Surprised by a Naked Swimmer (after Lucian Freud)
The showers are running cold,
had been scrawled in blue marker
on the white board at reception.
However, until he shuffled in,
clutching a wash bag to his chest,
they were all right – not hot, but warm enough.
Then suddenly they had me in their stranglehold,
like a chilly undercurrent in the sea that takes your breath away;
or an unexpected shudder that’s supposed to mean
there’s someone walking on your grave.
Normally he arrives in the building as I am leaving
and we nod at each other warily.
Today, however, we must have been in the pool together;
and I remarked upon this break in his routine.
To begin with he ignored me,
just opened out his wash bag,
and let it dangle, with its contents on display, from the peg
by the notice that forbids spitting anywhere in the building.
(Use the toilets and blow your nose before you swim, it also says.)
Then, joining me in the cold, he began:
“It’s work, pressure of work.
That’s why I’m here at this time.”
I grunted and continued to rinse my hair.
“Five days a week for the last – what – seventeen years,
I’ve been swimming here,
and I’ve hated every single day
until I’m in these showers.
Then it’s just about all right,
except like now when they bloody well run cold.”
Moments later I saw him
naked in the changing room,
huge gut, like a cliff, above his speck of a prick,
man boobs wobbling and puckering,
as one hand rubbed him down,
and the other used his mobile phone.
“I see what you mean about pressure of work!” I said.
“Not work. The squash club,” he replied.
“If you miss calling at eight,
you don’t get a court till late,
and I just have – oh, well, such is fate!”
He flipped the phone shut.
“I only really swim to cope with squash.”
I wondered:
if he exercises so much,
how come he has such flab?
He sat down and it flopped over his prick.
“No one really teaches you how to grow old, do they?” he said.
“I never thought it would happen to me.
Once you get to fifty, though, that’s it.”
I thought for a while,
in the silence of the changing room,
phalanxes of lockers all around,
with keys on rubber bands and slots for 50ps,
hair and sludge stopping up the drains,
and the remnant of a bar of soap, which I’d been noticing for weeks
lodged in the space where the corner of a tile was broken.
Then I said: “He’s as old as my father at eighty-two,
but Lucian Freud isn’t doing badly, you know.
Did you see his latest painting in the papers the other day,
of a beautiful, naked woman, fifty years his junior,
entwining her legs round his, as he stands,
and she sits on the floor, head yearningly by his knee,
her long, tapering, ringless fingers clutching his thigh?
She’s entrapping him more than just literally.”
I smiled. “The Painter Surprised By A Naked Admirer.
What a wonderful title!”
“I’m not interested in that sort of thing,” he snapped back,
head down, as he dried between his toes,
“I’ve got a daughter of twenty.
My own daughter’s twenty.
It doesn’t interest me at all.”
What sort of thing does he think it is, I wondered,
with a shudder, like I’d had when the showers ran cold?
It sounded like pornography he was rejecting,
or the suggestion that he might be into younger women.
Perhaps now, he would think I was,
like middle-aged men are supposed to be.
I wished I’d kept quiet from the very beginning,
like I usually do and like I was going to now,
for I knew I couldn’t take back what I’d said,
or explain it without getting deeper in.
Then he had on his shoes
and bustled out with a grin
- leaving me as if hung on the peg
above the bench where I was sitting;
for inside my mind,
how desperate he seemed
to avoid my contaminating kind.
Then I remembered showing the article to you,
as we lay in bed together, one night.
Alongside a shot of the painting itself,
there was one of Freud and his nude model,
which looked to have been taken at the time of the sitting.
She was wriggling across the floor on her bottom,
perhaps about to pounce (or was she backing off?),
while he placed a heavily shod foot in the direction of the canvas.
Yet in the painting he didn’t look heavy,
more like a hawk, which had momentarily landed,
and, almost straightaway, was struggling to take off -
sharp-eyed, cannily beaked, with a singular purpose,
the brushes he reached towards, spreading like feathers.
Comparing the two photos, you said,
“Just look how ugly he makes her.
She’s beautiful, gorgeous. The journalist mentions
her delightful orbs, and she’s right,
yet look at how ragged and scrawny he paints her.”
You thought he was boasting like any other stud -
of his attractiveness to even much younger women.
Look, I can’t keep them off. I’m so famous,
such a genius, so personally handsome,
was what you felt he was saying,
the white sheets scattered randomly around,
reminders of her discarded clothes,
or part of a set for that pornographic shoot.
Yet to me he didn’t look so triumphant, or predatory, at all.
His hands were reaching out to continue the painting,
not down to her nakedness, or to touch her hair.
It seemed much more probable that, like a hawk,
he wanted to fly higher in the air,
to capture, not her body,
but the desire that was there,
and their tangled loss of it
(sod what the gossips might aver,
and people, like my fellow swimmer, disavow).
This was why she was so scrawny now:
the sheets were not her clothes, but their shroud,
the look on her that of rigor mortis.
And he must set it down in oils
- this push and pull, this volatility,
this ever-changing world -
and by grasping our mortality
stay within the flow of life -
instead of growing old,
only to curse
the shower running cold.
And if she loves him,
maybe this is why,
and why he’s so alive,
and, now, why I can move,
and feel I will survive.
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