This is not me; my hands are moist. My calves are cleansed. From elbows to fingernails, I am exfoliated, loosened, and smelling enough like an herb garden to invite rape by an Italian chef.

For six hours I have been spot-checked, rolled, beaten and bathed, emasculated, kneaded, and wrapped in hot towels, flogged with vegetables, fondled by strangers. The ends of my feet and hands are streaked with white pencil (to make the tips stand out) as though white on very-white is distinguishable. My hair, normally like the wings of a dozen crows stapled to a melon, stands down. Even I don’t recognize my feet. My back, chest, lower legs, and shoulders have been slapped, pinched, and poked until the flesh goes ouch (and the mouth and bowels in unison go nnnnnnnh) and maybe for the first time in more than 20 years my stomach has survived without cheese for more than a few hours, having in a day’s nutrition only water, coffee, some fruit, plus a plate of lettuce with a miso-based dressing and some goosey chicken strips. I am in all senses prepped either to be eaten or married off were I living in a different culture from my own – indulgence-in-the-face-of-terrorism, debt-before-depression, superficiality-before-suffering 21st-century New York City – the type of time and place where when a friend ponies up a full-service gift certificate to the Elizabeth Arden Salon & Spa that he can’t use before its expiration date – ‘Hey, will you take this off my hands?’ – my gut responds before my brain clicks in, ‘Oh will I? Will I?!’

I had never been to a spa before. My thoughts on their purpose in society had a deep, black grudge. Growing up around rich people, I learned early that the last thing the world needs is rich people feeling their richness rubbed into them, richly. I had never had a manicure, pedicure, or facial. The few massages I’d suffered were gifts from my well-meaning parents on family vacations, and all of them were best exemplified by one masseuse in Maine who oiled me up well enough to be shot through a keyhole, and then practiced for her typing exam on my back. My only other ‘treatment’ was in high school with a therapist who hit on me during my one and only session. So with two examples, my attitude was entrenched: This stuff is all New Age hooey for assholes who can afford it; at best, it’s self-indulgent luxury, at worst, a 65-year-old woman with a wall of plaques and some ideas.

My wife and I didn’t really discuss the day-spa idea before I went. First, because I didn’t want to rub it in that while she was hard at work, I’d be having my face peeled off. Second, because no marriage needs the threat of intercourse with the elderly. Third, because I felt a little ashamed about the whole ordeal. Who goes to day spas? (Not me.) Who has the time to be pampered, poked, and waxed on (or off, depending on the spa, I guess) when there’s work to be done? (Not me.) And though I could at least avoid the regrets of having spent my own money (I called the Elizabeth Arden Salon & Spa and pretended to be interested in buying the very same ‘men’s day package,’ which is actually very limited and cheap compared to the pricier women’s packages – to find that the current cost in New York City is about $300), there was still the nagging fact that I had agreed to go, and worse, was looking forward to it. And that, I had hoped, was not how I’d feel.

‘I’ll write a story about it,’ I told myself, ‘that will make everything OK.’


* * *


It’s 11 a.m. Normally I’m at my desk, typing something. After passing two doormen and a bank of skin-care products, I ride the elevator up to the ninth floor of the Elizabeth Arden building on 54th Street. Apparently after the Nature Company folded, their decorator found a sympathetic ear: The spa’s lobby is tricked out with all sorts of verdant displays, purple fountains and rising mists. A nice woman takes my gift certificate and wonders if I want coffee. I do. The urns are set up next to a dusty bowl of Chex mix, right beside a stack of Gotham magazines.

‘Are you ready?’ she asks.

‘Oh definitely,’ I say, suddenly eager to please. I get this way whenever I’m being serviced. The cab driver gets more attention than my friends; waiters get 20 percent minimum; the dry cleaner can ruin my pants and I’ll still say, ‘Thanks!’ I may hate bad service, but I usually hate myself more for being serviced in the first place.

