Downward Dog

by Edward Vilga

  “Well, as I was saying, we had had quite a bit to drink, and when it came time to leave the hotel, Gloria informed me that she’d actually taken the liberty to reserve a suite at the Mandarin.”

  I realize that I’ve gotten my metaphor wrong. Andrew doesn’t belong in a locker room; with him lying on his back and me sitting off to the side, listening to him confess and share, he’s positioned me as his yoga therapist.

  “So, now she wants to see me again,” he continues. “And I just don’t know. They all get so needy, if you know what I mean. And even when they don’t become needy or dependent, sometimes it’s even worse when they start telling you things like you’re the only man who’s made them come in fifteen years.” Again, I mutter agreement, although fifteen years ago most of the women I now cavort with were nine years old. “I feel so bad for them when they say things like that, that it feels cruel not to sleep with them a few more times. You know, just so they don’t have to live like that.”

  Knowing Danielle’s and Brooke’s penchant for championing charitable causes, perhaps Andrew should enlist them to organize his own: The Foundation for the Preservation of High Society Climax? The Metropolitan Fund for Coming Together? Orgasms Without Borders?

  “Honestly, when a woman tells me how unsatisfying her love life has been for the past two decades—married to some putz who can’t tell a convertible bond from a clitoris—and now suddenly she’s divorced, on the market again, and desperately worried she’s over the hill … well, it breaks my heart each time.”

  “So, essentially you’re merely demonstrating empathy by fucking them?” I want to ask. Instead, I reply, “I can understand that,” surprising myself with my pseudo-therapist’s detachment.

  But the funny thing is that I do actually understand that Andrew’s being truthful here. It’s not the whole picture—this guy’s appetite for sex must clearly rival his passion for making money—yet, I can tell he’s being sincere when he says he’s moved by Gloria’s plight. Incidentally, that’s not all he’s moved by: It turns out she really is very hot. At one point in recounting his sexcapade, he tells me about her breasts, and then remembering, directs me across the room to an issue of W that Danielle has lying about. There’s a photo of Gloria at some art gallery opening. She’s like a Latin Susan Sarandon—great body, upscale, of undefinable age, seemingly forever desirable.

  After a few more restorative shapes—I realize I can’t leave Andrew in any of them for too long because he’s too stiff and the shapes are too potent—I’m hoping to get at least one standing pose from him: our grand finale, Tree Pose.

  In a way, it seems like standing on one leg should be child’s play. You focus just a little bit on your balance and simply lift the other leg into the shape.

  Andrew, however, shakes and wobbles. I modify the pose—suggesting that he be less ambitious and keep the lifted leg lower—but even that doesn’t improve things much. His arms spring wide out and to the sides as though he were walking a tightrope between skyscrapers, not lifting one foot an inch and a half above the ground.

  We try it on the other side, and like many people, when he’s doing it on his left, nondominant leg (he’s a rightie), it’s even more unsteady.

  This is a pose I thought he could do—frankly, I thought anyone could do it, at least a little—but it’s beyond his range of coordination and concentration. Worse than the vague, unsteady approximation of the shape is the fact that it’s made Andrew frustrated. Rather than having the poses open up his body, I feel like I’ve added another item to his list of problems.

  Andrew’s interrupted by a phone call. As always, he takes it.

  I can tell it’s Gloria calling. His voice becomes muted and flat, not so much for my sake—he’s told me everything already and will tell me everything that follows—but more so she can understand that he’s not exactly thrilled about getting this call at home.

  He hangs up in a moment, sighs heavily, and has the most heartfelt hangdog expression on his face when he asks me, “Kid, what am I going to do?”

  Honestly, I have no idea.

  HALF MOON POSE

  (Ardha Chandrasana)

  The word “half” is rarely used in a positive sense. Typically, it describes something that hasn’t fully arrived, as in half empty, halfhearted, half-assed. Half Moon Pose—Ardha Chandrasana—however, is fantastic.

