Claude is back. Louise suggests that they go to the pool because it has steam rooms and saunas. Good towels and a smoothie bar. She wants Claude to see how much she’s improving, how hard she’s working. She can walk in the water! Without a cane! But Claude says he has not brought his bathing suit. Louise doesn’t understand—she’d told him about her water exercises on the phone, and he said he wanted to see, to help her practice. Why doesn’t he want to now? Why hasn’t he thought of additional swimming moves that would be good for her to do, done some research on the computer?
She ends up screaming at him in the car on the way to the pool.
“I know this is hard for you to remember,” he says. “But I have a job. I have other things in my life besides you.”
Louise doesn’t know how to respond. His complaints seem less and less real to her.
There is an Aquatic Exercises binder with instructions on techniques, and drawings. Her favorites are the Snow Angel, the Butterfly Flutter, and the Super Eight.
•
Claude sees the pool, greenish and still, through the glass door. All around them are echoes of people yelling, but he sees no one. He tells Louise to start without him.
“I just want to play a quick game of racquetball,” he says. He walks backward toward the hallway with the courts. Louise shouts, “But you don’t have a racquet!”
Claude holds up a silver money clip, and waves it, flaglike.
“But I have this binder,” she says.
“Five minutes,” he says.
He jogs toward the courts.
•
We break up three days later over the phone, when he is back in California and I am in my bedroom in Michigan. I say the words and Claude doesn’t disagree, but the last thing he says to me is, “Just remember that you ended this—that you did it”—and then he hangs up.