Nesha knew which hotels had good pools. Margie had never failed to complain about the rooms but he didn’t care about where he slept, as long as the pool was deep and long. Well, he didn’t have to worry about Margie anymore; let a new husband have the pleasure.
On such short notice he couldn’t call around for information and had to settle for whatever there was. Late that evening, long before he would be able to sleep, he visited the indoor pool in the bowels of the hotel. The place was candy-coloured, pastel green and yellow and pink, perhaps to make one forget it was a basement. And the pool wasn’t what he was used to — he took in the trendy, impractical curve — but it would do. He needed his swim the way some people needed drugs or TV — to obliterate the world, to blank out a mind that ran the same murderous pictures over and over.
Unwilling to let the old newsreel begin, he let the water take him over. He luxuriated in the kiss of the water as he plied an easy graceful breast-stroke down the middle of an empty pool. His mother wept soundlessly, her long hair unravelling from the bun. Dust whorled into the air, hid the sky. But Nesha turned away. He let the green-yellow-pink of the pool take him somewhere simpler, somewhere on a different page of history in a different millennium. This must have been the very first stroke, he thought, when hyphenated creatures slid through the primeval oceans before memory, troutlizards and carp-toads and semi-dinosaurs, this stroke where the arms pulled the body forward by pushing the water down and away, laying open a channel as welcoming as a lover. This stroke could be sweet and soothing under an ancient sun, a movement so natural you could almost sleep in it. Suddenly the dust sifted down, down, the sun blazed a path through the dust until it became a cloud of smoke, a plume of fire in the little wooden synagogue of his nightmare. Nesha shook his head. He needed something faster.
He lowered his head and shifted his arms up into the butterfly, once a knockoff of the breast-stroke, but years ago now, promoted to its own competitive category. And what a category! If this didn’t kill him, nothing would. His hands traced a fast strenuous S back to his hips, then out again, back and out again at a pace that created a corridor of foam. The once voluptuous water was now violently forced open as both his legs kicked together behind him as one, like a primitive tail. He gulped and expelled air in the trough behind the bow-wave, keeping his head low and his body flat to offer the least possible resistance to the water. He didn’t care what he looked like in his goggles and his long hair tied back in a ponytail.
When he had learned to swim, the breast-stroke was strictly for sissies. He had spent more time in the water than on his grades. Even then, young as he was, he recognized the water’s allure: it made him forget. Like the River Lethe crossing into Hades, he learned at school; all would be forgotten on the other side. And what could be more natural. It was, after all, California. It was more like heaven than any place he could have imagined: the brightly painted, columned houses, the high sweeping vistas of the sea, the purple and turquoise and gun-metal of the water, sometimes separate, sometimes all at once, that reminded him he was at land’s end, the farthest point on the continent and a million miles away from the village that haunted his dreams.
Back and forth Nesha swam the length of the hotel pool, the muscles in his body sang with pain and he knew he would have to stop soon. Pretty good for an old geezer, he thought. Forty-eight. Where did it all go? Since Margie left he’d been forced to look at himself and he didn’t like what he saw. He had to hand it to her, he would’ve gone on like that forever if she hadn’t left, then not realized how wrong things really were till he was on his deathbed. Yeah, thanks Margie, thanks for nothing. He didn’t know how to love anymore, she had said. He had no love left. Well, how wrong she was. He could love. What he loved was feeling the water all around him, the water pulling at his memory, submerging it all into a deep corner of the pool. Wasn’t that love?
If he could have done what he wanted when he was eighteen, he would’ve swum. Instead, he studied numbers. Numbers had always been magical for him and it might have worked. But the commerce and finance courses turned numbers into ciphers and sent him down to the pool at the university in search of comfort. After two years he realized he would make life easier by apprenticing himself to an accountant.
It wasn’t until Nesha was married and a father that an American pup named Jastremski, coached by a breast-stroke champion, shortened and quickened the leg and arm movements of the stroke to come up with unheard-of speeds that smashed three world records. No sissy stroke then. Only fifteen years too late for him. By that time he had a house and a mortgage and several expensive cars to support. The breast-stroke became part of those deepest-sleep dreams that dissolve upon awakening.
In his heart, his painfully ledgered accountant’s heart, he had always known there would be a day of reckoning. It was a matter of checks and balances, credit and liability. He had played with numbers long enough to know they were the only things you could count on.
After twenty years of marriage, Margie came to him and told him that she wanted to live. A man courting death had no use for love, she said, and love was what she needed. Once Margie left, he realized that the only reason he was getting up each morning to go to work was that he’d done it the day before. One morning he went to a Y instead. He reacquainted himself with the breast-stroke and found to his relief that like old friends, they were still compatible.
His partners noted his tardiness at work. Clients were starting to complain. Mr. Malkevich was not paying as much attention to their financial affairs as he used to, he wasn’t available when they called. After so many years with their company, did they deserve such treatment? There were other firms who would be happy to get their business.
When Nesha showed no signs of “snapping out of it,” the partners offered him a deal. They knew about his wife and his tragic past but they couldn’t really understand what was going on. He knew they were much relieved when he accepted the deal even though they had to buy him out.
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