But her body — good Lord, how she had transformed her body. In her sports bra and skintight spandex shorts, she was lithe, sinewy, and buffed. So were most of the other women, and as they packed into the room and began warming up in front of me with sun salutations and downward dogs, I was afforded close-up views of curved, supple ramps of ass and distinctly delineated furrows of ungulate. I thought it impossible I’d be able to make it through the ninety-minute class without embarrassing myself with an erection.
I needn’t have been concerned. This was not yoga as I had imagined it. There were no smoldering sticks of incense or Tibetan tingsha cymbals to guide us into oneness, no Sanskrit chants or quiet moments of sitting meditation to harmonize our pranas. This was an unadulterated, ball-busting workout. This was boot camp, absolute hell on earth.
The instructor, Kenta, was Japanese American, dressed in a long-sleeved T-shirt, loose pants, and a bandanna. He was not an imposing man — short, and even, it seemed, a little pudgy. He walked with a strut and spoke with a nasal voice that betrayed a faint metro lisp. But he led the class through a series of torturous stretches and lunges and contortions. Cobra pose, warrior pose, I couldn’t keep up with the poses, couldn’t flex or twist the way everyone else did. Soon I was out of breath, in pain, and sweating. Really sweating. I had never sweated so much in my life. With the heat turned up and the doors and windows sealed, with all the straining bodies so close together, the temperature must have been over a hundred. It was a sauna, a convection oven.
“Superglue your nips to your kneecaps,” Kenta ordered the class.
Sweat dripped onto the floor and was puddling — not just from me, from my mat neighbors, too.
“Don’t let fear interfere,” Kenta said. “You might feel like you’re struggling, but just transport yourself into the eye of the storm. Now sweep up and inhale.”
Sweat from my neighbors hit the backs of my legs, the wall mirror, the ceiling.
“You feel that decompression?” Kenta said. “It’s all about letting go. Now rotate.”
Sweat from my neighbors flew through the air and splattered my face.
“Awesome,” Kenta said. “This is warm molasses. Love your body. Don’t push. Just flow.”
I had to pause repeatedly to rest. I’d drop down into child pose, kneeling pathetically, and then rise and try to follow along, grunting and squealing. I lost my balance several times and fell over, almost instigating a dominoic catastrophe.
“I thought you were in shape from running,” Jessica said when the class ended.
“Some of those poses were inhumane.”
I stumbled through the door, into the relief of the cool night air. “Your wrists don’t hurt?” I asked. I hadn’t noticed her modifying her poses or using any of the foam blocks or apparatuses.
“No. Yoga seems to help, actually.”
“I don’t know if I can walk home. Let’s take a cab.”
“It’s less than a mile. Come on.”
We stopped at the White Hen on Mass Ave so I could buy a jug of Gatorade. “Is Kenta gay?” I asked.
“No. Why do you ask?”
“He seems gay.”
“He’s married and has two kids. He used to be a professional kickboxer. Before this, he was a trainer for the Celtics. Have you become homophobic?”
“Of course not.”
“Homophobia’s always a sign of latent homosexuality.”
“I’m not homophobic, and I’m not gay. I was just asking,” I said. “Slow down. My legs are killing me.”
“I love the feeling after class,” Jessica said. “It feels like I’ve just had incredible, hot, sweaty, slippery sex.”
Sex. Sex with Jessica — hot, sweaty, slippery, or any other variety. I had been imagining it quite frequently in the two weeks we’d become housemates, in even closer proximity now than we had been on the fourth floor of Dupre. “Do you ever talk to Loki?” I asked.
“Loki? Not in years.”
From Skidmore, Loki Somerset had gone to Yale for a combined PhD in film studies and East Asian languages and literatures. RISD was only two hours up 95 from New Haven, so they had seen a lot of each other and had even begun talking about marriage. But then Loki spent a summer in Beijing and fell in love with a Chinese woman (“I guess I wasn’t authentic enough for him,” Jessica told me). Last she’d heard, he had gone back to China for a postdoc at the Beijing Film Academy.
“Have you been seeing anyone?” I asked as we crossed Linnaean Street.
“No, not really, nothing serious.”
This was her patented answer, invariably circumspect about the particulars. I didn’t really know anything about her romantic life in the last four years, whereas, if prompted, I was unfailingly forthcoming with her.
“Is it that you’re not looking for anything serious?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve been going through a lot of shit, and people are always trying to analyze me, saying it’s because of Loki or what happened with my parents, or bottom-line I’m a cold heartless bitch, or that I’ll only go out with people who are so fucked up or unsuitable or unavailable, it guarantees it won’t work out, which must be secretly what I want, but you know what? Fuck all that. I just want to be alone right now. What’s so wrong with wanting to be alone?”
“Because being alone frightens people.”
“Does it frighten you?”
“A little,” I admitted.
“That could be your downfall as a writer,” she said.
“Why do you say that?”
“To produce art, great art, you’ve got to be willing to alienate people and suffer the consequences.”
I wanted to see what she had been working on in Provincetown, and the next day she led me into the basement of the house, where she had stacked her canvases against the foundation wall and covered them with tarps.
She had changed mediums again. At Mac, she had expanded on her elaborate ink drawings, then had started adding watercolor to them, then had gone back to representational painting, mostly hyperrealistic portraits. She entered RISD with painting as her discipline, only to become interested in doing small-scale sculpture — not a true departure, rather a redefinition of the pen-and-inks, with the same kind of intricacy and exactitude. Joshua and I drove down to Providence for her thesis exhibition, and what had fascinated us were her table sculptures. She had made them out of architectural model materials: styrene sheets, basswoods, open-cell foam, and chipboard. One sculpture, called Wushu, was shaped like the Pentagon, an ordinary replica, it appeared, except the concentric polygons were made up of miniature pairs of Nike shoes. Another, called Yawn, was a one-hundred-Taiwan-dollar bill, only, if you looked closer, you could see that the bill consisted of infinitesimal logos for McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and the like. All of this was rendered with the utmost specificity, down to the swoosh and laces on the shoes, and Jessica had done it all by hand, using craft knives and fine saws, files, sandpaper, and glue.
But she had started paying a price for such precision. Her hands began to hurt. Her fingers tingled and numbed, her wrists locked up on her, she couldn’t grip a knife or a brush with any vigor, and she couldn’t sleep at night, she was in such torment. She had developed carpal tunnel syndrome. She had hoped it might be temporary, but it persisted, so she began trying every conceivable remedy. She slept in wrist braces and propped her arms on pillows. She took anti-inflammatories. She stretched and massaged her forearms and wrapped them in gauze. She applied ice packs and rolled Baoding balls. She dipped her hands into baths of hot paraffin wax. She saw an acupuncturist and a chiropractor. Finally she paid out-of-pocket for cortisone injections.