HE PLACED THE OARS in their locks and the floating seat cushion on the backseat. He wrapped his goggles in the towel and dropped it between the forward seat and the bow, where the aluminum hull was dry. He pushed against the bow and felt the stern go buoyant as it splashed into the lake. When the prow touched water he gave a last shove, then climbed in and began rowing, eager to get to the float, his private place.
The water, except where he defiled it with the oars (and where insects frayed across its surface, making fern patterns), was smooth as glass. Already the sky had turned a deep, warm blue streaked with white, like chalk marks on a slate board. A single-engine plane grumbled. On the close shore, rings of reflected sunlight thrown up by his wake shimmied like pale silk garters up the trunks of birch trees. As always, he tried not to splash while rowing.
He was seventy-two years old.
Every August for the past twelve years Frank and his wife, Dorothy, had come to the small lake in northern New Jersey, less than an hour’s drive from New York City. Theirs was one of a dozen cabins dotting Lake Juliet’s wrinkled shore. By planting flowers and a vegetable garden with tomatoes and squash and hanging their daughter’s art school watercolors over the couch, they had made the place their own. There was no telephone, no radio, no television. The lake was the only distraction. They liked it that way.
It was not even a lake, really, but an overgrown pond. In fifteen minutes one could row from one end to the other. Still, they preferred to think of it as a lake, “our lake,” they called it. It was where they came to escape the pounding heat and headaches of the subway, the black vulgar headlines of the New York Post, the noise and soot of traffic, and the tyranny of air-conditioning and closed windows. It was where, before retiring, he had come to escape his job as the supervisor of a four-color printing press, and she hers as a seller of advertisements for a fashionable glossy women’s magazine.
Skimming close to the float, Frank pulled both oars out of the water, laid them inside, and glided the rest of the way. Once at the ladder, he grabbed it with one hand while securing a line around it with a clove hitch. Then, taking his towel and goggles, he climbed out of the boat and stood on the float, watching the last wisps of vapor melt off the lake’s calm surface.
Back in their cabin, meanwhile, Dorothy prepared breakfast. She fried bacon and mixed pancake batter. For two people who understood each other very little, they had many understandings, one of which was that Frank would swim and she would cook breakfast. It was one of their many routines in a marriage that often seemed to consist of nothing but routines. Sometimes, standing on the float as he did now, Frank smelled, or imagined that he could smell, bacon frying. He could see Dorothy’s arms holding the heavy skillet, the flesh of her triceps pillowy and drooping. She had been a good-looking woman once, her Irish features square and strong. But she had let herself go. Her once-slim waist was gone, and her arms and legs had lost their tone. Still, she had a lovely smile, her cheeks round and sweet as apricots ripe for picking, and her pale eyes were still bright. It saddened him to look down from those changeless eyes and see the rest of her so changed.
The sun struck the float full. Soon Frank’s shoulders baked, and he could feel the day’s heat singeing his cheeks and forehead. He stood there, his skin as dark and leathery as a catcher’s mitt, scanning the water’s surface. He had always prided himself on being fit and trim. Unlike Dorothy, who now dressed modestly in loose-fitting clothes and seldom appeared naked even in private, Frank liked to live close to his skin. He liked the feel of his strong body, enjoyed its nakedness, here at the lake as well as back in their New York apartment — despite large untreated windows staring out into other apartments. His wife was always nagging him either to cover himself or to buy them curtains. But Frank did neither. “Let them look,” he said, “if it gives them pleasure. It’s the least we can do for our lovely neighbors.”
Despite his boastful teasing, Frank understood that, while his wife was fairly typical, he was something of a freak. While Dorothy’s body sagged and puffed like those of many women her age, his stood in sharp contrast to the bodies of other men in their seventies. He exercised fanatically, and because of this his belly and limbs were as hard, muscular, and lean as they had been at twenty-five, or even twenty. But his face, that of an ordinary man of seventy-two, with its creased forehead and sagging jaw and large ears sprouting white hairs, no longer went with the body underneath it. It was as though his head and his body belonged to two different people.
He spat into his swimming goggles, smeared saliva onto their lenses, snapped them on, and adjusted them.
