Saturday morning—yoga.
As with anything new, or out of the normal routine, the Kid had expressed extreme reluctance to try yoga. According to his very expensive Park Avenue doctor, he needed to develop core strength and improve his balance and coordination. Heather and I had then explained to the Kid why yoga would be good for him—a remarkably dumb waste of time on our part and a violation of my father’s first rule of parenting—“It tastes like bacon” always beats “It’s good for you.” But his resistance evaporated at the first class. He was good at it, and he had fun. Two months later, he had graduated out of the special-needs class and was now the star pupil—in my unbiased opinion—of the fours-fives. Mainstream fours-fives.
Tino drew appraising sidelong stares from the group of mothers gathered in the waiting room outside the small gym. Those women with more acute gaydar turned their attention from Tino to me—in questioning reappraisal.
“I think a couple of the women over there are ready to volunteer to help you with your reparation therapy.”
Tino looked over at them and smiled. “It’s been tried before,” he murmured. “It didn’t take.”
We were the only males present—Angie and her mother were having a lie-in before heading out to catch a matinee. Most of the mothers, upon releasing their children to the care of the yogi’s assistants, had immediately broken into groups of two or three and begun exchanging information and opinions on schools, doctors, and after-school arts, sports, and music programs—D-day was planned with less information. It was all a world that the Kid would experience only on the periphery, like an aberrant comet that circles the same sun but rarely crosses the path of any other heavenly body. Nevertheless, I took mental notes—just in case. They managed to conduct these conversations while simultaneously text-messaging nonstop so that I wondered about the future crash of the medical insurance industry, done in, sometime in the next decade, by the tsunami of cases involving crippling tendinitis of the thumbs.
The instructor called the class to order, and everyone’s attention shifted to the wide observation window. Cell phones disappeared, and conversations were cut short, or continued in a hushed, reverent whisper.
Sometime later, Tino leaned to me and said, “You think anybody would notice if I went over and slapped that boy silly?”
The boy in question insisted on making fart noises every time the class went into Stretching Puppy.
“I like the redhead,” I answered. A strawberry-haired girl in pink unitard meandered around the room, following some random route. She had a blissful smile on her face that transformed into evil-looking anger when one of the two assistants approached her. They each tried twice to get her to settle down and do the exercises, but she was obviously much happier when they left her alone.
“Too cute. And I’ve got a dozen clients back home who would name me in their wills if I could give them hair like that.”
“I think that’s her mother.” I gestured with a flick of the eye to a silky-haired redhead across the room. She was wearing jeans just a tad too tight for what Skeli would have called her “Kardashian hips.”
“Ooooh.” Tino winced. “Brazilian. That is so bad for you. I won’t do them.”
Brazilian? “How can you tell?”
Tino looked at me questioningly for a moment, then burst into laughter. The women looked over briefly, then went back to adoring their progeny.
“Not a bikini wax. A blowout.”
“Ah,” I said, feeling proud of my deductive powers. “A hair treatment.”
“You slap enough chemicals on a head of hair and you can just about make it do anything. Stand up, lay down, roll over, or sing Christmas carols in July.” He gave the month the Deep South accent on the first syllable. “But that doesn’t mean it’s actually good for you.”
“The price of fashion?”
“I have a friend in L.A. I visit sometimes. He’s an orthopedic surgeon out there. Anyway, we were walking along Rodeo one afternoon, and as we’re passing Jimmy Choo’s, Laurence stops to stare at the shoes. Well, Laurence is not like that, if you know what I mean. So I teased him about it, saying wouldn’t he rather be looking at the new line at Timberland.”
I chuckled politely.
“Laurence just smiled and said, ‘Tino, it’s shoes like these that paid for the house in Provence and the first-class tickets to get me there and back every summer.’ Shut my mouth.”
The instructor, a children’s nurse from Roosevelt Hospital with a ready smile, stopped next to the Kid, bent down and spoke to him quietly. He grinned. What could she have said?
Tino followed my eyes and looked out toward the Kid.
“He looks just like a cat, doing that.”
The Kid’s animal poses were his best—of course. “They call it Halloween Cat. I think he’s proud of himself. If you’re lucky, you might get to see his Cobra.”
The class ended with the Fallen-Down Tree. The Kid lay flat on his back, totally relaxed—without having to be bound in a tightly wrapped sheet. I didn’t have the words to explain to Tino how proud I felt.
“My yoga teacher tells us that’s the hardest pose of all,” Tino said.
“You have no idea how hard it is for him to relax—anytime. It’s like his whole body is constantly on guard—waiting for something bad to happen.”
Tino sighed. “Too bad Angie couldn’t come.”
Part of me—the part that suffered through cringe-worthy morning dreams—wanted to point out that Angie could very easily have come, but that she chose to sleep late instead. But another voice told me to listen to Tino and learn. It was too bad. For Angie. She was the loser for not having come. The Kid wouldn’t have noticed or cared. My opinion didn’t much matter to anyone but me. But Angie had missed the chance to see her son do something wonderful—and I found that I could spare a touch of sympathy for my ex.