She shows me to the men’s locker-room and shuts the door. So far I haven’t seen any other men in the building besides the security guards downstairs. Checking first behind my back, I pry open all the other lockers.

Every one is empty – no other men being spa’d today. I am finally, I decide, conclusively and empirically, a sissy.

The Elizabeth Arden Salon & Spa ‘Red Door Package’ outfits its guests with a quilted robe and rubber sandals. Men’s robes are blue, women’s robes are tan. Guests are instructed to undress and proceed to their first appointment. The day’s schedule of events is printed on two slips of paper tied with a red ribbon – not unlike the type of dance card often used as a dramatic device in period dramas. But Dominic, how can I possibly dance with you when Archie’s next in line?

I put on my robe and realize I have no pockets. This is when the first panic sets in: Where the hell am I going to store my notebook?


* * *


The great and lesser novels of the 19th and early 20th centuries frequently sent their anti-heroes off for curative treatments around Europe. Though modern literature learned to send its protagonists into rehab instead, for a time exhaustion, consumption, indulgence, the chills – though sounding suspiciously like symptoms of the flu – were enough to earn you a season of ‘taking the cure.’ Imagine 50 rich dandies taking naps in the Alps, and you get the picture. But in the world of novels this showed sensitivity, the eligible character exposed in her weakened state to adventure, solidarity among the world’s asthmatics.

Now it’s amusing to read these plots: We tolerate them as antiques, chronicles of a sort of life, or the sort of life its contemporary readers aspired to – bland meats, white robes, whoring around with cripples. But it’s not our world. Though the rich still send their children away – now to boot camps in the desert, or drug clinics in the Berkshires – there’s no longer any elitist élan from post-vapors romance. We sympathize for the blue-collar Oxycontin addicts, but the cokeheads from Choate can die silently.

Perhaps the best and most famous of this genre is Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. The center of Mann’s story is Hans Castorp, a young man who arrives at a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, weary at the idea of being committed. He eventually stays seven years. A big book, a very smart book, a moving story about sickness and the will to survive that must rank high in the charts of ‘bought-but-not-read-past-page-167-by-94-percent-of-readers,’ The Magic Mountain is still a masterpiece about a guy who doesn’t think he needs (or wants) the treatment but then makes it his life.

Hearing a description of the rest cure upon his arrival, and about to crack up, our friendly if dim Hans says, ‘What? You lie out on your balcony rain or shine, night or day?’ He is stunned that people do this and only this. He certainly doesn’t believe it works. But he comes around.

Nothing so lofty is in my head as I follow my masseuse, Janyen, down the hallway toward our appointment. There are, instead, bigger thoughts to be thunk.


* * *


No man with decent morals has ever had a full-body massage and not worried about popping a boner. Those with more tawdry morals probably had an easier, and better, time.

It’s with great relief to me that Janyen wants me on my stomach first, but I know soon enough, Janyen, shielding her eyes, will ask me to roll over. And I can’t get this out of my mind. I force myself to think about my dead grandmother. Some side of my brain tries to fool me into thinking I have necrophiliac tendencies, but it doesn’t win. Still, it’s not long before my imagination gets so wrapped up with the idea I might lose control that it insists I will lose control, simply for thinking about it so much.

Prior to the massage, Janyen explains what she plans to do to me and then asks if I have any injuries she should know about. She leaves, I undress, and she returns to find me pinching the sheet around my shoulders. The massage begins. Admittedly, it feels incredible.

But still, to be lubed up and rubbed down, I’m a table of boner-anxiety. I’m sure the piped-in ocean sounds are meant to induce relaxation, but I’m twitching with fear.

Janyen finishes with the back and wants the front. The specter of priapism becomes a full-torsoed apparition in my brain. (Years ago as an ambulance driver and E.M.T., I saw one too many unwarranted erections as the result of trauma, surely a trauma, I imagine in the moment, similar to what I’m going through. Car crash or massage, an undesired bulge on display is still undesired.)