Through the goggle lenses he saw something. On the near shore of the lake, some three hundred yards away, parked on the dam, was a small gray car. It had been years since Frank had last seen a car parked there. Near the dam stood a cabin nicknamed the Icehouse, used for that purpose a half century earlier, when the lake had been carved and carted away each winter. The least popular of the cabins, it lacked a septic system because of its proximity to the dam and had an outhouse instead. For as long as he could remember, the cabin had gone unrented and so had been overtaken by scraggly shrubs and weeds. Now, for the first time, a light burned softly inside.
Frank was not fond of change. When things were good, as they had always been at the lake, he liked them to stay just as they were, and so this sudden evidence of someone living in the Icehouse disturbed him, among other reasons because he chose to swim in this part of the lake for its privacy, for the luxury of being alone, all alone with the water and his healthy body. He would swim to shore and back, then lie on the float with his eyes closed, with the float lazily rocking him and the sun painting abstract masterpieces under his eyelids. He would catnap and sometimes even dream. That was his routine. And now it was threatened, shattered.
He rubbed his arms, coughed up some phlegm, spat in the water.
Oh well, he thought. Things change. What can you do? He plunged.
An arrow-shaped ache pierced his sternum; his mouth filled with cold green liquid. He spluttered and sloshed around ungracefully for a moment, amazed if not slightly alarmed by the audacity of a man his age plunging like a boy of ten or twelve. When his heart had settled a little, he looked toward the point on shore that was his destination. The car was still there, as was that light inside the cabin, its white trim obscured by ragged bushes. And something else too: a dot of bright red. Then the red dot moved. Someone was walking in front of the cabin.
He told himself to ignore whoever it was and swam, beginning with short easy strokes and increasing their length and speed gradually, letting his breath explode underwater, twisting his mouth into the air to refill his lungs, then exploding again, like a piston, his feet scarcely breaking the water’s surface behind him as they kicked. As he swam, the lake held him, guided him, stroking his skin and seeming to be in perfect sympathy with every inch of his body, his flesh. He felt himself merging with the water as one merges with another person’s body in the act of love. In truth, swimming was as close to lovemaking as Frank got these days, for Dorothy no longer attracted him, nor did she seem to find him attractive anymore, not that way, at any rate. She acknowledged neither his flesh nor her own, as if there were no such thing, only flowers, books, and jigsaw puzzles. Meanwhile, Frank exercised, growing stronger and firmer. Over time, like two rowboats, their bodies drifted further and further apart, with Frank rowing like crazy and Dorothy serenely floating. From this awareness Frank swam away as though swimming from death itself.
When he reached the shore, Frank stopped and treaded water as gently as possible, catching his breath. This was the part he liked best. He barely moved his hands to keep floating. The merest fluttering motion of his fingers sufficed. Aside from his breathing, there was no sound. But as he floated on his back with his goggles collecting fog and the tops of birches swaying, he suddenly heard a series of piercing yelps. Turning, he saw a dark, blurry shape atop the dam. He pulled off his goggles. A dog, a German shepherd pup, stood barking at him.
He heard a woman’s voice.
“Stop it, Harry!”
The woman ran up and put the dog on a leash, then stood there holding the dog. “I’m sorry,” she said looking down at him from on top of the dam. She had dark eyes and a round, pleasant face framed by hair just beginning to turn gray in places. She looked at him. She wore a red sweater.
“You must be a strong swimmer,” she said.
“Thank you,” he said, a little embarrassed, as if he’d been caught in some private act of intimacy.
“I sure wish I could swim like that.”
“Do you swim?” he asked, still treading water. The bottom could not have been more than inches away. Still, he chose not to touch it.
“Yes, but not half as good as you.”
Frank felt himself blush. It was a feeling he hadn’t felt in a long time.
“Are you renting one of the cabins?” the woman asked.
“F-Troop,” he said, referring to his cabin’s nickname. All the cabins at Lake Juliet had nicknames.
The woman smiled down at him, her dog panting gently at her side. She looked about thirty-five, maybe forty.
“This is my first time here,” she explained. Her eyebrows were heavy and dark in contrast to her hair. Under the red sweater she wore khaki shorts and sneakers with no socks.
