Swimming Studies

by Leanne Shapton

  While I’m voguing, in cap and goggles, in the back of my mind, I mention to James that there’s a meet not far from where we live, in an outdoor pool. I think: He’ll love me even more if he sees me race, he’ll fall in love with me all over again.

  He agrees to come watch me swim.

  The meet takes place in a six-lane fifty-meter pool. It’s surrounded by a low chain-link fence, and overlooks a small artificial lake. The meet day is sunny, an ideal outdoor-swim-meet day, the deck full of people, elderly, middle-aged, a few in their twenties. Some wear technical suits, most don’t.

  Swimming long course again feels luxurious, Californian. An outdoor fifty-meter expanse of water shimmers with the same kind of American dream that football fields and baseball diamonds do. Lines are crisp and colors are primary: swimming-pool blue, touchpad yellow, striped lane ropes, red and yellow flags. The pool, built in 1993, shows a little of its age, making it even more charmingly East Coast. It has heavy revolving doors leading to the locker rooms, old maroon starting blocks, and worn concrete decking. As I warm up, the bleachers begin to fill. I’m not feeling tip-top. My arms are heavy and my body drags a bit. I do a few starts and a few sprints, then get out and head for where James is sitting with my things, sipping an iced coffee. He’s trying to read the paper over someone’s shoulder as I approach.

  The officials are having trouble with the touchpad system and ask the crowd for timers. James volunteers. I am the only swimmer in my age group again, and during my first race I swim beside a man in the thirty-nine-to-forty-four age group. I lead the field, but fade in the last fifteen meters and finish second behind my neighbor. I look at James and he gives me a shrug. I realize he doesn’t get the whole age-group thing; to him a race is a race. Fortunately I win the heats of my next two races, giving the appearance of really winning. James offers a thumbs-up.

  As I stand behind the blocks for my last race, an older woman walks past in her black and neon-green tank, two children in tow. “Mommy’s about to race, honey.”

  It dawns on me why I am the only one in my age group. All the other thirty-five-to-thirty-nine-year-old women are pregnant, breastfeeding, or chasing toddlers. I cross my arms over my chest. I think the old thought: I have to start thinking about babies. Then: What do I think of babies? I think of being warned about performance-enhancing drugs twenty years ago and being encouraged to take them now. Of ovarian dysfunction at eighteen and now, at thirty-eight. How my body understands time better than my mind does. Then I think: This will be my final meet.

  When we leave the pool, James strolls toward the car like a man who has just sat through an interesting lecture and is now peckish. There are no cartoon hearts popping out of his eyes, just a distracted practicality. On the drive home, fishing for compliments, I remark that I’m surprised my times were that fast, considering I hadn’t really been practicing and I felt so crummy in warm-up. “Well,” James says absentmindedly, glancing in the side mirror, “I overheard someone in the stands say they wondered if the pool was short.”

  I stare hard out the window. James notices.

  “What? Sweetheart . . . was that a big contest?”

  • • •

  A contest. I stifle a smile out the window and my pride thins. It won’t matter to James if I’m fast or not, a good swimmer or not. It’s the last thing he’ll be impressed by.

  PIÑA COLADA

  Nina and I sit under a beach umbrella, two piña coladas in. I’ve just finished describing to her how easily I develop crushes, using as an example the man in the waiting area at the airport who boarded the small plane after us and who, before takeoff, declined my offer of an organic macaroon, explaining that he did not eat sugar. I am extolling the virtues of such crushes, that women need muses too, need to get a little carried away by the physical, the way men always have been, that though you have no idea who these people are, do not act, and will never see them again, there are those thrilling minutes when you know your body with every cell and yet don’t know yourself, when you imagine the people in your life don’t matter and you would give everything up. Nina barely noticed the man, while I was gulping reality down with my bottled water, afraid to turn around, fearful that James, two seats away and three years into our relationship, could tell.

  As I tell Nina that I am certain I will never see this man again, I turn to the water, glance up the beach, and suffer the stab particular to seeing a person you are not prepared to see. He is approaching an umbrella as an older couple, unmistakably his parents, make their way toward him from the water.

