Pools at Night

(Pool Party, 2010 by Jonathan Wateridge. Oil on linen. Courtesy of All Visual Arts/London)

The doorbell sits on a sandstone wall set perpendicular to the front door which is glass and oversized and mounted on a brass pivot and blends with the glass walls on either side of it. A girl I don’t know and who doesn’t say anything but acts friendly answers the door and I follow her through the house to the back where the pool glows sedately under the balmy summer night sky.

Tyrone is sitting on a deck chair on the other side with two girls sitting nearby. The girls are skinny but attractive, well-dressed, good teeth. House music plays from speakers hidden here and there. I can’t see them, but I can hear the sound swell and recede as I walk past them.

The light refracting from the surface of the pool plays on the surface of Trini’s skin in intricate designs like subatomic explosions. The borders always possess the most beauty and beauty is expensive. Houses on the beach or with mountain or ocean views cost something, because they have access to the border areas, the places where two distinct environments come together and interact. And the surface of the pool is one of these. A membrane between two worlds that defines beauty.

From The Heat Death of the Universe, copyright R. White, unpublished.