Swimming Studies Read online

  • • •

  It’s appealing to think in compressions of time, a month of Sundays, four seasons in a day; this might be why stitching and knitting metaphors complement the idea of time so well, something understood best through relative degrees of distance. The Olympics are often described as four years in two weeks. There is the popular phrase “An athlete dies twice.”

  This idea of dodging time reminds me of a Muppet Show segment that still moves Derek and me. It is a rendition of Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle”: An elderly scientist Muppet wanders around his cluttered laboratory singing the song as he mixes powders and potions in test tubes. He gulps his concoctions as others bubble over on burners, and verse by verse he grows younger, his halo of white hair turning gray, his dome covered again in tufts of red, his gravelly tenor growing clearer and climbing higher. Finally, with one last reddish drink, he explodes, returning to his true, eldest age, and gazes at his lab table hopelessly.

  • • •

  Artistic discipline and athletic discipline are kissing cousins, they require the same thing, an unspecial practice: tedious and pitch-black invisible, private as guts, but always sacred. One night, over a second round of Bloody Marys at Fanelli’s, I ask a few of my friends what they hate but force themselves to do. Bikram yoga. Child care. Work. Swim practice. We bang on the table. We firmly agree that one really ought to do something one would prefer not to do.

  Whenever I begin a large project, and when, as a swimmer, I contemplate a practice, a mental image appears: a grayish Sisyphean mound I need to ignore in order to begin to climb. After twenty years I still search for the dumb focus I had as a competitive swimmer. After a hundred workouts I might be faster. After a hundred CBT sheets I might feel better. After a hundred lengths I might be healthier. After a hundred pages, a hundred sketchbooks, when will it feel right?

  My fingers used to be pruney, from being in water. Now they’re ink-stained. I replace my laps with stacks of sketches, and my teenage dread of workout with my adult dread of bad work. I fill sketchbooks with repetitive studies, happy only when the last page is finished and I can look back, pick out the handful of good pieces. I paint series after series: my dog, the trees in my yard, all of the glasses in the house; flowers, Parisian signage, hardcover books, leaves, movie stills, a reservoir view, a single pitcher, patterns, photographs of people playing charades.

  • • •

  During a cocktail party in a London home, I stop in front of a small charcoal drawing of a swimming pool teeming with bodies, by Leon Kossoff. It is noisy, exciting, and alive. Kossoff, in a rare 2007 interview, age eighty, said of his practice: “Every day I start, I think, Today I might teach myself to draw. . . . It doesn’t make any difference how long you do it, it’s always starting again, one’s always got to start again.”

  • • •

  When I read in an obituary that Cy Twombly’s father was a prominent swim coach, I start to see Twombly’s paintings as thrashing laps, as polygraphs, as pulse rate. I wonder if I’m drawn to his work because he might have had an athletic habit he metabolized then rejected.

  • • •

  During my first year in New York, I see Ellsworth Kelly’s Dark Blue Curve at the Guggenheim. I keep going back to it, in books and online.

  • • •

  The first piece of art I bought was a small watercolor by Marcel Dzama. In it, a woman in a blue dress and blue boots is suspended beneath a few feet of water. Her back arches, feet sink, arms are flung above her head. Small bubbles rise to the surface, where choppy waves peak.

  • • •

  In my studio, I work beneath a David Hockney poster for the 1972 Munich Olympics. A drawing of a diver, the pool water in wobbly grid, sunlit in shades of aquamarine and white.

  • • •

  Every day I walk past an old oil painting in my hallway. I found it in a junk shop, a moody view of Poolvash Bay in the Irish Sea, seen from Balladoole, a Viking burial ground.

  • • •

  In my office, tucked behind a framed photograph of James, age twenty-four, rowing a boat in Central Park, I have a postcard from Ryan McGinley’s series of Olympic swimmers, originally commissioned by The New York Times Magazine. It is of Natalie Coughlin, mid-crawl, fingers splayed, grasping at the water in front of her. It reminds me of how, though swimmers spend hours catching and cupping water in the most efficient way possible, their hands are always relaxed, in a sensitive yet decisive rock-climber hold, where the water can be caught and passed.