  One foot stays on the ground; the other rises up and lifts off. At the same time, one hand stays on the ground, and the other reaches straight up to the sky.

  The challenge is the balance, particularly when you try to spin open the chest fully. You’re half on the ground and half off, and that’s a provocative place to be.

  Yet, after I nailed this pose, it always feels like floating free, half of me flying and half of me grounded. That degree of balance, however, is very hard to find off the mat. In life, it’s pretty much impossible to sustain.

  You feel like you’re soaring for about one minute, secretly knowing you don’t have the balancing skills yet and that sooner, rather than later, you’re going to fall. But for a few spectacular moments, you’re flying high.

  Right away, Shane gets another gig from that brunch, and once again, Hutch and I are roped into service. This time, however, with a bigger budget and a little more restraint, Shane actually manages to make a profit.

  At the end of the night, she’s beaming when she hands me and Hutch $100 each.

  “You don’t have to,” I insist, but Hutch doesn’t hesitate for a second. Grabbing the bills and stuffing them in his pocket, he picks up the empty coolers to transport back to Shane’s. “Come on you two. Drinks on me!” he says.

  Later that night, with the three of us hanging out and then joined by other friends, I tell Shane again for the fifteenth time how great a job she did that night. I’m a couple drinks into the evening, but I’m still totally clearheaded when I tell her that someday soon, when I open my own place, she should definitely be the chef.

  “Here’s to someday, then,” she says, clicking glasses with me.

  “Someday soon,” I correct, smiling back at her. “And just so you’re ready.”

  For a while now, I’ve been searching for the perfect gift for Shane. I want to give her something specific and rare that I know she’ll love. So for month, I’ve been scouring eBay for a copy of a first edition of Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire, a culinary classic I know she reveres. Finally, I found one, and even though it took most of a week’s salary, I knew I had to have it for her. And now’s the time.

  Opening her gift, for a rare moment, Shane is actually speechless. When she recovers, she’s still dazzled. “I’ve wanted this since I was ten!”

  “And now it’s yours.”

  Simultaneously, I realize that gifting someone like Shane the perfect gift is something I’ve wanted just as much, if not more, than her desire for a dusty first edition.

  Chapter 8

  For lesson two, Phoebe opens the door for me herself. Expecting her maid, I find myself smiling. She returns the smile, perhaps a hair too broadly.

  “It’s nice to see you,” comes out of me. Not that strange a remark, but it gives the impression that we’re old friends who’ve run into each other by chance rather than that I’m just showing up on time as her hired fitness instructor.

  “You, too,” she replies back. “I’ve been so looking forward to our lesson.” Phoebe and I stroll toward her exercise room, the fragrance of her innocent tea rose perfume mingling with the sandalwood incense she’s already lit. There’s an awkwardness to our walking, I realize. Even though I know it’s ridiculous, I feel like I’m on a date to the junior prom, all unsure and eager to please. If I had my letterman’s jacket, I’d rest it on her small shoulders.

  Entering the room, I notice that Phoebe has a few yoga books and other spiritual works on a small shelf. I comment on the Rumi. I know it’s a cliché to use poetry to get into a chick’s pants, but the truth is I actually dig thi
s Thirteenth Century Sufi Mystic Wildman.

  Of course, it was Gigi who turned me on to Rumi. It was my very first class with her, before she opened Thank Heaven, when as a senior teacher, she was still frustratedly overseeing the yoga programs at various hipster gyms in the city. I’d heard great things about her class, and within moments, I was indeed lost in the movement and the music and awed by her ability to take in the room as a whole, able to notice everyone’s individual needs and nuances. Like a Cosmic Cheerleader, she constantly called out to individuals. “Lift your left leg higher, Monica.” “Tuck the tailbone down, Sarah. It’ll protect your lower back.”

  Midclass, I notice Gigi noticing me and wonder what she’ll say. We’re in Extended Angle—a pose I arrogantly believe I’ve nailed. In fact, I secretly think I’m ready for the cover of Yoga Journal with it. “Breathe with your eyes” is all she says as she gently rolls my rib cage even more open than I thought possible. “Breathe with your eyes?” I wonder to myself. What kind of advice is that?

