The Swimming Pool 2012.07.13

Albi Brecker knew all about the pool in the basement. His first week at work he’d been – well, he liked to say he’d been initiated. The presence of the pool had been revealed to him. When Rick Baxter said:

“Hey. There’s a swimming pool in the basement.”

there had been nothing ritualistic about it. Still, Albi took away the sense of a ritual and it kept his after-hours swims sacred. It gave him a sense of mystery which he appreciated but held at bay, trepidatious.

It was unclear to him who kept the swimming pool in its pristine condition. He never caught sight of a janitor down there. For some reason he never asked Jerry about it when he saw him puttering around upstairs.

But whenever he went down there he found it clean, dry (apart from the water in the pool, which was wet, as it was meant to be), and fully stocked with fluffy white towels. The water was refreshingly cool but not cold. The smell of chlorine was reassuring but not overpowering. And there was almost never anybody else there.

Even though Rick Baxter had told Albi about the pool in the first place, he didn’t seem to use it very much.

“I don’t swim very well,” he once said to Albi, a non-sequitur in a conversation otherwise unrelated to the pool. Even that statement was probably unrelated to the pool, but it stuck in Albi’s mind, replaying itself whenever he wondered why he didn’t see Rick down there.

Occasionally he would step through the unmarked metal door in the basement into the healthful, only-slightly-damp atmosphere of the pool chamber (he always called it a chamber in his mind because that was the word that came to him the first time he stepped inside) and would look across the freshly swirled waters to see another human face with eyes, looking back at him.

There tended to be very little conversation made around the pool. Albi never initiated conversation, himself, and when someone else did he felt vaguely uncomfortable. It was like a church. A church of a religion of which you are not part, a church which you have stepped off the street into, to enjoy the cool confines and penitential ambiance of, a church where you are welcome – “All are welcome,” the sign said – but unknown (perhaps even in the eyes of the indwelling diety). In those places, those holy places, you do not speak lightly. You tread softly, neck slightly bent, and you speak in a murmur if at all.

There seemed to be some unspoken understanding that two people could not stay in the chamber of the pool together for very long. Even the one time after working quite late, when Albi had been somewhat shocked to find Mr. Crohn himself swimming vigorous laps, cutting through the water like a shark, the man pulled himself out of the water, towelled off, changed, and walked out the door before Albi had a chance to determine what remark, if any, he was justified in making to the CEO, especially late at night in the secret swimming pool beneath the building.

And on the rare occasions when Albi’s swim was interrupted by the slight shriek of the steel door’s hinges, he felt a strange urge to vacate the chamber, to make room for the new occupant. Perhaps it felt important to take turns, to give everyone their fair share (and the pecking order be damned).

What Albi liked to do most of all on the nights that he went down there – he tried to do it no more than once or twice a week, a little afraid that overuse of the swimming pool might be noticed and frowned upon, perhaps even leading to a revocation of privileges, if he actually had any – his favorite thing to do was to float on his back and stare up at the great white lights some many feet above and listen to the murmur of the filter throbbing through the water into his ears.

One night he was doing this, floating placidly, and he was so relaxed and the rough mumbling of the filter had so profoundly lulled him that he closed his eyes. No sooner had he done this, it seemed, than he heard the hinges. With an unsubtle splash he righted himself. Water went up his nose and stung the roof of his mouth. Also it stung his eyes, the chlorine a little more vicious than usual.

He scrubbed at his eyes with both hands, hearing no footsteps from the door as he did so. In fact he was already swim-walking in the direction of his chosen towel at the poolside while he wiped his eyes, knowing that his turn was up, and so his back was almost to the door and he hadn’t realized who it was until she spoke.

“Oh,” she said, a little late. And then: “Hello Albi.”

He twisted around to see her and bumped his elbow on the lip of the pool. It was Rachel Simmons, who worked in marketing and who Albi found very attractive. He often managed to be reasonably charming with her during their infrequent conversations; he found it easy to get along with her, which wasn’t always the case with people in general and women he found attractive in particular. That said, their relationship had not moved much beyond those infrequent watercooler chats. He considered himself a cautious person when it came to that sort of thing. He was slowly working his way up to an invitation to coffee in the break room or something like that. But he wasn’t quite there yet.

She smiled at him, with her bright, a-tiny-bit-crooked teeth. He felt blank, bemused. He studied her nose.

“Going for a swim?” she asked. He nodded. Her smile slipped. He realized he hadn’t said hello.

“Hello,” he said. She smiled again.

“Hi,” she said, and ducked her head and started around the pool, headed for the women’s showers.

