THERE WAS A pool in the back, with a patio empty of people and a view that went straight to the ocean. The pool was shaped like a dolphin with blue tiles lining the sides and bottom. The water was perfectly clear. As she approached the ledge she dropped her slacks and stripped off her top, revealing the athletic underwear beneath. With three skips and a double-footed jump she launched herself gracefully into the water at the dorsal fin before swimming underwater to the snout and surfacing, her hair parted perfectly down the middle and slicked to the sides of her head.
As she treaded water her eyes sparkled, beckoning. Her body appeared to be built for movement, the muscles working in efficient conjunction, while I had the body of a nearly middle-aged stand-up comedian. I imagined that I was buoyant, but I was definitely not a strong swimmer. In fact, I wasn’t sure I could swim at all unless swimming is defined simply as not drowning. The one time I tried for real, things did not go well. Though there were extenuating circumstances. I had told it to the goo, my answer for its question of What was a time when you thought you were going to die?
“Jump in,” she called. On her back she frog-kicked to the ledge and rested there in the water, her arms outstretched along the sides.
When I was a freshman in high school, swimming was required as part of the physical education curriculum. The class was coed, the suits school-issued, and it was a kind of hell.
The rationale for the whole enterprise was solid, the swimming a backstop against the flagging fitness of my generation, the first weaned on television and video games. Our thumbs were mighty, but our muscles were flabby. To allow the students to bring their own swimwear would be to risk embarrassment for the disadvantaged, and coeducation would show that we were the same, boys and girls, learning together, even as our morphing bodies most definitely highlighted the differences.
Between classes, the school-issued suits moldered in a soggy cardboard box, a dank pile of failing purple Lycra. They were neither shorts nor Speedos, rather a kind of one-size-sort-of-fits-some hybrid with a tie at the waist and elastic meant to snug up against the legs and seat. The daily laundering had left the fabric pilled and the elastic brittle and fried, making the overall appearance more diaper than swimsuit. Once in the pool, they instantly filled with water, ballooning in the crotch, making what once looked merely ridiculous, absurd.
At least I was in the same boat with the rest of my pale, sunken-chested male classmates yet to experience any of the benefits of puberty: the increased height, mature musculature, doughy faces hardening into chiseled manliness. No, this curse had visited only its worst parts on us, cracking voices, wispy, embarrassing hairs in the pits—soft as down, rather than the coarse curlies of manhood— that nonetheless trapped the smell of cabbaged cooked in iodine after any kind of exertion. My mother had often half-jokingly remarked that she thought teenagers should be locked up, and looking at us furtively changing in the locker room, terrified that someone else might see our pathetic junk, I was inclined to agree.
Somewhat buoyed by the strength of numbers, I exited the locker room to the pool area, towel clutched around my midsection, hiding as much of the suit and my ghostly, hairless legs as possible. The vast majority of the girls sat in street clothes on benches that ran the length of the pool, clutching excuse notes cadged from sympathetic gynecologists that testified to urinary tract infections, the inopportune coincidence of “monthly flow” or other swimming-prohibited ailments. Oh, how I hated them. I had splashed around at the municipal pool once or twice growing up but had never exactly “swam” before. A pile of kickboards massed at one end of the pool buoyed my spirits. Clinging to the Styrofoam wedge and kicking around for awhile seemed do-able. Certainly the school feared lawsuits. Nobody would be drowned or humiliated. Nobody would be drowned, anyway.
I skirted far enough away from the pool edge to ensure no inopportune slips into the water and everything looked acceptable until I saw Chris Darntoff moving toward me. Unlike the rest of us, puberty had greeted Darntoff both early and quickly, leaving broad, rounded muscles at the shoulders, and a small patch of hair in the cleft between his pectorals. In the locker room, Darntoff would stand naked and make a show flexing his muscles in the mirror, performance as intimidation in front of his as-yet-to-be-endowed classmates. As Darntoff approached, he bunched his hand into a fist, being careful to extend the middle knuckle into a slightly higher peak. Arm cocked back, he drove the fist, pointed knuckle first, into my left shoulder.
“Bam!” Darntoff said, drawing his fist back, and spreading his legs, karate-movie style. “Got ya.”
Knowing that a display of weakness meant death, I grinned as I moved all the way past Darntoff. Oh, it hurt, though mostly the arm was numb, neurons shutting down in defense of what they perceived to be a severe injury, but I could not betray this hurt, which would be to beg for a repeat visit from Chris Darntoff’s knuckle. This was not abuse, but a rite of passage, a form of bonding, of boys just kidding around.
The sound of a coach’s whistle echoed through the pool and Mr. DeFranchschi started yelling. “All right, let’s see what we got, here,” he said. “Two lines, one boys, the other girls. Swim test time. On each whistle the pair at the front dive in and swim to the other side. I will be judging your swimming proficiency as a benchmark against later progress.” He stood in his athletic-department collared shirt, arms crossed, the pit stains creeping out toward his chest. Another whistle blast and we lined up at one end of the twenty-five-yard pool. The other end stretched into the distance and I knew I would never reach it. At least we were starting in the deep end, so if I could make it two-thirds of the way, I could stand and walk my way in.
