swimming lessons
pretend that some convulsion, sometimes called accident, throws you into connection with a man or a woman who lives in hong kong; and that you fall in love
There were two standouts on my list of thirty-seven New Year’s resolutions for this year: to be more punctual and to fall in love. Nine months have passed since I dreamt up those wishes for the person that I hoped to be and the experiences that I longed to have. Pages and pages of my journal have been sacrificed at the altar of my sentimentality, but one of the wishes came true. I was twenty minutes late to meet new friends at the pool. Take your pick.
Lyon had been sticky and humid since my arrival in late August. The city was clinging desperately to the coattails of summer, and our plan to go swimming had been formulated after sitting through a methodology course where people had become so drowsy that they folded their arms across their desks and surrendered their fluttering eyelids to imperturbable slumber on linoleum linens. Huffing, puffing, Eve and I stumbled out of our oven of a classroom to find one another. Our melting minds had been thinking alike. Agreeing to meet at five thirty, then parting ways but not before promising to corral some others, we shouted our goodbyes and she rode away on her bike the color of clovers.
The wispy dreams for that afternoon, exchanged with helium in our voices in the courtyard after dismissal, dissipated rapidly as I stood before a crowded changing room wearing socks with teal and black stripes. I clutched my sneakers in my right hand and wondered how it was possible to feel so exposed when I was fully clothed and everyone in front of me was wearing the least amount of nylon possible to comply with national sanitation standards. I tentatively stepped forward and liquid permeated the cloth protecting my bare feet. One more step and I was stunned by the slamming of a plastic door in front of my face, the rattling of the door handle reverberating in my eardrums.
If only the apparition of someone else’s hand might have rested on the small of my back and steered me gently towards what was right. All that I could feel was the lukewarm water that trickled down my forehead and traversed my tear ducts; all that I could see was sallow lighting that cast shadows on youthful faces and reduced the hibiscus flowers of my orange bikini to stalks of silver irises. The tepid heat of the shower was helpless against the gusts barging in through the half-open door of the changing room. I was impotent, too. I turned the dial to its resting position and tiptoed barefoot, plodding my way across the abrasive concrete floor.
The sky had turned frothy and dappled in the fifteen minutes that I had been stupefied in the maze of crooked lockers practiced in the art of nabbing one euro coins. Fifteen minutes and the seasons had changed irrevocably; no melodic warning sounded over the loudspeakers, only admonitions against bringing your belongings with you to the pool for some godforsaken reason. The Canadian geese living beneath my skin had begun their season of migration to the south and left behind, as a token of their affection, fuzzy arms and a shadow of violet on my lips. No one was looking at me, surely not a single soul, but in my head every conversation between bathers chatting in the shallow end, every infinitesimal tilt of the head or premonition of a laugh, picked as its primary topic of discussion an insecurity lodged stubbornly in my bones or coursing through the veins of my nearly naked body. I ascribed my darkest beliefs about humanity onto innocent people as I walked the endless lengths of the pool, as my heels wobbled between wet and dry and wet earth.
But I know that god exists because I found his progeny amidst a homogenous crowd of swimmers. Eve’s blond hair held in its ringlets the promise of warmth and recognition, some twisted form of salvation. I sped to her, stopping myself from sprinting on the slippery ground, trying to convey with the ambition of my steps that I was not alone nor ever had been. The water, too, gave me offerings: of silence, of anonymity, of solace in spite of the gasp that I gave as I grasped the hostile steel of the ladder and dipped a tentative toe into its depths.
I winced a bit as I descended that underwater staircase (imagine a bronze iron balustrade, the ornate sister staircases of the seas, metalwork modeled after the epoch of William and Mary) and winced a little more as I wove my way through freestylers who borrowed breaths from the coves they created then destroyed beneath their right arms. The symphony of shrieks and of splashes seized my anxiety and squashed it flat. Then, only then, could I look in the brilliant eyes of the girls at the center of that labyrinth and partake in the grown-up pool game of observation. Together we remarked on a man sitting atop the stone bleachers on a cranberry towel. He was reading a book. His presentation of content solitude was convincing to the untrained eye. The only tells were the furtive glances he stole towards the crowd every fourth page or so, the fingers that strayed away from the spine to fix imaginary strands of hair that had, in theory, realized a dramatic escape from behind his ear.
Not for a second—it is important to me that you know that not for a second in this Lyonnais piscine—did I think about a different body of water, a different body, in a time and place that felt as foreign to me as the continent to which I had lugged my life, rolled up in tight spirals alongside knit sweaters and azalea-printed maxi skirts so that it would squeeze into two suitcases. It was only afterwards, as I walked home alongside a furious sky and forlorn swans drifting listlessly through the riverbed, away from three drained glasses of cheap white wine, that my imagination sprouted precarious legs and ambled away.
It was in this act of wandering that my time at the pool no longer belonged to me. The memory had been taken by someone who was not conscious of the theft. Someone who, if interrogated with his right hand resting upon the Bible, would not have the slightest idea of the charge that a twenty-year-old girl had levied against him. Like a twice-developed roll of film, the negatives of that evening had been superimposed with Fridays in the month of February, with plastic buntings above Olympic-length lanes, with glass windows so foggy that the letters of your name would linger long after the lights had been turned off, with lithe limbs that sliced seamlessly through the surface, with two people treading water. Even with several oceans between us, his ghost peopled the most abandoned corners of my person. It sauntered through the empty rooms of my heart, leafing through diaries that begged privacy, assessing my rapturous notes in the margins of novels, shifting ever so slightly the position of a perfume bottle on my vanity. Memories tarnished by the reminiscence, by the distance; memories once so gilded that I gave up on wearing jewelry altogether.
