“Uh-oh,” Becky says. “You are officially hooked! I can so tell! ”
“No way! Or maybe just a little. If you promise not to tell anyone . . . I dreamed I was doing poses last night. How sick is that? I used to dream about Hugh Jackman. And the worst thing is, when I woke up, I felt all off balance because I hadn’t done them on both sides.”
“Oh, my God. I’ve created a monster. I have never dreamed about yoga. Or about Hugh Jackman. Those tiny little eyes? No, thank you.”
For an awful long time now, Imani has been using her cynicism and irony as a shield. She’s been in enough therapy to know that. So it’s a little strange to her to be talking about this in such an earnest way. Not that she objects. A couple of days ago, she was in a class in which the teacher was talking about “letting go.” Nothing unusual there, since they all seem to talk about “letting go” at some point or other in class, at which point, Imani usually expects to hear a chorus of farts.
But that day, her defenses were so broken down from fifty minutes of going into poses, the words sank in in some way they hadn’t before. And she did let herself drop the tension in her muscles and sink into the floor, and she did think that if she could take this feeling with her somehow (“off the mat,” as they were always saying, another expression that had initially set her teeth on edge and now makes a lot of sense to her) her life would be better in some small but significant way.
“When does that movie start shooting?” Imani asks.
“Two weeks,” Becky tells her. “But there are a few readthroughs next week.”
“I’m losing my yoga friend!” Imani says. “What am I going to do?”
“It’s a temporary loss. Why don’t you start reading some scripts? You have the time. You don’t know when you might find one that’s really good. You have to get back on track.”
“Before I’m forgotten, you mean.”
“Look, we all run that risk. If you’re out of the public eye for more than ten minutes, you start to grow mold. It happens to everyone. Just begin. Don’t have any expectations; do as much as you can do.”
“It’s beginning to sound like conversasana.”
“Right. And you’re the one who started singing the praises of your chair pose. So use it. And listen, you don’t need me hauling you into yoga classes. I got a tweet last night about a class at the YogaHappens in Beverly Hills. Some hot teacher is giving a ‘Deep Flow’ Something or Other class. Everyone’s talking about it. You should go.”
“I’ll take it into consideration,” Imani says. “As long as I don’t get my back knocked out of joint.”
“The teacher is a woman. And the whole thing is described as a journey . . . oh, I don’t know . . just go. I’ll send you the link. And remember to book it in advance. It’s definitely going to sell out. There’s a huge amount of buzz.”
Stephanie heard about Lee’s class at YogaHappens from Graciela. Graciela and Katherine are going together to support Lee since she’s a little nervous about the class. New studio, high stakes, Beverly Hills, all that. It strikes Stephanie as a little odd that Lee never mentioned it during any of the classes she’s been attending at Edendale, but then, she might not want to give business to a competing studio.
Ever since that day, Graciela has been calling Stephanie pretty much on a daily basis, usually with some little piece of news or some question that is clearly an excuse to check up on her. Not that Stephanie minds. She appreciates the attention, and in a way, it makes her feel less ostracized by the events of that day, as if it’s just one more mistake that no one is going to forget but everyone is going to get past.
On the whole, Stephanie has been doing amazingly well at getting past things in the last few weeks. Past the shame, past the anxiety, and past the little waves of desire for a drink that occasionally wash over her. True to her word, Sybille Brent cut her a check for writing a draft of the screenplay, and so, for the moment, Stephanie’s life has fallen into a nice, simple, well-funded rhythm. Up at dawn, write for two hours at the table in her newly spotless living room, yoga class at her gym, writing and lunch in a funky hamburger joint around the corner from her apartment, drive up to Silver Lake and take another yoga class with Lee. Coffee and a little more writing, if she has the drive. And then, turning in early with a book.
