Filed under: Made in New York | Tags: Griffith Park, jackie robinson, los feliz, nadia comaneci, Neal Cassady, olive hill
When Alexandra met Alison’s father, the first thing he said to her was, “I hope you’ve brought your bathing suit,” and this struck both of us as a terribly endearing thing for the gray-haired Englishman to say. Bathing suits for me evoke a quintessential kind of happiness. I love the words, “bathing suit,” but also bathing suits themselves, shiny, stretchy and colorful containers taking the forms of different volumes and not the other way around. I get a kind of levity and joy thinking about it. I have the same feeling when I think of cherries or penguins or drawings of dinosaurs.
I’ve had my bathing suit for years. It’s dark teal like the necks of mallards 
– though, not iridescent — with silver rings holding the pieces together at the hips and solar plexus. But it’s not showy. It may not even be that flattering. I’ve worn it every season meant for bathing suits on both sides of the equator, and now, while surfing for the fourth time in my life and the third time at the Rockaways, I noticed there’s a part that’s worn and threadbare, and I won’t say where. It’s time to get a new one. I might as well also mention that I’ve been wearing a bathing suit more often in New York than in the nearly three years I lived in Los Angeles.
This is because my roommates surf. I found this out two years ago (before they were my roommates). I was living in LA, but 
spending two weeks in New York in my friends’ empty apartment, and the extent of care I owed to any other living creature was water to a little geranium. Simon visited me there, and we made a salad. We must have talked late into the night — I have a memory of Jenny calling, startled awake by some bad dream. He left soon after; it was late and they were going surfing in the morning. This seemed to me, at that time, an extraordinary effort (by which I mean unusual as well as strenuous), getting up so early to drive out of Brooklyn to a stretch of beach that hardly spanned a city block. I sensed then what I can perceive more directly now living with them, that their relationship is borne aloft with remarkable buoyancy by countless, small, extraordinary efforts. And while I stand apart from the source of that buoyancy, I feel its lift.
Cherries, drawings of dinosaurs, penguins and bathing suits are a distant approximation. Surfing comes much closer.
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