  • • •

  Next to my bed I keep a framed anonymous black-and-white snapshot of a woman in a bathing cap, swimming in open water. Her body has reached the most extended part of the breaststroke and she glides away from the photographer, the dark water ruffling around her. The photographer watches her swimming away; she is perfectly framed, maybe unaware that her picture’s being taken. It reminds me of the love I have for James when he doesn’t know I’m looking at him.

  • • •

  I’ve dragged a tiny jpeg of a watercolor by Laura Knight, titled Girl Bathing, onto my computer desktop. I’ve seen it only in this low-resolution version: a woman in a purple bathing costume, removing a shoe before swimming. I like postures like this—inward, small moments of body maintenance—bathers; Bonnard’s hypochondriac wife in the tub; variations on Fedele, “The Faithful One,” a Greco-Roman sculpture of a boy who, after delivering a message, stops to remove a thorn from his foot.

  I first saw a slide of the sculpture in my tenth-grade art history class. I remember being touched by the story of duty over pain. It’s a pose that we all feel to look at, the strain in our hips and spine as we draw our foot up and examine our sole.

  MOM

  There is a British expression that James likes to say in exaggerated mockney: Who’s he when he’s at home? It refers to getting above oneself or one’s station. It could be a Canadian thing too, this taking someone down a peg, like the title of the Alice Munro collection Who Do You Think You Are?

  One day, while my mother is visiting me in New York, I take her to Barneys to use a $400 store credit from a returned wedding gift. I want to restage our shopping excursions to Mississauga malls and flea markets, I want to buy her something luxurious, beautiful, something irrational and ridiculously priced.

  We start at the basement level, cosmetics and perfume, where we try to find a stick of her favorite foundation.

  We approach one counter. The saleswoman swipes at my mother’s cheekbone with various flesh tones. I notice a fly on my mother’s coat shoulder and brush it away. As the saleswoman checks the stockroom for the correct shade, we wander among the displays, glancing at lipsticks and scented candles. My mother walks with her hands held behind her back. The saleswoman returns empty-handed and tries to convince my mother that her skin is actually a different shade, one corresponding to something they have in stock, but my mother won’t have any of it. I proudly steer her to another counter. Here a cheerful man sits her down and makes her up, applying foundation to one cheek in a pinkish shade, the other in a more olive tone. He also applies undereye concealer, blush, and lipstick. My mother looks at her face in a mirror, chooses the pinkish foundation, and declines my offer to buy her the concealer, blush, and lipstick.

  We escalate to accessories, on the main floor. My mother admires a few things. She tries on a mink headband, a cashmere snood, a pair of fur-lined gloves, but after glancing at the tags shakes her head no. I suggest that she think in terms of something she likes, not something she can afford. She shrugs, eyes darting from Italian sock to mitten to handbag. We head upstairs to the first floor of designer collections. She runs her fingers over the pieces that catch her eye, turns over the tags and whispers prices, incredulous, under her breath. On the next floor I ask her if she sees anything she likes. “I’ll know it when I see it,” she says. She touches the shoulders in the
rows of soft knits and smooth cottons. On another escalator I pluck a price tag out of her hair that must have been attached to the mink headband: $675. My own eyes widen.

  Looking at the shoes, she marvels at a towering turquoise pair, clownish and exaggerated. I encourage her to try on some simple Chanel flats like the pair of mine she has borrowed for the day. She looks at the price. “No, no, they’re not nice.”

  On another floor I show her some of my favorite designers. Some imaginative knits, some clever design details, some beautiful pajamas. She looks, glances at tags, drops her hands.

  I find myself getting impatient. I remind her that she can pick out anything she likes, that we have $400 that has basically grown on a tree to put toward it. As her eyes glide appreciatively over the mannequins’ clothes, she denies wanting anything.

  On the top floor I suggest we buy the rest of the makeup she tried on, but she suddenly admits she saw a gray sweater she liked; she does not remember where. We head down floor by floor, searching for the gray sweater, inspecting corners we missed, touching and smoothing sleeves. It reminds me of visiting a furrier’s with my mother and Derek, I might have been eight. While she consulted on her layaway fur, Derek and I ran through the sleeves and skirts of squirrel, raccoon, and mink, rolling our eyes, stroking the empty arms, and cooing, “Softeee tofteee . . .” over and over again. I hid in the middle of the circular racks, feeling the fur on my face.