She has a rough draft of the first act of the screenplay, and she’s ready to dig into the second. Within a month, she should have the whole thing completed, assuming she can keep everything together. As for buying the author out of the option to do the screenplay himself, Stephanie is letting Sybille’s lawyers handle that. At the start of every yoga class, Lee advises her students to “choose an intention.” In the past, Stephanie pretty much skipped over this one. Her intention was always to get through the class with a minimum number of times taking child’s pose and not too many memories of Preston and how pissed off she still was at him. But now, she breathes into a few new mantras: It is what it is. . . . One day at a time. . . . and Don’t micromanage. Nothing terribly original, but all surprisingly effective.
She meets Graciela and Katherine at a juice bar down the street from the YogaHappens studio. She has the same reaction to seeing them she always has—a muted happiness that feels real and consistent (she’s never not happy to see them, even on that day) but is somehow limited to their shared experience of yoga classes. It’s not as if she has a whole lot in common with either one of them, and it’s hard to imagine she’d be friends with someone like Katherine under any other circumstances. But there’s something about being in a room with these women and breathing in unison with them and struggling with the same shared physical challenges that makes her feel connected. It doesn’t matter that both of them are more skilled practitioners. There are at least a couple of poses she knows she does as well as anyone else, and the rest she’s working on. Everyone has at least one pose, as Lee often reminds them, meaning that in a ninety-minute class, there’s at least one moment of expertise, even if it’s corpse pose.
She gets her juice and joins them at their table and decides to ask Katherine a question that’s been bothering her since she first heard about this.
“Why is Lee teaching a class here? What I heard is that everybody gets exclusive contracts at this studio. So is she thinking about giving up Edendale?”
“Oh, come on,” Graciela says. “Lee wouldn’t do that. It’s her place. I mean, look how full her classes are. She’s got to be doing okay.”
They both look at Katherine, who, Stephanie thinks, is keeping suspiciously quiet. Katherine has on a vintage yellow sundress that would look totally ridiculous on anyone but her, with her big, round eyes and the notes of irony and hard experience implicit in the punky haircut and the tattoos.
“Well?” Graciela says.
“It’s not so simple,” Katherine says. “Lee has a big following, but there’s a lot of overhead. If a couple of classes are light, it hurts. And she’s always offering a sliding scale or coming up with some way to let someone take classes for free.”
“Now I’m feeling guilty,” Graciela says. “All that help she gave me leading up to the audition.”
“Don’t feel guilty, honey. That’s what she loves. It’s what gives her the most pleasure. It just doesn’t pay the bills. Two kids? Alan off doing whatever.”
Stephanie lets this new information sink in and then says, “So it sounds to me like she is thinking about closing Edendale. We’re going to find out anyway, Kat.”
“You have to ask her. But do you know how much health insurance costs? For four of them? And let’s say you’re right. It’s just a change of venue.”
Stephanie is getting a bad feeling about this. She’s never been great with change and the thought of losing the anchor of Lee’s classes at the homey studio in Silver Lake makes her feel slightly ill. On the other hand, if Lee has always been there for her, she owes it to her to keep her best interests in mind rather than her own selfish interests. Maybe she’ll stay open until she’s finished t
he screenplay and landed on completely solid sobriety.
“True. We could always come to her classes here,” Graciela says.
“It’s a little steep,” Katherine warns.
“I have to admit,” Stephanie says, “that I hate chains. Book-stores, grocery stores, pet stores, movie theaters. Now yoga studios? A few years ago, it would have been a joke—a chain of yoga studios running the little guys out of business.” It’s partly what’s happening in the movie business, too—all the money going to the top and less and less for the independents and the middle rung. Even all those supposedly independent and small production companies are now just subsidiaries of the big guys. But everyone has a right to make their own deal, and if she’d gotten an offer from Paramount, it isn’t like she’d have had to sleep on it before snatching it.
When it’s time to hit the road, they hitch their mats up to their shoulders and head out. Katherine seems quieter than usual, and Stephanie’s tempted to ask. But she’s one of those people who have a low privacy fence built around themselves, and there are a lot of subjects you don’t bring up and questions you don’t pose. It’s easier to gossip about Graciela’s good news and speculate on how close she is to getting the role in the video.
