Preparing for the Plunge

David Amsden returns to John Cheever’s “The Swimmer” while cruising Los Angeles’s rentable swimming pools.

By David AmsdenMarch 23, 2025

• Memoir & Essay

• Fiction

JOHN CHEEVER WAS FAR from my mind, or so I thought, on the late-summer weekend a few years ago when a heat wave settled over Los Angeles. The apartment I shared with my then-girlfriend had become a kiln, our ancient window unit no match for the triple-digit temperatures choking the city. Waking to damp sheets suctioned to our skin, we lay in bed seeking out a form of comfort endemic to L.A., which is to say we lay there pretending to be different people living a different life. Specifically, the sort of people who had cut whatever deals or corners are required to end up residing in a home with a swimming pool.

“Just imagine it,” I said to her. “Imagine if that was us.”

It was then that she mentioned Swimply, a company I’d never heard of that allows you to rent private pools by the hour. With the fervor of a desert nomad glimpsing the distant shimmer of an oasis, I reached for my phone and downloaded Swimply’s app. Seconds later, I was staring, rapt, at a digitized map of Los Angeles peppered with hundreds of cartoonish blue blobs, each representing a pool that could be ours—at least temporarily. Did we want to escape the day’s inferno by straddling foam noodles in a backyard in the Valley? Or bobbing in an inflatable swan on a modernist hillside terrace overlooking the Sunset Strip? Infinity or black-bottomed? Kidney-shaped or mosaic-tiled? Waterslide or waterfall?

The abundance was dizzying, intoxicating. We opted for the pool in the Valley, where $150 delivered us two hours of a niche strand of ecstasy. Yes, the water was a salve. But the more potent pleasure was one Swimply does not explicitly promote: the thrill of feeling like we were trespassing on a stranger’s property. It was this particular thrill that sparked in me a visceral recall of Cheever’s most famous short story, “The Swimmer,” a surrealist parable in which a man swims home through the backyard pools of his suburban neighborhood. I hadn’t read it, or any other Cheever, in decades. Fairly or not, he had come to be half-consciously grouped in my mind alongside other midcentury celebrants of the male ego—John Updike, most notably—who I’d grown dimly embarrassed to have once lionized.

Alas, heat does strange things to people. As do books. And apps. By the end of the day, I was fixated on a plan to revisit Cheever, to determine how—or even if—he resonated with me today. I would reenact “The Swimmer,” hopping from pool to pool through Los Angeles and reading his work as I paddled my way back home.

¤

“The Swimmer” was published over 60 years ago in the July 10, 1964, issue of The New Yorker. Cheever was then 52 years old and enjoying a level of fame that is unfathomable for a writer today, let alone one known primarily for his short stories. Earlier that year, he had been on the cover of Time, where his wry, lyrical, tautly plotted tales of privileged suburban woe were compared to Ovid and praised by, among others, Ralph Ellison. Four years later, in 1968, “The Swimmer” was adapted into an intriguingly bizarro movie starring Burt Lancaster.

If friends, family, and colleagues knew Cheever as a difficult man who lived on the cusp of being undone by personal demons—his drinking, his repressed sexuality—his public and literary persona would become only more burnished in his last years of life. By 1977, he was also on the cover of Newsweek. In 1979, the year I was born, Cheever won the Pulitzer for his recently published collected stories, in essence a lifetime achievement award. His death at age 70, in 1982, was announced on the front page of The New York Times, where he was described as an “American Chekhov” and seemed assured a canonical perch equal to his primary heroes, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

I first read Cheever as a college student in New York during the late 1990s. By then, his star was already on the wane. He was hardly a syllabus staple, though in a way that only added to his mystique. I can’t recall the specifics of my own introduction because it came via osmosis; most every thirsty reader and aspiring writer I knew back then went through a Cheever phase, invariably spurred by a maiden reading of “The Swimmer.” The story was a rite of passage in the vein of Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” Cheever being one of these writers who helped you locate the exit ramp off the highway of the core curriculum and onto the unmarked back roads where you eventually discovered, say, the slashing wit of Lorrie Moore or the spiky subversions of Mary Gaitskill or the hallucinatory minimalism of Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son (1992). A critical compass, at least for me, during a critical time. I had The Stories of John Cheever in an elegant old hardcover, a crimson-jacketed, 693-page anvil that I hauled off the shelf often in the desperate name of discovering a voice of my own.

Before plotting my aquatic trek through the swimming pools of Los Angeles, my literal and figurative leap back into the currents of Cheever, I knew it was essential to get reacquainted with “The Swimmer”—the actual text, not its lingering residue in my memory. Always a risky endeavor, returning to the work of a writer who got into your bloodstream during the larva stage. Would I be bored, unmoved? Worse, would I be repelled? The last place I was eager to be was eye to eye with a former incarnation of myself, reckoning with my ignorance, or where my receptors to truth and beauty had become calcified by time and age.

