46. Thousands of Candles
Roman
I don’t know what I expected when I walked into the big, dim room. Wood floors made sense, and the total lack of other men wasn’t a huge surprise. All the shades being drawn and the many flickering candles in glass holders on the low stage not as much, but what did I know? I set down my towel and water bottle, collected a squashy, sticky mat at Summer’s direction, and told myself, However weird it is, you’re going to get good sex out of it. I was open to new ideas, and I didn’t embarrass easily.
The parts I didn’t expect?
First: I know it said “hot yoga” on the sandwich board out front, but surely not this hot. This was brain-melting hot. Lung-drowning hot. Sweating-instantly hot. Australia hot. Summer would still look good hot and sweaty. I was fairly sure I wouldn’t. I could feel the drops forming under my arms already. Not conducive to romance, in my experience.
Second: The spacey New Age music that wafted around us like steam. Combined with the heat, it produced an effect on me like when you’re starting to pass out in a sauna. Not what I’d call relaxing.
And then there was the third thing.
Or three things, to be exact. Three people. Karen, Hope, and Poppy, my brand-new cousins-in-law, who stopped talking to each other animatedly where they knelt on their mats in an extremely folded-up way I was not going to be able to achieve and uttered glad cries of welcome. To Summer.
“Hi!” Summer said, her face lighting up. The three women jumped up from the folded positions, and an orgy of cuddling followed. An orgy to which I wasn’t invited, which was good, because of the sweating thing. I don’t even want to talk about what was happening in my crotch area. It was a good thing my shorts were navy blue.
Karen, of course, was the one who talked to me first. “Wow, Roman. You are secure in your masculinity. Jax has an excuse why he can’t do this with me, and believe me, he uses it. Says the heat makes his prosthetic leg slip, and that it’s uncomfortable. I said that a combat-hardened New Zealand Defense Force sergeant shouldn’t be such a baby, and it still didn’t work. I may even have mentioned post-yoga sex, but he just said that if I came back relaxed and limber, he could manage the rest. It sucks having a husband who can out-argue you.”
“Except that that’s why you like him,” Poppy said.
“Possibly true,” Karen said.
“Well,” Hope said, “since we needed the boys to watch the kids, it’s good that they’re so uninterested. They’re all at Karen and Jax’s place,” she told me. “Three men and nine kids.”
“The levels of screaming,” Poppy said, “will be intense. And that’s just Olivia. I’d pay money to watch Hemi do hot yoga, though. Matiu would do it gracefully and beautifully and much better than me, so I don’t want him, but Hemi Te Mana? That would be a seminal life experience. Not that you’re not equally manly and frightening,” she told me. “Almost.”
“Cheers,” I said.
Karen said, “Enquiring minds want to know—is this a normal part of your Sunday routine, or did Summer drag you here, and if so, how?”
Summer said, “I, uh, said it would be a good thing for us to share. You know, getting all relaxed and so forth. We had an interesting night,” she hurried on when Karen shot me a much-too-sharp look. She began to tell the story of Delilah and the Erica situation to much rapt attention, some shock, and then some laughter at the part with the cops, eventually with her hands on the mat and pedaling her legs in an appealing bum-up presentation. I relaxed a bit myself, or as much as a man can relax when he’s streaming sweat and wondering if there’s enough deodorant in the world, and nobody’s even asked him to move yet.
At that moment, though, a gong sounded and then resonated as if we were in a Buddhist temple, and everybody shut up. The teacher, a fit woman in a ponytail, leggings, and a strappy sports bra who somehow looked cool as a cucumber, stood on the riser at the front of the room with the candles around her—not the safest items I’d ever seen decorating a wooden building, making me wonder whether the fire inspector was aware of this—and immediately set in to make us sweat more.
I was expecting something slow and New Age and possibly tantric to go with the music, but I soon realized my mistake. Jax would have been right at home here, because the woman was a drill sergeant, and this was horrible.
Have I mentioned that I’d never done yoga before? Five minutes in, I was reshuffling myself so I was slightly behind Summer and could watch her, and not even because I enjoyed seeing her curvy shape bending and stretching itself in all those interesting ways. As she hadn’t had yoga pants, she was wearing some stretchy black shorts instead. Like bike shorts, only thinner. She’d brought them to wear under her skirt for tomorrow, she’d said, because you apparently weren’t meant to see a woman’s legs beneath the fabric, while somehow seeing her skin wrapped in nylon and spandex made it appropriate. I wondered who’d made that rule, given that seeing a woman’s legs through her skirt was my idea of a good time.
