Bedside matters, p.17
Bedside Matters, page 17
“Tressie, we have to discuss more about setting up your own salon. I’ve talked to the attorneys—”
“Oh, do shut up, Walter. Talk we know you can do. Now let’s lie you flat on your back and tackle the quads. Missed last week.”
She shoves down the bed lever, hip-hops to the end of the bed, and whips completely away the lower sheet. “The quads are the biggest muscles. So you can’t run around, but there’s life in there from all the attention we’ve been paying. Plus your effort. Even standing with assistance you fire those babies.”
He wishes they could chat all day. At least she has set up music for him with help from the techie Irma hired. Endless dull days are no longer. All kinds of music he’s never heard of—her music. Pink Martini! Salsa! Merengue, Rumba, Cha Cha Cha! A far cry from the classics Ana’s granddaughter played at her recital for him. Minuets. Dainty piano taplings composed for palace swells. Now solos of harp and classical guitar that he found on his laptop have been much to his delight. Such simple strummings banish any thoughts whatsoever. They strike him as lullabies served up with the pedigree of concertos; to his ear they are rhythms to soothe aging, overwrought, addled adults at which he qualifies.
Shut up, Walter. Follow the leader. Breathe.
•
He is aware of her supple fingertips reaching up to and touching the lower edges of the pad. His thoughts shouldn’t be going in that direction since such sensations have long been shelved. His private parts have bypassed this outmoded designation for them. She, Irma, and others have dealt with all that for so many months. And yet he is somewhat relieved as her smooth hands glide back to the kneecaps, hardly an erogenous zone. And yet…Her very touch, up and over his thighs, stretching and releasing the muscles and whatever tissues underneath—every movement is relabeling itself as lovemaking, not therapeutic massage. He attempts to breathe more deeply, withdraw from the drift of this thinking. He must cast her solely as masseuse, not—call girl. Walter! he nears giggles to himself. Whatever would you know of those shenanigans? Maybe each touch is now reverberating as he once recalled Polly at their most playful doing nothing more than nibble his ear. And she would continue with that although his erection was on the brim of bursting but no, she carried on with the other lobe to tease him further, temper him ideally, someday, to her purposes as proper lover rather than a fire hydrant drenching himself instead of igniting her.
“This is silly. I’m not getting the inner thighs.” Off come the nappies. And there he is, his former glory a landed, wrinkled parachute collapsed and plastered on the ground.
“It’s true, this area up to the groin, it’s ordinarily out-of-bounds. Not the muscles themselves. They too need working. But it’s the proximity to the sex. For women, too, you have to keep this part covered. You okay, Walter?”
“Mmm,” he mumbles.
She increases her reach up the side of his thigh to where it meets the crease of the butt and the sitting bone. “I’ll just lift these out of the way,” she says, referring to his squishy penis and ball sack, and massages the perineum, the space between scrotum and anus. “Now, this area is untouched, unseen, ignored by even the person him- or herself, and yet it’s engorged with nerve endings. This is about stimulation today, Walter. Tapping these sections for whatever reactions. Do you feel any of this?”
“Ahhh,” he attempts to answer.
“You look content, so I’ll keep on. You know, my dearest man, we must acknowledge every ounce of you physically that can respond. Each fiber of you is connected to the next connected to the next. Why should anything be overlooked? You are telling me with that smile to proceed, so I will. Yours is just a body, Walter, like each of us has. Women and men react very similarly to erotic sensation. The parts are constructed or labelled as if they belong to entirely different animals. But no. The penis head and clitoris are first cousins. Hey, I like that! Now keep on with full, deep breathing. That’s it. Sink into whatever you are feeling, my good man. You are fully alive. Let go. Let go.” And she circles his flaccid genitals and eventually cups them, cradles them. And yes, he is ever-so-slightly swollen. Enough for her to tug along the limited length, twirl fingers around the head, pull some this way and then that.
“Umm,” he moans, barely audible.
