Wednesday, July 23  

Body

Vic has always thought of bodies as secret. Expanses of skin, connective tissues, bone and ligament that are carefully attended to in the privacy of one’s own home, but not talked about. Covered and revealed only in parts, when appropriate.

Vic has to hide her enthusiastic fascination in situations where these great secrets are revealed reluctantly and out of necessity. Locker rooms especially. She is glad in moments like these that she is not male, is not equipped with an appendage that could signal the exact level of her fascination to anyone who cared to see.

body: noun 1. the main part 2. a measurable whole 3. a number of persons who have come together.

Vic has a physiology textbook sitting on her coffee table. She often pulls it onto her lap and gawps openly at the crafty little organ systems and structures that people take such pains to hide under clothing. She knows from this amateur study that the dictionary definition isn’t quite right.

The body is not just "the main part" of us, revealing as that statement might be since Vic would rather agree that it is, after all, the most important part. But no, the body is more specifically the integumentary, endocrine, lymphatic, nervous, muscle, skeletal, cardiovascular, respiratory, digestive, reproductive, and urinary systems all working together to form one highly interesting compound.

It’s Vic’s consuming interest in the body and its systems that leads to her spend an entire weekend touching and rubbing the body of a stranger named Gregory. Allowing Gregory to touch and rub hers.

She arrives at 9am on Saturday morning to attend the course in Introductory Technique for Massage Therapy. She is required to take this class before she will be permitted to give the school 20,000 dollars and embark on a new career as an RMT. She’s changed her mind about wanting to become an RMT at all however, thinking she’ll probably just keep on working at the software company since nobody expects her pay dues on that (get a loan and live on pasta for 2 years) again. Changed mind aside, she still takes the course. It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity to handle people’s secrets openly and she’s not about to miss out just because she’s career-lazy.

The ethics of this situation do not concern her. She’s not lecherous. Just fascinated.

She is partnered off by the instructor with the tall, muscled and presumably gay (though this theory is challenged by the pale band of flesh on his wedding ring finger which she notices when she gets to rub his palms later) Gregory. They’re both quite tall so they won’t have to adjust the massage table when they switch positions, one nude on the table, one playing greased up therapist.

Vic offers to play therapist first so she pulls the privacy curtains around the table and gives Gregory a moment to undress and get between the clean, white sheets. While he arranges himself, she stands and watches the first live demo. The instructor teaches her green therapists-to-be to drape a body so only the area about to be worked on is revealed. This allows the patient to feel as though they still have some secrets.

For the rest of the morning, Vic pulls the white top sheet into delicate, discrete folds over Gregory’s various body parts. Once she’s tucked the sheet around the body part, creating a tight border which, the instructor admonishes, is not to be transgressed by therapeutic fingers, she moves aside and applies a small pool of oil to her palms.

Then, she approaches the body part that lays revealed and vulnerable. She stands quietly over it for a moment, examining it swiftly for areas of swelling, abrasion or knots in the musculature, then she places her warm, wet palms on the skin and sweeps across in the direction of the heart.

After that, it’s all just the practice of specific manual techniques which Vic doesn’t find very interesting at all. It’s the revelation of skin, the examination and the first effluerage that really excite her.

It is the abdomen, Vic discovers, that is the most revealing of all. When she covers Gregory’s chest with a white towel and carefully pulls the sheet back to the waistline, she blushes visibly. Not because the small expanse of abdominal flesh is arousing to her in particular, but because she is suddenly aware of just how vulnerable it is to her hands. Our guts are housed here. The dorsal/ventral cavity is the keeper of our most secret of all secrets. Behind this weak curtain of epithelial tissue, sits the great Oz, dictating the function of our entire body. This is the real deal, the holy of holys, the one place you do not want to show a stranger.

And there Vic is, hands hovering in descent over top it.

When she touches Gregory’s body like this, she feels as though she is touching the whole world. She is touching herself and everyone she has ever known. She kneads abdominal skin with a timed, circular stroke, closes her eyes and thinks that the body's secret has finally been revealed to her.

Later, when she lies naked under draped sheets and Gregory’s large hands make their way toward her abdomen, she watches his face for a sign of revelation.

Vic is disappointed to note that he does not look at all mystical or emotionally affected. Rather, this expanse of skin and bone and ligament named Gregory which had revealed major secrets (not only its own but the secrets of the world) to her just an hour before, looks stiff and embarrassed to be touching her belly.

She observes that he does not see her abdomen as the curtain of Oz. He sees it as most of her lovers have seen it, just the skin between her breasts and her cunt.