Swimming Studies

by Leanne Shapton

  • • •

  Chris is still living in Montreal, with wife, baby, and Oscar-nominated production company, and he stands at the back of the bookstore during the event. Over a beer afterward, he describes cycling past Lambert-Closse, which was boarded up and condemned. He says it was as though it had been stopped in time, the precise moment we all vacated. Me to Brooklyn, Chris to the Plateau, Amy to Toronto, Lisa to Concordia. He says it was the opposite of seeing an old house occupied by a new family, full of unfamiliar details but still sweet, clean, and alive.

  “So much happened there,” I say.

  “Yes, so much happened in that foyer.” He nods and repeats: “So much happened in the foyer.”

  The bar is loud and I have not seen Chris in years and the woman sitting across the table from us changes the subject to Halloween costumes and then the other friend I am with wants to leave.

  COACHES

  I dream about swimming at least three nights a week. In these dreams there is always a race, and there is always someone watching, usually a man. I’ve sought out that figure—the coach—throughout my life. I always seem to have one, to find a version in the men I work with, my bosses; I always seem to rely on one to draw out my “How high?” best.

  It would have begun with my father, a libertarian who tried to address normal childhood conflicts creatively. When I refused to eat beef tongue he used it as a lesson in trade—asking me, age six, what it was worth to me to not have to eat it. Desperate, I told him it was worth five dollars, my total savings from birthday and Christmas cards. He thought this was fair, and the exchange was made.

  Though we attended Catholic school, my father insisted that my brother and I not be baptized until we were old enough to make the decision ourselves. Thus my feelings of fraud for at least seven of my eight years of formal Catholic education. I remember the principal of my school saying that only those who are baptized go to heaven; as for the others, “Good luck to them.”

  Less liberating was his attitude toward corporal punishment. At one point he thought making me and Derek sit in a horsehair chair in a corner of a dark basement for half an hour would be effective discipline for our childish crimes. When he realized this was only terrifying us, he stopped. He’s been remorseful ever since, but I now can’t sleep without a light on. As a result of these strategies, and the long letters he would write to me on the importance of honesty, of study, and of not smoking, I was reasonable. I learned to be good.

  • • •

  When I was twelve a coach remarked I had a “feel” for the water. After basking in the attention for a moment, I understood exactly what he meant. I still do. It’s a knowledge of watery space, being able to sense exactly where my body is and what it’s affecting, an animal empathy for contact with an element—the springing shudder a cat makes when you touch its back. When I’m dry I bump into things, stub toes, miss stairs. I prefer the horizontal, feet up, legs folded over armrests, head propped sideways on my elbow.

  I don’t understand how to really draw until a teacher says, “Imagine you are running your hand over the surface of what you are drawing.”

  • • •

  A life-drawing class I take at Pratt Institute in 1993 includes a trip to Columbia medical school to sketch from cadavers. While a live model poses on a table, my instructor manipulates the body of a flayed, immaculately preserved cadaver in imitation. We are then invited to touch it. It occurs to me that even the most intimate relationship with another person can’t allow this kind of investigation. My fingers hyperextend the knee and then slip behind the patella, following the muscles as they weave beautifully around each other. They’re like silk cord and they smell like wet cardboard.

  Down the hall is a dissection room. I somehow find myself there, alone, before the rest of the class arrives. Two tidy rows of yellow-tarpaulin-draped cadavers lie upon their stainless-steel tables like giant bananas. The wet-cardboard aroma is heavy in the air. I turn and stare at the sink while I wait for the others.

  In the middle of the room is a vat full of heads, and another with a female study cadaver dissected so that, as with a pop-up book, we can open the rib cage and inspect the organs piece by piece. I rummage around in her abdomen and my instructor points out that the supple little coin purse I’m holding is a uterus. Later that night I have a craving for chicken.

  • • •

  When I was fourteen my father gave me a book called Revealing Illustrations that he had found at Crown Assets. It was about the work of James McMullan. I loved it, asked for a set of decent watercolors, and spent days copying the paintings onto pads of paper.

