Middle Age (43 page)

“Yes, if you begin therapy immediately, Lionel. No drugs! We don’t believe in pain-
killing
but in pain
control
. I’m recommending therapy three times a week. This, plus exercises you can do on your own, will help you control your pain, and eventually banish it.”

As Lionel dressed, with shaking fingers buttoning his shirt, the orthopedist smiled at him in a brotherly way, and said, “You’re fortunate, Lionel. Your pain is not organic, but merely ‘mechanical.’ To a large extent, a human being is a mechanical assemblage of bones, muscles, organs, tissue, nerves. We inhabit these robots but we need feel no sentiment, for they are not
us;
we are not
them
. Always remember: the management of your spine is your personal responsibility. If you have developed spinal problems, then you must learn how to deal with them, and how to prevent future symptoms. I will see you again in three weeks, Lionel, and by then, I predict, you will be walking upright. You will be feeling much, much better.” The man’s handshake was warm and reassuring and just perceptibly bullying. Again, Lionel had the discomforting sensation that their topic was more profound than simply physical pain.

At the lavishly appointed Park Avenue Neck and Back Clinic, Park at

nd Street, Lionel was assigned a young female therapist named Siri. In his haze of pain he scarcely noticed her. In his haze of pain, resentful and wincing with each step, embarrassed to be gripping his neon-throbbing
Middle Age: A Romance

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neck in both hands, Lionel followed the therapist through the atriumlike clinic, where pain-wracked individuals, most of them middle-aged men like himself, were exercising on machines. There was a steaming whirlpool. There was a larger pool of gemlike aqua water where individuals swam laps with cautious strokes. There were discreetly veiled mirrors, there were tropical-looking potted plants and sleek chrome works of art in the Henry Moore mode of aesthetic physicality, featureless and smoothed to perfection. Impressionistic music, Debussy or Ravel, was being piped in, quietly. No soft-rock music here as in a Midtown yuppie health club.

No beautifully proportioned young people working out on the floor, gazing with narcissistic ardor at their own reflections. No healthy clients!

All this, Lionel understood, would be very expensive, and no doubt the orthopedist was a part-owner in the clinic, shrewdly profiting from others’

pain.

Lionel staggered into the therapist’s windowless, white-walled cubicle, which opened off the atrium. He removed most of his clothing as directed by the therapist and lay down gingerly, with the young woman’s assistance—“Mr. Hoffmann! Slow-ly”—on a firmly cushioned table. He was terribly ashamed to have whimpered aloud. A stab of panic gripped him, that he might not be able to sit up again, except with assistance. He lay very still, his eyes shut. Willing himself to be strong. Yet thinking
I, Lionel Hoffmann, have become one of the walking wounded
.
No one must know
. Not his staff at Hoffmann Publishing, Inc., and certainly not his wife and friends in Salthill. He dreaded being the object of others’ scrutiny and pity; it infuriated him to imagine Camille’s women friends inquiring after his health, in that eagerly solicitous Salthill way. (In Salthill it was primarily women, of course, who were afflicted in myriad mysterious ways. Nerves, “migraines,” loss of appetite, depression. There was a free-ranging malaise commonly if vaguely referred to as “flu,” and there was a near-ubiquitous condition known as “chronic fatigue”—“Epstein-Barr syndrome”—which particularly afflicted women without work or responsibilities, like Abigail Des Pres. Where in another era such women might have passed around recipes to one another, dress patterns and outgrown baby clothes, in present-day Salthill-on-Hudson they passed around their symptoms, which constituted a strong bond among them. Camille’s physical complaints were so clearly psychosomatic, rooted not in her body but in her fantasies, out of embarrassment for her Lionel never inquired after them, nor did he question Camille’s choice of doctors and her reliance upon

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prescription drugs.) Lionel could not bear it, that he might be confused with such weak-willed individuals!

“Mr. Hoffmann. Please try to relax. The pain is greater, if you do not relax.”

The therapist spoke quietly yet with authority. Lionel shut his eyes tighter. He was resolved not to cry out, nor even to shudder with pain if he could avoid it. The first session was strenuous and intense, lasting fifty minutes. By slow degrees Lionel managed to relax as the therapist’s remarkably strong, deft fingers sought out what she called “pain sites”—

“stressed muscles”—and massaged them into compliance. Lionel was made to retract his neck like a turtle and to extend his neck like a snake.

