Virgil, an aggressively handsome but lackluster insurance salesman, has concerns about his wife. On an unseasonably warm November day, Kathleen has dipped herself into the swimming pool at their apartment complex in suburban Delaware and won’t come out. “The men at Equitable had spoken of ‘episodes’ with their wives, and Virgil worried that’s what this was turning into.
A bona fide episode.” It is around this single “episode” that “The Most,” Jessica Anthony’s spare, elegant novella, revolves. Her previous novel, “Enter the Aardvark,” was a darkly funny political satire that might best be described as unhinged.
That plot involved taxidermy, closeted gay politicians and a stuffed aardvark. The premise of Anthony’s new book had me thinking this would be in a similar vein: A housewife gets into a swimming pool and decides to stay there. But “The Most” is darkly funny in its own way, and in the end is less a comedy than a smoldering, Cheeveresque mediation on mid-century, middle-class disappointment.
Little, Brown “The Most” By Jessica Anthony Little, Brown. 144 pages. Paperback, $18.
99 The novel unfurls over the course of one day – Sunday, Nov. 3, 1957. The Russian spacecraft Sputnik 2 has just begun to orbit the earth, and strapped inside the small cabin is a tiny dog named Laika.
Not only does the dog’s fate seem cruel – fears that it will not survive the orbit will prove true – but the mere idea of a dog in space adds another layer of unreality to a day when Virgil is already struggling to parse the mercurial behavior of his wife. “A dog was up there now, he thought dizzily, flying right over his head, and it was as though everything he once trusted as logical was illogical.” Rather than attend church with her husband and their two boys, Kathleen stuffs herself into her old red bathing suit from college, which still fits despite her body’s post-pregnancy shapeshifting, and heads to the pool.
“The water was clean, like it was ready for her. It’s blue as a dream, she thought ..
. She climbed the little metal stepladder down into the water, smooth and warmed by the late autumn sunlight, and suddenly Kathleen Beckett was weightless.” Kathleen has no particular plan.
She submerges and glides from one end to the other. She studies her painted toenails. She ruminates.
She remains in the pool for so long that her cuticles begin to shred and her hands swell. Virgil and the boys return from church and spy her from the balcony of their apartment at Acropolis Place. Neighbors gape.
Kathleen is a spectacle. No one goes into this “cheap community swimming pool,” especially since it had been closed for the previous two years, ever since the owner drowned. When Virgil fails in his attempts to coax his wife out of the pool, he decides to play golf.
Six months earlier, the family sold their house in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and moved into this shabby, too-small apartment in Newark, Delaware, so Virgil could take a new job. They plan to buy a house, but money is tight, and Virgil is not closing a lot of deals. Money problems are symptomatic but not the only factor contributing to this couple’s malaise.
The bottle of whiskey tucked behind a tub of cooking lard helps, but not enough. Both Virgil and Kathleen harbor secrets, and on this already strange day, as poor Laika is burning up in space and the “unseasonably warm weather prompted everyone to flee the First Presbyterian as quickly as possible,” a phone call serves as the catalyst for Kathleen’s decision, such as it is, to escape to the pool. Kathleen’s troubles might be more accurately described as regret.
A former tennis player at the University of Delaware, she had been good enough to play professionally, and had even been approached by a scout who told her that “she had Wimbledon ‘in her pocket.’” He turned out to be lecherous, but that’s not why she gave up the sport. It wasn’t because she loved her future husband more than tennis, either.
It was because she hated losing. “Marrying Virgil, she thought, was the safer bet. Maybe she couldn’t win, but she wouldn’t lose.
” Now, from the swimming pool, she daydreams about a life winning Grand Slams. This alternative life might have seen her married, instead, to Viliam “Billy” Blasko, her former tennis coach. There is an explosive literary charge to what Billy teaches her about tennis, including a key move that he calls “the most.
” It’s a play that is meant to be deployed sparingly. Viewed a certain way, the move mirrors the very trap that Kathleen currently finds herself in. As this Sunday begins to draw to a close, it’s getting cold in the pool, while “above them, in space, a little Moscow street dog was crying out in her chamber .
.. the harness she wore was too tight .
.. her pulse was decreasing.
Death was imminent.” Will Kathleen ever hoist herself out of this kidney-shaped swimming pool, heat up the chicken cordon bleu and feed this family dinner? Tennis is like a dance, Billy once told her. And this marriage is, too.
But someone will have to make the first move. Susan Coll is the author of seven novels, most recently, “Real Life & Other Fictions.” Modify your screen name Please sign into your Press Herald account to participate in conversations below.
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