intermission
MARCH 2024
Municipal baths, she called it. It has the ring of something ancient or at least British, stone and limestone, someplace people gather naked and gossip. I was thinking of the opening scene of Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing, in which half the cast leaps from a shared public bath for their linens and their whites, giddy and innocent, trumpets announcing the approach of handsome soldiers, and their bare butts show, and when I was little my parents made me cover my eyes. Baths: sexy! And also collectivist. A dangerous, if rare, combination.
If you want it to, this term describes Barton Springs, Austin’s answer to Branagh’s Messina. It’s a natural spring that looks more like a small river without a current, hugged on either side by grassy knolls, with a view of the Austin city skyline due north. It’s free before a certain hour in the morning, and free after a certain hour at night. You run into people there, as in Prospect Park, only in bathing suits. “Sometimes people take their swimsuit tops off,” my friend, a native, promised me. “Sometimes on the full moon they have special night swims.”
I had landed in Texas only the afternoon before. That morning, we’d gotten up before the sun and driven to Barton Springs with our swimsuits on under our dresses. The sky was gray and the air was cool, making the water inhospitable at first, then gradually warmer-feeling than the air. Cally and I swam slowly from one end of the springs to the other; I canvased the crowd with my eyes as I went. It was true the early birds had a certain community aura, though I couldn’t tell if it was the effect of the baths themselves or just shared smugness, alien to me, in being morning people.
The sunrise vibe at Barton was not as loose as the sunset vibe at Barton. The last I had been there, in 2019, it was dusk and we’d run into some of Cally’s friends on the hill, and we changed out of our swimsuits and followed them to a second location and drank vodka mixed with Yerba Mate out of mason jars on the curb outside a Whole Foods. You could say it was both sexy, and collectivist, swimming in springs with boys.
This time it was not even 8 a.m., and I saw what I hadn’t before: the city, the pipes, the little snail racing the waterline. Cally and I debated whether to move him, deciding in the end on Yes. Afterward, we changed in an open-air stall without doors, and I thought again of Much Ado About Nothing, The Swimming Pool Library, the seventies. Our Birks slapped the pavement, waterlogged. “We can always come back,” Cally said, the next time entrance was free.
Five years ago, when I visited San Antonio, Cally picked me up from the airport in a car whose death rattle had been rattling six weeks, her knee up on the door as she drove, talking over it. Texas looked like darkness and yellow lights, swooping past us in a maze of freeways as she looked sideways at me, saying, “It’s crazy that you’re here. It’s just so crazy that you’re here.” We stopped at a Whataburger drive-thru. The spring air through the rolled-down windows was already muggy.
I was in the last term of my last year of college. Cally was in a rut. She had gone through a harrowing breakup and dropped out of Georgia Tech, was taking classes at UT San Antonio which she attended sometimes and without much vigor. Communication with her parents ran thin; money ran thinner. My first or second night there, I saw her fish a twenty dollar bill out of a tin can like a cowboy in a miu miu, I think to buy gas or beans with. She was always laughing. I slept in her bed with her, crouched up against the window. We smoked Mexican weed and rubbed our hair with oil.
One night in Austin, she took an Uber back to her friend’s house and dropped her keys in a neighbor’s bush. The next day, keyless back at her car, we called a locksmith, who told us that in fifteen years he had been completely stumped on only two occasions, and this was the second. Then he took pity on us and drove us to the Greyhound bus station. The air conditioning was broken on the ride back to San Antonio. “It’s so hot,” I said, and Cally said, her eyes glued to the window, “Yes, it’s hot.” I took a horrible little nap and she told me later that she stared out the window the entire two hours, too angry even to sleep.
But back at her apartment we were laughing again. She made a pantry pasta and my flight got moved, without my even trying, to the next day, so that we had all night to lay around eating and listening to music and reciting high points from the last twenty-four hours’ debauchery, over and over, so as not to forget. Cally was galvanized, forward-looking. “I need to make more money,” she said. “I’m going to make more money.”
And she did, despite her reservations. Last month she told me she used to think money was spiritually unwholesome, that wanting it was not a thing of the soul. But everything her soul wanted required it. A home, a farm even. Children. Peace.
I was twenty-one then. Twenty-one when I graduated, two months later. I had a narrow idea of what I would do to earn money and no sense of how to do it. Advertising was evil, non-profits were corrupt. Charities were tax fronts. All this is still true. But I have crossed to that other side of knowing it where you don’t let the fact that you know it change what you do.
After three months unemployed in my parents’ house, I ended up working at a jewelry design boutique, doing everything, since only three of us worked there. I worked from noon to five, Mondays through Fridays, and often if the day was slow my boss would send us all home early. The fact that my cursory understanding of history and literature or my limited philosophical capacities were not applicable skills in the showroom rankled me. When I think of my disdain for the clientele—their offhand comments on ‘the homeless problem,’ their exaggerated fear of coming downtown—I am embarrassed by my zealous contempt, and at the same time I’m fond of my younger self for having had it. I wish I were more like her. What I mean by this is I wish I didn’t have to pay my rent.
