culture diary, day 4

Good morning darling. It's 6:30 in the morning. I'm sitting in the nude in the top floor aerie sipping iced coffee. Very oppressive out, comfortable here with A/C on low. Let me check the weather where you are. Precisely as I thought - 39 and overcast.

***
Emails ahoy, from Monday:

D, if not too much trouble could u pls overnite my swimsuit (hanging in closet). I thought I might hang out at the Red Hook pool one day.

Can't get it out today (holiday)... checked UPS rates [pricey]... O [next door neighbor] offered to take it with him when he goes to work tomorrow. You'd have to meet him in Soho but you'd have it tomorrow... Take the O offer; it doesn't really cost him anything, he wants to do me the favor, and you'd have it sooner. Maybe you could check something else out in Soho to make the trip more worthwhile.

Yeah okay - maybe I will pick it up from O tomorrow - gives me
an excuse to get out of the house & into town.

O will leave the suit with the receptionist... As he is frequently pulled around to meetings he thought this would be simplest. The suit is one of two identical Delta Burkes - closet wire drawer, nothing "hanging".

Note: O works in the Soho atelier of a trendsetting, high-flying, very high-end fashion designer.

I just might pick it up incognito. I can just imagine horror of MJ staffers encountering the horror of a Delta Burke suit. All kidding aside will pick up & present whatever ID is required. I presume my plus-size person will suffice. Fuck 'em.

Proper attitude; just try not to laugh as you conjure an episode ofUgly Betty.

***
It went fine. The receptionist, a beaming young woman, was sweet as she could be, not the evil once-over type, and the suit was in a closed bag. I felt relieved that the pickup went smoothly and that I had escaped embarrassment, ego intact. But I did ride down the elevator with an elegant, soignee executive in a clearly expensive asymmetrically-cut formfitting sleeveless silk print dress and heels. In the lobby the burly male receptionist leered at her approvingly, ignoring me in my teeshirt (Ralph Lauren) and jeans (Peebles), as she sailed crisply out the door all action figure.

***
Afterward I went to the Angelica, the 11:20 screening of The Secret in their Eyes, an Argentinian crime suspense thriller that won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film last year. At moments it had a Law & Order feel and indeed afterward I read that the director also works in the States and has directed episodes. The movie was like a richly elaborated L & O, with all the more subtle themes, nuanced characterizations, and intelligent dialogue. There was an intriguing idea at the center of the movie - that individuals are motivated by a central passion, a driving force that doesn't change, that a person isn't really able to change. A person can change addresses, careers, spouses, and all the rest - but in the midst of all the mutable swirl of life there's an overriding, core passion that the person returns to again and again, is compelled to play out. I suppose I have come to a sense of mine, and that my daily writing, to the beloved, unknowable, unattainable other, is an expression of it.

***
I returned to the neighborhood, did a bit of grocery shopping, bought a couple of bottles of rose from the wine merchant with whom after all the years here I'm on a first name basis, and procured a large cup of black coffee that, chilled with a bit of raw sugar, became this morning's iced coffee.

Then I changed into my swimsuit, which fits beautifully, threw on a tee shirt and shorts, grabbed a towel, and headed towards the Red Hook pool, first time since moving upstate in 2005. I tucked ID and Metrocard in my shorts pocket, thinking that I might take the bus. But I found that despite the heat I was enjoying the walk. It was tolerable on the shady side of the street. I've been missing my conservation area regimen and it was nice to set out at a brisk pace again. When I used to go to the pool years ago we'd drive or I'd take the bus mostly because I absolutely hated crossing on foot the highway underneath the Gowanus Expressway that in its trademark Mosesian brutalism savagely divides Carroll Gardens from Red Hook. But yesterday I didn't mind so much. My head is in a different place. I've spent several years now in the country, know that I'll return there in a few days, and my nerves have been soothed somewhat over time. When I lived in the city I was so stressed out all the time that the filthy, cacophonous, overscale, highly trafficked Gowanus hurdle was just too much for me. Yesterday it was fine. I walked down leafy, pleasant Clinton, waited for the light to change, crossed the highway, passed under the rubbled, dark, pounding, concrete overhead behemoth expressway, and crossed another highway, all in one piece without my heart racing. Then, along a calm if impoverished street, I ambled a few more blocks to the pool.

I recall that they require that people bring locks for a locker, and was prepared to be turned away for lack of one. Lock? said a parks worker. I waved my ID. No, but I have nothing to lock up. He waved me through.

The pool is glorious. It's Olympic size or maybe two or three times larger, I have no idea. It's enormous and the water is a beautiful azure blue. Heavenly. One end is reserved for the majority, that is, adults and kids who just want to splash around and cool off. The other end is for serious lap swimmers - that's the end I like. This summer the middle seems to be off limits, creating a large calm buffer between the two zones (an improvement over previous years, when the middle was for lap swimmers and the enticing, lapping waters of the far end were left melancholically empty - attracting once I saw, an egret, longing and confused).

I slipped into the soft water, with a sense of pleasurable wellbeing that I'm in better shape now than I was the years before. The water was a lovely mild temperature, no shock to the system, and it felt heavenly to be immersed, stretch out my limbs and my body, move through the water at a steady rhythm and pace. I'm not a great swimmer, self-taught with no stylish stroke (I admire swimmers with beautiful, powerful, precise strokes and the ability to cut fast through the water). But I can get from one end to the other, and enjoy pausing for a few moments against the edge of the pool, resting, people-watching, and stretching my legs deliciously underwater.

Such a different realm, truly, to be in the water. I thought of the Bill Viola piece I saw the other day, the languid, underwater swimming nature of those on the other side. Viola has another wonderful video I saw once years ago at the Whitney (my first acquaintance with his work), divers coming up from deep bubbled ocean, bursting forth to the surface, cascading into the air, then returning, diving deep back down.

I felt myself to be in a peaceful, joyous, languid zone as I swam my lengths. But as happens every summer - some kids on the frolicsome end of the pool were evidently getting frisky. It breaks the romance of the azure waves to be interrupted by the loud, flatfooted, megaphone bellowing of a parks worker reading the riot act: there will be no male to female body contact, there will be no female to female body contact... She went through the various combinations, then issued the threat that that all bodily contact, which she took pains to spell out means hands and legs and all other body parts and parts thereof, is prohibited and punishable by a $250 summons - that's U.S. currency, she clarified (!) - plus an, I don't know, lifetime ban not only from this pool but from all New York City pools.

But hormones are hormones and whoever she was yelling at wasn't paying her no mind. So all up and down the pool on either side the lifeguards began to blow their whistles in short bursts nonstop - the signal which means everybody out of the pool, including us innocent (at least in public) adult lap swimmers. It felt like kindergarten for the whole class to be punished. We were all hauled out, and the perimeters on either end of the pool were crowded with everybody waiting for the all clear to jump back in. At that point though I'd swum only 20 lengths and was shooting for my usual 30, I put my clothes on over my wet suit and left. I crossed again under the Gowanus. The temperature at a Sunoco station read 102. A few moments later I was heading up the shady green of pretty brownstoned Clinton Street. I arrived back at the apartment, took a cool shower rinsing off the chlorine with fragrant lemon verbena soap, wrapped a bath towel around myself, filled a tall glass with ice, and poured a delicious Spanish rose. As they say in Argentina, Salud. Hope all is well with you, darling.