PISCINE OLYMPIQUE
I check into the Westin, at the corner of Saint-Antoine and Saint-Pierre. The hotel is tall and sleek, but the pool is tiny, more of a tank. Its one redeeming feature: a glass bottom that overlooks the entrance drive. I have a couple of hours before I’m due at a Montreal bookstore to talk about a new series of paintings, so I go for a swim. It’s impossible to do laps. As I make short passes across the pool, I see hotel guests silently get in and out of taxis, uniformed porters opening and closing car doors. I hope they’ll glance up and see me floating overhead, so I can wave, but nobody looks.
• • •
After the trials in 1992, I stop training, and miss the coverage of the Barcelona Olympics by taking a summer course at an art school in downtown Detroit. I stay in an apartment on campus, cover the walls in cartridge paper and draw large portraits of men from photographs in old Vanity Fair magazines. Robert Wilson’s face covers one wall, Tom Stoppard’s another. After a quiet week of rote life-drawing classes, calls to a not-really-boyfriend, and diary writing, my supply of spaghetti and Granny Smith apples has dwindled. I need to socialize.
I make some friends in the apartment building who persuade me to buy a pair of Rollerblades. They teach me how to blade during the empty early-morning hours. We drive over to Wayne State and park, put on an R.E.M. tape, open the car doors, and roll round and round the paved university campus, up and down deserted Woodward and East Kirby. When I talk about swimming, my new friends look at me blankly, so we talk about art.
In September, my deferral over, I head to McGill for freshman year, with Chris. We move into an apartment at 2100 Rue Lambert-Closse.
Halfway through the year, our roommates Amy and Lisa, who found the apartment, decide to turn a large closet into another bedroom and advertise for a “gay-friendly” roommate. Chris argues that this is discriminating against straight people. Amy and Lisa insist it means friendly, not gay. I suggest we all move somewhere nicer and cheaper. We see one apartment that I still think about: Recently vacated by a McGill professor, it had the winding halls, hardwood floors, and tall windows typical of Montreal. The rooms were lined with built-in wooden bookshelves, making the walls a foot thicker, floor to ceiling. I dreamt of filling the shelves with beloved books; I imagined that the insulated, focused qualities of the professor still infused the space; I felt that if I lived there I would be smarter.
We do not take the apartment. Sumaya—both friendly and gay—moves in and sleeps on a peach-colored duvet on the floor of the large closet. She leaves big pots of spicy dal caking on the stove. Each morning, while my roommates sleep, I silently maneuver my green mountain bike out of our hall, down the stairs, and into fresher air.
I bicycle from Lambert-Closse to the Cégep du Vieux-Montréal pool, for swim practice with the McGill team. The post-Olympics season is quiet, the gears slowly beginning on another four-year cycle. Earlier in the year I was in Montreal to compete at the 1992 Olympic trials, held at the Piscine Olympique.
• • •
I still have a memo Byron handed out in February 1992, a photocopy, on canary-yellow paper. He drew the Olympic rings on a flag upper right. The memo reads:
TORONTO SWIMMERS: OLYMPIC TRIALS AND OLYMPIC GAMES HERE WE COME!!
Our twelve-month build up to this summer is in its final phase. We have been able to stay close to our original plan: aerobic base in the Summer; aerobic and major strength focus in the Fall; boost of aerobic over Christmas; reduction in strength training focus with increase in racing in the winter. The results indicate that we are right on track to begin the final phase: the increase in speed work leading to the Trials.
SO . . . . . . LET’S DO IT!!!
The plan is very simple. Hard Work. Lots of it. Total focus and total sacrifice. No excuses. You CAN do it.
• • •
The memo, along with others outlining training and meet schedules, is tucked into a red notebook. Another scrap of paper reads, in my own handwriting: “Things that will help me achieve my goals: STRENGTH: weight training, knees/kick stuff; HEALTH: plenty of sleep, rest; INTENSITY: focused, practicing tired; WEIGHT: ideal 122.”
Throughout the notebook are lists of food consumed and my weight. On one page I’ve written the time I want for the long-course 100m breaststroke, 1:10:00, one hundred ten times. This faces lines about how much I hate certain teammates. The book is full of exhaustingly purple crush-pining; lists of art supplies and baking ingredients; notes concerning the rental of a studio space alongside plans to see live bands (Rollins Band, Luka Bloom, Cowboy Junkies) and independent movies (Angel at My Table, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Diva, Last Exit to Brooklyn). Every few pages I exhort myself: “Focus Focus Focus.” “Just swim.”
• • •
I can’t recall much of those Olympic trials, but from the final pages of the notebook I can piece together what happened:
Tuesday: After a morning workout in Toronto, left for Montreal. Got a quick massage at 8:45 a.m. and joined a team meeting at 9:20.
Wednesday: Shopped for groceries and watched heats. Did a light swim at 12:30 p.m., shaved down at the hotel; returned to the pool to watch finals.
Thursday: 200m breaststroke. Swam a disappointing 2:47:43 and finished thirty-fifth. (Four years earlier I had finished eleventh.)