I was wearing no jewelry seven months ago, except maybe the little silver hoops in my second piercings because they were such a pain to put back in. When I pushed open the door of the women’s dressing room on that dreary winter day, wearing a bikini diametrically opposed to the weather and the season, I moved with the assurance and ease of being accompanied by another person. I perched on a bench against the wall, waiting for him to emerge from the changing room on the opposite side of the indoor pool, trying my best to evade eye contact with my TA from the year prior who was waiting to jump into the lap pool and wearing a speedo.
I was not harrowed by the vulnerability of exposed thighs (my TAs, mine) or the exposition of the pale flesh of the stomach (my TAs, mine) because I had a companion, an accomplice, a person capable of banishing social barriers with the subtle shaking of his head or the magnetic compulsion of the smallest of his smiles. When we, together, went to the edge of the diving pool, so close to the precipice between land and water that we could feel the notches of the grates of the drain between our feet, it was only then that the act of raising my arms to be reunited above my head and leaping off of solid ground swelled with a kind of sanctity that it had never held before. Electricity transmitted as our legs brushed fleetingly against one another. Currents conducted in a kick, a flutter.
And when we got tired or just the slightest bit cold, we swam over to the foggy window panes and pulled our weight onto the floor. We sat beside each other on the threshold of the pool where the waves lapped gently into the drain, folding our arms around our knees and resting our chins atop our forearms. Pruny fingertips and the posings of questions, questions that you stop remembering to answer if no one ever asks. How you want to be remembered by the world, what you have dreamed about for as long as you can remember. His hair was so much darker when it was wet. Tepid afternoon rays would occasionally rap at the glass, lapping at our backs upon entry, illuminating the water droplets that pooled in the hollow of his collarbone, lulling me into staying in that patch of sun until it disappeared.
There was not a single other soul in that humid echoing chamber, not anybody except for him and me. There were one or two terracotta tiles between us. As he spoke quietly about the languages he hoped to learn, I studied the gentle rocking of the waves, knowing without seeing his profile exactly which expression was dancing across his face. We only lasted so long before the chill in the air made its way beneath our skin, so we chased it away in our underwater world, biding our time.
For most of my life, I had been convinced that I had known how to swim. Naively I assumed that it was largely intuitive, that my years on the Sunset Dolphins swim team in my small town and my diving intensive in the pool of a childhood friend sufficed to get me through any aquatic experience that I might have in my largely terrestrial existence. It took me twenty years to understand that I knew nothing, that any sort of preparatory education was rendered useless when I threw myself into the perpetual deep end of the diving pool at Yates Field House.
I had thought that I knew a little bit about what living was like. I had thought that I had gotten the hang of things, caught my breath, but all it took was a single person to unravel the careful stitches in the scarf of my life and skip stones across the river of my soul. I realized then, in the depths of the diving pool, that I knew nothing, that all the wisdom that I thought I possessed was manufactured courage compensating for a void of experience. It took giving myself up to another person on this earth that made me brave enough to surrender, wholly and completely, to the people that I love. It took the knowledge that someone else had chosen to love me to make me understand that I might be capable of being loved by other people.
Even if I loitered in the confounding chambers of the dressing room and indicted a man sitting on a berry-colored towel, it was to cope. For the first time in my life, I had the nerve to forge human connection with no foundation to build upon and the nerve to believe that other people might want to forge it with me. I bared my body to the elements and I offered myself to the two girls to my left who clung to the edge of the pool and I racked my brain for French farewells to bid to the man behind the counter as he printed my ticket for entry.
Before I drafted my list resolutions for the new year, I was familiar with the broad strokes of relationships. I knew the fierce connection of female friendship, of eating ice cream on stoops in the early hours of the morning and of tears seeping into the yarn of sweaters as my head rested upon a sympathetic shoulder. I knew the love of sisterhood, of linking ourselves together at the crook of the elbow and skipping alongside moving traffic on relentless city streets. I knew nothing of how special that love was. Assumed that it was happenstance or coincidence, their deigning to love me. This was the gift that he gave to me, wrapped in old editions of the school newspaper with a navy primrose pressed inside. He showed me what it meant to risk drowning, what it meant to be swept off your feet, to throw yourself into the abyss of this life, to plunge underwater and pinch your nose between your fingers and trust that love would keep you afloat.
I felt his imprints on my skin on that September day. In the odd droplet dripping down my dress and in the bitter air that whipped my hair back and forth as I battled my way home from the Centre Nautique. I still felt the ripples that he had sent ricocheting through me, but they had grown wider and wider and it was becoming harder and harder to trace them back to the original stones that he had thrown. Maybe those ripples came from the remnants of water that the swans shook off their feathers as they stalked, on awkward tangerine legs, towards the banks of the Rhône. Perhaps they came from the remarkable new people I had met, from phone calls with Maria as I got ready for bed, from the things that I had taught myself through him. From anyone and everything else.