It was cold and rainy again, and everyone on the street looked pained. Not Eddie: just being outside was enough to make him happy. The rain fell in icy little pats on his bald head, like some exotic form of massage.
The Midtown Athletic and Racquet Club had everything Eddie’s hometown Y did not—a juice bar, fluffy towels, rows of the latest Nautilus, StairMaster, and LifeCycle machines, a cushioned track, men and women in fancy outfits, squash and tennis courts—everything but swimmers of Eddie’s class, or
even Bobby Falardeau’s; or so he thought, watching the slow passage up and down the lanes. He dove into an empty one.
Right from the start he felt much better than he had in the hometown Y the day before; now he was a fluid being in a fluid medium. He swam for about an hour, just stretching out, listening to the water go by. He barely noticed when someone came up in the next lane, passed him with an easy fluttering kick. Eddie would have let him go, except he was curious about the ease of that kick.
He let loose a little, drew close on the next length, cruised half a body length behind, studying the other man’s technique. Not bad: he was swimming about fifteen stroke cycles per length, riding high in the water, keeping his head still; and he had that easy kick.
Eddie swam on, losing himself in the water, forgetting the other man. Forgetting, until the other man shot by him, passing him again. Shot by. And not because of an increase in arm speed. The other swimmer had decreased his arm speed, if anything; it was the underwater acceleration he’d speeded up.
Eddie did the same thing, felt himself surge. He was swimming beautifully, skimming, fluid and strong and fast. But the other swimmer drew farther and farther ahead. After three more laps, Eddie had lost sight of him. In ten more, he passed Eddie again. Eddie climbed out of the pool on his next touch.
The other man swam another lap, then fell back in the water, stretching. He looked up at Eddie and smiled. He was very young.
The young man climbed out, pulled on a Columbia sweatshirt. Columbia. Eddie didn’t remember it as a swimming power.
“You must have been really good,” the young man said. “Where’d you do your swimming?”
“Alcatraz,” Eddie replied. He’d learned something: It mattered whether JFK was alive, and where he was. It mattered a lot.
He went into the weight room. Eddie always started at the squat bar, but a woman in sheer tights and a pink leotard was there already. He waited until she finished her set and hoisted the bar back on the rack. She’d been lifting fifty pounds. Eddie
added four hundred more, got under the bar, set his feet, got his grip, shouldered the bar, squatted, thrust himself back up. Usually he did three sets of ten, sometimes four. Today, feeling strong, he knew he could do five or even six. But after just that one lift, he lowered the bar back in the rack. He didn’t want to lift. Lifting was for making time go faster, a prison thing. Why would he want time to go faster now? He was free, free not to do something a little too much like breaking rocks in the hot sun. He walked away from the bar.
The woman in pink was chalking her hands and watching herself in the mirror at the same time; she was watching him too.
Eddie went into the showers. He was drying himself with one of the fluffy towels when he saw a sign: Steam bath: Co-Ed—Please Cover Up. He wrapped the towel around himself and went in.
Eddie had the steam bath to himself. It was small, with wooden benches lining three sides. He sat at the back, leaned against the tile wall. Steam hissed out of a nozzle in one corner, filling the room with wet heat, wonderful wet heat that reminded him right away of the shed by the red clay court.
I need more memories, he thought. He got hotter; sweat poured off him. Eddie forgot about the shed and simply felt his body relax, relax as though gravity had failed and all the muscles, ligaments, and tendons could finally stop straining to hold his bones together.
“Tell me your plans,” El Rojo had said.
And he’d answered, “A steam bath. After that I’d only be guessing.”
There was nothing wrong with the steam-bath part. It was a good plan. He wished he’d carried it out sooner. As he sweated he imagined that all the foulness, dirt, and corruption of the past fifteen years was seeping out of him, leaving him clean, pure, untouched.
Time passed. A man with a sandy mustache peered through the window of the steam-bath door but didn’t come in. Eddie grew thirsty, but he was so calm, so detached from everything outside that steam bath, that he made no move to leave. Even his thirst was strangely pleasant, perhaps because he knew he
could slake it at will. Slake: he liked the word. It had lake in it, so it meant an endless supply of drinkable water. It was also good for rhyming.
With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
We could nor laugh nor wail;
Through utter drought all dumb we stood!