  Bored at Pratt one night, I look up James McMullan in the Manhattan phone book. To my surprise there is a number, and an address on Park Avenue. I dial. A man answers. I ask him if he is the illustrator James McMullan and he says yes. Then I ask if I can show him my portfolio. He says he’s in the middle of a move and suggests I call back in three weeks when he’s settled.

  Three weeks later McMullan’s assistant shows me into a bright studio and motions to a wicker chair where I can wait for Jim to finish a phone call. I recognize the chair as one I painstakingly copied from a watercolor sketch in his book. (His sketch was swift, confident, exactly the mood of a beloved chair in sunlight. Mine looked like it was made of hairy crab’s claws.)

  When he gets off the phone, Jim flips through my portfolio and tells me that I do not know how to draw at all, that everything I have done is gimmick and style. He turns to me and asks bluntly, “What do you want?”

  I ask him if he needs an intern.

  I work for Jim Tuesdays and Thursdays. After three weeks of filing, sorting, cleaning, and research, I ask him to look at some new drawings. Some dispiriting sighing, some head shaking, and then he turns to me: “You have to WORK.”

  • • •

  I sit in on two of Jim’s classes at the School of Visual Arts. He teaches us how to draw, taking us through the experience of paying attention and focusing. It’s like playing scales: we draw over and over, as honestly and clearly as possible. It calls up a memory from when I was seven: piano lessons in the basement of a music store in Mississauga. My piano instructor, a fat Italian man in a thick cardigan, falling asleep as I plunked on the keys. Waking only when I stopped, whereupon he’d say, “Re-pet-ah, re-pet-ah.” I’d leave the lesson, mimicking him while I kicked the gravel and waited for my mother’s car.

  After my internship with Jim, there follow more internships, I find more coaches to look up to, who impart varying degrees of influence and wisdom. I get my first illustration assignments from The New York Times and The Globe and Mail, an art internship at Harper’s Magazine, then a real job, at a Canadian newspaper, the National Post, editing and designing a culture section, then art directing its weekend magazine, Saturday Night. When the magazine is canceled in 2001, I leave for London, where I spend a strange winter and spring in love with two men, drawing furiously. I finally return to Toronto when the severance pay ends and my application for a U.S. green card comes through. I have no work, no money, two failed relationships, and a diagnosis of chronic depression.

  I don’t remember those bleak months, just my brother coming over to my apartment and sitting in my bedroom while I cry; my parents’ concern, confusion, and support; my friend Sara’s infinite patience with my ruminative, annoying phone calls; the little blue pills and the little pinkish-brown ones. I start cognitive behavioral therapy but I can’t imagine feeling better. In my doctor’s office I hold up a worksheet and ask him how many I have to fill out before I feel better. He says a hundred. I get it, like laps. I can do a hundred. I settle in, blinker myself, count the laps. Six months and a hundred fifty worksheets later I feel better. The drugs help me focus, and I finish a series of drawings, self-publish them in a book, move to New York with the green card.

  • • •

  One day, while
James and I are watching Roger Federer play tennis on TV, the commentator—filling the silence between serves—blandly repeats the well-known fact that Federer does not have a coach.

  I sigh. I think: I don’t need any more coaches.

  “I don’t need any more coaches,” I say to James.

  He glances at me. “You don’t need any more coaches.”

  James is the opposite of a coach. He encourages me to sleep in, isn’t bothered when I cancel, shrugs at my whims, my mistakes, my detours into self-indulgence. I tell him about Edmund Wilson, who would shut his then wife, Mary McCarthy, in a room for hours under orders to write a story. I tell him I find this romantic.

  “I don’t have to shut you up in a room,” James says. “You do that yourself.”

  • • •

  One night, I e-mail my father to ask him about Studebakers. He replies, with embedded snapshots of his cars. One includes him and my mother in the snow; another is of me and Derek with our first coach.