But the ghost goes away. Janyen finishes my front and sends me off to lunch.


* * *


In the subway on the way to the Elizabeth Arden Salon & Spa, I tried to picture what my fellow spa-ers would look like. Probably not like the people on the train. Some, I guessed, would look like the characters in Fellini’s 8 1/2, beautiful Italians who go to spas just to show they don’t need to. Others would fit better in an E.M. Forster novel: stuffy, transparent, quite possibly doomed. And still more, I guessed, would be like the society page from the New York Times, old swans and dons from the upper classes, less makeup and fewer jewels but still the right air about them – the one that makes them always seem comfortable in photographs.

The cast in the café is small. Even including me, we could barely stage Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and hell, I damn near own that part. There are two guests plus a waitress, an older Japanese woman they’ve dressed (or she has a serious fetish going on) in a maid’s outfit straight from a plantation. She sits me down and takes my order. Nice and extremely polite, she can’t seem to stop bowing, and when she asks how I liked ‘massage-y,’ I have to ask her to repeat herself. We both, I’m thinking, want to cringe at each other.

Guest number one is Nadira. A Croatian woman probably in her mid-60s who speaks no English, Nadira slightly resembles a just-boiled turnip, though with less intelligence. Our waitress brings her a blanket and she’s visibly confused. I begin to feel bad about thinking up the turnip joke, wondering if she’s senile or ill, until she barks at the Japanese woman while pointing to my coffee.

The turnip line stays. The turnip wants her coffee. With obvious effort and dexterity, she resumes staring at the wall. She is not just a turnip, she is every turnip, über-turnip. Nadira thinks in turnip. Turnip thinks itself in Nadira.

Guest number two is Maryann, probably the same age as dear Nadira, and exactly the spitting image of a substitute teacher’s dead grandmother. She’s also rude to the waitress, and I decide the reason she’s so pale is because her husband makes her watch videos of executions.

The coffee is good. I stare out the window (a good view of Fifth Avenue) and hear seagulls flying by. Of course this is really just the same nature soundtrack that’s broadcast through the entire floor, but it takes a minute to register.

My water is lemon-flavored (though without a lemon). My salad is decent (though microwaved). My shoulders and back: knotted right back up.


* * *


To kill time in the café (I have 45 minutes scheduled for lunch, an unexplainably long time for some arugula and half a chicken breast) I pick up a magazine, once again Gotham, like they had in the lobby.

I’ve seen Gotham before but never read it. It’s a big magazine, the size of a small medicine cabinet. It turns out to be W-ish, articles about mostly-New York society figures intended for society figures (though, more likely, for the lady who is not a society figure but knows enough to desire becoming one, from Des Moines).

But should terrorists need a reason to bomb New York, Gotham will suffice. It is entirely a paean to greed, superficial ends and means, brands, thinness, the triumph of white people, wealth, and products. Its literary riches include a diary written by a Hearst heir, plus a chart comparing the lives of children of the superrich. There’s not even the vapid, gassy engagement of an US Weekly or Maxim; Gotham takes itself very seriously. My favorite parts are the captions under society pictures that seem to have been written by 16-year-old Vogue interns on instant messenger (e.g., ‘Cute!’ or ‘So Façonnable.’). But the best part has to be the page of black people: Besides a half-dozen people of color, the magazine is as white as my cuticles until you hit page 210. Then, 18 black people and one really tan guy! Unfortunately, they don’t title it ‘Some Black People Have Too Much Money Too,’ but really, it’s the thought that counts.

