#22
      The "THERAPIST" Issue

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The Therapist

     by Joshua Dolezal

            The massage therapist I started seeing this spring in Missoula says she knows a woman with pure muscle. Not the cut-up vein popping kind bodybuilders show off, the kind with no knots, no trigger points. I don’t know why Alyse tells me this as she’s grinding away at the scar tissue in my shoulder. I say I don’t believe her. Alyse insists it’s true. The woman is a yoga teacher, she says, eats only organic, goes on a water diet once a month, sleeps nine hours every night. Does she have friends? I ask. Has one of her loved ones ever passed on? Does she pull weeds in the garden or stay up late at parties or accidentally roll onto her stomach in the night and wake with a sore neck? Maybe, Alyse says. But when we met at a yoga retreat we traded full-body massages, and I’m here to say she didn’t have a single knot anywhere.

            Alyse is a trim woman in her forties, a little over five feet, with short black hair and incredibly strong hands. She’s more stressed than usual these days because her husband, Alex, a broker for an investment firm on Higgins Avenue, has recently been diagnosed with lupus. I’ve never met Alex, though I know he’s usually home when I come in the afternoon. I can’t help but imagine him hunched over a laptop upstairs while Alyse is digging her elbow into my back. He’s depressed, she tells me, but she’s not sure if it’s a symptom or an effect of the diagnosis. And he’s starting to think he’s impotent, which could be his age – mid-fifties – or the Zoloft, which makes him gain weight, which makes him feel bad all over again. I don’t really want to hear all this about Alex, but it’s hard to protest when I’m naked on the massage table.

            I came to see Alyse because my back is a mess after over a decade of carrying heavy packs in the summers, hiking to a cabin in the Bob Marshall in June with a wilderness trail crew and working there until early fall. I lead the crew on ten-day hitches, looping fifty miles along a brushy ridgetop, logging out fallen cedar in the creek bottom, and humping back to the cabin for four days off. The packer usually bumps us to the first camp site with a team of four mules, but then we’re on our own with about eighty pounds apiece – clothes and food and shelter and tools. By the time I hike out in late September and drive back to Missoula, my hand loses feeling when I bend my wrist to make guitar chords, and I wake some mornings with one arm so numb I worry it won’t come back alive. I heard good things about Alyse from one of my running buddies, so I come to see her twice a month now, which is all I can afford.

            Normally I don’t mind chatting while I’m on the table. It’s like a two-for-one deal. But now Alyse loses track of time as she goes on about Alex, bearing down on my trigger points with her thumbs for ten, fifteen minutes past the hour. It seemed like a bonus the first time, but it’s happened often enough now that I should say something. Who’s the therapist here? is what I really want to ask, or maybe I should just say I’m feeling a little weird about all this. But conflict turns my thoughts to mush, and I can never remember what I should say until later, when I’m losing sleep reliving the weirdness. As far as I know, the only client Alyse turns to for comfort is me, and I’m a little flattered by that. Most days all I have to do is lie there without saying a word while she kneads my back and talks. What harm could there be in a little reciprocity? Maybe it’s like reiki in reverse, the self-healing ki flowing back into her hands when she knows she can trust me. And if I’m really honest with myself, Alyse is so good with her hands I’m not sure I want to risk losing her.

            I’m going bald about twenty years early and have the kind of pissed-off face and brooding bulk that usually sends people running. I freelance from home during the winter and spring, writing features for outdoor trade magazines, sometimes drafting ads for fishing lures with names like Coquette and Jitterbug. My all-time favorite is the Short Skirt Spinner. I mostly keep to myself, and when I get out for a short run every morning and night, my dog Mowat, a Siberian Husky with the pale blue eyes of a wolf, commands a wide berth from runners and walkers on the bike path. But some women know that a man with a dog finds it difficult to ignore distress, and a man with a calm and elegant dog like Mowat enjoys a certain serenity, and the women who catch a whiff of that know I’ll drop everything if I think they’re in trouble, even if I end up resenting it later. It’s why a college friend called me the night she had kidney stones, why I carried her down the stairs to my car and sped to the emergency room, why the Spanish language assistant from Majorca walked the brick paths on campus at night smoking Marlboro Reds while she wept to me about her redneck boyfriends with their mudding pickups and drunken rages. It’s why I’ve never been able to separate love from saving someone, why love always leads to a goodbye more tearful than the original grief I set out to ease. And it’s partly why I take Mowat into the Idaho wilderness every summer even though it’s killing my back, because I’ve convinced myself that I can’t fuck anything up for good if once a year I just disappear.