“You here for the whole summer?” she asked.
“Just one month. And you?”
“Weekends only,” she said. “My name is Juliet, by the way.”
“Juliet? Like the lake.”
“Yes, like the lake.”
“Mine’s Frank.”
“Are you here by yourself?” the woman asked.
“With my wife.”
“She doesn’t swim?”
“No.”
“That’s a shame.”
The air felt colder than the water. Frank began to shiver. “I’d better keep moving,” he said.
“Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt you.”
“That’s fine.”
“Nice to meet you,” said the woman. “If you get a chance, maybe sometime you can give me some swimming pointers.”
“Be glad to.” Frank spit in his goggles again, rubbed the spit around inside them, and snapped them back on. “It’s all in the breathing,” he said, and then he turned and started back to the float.
“How was your swim?”
Dorothy sat in a wicker chair eating toast and bacon and reading her mystery novel. She always asked him how his swims were.
“Fine,” he always answered.
Breakfast was on the table, with Frank’s plate covered by a saucepan lid. Three pancakes, one egg, two strips of bacon, orange juice, coffee. He liked his bacon lean; she liked hers fat.
“Should we go to the farmers’ market today?”
“All right,” he said, eating his breakfast but with less appetite than usual. They didn’t look at each other; they rarely looked at each other. It was part of the routine. Every so often, Frank would glance at Dorothy, but she would not seem to notice, or would pretend not to. Each time he looked at her, Frank felt increasingly disturbed and unhappy. What, after all, did they have to do with each other anymore, he wondered, aside from being husband and wife? Maybe I should have let myself go too, he told himself as he nibbled on a strip of bacon. I should have aged with her. Instead, I let her go ahead without me and now look: we’ve lost each other. Haven’t we?
“There’s someone renting the Icehouse this year,” he said to break his own train of thought.
“Really? That’s unusual,” said Dorothy.
“Some woman,” he said.
“Did you meet her?” she asked, still reading, bringing a coffee mug to her lips but not looking up.
“We exchanged pleasantries.”
“What’s her name?”
“Juliet.”
“Juliet?”
“A coincidence, I’m sure,” said Frank.
“Was she in the water?”
“No, no. She was on dry land. With her dog.”
“She has a dog?”
“I looked up from my swim and there she was.”
They were silent for a while. Frank could not bring himself to eat the second strip of bacon. For some reason it repulsed him.
“That cabin must be in terrible shape.”
“I wouldn’t know,” he said.
“It hasn’t been used for so long. It must be full of mildew.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“Oh come on, Frank, how couldn’t it be?”
“Things that haven’t been used in a while can still be fixed.”
“What?” She lowered her book. “What did you say?”
“You heard me.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Just because a thing hasn’t been used doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with it.”
“I was just saying it must be moldy.”
“I know what you were saying,” said Frank. “And I’m saying it’s no big deal. You clean it up, spray a little Lysol, whatever. Just because a thing is out of shape —”
“For godsake, Frank, what are you getting worked up about?”
“I’m not getting worked up. I just don’t hold to the philosophy that things go to pot and that’s all there is to it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Nothing,” he said, dropping his toast on his plate and carrying it to the sink. “I’m talking about nothing. Let’s go to the farmers’ market.”
For the past twelve years the New Jersey countryside, with its lush, rolling hills and manicured farms, hadn’t ceased to impress Frank and Dorothy, conditioned as they were to thinking of New Jersey as Newark and petroleum refineries. Neither spoke as Dorothy drove the hunkering blue rental car. Her mind, he decided, was on tomatoes. And his? It was on the woman who had rented the Icehouse. In thirty-seven years Frank had not thought of another woman. Oh, there had been that one time early in their marriage, but that had been nothing, had gone nowhere. Whereas this distressed him.
“What do you think about corn tonight?” said Dorothy.
“Huh?”
“Corn, what do you think of having corn?”
“Yeah, sure, whatever.”
A quarter mile from the farmers’ market, a half-acre bed of “pick-your-own” red and orange zinnias grew four feet tall. Once a week his wife picked a dozen to distribute throughout their cabin, putting them in every room. Frank watched through the rental-car windshield as Dorothy waded breast deep in a lake of fiery zinnias.
