Gratitude Is a Drug
I was after his secrets. I had some already, but so far they were all in the category of personal vanity. The girdle was one. His tan was another. He took a carotene product you can get in South Africa. It gives you a terra cotta appearance and makes your excreta gaudy. He used alum on the backs of his hands for age spots. I was finding myself in a game. It was like deciding to have an obsession. The game was roughly that I would get more out of him than he wanted to tell me — but not in exchange for what he wanted from me, which was yet to reveal itself but which probably meant tidbits about Martin and his friends. From me he would get nothing, not even fabrications on that score, although it might be necessary to start the game with fabrications. I would trade sex, if I had to, but I would get more points, the game would be more consummate, if I got his secrets by trading something else, something that hadn’t defined itself yet. I was greedy for his secrets, and I construed secrets as embracing everything he would rather not tell me — personal, political, what have you. I’m willing to call this decadent. The fact that spying is an execrable and stupid thing had nothing to do with why I wanted to play this game with Z.
I feel putrid when I go over my nexus with Z, but so be it. What I did, I did. Greed misrepresents my motives, which were complex, but is what you would come up with as an outside observer, because of the wining and dining that continued, the entrée into upper echelon white teas and potlatches. Overhanging me from the breakup with Martin were heroine fantasies, my somehow starring unexpectedly in the struggle against apartheid. Breaking with Martin meant losing someone who had something important, which was significance. I felt deprived and retrograde. I had begun letting my eating inch up. When I was with Martin I was almost never hungry, partly out of involuntary corporeal sympathy with what he was and partly because there was a limit to how disparate from my skeletal boyfriend I could stand to be. When it ended with Martin it was like a spring being released, evidently. I was in the Star Bakery and suddenly the bread available in Gaborone was intolerable. In the Star you could almost imagine you were in a bread museum, the display of types of bread was so broad — baguettes, braided loaves, rolls. But interiorly everything was made from the same spongeous cement-colored stuff. I had to bake. And what you bake you eat. I was eating too much and felt like a zero because of it, or a doughnut, rather. Here came Z, a worse bread maven than even I was, someone even more famished for good bread. We fit. Moreover, when the time came for me to regroup on my weight, the odd physical relationship that had evolved between us was perfect for that too — because of the quantum of sheer exercise in it.
We’d had some minor postprandial necking in the car, in the course of which I’d wondered if he was uncomfortable kissing in a sitting position. Or there might or might not be a goodnight kiss at the door as he left following a nightcap ceremony during which he had not been insistent on accelerating the physical pace, far from it. In retrospect I think the kissing was more a recurring declaration that in spite of the continued decorousness of our relationship, he was not unsexual toward me. He would occasionally get mild erections, nothing full-blown, though.
But once I’d faced what I wanted, I knew it was time to stop skirmishing so much. His back was his Achilles’ heel. One night as he was coming in I insisted he bring his back pillow. He was chagrined that I’d even noticed it. It was an orthopedic pillow he always tried to twitch out of sight into the backseat before I could spot it if I was getting into the car. I put it that since he had to know I knew about it he should bring it in and use it, because then he might be disposed to stay longer. I think he said You notice everything, and I said Oh you’ve noticed, so we laughed and he brought the thing in. This is how reduced I was: I took his You notice everything as a compliment conceivably containing the suggestion that he thought I might somehow make a good spy. This is how much, at our lowest, we suck after the male imprimatur for some completely congenital quality we might have. This is how I know I was on the plain of the abyss.
I said Your back is a mess, am I right? He couldn’t agree more and was prone on a sheepskin in front of the fireplace almost before I asked if he would let me see what I could do. I acted knowing in the area and that was all it took. I sat on my hams next to him and said I can’t do this through cloth, and he, in a sort of frenzy, said Yes, yes, and violently worked his shirt up to his neck like an escape artist, not even getting up to do it. Then with just the heel of my hand running lightly once up his spine I said I think this isn’t from parachuting, to which he burst back with No, it’s scoliosis, oh god — just as I was saying It’s scoliosis, isn’t it? He torqued around to look at me as though I was extraordinary.
The truth was that the man was in concealed distress most of the time. Nobody at the High Commission could know the extent of it lest the idea of his retirement arise. I had the key. What developed from this was a profound physical relationship without sex, although there was sexual feeling here and there in it. If you need professional massage in Botswana you’re in the same position as someone who needs periodontia. It isn’t there. I’m not a masseuse, but I have strong hands and arms and the conviction that massage is all logic and feedback, which, so far, checks out. With Z I was brilliant. I changed his life, briefly.
I mastered his back. I developed a rapport with it, is the best way I can describe what I did. I dealt with his back as though it were an autonomous entity like a face or a frightened animal. For two weeks we had nightly sessions and at the end of it he was close to reborn. He had decent cervical mobility again, which meant he could look over his shoulder for the first time in years, which had to have professional value to him — as I was kind enough not to point out. He was overcome with what I was doing for him. He would do anything for me, I only had to say what, why was I refusing his gifts? I was the only American he had ever met who made him want to see America, no woman had ever done for him what I was doing and I was doing it during the hottest part of the year like an angel of mercy and on and on, and did I know that he himself had been very anti-American and did I know how very much anti-American feeling there was among British Overseas Territories staff, which they hid, and he had to confess he hadn’t been totally uninterested in America until me because he had always been curious to see the Grand Canyon, and on and on.
By about the third session I had figured out what the protocol needed to be. The frame around the process was that we should both understand his back as our antagonist. He had to grasp that the process was cumulative. I was assembling my mode from what seemed to work, unknown to him, and it was clear that an authoritative tone was a winner. There would be two things we were going to ignore during this intensive, as I decided to call it. First of all, I said, we are going to ignore any erections you get and call them manifestations and laugh at them. Second of all, there are going to be incidents of flatus and we are going to ignore them and refer to them as queries. There was a genuine therapeutic notion behind both maneuvers. I wanted to abort the tension that would come from his thinking he, in the circumstances, ought to be getting aroused. And also the first time I had sensed I’d gotten him deeply relaxed a fart had escaped him. He was horrified and got tense. I presented the protocol on erections as a coin with two sides in that I would also be ignoring any feelings of desire that transpired in me. The regulations were that he would be in his undershorts and I would be in my mom-type lentil-green one-piece South African bathing suit. Finally, because I was the one who was in communication with his back, I would control the rhythm of the sessions. He was a bystander. He might have to be silent sometimes, and if he spoke to me I might not reply, because my mission was to preserve my concentration.