           

            It’s early May, and the syringa are nearly in full bloom. When I drive to Alyse’s house and park in front of her white bungalow, I see a pair of yellow pruners lying in the grass near the front step next to an Ace yard waste bag, and I wonder if Alex has been out here pruning the barberry bushes. As I step inside and close the door, the smell of sandalwood and incense washes over my face. Alyse hears me and calls down from upstairs that the massage room is open, so I leave my flipflops by the door and walk barefoot over the carpet past the oak bookshelf and floor lamp into the side room, where flute music breathes from the little Bose stereo. I lay my check on her desk like I always do and shrug out of my flannel shirt and slip off my jeans, sliding facedown between the clean sheets on the table. I settle my head in the rest, let my arms dangle from the foam pad, try to let my back go slack. I was nervous the first time I took all my clothes off for a treatment, worried I’d get hard and pitch a tent with the sheet, but I learned to focus on breathing, and I’ve seen Alyse enough times that it’s old hat by now.

            I hear the stairs creaking, the scuff of socks against the carpet, then Alyse knocks and I say OK, and she’s inside, latching the door. It’s spring, she says. I love this time of year. She pulls the sheet up to my neck and starts rubbing both sides of my spine through the cloth in long, firm strokes until I feel heat rising from the friction against my skin. Then she peels the sheet back and tucks it under my legs, just below my waist, running the heel of her palm from the glute all the way up the right side, my lower back and lats and traps crunching like gravel beneath the pressure of her hand. That’s how she describes it when I’m like this – gravelly – and I try to picture little stones breaking down, melting into pure muscle. But even after a full hour the knots never quite release. Sometimes they just start to throb, and I go home and lie on the floor with a tennis ball between my shoulders and try to get in deeper, which means I wake the next morning stiff and sore and desperate for the next time I can see Alyse.

            She works my left side with her other hand and then finds a trigger point between my shoulder blades with her thumbs. We’re quiet for a moment as she concentrates, holding the pressure for several heartbeats, then letting go as the blood rushes in. It’s relief and an ache all at once. My whole back starts waking up as she digs in again, this time attacking the center of the knot, sliding each thumb down and away until she slips off the edge of the lump. Alex is taking some time off work, she says. He tried to get out in the yard today, but his joints flared up, and he’s just got awful fatigue. He’s going to see if he can manage some accounts from home for a while, but I’m worried he’ll lose his clients if they can’t talk face to face.

            She squirts some lotion on her hands and rubs them together quickly and then spreads it all over my back. The minty smell fills my nose, and my skin starts to tingle from the heat. She works both sides of my back again, this time with her forearm, which tells me she’s about to dig in with her elbow, which always makes me feel like we’re really getting somewhere. I feel her groping for the trigger point as she guides her elbow into place, the tip of her bone so soft it feels like a finger until she settles in on top of the knot. Take a deep breath, she says, and I fill my whole chest and let it out as she sinks into the lump, mashing my face against the headrest. I can feel the nerves crackling all the way out to my fingertips as she holds the fiery pressure for a breath or two, then the cool flood of relief when she draws back.

