A Quiet Life (24 page)

Downstairs, there were three pools in all: one for racing, one for high dives, and a dark one—with a net over it—for deep
diving. Swimming classes were in session in the racing pool, and children were enthusiastically receiving coaching. Beside this pool was the high-dive pool, which, with its tiered bottom, resembled a tabernacle submerged in deep Nile waters; and in it was an armada of middle-aged women in aqua suits that resembled life jackets, leisurely moving their arms and legs to music from a radio-cassette player.

The pool for regular members lay beyond sliding glass doors along the high-dive pool, a few steps lower, and at the poolside Mr. Arai was already having Eeyore do some warm-up exercises. They immediately entered the lane farthest from the entrance to the pool, where nobody was swimming, and began practicing. I decided to swim in the lane next to theirs, so that if anything went wrong I could act as their interpreter. The place was off-limits to swimming-class pupils, and it being a weekday afternoon, there were only one or two swimmers in each lane. Someone awfully small, like a child, stood resting against the wall in one corner at the other end of the lane I had chosen to swim in.

I did the crawl to the other end, and slowly turned. The woman who was resting against a lane marker was clad in a lackluster swimsuit, and all I thought of as I swam back was that it must have been the refraction of the light in the water that made her body seem so outlandishly bloated. While swimming. I became aware that the woman swimming was following me. I turned again and we passed each other. And my heart stopped.

I had never seen anyone more obese. Arms and legs, in the shape of two cones attached to each other, protruded from her trunk, which was like a sack of rice. She was doing the crawl, but there was no space between her thighs, and her legs kicked the water like two fingers wiggling in one glove finger. She was
swimming without goggles, perhaps to spare herself their extra weight, and her face, narrow eyes and all, was the face of a plump
hina
doll resting on a triple chin. When I caught up with this fat woman, who was exercising in apparent agony, I felt too embarrassed to watch, right before my eyes, the movement of her writhing legs, which kicked the water but produced no bubbles. …

When I stopped for a breather in one corner of the lane I was in, I saw Mr. Arai nearby, in the adjacent lane, teaching Eeyore how to use his arms for the crawl stroke. He was marking time with a repetition of words that must have sounded pleasant to Eeyore: “Catch! Sweep! Recover! Catch!”—in this order. This may have been a basic technique required of every coach, but the method seemed perfectly suited to Eeyore. Mr. Arai got Eeyore to learn the arm motions in a very short time, and was already trying to make him swim, while supporting his sinking legs. I immersed myself in the water to see Eeyore's underwater movements. Gently, softly, but correctly executing each step. Eeyore's arms showed proper form, as they caught, swept, and recovered. With Mr. Arai directing him, Eeyore was able to effortlessly touch the floor with his feet, after which he composedly took a deep breath and waited for Mr. Arai's next instruction. …

Mr. Arai then had Eeyore clasp between his thighs a pair of cylindrical Styrofoam floats, and made him swim on his own. Father once got him to try this method a long time ago. As I remember, he made Eeyore use a kickboard, but because Eeyore's thigh muscles weren't strong enough to keep it between his legs, the board slipped out and burst to the surface from under the water. But the device Eeyore was using now—two round cylinders joined together—was entwined, as it were, around his thighs, enabling him to paddle the water, and advance about two meters; and for the first time in his life, his
body sank diagonally. Mr. Arai was waiting for him, and supported his torso. Eeyore spit out some water, and though he was coughing, he appeared excited at what he had accomplished. Mr. Arai was saying something to him, patting his soft, white back. He then turned straight toward me, as if to say he had known all along that I'd been watching, and called out, “Thirty minutes is enough for the first lesson. Let's go up to the drying room and discuss our future lesson plan there.”

Mr. Arai himself had been vigorously moving about in the pool, but his voice was clear and bright, without the slightest panting. Eeyore had already become his ardent admirer, and was firmly nodding his head. …

Eeyore and I sat side by side on the lower of the two tiers that lined the walls of the wood-paneled drying room. Eeyore hadn't worked out so vigorously in ages, and so he was pale with tension, yet the same tension was already beginning to ebb and leave an unusual expression on his face. Tired as he was, he kept his neck buried in his thick, round shoulders, and I could see that he was pleasantly savoring the aftertaste of a good workout.

