Making A Splash In The City

Seeking to achieve THE PERFECT DAY— and channel the very SPIRIT OF YOUTH and summer—the author embarks on a quest to swim the hidden ROOFTOP POOLS of New York.

- Dwight Garner

When I was thirteen and living in south Florida, I hadn’t yet read John Cheever’s classic short story “The Swimmer.” I’d lived it, though, in my own nocturnal, vaguely criminal sort of way.

Maybe you know “The Swimmer,” or have seen the film version, which starred Burt Lancaster. It’s about a man named Neddy Merrill who realizes, at an early afternoon cocktail party, that he might be able to “swim home”—some eight miles, hopping in and out of the pools of friends. “The day was beautiful,” Cheever wrote, “and it seemed to him that a long swim might enlarge and celebrate its beauty.”

Neddy’s swim starts promisingly. Along the way there are cocktails to consume, friends to embrace, old lovers who might be glad to see him. A few of his portages while in swim trunks—across highways, through horse farms—are embarrassing, but nothing he can’t handle. As Neddy moves along, though, we start to realize his mind has come unstitched. He’s lost everything that mattered to him, yet is unaware. “The Swimmer” is a dark story that I relish, in part, for its reflexive lightness— its hymns to swimming, life’s best activity that doesn’t take place in the bedroom or kitchen. I am right there with Neddy when he thinks, “That he lived in a world so generously supplied with water seemed like a clemency, a beneficence.”