Free A Short History of Richard Kline by Amanda Lohrey Page A

the wine soon sent him into a soporific slump. The small talk trailed off into a companionable silence, and for a while we just sat and gazed out at the horizon. After a while I turned to Julie and said, ‘Do you get much swimming in these days?’
    â€˜Not much. If it’s hot, I go for a swim at night, when the kids are in bed, and if Kieran’s home. That’s the best time. The wind’s dropped, there’s no-one on the beach.’
    Swimming in the dark? This struck me as foolhardy. ‘Can you see what you’re doing?’
    When she looked at me there was a gleam of the old mischief in her dark brown eyes. ‘No,’ she murmured. ‘That’s the point.’
    I remembered how she used to wade into the surf at Terrigal, swimming beyond the breakers like a sleek porpoise, so evenly, so smoothly, as if she were in her element, as if she might never come back. It seemed to me then that there was a mystery in her, something unfathomable.
    A warm breeze wafted up from the water and the sky glowed pink at the edge of the roofline. I saw that at night a trance came over these beach suburbs, a subtropical stupor in which all fear, all resistance was dissolved in the warm penumbra of dusk. Nature giveth, and Nature taketh away.
    Beside us, Kieran snored gently on his recliner.
    I drove home around nine, the last glow of daylight rimming the horizon. I wondered if I, too, could live like this, in the suburbs, a father of small children with a sundeck and a barbecue, a double garage and a frangipani tree. These were the surfaces, and then there was the reality. Reality was the man polishing his boat on land and the woman swimming in the dark, but they were a riddle, one that I was not yet ready to unravel. Supposing I were to enter into this riddle? What would it make of me? Who would I be?
    My mind drifted again to surfaces, the form of the thing. I saw my weary commute home in the evening, backyard cricket with the kids at twilight, supper on the beach on hot summer nights, an enigmatic wife who would form the impenetrable substratum of my dreams. This was the core of it. Everything depended on this last figure in the landscape: the woman on the beach. Without her I was just a cog in the machine. And with her? With her, we were mysterious creatures at the edge of the tide: liminal, amphibious, entwined.
    I drove on, into the dark, and felt that I was some great, displaced sea creature, splayed on a vinyl seat behind the wheel of a car; a beached merman waiting dumbly for the next enveloping wave.

    For the next nine months I lived like a monk. I did nothing but work, and for all of that time I was celibate, the longest period in my life since I was seventeen.
    I began to frequent a Korean bathhouse near Taylor Square in a run-down building that looked out onto the grimy columns of the Supreme Court. That bathhouse became my refuge. You went up a seedy narrow staircase and into a foyer hung with paper scrolls; you rang a small brass bell and a chunky Korean who spoke no English appeared, nodded and indicated the change room. Once undressed, you entered naked into the bathing area. This was a dimly lit room with two circular pools in the centre, raised above a surrounding deck of white tiles. The smaller of these pools was a warm spa bath filled with an infusion of ginseng, its leaves floating on the surface, and as you stepped out and down onto the tiles some of the leaves clung to your skin, creating the brief illusion that you had just stepped out of a brackish lake.
    After this you slipped into the larger pool, which was cooler, and bathed until you were ready for the steam room at the far end. At any given time there might be seven or eight men in the pools, some in the water, others sitting at the edge, dangling their feet and waiting to be rubbed down on one of the futons spread along the deck. Once you were prostrate on a futon, another of the masseurs would come and kneel, and begin to