Drawing by Judith Wolfe

DAVID McFARLAND

The one in white

"Act your age, Allen," his wife said almost immediately on catching up to him, which he knew meant Behave. Keep your eyes in your head. She said that to him in nearly every social situation.
"All right, honey," he said distantly, in that fashion he knew she would interpret as I do hear what you're saying. Anyway, every man looks at what goes on around himself, needs to look. No matter how old, he looks. If looking were a sin, all men were condemned without a chance. "I'm not doing anything, anyway." It was amazing how quickly she could put him in little rage.
"You're gawking at every one of those girls," putting a little emphasis on that last word. Dorothy surreptitiously pointed to the girl in white, whom he had already noticed and appreciated. A heavily tanned blonde in a white bikini, sixteen, certainly not more than seventeen. Dorothy believed every man wanted every woman he looked at, believed it no matter how many times he said I look at everything. She said then, You don't look at men. It was a continuation of their usual, pointless argument.
"I'm not gawking, and I'm not looking at the girls. Where do you want your stuff." She had given the swimming bag to him to carry though the locker room. Dorothy had carried just her towel through. The bag had her book, sunglasses and sunscreen, two towels and a complete change of clothes for her, a single towel for him.
"Here," she said, "over here in the shade." The ancient oak trees of the city park shaded the edge of the pool deck for the early part of the afternoon, though this scrap of shade would evaporate quickly. For now the shade let him take off his sunglasses. The concrete was not nearly so hot here. The concrete close to the pool's edge was foot-burning hot. It would take a half hour of splashing out to get it cooled down. The splashing would be accomplished by the small horde of children who had come in with him, the younger boys who had begun behind him in line but hurtling, shoving through the locker room past him in their eagerness to be the first to fling their thin adolescent bodies into the water.
"Go get me a chair," Dorothy said just as soon as he had spread his towel out.
"Two chairs."
"If you want one," she said, pulling open her book. Already she had left him; likely she was in some idealized country: Persia, Egypt, England in the civilized part of the eighteenth century. From the book cover it was hard to tell where Dorothy had gone. She had started this latest best seller last night in bed, had kept him up late with her light on. But her mood had been much better this morning. They had slept late, and she had not resisted him at all this morning as she usually did because of the pressures of getting them both off to work on time. The lethargy of a vacation having lasted too long had not yet begun to work on them. This morning had been fresh, like those they had loved years ago.
"Aren't you going to swim?"
"Later. I'm reading now."
"That's why we came, for you to swim. You made me come." There had been better things to do.
"Later, I said. I want to finish my book." That could take hours.
At the entrance counter, the young man on duty, a lean high school boy who looked like a swim team sort, said, "There's only one left. You've should have asked on the way in." He dropped on the metal counter a lawn chair, a recliner, the cheap kind that at the end of the summer would be sold in the discount stores for two or three dollars, the very worst sort of lawn chair. Pulling it across the metal-covered counter made a screech that hurt his ears.
"Yeah." You cannot tell teenagers anything about life, about how your wife changed her mind three times about wanting a chair while driving the short distance across town, finally saying, "If I want one, then I'll get it when we go in."
The petite brunette, not terribly attractive, too athletic-looking, who checked passes or collected money from people entering, said, "Donny, be nice!"
Donny said, "Well?" in that manner couples use to say What was it I did wrong?
Allen was tempted to say Son, get used to it, but every man has to learn on his own how to live with a woman.
"Here," he said to Dorothy, who looked up from her towel, saying, "You didn't want one?"
"This was the last one."
"Thanks." Then, unaccountably, she said, "I'll share it with you."
"You first."
She laughed. "Of course." She smiled too, and she seemed not far away at all, not so distant from the woman who had loved him this morning.
So he went, dove in the pool at the eight foot mark. The instant coolness sucked away all the sun's heat, chilled him more quickly than he expected, remembered from the summers he had spent in the water. He always had been a swimmer. He still was not good but certainly competent enough to swim two lengths of this oversized pool without stopping. He was still in that good a shape. By the end of the summer he would be able (though more slowly than he wanted) to swim four or five lengths, show off himself well enough without embarrassment. Against the younger men. The boys. The swim team fellows who spend every summer hour in the open air pool, making their bodies lean and fast and tanned, who parade themselves in front of the girls--knowing damned well how they appear, what comments and stirrings they can cause. The kind who say among themselves The only two things to know is her number and does she. In the best part of his youth, Allen had never looked like that. Now, after more than fifteen years of marriage, Dorothy's cooking, not enough attention to keeping his shape, he never would have even his old shape again. Not unless he ran, sweated, ate sensibly, all of which he was unwilling to do. It was far too late to recover his past. No. It was giving up the time. And, too, it was the narcissism. That was what he had hated about athletes in school years ago, what he disliked about these boys now, though it seemed almost unconscious with them, a vanity of the body as natural as breathing. Youth is wasted on the young, his father had been fond of saying. Doing a lazy backstroke, he started toward the shallow end. In the sky he saw a plane passing over in a roar of turboprop noise, dark against blue. Descending in a landing pattern or climbing up on the flight path for Chicago, impossible to tell. It's the perspective, he said, feeling the sound in his head though not so much hearing words in his ears. Then the plane went away behind the trees; the noise vanished suddenly. The sky opened up--a vast and vacant blue inviting, an endless and untroubled sea. For an instant there was no gravity, he was rising up. The disorientation made him falter, sink, and he uttered a little curse made in the brain, completely distorted by the water. Pushing off the bottom, he came up on the shallow side of the rope, stood up in five foot of water.