Before dinner that evening, as usual around four o’clock, Frank set out in the rowboat for his afternoon swim. By then the temperature had peaked. When he reached the float, his forehead and arms dripped sweat from rowing. He wasted no time mooring and putting his goggles on. Soon he was part of the water again, flowing through it as it flowed past him. When he reached the far shore, she stood there, on top of the dam, this time with no dog.
“Hi, there.”
She wore a bright red bathing suit. A pair of goggles dangled from her fingers.
“I’ll have to put up a no-wake sign here,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“You make such a big wake.”
A joke. She was joking with him. He smiled.
“How about those pointers you promised me?”
“Pointers?” Now he was being coy. But things were happening too quickly, and he thought he should slow them down. He took off his goggles, rubbed the irritated skin around his eyes. “Oh, yeah, right,” he said. “Sure. Whenever you’re ready.”
“I’m ready,” said the woman from the Icehouse. Her bathing suit fit her snugly. Her calf muscles were strong. She looked fit.
“It’s a free lake,” he said. “Come on in.”
As her body merged with the lake, he felt an odd tingle underwater, as if her bright red bathing suit charged the water with electricity. With her in the water, the lake suddenly felt colder, more quick and alive, while he felt warmer in it. She stood up to her chest in the water next to him. Her breasts were full, and though he tried hard he could not quite keep his eyes from the tawny shadow of her cleavage.
“Let’s see you swim freestyle.”
She swam a dozen yards, then turned and looked at him.
“Not bad. You’ve got a good, strong kick. A little hyperextension in the knees, which is good. But you need to work on your arms and breathing.”
“I’m all ears,” she said.
Frank explained. “Pretend the water’s a sideways cliff you’re trying to climb. Reach as far as you can, grab hold, and pull yourself along. As you pull your hands back, make sure that they’re pushing hard against the water, the harder the better. Maximize that resistance. You follow?” The woman nodded. “And keep your fingers close together. Not touching, but close, like so.” He showed her. “That’s very important.”
“I never knew that.”
“Oh, yes,” said Frank. “Very important.”
She swam again, and he watched her. She had a very strong kick.
“Better,” he said. “Now let’s talk about your breathing. Now when I breathe —” he demonstrated, “— it’s all in the exhale, see? Don’t worry about inhaling. Just worry about exhaling. Push it out. Push it out. If you don’t exhale hard enough, then you won’t have room to get any new air inside your lungs. They’re full of carbon dioxide. That’s why you get winded.”
“I never knew that, either.”
“Well,” said Frank, “now you know.”
Together they swam to the float.
“How did you get to be such a good swimmer?” she asked as they sat catching their breaths.
“The funny thing is,” he said, “I didn’t start until I was in my forties.”
“You’re kidding?” Her eyelashes glistened with water. “Really?”
“It’s the truth. I hated water. Hated it. Wouldn’t go near it. When I was a kid, I wouldn’t let my mother give me a bath. I never learned how to swim. Naturally, when I got drafted, they put me in the navy.” He pointed with his chin toward the anchor tattooed on his arm.
“That figures,” said the woman from the Icehouse.
“I was seventeen, on a Liberty ship. Sick to my stomach every day for thirty-nine days. Then we made the landing at Normandy. I’ll never forget. We had to jump from that big ship into this little lcs down there that looked about the size of a bathtub, and it’s going like this and the Liberty ship is going like that, and I stood there, shaking my head, muttering no way, no way, until some son of a bitch kicks me in the rump and down I go. All of a sudden I’m in this tub, crouched on my belly, praying to God Almighty, waves the size of elephants washing over us. Finally we get to the beach and land and there’s bullets flying everywhere and all I can think is hallelujah; I made it; I’m on dry land; the war is over. And I swore if I survived I would never, ever so much as look at water again.” He shook his head.
“What changed your mind?”
“It was the damnedest thing. About thirty years ago I just wanted to do it. I wanted to go in the water. It was like shaking hands with a Nazi soldier, you know? I just made up my mind: I’m not going to have this enemy in my life. Instead I’m going to embrace it; I’m going to learn to love it. So I taught myself how to swim.” He shook his head. “It wasn’t hard.”