  Somehow, I’ve inspired Gigi to start quoting more Rumi, mostly from memory. “‘There’s a field beyond right doing and wrong doing … I’ll meet you there’—or maybe just in Downward Facing Dog,” she laughs before looking up a longer poem to read from a Rumi volume buried in her cavernous hippie knapsack.

  After class—trying not to gush too much, although I’m already an instant Gigi groupie—I introduce myself and ask her about what she was reading. Just like that, she hands me her highly worn Rumi anthology. For a moment, as I look for a pen to write down the title, it’s not totally clear that she’s actually lending me, or maybe even giving me, her book.

  “If it speaks to you, keep it as long as you want, baby. He and I are old friends. I’ve got a feeling it’s high time you two met.”

  I’ve read my share of poetry—I was an English major at Yale, after all—but my first hits of Rumi blow me away. The twists and turns of Rumi and Hafiz and the other Sufi always surprise me. They’re weirder and wittier than their English Literary Canon equivalents. And they revel in things I can relate to, like wine and taverns and wild sexuality. They’re all about passionate excess, “living on the lip of insanity.” Hafiz talks about flashes of “Oneness with Everything”—and then descending back to being a “wine-soaked, talking rag.” All in all, those are the kinds of dudes I want to hang with.

  This morning with Phoebe, I spontaneously quote some lines from “Who Says Words With My Mouth”:

  This drunkenness began in some other tavern,

  When I get back around to that place,

  I’ll be completely sober.

  I can’t remember anything beyond the opening three lines, so I read the next stanza of the poem, the first one in the anthology of Essential Rumi:

  If I could taste one sip of an answer,

  I could break out of this prison for drunks.

  I didn’t come here of my own accord, and I can’t leave that way.

  Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.

  Anyway, you gotta admit that’s pretty good shit. Sure, I know he’s all about connecting to the Divine or the Big Cosmic Whatever. But for me, the poem underscores countless nights of me and Hutch carousing on the town, hoping I’m blessed with a competent cab driver and lucky enough to remember my address. (And of course, there’s that hard-to-extinguish dream of being the owner of the Tavern, presumably the one where the drunkenness began.) When I look up, I’m startled to see that there’s a tiny tear on Phoebe’s cheek. This blows me away.

  “Thank you. That was beautiful,” she tells me.

  I don’t know what to say. I didn’t write the lines—in fact, it’s her book—and when I read them, I was thinking less about connecting with the Divine and more about connecting with a martini.

  Phoebe brushes her tear away, slightly embarrassed. (Remember: this is my secret weakness, for which I have no defense. At least for once it’s poetry, and not my bad behavior, that’s provoking someone’s tears.)

  “I’m sorry. Look at me. It’s just that Rumi’s my favorite poet. It’s not the kind of thing I can share with that many people.”

  “Especially Phil, I bet,” I want to interject, but I don’t. I don’t know what to say. Even a cad like me doesn’t enjoy making a lady cry—usually I just piss them off.

  “I love his poems, too,” I add simply so she stops feeling self-conscious. “We can definitely incorporate some of his verse into our practice.”

  “I’d love that,” she smiles, her misty eyes already clear and bright once more.

  We begin the physical practice. Once Phoebe’s pretty warm from sun salutes and standing poses, I instruct her into Ardha Chandrasana—Half Moon Pose—a balancing challenge with one leg and hand on the ground, the other hand and leg lifted. She’s unsteady, though. Her standing leg needs to straighten so it’ll be less shaky. But it’s less a muscular adjustment than facing one of her fears. She’s uncertain about having only one foot and one hand to balance her. In this shape, she doesn’t trust that she can stay lifted and supported on her own power.

  I stand behind Phoebe’s back body with my hand on her sacrum, positioning my hip to brush against her to give her a sense of support. My other hand touches the head of her arm bone, inviting her shoulder and entire torso to open upward.

