it was she wanted to say. Still, she feels a mild, low-grade anxiety about her upcoming class at YogaHappens. It will be the first time in a long time she's given a class off her own turf and the first time in a very long time when she will be, she knows, evaluated as she goes along.

She's made detailed notes on the flow she wants to use, the physical focus of the class, and the way she wants to introduce a short, deep meditation. But somehow it all feels forced and false to her, and sitting at the table in her dining room, with the kids wrestling in front of the television, she keeps tearing up her notes.

Lee was twenty-four the very first time she took a yoga class. She was living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in a rambling prewar apartment that was officially rented to someone who hadn't lived there in almost a decade. There were four bedrooms—five if you included the little maid's room in back that was about the size of a closet—and eight people sharing the place. They deposited their rent checks into the account of a woman who, rumor had it, was living in Berlin and was supporting herself largely on the profits of the sublet. One bedroom was shared by a girl whose name Lee can't remember and a guy the girl barely knew. He worked nights and she worked days and the two roommates rarely crossed paths, even in the kitchen. Someone lived on the sofa in the living room, and there were usually two or three people visiting from out of town who overstayed their welcomes and had to be asked to leave.

Initially, none of the discomforts of the place (there were only two bathrooms, for starters) had mattered to Lee. Her life, her real life, was lived in the lecture halls and on the floor of the hospital where she had labs and volunteered so she would get more exposure to patients. Everything else she did was preparation and study for those classes or recovery from the rigors of sleepless nights related to them. What did she care about how long she had to wait to get into the bathroom or how little room there was in the refrigerator? She had never felt quite so alive or quite so clear about where she was heading. She'd been dreaming of becoming a doctor since she was a kid, and she had buried herself in premed classes for most of the time she was an undergrad at Wesleyan University. Even the constant headaches and the stomach problems related to all the studying she was doing in med school didn't bother her. It was all in the service of something that mattered deeply to future goals.

But somewhere in her second year at Columbia Medical, something began to change. All the praise she'd received her whole life for her studies began to be meaningless to her. She was turned off, nearly repulsed, at the way the human body seemed to be reduced more and more to chemistry and science, with less emphasis on human beings, on whole human beings, on
people
. Healing was a completely fragmented study here, in which specialties had to be chosen and referrals made to other specialists, until all sense of a person and a life was lost. The doctors she met kept talking about the pressure to reduce their time with patients, to run the minimum number of tests, prescribe something, and be done with it.

It all seemed so far removed from what she'd been planning for her whole life, she began to feel completely lost. The magical world of the classes and rounds began to feel like protracted torment. For the first time in her life, she began skipping lectures. She started smoking, and, with a combination of confusion and despair, more or less stopped eating. What was the point?