Through Thick and Thin (27 page)

“Do you think you’ll always be a yoga teacher, and a doga teacher?”

“I do,” he says, nodding, “Yoga, and doga, they’ve become things I can’t imagine my life without. And I love to share that with people.” She thinks there are things she can’t imagine her life without, too; thinks of how hard and how long she has worked to make it so that those things would be vital, inextricable parts of her life, her career, her
raison d’être
if you’ll forgive the drama. She thinks of the Zone she never got into, the carbs she couldn’t do her job without, and the points she can’t calculate. She has another question: she’d like to know why she is trying so hard to take away from herself the very things she can’t imagine her life without? Maybe it’s just what people do. But then maybe it’s not.

The conversation goes on as they make their way through their many appetizers, Meredith at some point abandoning all math, choosing to forgo point counting in favor of experiencing flavors, taste, and quality. Gary asks her to talk about being a restaurant critic, and she shakes her head, no, and indicates the waitress. He nods in understanding, and she thinks he might as well have called her Meredith. But still, she leans forward and softly tells him how she really does love it, but how she’d like to do more, how her sights are set on other things, the book deal, the TV show, the film rights.

“Do you want to try the sea urchin?” he asks her.

“No, I really don’t,” she answers.

As they dig into their sweet potato tempura and deep fried marinated chicken, she asks him about his future plans. “Do you want to write a G-Doga: Doggie and Me Yoga book, or maybe even franchise? I bet you could franchise. And in this day and age, what with Cesar Milan being just about everywhere, I would think a TV show of your own would be completely within the realm of possibility. Ellery would be great on TV.”

“I don’t think so. No,” he says, and she looks at him. She’d like to be able to hold on to electricity. She had thought that maybe electricity could have connecting qualities, that it could bring two things together; but maybe that’s not really what electricity is for. She feels as she looks at him, as the air of contentment about him seems to morph into complacency, that there is a small robot, a small ambitious robot inside her head, tilting its metal head in confusion and repeating over and over again, “Does not compute, does not compute.”

Gary leans forward conspiratorially—he doesn’t yet know that they’re no longer on the same team—and says to her, “That’s not really what yoga is about.”

“No,” she says, “of course not. I just think it’s such a market waiting to be tapped. I was just thinking you could have so much success at it. You could be a huge success.”

“I think we measure success differently,” he says to her. The sentence hangs there in the air, between them, and she reaches for a slice of baby yellowtail. She doesn’t say anything and watches as he takes another clump of the disgusting sea urchin.

“You sure you don’t want to try it?” he asks again between bites, slurps.

She shakes her head, no, “Really. I’m sure.”

“Look,” he says, placing his chopsticks on the smooth green stone that is there on the table, especially for that purpose. “To me, being able to live in the moment, in the present, is success. And with the life I’ve built for myself I can do that. To me, that’s success right there.”

She nods. He continues.

“Sure, there are other things I could do, things that would certainly be more financially rewarding, but this is what I want. The heart wants what the heart wants, and it’s a really great thing to want what you have.”
Want what you have
. She was sure that saying went the other way around. She nods at him, and maybe the way she nods, maybe it’s a little sadly. And he keeps talking.

“I mean,” he says, “I have inner peace, I have rama, I have joy, and I get to share that with people, and I get to try to bring some of it into their lives. And no, I’m not going to live in the apartments some of my clients live in, but I’m also never going to be one of those guys I see everywhere in this city, screaming into their cell phones on the street.”

“That’s true,” she says, and she pauses for a moment. She thinks that she’d still like it if he had his sights set on a G-Doga empire, or at least a DVD. She stares at the gelatinous orange glob that is the sea urchin he has left aside for her. And there is of course a very good chance that sea urchin is delicious, that it’s wonderful, and that if anyone could appreciate and enjoy the virtues of sea urchin, it could indeed be her. But there’s a line that gets drawn, everyone has one, everyone has drawn one somewhere, and hers is at sea urchin.

She gets this feeling lately—when she looks into DB Sweeney’s eyes and he seems to have so much in them, lifetimes of history—that she doesn’t know very much at all. But she thinks she knows that she wants Gary to be something he’s not. And she thinks she knows that’s a terrible idea. You can’t want people to be something they’re not. Because that’s asking too much of them. People, she’s learned, can have a hard enough time of it just being themselves.

“Excuse me,” she says. “I’m just going to go to the ladies’ room.” And he stands up when she stands up, and she has no idea in the world what to say, there isn’t anything, and so she says, “Thanks.”

Alone in the bathroom, she looks in the mirror, and she thinks, no, she knows, that as much as she does endeavor not to go there, she has gone not only to the ladies’ room, but also to the bad place. And the only thing she can think, for reasons most practical, is that electricity, and kindness, and that smile, aren’t everything. They’re not enough. To ask him to be something other than he is, is as wrong as her asking that of herself. She wants to be yogic—if that’s even a word—about it, and not blame herself. She wants to understand it about herself that when you’ve spent the past—how long has it been that she’s been dating?—eighteen years, waiting for your banker, your lawyer, your junior tycoon, your somehow-more-suitable-for-you variation on the Joshs of the world, the Kevins (though perhaps with a name more like Aubrey’s), that it would be a really big leap to a G-Doga instructor. It would be a leap that would be really hard to make, especially for someone who never quite learned how to deviate from a plan, whose plan always included living in nice houses and having summer homes and sending her kids, if she ever did have them, to private schools. She washes her hands quickly and turns away from the mirror. She really can’t look at it anymore, not right now.

As she makes her way back to the table, she notices as she approaches that her napkin appears to be upright on the table. Upon closer inspection, as she pulls out her chair, she can see that her napkin has been folded into an origami swan.

