Massaging Janet

a far cry from the Swedish sequence

Massage therapists are asked to think of the muscles in their actions as players in a drama. One muscle is the agonist, the other the antagonist. There might be more than one agonist and more than one antagonist involved, depending on the action, but each muscle is assigned only one point of origin and one point of insertion. No doubt this is reductive, and no doubt there will be those who think that it would be better to call the agonist the protagonist, so as to accentuate the positive and eliminate any hint of an agony in the works—which only goes to show that most of what passes for drama these days is just sentimental kinesiology.

But conflict, a principle of tension or balance, is inherent in the nomenclature— contrapposto: the idea being that we cannot accomplish a movement without one muscle initiating it and another supporting it by working against it. If you stand, for example, then sink slightly back, knees bent, you can feel a tension in your quadriceps and a slackness in your posterior thigh. The agonist is active, the antagonist passive. In moving, you have to stop or slow down to feel this principle at work—or you can feel it after you’ve done a lot of moving and, the next day, feel you can no longer move. That’s where massage therapists or bodyworkers come in.

Massaging Janet today, I felt the beginnings of an erection. Where does an erection begin? I think it was somewhere in my anus, or in that organ or gland better known for its relation to middle-aged men and cancer than for its erogeneity: the prostate.

Janet was prone to my touch, and I to hers, though passive. I stood holding the baby-blue sheet, half cotton and half polyester, while she stripped behind it. I averted my eyes, knowing that, back-lit by the afternoon sun, she could be seen through it.

Janet raised her arms toward the ceiling and nodded. I wrapped the sheet around her and clenched it behind. She moved toward the table and lay down on it, supine, then hiked herself over on her side. I was to do a longitudinal release on her erector spinae and then work her Latissimus dorsi.

This was a far cry from the Swedish sequence I’d been practicing.

I warmed the skin on Janet’s back with the flat of my hand. I began to roll her skin, freckle by mole, across the scale of her rib-cage. Her upper-back was small, the small of her back smaller. “Small”: that has to be one of the most sublime of our translations from the Latin. I don’t know why massage therapists have to refer to the “low back,” when such a word exists, but they do. Nor do I don’t know why they have to say “low back” instead of “lower back,” but they do. Everyone abbreviates.

Cervical, thoracic, lumbar: I warmed and rolled my way down her back in preparation for the specific work on the erector. Janet’s eyes closed once or twice. She said I had a nice touch. I could not return the compliment, but I did tell her that she had warm hands, remembering their presence on my body from an hour before.

That’s one of the best things about massage school. I’ve been in school all my life. I’ve heard lots of lip-service paid to “hands-on” experience; I’ve heard lots of talk about “teamwork.” But there’s nothing like learning how to give a message by giving one and then getting one, or getting one and then giving one. Reciprocity like that is not to be found in law or business school—not even, from what I’m told, in MFA programs.

Under the “Deep Forest” music that played, I heard Janet say something that none of the other students could hear. She said: “You can kiss my ass.”

I was in a position to do so, but I knew what she meant, so quickly can we move from the literal to what is actually meant. Had she said “my gluteus maximus,” or “my gluteus minimus,” or “my anus,” a place much harder for the lips to reach, someone would surely have taken notice. It’s the vernacular that makes us not take the body seriously.

Janet’s vulgar utterance started my erection. When a born-again Christian says “You can kiss my ass,” you have to take it seriously. I asked her if she was all right, knowing she wasn’t. She was retaliating for being ganged up on by the rest of the class. They wanted to listen to the last game of the World Series during the session. Our instructor had said that our vote had to be unanimous; Janet was the lone dissenter.

She must have felt in my touch, at least at first, how I sided with her. Anyone who sticks by her guns when all are against her deserves admiration. And what more pleasurable than the feeling of admiration? My erection grew.

I noticed Janet’s eyes for the first time. She could be Lebanese, I thought, or Portuguese (her surname, Lima—that’s Peru; Peruvian, then). Beautiful, hurt eyes. She was not relaxed.

