by Valentina Bonnaire
(05/30/07)
...But oh, that magic feeling, nowhere to go
Oh, that magic feeling, nowhere to go
Nowhere to go...
--The Beatles
"Just breathe."
"If you had to ask yourself this question 'What would my next thought be?'...What would it be?" Edwin asked the class softly. They were all lying in Pigeon Pose, one of the deepest hip-opening asanas. The one that works on your emotions.
"Breathe into the space between your thoughts."
Cerise had spent four long years Sunday mornings doing a dance in the yoga studio with Edwin. He was her personal edge. Ed-ge. That place where you go too far, pushing past a point of resistance. The place where you tumble over a cliff in your mind or in your body. When you practice, you learn to ride these edges, breathing through them to the other side. You learn to go deeper.
"Just breathe."
Edwin had repeated this phrase so many times in class Cerise had memorized it. It was true that he was her favorite teacher. He was the only one who could help her turn off the thoughts for a couple of hours. When she left his class she floated in a blissful cloud, her mind as settled as the Sahara at dawn. Cool winds blew through her head, in the emptiness and serenity of the trancelike space he had created in her mind.
Edwin was tall and thin and dreamy and redheaded. He moved with the dangerous grace of a panther when he wanted to. Other times he flowed with the fluidity of water, especially when he did his adjustments. When he pressed his body up against hers in Half Moon or Triangle Pose, Cerise blushed like an innocent. She might as well have been a teenager in those moments. In Half Moon Pose he held her leg up, right at the junction where buttock meets thigh, finger tips just millimeters from her center. His other hand supported her waist from below. She wondered if he could feel the heat flaming up through her unitard. She never wore lingerie to class, just that slim black sheath like a second skin.
"Rotate this, here, can you feel that? Ummm, like that," he'd say, as his fingers pressed into her even more deeply, twisting her further and further into the pose. "Beautiful." His hair brushed across her open palm, as her hand floated further skyward. "Beautiful," he'd say as her face flushed with the heat of his nearness; and a tiny quiver rippled from deep inside, her lips already parting for his fingers, so close, so close.
His hands liked to linger over her in odd ways. "Don't forget to breathe," he'd say sometimes, as his fingers moved over her with the softness of dove's wings. Edwin knew all about skin. Once, in Reclining Butterfly, he'd made an adjustment that went to her edge and way past it. For a very long moment his forefingers had plunged themselves into the centers of her palms. When her fingers curled involuntarily around him like petals around stamens, Cerise realized she had gotten very wet, lying in the darkness behind her closed eyes. His forefingers were like miniature penises in her hands.
After that, Cerise was in awe of his power to make her want him. This had little to do with his funny expressions and curious musical taste or the Indian accents he would impersonate periodically. It had to do with touch, and the way he stared at her across the studio. Edwin was a shaman.
Sometimes he'd play old Stevie Wonder songs and try to encourage people to leave their mats, for the pure joy of movement. He and Cerise would dance wildly in the studio, but never with each other. It was surprising the students who remained still at those times -- who refused to move at all, for fear of looking foolish. Edwin embodied the freedom that the practice of yoga brings. He always brought laughter bubbling up from inside Cerise. She flowed mirthfully like a little tinkling brook in his presence.
Just last Sunday, in Warrior Two, he had beckoned her with his fingers. "C'mon, he'd said. C'mon, as he stared straight at her and summoned her with his curling palm. But he was ten years younger, and Cerise was married. Or supposed to be. Two long separations had dulled matrimony for her. She'd had two love affairs already. So Edwin's gesture was really not surprising, considering he was a dangerous edge for her. He was, however, something safe to think about when she needed to make herself come...
After class Cerise surveyed her back garden. Dozens of insects, butterflies, and bees crowded the air. The apple and orange trees were thick with bloom and delicate perfume as Cerise watched everything hum and drone, tumbling up against all the flowers. She breathed in masses of blown roses, their thousands of blooms calling to her like sonnets. Lady Banksia, Cecile Brunner, Talisman, English Elegance -- she'd planted them all in the early years of the marriage. Now she parted the petals to reach their flushed centers. Her hair was full of fallen orange blossoms.
