Desert

 The room where the pool sits in is very high ceilinged, very clean and calm. The walls are tiled in royal blue and above, the glass canopy arches, rain hits, and diverts from where its gravity calls it. Water in the pool is warm and I want to get in, but my shame prevents me, physically. It is the naturist Sunday Swim at the Arlington Baths, and everyone is naked. From wooden hoops embedded in the roof it is possible to swing yourself across, and several young beautiful people do so, lending a jolly Grecian atmosphere to the Victorian setting; we could be anywhere were it not for the tattoos.

 

I am battling with a curious and vicious sensation; I have come alone, and surprising me is the knowledge that I am in an outrageously bad dream and have come (been stripped) nude where I should be clothed. It is a bad dream. I check compulsively that everyone else is naked, which they are, of course. They are naked but they are not ashamed. Maybe it is that which confuses me. I force myself to take off the sheet and swim a lap; I thought my breasts would somehow get in my way but instead the swim turns me into a seal. Doing backstroke, I make accidental eye contact with the young and handsome (clothed) lifeguard who had handed me a towel mere minutes earlier. Now I am in a different world. I neither avoid nor meet his eyes again.

 

The last time I swam in Arlington, ill-advisedly, according only to my rapid heart, I invited my ex-lover of a year. My friends, enclosed and tumbling in an enormous green marble bath like puppies, tactfully said nothing. It was not her breasts or stomach that I looked at, but her shoulders, which in a Glaswegian winter are potentially more secret. Our bodies unpeeled, and overall it was potentially a good thing that we visited together; from the steam room to the tea-and-biscuits-room upstairs there is a sweet and chaste atmosphere. It has been enlightening to see the range and age of genitals that are not my own, and lovely to see the calves on long men.

 

But speaking was a mistake. There is an orientalist “Turkish reading room” with vague shapes cut into the plaster dome. All events run into one sensuous one where words become less and less possible. Here, I plaited her hair last time. I bring out Desert of the Heart. Here I will learn to escape Eden, to look instead for a place out with goodness or guilt. It must be possible. Evelyn and Ann will teach me how.