  Hey Dad, I have a few questions for you:

  1. Were you the president of the Ontario Chapter of the Studebaker Drivers Club?

  No, never was president, just an ordinary member.

  2. Was the Hawk a 1964 Gran Turismo?

  Yes the white ‘supercharged’ Hawk was a ’64, the first Hawk I owned was a ’62 Gran Turismo and there were several others in between.

  3. Was the Loewy Avanti a 1963?

  Yes, 1963 supercharged Avanti. Loewy took credit but the designer most responsible was actually Bob Andrews, employed by Loewy.

  4. Was the Champion a 1953?

  Yes 1953 Champion Coupe.

  And what is the area between the backseat and the bottom of the back window called? Where you’d put mothballs?

  In those days, and still today, it was known as the ‘parcel shelf’.

  Luvya! Dad

  PRACTICE

  One of Jim McMullan’s favorite artists is Lucian Freud. In a short film about Freud by Tim Meara, titled Small Gestures in Bare Rooms, Francis Wyndham—whom Freud painted reading from a collection of Gustave Flaubert’s letters—recites, in voice-over, passages from letters that he and Meara felt resonated with Freud’s practice. Writing to George Sand in 1875, Flaubert asserts that the artist should appear in his work no more than God does in nature: “The man is nothing, the work is everything.” Wyndham then quotes from two letters written by Flaubert to the poet Louise Colet in 1853: “I think that the greatest characteristic of genius is, above all, energy. . . . What seems to me the highest and most difficult achievement of art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to raise our lust or our anger, but to do as nature does, that is, fill us with wonderment. The most beautiful works have indeed this quality, they are serene in aspect. Incomprehensible.”

  When I hear this I think of athletes.

  • • •

  At the end of Michael Phelps: Inside Story of the Beijing Games, a documentary about Phelps’s eight-medal Olympic sweep, are three bonus chapters. They are called “Michael on Herman the Dog,” “Michael on How He Likes Texting,” and “Michael on How Much He Eats.” In the footage—contrasting dramatically from the races and studio analysis—Phelps, in his sweats and bare feet, reclines on his sofa and scratches his bulldog, Herman. He explains that when he’s not swimming or sleeping, he’s hanging out with Herman on the couch, texting, or playing video games. His voice is deep, nasal, and relaxed. His dog snores and shuffles around, blinking sluggishly: a perfect anthropomorphic of the off-duty swimmer. Phelps on Herman: “He’s pretty chill, he’s pretty low-key, as you can tell. He doesn’t really like to move much, doesn’t like to run around a lot. Every now and then he’ll get a good burst of energy and runs around for a few minutes and he’s done.” Phelps plops Herman on the kitchen floor and reaches for a box of cereal.

  Serene in aspect, incomprehensible.

  • • •

  I had a brief encounter with Lucian Freud. I was visiting London with James, early in our relationship. At dinner with two friends, I recognized a solitary man at the bar as Freud. Knowing I was a fan, one friend urged me to go speak to him, and I approached. He wore a scarf, and his pale skin and features were delicate. His eyes were very clear and blue. I told him how happy his work made me; he thanked me and invited me to sit. After offering me one, he smoked a cigarette. We each had a glass of fino. We spoke a little about the restaurant and the food. I had my sketchbook with me and showed him some drawings I had recently made. He described them as vigorous and asked if I painted. When I told him I didn’t much, he talked about his process, said that when he painted, he did not make drawings. He then recommended a Frank Auerbach exhibition and asked me how long I would be staying in London. When I mentioned the name of my hotel, he told me he swam in the pool there regularly, especially in good weather when the roof opened to the sky. His dinner arrived and I said good night. In the back of my sketchbook he wrote his address, and the address of where he breakfasted each morning.

  When I got back to the table, everyone was finishing dessert. My food sat as I had left it, half messed with and cold. I had been at the bar for three-quarters of an hour. My friends made little of it, but in the cab, James was brittle with anger. We fought in our hotel room. At four a.m., unable to sleep, I took the elevator down to the business center in my pajamas and robe, and wrote James a letter of apology.