Friday: Light swim during prelims and read magazines in the Parc Olympique. Found a four-leaf clover, which I pressed into the notebook. That night the team had dinner at Pacini.
Saturday: Light swim during prelims. Ate an orange. Went to the movies (Lethal Weapon 3). That night my teammate Marianne made the Olympic team in the 200m IM.
Sunday: 100m breaststroke. A disappointing 1:17:52, finishing thirty-sixth. (Four years earlier I’d finished thirteenth.)
• • •
By the end of Sunday night, the Olympic team had been selected. My teammates Marianne, Gary, and Marcel had made it; Beth, Kevin, and Mojca had not. Beth had missed the qualifying standard by a hundredth of a second. A hundredth. I remember her face, glazed, stoic, on the medal podium. It was like watching the bereaved. Kevin had made the Olympic qualifying time but finished third, and the team took only the top two.
I got dressed and caught a team van from the hotel to the subway, then the subway to a pub, where I ate french fries. I talked to a heartbroken Kevin, then danced with him to “Let It Be.” Beth, Kevin, Andrew, and I took a cab back to the hotel, where Kevin was locked out of his room and came down to mine. We walked to a McDonald’s. It was drizzling. In the window of Dunkin’ Donuts we saw Gary and Mojca.
When I got back to my hotel room I sat in a chair, feet on the windowsill, and listened to “One” by U2 over and over again on my Walkman. I watched the sun come up and saw a teammate, carrying a blue backpack, walk across the hotel parking lot. He got into his car and drove away. I slept. When I woke I packed, taking the fruit and the peanut butter, leaving my roommate Shelley the granola bars.
Stuck to the last notebook page is a candy wrapper from the Bar-B Barn on Rue Guy. Pressed between two pages is a dried brown sprig of something that may have been a lilac.
• • •
That fall, back in Montreal, I don’t plan to continue swimming, but after the McGill head coach woos me over a mushroom omelet, I join the team on the condition I make up my own practice schedule. I phone it in, but for the first time in my swimming career, for those few brief months, I enjoy it. I walk out midway through the freshman initiation ritual (twice around the McGill track with a marshmallow tucked under each armpit and between the knees, wearing suit, cap, goggles, and sneakers) with impunity. The team has access to a private gym, where I spend happy hours in the fragrant steam room after weight-training/music-video-watching sessions. At varsity meets I room with my friends Andrea—a 1988 Olympic medalist and 1992 Olympic team captain who bears her mind-blowing accomplishments lightly and has a whooping, filthy laugh—and Ojistoh, the team beauty, a Native Canadian medical student who eats baked beans straight from the can and cucumbers like bananas.
• • •
2100 Rue Lambert-Closse is a long, three-story brick building, with a flat white portico veined with cracks. Inside, the foyer and halls are painted a glossy, sickly lavender, and give off a warm cumin scent. Our apartment is narrow, high-ceilinged, with warped hardwood floors. My room is at the end of our hall, overlooking the front path. Chris has the room next door, where he reads Details magazine, listens to Soundgarden and Nirvana. He’s starting to play music with his friend Vernon; they are forming a band. Amy’s boyfriend Dave teaches me some Fugazi chords on his guitar in the living room one night.
Vernon is visiting Chris when he inexplicably collapses outside 2100. I’m in Toronto when it happens, and stay there for the funeral, but when I come back to Montreal, I stand at my window looking down at the path, wondering at what Chris has gone through.
• • •
My McGill history of photography classes take place in a dark room. As the professor clicks through slide after slide, I’m stirred by the fine, pale faces in daguerreotypes; by William Henry Fox Talbot’s grainy nature morte and Julia Margaret Cameron’s images of girls and women, sepia profiles, thoughtful, strong. A hundred ghost stories, in black-and-white, flash up one by one out of the dark.
Hours between classes and workouts are spent in the McGill Library, where I look at publication design annuals from the 1970s and read about Pentagram and Push Pin Studios—a cool, candy-colored version of America, literate and illustrated.
These eight months are a hummus-and-steam-room-scented chrysalis—my age and my swimming age aligning. As if Montreal were an atoll enclosing the pools of Etobicoke and the open sea of New York. I swam easily—undermotivated, away from expectations, through dual meets with Dalhousie and Yale, Latin declensions, Fabien Baron–era Harper’s Bazaar, Leonard Cohen’s Gallic deadpan, and Paul Westerberg’s shaggy yearning—toward the conclusion of my competitive swimming career.
• • •
Chris is still living in Montreal, with wife, baby, and Oscar-nominated production company, and he stands at the back of the bookstore during the event. Over a beer afterward, he describes cycling past Lambert-Closse, which was boarded up and condemned. He says it was as though it had been stopped in time, the precise moment we all vacated. Me to Brooklyn, Chris to the Plateau, Amy to Toronto, Lisa to Concordia. He says it was the opposite of seeing an old house occupied by a new family, full of unfamiliar details but still sweet, clean, and alive.
“So much happened there,” I say.
“Yes, so much happened in that foyer.” He nods and repeats: “So much happened in the foyer.”
The bar is loud and I have not seen Chris in years and the woman sitting across the table from us changes the subject to Halloween costumes and then the other friend I am with wants to leave.