Bodyworkers know, not by name, not by the heroic empiricism of medieval grammarians, but by feel. I do not refer here to “gut feel,” but to something more superficial. When a man says, as I have not heard a man say in a long time, “Give me some skin,” he does not mean two things: 1) flesh, and 2) what he says. As a pound of flesh weighs more, in the imagination, than a pound of skin, so there is a tangible difference between the two materials. A massage therapist cannot penetrate the skin to get to the flesh; only a torturer would do that, or a surgeon. I doubt that the phrase “a pound of skin” would have had the same striking effect that “a pound of flesh” has had—if you are struck by Shakespearian things.

That said, a massage therapist who goes no more than skin-deep will not build up much of a clientele: we are not in the business of applying lotion. On the other hand, there is something faintly grotesque about the phrase “deep-tissue work,” and I am told by a woman with a thousand hours at her back and twenty regular clients in her Day Runner that eight of ten people who ask for “deep work” soon find it painful and ask you to ease up. As I understand it, after only 120 hours of study, you cannot in any case go deep without at first being very tactful on the surface.

I inserted a pillow between Janet’s legs, fitting it carefully between her knees. As I was doing so, I paused: to petrissage a healthy calf, a calf that has been shaved, with the thinnest layer of oil between the surface of your palms and the surface of that calf, is a great pleasure, a pleasure worth having a theory about. I could not do that today. The task today was a longitudinal release on the erector spinae, the muscle that made us Homo erectus.

Janet had adjusted another pillow under her head, and was placing yet another in defense of her breasts. As she did so, the sheet slipped and flopped over, and I saw one of the two things, both cleavages, that I was not supposed to see.

The room was quiet. The fetal position had infantilized half the people in it.

I started my slack, sink, and move manipulations on the most medial part of the erector, the spinalis. Score another one for the genius of medieval monks! Their inspired nomenclature makes me believe that there is truth in wine, mead, and cider. Perhaps it’s unfortunate that our classical heritage will have its fate decided in the medical schools and Classics Departments, where the last scholars of Greek and Latin are to be found, did they but know what they’re doing.

“Tradition,” from the Latin, by way of the Greek: tractatrice, the hair stylist whose gossip suggested that the relation between hand and mouth had more than an economic and nutritive function. As information begins to look more and more like gossip—my hands moved along Janet’s spine—gossip looks more and more like information, and we find ourselves becoming traditional once more. Even the resurgence of crookedness in hairstyle—cut in acute angles against the cowlick, stuck against the way it wants to fall by expensive unguents—is a Roman recrudescence, circa Caesar. (I leave tattooing and piercing to the tribal element, knowing full well that the Greeks and Romans had their gang-bangers and neighborhood gods.)

Janet’s spinalis was ropey. The intent of my hands was to soften that rope by separating its braided fibers under the skin, in that lubricious medium of tissue, the anterior inner surface of the skin, called the fascia—the skin’s skin, as it were. It is, the skin, the largest organ our body possesses, and Janet’s slid and rolled beneath my hands like a puppy’s.

What revulsion there would be if we were flesh only! More than we put up with now, surely, if we saw the underlying structure from inside out.

I’ve been doing massage for a month and a half now without incident. The other day, though, in clinic, I had three clients in a row. The first was about thirty and black, with thighs like a fullback’s and follicles as big as nipples. My hands were Lilliputians walking over Gulliver. This woman insisted she had no “pain,” only “tension from stress.” She stressed that. You know how important what we call things is when the body below you protests too much.

My next client was about twenty-five and yellow, but her skin was white, pure white, and its surface uninterrupted, so far as I could see, or feel, by a single pore.

“It’s been a bad day,” she said, as I escorted her into my cubicle. “Work is hectic, and I started my period. Is it all right if I leave my underwear on?”

My erection started with her, my first. It was alarming.

“What beautiful skin you have,” I kept wanting to tell her. Her frankness had disarmed me.

This morning, having repressed that involuntary incident, I chose boxers; I should have chosen jockeys. As my penis hardened in the inferior direction (footward, not headward, which the classicists called “superior”), it threatened to exceed the quadricep hem and show its cold, dry face.

