The Swimmer

July 12, 2021

As summer heat closed in, I started walking to the community pool. It’s small, without the lane lines painted on the bottom typical of community pools. It’s also on the scruffy side, red Southern clay staining the deck the way it stains the streets and sidewalks in these parts, even in nicer neighborhoods. On my first visit I grabbed a broom and swept, it was back the next day. But overall it’s okay.

The pool is a small operation. Usually you see a couple of moms sitting in the sun, a few kids in the water. No lifeguards sit watching for swimmers in distress. The kids splash and play with inflated pool toys and inner tubes, dunking each other, yelling and laughing. It’s what kids do at the pool in the summer. Our grandsons love their neighborhood pool, they’re in the water almost every day.

At times I’m the only one at the pool. I sit in the shade and read for a while then jump in the water, swim a few strokes, and get out. The few other adults who use the pool most likely go because it’s there, something that comes with the HOA dues. They may take a quick dip. No great interest in actually swimming.

Up to around early teens, my brothers and sisters and I went to our community pool almost every day. It was the same for our kids, they grew up spending their summers at the pool. Our Virginia neighborhood pool was and still is a big deal, with lifeguards and a swim team, paid coaches, and a cast of 100 children. For ten years, on summer Saturdays, we were at the pool at 6:00 AM for swim meets. We took lots of pictures, which we still have. Our son swam for his high school team. Then they got tired of swimming and it was over.

For a few years we were friends with other pool parents, or thought we were. We’d sit under the umbrellas and talk. But when their kids stopped going to the pool because they moved, left for college, or just lost interest, the parents stopped going. In time the swim-team kids and their parents were replaced by younger adults, strangers with younger children. Our generation drifted away. The pool was a gathering place, but the gathering just got old. Old, then a little sad.

In 1964 the writer John Cheever published a short story in The New Yorker entitled “The Swimmer,” made into a movie in 1968 with Burt Lancaster. Cheever was known as the bard of surburbia who chronicled, sometimes cynically, the lives of affluent people in affluent Connecticut places like Greenwich and Westport.

Cheever’s main character, Nick Merrill, decides to swim home through the series of backyard pools in his neighborhood. He names his route the Lucinda River, after his wife. At first his wealthy friends, sipping cocktails next to their pools, greet him warmly and offer drinks. As he swims across the neighborhood they become cool, remote, hostile. They remind him of his faults, his failures in life. He stumbles from pool to pool, exhausted, angry, filled with sadness. Finally he arrives at his home, it’s dark and abandoned.

The movie and its haunting soundtrack affected me, all those years ago. The pool became a metaphor for something unsettling. We’re never exactly sure why Nick acts the way he acts. But he and his friends and their lovely suburban homes somehow filled me with a sense of dread. Why I don’t know, exactly. Cheever darkened his marriage and his life with years of alcoholism, in the grim tradition of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dylan Thomas, and others with an acute and tragic sense of the human heart.

We think of the community pool as a nexus of summer happiness, where children splash and play for hours, maybe get a hot dog or ice cream cone. At our Virginia pool the college girls who coached the youngest swimmers took loving care of them, those kids will remember them forever. Adults handed the kids over to the lifeguards and lounged in their bathing suits, lovely or not.  They would have a drink, take a nap, maybe even go in the water. The sun shone warmly. Corporate executives chatted with people who earned hourly wages, although within the confines of pool talk. People didn’t say too much about themselves.

The pool told other stories. Several children drowned over a couple of summers. I heard various versions: the lifeguards couldn’t find them in the crush of kids; they swallowed water and lost control. One guy, once president of the swim team, walked out on his wife and kids. A former team member spent time in jail. Six years ago a lovely young woman, a star on our kids’ team, died in an accident caused by a driver high on drugs.

The walk to our pool here in South Carolina is a long block away, no fun with the sun blazing. As I walk I look at the landscaping in the neighbors’ yards, shimmering silently in the afternoon glare. There’s no traffic, most people are at work or staying indoors against the heat.  Once again, a few moms sit watching their kids in the water, the kids are thrashing around, having a good time. I look for my spot in the shade. I settle in and reach for my book.

We’re a long way from Greenwich, and I wonder why I’m seeing an obscure parallel between the chic Connecticut suburbs, with their sleek manicured properties and lovely landscaping, and our little community pool nestled behind a chain-link fence. But then it isn’t really about pools. Cheever’s Nick, in his place, reminds us that our world is, like his, filled with ambiguity. That is, sunny, glittering, gorgeous, but complicated by human experience, heroic and loving, poignant and sad. The way we see it, or not.