No one seemed to be paying him any mind at all. The lifeguards were relaxing in their high chairs. Dorothy was still reading her best seller. Probably she had not looked for him at all. The shade around her had vanished; she was exposed to the sunlight. In a while, when she was heated up, she would finally join him in the water. That would spoil the little peace he had just now. On vacation, a man has no peace from his wife. It would have been worse if they had gone anywhere; she would have made him slog from some scenic place to another scenic place, eating in restaurants she would hardly bother with at home.
So he started up the pool again, this time with his breast stroke, working through the children who were throwing a tennis ball back and forth, going around the knot of women in the three foot shallows holding their toddlers' feet in the water and talking about heaven knows what, laughing suddenly. People out to beat the heat. People who came out to visit with other people. People who came out to see each other, who came out to be seen.
The young girls had come out to be seen. Teenaged girls had not changed their habits, not from what he remembered of his youth. A knot of them perched on the edge by the four foot ladder, letting their feet and calves sway in the water. Surely they had picked the spot to be in easy view of the boy in the lifeguard chair. They had done this when he was young, paraded themselves, exhibited themselves in subtle ways in front of boys they wanted. From there the lean, tanned lifeguard could look down at each one of them, peer into their bikini tops, examine the quality of their tans, talk to them if he had any mind to. The one in white was there, smiling and laughing at everything. Better-looking now than Dorothy had ever been. Occasionally the girls pulled their heads together, whispered, laughed harder. Undoubtedly, it was about something sexual. At their ages, nearly everything had to do with things sexual. There was another blonde among them, but she was in black, very thin. One redhead, the rest brunettes. These were the girls he had wanted to know when he was young--the popular, sophisticated ones who had always eluded him. The cheerleader type with good grades, good looks, coming from nice families.
The one in white reminded him suddenly of Marcie. Marcie Delmare? Was it Delmare or Dewitt, Delaware. Something with a D. For more than ten years he had not thought of her; there was little left of Marcie in memory.
Marcie. With her name came her face, though dimmed, vague. The one in white could be Marcie, if her hair were lighter a shade or two, her body just a few pounds thinner--maybe five pounds. So you could see the muscles moving underneath. The one in white had big breasts, or it was the bikini top that pushed them out, held them up for every boy and man to look at. This girl's father probably disapproved of it. The suit. The bikini. The way it made this girl look adult, ripe. The boy in the lifeguard chair was probably enjoying himself, if he was looking around himself at all. Having the idealized Marcie transposed onto this one in white stirred his flesh. While his blood heated every inch of him even while standing in water to his waist, he remembered how Marcie had stirred him years ago; Allen marveled at how an old desire could be rekindled, made fresh, by nearly vanished memory. How his body was stimulated not by this one in white but by a useless remembrance. Marcie was long dead. Dying had made useless every little memory of her.
How different it was now--and, god, how completely different he was! Two decades. Marcie had been dead for twenty years, and he still felt like crying about it, crying for the boy who had been obsessed by her.
Across, on the other side of the pool from the girls, Dorothy was reading.
No, she was not there when he looked. She had disappeared. In the chair was the towel she had put behind herself, the book spread face down. Her body had made a deep impression in the cheap vinyl. She had been gaining weight in the last three or four years, complained often of it. It's just that we're not getting enough exercise, he told her. And this? she said, pointing to her uncovered, thickening thigh, at the splotches of blue and purple veins showing through the skin. We're getting older, he said, and there's nothing we can do about it. It happens, he said.