I might enjoy thinking later about how she looked upside-down in those snug shorts, but at the moment, I was grimly hanging on as I balanced on one leg and my palms with my other leg in the air, then did some pushup-adjacent work like that while the sweat ran down my face and into my hair, stinging my eyes and nearly blinding me. I stretched my towel over the mat in a futile attempt to mop it up, especially as the towel was about the size of a postcard and not of much use, and also so I wouldn’t slip and fall on my arse. As a male confidence booster, it wasn’t much chop, because I was dying here.
“Reach, r-e-a-c-h back for your heels,” the woman was saying approximately seventeen hours later—or rapping out, because she was failing once again on the serene front. “Get tall on your mat, send your chest and thighs forward, and open your throat to the sky. It’s not about whether you touch your heels. It’s about the opening. Give yourself to the world. Reach.”
If I reached any more, something was going to pop. I decided to reach for my water bottle instead. Unfortunately, I had about two swallows left.
“If you need to lift out of the pose for a moment and then reach for it again,” the woman said, “do so. There is no stopping, though. There is only the motion, fluid as water. Be the water.”
I was the water right enough. I was nothing but water. I was practically swimming in my sweat by now, my Band-Aid-sized towel was wringing wet, and yes, I was reaching again. With absolutely no serenity. The woman was glaring at me, I’d told Summer I’d do this, and I was no quitter. I was, however, running through every curse word I knew.
“And now,” the teacher said, “come slowly out of that—slowly, slowly, feeling how long your spine has become, how fluid your motions. Come forward, now, and shift your pose. Use the flexibility you’ve developed during this practice as you press your palms into the mat, bend your elbows, and place your knees on your triceps. Lift your feet, now, and feel yourself balance on your strong arms. Feel the weightlessness and pleasure of inversion, and share your effort with the room. The Buddha says, ‘Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.’ Let’s share this moment together, the effort and the effortlessness of it, going from one body to another, one spirit to the next.”
I suddenly understood Delilah’s objection to quotations. I muttered, “Bugger. Shit. Fuck a bunch of balancing” under my breath as I tipped forward, only the waning strength of my arms managing to hold me up as my knees rasped painfully against my sweat-covered triceps. Which was when they slid altogether and I crashed forward onto my head and did a sort of somersault into Summer, which knocked her off balance so she crashed into the woman in front of her. Also the woman to the right of that woman, because she fell at an angle.
My spirit was definitely going from one body to the other. My spirit of chaos, because we’d been in the back corner. I said, “Bloody hell,” reached for Summer to check that I hadn’t hurt her, and watched the dominoes continue to fall, one after another, until seven or eight women were tipped onto their backs like turtles, then scrambling up again. Karen, who’d been balancing beside Summer like a stick insect, as if this were mother’s milk to her, came down from her pose and started to laugh, and Poppy, who’d already fallen over, struggled to her knees and said, “Well, this is new.”
Karen said, “Talk about sharing your candle, Roman,” and then everybody was laughing. Except the two women who’d been bang in front of the teacher all this time, showing us all how it was done. They were still balancing upside-down with utter serenity, and so was the teacher, who was saying, “We accept the changes in life as the stones in the river accept the water rushing over them. If we fall, we begin again. We hold ourselves steady, because acceptance is our strength. We are not pushed off course by events but remain still within.”
“Bollocks,” Poppy said, and now, I was laughing. How could I help it?
“We bring ourselves back when we waver,” the teacher said firmly, coming out of her pose with grace as Poppy and Karen choked into the collars of their shirts and Hope said, “Karen. Sssh.” Which only made them laugh harder, and I was losing control of my own reactions. Not much of a river rock. More of a reed.
As for Summer? She was giggling. I’d never heard her giggle, but that was definitely what was happening. And that was half the class laughing, the other half glaring around at us, and the teacher continuing to talk. We were meant to be upside-down again now, resting on our shoulders with our legs in the air, but that wasn’t going to be happening. The puddle on my towel was more of a lake now, and I wasn’t lying in that. I touched Summer and said, “Meet you outside,” and Karen said, “Oh, the hell with it,” and stood up, too.
The five of us sneaked out like naughty schoolkids, and I dripped a trail of sweat all along the way.
This time, I wasn’t cleaning it up. If you want to hold a class on the surface of the sun, I reckon you’re responsible for the bodily fluids.