I bit my arm, I sucked the blood,
And cried, A sail! a sail!
Arm biting, bloodsucking: Eddie had seen crazy things like that. He was remembering some of them when the door opened and a woman with a towel wrapped around her body materialized in the clouds of steam. She sat down on one of the side benches, sighed, and leaned her head against the wall.
The woman had a trim body, nicely cut hair, cool blue eyes. Because he didn’t think New York was the kind of place where you ran into people you knew, and because she wasn’t wearing her tortoiseshell glasses, it took Eddie a few surreptitious looks before he was sure he recognized her: Karen de Vere.
“Hi,” he said.
She gave him a cold glance, said nothing.
Karen? Miss de Vere? He wasn’t sure of the proper form. Ms. de Vere?
Ms
. sounded funny to him; he’d never used the word in conversation and it brought to mind eye-rolling black servants in old movies, but he had a hunch it was the right choice.
“Ms. de Vere?”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re Karen de Vere, aren’t you?”
She squinted at him. “Do I know you?”
“Ed Nye. Jack’s brother.”
“Oh, my God. I’m sorry. I’m blind as a bat without my glasses.” Her towel slipped slightly, exposing the tops of her breasts. She hitched it back up.
“Jack’s a member here, isn’t he?” she said.
“Yes.”
“I never see him. I do aerobics and he’s into squash. The two crowds don’t mix. I suppose you’re a squash player too.”
“No,” Eddie said, trying to imagine Jack on a squash court.
Even with the added weight, he’d probably be good. There wasn’t a game he couldn’t play.
Karen was starting to sweat too. Her skin shone; a drop rolled down her neck, disappeared between her breasts. Her eyes went to the “Yeah?” tattoo on Eddie’s arm, then up to his face.
“What do you do to keep in shape, Eddie?”
“Swim.”
“Do you belong to a place like this in Albany?”
“Albany?” said Eddie, and then remembered. “I use the Y.”
Karen’s towel slipped again. This time she didn’t bother adjusting it. “What do you do up there?”
“Nothing too hard,” Eddie said. “Just stretching out a little.”
She laughed. “I didn’t mean in the pool. I meant for a living.”
Why not tell her the truth? Eddie thought of a reason immediately: Jack did business with her, and knowing his brother was an ex-con might give her second thoughts, especially if Jack had spun some cover story about him last night. On the other hand, Jack might have told her the truth. “Didn’t Jack tell you?”
“He was very mysterious.”
“There’s no mystery. I’m looking for work.”
“In what area?”
“The junk-bond revival.”
Karen laughed. Jack had already prepared her for the fact that Eddie was a bit of a character.
“It’s tough out there, I know,” Karen said. “Any leads?”
“Plenty. I’ve got friends in low places.”
Karen laughed again and the towel slipped some more. Eddie didn’t think there was anything to it: this was just big-city sophistication.
“But at least you’re taking courses in the meantime,” Karen said. “That’s smart.”
“Courses?”
“That
Monarch
you dropped. Don’t worry—I won’t snitch to your prof.”
“Prof?”
“I had one who confiscated any crib she saw. Like it was smuggled dope or something.”
Eddie’s muscles, tendons, ligaments, didn’t feel so relaxed
anymore, and he was very thirsty. “It’s just for pleasure,” he said.
She smiled. “Dope?”
“The
Monarch.”
“I’m teasing. What kind of
Monarch
does anyone read for pleasure?”
For some reason, Eddie didn’t want to tell her. He could see no way to avoid it. “ ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’ ”
“You’re kidding.”
“I guess it’s just a trifle,” Eddie said, recalling Ram’s opinion; a trifle like “The Cremation of Sam McGee.”
“I hope not,” said Karen. “I wrote my senior thesis on it. ‘The Cruciform Bird: Christian Symbolism, Coleridge, and the Fate of the Mariner.’ ”
Karen laughed. Eddie laughed too. This was fun—fun to sit in the steam bath with this beautiful woman, wrapped in fluffy towels, throwing words around. The man with the sandy mustache peeked through the window again and went away.
“If it’s for pleasure, why not just read the poem?” Karen asked.
“I know the poem,” Eddie said. “It’s just that—”
“What do you mean, you know it?”