            I lose track of time, and then Alyse lifts the sheet and asks me to roll over, and I peel myself from the headrest, blinking in the dim light of the room, and slide onto my shoulders. She tucks the sheet under my waist, dragging her stool to the table, cradling my neck in her hands. Tibetan monks chant on the stereo. Above their voices I hear a cymbal strike. Alyse says, I never thought men could get lupus. The doctor says the odds are one in ten, but he’s sure that’s what it is. She rubs more lotion into her hands and begins massaging my chest, working the tops and the sides of my pecs. Alex used to be into triathlons when we met back in Coeur d’ Alene, she says. We’d go to the lake and I’d sit on the beach and read and watch him swim the shoreline, a mile out and back, and then he’d be gone for a couple hours on the bike, and at least twice a week we’d both get up early and run. She works her way up the front of my neck, squeezing the long, ropy muscles between each forefinger and thumb. I try to lie still, but it’s tender, and I must wince a little, because she lightens her grip.

            I don’t know what to say about Alex. I don’t want to hear any more about him, but I feel cold and unfeeling just lying here mute. I’m sorry he’s having a tough time of it, I say. We’re quiet for a moment. It must be hard for you, too, I say. The session is surely past the hour by now, but Alyse pulls one arm over my head and blazes her heel down the edge of my tricep, down into the armpit, which I didn’t know was that sore. I bite my lip and let her do it while she tells me she can’t understand why her girlfriends complain about their husbands so much. It’s the worst during archery season, she says, when the men are all out bugling elk and she has the girls over, and Denise goes on about how Tom won’t stop smearing his face with elk shit to kill his scent and Jess complains that Brad keeps tracking pine needles into the basement, and they both say their husbands still stink when they come to bed, like they’re just as much in rut as the bulls they’re trying lure in with their cow calls. I used to laugh at them since Alex was never into any of that, but now I want to say, come on girls, did you marry men or mice?

            Alyse drags my other arm over my head and works that side until it aches, too. Usually she ends with the neck, then a little head massage, her thumbs smoothing the crease between my eyebrows until her fingers meet and pull away from my skin and she says, softly, there you go, take your time getting dressed and I’ll meet you outside. But today she’s got me in a half nelson when she looks up and says, oh my gosh, we’ve gone twenty minutes over! She drops my arm and leaves the sheet askew on my chest and says, take your time, and hurries out. I lie there for a few moments, rubbing my eyes with my knuckles. After I’ve dressed, I reserve a slot two weeks from now and decide to tell her then that it will be the last time I’ll see her until fall. Alyse bends over the table in her foyer to scribble it down, and I think about reaching out, touching her arm, saying I hope things improve. But the moment seems wrong, so I don’t, and then I’m on the front step, squinting in the sunlight. The pruners and Ace bag are gone, and one barberry bush has been perfectly trimmed, its branches curving up like the sides of a Buddha.

 

            It’s late afternoon, sunny and warm, and I’ve been interviewing professional bowhunters on my Bluetooth for a magazine short on how to avoid target panic, or buck fever, when the deer with the Boone & Crockett rack steps into view, broadside, and the hunter freezes up. Now I’m talking to an expert from North Carolina who claims it’s all about mechanics. Forget about the deer, he says, and talk yourself through the shot sequence you’ve been practicing all year. Think of the buck as the paper target on the hay bale at the indoor range, draw nice and easy like you always do, anchor in, find the target, and release. It might even help, he says, to chant something silently, like draw and anchor, to keep your cool. You want to be a machine, he says, alert but disinterested, there but not there.

            I thank him and take off my headset. It doesn’t sound like much fun, really, to be an expert archer. No fear, no adrenaline, no anguish or joy in the kill. I don’t hunt deer anymore, only elk, and I’d give it up if I didn’t think my head would explode every time I caught up with a big six-point bull in the snow and saw him spin his rack toward me, if I didn’t feel a surge of sorrow and ecstasy when I squeezed the trigger, the crack of the gun splitting my ears, the bull falling and struggling to his feet before sinking back into the crimson snow. At least, I’d want a hunter to feel that way if I were a bull gliding through the trees about to die. I’d want the hunter to be human, not all gears and pulleys and anchor points. What the expert really meant is that you have to become death itself to avoid target panic, just as merciless, indifferent, and cold as a terminal disease.