He loves me, he loves me not.
Thomas, her husband, was reading the Sunday paper as he always did, engrossed in the editorials about war. How many years had it been like that on Sunday mornings? Too many to count. The dove-like brushes of Edwin's hands that morning still caressed her skin in places, calling. Cerise shivered slightly, remembering. Thomas rarely looked at her anymore. Not in the way that mattered. Cerise was between affairs, but not for long. The practice made her feel too alive.
She let herself drift into a reverie, thinking about Edwin holding her,
as the bees droned lazily through the garden, and the hummingbirds spun by.
She could still feel the imprint of his palm from earlier in the morning.
It blazed on her thigh, so close, so close. Once, in Headstand, she had asked Edwin "Am I all right?" and squatting next to her he had whispered softly "Everything about you is all right, Cerise." The two of them had been dancing along the edge of that ambiguity for months. She had meant her form in the pose, nothing else. And yet...
Later, when Thomas wanted to walk the dogs, she declined. Better to stay at home alone, she thought. You go, she mused. "Take the dogs...have fun."
I want to touch...
Myself, she thought. Just go away. What Cerise summoned forth from the vastness behind her closed eyes had nothing to do with Edwin, really. He was just the starting point, or the entry into dream. She conjured ghosts of all the lovers she had ever had, facelessly. She summoned a composite male up from her depths. Who he was didn't matter. He was simply an imaginary presence who knew how to whisper things. His hands began to touch her as softly as bird wings. A thousand doves fluttered over her skin as her eyes closed into the subtle reverie of his embrace. "Breathe with me, just breathe," he murmured.
She could feel him there against her, all over her, an invisible yet tangible pastiche of every man who had gone before him. His lips traced the back of her neck. His hands slid down her, possessing her skin and claiming it. He was entering her from behind as she arched up against pillows. He was holding her and she couldn't get away. He wouldn't let her. Her lips mouthed the sound "fuck me" and he slid inside of her. It could have been her anus, could have been her vagina, could have been anywhere, really.
Her body was rolling into the softness of the bed, into the pillows,
and he was there once again, her phantom lover -- he was there with her inside of whispers, inside of breath, inside of dream.
Fuck me, she murmured with her mind as his fingers found her nipples and clasped them softly between his. He had no plans to stop, until she...until she was so lost in him that she came in a thousand colors.
Her mind floated briefly to the place Edwin had claimed on her thigh that still felt inflamed. She heard the man's voice saying "breathe" as the dove wings beat against her, fluttering, fluttering. His fingers. His whispers.
"Just breathe. Breathe with me..."
His hands pinned hers into the sheets in her mind's eye. Fingers interlocking, fingers interlaced. She arched against him, thrusting up toward him, toward his invisible presence. Dove wings beat, beating, beating all around them, against her. Suddenly an image of the two of them floated across a mirror in her mind, surfacing, coming, spiking sharply up, spiking to the summit, the edge, the edge, cresting over the top and back down again in a crescendo of breath, and of sigh. A thousand creamwhite doves released at once into the blue wash of sky above her, airborne, as she came suddenly, trembling.
His breath against my ear, his breath, his warm hands sliding...
Cerise's fingers gradually relaxed between her still shuddering thighs. She rolled over and smiled at the ceiling, as if she were still in class and it was time for Savasana.
It could have been anyone, anyone, not you Thomas, not Edwin, not other lovers, Cerise thought.
It's just what he does, my fantom. He knows everything. He knows everything I'll never let you know, or I can't let you know, Edwin. All the secrets between my thighs that you can never truly have. Secrets I'm not going to let you have. All of my life, they have belonged to him.
I can come for him and it is so easy. I can let him have it. Have everything. Because I want him to. It's a place no one else can go, you know? The place I go with him. The places that he takes me, again and again...