“By heart.”
“The whole thing?”
Eddie nodded. She looked at him, bathed in sweat now. “I don’t believe you.”
Eddie could have recited the beginning, as he had for the bookstore boy. Or he could have recited the arm-biting stanza, since it had just been on his mind. Instead, he began:
Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold.
His voice dropped.
“Go on.”
He didn’t want to go on. The sentiment was crude, the comparison inappropriate, applying to Sookray, maybe, but not to this woman.
Karen, in a low voice, finished it for him:
Her skin was as white as leprosy,
The nightmare L
IFE-IN-
D
EATH
was she,
Who thicks men’s blood with cold.
There was silence, except for the hissing steam.
“What does your crib make of that?” Karen said.
“I don’t know,” Eddie said. “I got it to find out something else.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s kind of stupid.”
“I doubt it.”
They looked at each other through the steam. Her legs had parted slightly. Her left knee was almost touching his right. His whole right leg tingled, as though it were being acted upon by some force.
Eddie cleared his throat. “I’m trying to find out why the Mariner shoots the albatross in the first place.”
Karen didn’t smile, didn’t laugh. He started to like her. “There are only two explanations I can see,” she said.
“What are they?”
“The first, less supported by the text, is the Everest explanation.”
“Because it was there?”
“Check. And the second, which fits much better, is the apple-and-Eve explanation.”
“Meaning?”
“Original sin.”
Eddie didn’t like that one. He preferred some of his own devising—such as the Mariner was afraid of sailing fast, or jealous that the bird could fly.
“Doesn’t grab, huh?” said Karen.
“No.”
“I didn’t believe in original sin either for the longest time. My work has convinced me otherwise.”
What had Jack said? She managed family money. “You’re an investor?”
“Right.”
Eddie didn’t see how that would give her special insight into original sin, and she offered no elaboration.
“I’m going to melt,” Karen said. She stood up, leaving a sweaty imprint of her sex on the bench. “And I’ve got to give your brother a call, as a matter of fact.”
Eddie rose too. “He’s out of town.”
Her voice grew sharper. “Where?” She hitched up her towel.
Eddie paused. They were very close. The heat, the nearness of their almost-naked bodies: what would happen if he just put his arms around her? He had no idea. He looked down into her eyes. There was something odd about them, but he couldn’t place it.
“I can’t believe he didn’t tell me,” Karen said, backing away. Suddenly she was angry. “That’s so sloppy of him. He knew this was rollover day. We discussed it last night. This is going to cost—him and us.”
Eddie didn’t know what
rollover day
meant, or how missing it would cost anyone. But it all sounded probable. “He’s gone to Grand Cayman. I don’t know where he’s staying.”
“Thank Christ,” Karen said. “I know where he stays. You just saved him a bundle. And me.”
Eddie was pleased, and more pleased when she smiled and said: “Now I owe you one.”
“You don’t.”
“I do. And I’m free for dinner tonight.”
“Me too.”
She laughed. He felt her breath on his face, cool in the atmosphere of the steam bath. “Pick you up at six,” she said. “Dress casual.”
And then she was out the door, trailing steam. For a moment Eddie was breathless, and not just because of the heat.
It wasn’t until later, in the shower, that he realized what had been odd about Karen’s eyes: he’d seen the circular outlines of transparent discs floating on her cool blue irises. How could she be blind as a bat when she was wearing contact lenses?
18
D
ress casual: what did it mean?
Eddie wandered around Macy’s, checking out the clothes and lots of other things, even trying on a blue blazer in front of a three-way mirror. He noticed stubble on his head. He hadn’t shaved it for a while, no longer had his Remington, of course; that was one of the gifts he’d left for Prof. The stubble had a tarnished sheen. Eddie stepped closer to the mirror, and saw that his hair was growing in gray.
“Fabulous,” said the clerk. “It fits you like a glove.”
Eddie left Macy’s without buying the blazer or anything else, and returned to Jack’s suite at the Palazzo. Jack would know how to dress casual. In the bedroom, he opened drawers full of stuff, better than anything he’d seen at Macy’s. There were all kinds of colors and textures. Eddie had worn denim so long he’d forgotten what matched what. He began putting on and taking off clothes, reminded of a scene in a book about Marie Antoinette.