            As I close my interview notes, I wonder if lupus is terminal, what it really does to a man, so I pull up an overview online and scroll through the symptoms. I recognize the intermittent fatigue and joint pain from what Alyse has told me, but I didn’t realize lupus caused the body to attack its own tissues or that it could lead, in extreme form, to organ failure. It’s not a death sentence, quite, but it seems chronic enough to throw someone seriously off stride, canting from health to the shadow life of overthinking every cramp and twinge. And I wonder if it’s like that for Alyse, if watching Alex slice through the choppy water on Lake Coeur d’ Alene just ten, fifteen years ago made her feel grounded and sure, his lethargy now something she never foresaw, as if he’d suddenly collapsed on one of their morning runs while she was struggling to keep pace with his longer stride. I picture her tossing after Alex’s medication has knocked him out, her heart pounding for no reason, hands clamping down on the duvet as she thinks of Denise turning her face to the pillow away from the animal musk she smells in Tom’s sweat as he glides against her body, the ridges of his shoulders glistening above her in the dark. I see Alyse lying there, tense, telling herself to breathe, thinking of her yoga friend with no trigger points who knows no pain and maybe no longer craves pleasure, either, drawn so deeply into herself that she drifts beyond thought, so fully present she’s no longer really there.

            I hear Mowat’s nails clicking on the floor and decide to take him for a quick jog through town to the river trail, past the University campus, then a few miles along the Clark Fork to the railroad bridge and back. Mount Jumbo rises over the interstate, bald and brown, the faintest hint of green creeping over its grassy slope. Mowat runs easily, his head erect, nose working, ears straight up like little goat horns. In a few weeks I’ll be packing up, redirecting my letters to the ranger station, automating my bills, emailing my editors to remind them that snail mail takes on new meaning when the mule packer delivers it once every ten days. Every spring I can’t wait to get back out there. The long winter makes me forget that I’ll spend the first two weeks listening to office slugs read every bullet on the training PowerPoints. I’ll watch the college kids sniff each other over like dogs at the park and try not to worry too much about the knuckleheads my boss has hired for the trail crew. Every spring I forget that the first hitch in June will be wet, that we will break camp in the rain and wade across frigid creeks, that part of my job will be to buck up morale, that I’ll fail at this like I always do and lie awake for hours in my soggy sleeping bag with my back knotting up and my arms falling asleep. In the spring I think only of the dry air of September, waking to alpenglow in the high country camps, watching the sun set behind the long line of crags they call the Chinese Wall. I never remember that this will all send me back to the massage table, muscles gnarled and throbbing beneath the sharp edge of an elbow as I lie face down trying to let the pain melt away.

 

            Alyse’s lawn is almost tall enough to mow when I park by the mailbox this time. Green shoots push through the yellow mat of last year’s dead grass. Alex has been doing yardwork again, seeding a few bald patches he’s covered with straw. The rest of the bale sits in a black wheelbarrow on the sidewalk, a garden rake lying teeth down in the grass. The sky is overcast, the air smells like rain, and it’s the kind of day that makes me think of driving over Lolo Pass, down along the tight curves of the Lochsa River listening to Emmylou Harris sing “Wrecking Ball.” As I climb the front steps, feeling for the check in my front pocket, I’m thinking about the clean smell of the mules in the corral by the ranger station, the enormous weeping willow shading the front office, huckleberry pie and ice cream at the Syringa Café. I see that Alyse’s door is a little ajar, and I rattle my knuckles against the wood in a half-assed knock as I push it open, wondering if the Syringa has hired the same Turkish girls they had on staff last year, when I run straight into Alex.

            He’s a tall man, leaner than I imagined, his cheeks hollow beneath the peppery stubble of a beard. I’m so startled I almost offer him the check, but I catch myself and offer my hand instead. You must be Alex, I say. He says nothing, just holds my gaze. His icy blue eyes cut through a puzzle of crow’s feet. One drooping lid makes me forget about the lupus, and I must be gripping his hand too hard, because his jaw muscles clench. I’m the first to look away, and when he steps aside to let me pass, I catch a whiff of peppermint. Then he’s gone, the door snapping shut behind him.

