Paradise Lust (13 page)

Soon into class, it became clear that Ajuni had become bored with Adele and was now directing his intimate “adjustments” toward Liesse, a tall Parisian woman; Adele surprised herself by feeling no reaction to this—she was usually so sensitive to any perceived rejection.

Practice was fairly uneventful, though Adele noticed that she fell out of balance poses a bit more frequently than usual. Probably the sleep deprivation.

As they sat in their final meditation at the end of the long three hours—never had a practice seemed so long before!—Ajuni spoke again, and it wasn’t his usual
Namaste
and a bow.

“Open your eyes,” he said. He looked around the room slowly. It seemed as though he was deciding what to say next, if anything. “Only a few days remain on this part of our journey. That is a large shift, a transition for which we must prepare, being as mindful of the transition as we are of the phases we move into and out of.”

A few stray nods

“I feel the awareness of that coming shift,” he continued. “But I also feel something else. There is a new aura on the island. Have you noticed?”

Adele heard someone next to her open her mouth and begin to speak, but Ajuni quickly went on.

“The intuitive creatures have noticed. The birds and bugs have retreated inland, as have the dogs. The proprietor’s baby, who I hear crying day and night, has been silent since midday yesterday. Several people complained to me of fitful sleep last night. Others?”

A sea of bobbing heads.

“This happens,” Ajuni said, his voice knowing. “It is nothing to be alarmed about, and I sensed it would come. On an island like Bali, where old rituals and spiritual tradition are deep in the land, the earth responds to the energies vibrating above it. The earth knows about our impending transition. It is also a full moon tonight, and the summer solstice is tomorrow. There are cosmic shifts interacting with our pedestrian ones.”

People fidgeted on their mats; the class felt collectively awkward and rapt. To Adele, jaded as she was with Ajuni’s teachings, it seemed like the first true thing he’d said in weeks.

“Not to be alarmed,” he repeated. “I only ask that you take the remainder of the afternoon to be silent. To observe the earth and be mindful of her movements. We will meet just after sunset on the beach for a final group meditation, after which we will break our silence.”

Silence??
Adele briefly panicked, and suddenly realized that she’d been spending all of Ajuni’s speech thinking about how she wanted to talk with Danny about it. But calm soon overrode the panic, as she remembered the comfort she’d felt before class—the secure feeling that Danny wasn’t going anywhere. One silent afternoon wouldn’t ruin anything. They could talk after her meditation that evening.

After Val had left his cabin, Danny had tried to go surfing. He needed to do something physical, something all-consuming, to rid himself of the horrible anger, disappointment, and loss he felt. But he’d been too shaken—and shaky, literally—to put on the ankle leash, and that frustration on top of everything else made him throw his surfboard across the porch. He’d been lucky to only break an empty coconut shell.

So he’d settled for a walk. He walked for a full two hours, but later couldn’t recall where he’d been or what he’d been thinking about. It was a hazy, hectic blur. The one piece of clarity at which he arrived was that he needed to confront her. He’d let avoidance of difficult things dictate his life, and he knew firsthand how claustrophobic and damaging it could be. He would just confront her, get it over with, and move on. End of story.

When he returned from his walk, there were still about forty minutes left in asana practice, and so he stood on the lawn outside the yoga hut and waited. The door was slightly ajar and he could see her (
In the front row, of course. Of course she’d want to be up front.
), which made his stomach involuntarily flutter, which in turn made him double down on his rage. He clenched his fists hard, digging fingernails into his palms.

He waited.

The more he waited, and the longer he watched her, happy and oblivious in her little yoga land, the more steely his resolve became. 

He’d let himself attach. He’d begun to open up to someone again. Just a few hours before, he’d been thinking that she might be the one he could talk to about everything—his deep unhappiness with his job, his guilt, his first marriage—and now he felt idiotic and humiliated and above all
angry
that she’d conjured these feelings up in him.

When the class finally emerged, the hot rage that had been vibrating quietly inside him flooded through his veins all at once. He had to focus all his energy on standing still.

Toward the back of the group (
Of course she was at the back. Probably stayed extra for some hands-on assistance.
), Adele appeared in the doorway. She wore those unfairly sexy little yellow shorts that perfectly cupped her ass, but the carnal desire her body lit in him only made him angrier in this moment.

As soon as she stepped out, she spotted Danny and trotted toward him, an enormous grin stretched over her face. Approaching him, she slowed to a walk, and began making hand gestures. She pointed to herself, then pressed a finger to her lips in the universal
sssh
sign, then drew that same finger across her sealed lips and threw away an imaginary key. Finishing her charade, she broke into that same grin and stepped forward, her arms reaching out to touch his.

Fighting against the urge to enter her embrace, Danny recoiled. He took two big steps backward and held up one arm to stop her from coming closer. The grin dissolved.

“Stop it,” he said. “So you’re doing a silent thing. Cool. Great. Probably really awesome for your yoga practice.”