She is whispering now, not so much with discernible words as simplistic lyrics to a Latin love song. She is crooning, humming, and breathing through what must be almost closed lips. He is surrendering. He is beyond an inkling of control. She assumes all of that. He is nothing but on the verge of a miracle. Even this thought he must suppress and is able to do so.
“You are almost there, sweet man. You are going, going, keep going—”
Eventually he arrives. Under an avalanche of shudders, the whole of him, head to foot. He sluices deep within the earth that has buried him. He lies there, thinking: It should be over, I should be gone now. What more?
Tressie covers him with a sheet. Slowly she goes about collecting her things. She takes her time before exposing him and administering a fresh pad. He hoists his upper self to confront her, unaware of any facial expression he is capable of composing. Tressie settles onto a stool.
“You know women do this, too,” she says. “It’s simply pleasurable manipulation. Just because you’re impotent…well, I guess you’ve got a thing or two to learn while you’re still alive if not kicking.”
“Tressie. I can’t remember an orgasm like that. Ever. And without an erection.”
“There are thousands of men with prostate cancer and other erectile issues. No need to give up sexuality. Receiving pleasure. Nobody talks about this. It’s not covered in the US Department of Health Guidelines for Loving Couples Post Prostatectomy. Wives have shown me. Nope. All they feature are penile implants, injections to stiffen the penis, all this business to keep it up! Reassure him he can still perform. Penetrate. No loss of manhood, oh, my God, never that.”
“Maybe you should run for office. Quite a platform.”
She tickles his toes.
“But I can’t—service you,” says Walter.
She guffaws and slaps his leg. “You men.”
“I feel I’ve moved beyond gender.”
“Good! In our case, Walter, it’s not only PT, physical therapy. It’s also making love. We can love others! Not just our spouse or lover, sexuality can be elevated this way, and rightly so. But why on earth should simple, God-given touch be hamstrung by the Church and laws and all that crap? The Pope and priests, it’s ridiculous. Look what perversion they’ve had to endure. So silly they’re not married, to men as well as to women. Oh, don’t get me going.”
Walter folds his arms across his chest. “Tressie. Getting you going and keeping you going is my new mission in life.”
“No way. Don’t you dare forget your children! Irma and all these good people you care for. While you’re here, they need you. Me included! We give and we take. We are not here to be isolated from our fellow beings. Is that understood?” She zips off the stool, stands soldier-straight, and jostles her tight jaw as if scolding him. But this she cannot maintain and beams those bright red lips into her broadest grin. “Now I do have my other clients, Mr. Walt.”
He holds up a hand, makes the most pleading look he can contrive. “Oh, Tressie. When can I see you again?”
She smirks. “Tonight. On the sly. I’ll bring a popsicle to cool you off.”
Chapter 17
Not until it turns into gold
does copper realize
what it had been before.
Bars, bars, everywhere I’m clinging onto bars. The bars each side of the toilet, the toilet seat raised as if that wasn’t enough of an assist. Bars in the shower. New bars, lower, because now I have to sit there instead of stand.” He blows out a sigh but Tressie appears occupied otherwise. “Now these bars up and over the bed.”
“They’re adjustable,” she says and does so, focused on her work.
“It’s like I’m a kid on a jungle gym.”
“But you can grab and swing the horizonal one here and use the pole to stand without me helping you. Pretty cool, you have to admit, Walter.”
“I admit to nothing except my total dependence on you, with or without these contraptions.” He practices standing and sitting, amazed he has the strength to elevate and lower himself. “Of course, you’re right, Tressie. This is pretty cool. However has Paula come up with all of this?”
“You’re not the first person on earth to lose mobility. She had shipped that tilting wheelchair, whatever she thinks might help.”
“Irma donated that to the veteran’s hospital, yes?”
Tressie nods and rolls up the sleeves of her floppy white jumpsuit with variously sized black polka dots. It whipped about like a flag in wind just before when she did the rumba to Trini Lopez. Walter begged her to keep dancing the way he never did nor ever would.