Mr. Arai, his upper body looking as though he were wearing armor made of muscles, continued to sit straight on the tier along the adjacent wall, beside the floats he had let Eeyore use, and some other training gear that he had placed next to himself. A girl, who could have been on a university swimming team, apparently someone he knew, came down from the direction of the locker room and gestured a friendly greeting to him, but he ignored her and maintained an expressionless countenance that seemed almost cruel.

It was only after Eeyore had fully recovered from the fatigue of the swim, the cooling-down exercises after it, and the walk up the winding stairway from the pool, that Mr. Arai broached with us the plan he had for Eeyore's lessons. Such
thoughtfulness from a young man—whose body was that of a diligent athlete, but whose neck on up resembled a cross between a young boy and girl, the type the older generation refers to as the “new breed”—led me to embrace a favorable impression of him, as did his way of talking to Eeyore, as men of the same generation would talk. They may, in fact, have been the same age.

“Can you come every week?” he asked. “The same day of the week, and at the same time? Practice for half an hour each time, for five sessions, and you'll learn how to breathe, and then be able to swim the whole length of the twenty-five-meter pool. You're good because you're not afraid of the water, and you follow directions well.”

“Yes, I followed directions well!” Eeyore replied, lending an attentive ear so as not to let even one of Mr. Arai's words slip by.

“He's never been told after physicals that he has a heart problem, has he?” Mr. Arai asked me.

“He has epileptic fits …,” I said, “but there's nothing wrong with his heart. And his epilepsy isn't all that bad, either. The fits last about thirty to forty seconds. He gets delirious then, that's all. It could be dangerous if it happened in the water—if he were alone. …”

Mr. Arai listened attentively, but twice the girl sitting next to him made a strange burplike noise. Alarmed, I turned to look up at her, and realized that she was stifling her laughter each time I said epilepsy. I let my eyes fall from her sweat-beaded face to her full, spindle-shaped, gloriously suntanned thighs. Then I resumed looking at my own plain white thighs, which were like sticks and weren't even starting to perspire. Although Mr. Arai certainly needed to explain his instruction schedule to me, I felt that he was being unfair to the girl, ignoring her as he was, talking only to Eeyore and me.

“All right, then,” he said, “let's swim together every Saturday, from three. For thirty minutes. I'm always free then. … All right?”

“All right. That's three to three-thirty, thirty minutes.” Eeyore replied, happy with the recurring numbers.

“How should we pay you for the instruction?” I asked.

“Please don't.” Mr. Arai said. “I'll be doing it for my own pleasure.” The girl with the spindle-shaped thighs, the color of persimmons with a strong reddish tint, again made a burp-like noise—which this time, I thought, was a warning to Mr. Arai to think twice.

“That's very kind of you,” I said, “but you're going to coach my brother, which isn't easy. …”

Just then, the man opposite us, who had been lying on the tier like an inanimate object, with a towel over his head and face, and was profusely perspiring from his armpits, crotch, and everywhere—the perspiration spattering on the floor—raised his upper body to sit up.

“Never mind the fee,” he said. His moonface, which had lurried beet red, was smiling at us, and he didn't bother to wipe the beads of sweat that were dripping from his flat pug nose. “Mr. Arai works here part-time, but he has Saturdays free. What he does all day Saturday is kill the body with training. Some light coaching should do him good, help him get his kinks out.”

Mr. Mochizuki of the Social Committee! Phis man had been lying in the drying room with a towel over his face long before we had come in. His appropriate counsel had therefore come after he had heard everything Mr. Arai had said and duly sized up the situation. Addressing the huffed-up girl who was sitting beside Mr. Arai, Mr. Mochizuki said, again with a smile, “Training now, Mika-chan? Or will you be teaching beginners?” The girl completely ignored him, but he retained his
friendly countenance, and positioned himself to lie down again when the two doors of the room simultaneously opened. Three or four people, the unusually fat woman first, entered through the door from the pool. Four or five men entered from the door to the locker rooms. Mr. Mochizuki was roughly restrained from lying down hy a diminutive man with a mustache.