Fortunately, Janet was turned away from me. I invited her to join me in some deep breaths. Overcompensating, my reinforced thumb bounced off either her illiocostalis or her longissimus—a novice, I couldn’t be sure—and I found myself doing two things a bodyworker should never do: think, and lose contact. Among other prohibitions, an erection is chief, and so I had my hands full.

I was reminded of the best explanation I’d ever read of Plato’s theory of knowledge as recollection: that we know things so quickly we can’t imagine ever having had time to learn them. In the field of physiology, an erection is the Platonic form of proprioceptivity: it experiences itself in space immediately and solipsistically, but has no idea where it’s going—only the urge for going.

My hands left Janet’s frame to move my stiffened member in a more medial and posterior direction, but I stopped in mid-motion: I had to reestablish contact. Once you’ve introduced your touch to your client—and been complimented on it!—you take leave at your peril.

Back in the lumbar region, two cun (an ancient Chinese measure, one cun equaling a finger’s width) above the iliac crest, nearing the quadratus lumborum, I noticed the superior hem of Janet’s underpants. Perhaps she was having her period, too, like my client of two days before; perhaps she was modest. Not normally receptive to the blandishments of lace, I had to admit—or my erection, proceeding apace, had to—that today was not normal.

In a sexual advice column I had been reading earlier that morning (I read two a week), the advisor, a woman, had diagnosed her correspondent’s problem with a shocking conventionality: she wasn’t getting any. Janet’s bald utterance (“You can kiss my ass”), her lace fringe, the fastidiousness with which she’d marked herself two minutes late on the honor-code roster, her born-again Christianity, her strange vocation—it all added up: not only wasn’t Janet getting any, but Janet had never gotten any.

And just as I was in a position to give her some, so she was in a position—an interesting one—to receive some.

I backed away from lumborum toward Latissimus dorsi, rhomboid, and trapezius, that bumper-to-bumper interchange on the freeway of stress, and asked Janet once again to breathe. I would do a passive stretch of some sort, but there was nothing to push against. The Greek tragedy of the musculature—agonist and antagonist—was not yet sufficiently known to me. And despite Plato’s theory, I couldn’t recollect what I did know, orient myself in its detail, and do some effective work. Distracted by my own flesh and blood, I was simply pushing skin around.

The other day, when this same tumescence began to disturb me, I was massaging my third client. She was eighty years old and white. Her complaint was sciatica, and she dug her fist into her left buttock to indicate the likely source of relief. Ten minutes later, there I was, taking a hard look at the buttocks of experience in extremis: I found them wonderful. And I imagined—I was constrained to imagine, given the sounds I heard coming up from under the face rest—that she found the pressure of my relaxed fists equally wonderful.

“I think that’s it!” she said happily. “My, you’re so strong.”

With an ejaculation, this woman had strengthened my faltering resolve to continue the 720-hour program in massage therapy. Was not the Institute’s motto, “Have work you love”? It was. And had I not always felt love and shame almost simultaneously? I had.

But now, not eight hours of course-work later, Janet’s utterance, and the erection occasioned by it, caused me to question both my fitness to be, and my motives for becoming, a bodyworker. The sensual, the sensuous, and the voluptuous were no longer distinct; their roots, even in language, seemed suddenly confused. The problem was beyond the reach of a dictionary.

As Janet flinched under my determination to do the work despite my distraction—as I petrissaged her lumborum, deep to the Latissimus, from my lunge position—I found myself in the classroom of Professor Kay MacNamee, twenty years earlier, sitting next to my friend Tim, trying to work out how the word “scruple,” which once designated a small pebble, had come to mean what it meant. Tim scribbled something and showed it to me.

I have a scruple

In my shoe

Giving me doubt

About what to do.

Shall I walk

Until I hobble,

Or stop now

And take it out?

As I laughed at Tim’s doggerel, Professor MacNamee glared and called my name.

“Mr. Ritter, suppose you explain the difference between the next two words on our list.”

The words were “sensual” and “sensuous.” I had not done my homework.

At some point during this recollection—and thanks to it—my body mechanics began to fail; I lost touch with Janet once again. As I rejoined her, hoping that my instructor had not seen my faux pas, a sympathetic spasm pinched my lumborum and, pain being for me a great deflator of desire, flaccid I finished the release.