by Edward Vilga
In the end, my decision’s pretty obvious. Right now, to quote Andrew, a trip through a sexual Disneyland seems to be exactly what I need.
I leave Serious Cleavage a message, embarrassed that suddenly I’m actually speaking in adulterer’s code: “I’m calling about arranging … the yoga lessons. As it is, I have a free space in my schedule.”
Nonetheless, however canned my message sounds, it is quite effective. Two hours later, Serious calls me back and says, “Everything is arranged,” and gives me a time and address: tomorrow afternoon at 2:30. At, of all places, the Harvard Club.
The irony that their husbands are being cuckolded by a Yale man is not lost on any of us. “I’m so glad they let an Eli in,” Serious says to me.
I barely remembered that one needs a jacket and tie in the public areas of the Harvard Club and threw myself together as I left my shabby apartment.
“It’s an unusual place to meet, don’t you think?” I say, as Diamond hands me a scotch. She doesn’t ask me if I want one, mind you; she just pours me a glass.
In a way, this gesture summarizes her style: There’s a saucy confidence that anything she’s going to offer you, you’ll obviously take—and frankly, she’s right.
“Our husbands are both members, so it’s only natural we’d lunch here, ” Diamond says.
“Trust me,” Serious says, as she removes her Chanel jacket to reveal her always-startling figure. “There’s nothing like hiding in plain sight. No one suspects a thing.”
“Lloyd pays for lunch, and I have my own account through Radcliffe to charge the room. In the extremely unlikely chance that Lloyd were ever to inquire, I was feeling a little flushed from the wine at lunch and decided to take a nap.”
“Even though you live at most twenty minutes away?” I’m dubious.
She laughs and kisses me sweetly. “Believe me, I’ve established a history of decadence. Spending a few hundred dollars on a two-hour nap is nothing.”
Diamond kisses me with far more subtlety and sweetness than the situation would suggest. “Besides, the Harvard Club is much too staid for anyone to suspect a thing. For a tryst, one would assume the Plaza—well, at least back in the day.”
“Or the Carlyle.”
“Or the Mercer, if you’re going downtown.”
They kiss each other. Diamond loosens my necktie as she speaks. She leaves it on.
“Everyone goes for the obvious in a clandestine affair. They practically wear trench coats and sunglasses, begging to be noticed,” Serious says, as Diamond undoes her friend’s blouse.
“But this place is so deliciously dowdy, no one would suspect a thing.”
Serious begins to undress Diamond, who, true to form, has her magnificent pendant afloat on her magnificent breasts.
Serious, meanwhile, has stepped out of her skirt to reveal an incredibly lithe body, with perfectly toned butt and thighs—thanks, no doubt, to all the Centrifugal Force at Epitome.
“And in the end, what could possibly be more innocent than lunch and a little spending spree with my shopping buddy?”
Diamond and Serious giggle but only for a moment as they start nibbling, then segue into French kissing each other rather passionately.
I stand there, scotch in hand. Serious and Diamond are now nearly totally naked and making out, with only my tie loosened. This is their game and they’ve invited me to join, but I don’t quite know the rules yet. Hand in hand, they walk over to the bed, their perfectly contoured bodies increasingly and effortlessly intertwined.
I stand back, happy to watch, yet unsure what’s expected of me. After a moment, they look up—as though I’ve passed some kind of test—and smile at me.
“Would you like to join us?” Serious asks, as Diamond seductively fingers the platinum chain of her necklace.
“I thought you’d never ask,” I reply, as I move toward the bed, rapidly shrugging off my jacket and shirt.
“Not so fast,” Diamond smiles. Clearly, they have this down to a science. I sit down on the edge of the bed.
Serious begins to undress me as Diamond produces a blindfold from the pillow. “It’s more fun this way, trust us.”
“Just let yourself get lost, “ Serious instructs.
