SOL March 16: Fiction as Life, or Vice-Versa

 I read the following essay in the New York Times about why so many readers think novels are really autobiographies, which prompted this recollection of my own fiction attempt.

            I wrote a novel once. (The very messy first draft still sits in a box on a shelf.) The only consciously autobiographical aspect is the setting, where I lived at age 12 in 1954 West Haven, Connecticut. One element of the plot involves the mother of a 12-year-old girl having an affair with the man who lives across the road. At some point I wondered whether I was "remembering" something — so I asked my mother whether she'd ever had an affair when we lived in Connecticut. There was a long pause, until she mused, "Not in Connecticut." You can imagine my astonishment. My rather prim mother, apparently admitting to an affair! I pressed her for details. It seems that around 1960 a couple they had been friends with since they'd all been young marrieds in the early 1940s were visiting (we were living in a Philadelphia suburb at that point), and the male half of the other couple said they'd done so many things together, but there was one thing they'd never done, and that was have sex with each other. My father wasn't so eager at first (he was even more prim), but eventually agreed, and there were maybe two or three episodes of "wife-swapping." Then that was over — and a few years later, my father decided the other man had given him bad investment advice, and they never spoke again. I can't help thinking the wife-swapping also played a part in my father's withdrawal.

            There's so much I didn't ask my mother about this, but I couldn't get past the child's inability to consider the parents’ sex life. But my mother did once mention that my father had a "low sex drive." Did that have something to do with the couples' estrangement? Did my mother want to try some tricks she'd learned from the other man? Did my father find this disturbing? Did he feel his marital-bed-authority challenged? Was this one more little piece that nudged my mother to leave my father years later, when they were in their 60s? They are both long dead now, so I can only make it up. Another messy first draft?

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SOL Tuesday: Is Physical Therapy Sex?

I have been seeing a physical therapist off and on for the past four years for a spinal stenosis that causes me pain in one of my legs. My therapist is a young man, well, maybe around 40, with lovely blue eyes.

            Mostly, I think he is very good. He explains what each exercise or stretch is for and in detail what each part of my body that’s involved should be doing, or not doing. Occasionally, he will do massage-like “manipulation” on a muscle or set of muscles.

            Every now and then, his work on my muscles takes a form that feels almost sexual. For instance, to work out my glutes, he had me on my back with my legs bent to my chest and my feet against his chest. He then used his own body as a weight to put pressure on my legs. It did indeed stretch the glutes. But it also felt like a position of sex.

            Don’t get me wrong. The door to the room we’re in is open, there’s zero chance that there this is anything actually sexually abusive going on. Of course, we are both fully clothed. In fact, ever since Jack died, I have missed enormously the feeling of another person’s body against mine. (I sometimes wonder whether I continue to go to physical therapy just for the touch of another person. A friend whose husband died suddenly some years ago confessed that she’d starting getting manicures and pedicures just for the touch of another person.)

            Yesterday, we did another one of those stretches, in which he used his body as a weight to stretch out my calf muscle. I usually close my eyes during these stretches because it’s easier to feel how my body is responding if I have no visual distraction. I wonder what he thinks as he uses his body to work on the body of an elderly person. Most of his other clients I’ve seen are elderly people like me. But I can’t ask him. I don’t want him to think I think there’s anything risque about what we’re doing. But in a corner of my mind, or is it my body, I think, physical therapy is sex.

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