Selected Excerpts

L. Debard and Aliette

Lauren Groff
The Atlantic Monthly

He is at first a distant wave, the wake-wedge of a loon as it surfaces. The day is cold and gray as a stone. In the mid-distance the swimmer splits into parts, smoothly angled arms and a matte black head. Twenty feet from the dock he dips below the water; a moment later he comes up at the ladder, blowing like a whale.

She sees him step onto the dock: the pronounced ribs heaving, the puckered nipples, the mustache limp with seawater. She feels herself flush, and, trembling, she smiles.

It is March 1918, and hundreds of dead jellyfish litter the beach. The newspapers this morning include a story, buried under the accounts of battles at the Western Front, about a mysterious illness striking down hale soldiers in Kansas.

The swimmer lifts his towel to gain time, wondering about the strange, expectant trio that watches him. The man in the clump is fat and bald, his chin deeply lined from mouth to jowl. His shave is close, his clothes expensive. A brunette stands beside him, the wind chucking her silk collar under her chin: the fat man's young wife, the swimmer thinks, mistakenly.

Before them sits a girl in a wheelchair. The swimmer's glance brushes over her, and veers away when he sees her wizened child's face, the diluted blond of her hair, her eyes sunken in the sickly white complexion. A nothing, he thinks. That he looks past her is not his fault. He doesn't know. And so, instead of the lightning strike and fluttering heart that should attend the moment of their meeting, all the swimmer feels is the cold whip of the wind, and the shame at his old suit, holey and stretched out, worn only on the dark days when he needs nostalgia and old glory to bring him to the water.

The swimmer is a famous man. He is an Olympian: gold medalist in the 1908 London Olympics in the 100-meter freestyle, anchor on the 4 _ 200 relay. Triple gold in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics: 100-meter freestyle, 100-meter backstroke, anchor again on the 4 _ 200. He was on the American Swim Association's champion water polo team from 1898 through 1911. He is, quite simply, the World's Best Swimmer.

His name is L. DeBard, though this was not always his name. He was born Lodovico DeBartolo, but was taken from Rome at the age of six and transplanted to New York, where the Ukrainians, the Poles, the Chinese couldn't pronounce Lodovico. He reworked his last name when he discovered in himself literary agility and a love of Shakespeare.

He is a swimmer, but he is other things, too: a forty-three-year-old with a mighty set of pectorals, one chipped front tooth, and a rakish smile; a rumored Bolshevik; a poet, filler of notebooks, absinthe drinker, cavorter of the literary type. He knows a number of whores by name, though in the wider world he is thought to be a bit queer, his friendships a mite too close with the city's more effeminate novelists and poets. He has been alone in the company of Tad Perkins, C. T. Dane, Arnold Effingham. Something is suspect about a man-poet anyway, and many of his critics ask each other, pursing their lips lewdly, why he is not in France, fighting for the
Allies. The reason is that his flat feet make him unfit for battle.

And today he is one last thing: starving. Poets and swimmers are the last to be fed in these final few months of the Great War.

The fat man steps forward. "L. DeBard?" he says.

L. wraps the towel under the straps of his suit. "Yes," he says, at last.

Then the girl in the wheelchair speaks. "We have a proposition for you," she says. Her voice reminds the swimmer of river rock: gravelly, smooth.