I say nothing in reply. I sense that there’s nothing they need from me, beyond acquiescence. Oh, of course they want a compelling erection that lasts, and lots of enthusiastic use of it, all of which I’m happy to supply. They really just want to use me as a condiment to their adventure together. The blindfold, meant to add to the eroticism, accomplishes that, but it also makes them impersonal to me—and me to them, too. I can tell Serious from Diamond only when I’m touching their breasts. Otherwise, they blend into one shimmering, invisible, erotic creature. I don’t know who I’m kissing. And when their mouths move over every inch of my body, I have no idea about any personality, any individual attached to any of it. Before, during, and after, I am fundamentally no one to them, and in the midst of the most intense physical pleasure, they’ve made sure they’ve become no one to me. It’s just pure erotic bliss, and it’s fantastic. In the end, we’ve all three gotten exactly what we wanted.
The two of them have gotten a naughty adventure to tide them over between lunch and more shopping. And me, well, for a few hours, I haven’t had to think about my woeful miscasting as a guru. Or my pimped-out Epitome class. I’ve put my S&M relationship with Brooke, and my therapist role with Andrew, on the back burner. I’ve valiantly striven to distract myself from how I’ve complicated Phoebe’s life, and perhaps even more important, I’ve managed to block out that heart-pounding feeling from kissing her. Most importantly of all, I haven’t been thinking about my failure to raise bank, and that this is probably the last nail in the coffin for my Shane forgiveness strategy. Basically, trysting blindly with the Cleavage gals, I’ve gotten a chance to vanish.
In the end, I am my own pity fuck.
Once I’m outside the lobby of the Harvard Club—there’s no cell phone use, although apparently a ménage à trois skims underneath the radar—my cell starts vibrating. I get a phone call from Sassy, this chick who’s now making a name for herself as a teacher at Thank Heaven. She’s obsessed with anatomy and precise alignment and knows a ton about all that shit. Early on, I attended some of her classes and I believe (shades of Phil) that I told her that I sweated my ass off—back in the day, it was my highest compliment.
Anyway, Sassy wants to know if I can be an emergency sub for her. She’s got a last-minute audition for a Broadway show. Sassy gives me way too much information—apparently she knows the director and he requested her, and she’s right for the role because she once played the first revival of it and … Anyway, there are about four million other details that make it incredibly URGENT that she show up and strut her stuff onstage.
I just want to go home and sleep—actually, I’d rather go out and get smashed but it’s only 4 p.m.—but other than that, there’s no practical reason I can’t sub a 5 p.m. class at Thank Heaven.
“Sure. I guess I can do it. No problem.”
Sassy is profoundly grateful, and thankfully, I’ve showered the adulterous sex scent off myself before leaving the Harvard Club.
I head straight to Thank Heaven. Especially given my early, dismal misadventures with replacing Jasmine, I’m aware that it’s always weird subbing a class. It’s like going to the movies and finding out that your flick is sold out; there’s usually something relatively decent to see, but it takes a minute or so to switch out of erotic thriller expectations into a sophomoric comedy mindset.
After countless hours taking classes and doing teacher training at Thank Heaven, it’s a little trippy to actually be teaching here. However novel this is, I’m utterly blown away as Gigi herself plops down a mat in the back of the room. I’m surprised at how much dread I feel as I go right over to her. She wraps me in the warmest of hugs.
“Darlin’, I was just dropping off the paychecks,” she says, “an
d I found out you were teaching. So I thought I’d stay.”
“Great,” is all I can think of to say. ‘Damn it, but why can’t you have direct deposit like Epitome?’ is what I think.
Under any other social circumstance, I’d be probably be thrilled to see Gigi, yet now I’m scared shitless. The teacher I respect most is taking my class, a class I didn’t know I was teaching until forty-five minutes ago.
There’s no time to plan anything. There’s no time to panic. It’s time to get started.
