Swim Bro

You come in dripping from the pool with your hair up in wet dark spikes. You come in with your duffel tucked under your arm, set it on the bench, climb up next to it, look at it, look at me, say, “I guess my bag doesn’t need a sauna,” climb down, lift the duffel, open the door, leave, set the bag against the wall outside the sauna, come back.

You climb up onto the bench and lean against the wall. You close your eyes and inhale, exhale, inhale, hold. You open your eyes and lean forward. You climb down, take the wooden spoon from the bucket, ladle water over the stones, which hiss and spit, and then you climb back up.

Just the two of us in here this morning.

Do I mind if you ask me a question? I don’t mind. 

You want to know if I think your swim shorts look okay. Are they—in my totally objective opinion, as a stranger who owes you nothing but an honest answer—too tight?

So now I have a few questions for you, beginning with: Are we, perhaps, in the lowest of all low-budget pornographic films? Does your duffel bag contain a hidden camera? If so did you sabotage your own mission by setting it outside, or is that subterfuge? Will it now record more artfully, at ankle level and through the smoked glass of the door?

If I’m looking: your swim shorts seem fine. They’re shiny black Lycra and they stretch from hip to knee. You got them at Scheel’s at the Coral Ridge Mall; you were psyched to find a pair in Hawkeye colors. (Yes, I do see the yellow piping running along the outside of your thigh.) You’d been swimming laps in trunks but those caused too much drag ever since you started getting real with workouts: fifty free, twenty-five fly, fifty breast, fifty back, repeat.

I didn’t mean to get into it but here I am telling you not to worry, saying the phrase fashion zone, as in, “I don’t think of the gym as a fashion zone,” saying there are guys at the pool in skimpier suits than yours. “Guys wearing speedos, all the time in there,” I say, pointing toward the pool, though I don’t know if that’s true, because I rarely ever look in the pool.