He was made to “sidebend” and “rotate” his neck. His vertebrae were loosened and shaken like dice. His eyeballs rolled white in their sockets with intermittent flashes of blinding pain, beads of sweat broke out on his body and trickled down his sides. From time to time there came the warning murmur
Don’t stiffen, please
.
Mr. Hoffmann
. Some of the exercises were performed while Lionel was lying on his back or stomach, and some while he was sitting up. He began by disliking the lying-down exercises which put him, as a man accustomed to authority, at a disadvantage; in time he would come to prefer these, for he was a man accustomed to authority, and weary of exerting it. The therapist leaned over him, clad in crisp white nylon, intimate as Lionel’s mother of decades ago; yet, unlike Lionel’s mother, the therapist rarely spoke, to Lionel’s immense relief. How accustomed he was to female chattering! Where he hadn’t the obligation to speak, or to deal with being spoken to, which constituted the major portion of his adult life, he could feel himself free, and anonymous. Tears streaked Lionel’s face, for the exercises were in fact painful; but these were tears of gratitude as well.

So quiet was the therapist, Lionel began to wonder if perhaps she didn’t know English well. What was her name—“Shura”—“Siri”? Possibly she was Middle Eastern? Indian? Yet she seemed to speak without any evident accent; her throaty voice was purely musical. Through half-shut eyes Lionel had a dim vision of the girl’s olive-pale face, pursed lips, and large exotic deep-set black eyes fixed intently upon him.
Yet she doesn’t see
me.
I am free of her knowledge of me
. That musky-nutmeg smell, that rose from her thick dark plaited hair, neatly fastened at the nape of her neck.

He wondered how long her hair was, when unplaited. He had a vision of velvety hair falling in glistening strands.

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At the end of the session the therapist placed around Lionel’s neck a collar heavy and clumsy as a horsecollar, surging with hot water. For ten astonishing minutes Lionel drifted pain-free and entranced. How happy he was! Like a disembodied spirit he contemplated his life from an elevated distance and was forgiving of others, and of himself. He resolved to be kinder and more attentive to Camille; to be less impatient with his children, who seemed to him insufficiently mature for their ages. That weekend he would arrange to see Adam Berendt, his most worthy friend.

Adam, what an insight I had! The secret of life is
—

But when Lionel pressed several bills into the therapist’s hand, as he prepared to leave, the young woman stepped gracefully back, and murmured, with an air of apology and regret, “Mr. Hoffmann, thank you but
no
.” Suddenly Lionel was looking at her—they were nearly the same height—and his heart thudded absurdly in his chest.

“Forgive me,” he said, staring. “This was my first time.”

When did I fall in love with you, I fell in love at once
.
Your hands
.
Your touch
.

Oh, Siri!

Very quickly it would come to seem to Lionel Hoffmann that the remainder of his life, all that was not Siri, was of little more substance than those hypnagogic images that flash against our eyelids when, in a state of exhaustion, we begin to sink into sleep.

Y L , and didn’t inquire of Siri until the end of his third week of therapy, when things were going very well for him, whether he might “see” her sometime; and Siri declined at once, though with downcast, embarrassed eyes; and that air of apology and regret that suggested (unless Lionel imagined it?) how much she regretted being in a position obliging her to decline Lionel’s offer, and to disappoint him. Lionel saw in the mysteriously silent, darkly beautiful girl a sensitivity to another’s feelings that could only have been foreign, for it was certainly not American. “If I weren’t your patient, Siri? Would that make a difference?” Lionel asked, and Siri turned away, stricken with a deeper embarrassment, forced to murmur, “Mr. Hoffmann, how can I say!”

Which left the issue, Lionel thought, ambiguous and open to interpretation.

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B   he knew her name: Siri Joio. Frequently he spoke it aloud when there was no one to overhear. He knew from the few remarks he’d been able to draw out of her that she lived in Manhattan, in the East Village; it seemed likely that she lived alone; she had few relatives; always she’d wanted to be a physical therapist, and to devote herself to helping

“alleviate pain” in others. Lionel was deeply touched by the girl’s idealism, which reminded him of his own idealism, years ago; before he’d gone into the Hoffmann family business. Lionel assured Siri that she was certainly helping him, and he was very grateful. Except—“When I’m well, will that mean we’ll never see each other? That doesn’t seem fair.”