I’m thankful that Gigi’s positioned herself in the back, something I’ve observed she always does whenever she takes class. If you know she’s in the room, it’s hard not to notice her, but it is a consideration to the teacher so as not to steal her (or his) thunder. There’s no need to remind the employee that the boss is on the premises, or the understudy that the superstar watches hawk-like in the wings.
I decide that my strategy is to keep it simple. No bravura moves or sequencing, I intend to offer nothing out of the ordinary. I just want to get through a standard hour class and have my performance be unimpeachable.
Right from the start, everything feels false. I offer up nothing spiritual, nothing heartfelt. As with many yoga centers, there’s a monthly focus that teachers can riff around, giving a coherence to all the classes. Unfortunately, having been largely absent for this month (and the last two), in more ways than one, I have no idea what the spiritual focus is. I’d like to be able to speak from my experience, but having just exited the Harvard Club after a threesome with two married women, which involved being their blindfolded plaything for two hours, there’s no doubt in my mind that I’m absolutely the least spiritually grounded person in the room.
I spend a lot of energy trying to ignore Gigi even though she takes the class just like any other student. It’s perhaps not the best focus, since when I look at my watch, I realize we’re forty minutes into the one-hour class, and I’ve just gotten started. The time has completely gotten away from me again. This is exponentially more problematic since I know about Gigi’s insistence on good sequencing. I need to make some decisions quickly. Although Gigi’s own classes run over, she’s built that into the schedule; there’s never anyone directly after her who needs the room. After this class, however, there’s another one in fifteen minutes. In other words, I must end this on time.
I can probably get away with a five-minute Corpse Pose, but we’re nowhere near where we should be for that. We haven’t done a single backbend or twist, and God knows we’re not getting near any inversions. The class has become a big, messy spill of rudimentary poses that I realize I have only a few minutes to clean up.
I get through the rest of it somehow. The class and I Om together. Heads bow with a “Namaste,” and the class is complete. Students who bump into me as they exit thank me politely, but I can tell that there’s little enthusiasm. This was a particularly slipshod performance for a Thank Heaven class, especially since they’re used to Sassy’s no doubt super-plotted offerings.
If only there were a way I could sneak out of the center without Gigi noticing me. Maybe there’s a yoga emergency that needs tending. Of course, she’s waiting for me by the front desk. She gives me another warm hug. “Thanks for class, teacher.”
“You’re welcome. Not my best, but …”
“Well, we can talk, if you’ve got a minute.”
“Sure,” I say out of knee-jerk honesty. If only I were more sensible, I’d have fabricated something incredibly urgent that would prevent the conversation for the next six, maybe ten, years.
Gigi and I retire to her office, a small affair but with enough room for us to both sit on the floor on oversized batik Indian cushions. Instead of launching in, always the teacher, like Socrates she begins with a question. “So, what did you think of your class?”
It’s better for me to man up and admit that it sucked than for her to have to tell us both. “Not great,” I say. “I suppose not being prepared is a lame excuse, but I totally lost track of the time.”
“Happens to the best of us, God knows,” she replies. “What else?”
“Well, mostly stuff I didn’t get to.”
“Such as?”
“Revolved poses. Backbending. More forward bending than just Baddhakanasa.”
“I see.”
“Am I missing more?”
She pauses for a moment. “Well, poses aside, I guess the main thing is I wanted to see a little more of you in your teaching.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, there was nothing particularly wrong about anything you said—you did forget the second side once or twice during the sun salutes and standing poses—but there was nothing particular about you that came through. Anyone could have recited facts about those poses like you did. I want to see a little more of your own practice, your own journey.”
“I’m sorry that I didn’t have a spiritual theme prepared. They discourage that at Epitome. And I honestly didn’t know what the focus was this month,” I explain.
“Well, ‘spiritual’ is such a loaded word. I was thinking more about ‘personal,’” Gigi counters. “I don’t care if it’s an anecdote, or an expression, or the music—anything that really excites you. Trust me, the most personal things always turn out to be the most universal, the most ‘spiritual.’”
