“But Maggie lets me touch her boobies,” the man protested. But when the reaching turned into groping, she firmly explained he needed to stop. When her patient reached up for her, Yvette figured his delusions were kicking in again. Yvette is serious about the healing aspects of her discipline, so much so that these days, she specializes in oncology massage. She got to work, using her knowledge of the human body to improve the man’s well-being. The first few times, Yvette corrected him each time he called her by the other name, but then let the matter go, surmising that somewhere along the line, her senile customer had a black woman like her as a caregiver. “He kept calling me Maggie,” she recalls.
Soon after he disrobed, Yvette assumed the elderly man was sweetly delusional as well. But this wasn’t the kind of guy who’d cause problems: “He probably doesn’t even know about happy endings,” Yvette thought. Then working for a downtown luxury hotel, the massage therapist (who didn’t want her last named used) tried to look out for men who wanted more than the knots in their backs rubbed out. At first, the well-to-do, silver-haired man Yvette had been summoned to massage in his hotel suite didn’t look like a threat: He was a senior citizen who could barely make it up onto her table because of a limp.