Emma Straub - Modern Lovers

“Come on,” Andrew said. “Let’s go back.”

“Fine,” Lydia said, sticking out her lower lip and squinting at him. “Or I could just blow you right here.” They crossed the street into the park, and Andrew unzipped while Lydia crawled half under a bush and then pulled him to his knees.

Would that scene be in the movie? The white light didn’t exist. Andrew’s head was filled with Lydia. They slept together a few more times, and then the semester was done, and Andrew moved in with Elizabeth, and it was over. Lydia swore to him that he wasn’t the reason she was leaving school, that she actually fucking hated it there and he wasn’t even remotely that important to her, but he never knew for sure. That summer he helped her load a U-Haul truck, and when she hopped up into the driver’s seat, she shook her head, giving him that same look she gave him a thousand years later at the restaurant, after Harry was born. She looked at him like he was a fool, like he’d made the wrong choice and she knew it. It was never so clear to Andrew — nothing was. All he wanted in life was for something to be as clear as everything had always been for Lydia. She had wanted him, and when she didn’t get him, she was out. Whenever Lydia sang that song, that fucking, perfect, beautiful song, it was all Andrew heard. She was calm, and she was gone, and he was left with her voice and Elizabeth’s words, and Andrew was sure that he heard exactly what Lydia wanted him to. It was the thing in his life that he felt the guiltiest about, and when Lydia died, Andrew’s first emotion had been relief. No one else knew, and now he’d never have to tell Elizabeth. That relief was the second thing he felt guiltiest about. It was a guilt sandwich, with Lydia in the middle.

Andrew felt Salome ruffle his hair and heard her crouch down behind him. She pressed her thumbs against his shoulders, grounding him into the floor, and then she rubbed little circles on his forehead. Her hands smelled like lavender. Andrew breathed it in and breathed out as much Lydia as he could. There was always more. She was sticky inside him, a thin coating of lust and regret stuck to his insides like tar. There was never enough white light, but he kept breathing, hoping that it would change.

Now that her job was on indefinite hiatus, Ruby had more time for being a creeper for Elizabeth. It was fun, like pretending she was Harriet the Spy, and more than anything, it gave her something to do. The first step was going to a yoga class, which Ruby thought sounded relatively low-impact, in terms of spy missions. The EVOLVEment website was garbage — just a bunch of photos of pretty girls with their eyes closed, smiling like someone’s tongue was on their clit — but there were class schedules on pink pieces of paper in a clear plastic box on the porch. Ruby put her hair in a ponytail and stole Zoe’s mat from the hall closet. “Just see what it’s like in there,” Elizabeth had said. “Just see if there’s anything weird going on. You know, talk to people.” Ruby was on it.

The classes were fifteen dollars for drop-ins. Ruby paid cash and signed a waiver under the name “Jennifer Lopez,” which seemed both funny and within the realm of possibility. “Call me Jen,” she planned to say to whoever was teaching the class, before launching into a long soliloquy about her youth as a gymnast and her tight hamstrings.

The preplanned speeches were unnecessary — unlike most studios, which were pretty empty during the day, EVOLVEment was packed, and the woman teaching the class didn’t even introduce herself. She was a lissome blonde, and she stepped on the tiny slices of hardwood floor in between the mats, touching everyone as she made her way around the room. Ruby unrolled her mat in the front row — she had to be an eager student if she was going to get any intel — and Om’d loudly when called upon to do so.

“Welcome to EVOLVEment,” the woman said. “My spirit sees you.”

“My spirit sees you,” everyone in the class said back.

“Let’s do this!” the blonde said. She turned around, whipped out an iPhone, and pressed a button, immediately filling the room with Afrobeat music. “I want to see your beautiful bodies moooove !” If Andrew was in trouble, it certainly wasn’t with this idiot. Ruby did as many upward-facing dogs as she could before collapsing onto her mat and waiting there for the class to be over.

• • •

When they were all rolling up their mats, Ruby sauntered casually up to the teacher, who was drinking a tall glass of something frothy and green.

“Good class,” Ruby said. “I ran six miles yesterday, and my body just needed a little break. But really good class.”

The woman lifted her thumbs to her forehead and offered a micro bow. “Thank you so much,” she said. “My spirit could tell that your spirit needed a rest. That’s so important, really — it’s, like, the number-one thing that you learn in teacher training, that the hardest thing to do is to just listen to your own body and not care about what else is going on in the room.” She put her hand on Ruby’s arm. “You are my greatest teacher today.”

“I feel exactly the same way,” Ruby said, and put her own thumbs to her forehead. “Namaste.” She looked around the room, which had finally thinned out. There were still a few bendy-looking people loitering, giving each other back rubs, complete with appreciative moans. They reminded her of Dust and the church-step kids, only with better skin and clean livers. “This place is so great,” she said. “Do you teach here a lot?”

“Oh, we’re all teachers here,” the woman said. She leaned in. “You know, I think that you could really be an interesting part of this place. I’m Lena. Can I show you around? Want some kombucha? We make it here, it’s so good. Have you had it before? It’s kind of like iced tea, only funky.”

“I’d loooove that,” Ruby said, trying not to ignore how sore her thigh muscles were when they started climbing the stairs.

The tops of Dr. Amelia’s feet were tan except for the crisscrossing flesh that had been hidden underneath the straps of her sandals, which made her look like she was sitting in the shadow of venetian blinds. Zoe thought someone ought to tell her that her whole body needed SPF 30, not just her face and arms, but it seemed awkward to give a doctor medical advice, and so she kept her mouth shut.

There was a lot that Zoe wanted to keep her mouth shut about — she knew that Ruby and Harry had been fooling around whenever they thought she and Jane were asleep, and she didn’t care. She and Jane had been fooling around whenever Ruby was out, which was like when she was a baby, and they’d have sex during her naps because they were too tired and/or busy after she went to sleep for the night. She didn’t want to tell Elizabeth about Jane, which was ridiculous, because Jane was her wife and Elizabeth was her friend — but Zoe was worried that Elizabeth would be disappointed if she and Jane stayed together, like she was chickening out.

Dr. Amelia liked to sit cross-legged in her Aeron chair. “How’s it going, guys?” she asked. “Seems like it’s been a good summer?”

“We just had a fire at the restaurant,” Jane said. “The restaurant itself, actually.”

“And Ruby still hasn’t gotten into college,” Zoe said, and then corrected herself. “Isn’t going to college, I guess.”

“And she got hauled into the police station for having sex in Prospect Park,” Jane added.

“Oh,” said Dr. Amelia. She wrote something down on her notepad. “And are you two getting along? That seems like a lot of additional stress.”