The Necessary Hate

Leaning back in the rattan chair, half in and half out of the shade from the umbrella, Ian tapped the surface of the poolside table with his index and middle fingers, gripping an imaginary cigarette. Normally, the pool's miasma of chlorine would make him mildly sick; the sounds of splashing and squealing would normally get on his nerves. But with his eyes on Margot, nothing could disturb him.

There were few people in the pool that morning—not surprising since fewer people typically came to the club on Sunday mornings, and the pool was less of a draw at the end of summer, when yellow leaves settled here and there on the water, and the peaks on the horizon wore an early dusting of snow. A thickly-built middle-aged woman was practicing the breast stroke in the middle strip of the pool, near the shallow end. At the near side, children from two different families were splashing, sputtering, crying, playing some game of tag that involved dunking and hair-pulling, watched over by one bored mother sitting alone at another of the umbrella-topped tables, eating a Danish, licking her fingers between bites. Meanwhile, an equally bored lifeguard was perched on the stand, with one indifferent eye on the swimmers, the other on her phone.

Margot was alone in the part of the pool set aside for laps, cutting her way through the water with crisp, firm, precise strokes, her deltoids straining, her back muscles rippling, her legs making steady, piston-like motions, leaving behind a pair of creamy wakes. Between the straps of her suit you could make out nearly her entire tattoo, the six lavender morning glory blossoms and the tendrils of a long, snaky vine.

Ian's mother, sitting two chairs over from him at the table, nursing a cup of white coffee in a glass mug, was studying Margot with almost as much interest as he was. He could easily see why: those muscles and those supple movements were natural objects of admiration. He wondered if she was even impressed with the sight of the full tattoo, after all the dismissive comments she had been making all week when Margot was out of the room, about the supposedly tacky-looking blooms that peeked out of Margot's sleeveless blouses—not to mention the remarks about her slack posture, about her bitten fingernails, about her habit of slipping outside to vape and the sickly-sweet smell of her breath afterward, about her fondness for the word ginormous, coincidentally his mother's least favorite word. All the things his mother had objected to the most—Margot's careless way of carrying herself, and slouching on the sofa, and lazily twisting strands of her hair—were now revealed in their true light, as the repose of a fierce competitor. The way she somersaulted smoothly at the ends of the pool and slapped the concrete with the balls of her feet, flipping her body underwater as she began another lap—that was the clinching proof.

One of the children started screaming, drawing the momentary attention of the woman eating the Danish, but not the lifeguard. Another child was shouting loud enough to drown out the screams. The breast-stroking woman paddled away in disgust. But nothing broke the rhythm of Margot's strokes. Nothing disturbed Ian's pleasure in watching her, nothing vexed his mother's pleasure in watching her. It was as if the three of them were joined in some kind of perfect communion, brought together by the exuberance of Margot's body.

Near the sliding doors that led into the clubhouse, Ian spotted his father, in painter shorts and a polo shirt, talking to a man in a swimsuit and T-shirt. Holding a glass of orange juice, which he had probably spiked with vodka swiped from the now-closed bar, his father was speaking with a lot of animation about something that seemed to interest the other man. But Ian could see that he was facing toward the pool. He could see how his father's eyes shifted between sips to wherever Margot's body happened to be, as she made her steady way from one end of the pool to the other, then back again.

Ian felt a flush of warmth. Finally, he had found a way to seize his father's attention. From the beginning of the visit, he had noticed his father's receptiveness to Margot, and the glint of his eyes on her now confirmed what Ian had come to believe: through Margot, he was becoming a presence in his father's world. None of Ian's missteps and mistakes would matter anymore—the fact that he had changed his major almost half a dozen times, from pre-dentistry, to art history, to criminology, to astrophysics; the fact that he'd dropped out of college to join a start-up marketing CBD-laced chewing gum. It was bad enough that the company failed but even worse that several of his father's business partners lost all of the money he had persuaded them to invest, implying that his father backed the company as well. His expensive stint in a recovery clinic had strained what little relationship he'd still had with his father. But when he ushered Margot into the family living room, all of that had been erased. He had given something important to the family: the promise of quickened life. It was an accomplishment that finally set him apart from his brothers. Robert, the older one, was a junior partner in an environmental lobbying firm; Trevor, the younger one, had recently acquired a patent for an encryption code he developed in graduate school. But they were both unmarried and uncommitted, satellites spinning in self-involved circles, while Ian was just a simple question away from starting a new generation for the family.

He tilted forward now, leaning into the shade, spreading his fingers over the surface of the table. The man that his father was speaking to tossed his T-shirt on a chair and jumped into the pool, setting bubbly waves in motion, bobbing the rope that separated Margot's section from the rest of the pool, but doing nothing to disturb her constant rhythm. Ian's father shouted one-liners at the man in the pool, who spat back cryptic wisecracks in return. But as Ian could see, his father's eyes never left the outstretched body of the swimmer who tirelessly cut her way through the lapping, sun-dappled water. Ian could only imagine the effect she would have when she appeared at today's luncheon in the silk dress she had brought to change into, especially now that his father had seen her in all her muscular, shimmery, tattooed glory. He envisioned a moment of attentive silence just before they all took their seats at the table. Then the communion would be complete.