  I feel her lean into me for support. I’m steadying her less by holding on to her with any force (I’m barely exerting any tactile pressure at all) and more by the strength of my presence. Just by letting her know that she could fall back and I’d be there for support, I’m allowing her to find the confidence the shape requires.

  Given all the roller coaster thrill rides we have in our society—all the addictions from drugs to gambling to sex—it may not seem like a yoga pose can provide a palpable rush, but trust me, it does. I can tell that Phoebe absolutely feels a thrill embracing this shape although I’m not sure if, like a devoted lover, I find even more satisfaction than she does in bringing this pleasure to her.

  When we’ve finished, as before, after Corpse Pose, we Om together three times. Right before we’re about to dip our heads toward each other with a mutual bow and salute each other with a traditional “Namaste,” I manage to pull a Rumi quote from my wine-soaked memory:

  The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.

  Don’t go back to sleep.

  You must ask for what you really want.

  Don’t go back to sleep …

  I pause for a second, trying to remember the rest of the stanza. Sensing my struggle, like a lover returning a caress, Phoebe rescues me. She knows the words by heart and shares them:

  People are going back and forth across the doorsill

  Where the two worlds touch.

  The door is round and open …

  We complete the last refrain together:

  Don’t go back to sleep.

  When we open our eyes, I see no tears from Phoebe this time. And yet, the way she looks at me is still pretty amazing. It’s an expression I haven’t gotten before, so it takes me a moment to identify it. I’m startled to realize it’s admiration, and not for my biceps or in gratitude for a wild romp in the sack. Rather, Phoebe’s looking at me with admiration that’s closer to devotion, as though I have some deep spiritual connection that she wants to plug into and merge with. Wow—all those cult leaders are totally onto something. You can be an absolute bastard like me, but with a little smoke and mirrors—a few lines from a Sufi mystic, for example—you can have chicks not only willing to drink the Kool-Aid for you, but lusting after you, their guru.

  My “Note to Self” about starting a cult is cut short when Phil, again showing surprising restraint given his boisterous voice and clunky manner, enters the room only after our regular conversation resumes. He tells me that he was feeling too stiff to try yoga today, and rather than telling him that that’s a clear sign that he needs some yoga, I tacitly agree. The last thing I want is him thr
ashing the Sufi Poetry and Sex Vibe Phoebe and I are co-creating.

  I catch myself immediately. This is not a seduction scenario. I’m not here to run my usual seduction games in order to get laid. I’m here to pay the bills. This is my new career.

  As is traditional, I let myself off the hook. After all, I’m not guilty of anything inappropriate, unprofessional, or self-destructive. I’m just innocently enjoying the warmhearted teacher-student rapport Phoebe and I are developing.

  And, until I exit the apartment and that bitter January wind slaps me brazenly in the face, I actually almost believe it.

  I arrive to teach my class at Epitome twenty minutes early. Marguerite makes a point of welcoming me warmly, escorting me towards the large, tastefully neutral fitness room. “I thought we’d start you with an end-of-day class,” she beams. “They tend to be our most popular.”

  In other words, a roomful of gainfully employed rich people, toning up and winding down after a day of productivity. Yet another aspect of Epitome I can’t quite relate to. “Great,” I reply. Marguerite wishes me luck and departs as students drift in. I can tell they’re surprised to see me, some pleasantly, others not so. I’m approached by one of the latter.

  “Where’s Jasmine?” a strident brunette asks.

  “I don’t know. Did she used to teach this class?”

  “Ever since it started. And that’s how long I’ve been taking it.”

  “I honestly don’t know. You could ask at the front desk. I don’t know how they’re changing the schedule.”

  Jasmine-Fan makes an “Okay, whatever” face, then snaps and unfurls her mat directly in front of me like a bullwhip. It feels like a challenge, a dare almost: “Go ahead and try to teach me … But you’re no Jasmine.” I can tell she’s going to be trouble.