“That’s an amazing story,” said the woman.
“Is it?”
“Yes, amazing.”
He had told Dorothy the same story several times, but he did not remember her being amazed. He wondered if she was watching the float now. No, she was reading her best seller or shucking corn for dinner. Dorothy had long since lost any interest in his swimming. He could have drowned, for all she knew.
They swam back to the dam. In the shallow water, Frank gave her a few more pointers, showing her how far out of the water to lift her head and explaining to her again about breathing.
“It’s the most important thing,” he said. “When you swim think of yourself as a breathing machine. Breathe, breathe, breathe. Everything else pretty much takes care of itself.”
They met several more times. Her swimming improved greatly. One morning after they had swum together, she invited him for coffee. Inside, the Icehouse was cool, even cold, as if ice were still stored there. And it did smell faintly of mildew. Frank watched her open a can of dog food. Her arms were perfectly shaped, gloriously smooth, firm things. He thought of his wife in her baggy robe holding the bacon skillet and felt a sharp, sudden emptiness in his abdomen, as if he’d been gutted.
That same night, with his belly full of corn and zucchini, Frank slept poorly. Several times he awoke from nightmares of which he remembered nothing more than bubbles, black bubbles. He lay there, touching his forehead with a trembling hand. Beside him Dorothy lay fast asleep, breathing deeply, snoring. He shook himself awake. He wanted to make a confession, then and there. He wanted to tell his slumbering wife everything, say to her, I have reached the bottom of my willpower. I have loved and been faithful to you for thirty-six years, but enough is enough. I have met another woman. The woman in the Icehouse. Juliet. I have fallen in love with her. She swims.
He had an erection.
He got up and took a cold shower. Afterward, he stood dripping in the doorway of the screened porch where they slept, listening to the electric noise of crickets. Gray dawn seeped in through the rattan shades. Turning, he stood at the foot of their bed.
“Frank, is that you?”
“Swim with me,” he said.
“Tomorrow. Today. This afternoon. I want you to swim with me. Will you swim with me?” He stood naked in the dark.
“You know I don’t swim, Frank.”
“I’ll teach you.”
“Frank, for goodness —”
“Please,” he said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “It’s important. I want you to swim with me, Dorothy. I need you to swim with me.”
“All right, all right; I’ll swim with you, for godsake.”
“Thank you,” he said, and bent down and kissed her.
“But not this morning. I need to sleep.”
“This afternoon will do fine,” said Frank.
He went for his morning swim alone. He wasn’t surprised to see the woman from the Icehouse waiting for him, already in the water.
“Practice makes perfect,” she said, treading.
They swam out to the float. When they reached it, the sun had broken over the tops of the trees to bathe it in yellow light. They rested, drying and breathing together, their bodies touching. Frank lay on his back with his eyes closed, letting the sun paint its Rothkos and Mirós. It took him no time to doze off. He found himself back in the dream he’d had during the night, in which he chased — or was chased by — black bubbles. The bubbles rose from a hideous depth into his face, blinding him. With a gasping start he awoke, startling the woman from the Icehouse, who’d been watching him doze.
“You had a nightmare,” she said.
“I know,” said Frank.
“You grind your teeth. Did you know that?”
“No, I didn’t know that.” He smiled. “Please don’t tell my dentist. I’ll never hear the end of it.”
“Your secret is safe with me.”
She put a hand on his shoulder, looked at him. Her green irises held tiny flakes of brownish red — like rust. Frank swam in them. A drop of water from her hair landed on his lip. She bent forward to kiss him. Frank broke away. “I’ve got to go,” he said, untying the rowboat.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought you’d like it.”
“It isn’t a question of like,” said Frank, climbing in. “I’m old enough to be your grandfather.”
“Oh, so it’s a question of age, is it?” Before he could say anything, she reached forward and kissed him again, a slow kiss on his lips.
He watched her red bathing suit get smaller and smaller as he rowed, turning into a red dot as he hurried back to his wife.