I hate that my first class for her sucked. Gigi reads the dismay in my face. “Please don’t look so hangdog. I don’t want to be too hard on you. This is only the kind of stuff that will make you a much better teacher.”
Technically, to become a “better” teacher, I’d have to be a good one first—but I don’t correct her.
“What I loved about the physical part of your teaching final,” she continues, “was that it was totally you all the way. I connect with Nina Simone; you connect with U2—and you made me connect with them during your opening sequence. Everything came from your own experience on the mat, not a Rodney Yee DVD.”
She waits to see if this registers with me and then continues.
“Anyone can teach the poses ‘correctly,’ but that’s not what keeps people coming back for more. We’re not here just to work folks out; we’re here to offer a little uplift.” As she says this, she touches my arm; it’s a warm and friendly gesture and would have a soothing effect if I didn’t feel unbelievably shitty to begin with. I feel like I’m having a postmortem with a spiritual Sherlock Holmes; will she be able to detect the faintest traces of scent of Diamond and Serious Cleavage that linger post-shower? Or, maybe—besides defying gravity when she moves through poses—can she also read everything in my presumably filthy aura?
When I don’t offer more, she speaks again: “Please don’t take this so hard. I’ve always thought you had the makings of a really fine teacher, and I still do. I just think for you to move to the next level, you need to incorporate more of your own practice—more of yourself—into your teaching. You’ve got to let us in. That’s the only way you can really uplift your students.” I take this in.
“Well, in terms of offering anything uplifting—I just don’t know … if I’m in a place where that’s possible for me.”
“How do you mean?”
I look up at her, and I see real interest and true compassion in her eyes. I’ve got her undivided attention. It’s funny, but for a second, I flip back to what my students might possibly think of me. Gigi is a truly amazing person, but this is also partially attributable to the context in which I know her. As always, she is my teacher first and foremost. She bears the mantle of this relationship whenever we’re together, no matter how seemingly casual the chatter. In other words, I might not have any of these intense feelings about confiding in her had we met, say, on line for an action movie; I met her when she offered her spectacular practice, her blazing energy, and the heart and soul of her life experience via her yoga class.
I swallow and feel myself about to toss everything in my life out on the table for her to fix: my indul
ging in a flirtation and Phoebe’s subsequent advance, the dalliances with Serious and Diamond Cleavage, my fuck buddy Monique, Andrew’s yoga-as-therapy sessions, Brooke’s abdominal obsessions, and my basic feeling that, despite offering a few decent sweaty practices at Epitome and instructing some physical breakthroughs with Janek, I’m a complete fraud. I’m ready to even cap off the whole litany of my troubles with my screwing over Shane. God knows I so desperately want to tell Gigi everything and have her just make it all go away for me, or at least to tell me what to do. And frankly, I’d bite the bullet no matter what she suggested. If it means a mountaintop in Katmandu, I’d be trudging there barefoot through the snow. But at that very moment, when I’m about to spill my guts, one of the front desk karmi-girls knocks on the door.
“I’m sorry,” says Cute Karmi #461, one of an endless stream of fresh-faced, beautiful twenty-four-year-olds working at the front desk in exchange for free classes.
“What’s up, Liz-Beth?” As always, I marvel that unlike me, Gigi remembers everyone’s name.
“Calypso’s on the phone. She’s waiting for you downstairs and she’s double-parked.”
Gigi looks at her watch, “Damn. Why is it so easy to lose track of time?” She looks at me intently. “Are you all right?”
“Yup. Totally fine.” I lie.
“We have to pick up Calypso’s niece for her surprise birthday party. Otherwise, I’d—”
“No, you go. I’m good.”
“Are you sure?”
I nod, trying to appear together and not like someone she should be worried about.
“This conversation is to be continued. I don’t mean the critique part. That’s over and done. I want to hear what’s really going on with you, my little Flying Crow Yoga Celebrity.” She hugs me, and maybe it’s just the extra lingering beat of it, but I detect concern with the compassion.