            I leave my flipflops on the rug and pad back to the room, my feet sticking a little on the floor. The door is open, an incense stick burning on the desk below a large posterior diagram of muscle anatomy. As I lay the folded check on Alyse’s black leather planner, I try to locate my trigger points on the poster, the trapezius falling like a cape over the latissimus dorsi, the infraspinatus, and the teres major. I wonder if my back looks anything like that or if it’s more like the snarl of wires at the bottom of a drawer. I push the door closed and undress and slide between the sheets, breathing through the hole in the headrest. Usually the stereo is playing, but it’s quiet today, and it seems like forever before I hear Alyse’s socks swishing over the floor, then her knock, and the feeling of her there in the room. The CD changer whirs and clicks, a disc zipping in the carousel, and the sound of a synthesizer with a slow steel guitar swells from the Bose.

            How are things? she asks. Not bad, I say. How are things with you? She sighs. No better, no worse. She pulls the sheet back, tucks it beneath my legs, and starts working the full length of my spine with her palm. I met Alex on my way in today, I say. He looks pretty rough. I feel her hand stiffen for a moment, then she switches sides. She’s not using oil yet, and my skin starts to heat up, my upper back loosening just enough to ache. I sink into the table, breathing, waiting for her to dig in with her thumbs and start breaking the gravelly muscles down. The steel guitar wails on the stereo. I’m desperate to feel the sharp point of her elbow working under my shoulder blade, down into the center of the most inflamed knot, pinning me to the table for a few rapturous breaths, when I lose track of the difference between pain and ecstasy. But it’s taking her a long time to get there, and after months of listening to her talk well past the hour, it unnerves me to lie here in silence. So I blurt out that I’m heading off to the Bob Marshall next week. I won’t see you again until September, I say.

            Alyse takes her hand off my back. I hear the crinkle of plastic and what sounds like the snap of a rubber band, then the squirt of the oil bottle and the slick sound of her hands rubbing together. When she searches for a trigger point with her thumbs, they feel cold. Are those latex gloves? I ask. Yes, she says. Her voice has changed, like her thoughts are elsewhere. I’ve been fighting a rash, she says. Could be the oil or stress, but either way it’s safer like this. She works for the rest of the hour in silence with just her fingers and thumbs. I roll over when she tells me to, and she inches up the neck, the latex pulling my hair as she kneads my scalp, smoothes the crease between my eyebrows, lifts her hands, and says, there you are, sir. She doesn’t offer to set anything up for September, and by the time I’m dressed and walking barefoot to the door, she’s in the kitchen, banging around in a cupboard. I think about calling out a farewell, but I don’t want to hear the sound of my voice in the empty foyer, so I slide into my sandals and walk out to the car. The wheelbarrow and rake are gone, and the straw has been swept from the sidewalk. The street is wet, and I feel rain on my neck. As I buckle up and pull away, the white house blurs through the glass beneath a steady drizzle, and by the time I get home, a fog has dropped over the valley and it looks like the storm is socked in for the night.

            After dinner, while Mowat watches me roll around on a tennis ball trying to get the throb in my back to die down, I can’t help wondering if Alyse dreamed up the woman with pure muscle to keep me coming back, or to visualize what she was working toward every session, or if maybe it was just a trick of her memory, like the way she wants to remember Alex gliding through Lake Coeur d’ Alene when they were young. I rock the tennis ball down under my shoulder blade into the spot where I wanted the full weight of her elbow, but the ball keeps slipping off the knot and I’m just making it worse. As I roll onto my knees, Mowat licks my face and I pull him to me and rub his ears and pound his shoulder good and hard the way he likes. The difference between people and dogs, I think, is that a dog loves without foresight and remembers with no hindsight, which is why he has infinite sympathy. The rest of us can only take so much of someone else’s misery. Most nights I drift to sleep with the smell of the oil still on my skin, but tonight I reek of latex, so I shower before bed and slide naked under the comforter, knowing I’ll wake up stiff, no better and no worse than any other day.

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