Adele’s face looked baffled, on the verge of being upset, but mostly confused, seeking. One corner of her lips still looked like it was trying to turn up into a smile. She opened her mouth as if to respond.

“Don’t,” Danny said. “Don’t break your little silent yoga game for me. I already know I’m pretty low on your priority list, so you go do all the shit you have to do to become enlightened or whatever.”

He paused, gauging her reaction. She still looked perplexed, but the sad attempt at a smile was gone.

“And if that includes fucking some bullshit-spewing guru with a waxed chest, by all means, go for it,” he said. The confusion left her face, and he felt his heart sink. Only then did he realize that he’d still been holding onto a shred of hope that he’d been wrong. Sadness and anger overwhelmed him, almost buckled his knees. Panicked shimmered in her eyes, and she opened her mouth to speak again—

“Don’t’,” he said again. He wanted to say more—he had pre-rehearsed lines while he’d been waiting, he had a great one about karma—but didn’t trust his voice not to break.

“Danny,” she said, and took a step forward.

“Ha!” A cruel laugh erupted from him. “So now you’ve abandoned your yoga, too. Wasn’t that priority #1? No wonder the lower priorities get shit on. Real glad you were lecturing me about integrity. Real solid moral footing you’re on there. Good luck in life, Adele.”

He jerked his face away from her and turned toward the ocean. A confusion of feelings coursing through his veins, he strode heavily toward the beach and, before he could stop himself, turned to see if she’d followed him. She stood exactly where he’d left her, looking tiny and frail and broken. Her chin lifted at the sight of him turning, as if believing he was about to come back.

He clenched his fist tighter and, needing to save face, said, “Go back to being a back-stabbing, opportunistic corporate lawyer. Seems like that’s your thing.”  

This time when he turned toward the ocean, he broke into a run. There was no looking back.

Chapter 19

Sunset was hazy and anticlimactic that evening, the dull yellow orb slipping between a layer of blue-gray clouds before it reached the horizon line of the ocean. Adele’s eyes followed its path, remaining affectless and hazy themselves.

This day. What a day. Thinking back to the way it had begun—snuggled up in Danny’s warm arms, blissful, believing that nothing at all could shake their newfound happiness—sent a cruel pulse of misery into her stomach. If she could only go back in time, somehow fix things. It seemed so close, that happiness.

How had she not thought that her tryst with Ajuni would come out? How could she have been so stupid, so trusting, so confident in the universe ensuring things went her way? Hadn’t the world proved to her, again and again at this point, that that’s not the way things worked?

The thoughts piled on top of each other until she abruptly brought her hands to her face, rubbing her palms over her eyes and cheeks vigorously as if to physically erase the discord in her mind. Removing her hands, she stared back at the last rays of the disappearing day with bloodshot eyes. Sunset. It was time to go to the beach for group meditation.

She felt an impossible lethargy, coupled with a deep apathy—what was the point?—and yet the good, obedient student in her prevailed. She wouldn’t disobey a teacher—even if that teacher was strange and power hungry and was, in some ways, the reason that she’d lost a man she….loved?

With great effort, she pulled herself up off the front steps of her cabin and walked toward the beach.

Most of the class had already gathered by the time she arrived, and she settled herself as quietly as possible in the back of the group, farthest from the shoreline. Her peers sat peacefully, facing the ocean, most in lotus pose, all with eyes closed. For a few moments she watched the waves, strangely churning and restless, before she, too, closed her eyes.

It felt silly to be consciously meditating, since she’d been alone with her own protectively blank mind for most of the day, but she would try. Perhaps she could even get a few minutes of real peace, though she didn’t think she deserved that.

She couldn’t settle into a calm meditation, which wasn’t surprising. However, she felt similar agitation around her as well. She could hear and sense her classmates shifting, clearing their throats, swatting at mosquitoes. The ocean, too, continued to roil, the normally steady and hypnotic ebb and flow of waves replaced by an erratic and uneasy tossing. The mild ocean breeze had taken on a sharp chill, and Adele found herself wishing that she’d brought her sweatshirt.

Clear your mind
, she thought.
At least focus on the one thing you truly came here for. Breathe. Just breathe.

And so she did, for a few minutes. But the restlessness persisted. Her eyelids twitched impatiently.

As if of their own volition, her eyes snapped open suddenly. She was about to force them back shut when she froze cold. It took her a moment to fully register what she was seeing, a precious moment that might have been put to better use. The shoreline was rapidly receding, and beyond it, not too far back, a massive swell was moving toward the beach rapidly, gathering height and mass as it drew nearer. Whitecaps began to ripple its surface, and she could see the start of a curl. It was huge. It was close.

Her eyes enormous, she looked around frantically, and felt her horror increase as she beheld the scene. Her entire class sat arranged on the beach, everyone’s eyes closed, still attempting to find peace as the rogue wave closed in on them.

