I remember all this now because it seems to me the truer feeling of the time was somehow that uncomfortable one, rather than the collegial atmosphere of the convention or of my golfing trips, and it makes me now consider my many good years here in Bedley Run in a slightly different light. For what I didn’t let Liv Crawford know this morning is that I’m probably nearer to actually selling my house than I’ve ever been before. I know I told Mrs. Hickey otherwise in the store last week, but more and more the time feels right to me, not so much from a financial viewpoint but from a sense of one’s time in a place, and that time being close to done. It’s not that I feel I’ve used up this house, this town, this part of the world, that I’ve gotten all I’m going to get, but more that this feeling I’ve come to expect, this happy blend of familiarity and homeyness and what must be belonging, is strangely beginning to disturb me.
What used to concern me greatly about leaving was the awkward impression you can sometimes have, say when you find yourself on an everyday street, or in a store, or in what would otherwise be a shimmering, verdant park, and you think not about the surroundings but about yourself, and how people will stop and think (most times, unnoticeably) about who you may be, how you fit into the picture, what this may say, and so on and so forth. I’ve never really liked this kind of thinking, either theirs or mine, and have always wished to be in a situation like the one I have steadily fashioned for myself in this town, where, if I don’t have many intimates or close friends, I’m at least a quantity known, somebody long ago counted. Most everyone in Bedley Run knows me, though at the same time I’ve actually come to develop an unexpected condition of transparence here, a walking case of others’ certitude, that to spy me on my way down Church Street is merely noting the expression of a natural law. Doc Hata, they can say with surety, he comes around.
And yet there is a discomfiting aspect to all this rapport. I don’t know how or when it happened, or if it is truly happening now, but I’m sure something is afoot, for I keep stepping outside my house, walking its grounds, peering at the highly angled shape of its roofs, the warm color and time-textured facade, looking at it as though I were doing so for the very first time, when I wondered if I would ever in my life call such a house my home.
So after speaking with Liv Crawford, I changed into my trunks and walked out the French doors of the kitchen and past the gardens to the pool. I swim each morning, doing twenty-five steady lengths, rain or shine. It is July but has been unseasonably cool and dry, and with all the shade from the towering trees, the water is bracing in its chill, which is in fact how I prefer it.
So now I begin my swim the way I always do, taking a shallow dive from the far side and gliding underwater for much of the first length. It’s always a slight shock to the system, and there’s the bare second when I’m sure my heart has stopped, skipped in its time, though I’ll keep going and gently rise, to begin my crawl. But this morning, beneath the surface of the lightless water (the pool bottom and sides were painted a dark battleship gray, to match the stone surround), I suddenly have the thought that I’m not swimming in my own pool at all, but am someplace else, in a neighboring pool or even a pond, and my chest gives a buckle and I actually swallow some water. Gasping, I peel off my goggles, and they lazily drift somewhere to the bottom. When my eyes clear, of course, I am nowhere else but home.
I decide not to swim anymore, and I pull my robe tight around me and step quickly inside. I’m shivering, almost uncontrollably, and instead of taking a warming shower, I have the odd compulsion to start a log fire in the family room hearth. Sitting crouched before it, arranging the kindling, I can’t help but remember a story I once read in an old book of Sunny’s, one she must have used in a high-school class. I found it among others on the shelves in the family room, and it had all sorts of interesting markings and notes in the margins. The story, which she had dog-eared, is about a man who decides one day to swim in other people’s pools, one after another in his neighborhood and town, which, as described, seems very much like Bedley Run. The man, the story goes, has resolved to “swim across the county,” and after some travail of walking in on his neighbors and scaling property walls and crossing busy parkways, he finally makes it back to his own home, which, to his desperate confusion, he finds locked up and deserted.
I’m not sure if I’ve ever appreciated fully the moral or deeper meanings of the story, which it no doubt has, but nevertheless it makes me think of many notions, the first being that the man has begun, whether knowing it or not, a sort of quest or journey, and ultimately finds himself, if in spiritual disillusion. This, naturally, seems reasonable. Another thought is that he has simply gone mad, or perhaps suffers a perennial state of upper-middle-class drunkenness, and his project is one of escape, to free himself from the realities of his fallen station. Or that (and this I draw mostly from the side notes, scribbled in several hands) he is making fitful passage, in a metaphorical sense, through the epic “seasons” of life.
Sitting before the fire, I wonder, too, whether someone watching me swim each morning in the peerless quiet of the pool, steadily pulling my way back and forth, would think I was entering a significant period in life, a time in which all I would do was swim every day in my backyard, a lovely place of my own making. And while this may seem a romantic, even triumphant picture of near-end, what we might well hope to achieve at the start of our adult lives, it strikes me that it could be a scene of some sadness as well, of a beauty empty and cold. It is an unnerving thing, but when I was underneath the water, gliding in that black chill, my mind’s eye suddenly seemed to carry to a perspective high above, from where I could see the exacting, telling shapes of alclass="underline" the spartan surfaces of the pool deck, the tight-clipped manicures of the garden, the venerable house and trees, the fetching, narrow street. And what caught me, too, was that I knew there was also a man in that water, amidst it all, a secret swimmer who, if he could choose, might always go silent and unseen.
Of course, when you read something like a story, you can find yourself thinking too long about all sorts of ideas, which usually complicate rather than settle the questions at hand. And while we understand that art and literature mean to do this to us, is there not a serious, thinking person who sometimes wishes the questions would be answered directly by a reading, with clarity and resolve, so that he might move steadily onward, to be further enlightened, improved?