“It was . . . it was, um, kind of nice getting to talk.”
“What? Oh. We should, uh . . . Okay, I’m going out first, and I’m going to take these guys, the police, on a little shopping trip to find the most expensive lingerie in the Village. Hey, did you hear?”
Stampfel is standing, one hand on the vinyl lining of the booth.
“Shelley Ralston Havemeyer.”
“Who?” Jeanine says.
“She wrote
The Diviners.
We actually found her.”
“I thought her name was Marjorie something.”
“Don’t believe everything you hear. She has two studios fighting over her.”
Annabel, having had her only meal of the day, makes for the door, her Celtic tattoo just visible above the rim of her leather pants, in that sacral zone between belt and shirt hem. Out she goes into the rain. The Bloody Mary drinkers, aligned at the bar, in an intensity of forgetting, don’t see. The runway models, still irritated at waitressing or hostessing when by now they ought to have become supermodels, don’t see. Even the detectives, calling in to the precinct, indicating that they are just about done for the day, have not seen. The person with a scoop on the way these events connect is the woman in the conservative and sensible outfit, the one with the burn scars and a dead-bolt key.
“With that,” he says, and he means the masking tape, on the desk of the False Guru, in the office of the False Guru, in the Ashram of the False Guru, where he’s located with a woman named . . . what’s her name again? Her name is Nora. He has removed many items from this desk, just in case a surface is needed. His good fortune owes to the fact that he has agreed to be a part of the next gala benefit thrown by the False Guru for the Foundation of the True Practice, a foundation that aims to bring remnants of Eastern wisdom to the thirsty Western masses. The False Guru has the cooperation of a number of persons with perfect skin and large fortunes, and Thaddeus Griffin has now agreed to lend his name, in concert with these persons who have fortunes, and this has caused the office of the False Guru to be made available on short notice, for an important private lesson with one Nora Richards, whom he’d earlier thought to be merely another student of the False Guru. But no. She’s not simply a student, she’s a yoga instructor in training, and she has proven her willingness to conduct this private lesson in the office of the False Guru, a lesson commencing in seated posture on the Oriental carpet. Quite a lovely and expensive carpet, when you pause to consider that the False Guru was at one time a practitioner of the fine arts, a free-wine-in-plastic-cups-drinker at local art openings. But then the False Guru traveled to India to learn the binding poses. He practiced renunciations and the diverse skills that would enhance the business that he was launching here on the fringes of Noho.
One with the carpet, one with the tumbleweeds of dust on the carpet. Thaddeus accepts a gentle correction in the performance of the auspicious pose, bhadra-asana, bringing the soles of his feet together under the scrotum, hollowing the hands above the feet in the shape of the tortoise. He allows Nora to push roughly upon his shoulders because the problem is that his shoulders are always up around his ears, and this is inauspicious. Thaddeus makes the shape of a tortoise, indicating receptivity. There is a siren going past the Ashram of the False Guru, and somewhere there is the faint tinkling of the indoor fountain installed at considerable expense, also the chittering of beautiful yoga practitioners in their expensive outfits. This is the poetry of sounds, respiration, siren, fountain, and the liquid vowels of practitioners, and this is the magnificence of incense, and this is the raising up of prayer, and this is the knowledge of subtle things, a knowledge of things that are hidden away, which is one of the tasks of the yogin. When the yogin knows these subtle things, then shall he mash his mouth against the mouth of his yogini.
She was once employed in the helping professions. She told him so. She was once employed in the profession of exotic dancing, and so it does not seem as though she will turn away from the desperate collision of soft tissue, this mashing of faces. She has an Indian guru. She has learned to play the harmonium. She is allowing herself to be kissed by Thaddeus Griffin, movie star and practitioner of yoga, and she is kissing back a little bit, and this is the pose called the Adulterous Union, wherein two practitioners, who are elsewhere participants in love’s vast covenant, conjoin their mouths on the Oriental carpet in the ashram.