“Everyone run!” She bellowed, breaking the silence that had shrouded the island for the last nine hours. Eyes snapped open and turned toward Adele in confusion, but in milliseconds everyone had seen the reason for the alarm and was scrambling up, sprinting away from the ocean, stumbling up the slope of the dunes, slipping in the loose sand, screaming.

Adele leaped up onto the lawn, reaching the proverbial higher ground before anyone else did, and quickly turned, extending a hand to Val to help her make the two foot jump. As she turned again to see if anyone else needed help, she looked out at the ocean once more, the wave now beginning to crash violently on the beach and rushing up toward them at a terrifying rate, and her stomach clenched in dread as she saw what seemed to be a person out there, in the water, being tossed around by the ocean like a piece of seaweed.

Felicia fell flat on her face as she ambled up the ridge and onto the lawn, and Adele swiftly helped her up. When she looked back at the ocean, there was no sign of a person ever having been there.

She felt a tug on her arm, and turned to see Felicia pulling her away. The wave looked like it was about to breach the edge of the lawn.

After a moment’s hesitation, Adele fell into step beside Felicia, first running for cover, then sprinting.

Chapter 20

A fat raindrop burst on her nose, waking her. She glanced up with fuzzy eyes, and saw more heavy, shining droplets descending. They seemed to be moving slowly, but that was impossible.

Becoming aware of herself, she whipped her head around, taking in her strange surroundings. It took her a full thirty seconds to realize where she was, and how she’d gotten there.

She sat curled into a ball on the wicker chair of her front porch, wrapped in a woven blanket that she now realized had been dampened by rain. The black night spread in front of her, the only visible markers the ephemeral, glistening ripples of waves in the moonlight, vaguely marking where the earth ended and the ocean began.

After the violent wave had erupted over the group meditation session, and subsequently receded back into the ocean in a slow, anticlimactic seep that seemed almost embarrassed, she and her peers found each other on the lawn in front of the yoga hut. Some people were soaking wet, some had scraped and bloody knees or elbows from grappling up rocky surfaces or falling as they tried to escape. Others, Adele included, were bone-dry and scratch-free. Still others appeared to have more serious injuries, all people who had been sitting in the front row, closest to the ocean. (Adele thought of her late arrival to the meditation, and a pang of guilt stabbed her in the belly as she remembered the ungrateful thoughts she’d been entertaining earlier about the world having it out for her.)

Nick, a slender and sweet young man from Los Angeles, had twisted his knee badly while running away; Meghan’s hip had been pummeled hard by a rock the wave had carried in; Sue, an older woman from Oregon, had been held underwater for so long that she’d almost gone unconscious, and was now in a sort of catatonic state of shock, being soothed and talked down by Val; Ajuni himself appeared to have gotten a horrible case of whiplash. He sat silently away from the group, though this time his silence seemed sullen and sulky, rather than serenely powerful.

They milled about, hugging each other, not knowing quite what to say. Eventually they settled into silence, nobody feeling much up to small talk. Adele was shaking, and she couldn’t tell if it was from shock or from cold. Everything felt surreal.

Budi, the chef, sauntered toward them, and the crowd parted as he approached. The relief at his arrival was palpable, and the shared thought seemed to be
Finally, a native to explain what the heck just happened.

“Quite a wave,” he said, standing in the middle of the crowd and resting his hands on his belly. “Is good, though. The nature was…not right today. It needed to do this. It happens. The tide, y’know, in and out in and out, but not always so regular. Doesn’t always need to be regular. Sometimes, time for a big wave.”

He looked around, offering a reserved smile. He seemed to sense that this group of non-Balinese people weren’t as quick to accept the “nature being nature” concept as his neighbors, especially when it inconvenienced them.

“Is okay,” he said, nodding firmly, removing his smile. Adele fixed her eyes on his face and felt comfort in its sureness, in his words. Yes, everything was horrible right now, but maybe, just maybe, it was also okay. It’s okay.

Budi then let them know that Yande had the van ready to take any injured people to the nearby clinic. Before walking stiffly away, Ajuni stood slowly from his place on the ground and said only, “I knew there was something coming, but I did not see this. It perhaps was a challenge to our meditation, to stay clear and peaceful as chaos approaches,” he paused, rubbed his neck, looked around. Nobody seemed quite convinced. “Come to practice as usual tomorrow. Valerie will take care of things.”

And then he left, along with the other injured folk. Those remaining watched them descend, then dispersed, without saying a word, as if their silent afternoon had never had this very noisy interruption.

Afterward, Adele had made her way shakily back to her cabin and settled onto the front porch. She knew she was too wired to sleep, and would need some time outside to process what had happened: Danny, the wave, the strange prophetic signs from nature—it was all insane. Or maybe she was just going insane.

But then, somehow, she had fallen asleep, and now she found herself sitting outside at God-knows-what-hour, being gently pelted by a gathering rainstorm. Not wanting to wake up enough for her mind to dive back into torturous analysis and thought for the rest of the night, she hopped up from the chair, grabbed her blanket, and headed inside, straight to bed. The light of day would bring some clarity.

Maybe.