* * *

The pool was less than twenty-five meters long. Margot could tell as soon as they entered the pool area through the sliding doors. And she could tell from the number of strokes it took her to get from one end to the other. Her body had never completely forgotten the habits of race day, and she ended up about two and a half strokes short with each lap. Though she felt confined by the dimensions of the pool, every time she emerged from the underwater part of her flip, she glimpsed the mountains in the distance, serene in their blue heights and traces of snow. Each time, once she resumed her strokes, she imagined herself straining toward them, reaching above these sterile surroundings to a world of elusive promise.

She had already made up her mind to finish things with Ian before they left for Colorado to visit his parents. There was probably something a little dishonest about joining him on the trip, staying at his family's spacious, overfurnished house, making daily trips to his family's country club. But she had been looking forward to this vacation for months, and she saw no need to deprive herself of a little pleasure in the crisp air and mellow sunshine of August in the Rockies. If she had anything to feel guilty about, she would deal with it later. For now she had golf and she had tennis and laps in this pool, undersized but sparkling and warm.

For weeks she had known that the end was approaching, but it was easy to let one day after another go by, the two of them meeting downtown for lunch, having supper either at her apartment or his, making love in the ways they had prescribed for each other over the past six months, eating separate breakfasts each morning, leaving one person to clean up for the other, with plans for the next night to be decided at lunch. A perfect circle of habit, gradually becoming a dreary spiral of boredom.

When it all started, she believed she was venturing into unimaginable depths of intimacy, which would allow her to be newly vulnerable, making her more conscious of her own secret needs. Maybe that's how all her relationships began, but this one especially because of what she thought she saw in Ian's eyes. When she met him at a Valentine's Day singles party put on by some mutual friends of theirs, she was struck by what appeared to be murky depths of sadness. She went out of her way to speak to him, and his quiet sense of humor made him seem approachable but no less mysterious and attractive. They had left the party after another hour, and by midnight they were exploring each other and tasting each other in Margot's bed.

What she had gradually learned, over six months of increasingly stale companionship, was that the sadness she had seen in his eyes was actually nothing more than self-pity, bottomless self-pity. Apparently everyone in Ian's life misunderstood him. His father and his mother and his two brothers all thought he was either immature or unserious or feckless because he kept changing his career plans, but what they all failed to see was his agility, his openness to new possibilities and new ideas as they arose; it was actually a strength of character, as he had explained to Margot on many occasions, in many different ways, using many different words, all of which meant the same, self-pitying thing.

After the physical excitement of the first two months had waned, she sensed that his attentions to her had something servile in them, as if he had some insatiable need for indulgence and approval that only she could supply. When they had been seeing each other for about two months, she began to notice occasional gaps in the conversation, usually when he was narrating something that he wanted credit for—like something snappy and daring he had said during a college history class, like the strategies he had used to recruit his father's partners for his failed enterprise. Never mind the failure; he insisted that his talks with the partners would lead to success in the long run because he planned to use information he had gleaned from them to start a company that would compete directly with his father's, eventually forcing his father to buy him out. Ian would pause to give her a chance to congratulate him. He desperately needed acknowledgement, and he became increasingly passive aggressive in pursuit of it.

She was actually willing to play along for a while. There was a time when she liked the idea of nurturing him and building up his confidence. It gave her a kind of motherly feeling which she found appealing at first. But the whole act wore thin in a matter of weeks. And then the two of them were locked in a set of self-perpetuating habits. Those gaps in the conversation grew longer and longer until they eventually consumed whole evenings. It wasn't just the fact that Ian needed more and more affirmation, though that was part of it. Mainly they had already used up what they wanted to say. For Margot, no one better had come along yet, but she had reached the point, several weeks ago, where solitude was becoming preferable to a silent companion.

The trip to Colorado confirmed her decision. The weather was beautiful, the leisure was gratifying, but she'd had enough of Ian's family in just a couple of days. Ian's mother was hard enough to take, with her back-handed compliments, her facial tics, her sad attempt to take ten years off her age with lurid lipstick, flouncy tops, and yoga pants. She could be tolerated for a week, perhaps, but Ian's father was an out-and-out creep. For starters, he was an obvious alcoholic. She probably shouldn't hold it against him because it was said to be some kind of disease. But it was very uncomfortable to see him cleaning his guns nearly every night in the living room in front of the television. A pistol one night, a spring-piston air rifle the next, a sniper rifle… Did he actually need to do this all the time? Did guns need that much cleaning? Or was it just for her benefit? The way he talked about his so-called friends was also perverse. He would speak at great length about their physical flaws, and their character defects, and their infidelities, as if he wanted to make himself seem sharp and witty and sardonic. And then of course there were those nightly text messages, which were becoming increasingly obscene.

The trip was supposed to last two more days, but her glimpses of the mountains as she came up for air were making her increasingly restless. As she completed her twenty-fifth lap, she decided she was definitely going to end it early. She would indulge herself a little at the luncheon. With Ian's father pouring the wine, there would be more than enough for her to enjoy a very pleasant buzz. Then that night, when everyone else was asleep, she'd pack her suitcase and call an Uber to take her to the bus station. She'd settle in and wait for an early bus back to Chicago. From then on she would be ghosting Ian online and blocking his calls. Better to make it a clean break.

It would probably come as a surprise to him, but why should it? Like her, he was capable of seeing that their days together had become colorless and dry, like spent leaves rattling in an autumn breeze. She was sure he'd be fine, once he had time to burn through the necessary hate.