  “Oh my God.”

  “What?”

  “He’s there.”

  Nina laughs a piña-colada-scented laugh.

  He is tall, thin, smiling into the sun behind dark glasses. Seeing him with his parents is weirdly touching. He looks seventeen.

  I whisper to Nina, “How old do you think he is?”

  “I can’t tell from here. Let’s go swimming.”

  As we pass I hear him speaking authoritative German into his cell phone. I wave a friendly hand, as does he. He looks my age.

  In the water I show off. I demonstrate my smoothest stroking, my most otterlike flips and dives. Nina swims over to some rocks and I do a few exhibition laps along the shore. I see him get up and walk out onto the jetty. He is alone. I swim away from him, willing myself not to swim in his direction, wishing I did not want to as much as I do, astonished at how much I want to see him in the water. I kick farther away and, treading water, watch him swim jerkily around the jetty and then get out.

  Nina is back beneath our umbrella. I swim to the jetty and climb out of the water. I put my goggles beside me as I lie in the sun for a moment, and think about the bathing suit I am wearing (1970s vintage brown zebra-stripe tank, found at a yard sale in South Salem, New York). I have to pass the man and his parents on my way to our umbrella.

  I am halfway down the beach when I realize I’ve left my goggles behind. Ten feet from their umbrella I stop, turn around, and go to collect my goggles. As I pass again, the man’s mother steps toward me. I worry that she intuits my inappropriate crush on her son and now she is going to tell me to step off, but she doesn’t. She makes friendly conversation and I immediately like her. We part, and I wave at the man and his father.

  Back at our umbrella my heart is pounding. I sit and slurp the warm remains of colada in the bottom of my plastic cup.

  Nina turns to me:

  “Well!”

  JAWS

  Quint: Y’all know me. Know how I earn a livin’. I’ll catch this bird for ya, but it ain’t gonna be easy. . . . Bad fish. It’s not like going down to pond chasin’ bluegills or tommy cods. This shark—swallow ya whole. L’il shakin’, l’il tenderizin’, down ya go.

  —PETER BENCHLEY AND CARL GOTTLIEB, JAWS (1975)

  The swimmer must be afforded advantages that only the pool can give; a course of known length, smooth clear water and well-defined lines on the bottom of the pool, ending in distinct cross-markings that indicate the approach of the turning end, as well as distinct markings on the end of the pool.

  —ROBERT J. H. KIPHUTH, SWIMMING (1942)

  The hotel is on the shores of the Bråviken, a handsome Baltic bay in Sweden. In the late-summer afternoon, its dock, a long T shape nudged by motorboats, beckons. We spread our towels on the planks and recline to warm in the sun. The water is green-gray; a strong breeze furrows the surface. James gets in first, and the waves take him quickly down-dock. Looping back, he swims out to one of six bright red buoys running parallel to the dock. He weaves in and out of them, then stops at one, tipping it toward himself to hook his arms over its mast. I watch him from my towel, dry and warm in the sun. As he swims around the tall buoys, I contemplate my aversion to open water. I wonder: How many competitive swimmers like swimming in open water? I compare my comfort in swimming pools to my discomfort in open wate
r and my contentedness with solitude to my anxieties in close company. I think about limits, how easy life can be when it’s limited, how manageable. Limits appeal to my controlling nature.

  I ask other former competitive swimmers about open water, and most feel the same way. My former coach Byron does. His first objection is to the cold, his second to having to look to see where he’s going, and his third he describes as the “What the hell is down there?” factor. He tells me about holding an ocean swim at training camp in Barbados, where one of his swimmers from Newfoundland refused to venture more than ten meters from shore for fear of sharks.

  • • •

  I watch James a while longer, then decide to get in. The water is warmer than the Vättern, a crystal-clear lake we swam in after breakfast. It tastes like diluted saltwater, with something green and mineral in the mix—thin chicken stock from a stainless-steel bowl. I swim toward James, who has let go of the buoy and now circles it. His scale next to the buoy makes me think of the scene at the beginning of Jaws, where a girl treading water is yanked sharply down, then flung violently through the dark water by something gripping her from below. She manages to grab hold of a buoy that clangs as it tips toward her, and prays aloud before being carried off and down. (Derek and I used to reenact this scene in various public pools when we were bored with Shipwreck.)