“I really can’t help myself, you know, I can’t help what I’m going to say, so I’m just going to say it. Because why hold back, you know? You’re just incredibly beautiful, do you know? Do you know how beautiful you are?” The yogin says these things as though to say them were a chant. It’s no falsehood to speak in this way. Falsehoods are not noble truths. She is beautiful, even if it is also true that the yogin thinks virtually everybody is beautiful. Fully two-thirds of the yoginis he passes on the street are ravishing. They don’t know this about themselves because a ravishment doesn’t know what it is. For example, the way a certain woman wears glasses, tiny spectacles, pinched onto her nose like a fence that protects the male of the species from the memorable hue of her eyes. She probably works for Internal Revenue. There’s a way she shifts her weight from side to side as she walks, she has the most beautiful ass he’s ever seen, and this ass was created as an evolutionary novelty so that men would see the ass of this Internal Revenue employee and these men would beg to be with her, and she would preserve her rajas, or genital ejaculate, and suck up bindu, thereby ensuring fruitful multiplication, in turn creating the chromosomal reproduction of the perfect ass, and thus the continuity of a brave line of Internal Revenue employees.
However, upon seeing this woman on the way to the Ashram of the False Guru, the yogin’s reverie about her ass is interrupted because passing close by her, in the opposite direction, is another yogini in a conservative suit who is wearing a high-visibility hard hat. She is so beautiful with the hard hat on that it is almost impossible not to propose to her on the spot, and the fact that she has a mole on the side of her nose is completely irrelevant to the enlightened yogin, she has to wear that hard hat, she must keep wearing that hard hat, and as a matter of course he’d still be thinking about her, except that now he passes a woman with that little calf muscle, the calf muscle from too much high-heel wearing, or perhaps it is just the advanced practice of uttankoormasana, resulting in a sculpting of calves; she smiles as she walks, the yogini, and the smile of a yogini is philosophically overwhelming, emanating from the third eye center; it is as if the yogini knows that the universe is situated in her body; it is as if the yogini drinks the water from the cranial bowl of the yogin; if they all smiled while walking, yogins would be as idiots stunned by the multitude of smiling yoginis, and still he is thinking about these calves, that smile, wondering if he should run after the yogini in order to get to know her in her quintessence, in her rajas, whoever she is, this as he enters into the ashram, signs in for class, only to find, again, by the sale leotards and the CDs of thunder drums, as the fountain spills into its retaining pool, the aforementioned Nora Richards.
“So how much for a private lesson, anyway?”
Which brings us to this moment. Nora is attempting to observe the rigors of private tutelage, pushing against his pelvis as she tries to get him to do the second warrior pose with binding, reminding him to lock in the belly, performing in this way the mula bandha. Close the anus and strongly draw upward the excreting energy. She reaches under, and she must know how enlightening it is to have her reaching under him in this way. He is truly experiencing the enlightenment and the freedom from rebirth. And it is then, in a state of enlightenment where there is no room for individual consciousness, that Thaddeus suggests that she masking-tape his wrists together in order to ensure that the binding in the pose is performed according to tradition.
“What?” Nora asks.
He is balanced in sushumna, between inhalation and exhalation, between the masculine and the feminine. He is thinking that this is a bad idea, this private class, in that it does not observe abstinence from the eight kinds of erotic action, namely, to think it, to praise it, to joke about it, to look with desire, to converse in private, to decide to do it, to attempt to do it, to perform it. And yet it seems like a very, very good idea at the same time, because self-discipline splits the personality in two, as the masters say, and without self-discipline one drinks in the fluids of the moon.
“With that.” He selects from among the personal effects of the False Guru. Standard-issue American masking tape, the sign of a well-equipped desk.
“Isn’t it going to hurt?”
“It’s going to make it so that I do the pose right, you know, and that’s what I’m after. I’m all about trying to do the pose right. That’s why we’re here.” He’s in the pose and he really does feel like a warrior, because he is a warrior of the Adulterous Union, he is a warrior of expedient decision making and inadvisable seductions, and he’s in the pose, the warrior pose, and this is the presentation of the lingam, the gesture of the lingam, in which concentration on longing is in the shape of an arrow shining like a thousand suns, and this is good, because sometimes he has to resort to the philters of Western medicine to achieve the proper presentation of the lingam, and he reaches one arm under himself and one around his side and says, “Bind me.”
“What about getting it off later? That’s going to burn.”
His impatience is plain to see. For this is the lingam gesture. Nora peels up the end of the tape, wraps it around his wrists twice, and then, under pressure, a third time. This is the pose of the Humiliated Pupil, and once in it, he scuttles, as if crustacean, closer to her, where he can plant his five o’clock shadow on her hams, and she giggles, and he kisses her thigh. Her thigh has the excellence of distant galaxies.