Scratch that – the best part is J. Oliver Nixon’s editor’s letter. Let’s pretend editors’ letters aren’t expected to be bubbled-headed, alliterative postcards from one imaginary brain to another. An excerpt:
For me, the fall is all about day trips and long weekends and pre-holiday relaxation. A jaunt to London to check out the latest West End theater offerings. Montreal. Cooperstown for Thanksgiving. The Emerson Inn & Spa in Mount Tremper for massages and R&R. And a very decadent escape to the fabled Point in the Adirondacks and loads of antiquing in the towns around Kent, Connecticut…The theme that I coined for the November issue is ‘glamour, luxury, and the holiday gift guide,’ so you’ll find plenty of luxe sophistication and dozens of suggestions for what to buy the ones you love, from the drop-dead and expensive to the chic and funky.
Nixon is apparently the type of person Adirondack year-rounders dream of driving over with their pickups. (I wish I had space to quote Jason Binn’s publisher’s letter in full, but one line will have to do: ‘So, the next time you wonder whether it’s worth it to drop the extra money on those linens or the diamond bracelet, the answer is a resounding ‘yes’!’) But because of Gotham’s now-double appearance in the Elizabeth Arden Salon & Spa, I begin to smell a business deal. Do Elizabeth Arden Salon & Spa customers want to read Gotham? Are they its audience, or its subjects? Does J. Oliver Nixon come here to have his monograms waxed? Do ‘spa people’ read Gotham and thus, is my quest over? Have I figured out, finally, who in hell spends their day being buffed and polished?

Nope. The evidence is inconclusive. Neither Nadira nor Maryann pick up a copy of the magazine, and I can’t exactly relate their physical frames to the über-obese Hilton sisters. Plus it’s time for my manicure and I’m five minutes late.


* * *


I ride the elevator downstairs for my final appointments. A very nice woman at the desk chides me for dawdling. ‘Are you having a wonderful time?’ she wants to know, and I assure her, yes, everything is wonderful. My manicurist, Ines, arrives to lead me to her station. She is exactly the size of a laundry basket.

After my massage I changed back into civilian clothes, my blue jeans and sweater, but didn’t risk showering in the glass-walled men’s shower before redressing, so now not only am I oily, my jeans are, too.

Ines asks me what type of manicure I want and it takes me a while to explain that a) I don’t know because it’s my first time and b) No, I really do not want any nail polish, no way.

Still, she tries two kinds, saying each will be less shiny than the last. Both show decent reflections of the ceiling. I stand my ground.

The manicure, pedicure, and hairstyling floor is outfitted much more like an expensive hair salon than the hobbit’s burrow upstairs. Ancient Greece is the theme: sconces, busts, buckets of ivy. The Greeks, I decide, were very progressive males. They laid down the groundwork for centuries of science, philosophy, and literature. Surely they had someone buff their nails once in a while. No way did it detract from their characters.

‘So you have an inside job.’

This is a statement, not a question. First I wonder if Ines is alluding to some sort of robbery scheme I’m not aware of, then I catch her drift.

‘You mean, do I work inside?’

‘Yes,’ she laughs, ‘you work in an office, no?’

‘Well yeah. Sort of.’ Then I get it. ‘You can tell this from my hands?’

‘Oh yes,’ she says, smiling, every part the indulgent grandmother feeding her pallid grandson cookies, ‘you can tell by the softness of a man’s hands.’

And that’s it. The best and final judgment. Ines has proclaimed the truth: I am the sort of person who belongs in a day-spa. Loggers and sheet-rockers are better off scraping paws on the hips of lusty virgins and drinking scotch from chewed-out rocks; us laptop-aficionados, on the other hand (so to speak), need some nail work done.

Ines dries my nails by holding them near her lips and blowing softly.


* * *


The older, vaguely Slavic woman is not happy with the condition of my soles. My pedicure is a disaster; I regret every moment. Bathing my feet in rosewater, having my toenails fingered and clipped, the bottoms of my feet sanded down, my legs hoisted up into the strong woman’s lap and then massaged while she stares out of the room – not for me. Nail polish is refused, again.

