Yoga and Whiskey

I'm Britney, I'm thirty-four, and I teach yoga, which means I spend my days telling strangers to breathe while I quietly panic about my own life. This is a story about the night that stopped working.

* * *

Here is what nobody warns you about sex in your thirties, or at least nobody warned me, and I read a lot of articles at two in the morning because my sleep schedule is a crime scene. It gets efficient. That's the word for it, efficient, like a well-run warehouse. You meet a guy, he's your age or close to it, thirty-one to thirty-nine has been the whole range for a decade now, and within three dates you both know the moves. There's the kiss on the sidewalk outside the bar, there's the text the next morning that says had a great time with a smiley face, there's the slow incremental negotiation toward somebody's apartment, and then there's the sex itself, which is fine, genuinely fine, competent, two adults who have both seen the same internet doing roughly the same things at roughly the same tempo.

I'm not saying it was bad. I'm saying it was a script I had memorized so completely that sometimes I'd catch myself mouthing along, the way you do when a movie you've watched ten times is on in the background. He would say "you're so beautiful" at the exact moment I expected him to say it, and I would make the sound I was supposed to make at that moment, and later he would leave or I would leave and we would both text something polite and the whole thing would collapse neatly. Several boyfriends in my twenties, a fair number of casual hookups into my early thirties, and not one single surprise. Not one. That's the rut I was in, and the worst part was that I had helped dig it.

So when people ask me what I saw in Edwin, and my sister asks, and my friend Nell asks, and honestly the woman who does my eyebrows asked, the honest answer is that he surprised me, and by the time I understood how much I wanted to be surprised, it was already too late to be sensible about it.

* * *

The way it happened was stupid and ordinary, which is how most of these things happen. My studio does corporate wellness gigs, which means once or twice a month I drag a bag of mats to an office and lead a room of accountants through sun salutations while they check their watches. This particular gig was the University of Toledo, philosophy department, faculty and grad students, a wellness afternoon tacked onto the end of a department retreat. My boss Maria runs the contract, and Maria's name is worth remembering because her father turns out to be the whole point of this story.

The yoga went fine. Professors are better at yoga than accountants, worse at hiding that they're competitive about it. Afterward there was a reception in the department lounge, cheap wine and cheaper beer, and I stayed because the bag of mats is heavy and because Maria said stick around, have a drink, dad's coming, you can keep him company, he gets cornered by the Hegel guy otherwise.

I didn't know who dad was yet. That's important. I was standing by the snack table with a plastic cup of wine thinking about leaving when a tall man in a brown corduroy jacket knocked a full glass of red wine off the edge of the table and onto the sleeve of a grad student, and then spent the next ninety seconds apologizing with such genuine horror that the grad student ended up comforting him.

"That's the third one this year," the grad student said, wringing out her sleeve. "It's a department tradition at this point, Dr. Carroll."

"I should be billed for the wine," he said. "Line item. Sundry damages, Edwin Carroll."

And I'm standing there thinking, Carroll, Maria Carroll, oh no, this is the father, and also thinking something I did not immediately admit to myself, which was that he had a nice voice and terrible posture and sad eyes, and that combination was somehow doing more for me than the last six guys from the apps combined.

He came over to refill his cup and got cornered next to me by the geometry of the snack table, and he said, "You're the yoga person. I did the breathing wrong the entire time, I believe. Maria warned me you'd be here, she said be nice to Britney, she's carrying forty pounds of mats for us."

"So you're the dad," I said. "She didn't mention you'd be here."

"She mentions me the way one mentions a wall that holds up a house," and then he caught himself and laughed. "No, that's unfair, she's a good daughter. I'm Edwin. I'm told I'm why you're drinking that wine, so I apologize for the wine."

The wine was honestly terrible, so I told him it was terrible, and he said thank god, I thought it was just me, and that was how an hour went by. I was not flirting, or I did not think I was, I was just talking, which I had forgotten I could do with a man without performing. He asked actual questions. He was fifty-eight, he told me without making a thing of it, retired in the sense that tenured philosophy professors retire, he still taught one seminar a year because nobody stops him. His wife had died four years ago, he said it plainly, not fishing for sympathy, just a fact he put on the table early the way you'd mention you were left-handed, and I didn't know what to do with that except say I was sorry, and he said thank you, it was a long illness and she was very brave, and then he asked me how I got into yoga, which was a kindness, changing the subject like that.

I told him the true version, not the brochure version. I'd been a gymnast in college, blew out a knee at twenty-two, drifted into yoga because it was the only thing my knee could do, and stayed because I liked watching people's faces when they finally got a pose they'd been fighting. He said that was the best description of teaching he'd ever heard, and I said you teach philosophy, how hard can it be, and he said you'd be surprised, and then he did an impression of a sophomore asking why anything matters, and I laughed harder than the joke deserved, mostly because he seemed so startled by my laughing.