He could not from here in the shallows distinguish her from any of the other women in the pool, so many brunettes. So he started to swim again. Casually. In a long circuit around the edge of this twice normal size pool, alternating freestyle with breast-stroke. Under the rope, bobbing up to look from there, to the south corner of the deep end. Across to the north corner, then holding to the edge for a while to look over the people there. Up to the shallows again. After one complete circuit she still had not come back to her chair. Not to worry he said almost aloud. He was warmed up now, the heat of his body balanced against the water's coolness. It was why he enjoyed swimming. So he made another slow round, passing by the knot of girls giggling loudly when he was only just past them, a shallow dive under the rope, working on his stroke, concentrating on patterned breathing, the rhythm of stretching and pulling through, feeling muscles working. He might be sore tomorrow, but not much if he eased into it, did not overdo. Two weeks of gradually increasing effort would have him in better condition. If Dorothy did not contemplate day trips to Chicago, looking for clothes or to eat in some French place never to be located here--where the best was the Main Street Café, cheap enough, of a certain quality, even better than the standard fare of small towns. One day next week they would go, overspend, and then he could look forward to staying home, working on the house in the little time she would leave him. At the end of his second round Dorothy was again on the recliner, stretched out on her back in the sunlight, book down. So he went around again. Four times around was enough. At the three foot end he pulled himself out, sat on the edge with his feet in the water, watching, letting the sun warm him again. The gaggle of girls was still beside the lifeguard's chair, still deeply interested in each other and paying no mind to the mothers and little children and the older girls who played in the water, swam, the ones who abandoned themselves to the luxury of time and water and sun. The one in white was the center, leaning back, letting the sun wash over her. Arrayed to each side, the other girls were like attendants for a bride, pretending with their laughter to be innocent of their purpose here. Once in a while the one in white would sit up, tug upwards at her top, and he watched the wobble of her flesh when she let go. Every time she was un-satisfied with it and repeated the process before leaning back again, her long hair falling to drag over the concrete. Her hair was streaked through with gold highlights that the sun made vivid. When he was younger he would have wanted her, have been haunted by her in his dreams, by her perfect flesh. The way Marcie had haunted him all through high school. There had not yet been enough years to erase her. Eventually, though. That had to happen.
"There you are," he heard. Dorothy was standing over him at the edge of the pool. "I couldn't find you."
"I've been swimming."
"You're watching the girls. That's how I found you. I knew you would be doing it. Men are so predictable, really."
He moved his arm, vaguely pointed in that direction. "She looks like Marcie."
"Like who?"
"I've told you about Marcie. From high school."
"She killed herself." Not to break open an old wound, but only as a means of identification.
"Yeah. Marcie." Who killed herself from shame, because of her family and church, staunch Catholics well known for their views. For too brief a moment the one in white became Marcie, every inch. Every aspect of her lovely. In his groin came full grown the pain of passion, and he was that foolish boy who had cried for a week over Marcie when reading discovering her death in the newspaper, that boy whose passion died when someone said It was Charlie's. Everybody knew it. But not he. In the way that everybody knows, he had not known. Then it was over: the girl in white was herself, a few pounds heavier, larger breasts, though still she was the center of everything as Marcie had been in her group. The group he had never gotten into, with Charlie and the other athletes whose lean bodies shrugged off with ease and grace what should have been shameful. How he had hated them all.
But he was older now, and hate is a luxury reserved for youth. His youthful hate for a few had turned to a dulled resentment of an entire class, and, so, it was useless now. He had hated them, Charlie and the lean, handsome boys of good families who had taken as a right of natural law the prettiest girls, the best they found of everything, who wasted all they touched. Because they had not cared. And Charlie had married soon after another of the pretty girls with perfect skin, a girl from a good family, the Dickersons. Who owned the Ford dealership.
"Which one?"
"Yes?"
"Which one looks like her?"
"The one in white."
"Oh. Marcie was pretty then."
"That's right."
"How long did you go with her?"
"I never went out with Marcie. I hardly ever talked to her."
"How could you love her then."
He must have used that word at one time or another. It must have been the easiest thing to say at some moment, the closest word that contained some grain of truth. Why does any boy love the unknowable, the unreachable? Because she had smiled at him once in a way that seemed genuine? Because she had been beautiful, untouched, who had for an instant shifted the orbit of her life to include him before she spun out of control. It had never been love, only an unsatisfied desire, which made it worse. But all of that had grown out of himself, and he knew that now.
"I didn't love her. I didn't know then was love is." He had been a romantic, a foolish boy.
"Do you love me?
Dorothy had never asked before. Not directly. As all good husbands do, he had learned to say easily I love you, to put ample energy into the saying of it as a proof, a measure of meaning. That had sufficed. For more than fifteen years. She had only ever asked it to mean Do you love me enough to buy me _________? When can we _________? Never before with consequences attached. The hell of it was that he did not know. In that moment, he had never known what it was nor how to recognize it. His life had never taught him about love but only about routine, comfortable convenience. He was no longer a romantic, but he had not evolved into anything more.
"I do love you."
"You took too long." Dorothy slid into the pool, the water coming nearly to her waist. She dove under, stroked in the direction of the deep end. The waves on the surface distorted her image--she seemed all legs just then, but she turned back and surfaced to face him. She was crying. He could see it. Despite the water running over her face. She came close enough so that he thought for a moment that it was all right, that she had changed her mind and believed him. Believed in him. Loved him. Again. "I'm glad we never had children," she said before falling under the water, swimming away.

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