“Rose!” Ian came swinging into the kitchen, shoving his phone into his back pocket, twirling swim trunks from his finger, a gliding, swaying ballet that paused only for the instant it took to kiss my cheek. “Ready to shvitz?”
I shyly nodded. Even thinking of him constantly, I’d still managed to forget how big and crazy his curls were, how thick and muscular his forearms were, how deep the notch ran between his eyes. There was the tang of his smell, and the way he looked at me. It was all new, always.
“This place is a trip.” He unplugged the string of Christmas lights and grabbed his keys from a hook by the door. “Let’s go.”
* * *
—
We took the F, and from the F walked to Coney Island Avenue. The Brooklyn Banya sat sandwiched between an auto repair shop and a Pakistani patisserie, a squat gray box with multi-hued floodlights that bathed the word “banya” red, then indigo, then green. I turned to Ian, my eyes a question, and not a nice one.
“What?” he said, and then more defensively, “What?”
I overturned my hands in supplication. Was he really going to make me say it? If I squinted, I could see the street sign for Albemarle Road.
“Oh, come on. It’s fine. She never goes here.”
Were they teasing me, testing me, was I supposed to act oblivious, was this an offer, or a joke? I thought again of that night reading Angela Carter’s fairy tale, the three of us in bed, the heave of my smoky desire and the ammonia of my panic.
“Shall we?” Ian pushed open the gunmetal door.
I bowed, fake courteous, and decided to let it go. Some people inhabit New York as if it were a series of sealed bubbles: you could stroll a few blocks from your ex-girlfriend’s apartment, and as long as you didn’t have plans to see her, you wouldn’t. People like this believe in the city’s anonymity, its density; they trust it the way a rock climber trusts the rope.
* * *
—
Ian paid my admission fee, and we separated to change. I stripped amid beatifically obese older women and teenage girls furious with curling irons. I’d had to buy a bathing suit, and the one I’d found, amid December’s paltry offerings, was nautical and stupidly skimpy, the blue and white striped triangles held to my chest by a complex system of strings disguised as thick sailors’ ropes.
We met again in the dim, echoey main hall, redolent of chlorine and fried pierogies. Nearly naked couples sat at white plastic tables, men and women alike draped with gold chains and felt hats, eating and drinking beers, sucking on orange slices, calling to their children who ran between the hot tub and the cold pool and pressed their little faces against the glass doors of the sauna, leaving ghostly imprints.
Along the back wall there was a mural in faded acrylics of a Grecian garden, with squarish Greek gods reclining beside turquoise pools, as if to reflect back to us in amateur hands the Platonic ideal of what we were doing. To counterbalance this, a twelve-inch TV bolted to the wall blared a Russian Christmas music spectacular, with a leggy blonde in a sparkly gown and a chorus of children singing through falling snow.
“It’s very…Russian,” I said, tucking my thin towel more tightly around my waist. In his orange trunks Ian seemed somehow even more massive.
He grinned, delighted. “Isn’t it amazing? Let’s do the wet sauna first.”
In the bright tiled room, thick with condensation, there were a few middle-aged men with their heads bowed over their tremendous bellies as if in great sorrow. We took our seats closest to the door, and Ian sighed deeply. Soon buds of sweat bloomed on his thighs, pearls that grew large and luminous before trickling away. My skin, pasty white, welled up tears.
A man dumped a wooden bucket of water over the vent and a wall of steam enveloped us. Ian sat back, shiny sweat slicking him. His curls were slack and damp against his skull. Glistening rivulets ran over his stomach and puddled down to his shorts.
I kept thinking we were going to talk but talking was impossible with all the sweating and sighing. The great Russian men sat like totems around us. The truth was that I hated saunas but I was determined not to flee before Ian did.
“God.” The sigh came from the back of his throat. “I like you so much.” He opened his eyes and patted my thigh briskly, and then stood and pushed open the steamed glass door.
I followed, my heart yammering. Out in the atrium, the chlorinated air now felt brisk. We eased into the cold pool, gasping. I crossed my arms over my chest. Ian did soft, slow breaststrokes in circles.
Not until we had moved to the hot tub did he say, “So. You’re skipping town.”
“Yeah.”
“When?”
“Tonight, actually.”
He laughed, as if at an old familiar joke. “So you’re just, like, leaving. You’re going to move away.”
I nodded. “Pretty much. I got fired. Did I tell you that?” He curled his lips no. “Yeah, I got fired. So. There’s not really anything for me here.”
With an indifference that broke my heart, he skimmed his arm along the water’s surface, watching the chlorinated bubbles cling to his puckered skin. “This city is too expensive anyway. You’re smart to get out.”
The jets rumbled to life, kicking up a white frothy stew of bubbles. Ian slid over to one and let it throb against his neck, vacantly staring up at the ceiling. Somewhere, someone turned on a shower.
He reached out and touched the sailors’ rope slung over my shoulder. “Cute suit.”
The noise of the banya, the wet thwack of flip-flops and echoing voices, receded. I dropped my gaze. “Thanks,” I muttered. Underwater, our legs touched. He slid his foot over mine. His old tricks. He leaned close and gently kissed my temple.
Then he pushed himself up to the lip of the pool, swung his legs around, and walked away. “Be right back,” he called.
I stared after him. How could he give himself so completely, then withdraw so easily? There was a lightness, an emotional agility to him, that I lacked. On the TV, more fake snow was falling.
A girl and her boyfriend lowered themselves into the pool. “Aah, aah,” the girl said, flinching as the hot water lapped her thighs. “It feels nice,” the boy insisted, and they circled briefly before perching opposite me.
When Ian returned he said there was a man who wanted to beat me.
“What are you talking about?” Intrigue curled my gut.
He pointed with his chin, and a man sitting at one of the plastic tables, whom I recognized from the steam room, nodded shyly. He was round and bald, with a white wool hat that gave him a courtly dignity.