When they get to the YogaHappens Experience Center, all conversation stops.
“Jesus,” Stephanie says.
The building is set impossibly far from the street, with a rosewood walkway leading to it, covered by a trellis with an orange trumpet vine woven into it. Stepping under the trellis feels like entering a magic kingdom. By the time you get to the front door, you already feel as if the traffic and noise of the street are fading into irrelevance. There’s a soft sound of trickling water that Stephanie assumes is piped in on speakers, until she sees that the wall of the building beside the front door has been covered with what appears to be corrugated copper with water trickling down over it. Impressive, even if you’re determined not to be impressed.
The inside of the studio feels even more serene, with faint chanting sounding from an invisible speaker system. It looks like a cosseted, wood-paneled spa, and there’s a smell in the air like . . . she’s not sure; honey and lavender are what come to mind immediately.
Graciela is clearly wowed, and even Stephanie has to admit it’s spectacular. Katherine, on the other hand, seems mostly focused on finding Lee among the crowd of people lined up at the front desk. So far, no sign.
“Do you think that can be right? ” Graciela asks, reading from a pamphlet. “Individual classes are thirty-five dollars?”
“That’s what it costs,” Katherine tells her. “But it includes unlimited use of the sauna, in case you have unlimited time on your hands, which you probably do if you have unlimited funds and can pay thirty-five dollars for a single yoga class.”
They get checked in and go to change in the glass and marble locker rooms, which look like something out of a Roman bath as reimagined by a Vegas decorator. Stephanie would love to see the balance sheet on this place. It doesn’t seem possible that they could be turning a real profit, despite the mob of attractive young women wandering from the sauna to the showers draped in terry cloth robes supplied by the studio. The Italian bath gels and moisturizers are from a company Stephanie has read about in style magazines but has never felt self-indulgent enough to actually purchase. Too bad she didn’t bring a little travel bottle she could pump a sample into before leaving.
The receptionist proudly told them that there are between five and six classes going on simultaneously from six in the morning until ten at night, so maybe it’s purely an issue of volume.
“And on Fridays we have a midnight ‘Hour of Power Chill’—a heated class done to ambient chill and deep house music. And soon we’ll be having live music supplied by a master harmonium player—Panjit Alan. After the Chill class, there’s a champagne bar in the Karma Lounge.”
“I quit drinking at just the wrong moment,” Stephanie said to Graciela.
“Sparkling cider is also available,” the receptionist, paid to be helpful no matter what, put in.
It all sounds too silly to be believed, even if there’s something appealing, too, about all the pampering.
When the three of them step out of the locker room, Katherine puts her hand on Stephanie’s arm and says, “Isn’t that Imani Lang?”
The mention of the name, which Stephanie had been bandying about a few weeks ago when she was pitching her movie, gives her a little pang of regret mixed with excitement. She’s been hoping Imani would turn up again at a yoga class, but she never appeared. Now here she is, curled up in the corner of an orange cushioned banquette built into the wall, talking quietly into her cell phone, dressed in the creamy V-necked yoga top Stephanie was coveting at Lululemon only last week.
“Has she ever come back to Lee’s studio?” Stephanie asks.
“Not that I know of,” Katherine says. “Come over with me.”
Imani puts away her phone as soon as she sees Katherine, springs up off the banquette, and gives her a hug. “My Silver Lake savior,” she says. Like a lot of successful actresses Stephanie has met, Imani has a way of sounding sincere while at the same time seeming to project loudly enough to be heard by the small audience of adoring fans she knows are watching.
“Savior’s a little exaggerated,” Katherine says, “but I’ll take it. You remember Stephanie?”
Imani gives Stephanie a relatively cool hello, and Stephanie reminds herself that, sometimes, coming on too strong too quickly can backfire. She’s been getting better at holding back a little and not trying to impress or make an impact right out of the gate. Don’t force it, Lee tells them in class. Let the pose blossom.
