Belletrist Coterie

my rescuer. I was thirty-three, the same age as Christ when he wandered in the wilderness and was crucified. Put simply, my sense of high drama endured.

I was paying people to touch me on a weekly basis. It was as much intimacy as I could take.

The popular expression is “Spa Whore,” but I always felt more like a John. I went into rooms with countless strangers, took off my clothes, and paid other people to make my body feel good for an hour.

Eros kept me on his table for nearly twice my allotted time, and I wondered, when his hands grazed my (immaculately trimmed) bush—twice, three times—under the auspices of thigh work, if this was deliberate. I sat and talked with him for too long afterwards, some awkwardness returning to my liquefied form as I wondered what he might or might not want with me. What could anyone possibly want with a young, neurotic divorcée?

“What a whore my ex-wife turned out to be,” Robert told me over dinner. As he elaborated bitterly on his ex-wife’s vicissitudes and boasted about tax evasion, I couldn’t hide my dismay. My healer was broken. I was forever romanticizing rescuers and healers, and they were forever revealing themselves to be mere mortals. Still, he gave me a lasting gift when I told him I was flying home to see my brother, who was ill again.

After six years, Charlie’s body was rejecting his new lungs. Forget the giant slalom. My brother could no longer negotiate a single flight of stairs.

“Do this when it gets to be too much,” Robert told me. He took my index and middle finger and showed me how to press them firmly against my chestbone, about four inches north of my sternum, and release. “I don’t know why. It just helps.”

A month later, my brother was dead. Eight years later, I still take my index and middle finger and feel for the same spot absently, when I’m grieving. I press firmly and release.

V. I should only be with women. Now that I’ve reached my forties, solid wisdom has (finally) arrived in the form of this epiphany.

An hour south of San Diego, in Baja Mexico, there is a spa called Rancho La Puerta. It’s at the base of a mountain. They feed you organic vegetarian Mexican food, and you choose between hiking, arts and crafts, Pilates. A few enlightened men see Rancho La Puerta’s value, but it’s mostly sleepaway camp for women. Rich women, hectic women, broken women, earnest women, casual women, yogic women—I’ve been all of them except rich. My mother always brings me as her guest—a real gift, especially when you consider that she finds the average spa treatment about as pleasant as a waterboarding. All it takes for her is a good murder mystery and a hammock.

An elderly Shoshone called Grandfather Raven used to offer “Drumming Circle,” but doesn’t anymore. He once offered a bunch of us a handful of semiprecious stones from a leather pouch. I picked out all blue stones while he flirted with a wealthy, peppy blond in her mid-sixties.

“What should I do to feel happier?” I asked him, enacting the dual roles of Broken/Earnest Woman. He broke away from the blond just long enough to consider the stones in my hand and take back a couple of the blue ones. He tossed a few red and orange ones into my palm in their stead.

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