Chapter 8

The next evening Yuri witnessed a curious scene. His wife was sitting on the floor in front of a laptop, teaching a yoga lesson. Nothing strange there -- the session for her lagging student was on the schedule.

The question was how she was teaching it.

Yuri couldn’t remember his wife ever leading a lesson in lingerie, legs spread wide.

“Ann ... is everything okay?” her bewildered husband asked.

She hissed at him.

“I’m teaching. Can’t you see?”

“I don’t see a lesson, I see you stripping for the camera,” Yuri wanted to say, but he swallowed it. “Maybe I just never paid attention to how she teaches before?”

Later, of course, he brought up this new “specificity” of her work. Ann said she was demonstrating a type of practice where you need to see the muscles working -- and that she always taught this kind of session like that.

Yuri stared at her for a long time, until she even asked:

“What is it, love? Is something bothering you?”

“No ... just work,” he answered thoughtfully, and went into the other room.

He remembered that student. A decent man, respectable on the surface. Hardly the type you’d suspect of seducing someone’s wife. And yet...

Ah -- for one lovely woman, if she wishes it, it is far easier to make a man stray from the path of virtue than for an entire crowd of devils with the most enticing -- but alas, so monotonous -- promises. Just a few smiles and tender looks, and yesterday’s righteous man falls into the arms of sin...

Yuri horrified himself. How long ago had his rosy image of his wife as a kind of saint turned into the thought that she herself might seduce her student?

Oh, Ann, Ann ... what are you doing to your poor husband ... you do remember that even the rich cry, don’t you?

“If only we could live well without that disgusting old man,” Yuri thought miserably. I swear by hell, each of us has our own “if.”