It was not lost on me that such nerves were vaguely Cheeveresque, given his own preoccupation with the corrosive power of nostalgia. This is the man who wrote a story, after all, called “O Youth and Beauty!” (1953) about a 40-year-old former track star named Cash Bentley who, when drunk, engages in a party trick that a modern tween would instantly summarize as #cringe: running solo hurdle races through the well-appointed homes of dinner party hosts, leaping over tasseled sofas and lacquered end tables, always commencing these escapades by enlisting someone to fire a loaded revolver out the window in lieu of a starter pistol. What comes of Cash’s need to cling to who he’d once been? First, he breaks his leg. Then, in a Chekhovian nod, his wife accidentally shoots Cash dead.

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Mercifully, “The Swimmer” turned out to be largely as I remembered it: strange, symphonic, hilarious, if also significantly more horrifying. The story centers on Neddy Merrill, a quintessential Cheever archetype: white suburban male, fortyish, pickled with booze, plucky with self-satisfaction. We meet him on a Sunday afternoon in midsummer, lounging poolside at a neighbor’s home in Bullet Park, one of Cheever’s fictional stand-ins for the rarefied hamlets of New York’s Westchester County. One is not exactly primed these days to sympathize with a middle-aged stalwart of the patriarchy introduced sitting “by the green water, one hand in it, one around a glass of gin.” But Cheever is quick to clarify that he’s not expecting sympathy for Neddy:

He was a slender man—he seemed to have the especial slenderness of youth—and while he was far from young he had slid down his banister that morning and given the bronze backside of Aphrodite on the hall table a smack, as he jogged toward the smell of coffee in his dining room.

Cheever knows, in short, that Neddy is a first-rate buffoon. He’s already rolling his eyes—with some tenderness, yes, but that’s hardly the same as letting Neddy off the hook.

The narrative is animated by Neddy’s epiphany: that he can make the eight-mile trek home via the many pools of his neighborhood. This is evoked as glib melodrama, but in sentences that reminded me why I once gravitated to Cheever; they are so beautifully precise that you could deploy them in the tuning of a piano: “He seemed to see, with a cartographer’s eye, that string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the county.” He christens this stream Lucinda, after his wife, who at the start of the story is with him at the neighbor’s pool. Then he dives in.

What follows initially appears to be a literal accounting of Neddy’s quixotic lark, a comedy about his Homeric vision of himself as “a legendary figure,” and if Cheever stopped at that, the story would likely carry the distinct whiff of mothballs. But something mysterious begins to nip at the narrative’s spine, a discomfiting voodoo that transforms the story. First there is the weather: it shifts from midsummer to early winter in elliptical, time-lapse intervals; maple trees change color, shed their leaves. Neddy, at one point, comes across a pool that has been emptied, the outdoor furniture stacked under a tarp. “Was his memory failing,” Cheever writes, “or had he so disciplined it in the repression of unpleasant facts that he had damaged his sense of the truth?” Then there are the neighbors Neddy encounters: how quickly they come to pity him, be it an annoyed former mistress (“Good Christ. Will you ever grow up?”) or the Hallorans, a wealthy elderly couple who greet him with polite sympathy (“We’ve been terribly sorry to hear about all your misfortunes, Neddy”).

What, you start asking yourself, is going on here?

And yet Neddy is immune to asking it, always more amused than disturbed by these run-ins, always soldiering on with the stubbornness of a man whose peripheral vision does not extend past his own navel. But soon the “especial slenderness of youth” he radiated at the outset has given way, eerily, to the frailty of old age: “Here, for the first time in his life, he did not dive but went down the steps into the icy water and swam a hobbled sidestroke.” Later, after his final swim: “He climbed up the ladder and wondered if he had the strength to get home.” It is only in the last sentence that Cheever fully exposes the story’s devastating arc and moral undergirding, when Neddy arrives at his home to discover it in a state of disrepair and long empty, his wife and children gone, the life he thought he was living no longer a reality but a protracted delusion.

I knew this was coming. Knew “The Swimmer” to be a revision of the myth of Narcissus, a kind of inverted precursor to the Talking Heads song “Once in a Lifetime” (“And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife / And you may ask yourself, ‘Well, how did I get here?’”). In my twenties, though, I appreciated the story primarily as a middle finger elegantly extended in the direction of suburban conformity, which dovetailed nicely with my own worldview and an era when Todd Solondz’s Happiness (1998) and Richard Linklater’s SubUrbia (1996) were movies you referenced when you wanted to sound cool. Stir in the seductive glitter of Cheever’s prose and it was easy to ignore how the “The Swimmer,” at its core, is an excoriating cautionary tale, about a man being the architect of his own demise—about a man’s demise being a symptom of a larger sickness.

