Copyright, drlust, 2004
The conference in Toronto, like all other stuffy academic conferences I have to attend in my capacity of âlearned expert,â 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 havenât attended one of these affairs, they are best characterized as âmutual intellectual masturbation.â 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 citiesâso 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 Torontoâs grand hotel, a place worth spending at least one night in your life. Like most of the old grand hotels of its vintage, Torontoâs 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 shortâprobably no more than 5â2â or 5â3â, 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 forbearsâjust slightly almond shaped and very dark.
Her smile was bright as she welcomed me into the room and as I entered, I couldnât help but stare at the sculpted nature of her physiqueâhighlighted 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. Iâm one of those rare oddballs who actually speak Hungarian, because I lived in Budapest for three years in the early 1990s.
âHow is it that you speak my language?â 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 countryâs 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.
âWell, Mark,â she said, âIt is nice to meet you for sure. Do you have any injuries that I should be aware of before we begin?â
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.
âThat will be no problem for me,â she said, laughing lightly. Given her physique, I could imagine that it would not.
âDifferent of my clients feel differently about nudity, Mark, so whatever you are comfortable with is fine for me,â she continued.
âI stopped worrying about that a long time ago,â 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.
All this I deduced from hearing her, because all I could see was what was available through the round hole in the table where my face was planted.
Ildiko then set to work on my shoulders, bearing down on me in the way that I especially like. Often I find that female masseuses are not strong enough, or willing enough to attack the muscles in my back to my satisfaction, so the therapists I see at home are all male. Ildiko was as strong and as willing as any of the men who I seeâperhaps even more energetic.
As she worked, we chatted lightly about her life in Canada. She had emigrated in 1994 and so had been in Toronto almost 10 years. She had trained in the medical university in Budapest and so had little trouble finding work in Toronto once her English improved. Several times she asked if she was being âtoo strenuousâ and each time I assured her she was doing fine.
âHow is it that you live with these steel cables in your back Mark?â she asked after a good ten minutes trying to do something with my trapezius muscles.
âThe body can adjust to most things,â I grunted, as she bore down on me.
âAh, but it shouldnât have to,â he chided me. âYou should stretch more and perhaps practice Yoga.â
âYou arenât the first person to complain that my back is too much work,â I fired back at her.
âI didnât say too much work for me,â she scoffed. âI meant too much work for you!â
After that, we lapsed into silence, as a massage often does when the first pleasantries have been exchanged. Once she had finished with my upper torso, she moved the blanket so that my torso was covered and my right leg was all that was exposed.
Over the next five to ten minutes she gave my leg just as much of a workout as my back had just received. In my experience, massage therapists are scrupulous about avoiding the top of oneâs inner thigh, so as to avoid any hint of sexual content in the massage, but Ildiko was an exception.
She pulled my legs apart more than I was used to and spent several minutes massaging both my gluteus muscles and the place where my thigh and butt intersect. She never touched my scrotum, encased as it was under the blanket, but she was damn close!
Something about the way she was working that areaâperhaps it was the fact that no massage therapist had ever been that close to my crotchâcaused an unpleasant reaction in my cock. One thing I do not want during a massage is an erection. It is distracting and potentially embarrassing. But, when Ildiko switched to my left leg and ended up massaging me hard in the same locations, I couldnât help myselfâŠI was fully hard within minutes.
Because I knew that shortly she was going to ask me to roll over, I tried to think myself out of the erection, but to no avail. The more I thought about it going away, the harder I became.