The Constancy of Things

I

The first time Anna saw Salvatore, he asked if he could borrow her goggles. She was doing a few stretches on the pool deck, still wearing those goggles, when he approached. Something had fallen out of his swimsuit pocket, he said, and he needed to dive in to retrieve it. He would just be a minute. Would that be okay?

She noticed how tall he was, observed his lean, muscled body and how his dark hair fell in curls on his forehead. “Of course,” she said and gave him the goggles, following him to the edge of the pool. As he dived down through the water of the deep end, she watched anxiously from the edge, leaning over and holding her breath. He seemed to stay down there for such a long time, circling around and around like a shark looking for prey. She was suddenly afraid he would never resurface.

When he emerged, he took in a great gasp of breath, which made her gasp too. He swam back to the ledge, took off the goggles, looked at the name taped to the back, and handed them back to her. “Thank you, Anna Sarton,” he said. “I got it!” and held up a small Swiss Army knife.

She said that she was glad and turned toward the women’s locker room, though for a minute she wondered why the man had been swimming with a penknife in his pocket.

II

Anna’s mother was French. She was 18 when she met the man—just a boy really, long-limbed and inexperienced—who would become Anna’s father. It was the early ’60s, and he was spending his junior year abroad in Paris. They were alone one evening, in the back of a car, when he turned to grab her, somehow accidentally swinging his elbow into her eye, and almost blinding her.

“I just had to look at your father to fall pregnant,” her mother would later say, laughing.

Anna could imagine her mother pinioned on the back seat in the half-dark, her gray-green eyes blurry with tears, and she could see him, too, her father, his long legs stretched out, the shadow of baby Anna stirring into life. This, of course, before the advent of the pill in France.

III

The next time Anna saw Salvatore at the health club, he was swimming a strong backstroke in the fast lane, his arms like oars thrashing the water behind him. He appeared oblivious of the other swimmers and the lifeguard, and of her watching him. His gaze was fixed on the ceiling, and she was afraid he might hit the tiled blue wall, knock himself out, disappear down into the deep end, and she wanted to call out to warn him, but every half lap, he seemed to know just when to do a fast racing turn. Was he counting his strokes? she wondered. When he finished his laps, he spotted her, and in no time he was beside her on the deck, bathed in the winter sunlight coming through the large window behind them.

“I wanted to thank you for lending me your goggles the other day. I’d love to buy you a drink.”

“You don’t have to do that,” she said. He must be at least eight years younger than I am, she thought. Was he even 30 years old?

“I would like to buy you a glass of wine, Anna Sarton. Would you meet me in half an hour? At the café here in the club?”

She said yes, perhaps because he had remembered her name, or because she was curious. She went to get dressed, regretting that she had nothing more attractive to wear than her old blue jeans, a baggy, striped blouse, flat shoes. She had always found it difficult to say no to men, afraid of offending, of seeming stuck up or superior, afraid of being left alone to fall through the air.

IV

As a small child, Anna had had several close encounters with death, and though she did not remember them, she