I remember my father describing how he clipped my grandfather’s toenails once he was moved into the constant-care center. Big yellow scoops of nail, black and ugly, rotting. I stare at the woman working on my feet. Does she notice two of the toes on my left foot are partially webbed? (My grandfather, who was disappointed in many ways by our family’s later generations, had two fully-webbed toes and liked to brag they improved his swimming.) And how many awful, nasty feet has she bathed? What has she done with her life?

But on the list of people to tear down for unstable moral reasons, she’s the last, plus I’m tired of all this. I’m tired of myself. I want out.


* * *


Thankfully, they seem to have forgotten my promised facial (and I’m not going to bring it up), but there’s still the matter of the haircut. Perfectly friendly and outgoing hairstylist Jennifer leads me to her station. She’s young and Chinese and has a pretty bad lisp and a limp but, frankly, anyone this nice has to be on someone’s good list.

‘I just want a trim,’ I tell her. ‘Nothing fancy. And no gels.’

‘Hey, whatever,’ she says sincerely, ‘Whatever you want. Whatever makesth you happy! Come on – people thould be happy!’ She smiles widely at me in the mirror.

I’m kind of shocked. Maybe Jennifer senses this. ‘Let’s go thampoo your hair,’ she says.

And finally – for the first time today – I relax. The shampoo takes a while, and then Jennifer says it’s time for a deep-moisturizing conditioning treatment. She ties a cotton bandana around my forehead and sticks me in a steam machine (kind of like those big hair-dryer pods, but circulating moist air) ‘It’s just thteam!’ she says, ‘You won’t get hurt!’ She brings me another cup of coffee. Do I want a magazine? she asks, offering me Gotham. I laugh out loud and say no. Across from me an older woman is lying down with aluminum foil in her hair, underneath what I can only describe as a rotating barbecue coil. But she looks happy enough. Maybe she’s dead, I wonder.

During the haircut, Jennifer tells me about her family, how she’s trying to cut down on heavy foods and sugar, about a friend of hers who wrote a karate novel in Chinese that’s being made into a movie and now he’s Mr. Big-Time. She’s going to get me a copy, she says, if they have an English translation.

‘Tho,’ she asks, ‘you guysth thinking of having kidsth soon?’


* * *


Many people, I decide, are naturally vain, as many, probably, as those who are naturally nice, compassionate, loyal to their friends. Perhaps writers – with the tasks of introspection, self-whittling, criticism – are more likely to suffer vanity’s traps: snobbery, low self-esteem, pettiness. Surely this is true of me. In an interview with New York magazine, Jonathan Franzen explains how Details paid him $2,000 to write a story about buying his first suit. ‘I wrote the thing and got a suit from Barneys which I still wear. The real bonus, though, was that Details never ran the piece.’ Psyched because he got the suit and the money, he also ducked the embarrassment from having anything so trivial on record, which surely would have been below him, the novelist Franzen who’s concerned with larger things. I hold Franzen in very high esteem, but if you offer me a new suit and two thousand bucks for what, 500 words? I’ll not only show the article to my wife, I’ll mail it to my in-laws.

Jennifer blow-dries my neck and gives me her card. I tell her I can’t afford to come back but I go out of my way to thank her. It’s a good haircut. I go back upstairs, check out, and return to the street. Now it’s dark. In an interview with the Paris Review Raymond Carver said (and I’m paraphrasing from memory here), ‘Above all else, the writer can’t be afraid to tell his own secrets.’ Here’s my secret, then: I loved the Elizabeth Arden Salon & Spa. I had a ball. Though I won’t go again, and I definitely won’t be having any nail-work done in the near future, I will recall and concur with the advice my pedicurist gave me right before trying to sell me some foot moisturizer: ‘Everyone – everyone – should at least have the feeling once of being taken care of.’





is the founding editor of The Morning News. He writes and edits in Brooklyn, currently working on the second draft of his first novel. He’s never met a plate of nachos he didn’t finish.