  • • •

  One night, Jim McMullan invites James and me to the opening of a show of his poster work for Lincoln Center. The gallery is full of people, and Jim’s posters line the walls: Carousel, South Pacific, Six Degrees of Separation, Arcadia, Ah, Wilderness! I can hear Jim intoning the titles of these plays—he has a dramatic, passionate way of speaking, and I have never heard him mumble. Everything about him has intent. As I wander around the room and look in the vitrines that display his studies and notes, I remember my drawing classes with him. How painful and frustrating they were. I glance toward two tables piled with crudités, cheese, and tortellini on sticks. Some of Jim’s students are hanging out near them. I feel something like jealousy.

  The arrangements of Jim’s multiple sketches illuminate his practice, how he pushes past perfect moments of clarity to get something even better. His rigor is astonishing. My own sketches betray distraction and cross-fingered stabs. Spaghetti on a wall. Jim once generously described my work as “blithe.”

  • • •

  The idea of specialness occurs to me one night when I can’t sleep (or bake). That as good athletes, we defined ourselves as special, then submitted to a routine in which we did exactly as we were told. I think of the limitations that “specialness” requires: doing a series of very unspecial things, very well, over and over, a million times over, so that one special thing might happen, maybe, much later. So—I think to myself in the four a.m. blear, face squashed into my pillow—specialness is sanctioned, rigorous unspecialness. An unexpected feeling of relief flows over me. Then dissipates as I start grinding my teeth.

  During the last third of The Magic Mountain, I start to think about how the body bestows specialness in prowess and illness. Both involve enduring some kind of pain. When Hans Castorp’s uncle flees Berghof Sanatorium, escaping the calm smug of the ill, the unspotless, Mann (or his translator at least) describes his afflicted nephew’s attitude as “callous” a number of times. I recognize the description—and the feeling of superiority the “special” have toward those they consider “un”—but also, a callus, a hardened patch of skin formed by repetitive motion. Does specialness beget callousness, or does the mind conjure specialness? Does the mind follow the matter of the body into specialness? What separates rigor and brilliance?

  While watching the French Open one morning on television, I leave my chair and walk toward the kitchen. John McEnroe is commentating, and as I put the kettle on I hear him mention that Rafael Nadal is playing throu
gh a sprained ankle. I remember the blunt fact that when I was training, I was in constant pain. Not just the sharp pain in my knees, which was taken seriously, but a dull, steady pain in my arms, back, shoulders. Pain when I sat down, pain when I got up, pain when I leaned back in a chair, pain when I reached for the salt or sharpened a pencil. Thinking of stoic Nadal, I remember how I ignored, then eventually forgot about, pain when I raced, and even to some degree during practice. It was as though pain on land was there to remind me to get back in the water, where, after a certain threshold, the pain went away. For an athlete pain is not a deterrent, because the only place the pain will be eclipsed is in practice or in competition.

  • • •

  Watching some hip-hop dancers on TV, a friend asks me: “Why is it so fun and satisfying to see a group of people do exactly the same thing?” I think about this—how we apprehend the life of the special body, choreographed movement, dance, planes flying in formation. It is satisfying, but also like watching something defy gravity, or more specifically, defy the wilderness of our bodies in time. All that work and then, finally, something levitates. When the minute stresses of practice fade, the specialness emerges. There is a quotation from On Directing Film by David Mamet that I underlined in 1993 and have never forgotten: “Stanislavsky wrote that the difficult will become easy and the easy habitual, so that the habitual may become beautiful.”

  Glenn Gould, explaining his love of the recording studio, described it as “an environment where the magnetic compulsion of time is suspended—well, warped at the very least. It’s a vacuum, in a sense, a place where one can properly feel that the most horrendously constricting force of nature— the inexorable linearity of time—has been, to a remarkable extent, circumvented.”