#129
Late summer, early August. It’s 43C outside or over 110F, and I can’t help but pull a chair under the leafy grapefruit tree in the yard and read until my body rejects the envelope of heat. I put my feet in the sun, so they can brown as if I’ve been on the Mediterranean all these months, but instead, I’ve been using the pool at a hotel in town on Camelback, an older place that has qualities I appreciate. It doesn’t feel like a hotel, but more like a club, one that I belong to, and I’m welcomed into each Sunday afternoon when I arrive. The mountain looms behind it, and the rooms have curved, southwestern-style fireplaces. The main buildings are situated around courtyards with fountains and they only reach two floors. The colors are of the desert, they blend in, but the fiery bits of scarlet bougainvillea and white dots of oleander bring it alive. In the winter months, globes of oranges hand from fifty-year-old trees, and guests drink cocktails by the shimmery cool blue waters.
It’s a fine substitute. The guests, many of the young, wear bikinis that show off their assets in ways that are truly American. Never too revealing, but revealing enough to make you want a little more. They are perpetually hydrated with ice water, and their books are not books, but magazines or, e-readers. The women always seem fitter than the men there. Once I saw a guy reading a philosophy book, heavily tagged with post-it notes, while laying half in the sun, half in the shade. His body showed the signs of someone who cared, but who also didn’t deny himself things he liked — wine, cocktails, a steak.
I’m always greeted by Sara and given the same key to the same locker, #7, and in the men’s changing room, which is perpetually empty, I find plenty of inspiration for daydreaming, thoughts that feel foreign and also close at hand. The products they supply have a scent that I can’t place, but one that I like returning home with on my skin. I take advantage of it all — the well-appointed showers, the towels that are fluffier than anything you can seem to find in any store, and the cedar lockers that keep my linen shirt ready to have a drink after at the bar near the lobby next to the lawn.
Sometimes, I lay there and listen to the conversations of the other guests. I hear them talking to strangers and I try to figure out if they are telling the truth or just the truth that they want to spill. A few couples there for the day, escaping children, they all seem to say. I think about what I am escaping and it’s mostly housework or a dark cool living room or skipping my afternoon out in the garden under the grapefruit tree.
The last few times, I take a book and take it in the pool with me. At its deepest, it only hits my chest, so I lean against the edge and read, sometimes resting the book and my arms along the hot stones, sunglasses on but dotted with specks of water, and from this angle, watch the mischief. The feet that touch each other quickly but purposefully, the hands that idle longingly for one another around the oval of the water. The palms that give the property its name make a crumpling noise in the light wind, and the dry air and sun push my hair more towards blonde. By now, my feet are brown enough to pass, my chest is a little red but dotted with freckles. I open up the umbrella and lay on my back, and think, dream, hard, about each guest around the pool until I fall asleep. Sara wakes me up, she’s going home, do I need anything? And I think about it before telling her thanks for the afternoon of escape. Any time she responds with what I take as a wink, because she knows that the pool is an ideal place to calculate your own personal ways with the world and others, and because I think, she has a crush on me.