Stephanie introduces Graciela, and then says, “You never came back to Edendale. We’ve missed you.”
“I keep meaning to. I’ve been making the rounds of a lot of studios with a friend.”
“I saw a picture of you and Becky Antrim on TMZ,” Graciela says. She’s just sweet and innocent enough to get away with making this kind of comment about a gossip site and not have it sound insulting or invasive. “You both looked gorgeous. At a workshop in Santa Monica, I guess it was.”
“The less said about that the better,” Imani tells her. “Becky’s the one who told me about a class here today. Deep Flow Something.” She shrugs. “I’m way better than I used to be, I can tell you that.”
“It’s Lee’s class,” Katherine says. “That’s why we came. You didn’t know? You’ll see how good she is, now that you have other teachers to compare her with.”
At the door to the studio, they’re stopped by an attendant, a slim man with a ponytail, gorgeous shoulders, and a smile that’s somewhere between beatific and Jaws. “You’ll be happy to hear,” he says, “that you won’t need your mats. Everything’s supplied!”
Stephanie peers over his shoulder, and indeed, there are mats spread out across the floor of the vast studio, a few different shades of orange arranged in a carefully composed pattern, like a rubber mosaic. The lighting is low, with little bulbs twinkling on the ceiling, a constellation of distant stars. How pretty and how irritatingly perfect.
“When you say we’ll be happy to hear we won’t need our mats,” Stephanie says, “I assume that means we can’t use them? ”
“It is a policy,” the attendant says.
“How do I know who’s used the mat before me?” Imani asks.
“They’re individually sanitized every night,” he says, “with organic witch hazel and orange peel extract. And then treated with ultraviolet light. And by the way, I’m a big fan, Miss Lang. Oh, and we’d like to encourage you not to bring plastic water bottles into the studio. We sell reusable metal YogaHappens containers out front. They’re coordinated with the color scheme of the studios.”
“Maybe next time,” Imani says.
“Certainly,” the attendant says. “And if you don’t want to use them today, I’ll be happy to keep your plastic bottles here until after the class. We can label them
with your names.”
Stephanie would find the whole thing less annoying if they just came right out and confiscated their forbidden supplies and tossed them in a barrel, as they do at airport security. The rehearsed quality of this polite phrasing is insulting. And she hates being told what will make her happy, especially since using her own mat and drinking from her own plastic (!) water bottle is what would please her most right now.
“How much are the bottles?” Graciela asks.
“Forty-two dollars,” he says. “But there’s unlimited filtered water throughout the Experience Center at no charge, and you get a coupon for a complimentary organic Himalayan kombucha tea—or a cappuccino—in the Karma Lounge.”
Between the champagne and the cappuccino, the Karma Lounge is starting to sound like a pretty spicy spot. Next they’ll be crowing about their ice cream sundaes and roast beef sandwiches.
“We’re expecting a full class today, so you ladies might want to go in and choose your practice zone.”
“Is Lee here yet?” Katherine asks. “The teacher?”
The attendant gives her a grin that’s supposed to be friendly, but looks to Stephanie as if he’s letting Katherine know she’s just one of the insignificant little people and shouldn’t even be asking about the star.
“I’m sure she’s in the greenroom, focusing. If you’d like to send her a message, I’d be happy to find someone to deliver it.”
“That’s okay,” Katherine says. “I’ve got my eye on a particular mat and I don’t want to get zoned out of my zone.”
“Greenroom? ” Imani says as they walk in. “I am so in the wrong profession.”
The greenroom is not, of course, green but a faint shade of salmon that goes with the burnished orange tones of the rest of the studio. Lee finds all the coordinated colors incredibly restful, which is probably the point. She and Alan decorated their studio using intuition and, it’s true, some flooring and discontinued paint colors they got a good deal on. It hadn’t occurred to her that they might hire a decorator or a feng shui consultant, not that that would have been an option anyway. But everything here is planned down to the smallest detail. It feels a little manufactured, but there’s something reassuring about it, too.
Tales from the Yoga Studio Page 17