  Feeling the brackish water shift between icy in one spot and warm in another, I imagine some kind of Swedish megalodon, algae-flecked and prehistoric, that’s swum freakishly up into the bay. I head back to the ladder, get out, wrap myself in my towel and continue watching James swim among the six tall buoys. He looks happy.

  Earlier, driving along the E4 past pretty countryside, I bickered with James about our evening plans and let fly a deep insult, engineered to hurt. Later, as we lay, peevish, next to each other on the hotel bed in our shoes, he whispered back what I’d said. I’d been awful. I’d yanked him down below the surface into my mean, cold dark.

  • • •

  Jaws, the movie, is about a man-eating monster. Jaws, the novel, is about marriage. The shark is a metaphor for infidelity, in the shape of Matt Hooper, a wealthy, scallop-eating oceanographer. As the great white glides predatorily along the shoreline looking for food, the oceanographer seduces Chief Brody’s wife. Peter Benchley describes the (somehow more sordid) act of Ellen Brody’s shaking bath powder into the cups of her bra and her pumps before he details their tryst: a sloshy lunch followed by sex in a motel room. Then he describes how Ellen remembers the scene:

  It was a vision of Hooper, eyes wide and staring—but unseeing—at the wall as he approached climax. The eyes seemed to bulge until, just before release, Ellen had feared they might pop out of their sockets. Hooper’s teeth were clenched, and he ground them the way people do during sleep. . . . Even after his obvious, violent climax, Hooper’s countenance had not changed. His teeth were still clenched, his eyes still fixed on the wall, and he continued to pump madly.

  Jaws, the movie, is one of my favorites. As always, Spielberg casts the spell of suburban American life perfectly. I like his dining scenes in particular: Richard Dreyfuss as Roy Neary, mounding his mashed potatoes in Close Encounters of the Third Kind; then as Matt Hooper, helping himself greedily to the wine and Brody’s leftovers in Jaws; Elliott ordering pizza; E.T. spilling milk. Spielberg’s messy tables and twilit kitchen counters are the stomachs of his players externalized; they expose our own appetites for safety and familial security. Seeing his characters eating anticipates the inevitability of something consuming them.

  While Spielberg’s Jaws is Man versus Beast—not a love interest in sight (the pretty girl gets gobbled five minutes in)—Benchley’s is about Man versus Sexy Beast. In the book, the shark threatens the prosaic town the way infidelity threatens our tidily framed ideas of marriage. It is part of nature, it is painful, it is down there.

  • • •

  One day I watch, in succession, Deep Blue Sea, Open Water, Open Water 2, and Shark Week, Season 6. It is a saltwater orchestra of cautionary tales: Don’t genetically engineer sharks, don’t trust a laid-back dive-boat crew, don’t try to cure people’s phobias, don’t grab a cell phone from someone in the water, don’t try to get a knife off a lunatic, and don’t lie about your wealth. There are a few nice moments: the romantic frisson between two shark scientists; a married couple on a groggy hotel-room mosquito hunt; a husband and wife teaming up against an evil ex. Scenes of marital love seem to set up shark attacks particularly well.

  • • •

  Benchley based Jaws on the theory of the rogue shark—a shark that seeks out humans over its natural food sources—which has since been widely disproved. His novel and his shark loom so large in our imagination because we’re invited to sweep our own dark tendencies under the shark’s great white belly and demonize it. Even Carl Gottlieb, who cowrote the screenplay, ignores the subtext. In The Jaws Log, he writes:

  Another steamy subplot that had been excised in creating the movie was the love affair between the police chief’s wife and the young oceanographer. The sexual tension created by that liaison had been eliminated in favor of a more straightforward approach to the storytelling, an uncomplicated man-against-shark monster/adventure yarn with overtones of social conscience and individual action for the common good throughout.