That afternoon he held Dorothy up in the shallow water. He did the same the next afternoon, helping her practice her breathing, teaching her to reach with her arms and turn her head from side to side. She wore her green one-piece bathing suit. It made her skin look ghostly white.
“Kick,” said Frank, buoying her up. “Kick!”
“I’m kicking!”
“Hello, Frank.”
The woman from the Icehouse stood there, on the dam, holding her dog on a leash.
“Kick,” said Frank, ignoring her.
They spent the rest of the afternoon practicing in the shallows, with Frank teaching Dorothy to kick and tread water. He taught her the freestyle stroke and had her practice it with her feet touching bottom. “Frank, my arms are tired,” she kept saying, until finally he relented. “Fine,” he said. “You’re doing fine. We’ll pick up tomorrow.” The next day, before lunch and after his morning swim (he had not seen the woman from the Icehouse, which both relieved and disappointed him), he brought his wife with him out to the float.
“Are you sure I’m ready for this?” she asked him.
“Don’t worry,” he said.
While mooring the boat, Frank saw a red dot in the distance. As they drew closer, the red dot waved. Frank nodded.
“What is it?” said Dorothy.
“What? Nothing,” said Frank, turning away. He stepped onto the float. “Come on,” he said, taking her hand.
“I’m really not sure if I’m ready.”
“You promised.”
“I don’t want to do this, Frank.”
“Please — don’t let me down.”
She shook her head. “Frank, let me stay in the boat.”
“Don’t let me down!” He gripped her arm.
“I’m not letting you down! This has nothing to do with you! I don’t want to swim. I don’t feel like it. Let go of me!”
“Please.”
“Let go, Frank!”
“Damn you.”
He let go. The boat had drifted away from the float. Instead of falling back onto the seat, his wife fell forward, over the side. She came up thrashing.
“Swim!” he said.
The woman from the Icehouse stood there, watching, waving. Frank’s eyes darted back and forth from his wife thrashing in her one-piece bathing suit to the woman on shore in her bright red bikini. Though only several hundred yards, the distance may as well have been measured in light years. It was the very same distance, he reflected (dimly aware of his wife’s spluttered cries), that had stood between him and joy, him and the vigor of his youth, that impossible distance of dark, deep water. No amount of swimming, his own or anyone else’s, could broach it.
Frank!
To cross that distance you had to do more than swim.
Frank!
As he watched his wife struggle, an irresistible force gripped and held him frozen — a vibrating electric force that numbed his shoulders and turned his arms and legs to quivering bars of lead. It came from all the way across the water, from where the woman from the Icehouse stood watching him.
Help!
“Jesus!”
He dove in.
The water was cold and dark, dark green. Bubbles smashed into his face. He followed them down and down until his muscles and lungs began to cringe, then surfaced to catch his breath, then followed them down again. In the green darkness he saw nothing, only the pale explosions of his breath as the churning water multiplied the bubbles in all dimensions. He groped blindly, kicking at the darkness until his lungs began to explode. He rushed up into the wavering cone of light, his left leg striking something on the way. Snatching a razor-sharp breath from the surface, he plunged again, found her, and brought her up a dozen yards from the float. With one arm around her wide waist and one for the water, he dog-paddled her to the ladder. Somehow, in a series of movements that cut a wedge out of time, he lifted her out and up onto the float, where he lay her on her back and pinched her nostrils and breathed into her, his warm lips pressed against her cold ones as he massaged her heart. She retched back to life. He rolled her on her side and watched her cough water. Then he sat with his hand on her shoulder, his feet over the edge of the float, his face dripping. His heart pounded in his chest like a wire beater thrashing a dusty old rug.
He looked to shore.
The red dot was gone. There was no gray car, no black barking dog. No light burned in the Icehouse, which looked as weedy, as empty, as abandoned as ever. A blue heron sailed overhead. A breeze swept the lake in a gray parabola. He closed his eyes and sobbed, tears mixed with lake water dripping from his sagging, creased face.
“I’m sorry,” he told no one. “So sorry.”
With his eyes still closed he felt himself drifting; he felt he could drift like that forever. When he opened them, he saw the clouds shifting high above the trees. He looked down at the water in time to see a creature — a pond skater or a water strider — walking there.