Siri’s only response was to laugh nervously.

O   were engorged with her. His neck, shoulders, upper back, and spine were erogenous zones. The blood of lost youth pumped into his groin, waking him on the brink of orgasm. During the day, at Hoffmann Publishing, Inc., in meetings and at luncheons and on the phone, Lionel was seized with irrational surges of happiness, and hope.
You won’t abandon me, Siri! I know it
. At other times, when the pain returned to his neck and spine, a dull sullen throbbing, he was overcome with a sense of desolation, self-disgust, hopelessness.
Of course I’m too old
for you
.
And you’ve seen my weaknesses, exposed
. It had been years since Lionel had felt so irresolute. His emotions so mercurial. Years since he’d understood that love brings fear: our worry that we won’t be loved in return, that our emotion will be flung back into our faces.

He could not recall having loved Camille like this.

He could not recall having loved anyone like this.

He’d told Camille only that he was having minor neck and back problems, and seeing an orthopedist in the city. Preoccupied with her own problems, and the intensity of Salthill social life which resembled a high-speed roller coaster from which one might never alight during one’s lifetime, Camille was sympathetic, but not very involved. “So long as you’ve had X rays, darling? And there was nothing—serious?”

Lionel reassured Camille, there was nothing “serious.”

Liking it that he felt so little unease, in her presence. And when he was away from her he scarcely thought of her at all.
Siri, you have taken over my
life
.
Siri, have mercy!

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O , in their fifth week of therapy, when Lionel lay grimacing and panting in pain after an arduous exercise in neck “flexion,” Siri gently continued to massage his neck; and paused, and stroked his forehead, which was damp with perspiration. Lionel’s eyelids opened at once. He saw Siri’s dark, tender gaze fixed upon his. He gripped her hand and held it for a long, tense moment.

Walking wounded
. He saw them everywhere, now. He pitied them, and felt contempt for them, and looked quickly away when their eyes that shimmered with pain sought his.

Head retraction in sitting
.
Neck extension in sitting
.
Head retraction in lying
.

Neck extension in lying
.
Sidebending of the neck
.
Neck rotation
.
Neck flexion in
sitting
. Each of these exercises was to be repeated ten times. Each complete set to be performed twice daily in Lionel’s bedroom, or more often, as Siri said, depending upon need.

“But I need my pain, too! My pain is my bond with you.”

Not in Salthill but in the apartment on East 6st Street, Lionel slept, or tried to sleep, with a rather hard tubular cushion called a “cervical roll”

between his pillow and pillowcase. He’d purchased it at the clinic, as Siri recommended. Sometimes he dreamt that Siri of the smoldering-dark eyes and warm nutmeg scent was pushing a bar against the tender nape of his neck. Her throaty almost inaudible voice.
Mr
.
Hoffmann! Relax, please
.

Sometimes he dreamt he was naked, in a public place, awkwardly kneeling, his neck throbbing with pain outstretched above a bucket as, above his head, a guillotine blade was being raised, preparatory to slicing his head from his body.

H  , he knew! One day soon she would consent to see him.

(But would she?
This is ridiculous, I’m too old
.
Adam would laugh at me
.) Yes but Siri was so kind. He’d overheard her speaking with other patients, before and after Lionel Hoffmann entered her cubicle. He’d overheard her speaking on the telephone. And her strong deft capable fingers were so kind. It was her task to alleviate pain. She was an angel of mercy

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clad in crisp white nylon. A smock, trousers. The smock was loose-fitting so one could not make out the shape of her breasts except to know that they were not small, though obviously not large, crudely mammalian. Siri was of an entirely different physical type from Camille: slender, boyishly lean, with perfectly proportioned thighs, hips, torso, shoulders, and arms, subtly muscled, not an ounce of fat. Poor Camille: with her fleshy hips and breasts, her pink-skinned round face so eager to please, she was one whom evolution had bypassed; young women no longer died in childbirth because their pelvises were too narrow, they no longer required hefty milk-bags for breasts. The thought of Siri’s flat smooth belly made Lionel sweat.
This is ridiculous! Help me
.