  We still haven’t located the sweater by the time we reach the ground floor. My mother looks around at the hats and gloves as though she’s lost something. It is a state of confusion and mild panic I recognize; I’ve felt it too. It’s about looking for something you don’t naturally want, for fear of missing out on what you think you do. Taken on, it’s a heavy, absurd confusion—the feeling of not knowing yourself.

  There’s something “Rocking-Horse Winner” about the moment: the dark places where shame will take you and exhaust you. My seeping impatience is tempered with remorse at bringing her here, the extravagance of Barneys, thirty years after Dixie Value Mall. Why should I expect her to be seduced by things I myself am uneasy about? I want to get out of the store, but I suggest we retrace our steps upstairs.

  On the top floor she considers an iPad case, a purse. We have been in the store for close to two hours. I suggest a simple bag, a scarf, a wallet. No. No, no. She fingers a different cashmere cardigan and I urge her to try it on. A salesgirl, wearing the same cardigan, retrieves her size. I look at my mother in the sweater; it is nice, but trendily cut. The arms look strange. She prevaricates, finally decides against it. On the fourth floor she stops short in front of a row of knitwear and pulls out the gray sweater. It is $900. I pause. We both laugh. We take the elevator back down to cosmetics, find a gardenia perfume she likes, buy the concealer, the blush, the lipstick.

  TITANIC

  My first visit to Ottawa was with my sixth-grade class, touring the oak-paneled, green-carpeted chambers and hallways of the Parliament buildings and peering into the store windows on Sparks Street. Later, I swam in meets at the Nepean Sportsplex, and stayed with my team at the Embassy motor hotel, where one night my roommates and I snuck out and walked aimlessly along the highway for two miles, giddy with our jailbreak, looking for a gas station with vending machines so we could buy junk food.

  The next series of Ottawa visits revolve around a friendship. Adam and I are roommates first, a couple briefly, then quarrelsome but loving friends. His influence gives me a taste for the unapparent, nuanced qualities of things. He lends me Celan, Baudrillard, Beckett, makes me tapes of Ol’ Dirty Bastard and Aphex Twin, teaches me how to cook and taste good food. With him I begin to look at art and people with equal affection and appreciation. I begin to understand the value of contradiction and the fun of false notes.

  I meet Adam’s family in Ottawa and visit their cottage on Meech Lake. Years later I read part of The Magic Mountain aloud to him in hospital, then, arriving a couple of hours too late, see his body at the Élisabeth Bruyère palliative care facility. I fly back for his funeral a week later.

  After the ceremony, a group of Adam’s friends and family gather at Meech Lake, drink red wine and talk about him. The lake is frozen. Nine of us put on our parkas and boots and set off across it with Maya the Weimaraner, and Ivana, Adam’s collie mix. The night is cold, moonless, and black, and some of us carry our glasses of wine, which we sip, fingers freezing, as we follow the ribbing of snowmobile tracks. The flash of my camera lights our progress now and then, leaving glowing negative shapes of each other in our vision. We walk side by side, without seeing one another’s faces, wiped out by grief, glad to be together. Looking at the photographs from that night you’d think we were celebrating a birthday; we look tired, but in all of them we’re smiling.

  Adam’s mother tells me there is a famous pool at the Château Laurier, the hotel where I am staying. Before I check out, I take the elevator down and look at the pool from the gallery, wishing I had packed my bathing suit.

  • • •

  My most recent trip to Ottawa is to attend my cousin’s wedding and launch a posthumous collection of Adam’s short stories. James and I book into the Château Laurier. Our room is not ready when we arrive, so we go for a swim while we wait. The Art Deco lap pool at the Château was built in 1929, and the basement complex was billed—in the mustache-twirling language of the time—as “The Hydro and Electro Therapeutic Department Turkish Baths and Swimming Pool of the Château Laurier, Ottawa, Canada.” Photographs in the reception area show men in unitards leaning on machines that look like giant megaphones. A woman lies on a pristine bed, eyes covered by goggles. An androgynous head, wrapped in a turban, pokes out of a large iron tank. In a photograph of the pool, one side is flanked by cane lounge chairs upholstered in palm-tree-patterned fabric, spotlit by seven enormous heat lamps. The Department offered guests treatments for rickets, infantile paralysis, and tuberculosis with quartz ray heaters, autocondensation cushions, carbolic acid baths, and ultraviolet rays.

