She looks at me long and walks back to where her daughter is.
At yoga, there’s a teacher I’ve never had before. She’s more solid than the other women, short and stocky. She wears a thin red T-shirt with white writing that pulls at her breasts and bunches overtop her ass. She has curly, light-red hair held back and wide, round legs.
This is a multilevel Vinyasa flow, she says, which means some of your neighbors might be making modifications, so please keep your eyes off your neighbors and just follow what I say.
She keeps saying this throughout the class, a little scolding. I always get behind and have to watch the women in front of me or behind me and I get nervous, hoping that she doesn’t see me as I look.
Please take your eyes off of your neighbors, she says again, as we sit in a squat, and I think I’ll never take a class with her again.
Except there is a rhythm to the class and I get inside it. We move more quickly than I’m used to and I think I’ll fall or the woman behind me, whom I’ve seen before and who can do the headstand, will fall over laughing at the fact that I can’t even touch my toes.
I sweat more than I usually do at yoga, and my back straightens and it lengthens and my stomach pulls back further to my spine and I look straight ahead.
Every day or two I get a text from Sasha, pictures of the baby. I touch my phone’s screen and smile at her. I don’t know how to tell her what I think, how much I hope for her and her baby, how much I wish I could be there with both of them. I send back pictures of our girls instead.
We’re friends now, I think. It’s different. I think maybe this time, as we try to love each other, maybe it will be more careful and less dire.
I get an email from Melissa. Just wanted to check in to say I’ve been cleared, she writes, of whatever this whole thing was about. I wanted to thank you, she says. She suggests we meet for dinner and I agree too quickly.
I’d love to, I say. Tell me when and where.
How are you? says Melissa. I see her outside. She’s very thin, no longer pretty, but the structure of her face serves as a sort of palimpsest for all the ways it must have been pretty, must have been a force.
We hug although I’ve never hugged her. I brush my arm accidentally along her abdomen.
I don’t think the food is very good here, she says. She picked the restaurant. It’s close to my apartment, she says. And the drinks are strong.
I smile, not sure if I’m meant to laugh.
The host leads us to a table in a dark corner of the room. She gets a gin martini and I am grateful and I get the same and she smiles at me, showing teeth.
You’ve been good? she says.
She never asks about my children and I’ve always liked this about her. She has no children. I have heard, though she’s not said this to me, that she dislikes them.
I’m so glad, I say, that all of this is settled.
Our drinks come and she sips hers.
She says my name. You have no idea, she says.
I don’t know if you want to talk about it.
It’s fine, she says. It’s over now.
What happened? I say. What did any of this have to do with you?
David is a friend of mine, she says.
David is the man about whom the students had been talking, the man of whom I reported uncertain allegations but who now has apparently been cleared.
There are certain people, she says, who have been out to get him. Not least because he is allied with me.
She’s a fiction writer. I’ve read only one of her books, and in it a woman sleeps with her sixty-five-year-old professor/mentor. She’s a gorgeous writer. The book spends a good amount of time unpacking all the various ways and places they have sex. There are paragraphs describing New York, at night and early in the morning, the park, along the water, that I can still picture sometimes in my head.
There’s something happening right now, she says, a certain type of victimhood, she says.
Our food comes.
I sip my drink and she sips hers.
It’s been weaponized, she says. Anyway, she says, noticing that there’s food before her.
What happened, though? I say. What’s happening with David?
He was dating a student, she says.
But he’s married, I want to say, and then feel strange and dumb but also angry. He’s married. He has little kids.
There are all these new provincial rules because the institution is afraid, she says.
She eats her sandwich in small bites and chews it slowly.
I have a cheeseburger that I’ve yet to touch.
One of these hypersensitive girls thought it was not appropriate, she says.
She, this girl, she says, not his girlfriend—she asked to be removed from his class. I told her I saw no reason for this, she says.
She sips her drink and I press my hands against the hard wood of the table.
So she told on me, she says.
I pick up my burger and I bite.
It’s still not clear to me, though, she says, why they looped you in.
I chew and neither of us speaks for too long for it not to be on purpose.
Yeah, I say. Who knows?
When I get home, my husband is in bed. Left out on the counter, meant for me to see it, is a letter telling us the owners of the building are converting it to condos. They’ve given us the option to purchase our apartment or to leave within the month.
I call the rich woman the next morning.
Could we get coffee? I say to her.
I have news, she says.
We’ve waited too long and she’s pregnant. They did one round of IVF with other donor sperm she doesn’t explain and