“Okay, down to business,” she says.
“My pole dancing was just a warm-up?” He reclines back at her signal. “Thank goodness you, like me, are too old for Mo’s rap music. This stuff you’re playing, I presume you’re humoring me. I mean, Xavier Cugat? Even before my time, although the name rings a vague bell from my youth.”
“Brown music for white people. If it makes you happy, I’m all for it. Now. Let’s talk about bladder control.”
“Oh, Tressie, that’s a lost cause.”
“You told the doctor no way would you go for surgery, the—suprapubic catheter,” she pronounces by the book.
“I will not have all of you emptying bags. Changing nappies since I rarely make it to the john is bad enough.”
“Fine. We’re going to try pelvic massage. The Kegels isolated the sphincter. There’s more we can do. And for this we can leave the pad in place.” She winks. Her headband of the day—black with white polka dots—matches the jumpsuit but in reverse. He can’t imagine the heaps she must cram into her dressing area. She claims her every stitch is from the thrift shop.
Walter submits and lies still. His only option with Tressie. Funny, he doesn’t miss the few other times in the past months that he asked for a repeat of that thrilling encounter. Once he came close, and the journey was a joyride if not coupled with a destination. But the memory of that initial wallop was enough to give him a gift that keeps on giving. It had been all her doing, nothing that he could subsequently shift from his singular role as recipient to abruptly calling the shots. She often asked if he was interested in more pleasure that way, but he demurred. And it was impossible, he told her, attempting that on his own. With these hands?
“I could give you a vibrator, Walter,” she says.
“A what?”
“You know, what women use. Men, too, I suppose. My gay friends who are the bottoms. They say it gets a bad press. Hugely sensitive in there, the final gut lining. We should consider—”
“No way! Are you kidding?”
“Oh, relax. You never took it up the ass?”
He smolders, speechless.
“Of course not, just joking,” she answers herself and him. “But they say it’s double the ecstasy, all those nerve endings inside and out. It doesn’t have to be a dildo, a fake penis. It can be a butt plug. There are a zillion toys I know. For gents as well as the ladies.”
“Stop!” he pleads when he can manage a word after laughing himself breathless.
In any event, Walter muses, now flat on his back for today’s session, it is Tressie’s touch, her loving energy that infuses every stroke, blurring the line between therapeutic and sensuous. What truly is the difference? The orgasm was great, he thinks as Tressie works the ridge of his pubic bone, but so is a good sneeze. He remembers how Polly sparked arousal in his earlobe. Tressie, day in and day out, is enlivening every particle of him, from his temple to his toes.
“Walter, I want you to breathe into this area, think of nothing else. You are empowering these pelvic tissues with new blood, more circulation. Close your eyes. Stop looking at me.”
He tries his best to do as she says, although he’d rather not picture his pelvic tissues. He knows full well this effort is all in his mind, that it may or may not result in moving a microfiber let alone a muscle. Where is my willpower? he asks himself. If it’s mind over matter, well, the mind is the very last thing at my disposal. What has willpower ever been for me as a white man compared to her brown? What landed in my lap—forget how hard I supposedly applied myself—was because of the luck of the draw. My time and place. No foreign competition. A welcome mat for folks of my ilk and color of skin. But hers? A force of nature she needed just to exit the hovel and not look back. Or around, at all the wreckage of her kin. In junior high they were teaching us the foxtrot, partners a foot apart, while Tressie was bopping to the beat of conga and bongo drums…
“You aren’t concentrating, Walter.”
“I was, in my way.” He reaches for her hand and taps it. He can initiate that much.
