Free The Colorman by Erika Wood Page A

were meaningful to her—her yoga practice, her ongoing healing with her grown son, her various women’s groups—these were her true heart’s connections. They took a place apart from her sexuality, though of course, the yoga did sneak into it a little.
    She might say she was just here for the sex, but it seemed to her that she and James had a beautifully “skillful” relationship, to use another of her yogic terms. Evolved. Lucy’s maturity was thrilling to her, especially since her carefully minimal food intake and her vigorous teaching schedule kept her body toned like an eighteen-year-old’s. This physical confidence and pleasure was something she hadn’t been blessed with as a teenager or a young woman. Finding it now, even though her face had loosened and her hair was wiry with grays, was like a consolation prize worth far more than the dangled carrot you were supposed to have wanted in the first place.
    Better, since the pleasures of attractiveness were such a double-edged sword for a young woman. By spending her teens, twenties and even up through much of her forties increasingly plump, Lucy suspected that she’d taken down one of the pillars of her beauty on purpose since all it ever brought her was insult and pain. Uncaring lovers looking only for conquests, jealousy and insults from other women and that leering false interest and utter dismissal from elders. These last two were attitudes in which she always promised herself she would never indulge. The respect and directness she employed when dealing with others in the studio where she taught may have been partly responsible for her elevated status there, where most of the other teachers and students were much younger women.
    Now that she had little jowls and crows feet and those unruly gray curls, Lucy could embrace her sexuality and attractiveness. Age brought her another pillar down, societally speaking, but this demotion somehow made her feel braver and stronger, rather than simply shut out, the way her fat had.
    Though James was not her only partner, he was her most regular. She kept her other relations to one-night stands, usually with other yoga teachers on retreat, those opportunities for combined enlightenment, tantric practice and the “letting go of attachment” being too good to pass up. Those isolated incidents were a bit of a game, she knew, both for her and for these men, who were invariably quite a bit younger than she—usually married, vaguely homosexual or in committed relationships. There was plenty of experimentation and the occasional group session, but she didn’t go on retreats too often, as maintaining that perfectly balanced detachment was sometimes difficult in the face of the dangerously contagious exhibitionism so rampant there.
    With James there was nothing to have to pretend. They had an ease together, James expecting so little of her, and allowing her to conquer him at each of their twice-monthly meetings. Once she came on to him, he would come back at her voraciously enough, but he was passive until she’d moved on him.In fact, he had been quite unperturbed by the one companionably unsexual evening they’d spent together. Lucy had done it to test him, to get a feel for what he might do, and though by their next date he did seem particularly energetic, James was so easy with skipping the sex, that Lucy wondered whether she needed to complain. But then she brought her awareness to yet another level of appreciation for this relationship. No attachment. No expectations or whining or games or demands. Just what it was.
    They had the routine whittled down to dinner at his place once a month when she came up to perform onsite physical therapy for his employees and in the city at her place between those visits. Their assignations were easy, slipped into like favorite slippers but no less energetic or pleasurable for that ease.
    James would always rise early, make coffee, and get