Even this, I think—the necessity created by adulthood, the lifting of idealism and with it its qualms—is a flimsy excuse for devoting the better part of my days to an industry whose effect on the world I find disgusting, whose stated aim is to rot minds and reduce real people to sellable data and lie. I’m not comforted by the fact that I’m not any good at it, because not being good at it just makes my life harder. It has been my unfortunate realization that there is no quality less attractive in a sellout than self-awareness.
I fantasize, of course, about being more bohemian. Working in a café, a bar. But I’m bad with money, and the idea of making any less of it than I do now has become untenable. I used to make none of it—in a way this was a purity—but back then I lived in Portland and it didn’t matter. My rent was $550. I had four roommates. Swam often. Was aimless, could afford to be. At twenty-two, working in the jewelry shop, I met a man whose meeting me I look back on as a sort of trap door, snapping open under my feet and sending me down a rabbit hole, willingly, into an alternate reality from which I would emerge bruised and different and worst of all, older. But it wasn’t an alternate reality. It was this one. It wasn’t a rut. It was just my life.
When I visit Cally now, I can feel that we are not twenty-one. We tire earlier, get less drunk. Once, when I stayed with her, the view from her bedroom window was of a hornet’s nest attached to the upper right corner, the hornets’ grim, bloated bodies crowding the glass. Twice it was of a parking lot, which is not to say that mine, now, is much better, but that hers is—green and blossom. She has her own place. She drives a nice car. She lives in Austin.
Cally prayed for these things and she worked hard for them and got them. She would not, I don’t think, discount the role of the universe in this. One night on this latest trip, I turned on my back and listened to Cally listening to a Danish astrologer interpret the stars at length, forecasting key junctures for each sign to look out for in April. “I know you don’t believe in this,” she said, scrubbing through the video, “but it might be helpful anyway.” And I said that I would like to believe.
No one is more woowoo than Cally; that much hasn’t changed. That someone whose wisdom I trust above just about anyone’s believes in something, even if that something is loosely pagan and firmly spurious, lends it credence in my eyes. In anyone else, I’d call it grasping at straws: she watches the moon, she burns things, she swims naked, she prays at an altar in her room. But everything she says makes perfect sense. And she’s almost always right. “It’s annoying,” she says, “being almost always right.”
She isn’t the only one. “You have been dealing with difficulties,” said a Nordic voice coming from Cally’s laptop speakers. I stuffed Cally’s pillow under my head and turned my back to her, pretending faithlessness. “Secret difficulties,” the voice divined. “Possibly financial.”
Cally is a licensed massage therapist. She soothes people’s pain for a living. When I complain about work on the phone to her, I say the same thing I said when I broke down crying in the middle of a street fair on Atlantic when my parents last visited, that my job is meaningless, that it’s disconnected from humanity, that it’s unethical in the grand scheme of things. When she complains about work to me, she says that she is exhausted in her body and her heart and mind, that the owners of the clinic overwork and underpay her, that she can’t go on forever doing this unless it’s on her own terms.
On one’s own terms. It’s a spectrum. Three weeks ago in Austin, Cally and I had a couples’ massage at what would become her new place of work the next week, a woman-owned clinic with crystals and oils cluttering reception. Everyone who worked there spoke slowly and softly while smiling without irony. In the room, my masseuse asked me if I had any problem areas, and I told her I had a desk job and that she probably knew the profile. “But you’re not a profile,” she said, “you’re a person,” and I said yes, sure, neck and shoulders please.
I fell into an oily, cluttered sleep. I thought about when Cally had said to me, a long time ago now, that after she and Calvin broke up, she slept for a year. For a year that was what it felt like: like not being fully there. I can’t pretend I haven’t sometimes been a figment in my own life, lying awake alone just as I once laid next to someone, remembering whole days and whole nights that passed like Bible passages, changeless and full of plagues. Don’t touch me. Don’t talk to me. Don’t cry. It’s easier than you think to crawl around in the dark.
Cally once told me, “I needed that sleep. It took a long time, but my body needed rest,” and for a period of her life that’s what she did. She rested. This, more than anything, is what I’ve learned from her: there are no ruts, time isn’t wasted; every moment brings you to the next one. That YouTube astrologer said love would come my way in April. I am about to be older than he ever was when I knew him.
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reading list
Nora Ephron, Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women (1975)
Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (1954)
Linda Lovelace, Ordeal (1980)
Beryl Bainbridge, Injury Time (1977)
I remember jewelry store era dori