She looks not at Gary but self-consciously around at the other tables, at the waitresses, to see if it was they who had taken her used napkin from the table where she’d left it, when she’d gone to the bathroom for a bit of a refresher on reality and self-loathing, and folded it so lovingly into an origami swan. She wants, right now, very badly, for it to have been them. But she knows it wasn’t. The swan is so buoyant, so poised for flight, and there is something so personal about it that there is no way this swan is the product of something that’s done for everyone, every time a napkin is left alone on a table. She knows even before she looks up at Gary, who has somehow improved upon his smile, who can, right at this instant, only be described as beaming.

She looks into his eyes, and there are things she could say, there are so many of them. “Oh,” she says, uncomfortably, “you folded my napkin into an origami swan?”

He nods and he smiles and she can’t think of anything except,
This is one of those things.
This is one of those things, one of those things that could go either way, if you would let it. It could be like the moment you first saw DB Sweeney, or the moment you first heard “Don’t try hard, try easy” and thought it was spoken only for you. It could be the very moment that you know you are a goner. Or it could not be. And Meredith thinks,
I don’t want it to be,
and so she just says, “Thanks,” and attempts to take a sip from her already empty beer.

They stand together on the sidewalk outside the restaurant. But it’s not a real together, it’s the together that’s a few feet apart. The air is springtime.
Spring really is here
, she thinks, even though she suspects it’s still winter in her heart. She crosses her arms in front of her, she’s never realized how often she does that.

“Well,” she says, “thanks so much for joining me and for ordering all the dishes.”

“It was nice, thank you,” he says.

“Okay, well, I’m heading that way,” she says, but she doesn’t point in any direction. “If you just want to grab a cab here, that’s cool.” She doesn’t mean to be unkind, and she hopes it isn’t coming out that way. She doesn’t want it to; she just wants to walk home alone, to be alone with her thoughts, even though she hates her thoughts right now.

“I think I’ll just take the subway.”

“Eighty-sixth Street is definitely the closest. And it’s an express,” she says, though he probably knows that, spending as much time as he does at the 92nd Street Y. “I’m fine to walk alone.”

He looks at her for a moment; he tilts his head. He gets it. She feels awful.

“Goodnight then, Meredith,” he says and as he turns and walks toward Second Avenue, she stays glued to the cement and watches his shoulders. She tells herself that his shoulders, they’re upright and they don’t seem at all forlorn. She wonders if she’ll ever find what she wants, and if she does if it will have a smile so sweet.

As she said she was fine to do, she walks home alone, down Second Avenue. It’s not a part of New York she has ever paid much attention to, even though it is, technically, her neighborhood. She passes the innocuous noodle shops, and sushi bars, and several boring bistros, the dime-a-dozen Italian restaurants. Restaurants she wouldn’t review, and probably wouldn’t even eat at.
Nothing special,
she thinks and she wonders if she can even define the word. She still feels awful. She tells herself she shouldn’t.
The heart wants what the heart wants,
she tells herself. But she worries about her heart. She wonders if maybe hers is the heart that wants the wrong things, wonders if hers is the heart that wants mostly a prewar classic six on Central Park West.

Meredith offers DB Sweeney a piece of her Thomas’ Light Multi-Grain English Muffin. They’re just one point for the whole English muffin. Really. Even though the proffered piece of English muffin is slathered seductively with I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter Light spread (spread of what, though, that is the question), DB Sweeney will have none of it. He is not a fan of any of Meredith’s Weight Watchers food, and she thinks on occasion, on occasions such as now, as she is celebrating the fact that she has conjured a snack that is, at most, a point and a half, that DB Sweeney is very likely smarter than she is.

It’s Wednesday night and G-Doga Doggie and Me Yoga class starts in an hour. She didn’t make a dinner reservation for tonight, just in case she decided she wanted to go. Sunday afternoon came and went, and she didn’t go to Gary’s yoga class. She felt like maybe she shouldn’t. But she did get Baron Baptiste’s yoga DVD, since Baron Baptiste was Gary’s teacher, and she has, much to her own surprise, been doing (she means practicing) yoga every morning. And actually, she’s been feeling quite fantastic.

DB Sweeney looks up at her, in a way that she thinks might be soulful, or even might be full of yearning, though the yearning part, that could just be her imagination. She wonders if DB Sweeney knows that tonight is G-Doga class, even though he’s only been there twice? She looks down at him, right into his eyes, and thinks she needs a sign. Or not even so much that she needs one, but just, you know, she could use one.

“Do you want to go to G-Doga class tonight?” He just looks back at her. Maybe he doesn’t care.

“Do you want to see Gary?” she asks and DB Sweeney barks and gets up on both hind legs. “Okay,” she says, very seriously to him, “Okay.” She heads back to her computer, saves her review of Hola (mediocre tapas in Chelsea, uninspired and not recommended) and e-mails it in to Douglas. Gary said he’d never be one of those New York guys who spends his time screaming at people through his cell phone. She’d had a feeling when he said it that maybe it boded ill, that if she continued in her quest for a lawyer, a banker, a junior tycoon, that maybe she’d find herself one day, even one day soon (soon and for the rest of her life!) watching someone scream at people through his cell phone. But the only person she knows who screams like that is Douglas, and this isn’t one of those stories, there is no way in hell, even if hell is filled with power types on their cell phones, that she’s going to wind up with Doogie.

“Okay, dahling,” she says to DB Sweeney, glancing at her watch, “give me two seconds to change, and then we’ll go to Doggie and Me Yoga class.” And as she turns up the volume on the iPod dock (“Wig in a Box,” even though she doesn’t wear a wig to G-Doga), she thinks of course DB Sweeney is right, as right as he probably is about the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter Light spread.