After the noisy, foul-smelling highways, Tim and I drove through prettified towns bustling with shops and framed by commercial strips and billboards. Between the towns stretched acres of potato fields; farm stands along the road displayed robust fruits and vegetables. At last we turned off toward the ocean, its salt smell wafting through the car windows, and passed through flat, empty land barely graced by a tree. New gray-shingled frame houses sprang up haphazardly, as if someone had scattered a handful of Monopoly houses on a board. This strange pattern, or nonpattern, arose, Tim explained, when real estate was in its palmier days. People bought up sections of the potato fields one by one to build summer homes.
He swung the car easily around a few bends—Tim drives with grace, the way some men dance—and onto a dead-end street. We pulled into the driveway to find ourselves secluded by high dark hedges suggesting a sanitarium or an expensive boarding school. The house and its surroundings felt isolated, and then a couple appeared to greet us.
The first thing they did, laughing wryly, was show us the pool, which was about half an acre down a slope of sunny, manicured lawn. The pool was empty, or nearly empty. A little past its center, toward the deep end, lay a green hose from which a thin stream of water trickled.
“What happened, you’re wondering, right?” said Celia.
“What happened,” said Hal, “is that the pool people were supposed to clean and refill the pool last week while we were away but they obviously forgot to finish the job.”
“They didn’t forget,” said Celia. “They’ve got a lot of pools to do and they neglected this one. Like triage. Or it might be that you forgot to pay them.”
“Well, whatever,” Hal said mildly, untouched by the sharpness of her tongue, even smiling with a kind of familial pride. “The point is, this is where we are with it. But it’s okay, there’s always the ocean.”
“Yes, I hope they remembered to fill it,” Celia said.
The pool was long, elliptical, and walled in slate, not the usual blue-green that suggests a Walt Disney movie where fabulous sea creatures might suddenly cavort onto the scene.
“When it’s filled,” said Tim, “it’s very beautiful. Have you ever seen a slate pool? It’s dark, like a pond in the forest. Sort of mysterious.”
I looked at him with surprise. That was very poetic, for Tim.
The four of us stood at the edge of the pool as on the lip of a canyon, contemplating its emptiness. There was nothing mysterious or forest-like about the sloping lawn and handsome low house up the hill with its deck and tubular furniture, or about the navy blue webbed reclining chairs on the concrete border of the pool, affably waiting to receive idlers. On a small Lucite table were newspapers, glasses, an ashtray. Evidently before we arrived, Hal and Celia had been enjoying their summer retreat, watching the pool fill.
Seeing me glance around, Celia waved at the chairs. “Yes, we were watching the pool fill up. It’s going to be our weekend activity.”
I smiled, though I didn’t wish to be seen as partaking in her amiable scorn—for her husband, the pool, the world? She was compact and athletic-looking, with auburn hair tied back in a pony tail. She seemed forever on the verge of moving or speaking, every cell alert, a step ahead of the moment. She wouldn’t be shocked by my wishing all the drivers on Broadway dead. She’d probably wished much worse.
“How long will it take to fill up?” I asked. “A few hours?”
“Oh, no, much longer,” said Hal, his mustache dancing as he spoke. He was tall and fat, his round genial face shrouded in a dark beard, a cigar stuck between his lips. He wore a blue short-sleeved shirt and powder blue shorts that reached nearly to his knees and swelled alarmingly at his middle. “The water has been running like this since last night, that’s Friday. Let’s see, the pool is sixty feet long by twenty feet at its widest, that would be twelve hundred square feet. To get the volume you’d have to make allowances for the gradation in depth. ...”
The two men calculated, with mathematical precision, the volume of the pool, taking into account its elliptical shape and the gradation in depth, then factored in the rate of the water trickling from the hose, which they deduced by dividing the volume of the pool which was already filled by the number of hours the hose had been trickling.
“The pool will be filled,” concluded Tim, “by Monday morning.”
“No, Sunday morning,” Hal corrected. “In practical terms, that is, because it doesn’t have to be completely filled in order for us to swim in it.”
Celia laughed her sharp laugh and tossed her head disdainfully. “Not before Tuesday, I’m willing to bet.”
It appeared that Hal and Celia were performing a teasing script in which Tim and I were required to speak our lines without knowing the larger themes and references of the play, just as some choreographers, Q. once told me, prefer that their dancers be ignorant of the mythic sense of the work and simply execute the steps. As always, when Q. came to mind lately, a little blob of elation and despair thumped around my solar plexus but I paid it no attention.
“Not Tuesday, sweetheart. How can you say that?” Again, her taunting didn’t seem to bother Hal. Nothing seemed to bother him except, I later discovered, the state of the real estate market. “It’s much more full than you imagine. It’s up to six feet at the deep end. In fact you could probably swim at the deep end right now. It’s very deceptive, an optical illusion.”
This struck me as highly unlikely, little as I knew about pools or optical illusions. From where we stood it looked as though roughly two feet of water covered the deep end, while the shallow end was not yet wet.
“No, Hal,” said Tim in his judicious way. “I doubt if that’s six feet deep.”
“I’ll give you a demonstration.” With his lit cigar in his teeth at a jaunty angle, Hal strode to the shallow end of the pool and stepped suavely down the stairs. He walked across more than half the length of the pool before his feet got wet. As he advanced further, water enveloped his legs at a surprising rate. Water is deceptive. And the angle of the pool floor at the deep end was evidently steeper than it seemed from the rim. Hal walked until the edges of his blue Bermuda shorts were wet, then glanced our way for acknowledgment. The day was very fine. The leaves of the shrubberies glistened, the flowers in the flower beds stirred softly in the breeze, the sky was blue, the light radiant. Not so hot yet. Not hot enough to swim.
“Six feet, ha,” said Celia.
Ignorant or not, I would enjoy this performance. Too bad Q. wasn’t here to watch—he would appreciate Hal and Celia as much as I did. They played their roles well, like Pinter characters.
Hal kept advancing. When the water reached the crotch of his shorts a shiver rippled through his vast body and he glanced up again and chuckled. Ungainly, no question about it, yet not unattractive. I wouldn’t mind at all, despite the weight, I mean I wouldn’t mind aesthetically. Certainly Celia wouldn’t have taunted were she indifferent. Probably quite the contrary. He kept walking, holding aloft the lit cigar, until the water reached the breast pocket of his shirt, which contained two ballpoint pens, and still he was not at the deepest point, where the drain was.
“Hey, I wish I had a picture of this,” said Tim. “I didn’t think of bringing my camera.”
“Is it cold?” I called out.
“Not too cold,” Hal called back. “Come on in.”
I took off my shoes and walked the length of the concrete border, down the steps and into the shallow end of the pool. Not until I was at the center, near the green hose trickling out water like a burbling brook, did the soles of my feet get wet. The water was so cold that a chill shot through my spine to the back of my neck. I walked on, up to my ankles. At the far end, Hal stood immersed up to his shirt pocket, his arms held above the water with the fingers of one hand lapping tenderly at the ripples as one does in a canoe, while he puffed on his cigar and gazed fondly around at his property. From down in the pool the property took on a majestic aspect: the trees were higher, their swaying tops closer to the azure sky, the spreading house set regally on the crest of the slope. Tim and Celia, standing at the edge and laughing at us, appeared elongated and powerful.