“My, oh my, Mr. Mochizuki!” the man said, with an effeminate hut sharp tongue. “Do your lying elsewhere! Can't you see this place is getting crowded? Go get yourself some exercise. Swim. Do something. It's not. good for you to just drip with sweat. It's bad for the body.”

“I wonder why,” Mr. Mochizuki said, as he sat up again, looking apologetic but still smiling.

The mustached man, who spoke the way women do, then said to the fat woman, “Mrs. Ueki, have you gotten rid of some of your weight? You'll be disqualified as a woman if you don't get some of that blubber off you!”

“That's going a bit too far. Such insensitivily!” was the sentiment that seemed to unite everyone in the drying room. Eeyore, ill at ease, also hung his head down. But Mrs. Ueki herself firmly nodded back, and didn't seem to take any of it very personally. The room was soon filled with conversation, but Mr. Arai clammed up, hugging his knees, which he had pulled up to his chest.

Mr. Arai's behavior was not, however, something that surfaced above the fresh atmosphere of the room, which was now full of people. In the middle of the room was a metallic barrel-shaped device filled with black stones that radiated heat—a heat source for sauna effects. I think—and a woodwork frame enclosing it. There was also a narrow space between the frame and the tiers, where we were seated. Some people started warm-up stretches and what not. One man even lay flat on his
back on the floor right in front of our eyes. He then crossed his feet, brought them to his abdomen, and assuming the form a genie would take when entering a bottle, started spinning his ankles. Having to bear this sight right before his eyes, Eeyore turned to me with a grin, a reserved one, which seemed to say, “Spare me!”

“Well, Mr. Arai has some more training to do,” Mr. Mochizuki said to Eeyore, standing up. “Let me take you to the locker room now. You can take a bath, or get warm again in the sauna room there, and get dressed.”

The place where Mr. Mochizuki had been sitting was wet, as though he had violently emptied a bucketful of water. Yet even while he was perspiring so profusely, he had been mindful of Eeyore. Realizing that Mr. Mochizuki was trying to help us newcomers, the effeminate mustached individual stopped needling him and sent us off with caring eyes. This was most likely the result of Mr. Osawa having done a lot of spadework, talking to people whenever he could, in the lobby or in the locker room, to ensure that things went well for Eeyore.

I took a quick bath and, without even drying my hair, went out into the lobby to carefully watch the entrance to the men's locker room. Before long, Eeyore spiritedly emerged from the swinging door that Mr. Mochizuki had pushed open for him. He courteously bowed to Mr. Mochizuki, who went back into the sauna room. To celebrate Eeyore's success at his first swimming lesson, I got each of us a can of hot black tea at a vending machine, and we drank together.

Just as we reached the bottom of the stairs of the club building, about to walk to the station, Eeyore made a bombastic gesture with a strained effort to stifle his joyous surprise. In the already fallen dusk, through the wide windows facing the sidewalk, we saw the glimmering swimming pool on the
first floor of the building. Lessons for adults had already started in the large pool, but some of the lanes bad starting blocks with signs reading
TRAINING LANE
on them for regular members who had their own training regimens. In one of them, a swimmer with the entire lane to himself was fiercely practicing the breast-stroke. For every lap he did, he moved a float on the marker, which may have been bow he calculated the distance he swam. Alter a minute's interval to catch his breath, he savagely plunged his shoulders into the water, and again pumped away. His shoulders split the water, and his wet muscles glittered like those of a marine animal. Eeyore quickly noticed that this merman was none other than Mr. Arai.

Eeyore and I leaned against the steel sash of the glass window and rapturously watched Mr. Arai and the shimmering water around him, which mirrored the swimming pool lights. He repeatedly went through the motion of hugging the water with a menacing force, and when he raced to the end of the lane near where we were watching him, he stopped, heaving his shoulders to catch his breath, like an ailing man, and moved one float on the marker as though he were rolling a log. Yet the strength of his legs—which you saw each time he immersed his whole body in the water, kicked the wall, and sprang off—was alien to the controlled, graceful beauty you saw in a young athlete. It was even coarse, and savage. … It didn't communicate the wholesome joy you feel when you see an athlete in motion. You felt more as though you had been made to witness a self-flagellation. I suddenly understood what “killing the body” meant, which dampened my spirit.