  • • •

  Every summer, James asks me the same question: Why am I so fearful of and obsessed with sharks? After watching these movies, I begin to think my fascination is in direct proportion to my preoccupation with ideas of sentimental, obsessive, unrequited, and true love. The hopes and dreams I’ve held around love have an oblique counterpoint. My dread of sharks is my fear of loneliness, vulnerability, violence at the hands of something physically stronger, unemotional (and hungry). Also in the wings is the fantasy of submission, the danger of longing to be consumed by something strange.

  Shark attacks are anthropomorphized crimes of passion, even divorce. The negative appetites that are attributed to sharks—greed, compulsion, cold-blooded ambition, violence, gluttony—are human vices. We all have savage sides and gaping maws, we all are capable of eating and being eaten. Even the language of love is destructive: Love will tear us apart. First the crush, being swept away, inflamed, devastated, consumed. L’il shakin’, l’il tenderizin’, down ya go.

  • • •

  Simply admitting that you’re looking for love means accepting that you want to enter something that can bear you up and break your heart, means disrobing and getting in.

  In giving up the laps, the control, and the reward system that swimming used to represent, I know that I should do the same with my marriage; that as much as I need to maintain it and pay attention to its currents and riptides, it’s not something to win, not a course of known length with smooth, clear lanes. It is my small, open body of water, and if I’m careful, it may sustain me.

  James and I spend a couple of nights in Prouts Neck, Maine, in a house once owned by Winslow Homer. Like Edward Hopper and Andy Warhol, Homer began his career as an illustrator, then moved on to the deeper wells of fine art. I think of illustration as a version of what we understand already, and in most cases we choose to be attracted to and see, whereas art reveals something we haven’t yet seen, that hasn’t yet been articulated, at least not in a familiar way.

  Much of Homer’s work hews to the conventions of illustration, but it gets interesting, to me, when it includes sharks. Next to his seaside pastorals and rocky shorelines, his fisherwomen and bathers, his few shark pieces stand out. In The Gulf Stream, painted in 1899, a lone black sailor reclines in a keeling boat, circled by sharks, a hurricane approaching, a frigate in the distance. Sharks (The Derelict), painted fourteen years earlier, shows a listing empty boat beset by writhing sharks, one of which, belly exposed, tips the boat precariously.

  Both are strange, dreadful images, one of a man stuck between unlikely salvatio
n and gruesome death, the other of a lonely hull left to the ravages of nature. The weirdly passive and aggressive postures of the sharks in Sharks resemble the hapless orphan boy and the predator in Watson and the Shark, John Singleton Copley’s dramatic 1778 depiction of Brook Watson, a fourteen-year-old crew member of a trading ship being attacked by a shark as men in a small boat struggle to save him.

  Watson is naked, throat exposed, back arched, arm flung desperately toward the men, helpless and doomed. You see the desperation in the eyes of his rescuers, the cold gaping mouth of the shark, teeth glinting. Watson’s posture is vulnerable and sexually ecstatic. (In the end, Watson lost part of his right leg, but survived to become Lord Mayor of London in 1796.)

  Homer’s and Copley’s shark-subject paintings were their most enduring. In 2007, Gulf Stream and Watson and the Shark were installed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art alongside Damien Hirst’s tiger shark in formaldehyde. The title that Hirst gave his 1991 piece is weirdly tender: The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. Like Benchley, Hirst tries to circumlocate the unbearable. It’s the shark that dare not speak its name: love.

  VALS

  BATHING

  The title of the book is Zweminrichtingen: Swimming Pools. A sticker on the back shows that it was purchased from David Mirvish Books on Art in Toronto. It is a pale-green-jacketed collection of black-and-white photographs of thirty Dutch swimming pools by Daria Scagliola, published in 1991. The photos I pause at are of the public pools, built in the 1930s or earlier. They are unpopulated, tiled neatly, signage—in tidy block type—visible at the water’s edge. Other photographs are of abandoned outdoor pools, weeds sprouting between concrete tiles, water levels disturbingly low; it is like seeing a section of unshaven leg, or an abandoned drink. As I linger over these images I think of the ghosts of northern European swimmers and summers past, vaguely of the Second World War.