She had to help me onto the table. I took off my clothes by myself in the room. She said I could take my underwear off if I wanted to. This was a strange thing to be told. I left it on. I wanted to get on the table by myself, but I couldn’t manage it, probably because I tried to do it too fast, trying to outrun her threatened knock. I wrapped myself in the sheet, as she’d instructed, and she came in and helped me up. This was all so humiliating that I wanted to weep. It’s not as though I’m unaccustomed to being poked and prodded. I accept medical treatment with the not-quite-there dignity the sick and the elderly do their best to master. I suppose I just hadn’t wanted her first knowledge of me to be knowledge of my fragile, frustrating body. I hired her to do exactly what she was doing without expecting her to do it. Perhaps I imagined she’d recognize all I’d wanted was a pretext for meeting her.
Lying facedown on that table I was so tense I must have looked like a prisoner awaiting torture. I could feel her presence behind me, although she didn’t speak. I braced against her touch. After a moment I felt her lay her two palms flat on me, one on each of my shoulders. I thought she would begin to move them, but she didn’t. Then I thought she might say something, but she didn’t. I could feel the heat in her hands. I waited for her to do something. I opened my eyes and looked at my carpet and closed my eyes again. I watched each second pass like you watch each single, persistent drop from a leaky faucet form and fall. Suddenly the strangest thing happened—something in my shoulders let go. It was like caving in. It was like my shoulders had been brick and now they were pudding. I had had no idea.
She exhaled. “Good,” she said, and I felt as pleased as a child to have done what she wanted. “You keep a lot of tension there,” she said.
“You have to keep it somewhere,” I said, trying for insouciance.
She didn’t answer. She began to move her hands, gently, down my back. I must have drifted, honestly, because I don’t remember much else until she pressed a spot in my lower back, and a shock went through me, some kind of electrical pulse. I startled. “Hmmm,” she said. She rubbed a series of circles around that spot.
“You remind me of someone,” I said. I blurted it, stupidly, like the place on my back had been a button that released that thought. She stilled. I felt the wariness in her body, even without being able to see her. “An old friend,” I said. “Someone I knew a long time ago.”
“Oh,” she said, but flatly. It was another moment before her hands resumed their ministrations.
It’s intriguing, isn’t it, that that comment frightened her? I don’t know what that means but I’d like to. At any rate I see now why I’ve taken such an interest in her, from the moment I saw her across the pond: I recognized a mystery.
She had me roll over and went to work on my legs and feet. My thoughts dissolved. I drifted away.
Later I woke to find myself alone in the room. I got down from the table carefully, and dressed, and went out to find her back in the chair she’d chosen earlier, making notes on her form. She stopped when she saw me and closed her folder. “How do you feel?” she asked.
I nodded. I couldn’t manage to speak. She rose and met me where I was. “Let’s sit down.” She put a gentle hand under my elbow and guided me toward the chairs. I could feel her hesitating over which one to plant me in.
“The armchair,” I said, and she eased me down into it, and then, without asking, lifted my feet one at a time and put them on the ottoman. It took me a moment to notice that after I was settled she disappeared. I lifted myself out of the chair a little so that I could look round for her.
She came toward me out of my own kitchen, holding a glass of water. “You should drink this,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“Mind?” I accepted the glass. My arm floated it to my mouth.
“Me rummaging in your kitchen.”
“Oh,” I said. “No.” I smiled dreamily at her. “I feel as though you gave me a sedative.”
She smiled. “It can be like that sometimes,” she said. She pulled her chair over and perched on the edge of it, leaning forward with her eyes on me.
“I’m sorry that chair is so uncomfortable,” I said. “Like something from an old schoolhouse.”
“That’s fine,” she said. “How do you feel?”
“I feel wonderful,” I said. I couldn’t help confessing this. “I feel like I’m melting into the chair.”
She nodded, seriously, like a doctor hearing my symptoms. “Nothing feels bruised or achy?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Absolutely nothing.”
“Are you still able to get in and out of a bath?”
Normally I would’ve found this question intrusive. I just said, “I have a rail.”
“Good,” she said. “You might want to take an Epsom salt bath, to keep from being achy later. I was gentle, but since you’re not used to massage . . . And drink lots of water.”
I raised my glass to her and then dutifully drank from it.
“Can I get you some more?” she asked, and because it was so pleasurable to be tended, I let her. Then she went into the guest room to pack up her table. I dozed a little, I think, because the next thing I knew she was touching me on the shoulder. “Are you all right in that chair?” she asked, her voice low like she was trying not to wake me. “Or would you like me to help you up before I go?”
“Oh, I’m fine,” I said. “I hope you don’t mind if I don’t get up.” Her table was folded and waiting by the door.
“Not at all,” she said. She straightened and looked at me as if giving me one last chance to speak.
I said, “You do remind me of that friend, you know.”
“I hope that’s good,” she said.