•
He knows the city. The blocks are even-odd in a perfect square, how could one possibly get lost? He’s completely familiar with the theater marquees, department stores, the pavement bustle of the affluent crowd, shoppers but mostly businessmen like himself. He, too, is striding to an appointment, he presumes. Across town and not too far down, the pedestrian traffic is thinning. The blocks are gradually composed of fewer commercial high-rises, the odd tenement wedged between otherwise faceless, purposeless buildings. Laundry is hanging out on lines strung here and there, limp, smudged with the ever-present soot, at least in this part of the city. The crosstown avenue, typically streaming with buses and taxis, narrows into just another street. He attempts to keep up his pace but must avoid the sidewalk clutter, debris from the curb spilling up and over into his path. Women are draped out of windows, screaming at kids. The crosstown street abruptly ends. He is forced to zigzag over and down ever-darker blocks to make his way. Eventually, there is not one other soul rushing or even strolling on the street. He hears shouts, laughter, anger, no way can he tell, but it is not polite. There are no buildings on either side, just caverns of dirt and rubble left from entire demolished blocks. The graffiti-splashed fencing becomes periodic and then ends. There is a clutch of boys, black boys, punching each other, kicking an abandoned car with their heavy boots. What is left of the windshield is smashed by one of the boys with a metal bar. They get bored with the car and are coming toward him. He must cross to the other side of the street! Some of them are swinging baseball bats. He cannot cross the street. He is doomed, utterly done for, either way…
Walter awakes, shuddering. Another one of those. So many times before. He lacks the will to think it through. Can only take the path of least resistance. Leaving the maelstrom of nighttime horrors and returning to the light of day where he simply exists, nothing required of him otherwise. A willing slab for Tressie. A mouth for Irma to feed. A listener for any who visit, their words hopefully unbeknownst to them like a swarm of sparrows fluttering across the picture window and then forgotten on the spot.
•
Since he cannot envision a future, Walter often revisits a moment he has long since ignored, an occasion he considers contrary at the least. He drops a skillet of scrambled eggs. His hand is suddenly without power, like a vehicle stalled for no rhyme or reason. He picks up the skillet, cursing himself, angry at the hurt on the top of his foot. He bemoans the loss of good eggs. But he does not connect it to the time his briefcase slips from the grip of his fingers onto the floor of his office. Out of the blue. Never before, and so it is easily dismissed. There is that scene at the supermarket, his holding open the door for a woman exiting and hugging two overstuffed brown paper bags. The heavy door slides from his clasping it and rams into her face, groceries scattered to the ground, blood gushing from her nose. He will not go to the doctor, does not want to be bothered. He thinks of buying a grip device to strengthen his hands but forgets. It takes a visit with Paula, his eaglet, who is shocked when he cannot twist open a bottle of water. He is reduced to her helping him, but soon after sipping from the bottle it lands in his lap.
What is going on, Dad? she demands and makes him promise to check it out at least with a therapist if not a physician.
Did I do that? he wonders. When did the doctors intervene? It takes several years, he cannot string together the eventual sequence of events. Presently it’s all a muddle, even though his mind is supposed to be the last thing to go. Well, it’s going. Good. The less of this malarkey I can remember, the better. And there is a future. He just hopes it arrives sooner than later. He is trying his darnedest to live day by day, moment by moment as the mystics advise. But the better, or worst, part of him knows full well: he is waiting, he is biding his time.
•
His room is electrified as if he’s lived through a long-standing power failure and suddenly the lights are ablaze. Paula enters as was prearranged the day before, but he’s totally forgotten. Before saying a word, she exudes the presence of her mother Polly. There is a purpose to her life that never is in question. Whatever personal wars she’s engaged in are conducted within the confines of her solid skull. There should be more of this, of her sort, in the world, he thinks. Wishy-washy types like I’ve been go with the flow, as it was glorified, but we just add to the bewildered surface about which everyone has to crash and careen. For good or ill, right or wrong, she takes a stand. Paula strips off her dressy taupe jacket and shakes out the sleeves of the silky blouse before sitting comfortably in the bedside armchair. Immediately he had noticed the tailored suit and high heels. Her usual ponytail is pinned back into a tight roll-up in some fashion. So formal. Shiny earrings like gold coins.
“Have you been to the banks up here?” he asks when Paula is finished surveying the bed linens, the various equipment, the orderliness of jars on his bedside stand.