“Take off the gear.” He means that the time is so short. And she does the perfect yogic removal of layers, one leg at a time, like a pink flamingo of yogic abandon. And because she has the experience in the helping professions, she has eliminated coarse overgrowth from her body, except for a landing strip, in the Brazilian style, and she giggles as he cranes with his neck, winching forward to make a landing in the folds of her, though she cannot help but say, “Flat back, shoulders down, please. Shoulders down,” and then there’s a little rush of the breath of the ocean, a silencing, as he has now placed his tongue where he would prefer to have his tongue, his subtle tongue of the candle flame. Exertion is involved because his hands are in the binding position and so his hands cannot be used. And it is said that meditation upon the mandala on the wall in the office of the False Guru shall alleviate conditions of suffering, the mandala on the tapestry, that representation of Shiva the destroyer, but this causes distraction from the presentation of the lingam, which causes the lingam to fail. There is no other explanation but the explanation of unnecessary concentration upon the mandala. How could this always happen? Losing himself in the shambhavi mudra when he should be engaged with the tantra and the yogini. How could it happen?
He collapses onto the floor. “Bow pose. Can we do bow pose?”
The yogini expresses hesitation at causing pain to the yogin in the pursuit of the bow pose, which is better performed by seasoned practitioners. And yet the entire alimentary canal will be toned in this practice, which is the practice of dhanurasana, likewise adrenal glands and thyroid gland.
“Tape my ankles, too, when I —” and he rolls onto his stomach, the bow pose, with one arm pinioned under him, left over from the binding, “and then you can sit on top of me and you can do a correction. On top of me.”
The instructor must know the shape of the cosmic being. The shape of the cosmic being is the guise of the star of the action film, star of distant light, star of the eternal cosmos, and the yogini is a drinker of the light of the cosmic star of the action film. And she kneels over him, reaches in through his shorts, massages his buttocks, as if he were clay and she the potter, and then she shoves his ankles together and starts circumnavigating these ankles with the standard-issue American masking tape, twice around, three times around. And then she yanks his workout shorts down, without even asking, there he is, the cosmic being, in the office of the False Guru, extremities taped, and his shorts around his ankles, and he’s a cosmic being who has a most fleshy lingam, and he needs something more, something, in order to perform the gesture of the lingam. It has to be real suffering for him to be able to do it, something that increases the wattage of the prana. And this is what he says to Nora: “Can’t you put some fingers up me? Could you maybe just put a few fingers up me or something?”
Which, as has been explained above, is the digital exploration of the mula bandha, root contraction, which conquers old age and death. It would be better, of course, if these things did not need to be explained. When the breath is held, the prana is still, and so the yogin holds the breath, and the prana is still, and there is the digital examination of the mula bandha, which is a part of the tantric exploration, which is the moving of the lingam without allowing the seed to fall. And so we have again the placement of the mouth of the yogin at the yoni of the yogini, which is the gesture of the beginning of the worship of the yoni, where a thousand petals crowd the mind of the yogin, and the deities dwell in the subtle centers, and what could be better, for the lingam once again desires to perform the lingam gesture, and the yogin thinks now of all the crowding images of humility that are upon him, on the carpet of the False Guru, under the tapestry with the mandala upon it, the image of humility in which he could perhaps be on the desktop of the False Guru, with his mouth against the yoni of the yogini, and then even more than this there is the expelled cleansing of the yoni, bahish-krita-dhauti, perhaps there could be an expelled cleansing of the yoni onto the yogin, for the yogin believes that his practice could improve significantly in the presence of this magnificence of the yogini, because the life force lies in knowing these things, in doing all things with the body of the yogini, the things that he has not yet done, or at least has not done recently, and what about gajakarani, or elephant technique, perhaps the yogini could teach him of this ritual cleansing, because if anything, the yogin needs cleansing, needs to be cleaned of the wastes, mucus, gas, and acidity, there is a shortage of cleanliness, and he presses his mouth against her, and there is the bellows breath. The yogini is practicing the bellows breath, and then perhaps the yogini is performing the humming bee breath, which stretches back to the centuries before the birth of the Buddha, the breath that is indicative of tantric ascension, and that is when the yogin asks about the amorali, reminding the yogini that we need not think of amorali as consuming something unclean, like solid wastes, because the practice of amorali, the yogin thinks, is about immortality, except that he uses more coarse language, to ask about it, and he asks about it, because the drinking of the urine will be of the midstream, for the midstream has no bile in it but rather hormones, enzymes, and other by-products that are a surfeit, a supplement to the harvesting that the body does, and therefore it will be —