Copyright, drlust, 2004
The conference in Toronto, like all other stuffy academic conferences I have to attend in my capacity of “learned expert,” seemed likely as not to three days of boredom enlivened by moments of conviviality with old friends teaching at other universities around the world.
If you haven’t attended one of these affairs, they are best characterized as “mutual intellectual masturbation.” That is, they offer bright people the opportunity to show off to other bright people just how smart they are by giving a paper about some incredibly obscure topic that only three or four other people in the room actually know anything about.
For me, these events hold only two attractions any more. I do enjoy some of the evening schmoozing with old friends around the bar and whenever the conference is held in a city I like, I take advantage of the opportunity to reconnect with a world of culture not available to me in the small Midwestern town where my own university is located.
Toronto is one of my favorite cities—so vibrant, so cosmopolitan, and so not-American in many ways. And so, when the annual meeting of my disciplinary society was announced for Toronto, I was actually looking forward to the trip.
In the months before my arrival on the north shore of Lake Ontario, I spent a lot of time researching the restaurants I would eat in, the neighborhoods I would stroll through, and the museums I would visit. Lest you think me just another stuffy academic, at the top of my museum list was the International Hockey Hall of Fame.
Best of all, the conference was held in Toronto’s grand hotel, a place worth spending at least one night in your life. Like most of the old grand hotels of its vintage, Toronto’s lacks some of the most modern amenities, but it makes up for that lack with style. I had stayed there almost 15 years earlier and had thoroughly enjoyed myself, so I was looking forward to a return.
I arrived on Thursday morning and went straight to the hotel. Because there was almost nothing happening at the conference Thursday afternoon, I went to check out the exercise facilities and was pleased to see that they still had their lap pool, a nice weight room, and offered massages right there in the gym. I decided right then to treat myself to a strenuous afternoon workout, followed by a full hour of massage.
Inquiring at the front desk, I found out that if I was willing to wait into the early evening, I could indeed schedule a massage. When the pleasant young woman at the reception desk pulled out the schedule, I noted that at 7:00 p.m. the opening was with a woman named Ildiko, so I asked for that appointment.
You may not recognize the name as female, but as a specialist in things Hungarian, I knew that only Hungarian parents name their daughters Ildiko.
My evening set, I returned to the conference suites and visited the book exhibits, keeping a sharp eye out for new work by competitors in my field. I returned to my room at 4:00, watched a few minutes of the CBC and then gathered my workout clothes and headed for the gym.
Over the next two hours I put my body through its paces. First an hour of intervals in the pool that left my arms and shoulders shaking, then another hour in the weight room, alternating between the various cardio machines and the weights. By the time 6:45 rolled around, I was spent and ready for my massage, so I returned to the locker room, showered, and put on the robe they had given me at the reception desk.
At 7:00 sharp, I rapped lightly on the door of the massage studio and the door opened to reveal a woman of power and grace.
Ildiko was short—probably no more than 5’2” or 5’3”, but the muscles in her shoulders and arms exposed her instantly as someone who not only gives a lot of athletic massages, but also spends a fair amount of time in the weight room. Those broad shoulders tapered to a very slim waist and her braless breasts were quite small and slightly flattened against her chest by the muscles underneath.
Her hair was blonde, very curly, and cut just below her ears and her eyes betrayed that tenuous link the Hungarians have with their Central Asian nomadic forbears—just slightly almond shaped and very dark.
Her smile was bright as she welcomed me into the room and as I entered, I couldn’t help but stare at the sculpted nature of her physique—highlighted as it was by a skin-tight tank top and sweatpants riding so low on her hips that they looked to be in serious danger of dropping to the floor at any moment. She was wearing bright red underpants, the waistband of which was clearly visible where her sweats rode low.
When she greeted me her accent betrayed her as a recent immigrant and so I surprised her by greeting her in Hungarian, something that Hungarian expats almost never experience. I’m one of those rare oddballs who actually speak Hungarian, because I lived in Budapest for three years in the early 1990s.
“How is it that you speak my language?” she asked. This is the standard question I get every time I show off my fluency.
I explained to her about my career and my residence in her country’s capital. She nodded, smiled, and told me how nice it was to be able to speak Hungarian for a change and wanted to know if it was okay to stick to Hungarian rather than English. Of course, I agreed.
“Well, Mark,” she said, “It is nice to meet you for sure. Do you have any injuries that I should be aware of before we begin?”
I told her about my stiff lower back and about my bad ankle, and explained that I prefer a more athletic massage to a more gentle one.
“That will be no problem for me,” she said, laughing lightly. Given her physique, I could imagine that it would not.
“Different of my clients feel differently about nudity, Mark, so whatever you are comfortable with is fine for me,” she continued.
“I stopped worrying about that a long time ago,” I replied, dropping my robe to the floor and climbing onto the table, fully naked. She draped a blanket over my lower body, turned on some kind of atmospheric music that was just loud enough to muffle most of the sounds from the gym just beyond the door and lit a scented candle.