He realized his tongue was tied, and he had the uncanny sensation that he was sweating, adding salt to and disturbing the delicate chemical balance of the pool’s waters. Perhaps it was – no, he knew it was the strange context (he had never seen her in the chamber before) – but he found himself unable to summon the halfway-glib, almost-smooth, pseudo-banter that he normally found so easy to engage in with her.

He blurted: “I haven’t seen you down here before!” just as she was stepping through the doorway out of the chamber and into the changing room. She turned around fast, covering a half-stumble by leaning on the door frame, half hiding behind it.

“Well,” she said, “I don’t come down here very often.”

He looked at her, felt a drop drip off the end of his nose and plink back into its source.

“Well,” she said, and turned back toward the showers.

“Me neither,” he said an instant too late, stopping her short again. “Maybe once a week. At most.”

She looked over her shoulder briefly, smiled without showing her teeth, and then scurried out of view.

“Smooth,” he said to himself, because he’d seen people in movies say it at moments like that. But he said it very quietly, because he didn’t alway believe that the other people in the films couldn’t hear those secret self-rebukes. He rested his head against the cool lip of the pool, another thing he thought he’d seen in a film. Then he raised it quickly again when he pictured Rachel stepping back into the chamber and finding him in such a defeated posture.

He pulled himself up out of the water and felt it cling to him, then subside, back into the pool and onto the deck – who mops it up? he thought, as he often did – while he scooped up his towel, still neatly folded. He had full intention to go to the men’s locker room and change, but instead he found himself staring blankly into the portal through which Rachel Simmons had disappeared moments before. He shook himself and took a step toward men’s, but as he did he felt a certain kind of strength grow in him. He felt determined. He wanted to make amends for his awkward speech, his recession of their relationship back to a pre-friendly-conversation level, back to a first-time-at-the-watercooler-by-chance level, a level he didn’t remember ever having been at and a level at which he didn’t want to be.

Turning around and dropping his towel on the deck he sat on the edge of the pool and dangled his legs in the water. He watched the small waves his body had made during his exit hit the opposite wall and rebound. Or maybe they were rebounding again from an initial rebound.

He heard the sound of flapping feet on tile a moment or two later, and looked over his shoulder. Rachel was wearing a blue one-piece, and one of those swimming caps, and even a pair of tiny googles. She looked serious. That is to say she looked serious about swimming. Albi was momentarily intimidated by this (he was a casual, pastime swimmer at best), but he turned just in time to catch the little hitch in her step, an almost-stop, when she saw him, and also the little smile that she hid behind her towel as she walked around th pool to the end near the door.

“Those are nice goggles,” he said as she walked, and her step hitched a little bit once again. She sat down on that end of the pool. He didn’t want to say something stupid again, so he offered up his best smile – he thought of it as slightly dopey but still slightly cute, and many would have agreed with him if they knew his mind – and even found a little laugh escaping his lungs, slipping right out without his moderation. His was momentarily mortified, fearing that the laugh was at best startling and at worst slightly creepy, but it was a pleasant and natural unmediated laugh, and Rachel smiled.

“I’m going to swim some laps,” she said. “Is that alright? Will I be in your way?”

“No no,” he said. “I was almost leaving.” He paused, then: “Do you mind if I watch?” which sounded very weird, and it was also weird that he asked, and he kicked himself mentally, but Rachel snorted a little laugh and said: “No, that’s okay. I won’t even notice.”

And with that she put her little goggles in place and slipped into the water.

Albi watched her swim laps, up and down. Again he thought she looked serious, and again he felt a little intimidated, as if he was intruding ignorantly, a dabbler in a pool for professionals. He also felt a growing awareness that this was the first time he’d exchanged more than a word or two within the chamber of the pool, and also the first time he’d shared the space with someone else for more than a few minutes. But by the time this awareness had slipped up from his unconscious and presented itself to his waking mind Rachel had finished half of her fourth or fifth lap and had stopped in the middle. She stood up in the water and pulled her goggles up, let them rest on her forehead like a second set of eyes. She turned to face him, just her head and shoulders above the water.

“Are you still leaving?” she asked. Her mouth was smiling again, without showing her teeth, and it made him think maybe she was making a kind of little joke. He wasn’t sure though.

“Yes,” he said quickly, and then, “well, almost.” He raised his feet out of the water, soles toward her, heels dripping, and then felt embarassed by this childish display and put them down again with a splash.

Rachel laughed outright.

He slipped into the water then, compelled, perhaps, by her laughter, which was at the same time hollow and bright as it echoed through the chamber, as it filled the room, fed by the water.

And with two swift, strong strokes she reached him and placed a sweet small kiss on his nose – and then she was away on another lap. He had only the phantom of the gentle lips’ pressure on his nose and the afterimage of her smile as she swam away, but it made him laugh out loud, and the echoes of her laugh mingled in the air with the fresh emanations of his.