  I give the attendant our room number and take a towel. The ladies’ locker room is two flights down. It is a brightly lit warren—short hallways of white-painted wooden cubicles, each with a bench, hook, and mirror. The showers are dark-tiled, smelling of perm solution. The locker room is empty and silent but for the thin hum of the lights. I change in a cubicle, leaving the door ajar, and hear someone enter and turn on a shower. As I pass the anteroom that leads to the shower stalls I immediately think: ghost.

  On deck, the pool is all slabs of amber and green marble, surrounded by fish-, shell-, font-, and wave-themed ironwork. Overhead, twenty-four globe lights are suspended from propeller-shaped ceiling fixtures. The deck slopes slightly toward two heavy columns at the deep end, the grotty tiles auguring verruca. It could be Lex Luthor’s subterranean residence. Along one deck I recognize the same seven heat lamps from the photograph, now weakly illuminating cheap plastic pool furniture. At the shallow end, a marble enclosure that used to showcase a fountain stands empty.

  As James sidestrokes and I kick, we talk about the backyard pool of his childhood home, where he learned to swim. He describes his near-drowning: His mother and sister had gone to change, leaving him behind on the deck. When he reached for something in the water, he slipped into the deep end. He clearly remembers thinking that since he didn’t know how to swim, if he sank to the bottom he could walk up to the shallow end and get out. His next memory was of waking in his bedroom, covered by a blanket with an electric heater trained on him full blast. His sister had jumped into the pool and yanked him to the surface, and his mother had lifted him out. I try to imagine a world without James. Then think about Adam. A melancholy wave washes over me as I buss the water with my lips. I watch my progress against the side of the pool, where red and black tiles tidily spell out: | STEPS 7 1/2 FEET DEEP | + | | + | 9FT. DEEP | + | | + | | + | | + | 5 FT DEEP | + | | + | | + | | + | 3 1/2 FT DEEP STEPS |

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bsp; I shower and change. As we leave, we pass a tall framed rendering of a steamer, black smoke billowing from its stacks, passengers waving from the deck, its wake swamping a small sailboat off its starboard prow. A handful of seagulls glide beneath the simple white letters spelling TITANIC. Next to that image is an equally large one of a stern, bearded Charles Melville Hays. Between the two frames is a small plaque that reads:

  Charles Melville Hays, general manager of the Grand Trunk Railway (1896), perished on the ill-fated Titanic when returning from England. Hays was the inspiration behind building the magnificent Château Laurier.

  • • •

  This is the second time the Titanic bears down on me in a pool. In London a few months earlier, I visit the swimming pool available to guests of Durrants Hotel, at the Fitness First health club, Baker Street.

  Health club locker rooms are waltzes of averted gaze. I wish I could stare at people getting changed; I’m convinced all other women know something I don’t—about grooming, about their bodies, about things I never learned to do because I was too busy swimming. But I face the lockers, strip under my shirt, pull my suit up under my towel.

  In my periphery I notice a lot of black. Black tights, black heels, glossy black ponytails. It is a little before nine a.m. and I’ve collided with the post-workout pre-work crowd, dressing for the office. The air smells great. After an “All Swimmers Must Shower Before Entering Pool” sprinkle, I survey the deck. It’s a small pool, twenty meters long. Ellipticals and treadmills are parked behind the glass windows at either end, their passengers’ blank, determined faces staring out over the water. I find a lane to myself, slip in, and start swimming. The water is too warm, so I think of the opposite—cold water.

  The day before, I took the Jubilee line to the O2 bubble in Greenwich to see Titanic: The Artefact Exhibition. The disaster interests me from a swimming perspective; Alcatraz does in the same way. The thought of swimming to freedom in shark-infested waters; the thought of swimming away from a massive, sinking ship in the dead of night in the frozen Atlantic—I dread these unfathomable situations yet relish imagining them. When I was fourteen, a Filipino aunt living in San Francisco heard of my love of swimming and sent me a pink and black Alcatraz Swim Team sweatshirt. I wore it until the lettering faded.