PRIVATE PLEASURES

My body was still new in those days, unexplored, a temple of wonders. I bit down on my forearm and watched the indentations slowly fade. I concentrated until I could wiggle my ears. With a little grunting and cussing, I learned to hook either foot solidly behind my head (though never both simultaneously, alas). The body my mom had assembled was the toy I played with most:  we weren't a poor family, and there were plenty of plastic and wooden toys lying around, but none intrigued me as much as my own fingers and toes and ears and thumbs.

For such fleshly obsession to emerge in a family of authors, mathematicians, and lexicographers seems curious. I was bred for the cerebral life, and by elementary school bore all the markings of a fledgling academic: the shortest kid in the grade, the pale skinny boy with freckles and bony knees and perfect test scores and an unfashionable haircut which his mother re-inflicted monthly. I was the seventh grader who solved everyone’s Rubik’s Cube and memorized digits of pi. [1] Every September, when we took up our stereotyped roles in the classroom drama — Sweetheart, Bully, Clown, Jock — my part was clear: I was the Brain.

And yet, I was fascinated with my Body. I would close my eyes and rub them with my knuckles, just to watch those bright spots moving around. Keep rubbing and the eyeballs change texture — they lose that boiled-egg resistance and go all mushy. Fantastic! Everywhere you push, it's like jelly. When you finally separate your lids the world is bright and hazy, and your softened lenses struggle to focus.

If you stick a finger firmly in your ear, I discovered around age seven, and thrust your jaw back and forth, you can create a popping sound, followed by a quiet tinkle. You get one pop per ear and then have to wait a while before it will work again. Generally I was apprehensive about this habit. It felt unhealthy, like something was cracking in half, perhaps my eardrum. I limited myself to one or two pops a day.

One night I was left alone at the dinner table, forbidden to leave until I had taken four more bites of spinach. Doing so was out of the question, of course, but it might be hours before my parents relented. To pass the time, I hooked my foot around a rung of my chair and clenched my calf muscle as tightly as I could until it knotted. One loosens a knot by simply straightening the leg, but what happens if you don't? It was interesting to feel the muscles fight each other for the next two minutes, trying to work their way back to their original positions — and it didn't hurt nearly as much as I’d always feared. Long after the knot subsided, its shadow remained. I could still detect it at bedtime (the spinach finally forgiven); a faint round ache, a pressure.

This capacity for enduring pain made me briefly famous at Camp Norway, on a lake in Vermont. “That's the boy from Cabin Eight!” kids whispered. “The one who doesn't feel pain!” Various campers and counselors took their turn, attempting to inflict discernible pain on the leper boy. Through all these tests of manhood — the Indian Burn, the Hanging Leglock, the Thumb Twist — I held my face expressionless and concentrated, zenlike, on some distant part of my body, far from the currently tortured limb. Over the next five years, to keep the attention of my peers, I also became a contortionist, a virtuoso whistler, and a champion breath-holder. I taught myself how to walk on my hands, how to sit in the lotus position, how to gurgle and hiss in uncanny imitation of a percolating coffee pot.

Tricks like these attracted only amused glances, not the ravishing popularity which I craved. But privately I began to think of my body as downright remarkable. Why, it was tougher and nimbler than most any other body around! What a fine sense of balance! What astoundingly quick hands! My pride in the capability of this body was matched only by my despair at its lack of loveliness. I never wore shorts, never removed my shirt in public, even on the hottest of days. Glimpsing myself in photographs dismayed me, for I could tolerate my face only in motion: the tongue waggling, the nose wrinkled, the eyebrows fluttering comically. Perhaps this distaste for my own appearance was what led me so frantically to entertain others, as if phenomenal dexterity could make up for a body's aesthetic shortfalls.

Then, around age fifteen, I started singing. It was simply another trick, at first. Imagine performing covert gymnastics inside your body, employing the ribs, spine, tongue, palate and jaw: singing is precisely that, a feat of coordination which is heard rather than seen. What most people call a beautiful voice is more properly an agile one, and I saw any form of agility as a challenge. Could I buzz both cheekbones? Could I lift my soft palate even higher? Could I sustain a note on one breath for twelve slow bars? Over the next few years I learned how to release sound into every part of my body — rippling through the roof of my mouth, vibrating my spine, shivering my hips and reverberating down to my ankles. When you sing a note right it feels fantastic, like sitting in one of those vibrating armchairs from the Sharper Image.

But it was just another game. I was never aiming for beauty. So I was startled when, after a performance in college, a certifiably attractive member of the audience described my voice as sexy. Sexy? Me?

“Sure,” she purred. “You can sing me a lullaby anytime.”

I was dumbfounded. Although I'd come to see my body as competent, it had never occurred to me that mere competence could elevate itself into grace, and grace could lift off into beauty — that my body, this skinny, pale, short, freckled body, could make something beautiful.

So I got a job as a music teacher. And finally, all the idle games of my lonely childhood came together:

“Do the foot trick, Mr. Isaacs, the foot trick!”

I narrow my eyes and cock my chin challengingly. “Only if you get this next rhythm absolutely perfect!” I dare them. 

Thirty-one sixth graders sit up eagerly in their chairs, furrow their little brows, concentrate with comic intensity on the banal exercise scrawled on the board. Their performance is flawless. I reward them by twisting my ankles slowly outward until my feet line up, heels touching, toes pointing toward the side walls of the room. I keep winding them farther and farther around (to gasps of delight and horror) toward the blackboard behind me. By the end of the trick, my feet achieve what a ballerina might call eighth position: they look like they've been installed backward. It is, I'm told, stomach-turning.

Satisfied, the children slide back in their seats. Then one remembers: “Do the tongue trick, Mr. Isaacs, the tongue trick!”

“Do Grover! Do that Grover voice!”

“If we get the next one right, could you balance a music stand on your chin like you did for the other class?”

I erase the board, smiling. Then I turn around.

“I wonder,” I suggest instead, “if you guys can sing one note, without breathing, for a whole minute?”

[1] 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399... good lord, why is it still there?... 375105820974944