On the table

by Sarah Bradley

The room smells of incense, the chic, expensive kind—palo santo, not nag champa from the head shop. The table in the center takes up almost the entire space. There’s room for a body to maneuver around it, but only a certain kind of body. Above the table I know there are bars, because that’s what I’ve been told, though it’s too dark to see them.

She ushers me inside and leaves me to take off my clothes. At one end of the room lies a shelf of crystals shaped into implements whose utility remains obscure to me. Somehow I don’t think more light would help. I disrobe and place my clothes in the cubby underneath. I fold everything neatly, my bra tucked away between my t-shirt and jeans. I always think they must judge you if you crumple your clothes up like a slob. You spend a lot of time thinking about all the ways you might be judged when you enter into a relationship in which you pay to get naked and have someone touch you.

I leave my underwear on. I’m not sure why. Normally I take them off unless I’m on my period, but today I’m not, so I have no excuse. Maybe it’s just that we’re in a new place, and that makes the whole transaction feel unexpectedly vulnerable. Like we haven’t been doing this for years, Doris and me.

Doris has a few other lives that I know of. She’s a yoga instructor and a former kindergarten teacher and a dancer, although I’m technically only supposed to know about the first two. The last one I promise I didn’t learn by googling her. She was in the local alt-weekly, apparently she’s kind of a big deal. We’ve never talked about it. Talking is only acceptable outside the room, at the beginning or the end. I liked Doris right away because I could tell she understood this. Finding someone you can share a room with in silence, without it being weird? That’s a gift. Especially if only one of you happens to be clothed.

By my count, this is the fifth place I’ve come to see her. The first was a matter of convenience, a studio around the corner from my house. Lots of people worked there, so you could always get an appointment on short notice. (I say “people,” but they were all women. I can’t imagine getting a massage from a man; I think it would be impossible to fully relax.) Some of them were better than others, but they were all more or less fine. I was never a repeat customer, until I found Doris. She told me I was her first regular, too. She seemed self-conscious when she said it, giggling as she rang me up with a discount. She was wearing red lipstick that day, unusual for her. Funny, the things you remember.

I’ve been coming to Doris for six years now, which I’d say qualifies as a long-term relationship. I’ve seen her in an apartment behind a coffeeshop, the office of a yoga studio, a garage apartment with no curtains on the windows, and now here. Why do I keep coming back? I suppose it comes down to the same thing most relationships do, in the end: she touches me the way I like to be touched. She has a way of getting into my muscles that makes me gasp, the kind of release so intense it’s shocking. It’s not sexual, but it’s intimate. How could it not be, when she knows parts of my body better than any lover ever has?

Sometimes when I’m on the table, I wonder how many people come to her because they’re hungry to be touched, because in their normal lives it just doesn’t happen. I know Doris must have stories. Every woman has stories. Every woman has been made to feel vulnerable, has been put in situations where she understands that she’s not in control. How much more fraught must it be when you’re a woman whose work is other people’s bodies? If we were friends, I’d like to ask her. I’d offer to hear her stories, if she wanted to tell them. But we’re not friends, no matter how long she’s known me or how intimately. There’s a veneer of friendliness to our interactions, like when she compliments my glasses or my scarf or asks about my day—but that’s not friendship, it’s customer service. That’s what I am: a customer. I pay for a service she provides. And yet.

Bodywork, at its best, feels like a collaboration. You come to them with a problem, you describe it as best you can. Tension here, a knot there, pain when you do this. But these are just words. They have to lay hands on you, have to feel it for themselves—there’s no substitute. Through touch they begin to identify and work out the problem, but your role is not passive. You’re helping them find what they’re looking for, using your breath and your body to achieve a common goal. You have to be limp but receptive, open as a flower. There’s a lot of trust involved. There will be pain, but you have faith that it’s in the service of its opposite. Sometimes it’s right on the edge, and you ask yourself how much more you can take, when will you say no, stop, that’s too much. It becomes an endurance test, an exquisite kind of torture.

I often wonder about the toll this work takes on Doris’s body. At times it feels like the tension is being removed through osmosis, absorbed from my body into hers. It must require tremendous strength. But there’s one thing Doris does that I’ve always loved, and it has nothing to do with strength. When she’s finished working on a particular part of my body, she runs her fingertips very gently up and down the skin. It doesn’t feel like something she learned in massage school. It feels less technical, more intimate than that. In fact, it’s something I’ve also done for partners in the most intimate of moments. It’s not therapeutic; it’s about the sensation on the skin, not the tension in the muscles. It’s about giving pleasure, plain and simple—which, in this context, isn’t simple at all. It’s a blurring of the boundaries, like how sometimes at the end of the session, she tells me that my body feels good, that she can tell I’ve been taking care of myself. How to interpret this, when as a woman, your entire experience of the world has taught you to read far too much into any comment about your body? I choose to take it at face value, because to take it any other way would open up a chasm of possibilities that would compromise everything. But do I enjoy it? I’ll admit it, I do.

Like most things that are ultimately liberating, presenting your naked body to a stranger is awkward at first, and somewhat mortifying. I think everyone should do it, assuming you’re not a creep, that your motivations are pure. There’s something terrifically normalizing about the experience. You realize quickly that your body is just a vessel, both like and unlike all the others this person has encountered. No matter what shape it’s in, no matter what hangups you may have, it’s nothing they haven’t seen before. There’s no judgment; the objective is simply to get it in the best working condition possible. It’s comforting to know that your body will be given the same attention and care as any other, despite its various wrinkles and folds and pouches. None of its quirks will be commented on (unless there’s a mole you should think about getting checked out). What a strange and beautiful thing, to have a relationship with someone entirely predicated on your body, and yet divorced from all the other contexts in which you carry it through the world. For a brief time, you get to be the center of someone’s universe, the singular thing toward which all their concentration and skill are directed. It feels a bit like being worshipped. And when it’s over you give them money, and you both walk away.

I’m lying on my stomach when Doris knocks softly at the door. My face is nestled in the cushion, the crisp white sheet pulled up over my body. She asks if I’m ready, and I tell her I am. I hear the door slide open and then close behind her. A susurration as she moves about, the tinkling of glass bottles, and the music starts to play. I feel a change in the atmosphere, the prickle of her presence looming over me. She asks how the table feels, if I’m comfortable. I tell her it feels good. She pulls the sheet back, and I feel a rush of cool air against my skin. “Good,” she says. “Shall we begin?”

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