Submersions

Abstract

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• Submersions
• Jasmin Sandelson (bio)

A massage therapist I see a few times a year settles me face down, tucks a towel into my underwear. With firm hands, she thumbs my neck, shoulders, hips.

"Usually," she says, "your shoulders are tight. But today, your hips. Why?"

My shoulders get tight because childhood gymnastics left my spine flexible but weak, over time causing crystals of lactic acid to calcify around my scapulae. They also get tight because I hike them, unthinkingly, bracing against nothing.

"My hips?" I say, my face squished by the cradle. "I don't know."

But I do know. I recall lying beneath N, my thighs wide open around her body.

With excruciating exactitude, the massage therapist elbows my glutes. When I grimace, she chuckles. Then she bends so close I feel her lips by my ears.

"Good girl," she whispers. [End Page 428]

_______

Later, I tell N about the massage. We're in bed, heads sharing a pillow the yellow of dandelions.

"Wow," N laughs. "That masseuse is a bit of a domme, huh? You know, since I started doing kink, I see power everywhere. Little moments of body language or eye contact."

"It's like Foucault's idea, the microphysics of power," I say.

She props herself on her elbow, kisses me.

"I like that," she says. "Tell me more."

"Just that power isn't like, top-down—rulers and subjects. It's diffuse, it's in relationships."

_______

"Been dating?" a friend asks me at brunch.

"I've been seeing someone," I smile. "A poet. But she's only here on sabbatical."

"Show me," my friend says, and I flash a photo from the dating app where we met.

"A hot butch in a button-down," they say, grinning. "Does she just top the fuck out of you?"

I laugh. She does, but we, too, have microphysics. N, who is ten years older than me, has a house and a tenure-track job. N wears the strap and wields the crop. But she's shorter than me and softer-spoken and also has smaller hands—although her hands, as I told her one morning, our fingers twined, are just the right size. I stared into her eyes as I said so, and the insinuation—all knuckled bliss—or the memory, made her look away, and my power to do that, to fluster her, too, is part of what lets me yield. [End Page 429]

_______

On the subway, I reread texts from N. I do this to distract myself as I pass through the tunnel, the long stretch between Brooklyn and Manhattan, which I fear so intensely that increasingly, I avoid the 4 train, though it is the line nearest my apartment.

I avoid the 4 because its underwater crossing lasts three minutes and forty-five seconds—to the A's two minutes and the F's ninety seconds—and also because it was an overcrowded 4 train that shrieked violently to a stop beneath the East River one morning two years ago, leaving me trapped under all that water—with no updates or instructions—for forty horrifying minutes. Crushed in a carriage of commuters, I felt so sure I was doomed, so sure water would breach the tunnel, that now, years later, I cannot ride between the boroughs without both reliving the terror and conjuring the image of my bloated, bobbing corpse.

_______

N is all I can think about, all I want to discuss. But there aren't always words. A once-close friend, a man I lived with one summer in my twenties—through which I diligently scheduled date after date with man after man, all the while wearing flouncing pastel sundresses, breasts perkily secured with tape—enquires about my dating life. I tell him briefly about N. The morning after my next date with her, he texts me, asking whether the date went well.

I don't reply.

My answer—and the word yes—cannot capture how, minutes after I arrived at her studio sublet, she had her hand inside me and made me come as she told me to tense around her; cannot capture how we walked, pressed together beneath...