For some time he paddled about in his amateurish way while she went up and down, up and down the length of the pool. Then he watched as she sank back and floated, her eyes closed, in the very same posture (he imagined) that he so enjoyed. And as she floated the lapping body-sparked waves pushed her closer and closer, and when she opened her eyes he was above her. He bent his arms at the elbows and put his hands beneath her tentatively, just enough to hold her a bit should the delicate balance of her float be disturbed. Then he bent and kissed her lightly on the lips.

She kissed him back. And then she smiled and sank, folding in half like a scissor and evading his grasp, sank beneath the water and surfaced a few feet away, laughing and splashing water at him.

They found their way to the edge and lifted themselves up onto it, sat side by side but not touching. And with an easiness that stunned Albi they continued a conversation they’d been having the day before, about pears, and everything was the same as it had been and yet it so-very-much wasn’t.

They talked for some time. He realized he loved some things about her. He loved her smile, he loved the freckle on the back of her hand, her loved her laugh, he loved how she loved all the foods he hated, the way she looked at him out of the corner of her eye, not as if she were shy, but as if she were trying to catch him at something, unawares.

“Your smile,” she said when he asked about that. “You’re very serious whenever I look at you. But I like your smile.”

He smiled.

And then he leaned in to see if she would have another little kiss with him, when something moved firmly and concretely through the water of the pool like the tail of a fish.

Two sets of feet came swiftly out of the water. They both scooted back from the edge, crouching like animals, their heads up, looking out into the freshly-stirred water. The noise of naked feet slipping through a sheen of water over tiles subsided quickly into the sound of two sets of lungs working quickly, responding to thumping hearts and bringing two bodies up to speed to fight or flee.

The thing in the pool moved again, in a different spot this time, and both of them swivelled their heads to try and catch it, did not need to ask whether the other had seen it.

To Albi it seemed that most of the lights in the chamber had gone out, and that the remainder had grown greener and bluer, ocean colors, dark-water-in-caves colors. The scent of chlorine, heavy in the air, now reminded him of salt. He thought of the sea, where infinite waves flowed and shifted eternally only a few miles away from them, and wondered if there could be some secret lost passage, an influx and intrusion of the unending waters through the ground beneath the city into the basements and into the swimming pool. The water hanging in the air now was old, old and deep, smelling of a thousand years of rain and sun and surging waves. The chamber was no longer a chamber, it was a grotto, lit by sunlight filtered in from high above, through plant matter, or maybe by luminescent lichens on the walls or glowing fish beneath the surface of the waters. Crouching on the slippery rocks Albi reached for Rachel’s hand and took it in his. She grasped him tightly, and he grasped her. The light had grown so dim, emerging only from one small source, high above, that when the stirrings in the water stilled and the shapes began to rise, slowly emerging, slowly swaying, it was impossible to say what they might be. But they had nearly the shape of human torsos, arms and heads, sliding out of the water, streaming. Albi heard out of his memory the voices of men, sailors speaking of their fears and wishes, accents, languages, words that Albi had never heard in waking life.

He thought he saw the glint of eyes, and then the singing started, mingled with the lapping of the captive waves against the rocks.

Albi turned to Rachel. Her face was lit, in fact the only clear thing in the grotto, where shapes shifted and reflections slithered over every surface. She caught a single errant pure strand of sunlight in her hair and did not let go of it, and when she turned to face him her eyes were lit.

“All my life,” said Albi, “I have hoped and dreamed that there would come a time when thought and action moved as one, when life seemed pure and love looked me in the eyes.

“I have waited for you all that time, all that time and more perhaps. The seas have turned and turned again and have I watched them from towers above the shore.

“Always in my mind your laugh rang out surely to me, a sound I’d heard before, a sound I loved to hear above all others, and with it carried the song of the deep grotto, waves and words in a language unknown. But I had never heard your laugh, though it rang in me, until I met you, face to face.

“And then your beauty and the calm with which you spoke and the sureness of your mind to mine made all sure to me, deep down, down beneath my mind.”

The singing of unearthly voices, voices as old as the sea, rose in their ears, a crescendo like the breaking of a wave against the sand. The light was dim, but around their eyes it glowed ready and joyful.

Albi breathed in deep, taking in salt and slime and fish and old, old rocks beaten down, beaten down as the days went by unending, unending. And then he said:

“Would you like to go out for a coffee or something sometime?”

Rachel laughed, and they both leaned in, and kissed each other deeply, and the waves crashed and the voices sustained one last note of everlasting triumph, and bright seal-eyes glimmered in the dark, watching two people sharing a strange, eternal, unexpected, (yearned for) – love.