Somewhere in there the party thinned out around us. The Hegel guy left. The grad student with the wine sleeve left. Maria gave me a look on her way out the door, a raised eyebrow I chose to ignore, and the room got down to the two of us and one guy washing cups in the little sink, humming.

"Here's my question," Edwin said, turning his cup around in his hands. "And tell me if this is rude, it may be rude. Do you ever get bored? Of the poses, I mean. You said you watch for the moment it clicks, but you've seen it click ten thousand times. Doesn't it become..."

"Efficient," I said, and he looked pleased, like I'd answered a seminar question correctly.

"Precisely. Efficient." He frowned into his cup. "I ask because that's my problem too. Everything after forty years of teaching one subject becomes efficient. I know the questions before the students ask them. It's a very quiet kind of death, efficiency."

"That's dark," I said.

"I'm a philosopher. We're contractually dark."

The cup-washing guy finished and left, and then it was just us and the fluorescent hum and my bag of mats by the door, and I should have said well, it's late, I've got a six a.m. class. Instead I said, "Do you want to get out of here? There's a bar, The Spoke, it's two blocks. They have whiskey that doesn't taste like regret."

Edwin looked at me the way you look at a question you didn't expect on the exam, and then he said, "Yes. Very much, actually," and it was the "actually" that did it, the small honest surprise in it, like he hadn't been asked anywhere in a while and hadn't realized how much he'd missed it. I picked up my bag, forty pounds of mats, and he reached for it, and I said don't even think about it, you spilled wine on a graduate student tonight, you've done your share, and he laughed and held the door, and we walked out into the cool Toledo evening toward two dollars a pint and whatever came next, which, I should say now, neither of us saw coming.

The Spoke on a Sunday is grad students arguing at the good tables and townies ignoring them, and Edwin and I took the two stools at the end of the bar like we'd been assigned them by the state. He ordered for me without asking what I wanted, which normally makes me crazy, but he ordered me the whiskey I was already drinking, so it was less mind-reading than attention, which I kept having to remind myself was a different thing.

"Maria told you to be nice to me," I said. "What did she say, exactly?"

He winced into his glass. "She said, and I quote, Dad, be nice to Britney, she's a professional and you're a menace with red wine. Then she said don't be weird. I confess I don't know what she meant by weird."

"You're doing fine. This is the least weird you could be."

"Give it time. I once gave a lecture on Kierkegaard in my pajama trousers. Tenure is a terrible thing to give a man."

We closed the place, is the short version. The long version involves two hours of him telling me about the seminar he teaches on stoicism and grief, which he started teaching after his wife died, and me telling him about Nell, who has opinions about my dating life that I pay for in tacos, and at some point he mentioned his back, how it seized up on him in the mornings, how Maria kept telling him to try yoga and he kept telling her that his body was not a place he liked to spend time. I heard myself say, before my brain voted on it, that I do private sessions, that if he ever wanted an hour, I could probably teach even his body to be a place he liked.

He wrote his number on a napkin. That felt like nothing, but it felt like everything, my hands actually shook a little walking to my car, which is stupid, I was thirty-four years old, I had done this before, but not like this, not with a man who said things like I confess I don't know what she meant by weird and meant them.

I texted him first, three days later, because I figured if I waited for a philosopher to text first I'd be waiting through a whole chapter on doubt. Can I ask a professional question, he wrote back, is it normal for a back to feel like a rusted gate. Very normal, I wrote, especially yours. Come in Sunday when the studio's empty. I'll do a private session, just you, no one watching you be bad at it.

He showed up Sunday in what I can only describe as dockers and a polo, looking as if he were there for a tax audit, and I put him on a mat in the empty studio and told him to take off his shoes, and that was already an event, apparently, the shoes.

"Nobody's adjusted me since physical therapy in 2009," he said, lying down on his back like a man lowering himself into a bath. "What happens now?"

"Now you breathe and I poke at you."

I started with his shoulders, because everything started with his shoulders, they were up around his ears like he'd spent five decades bracing for bad news, which, fine, he had. I pressed a thumb into the meat of his trapezius and he made a sound, low and involuntary, and I felt my whole face go warm, and I was glad he was face down on the mat so he couldn't see what that sound did to me. This is the part I'm not proud of, or maybe I am, it's honestly hard to tell. I have touched hundreds of bodies. I adjust strangers all day, it's plumbing, it's nothing. But my hands on Edwin's back felt like information, like I was reading him in a language I hadn't used in years, and every knot I found I found with an interest that was not professional.

"You're holding everything," I told him. "Thoracic spine, hips, all of it. When did you last let someone touch you?"

There was a pause long enough that I checked whether he'd fallen asleep.