My arm had shifted from numbness to violent tingling, but still it dangled, wasted and useless. I jockeyed for the final position in the back and hoped for the feeling to return. It didn’t.
At the ledge, Coach D. tweeted the whistle, and by reflex I jumped in. (There would be no diving for this guy.) As I surfaced, I heard a laugh go up from some of the swimmers who had already finished. I figured my best and only chance was to start strong, kicking with as much might as I could muster while flailing forward with my one usable arm. Launching into my stroke, I heard Coach D. yell from behind me.
“For the love of god, son, stop screwing around.”
But I was not screwing around. I was trying to keep from sinking to the bottom. I quickly become exhausted, swimming in circles thanks to my one-armed stroke. My brain matter swirled around my skull like a tornado and I heard sizzling noises like the water was boiling around me. Coach D. got madder and madder, blasting the whistle and screaming at me at the top of his lungs to cut the crap. I thrashed for everything I was worth and wondered if I stopped and sank if someone would come get me. Everyone else had finished their lap and was poolside, laughing. Even the girls with the excuses looked up from their nails and paperbacks and joined in. Finally, on one of my loops I got close enough to the edge to grab on with my one working hand and Coach D. pounced and hauled me out of the water, hands under my arms, the suit dripping like a soiled diaper. My breath came in heaves. I felt like I’d swallowed half the pool.
“All right, funny guy!” he yelled. “You’re done! Hit the showers!” As I shuffled my way to the locker room, Chris Darntoff extended his hand and slapped me five.
“Dude, that was hilarious,” he said.
AND SO I recalled it in that moment as she beckoned me from her position at the tip of the dolphin’s nose, raising a leg above the surface and wiggling her toes at me, her lovely calf flexing, but unlike my time with the goo when I could feel my heart pound as I reexperienced the memory, this time it’s just something not very important that happened a long time ago.
I have to traverse two-thirds of the pool’s torso to reach her. It seems very do-able. I hop on one foot as I yank off my shoes and socks and drop my pants, giving thanks for Chet’s taste in boxer shorts. I suck in my gut as I strip off my shirt and dive—yes, dive in—the bottom rushing toward me before I arc upwards and dog-paddle with my head above water toward her, undignified, but undoubtedly swimming. With each stroke she grows closer. I swallow a mouthful that burns in my nasal passages and she briefly goes out of focus, but I endure, and there she is, right in front of me, treading water with very little effort.
“You made it,” she says. Her legs brush against mine under the water. I have a desire to put my hand on her waist and pull her toward me, so I do. She does not resist.
“Beware, I’m troubled,” she says. She smoothes her hand over the stilled surface of the water.
“Aren’t we all?” I place my other hand on top of hers. I have never been so bold in my previous life. My ex-wife and I were like two atoms colliding, heedless of what was coming until the moment of impact, or electrons combining. The women on the road were groupie dodgeball. Meredith Babcock propositioned me.
Our fingers twine and she pulls me toward her. Here is a face that is so familiar, but it is like I’m seeing it for the first time.
“I’ve never been kissed,” she says.
“Really?”
I think she might blush. “I’ve had other priorities.”
“I see,” I say.
She smothers her face in her palms and then tilts her head up and shouts, “I’m a freak!” and then looks at me and says it so sadly that I swear I feel it in my heart. “I’m a freak.” I want to deny it, to bat it away, but we both know she’s right and that she’s not just describing herself. I have no words, so I lean in very slowly in an effort to remedy the situation. As I approach her eyes close, and I shut mine. Our lips brush …
AND THEN CHET showed up. “There you are,” he said, his voice filled with false cheer. He held a large towel with the phoenix stitched into it up with arms extended like he wanted to give someone a hug. “I’m afraid the party is over for us. Big day tomorrow.”
“Go away, Chet,” I said, trying to sound as threatening as possible. I hovered millimeters from Bonnie’s face. Her breathing came out in little huffs.
His voice came back hard in a way I hadn’t heard before. “So sorry, sir, but it is time to go.”
Bonnie looked at me and shrugged and ducked underneath my arm and swam a powerful freestyle toward the tail, the water frothing behind her kick. I got out of the pool and Chet encircled me with the towel. He carried my clothes for me as we made our way back to the bungalow.
“I have a question, Chet,” I said.
“Yes, sir?”
“Do they teach you about cock-blocking on this island?”
“I don’t believe I understand your meaning.”
“Never mind, I’ve got another question.”
“What’s that, sir?”
“When this is all over, am I supposed to tip you?” We’d arrived at the door to my bungalow. Some nights he stayed and played chess with me, but I was not inviting him inside this time.
“Gratuities are always appreciated, but not expected,” he replied. “Sleep well.”
In our dreams we are always approaching our goals, only to have our brains snatch us away to some other, unconnected story, and this is what that felt like. After Chet left, I lay in my bed and told myself that while it seemed like a dream, it was not a dream.
Of course, I now recognize the calculation in everything, the integration with everything else I was undergoing as part of the treatment at the Center, but as I slipped into my impossibly soft sheets, eased into sleep by an ambient-noise machine perfectly suited to my aural needs, I cursed that fucker. My only desire was to get my hands on Chet and fuck him up, but good.