But now I am in my forties, around Neddy’s age, and under the circumstances had to ask why I’d been so quick to romanticize his journey, so giddy at the prospect of emulating it.

¤

Rather than explore these questions, however, I initially treated them as Neddy might: pushing them into a dusty corner of my mind and telling myself that my idea remained a very good one, even if I no longer knew why.

I turned to Swimply’s website, considering various pool-strewn routes through Los Angeles, eventually settling on a southward vector that would take me through a dozen pools. The first was tucked into the backyard of a cottage in the hills of Laurel Canyon, from which I’d snake into the basin where L.A. eventually meets the gray-green churn of the Pacific, grazing the mansions of Beverly Hills before ending, just a bit further south, in my humbler neighborhood of South Carthay. If not exactly an iconic location to conclude my voyage, it would provide a certain geographic symmetry. It is as close to the dead center of Los Angeles as possible.

Cheever, I learned from that 1964 profile in Time, was not a fan of L.A. No major revelation, that. Born in Massachusetts, fond of exaggerating his genetic ties to early Puritan settlers, and ashamed of his family’s lack of money from a young age as he’d later be ashamed of his attraction to men, he spent his adulthood ensconced in the WASPy environs of his fiction, most notably Ossining, the leafy commuter town in Westchester where he lived with his wife and two children—and where, certainly not by accident, Don Draper lived in Mad Men (2007-15), a show that can be viewed as an extended homage to Cheever.

Disparaging the West Coast in general and Los Angeles in particular was, until recently, a mandatory flex of one’s social and intellectual credentials in such precincts. Yet as I planned my swim to avoid thinking of why I was still planning my swim, I realized that L.A. was a uniquely apt backdrop for contemplating Cheever, the city not so much the antithesis of his world as its apex: an entire metropolis built on the promise and aesthetics of suburbia, to say nothing of hubris, vanity, and denial. L.A. County is, famously, a near-desert lacking the natural water essential for human survival on a mass scale; today, it is the nation’s most populous county, boasting some 250,000 homes with swimming pools.

It further dawned on me that “The Swimmer” and Swimply shared a symbiosis that extended beyond my dubious project. Cheever’s story, along with much of his fiction, has been widely read as an evisceration of the American dream, with Neddy serving as an avatar for the rot at the core of all that striving and aspiration, of a center that can’t hold. Isn’t Swimply, if you squint just the slightest, a mutation of the same cancer, of what happens once that center is no more? The business, it’s easy to forget, does not exist solely because have-nots like me perk up at the idea of renting a rich person’s pool on a scalding afternoon. Equally critical is the large number of swimming pool owners who, kneecapped by late-stage capitalism in one form of another, are willing to treat their private oases in the manner of a no-tell motel. I had been holding on to the quaint notion that the people who had pools in Los Angeles didn’t need my $150; they could roll it up, light it on fire, and ignite their palo santo sticks. Not so simple, said Swimply. Potentially darker and more complicated, said “The Swimmer.”

Emboldened by these connections, however tenuous, I prepared for my plunge.

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On a sun-flecked afternoon last summer, I lay supine on a lounge chair by a pool tucked behind an ersatz colonial mansion in Beverly Hills. Surrounded by the fronds of birds-of-paradise, carefully pruned boxtrees, and the synthetic din of idling luxury electric cars, it was easy, deliciously so, to imagine I was someone I am not: geriatric Hollywood royalty, say, or the owner of a personal helicopter. I was not drinking gin, but I was drinking: splitting a bottle of sparkling rosé with my girlfriend. That the bottle came from Trader Joe’s somehow added to the thrill. We were not supposed to be here, yet here we were.

The pool was meant to be the second to last stop on my swim through town. Ultimately, however, my ambitions were thwarted by a scourge that claws at the fabric of many of Cheever’s stories: money. With most pools on Swimply requiring a two-hour minimum, and most going for well over $100 an hour, my lark would have set me back too much—the sort of whim that Neddy would have indulged, no doubt, but look at where it got him. In abandoning my solo swim in favor for a day with my partner, I told myself that I was, to some degree, heeding to the caution of “The Swimmer.”

Still, I’d been rereading Cheever for a few weeks, dipping in and out of his collected stories, which proved to be a largely delightful and illuminating journey. Sure, some are a little musty. But my primary concern—that his writing would feel dated, retrograde, even icky—proved largely unwarranted. Throw a dart at a page at random and you land on a sentence that you want to read aloud to whoever is near you. And though Cheever himself prefaced his Pulitzer-winning collection as being a set of vignettes from a “long-lost world” where “almost everybody wore a hat,” I was surprised at how vividly they hinted at the world we presently inhabit.

Take “The Enormous Radio” (1947), in which a starchy couple living in New York City purchase a newfangled radio that turns out to have a curious defect: rather than broadcasting radio stations, the novel technology allows them to tune into the apartments of all their neighbors. The couple’s home fills with a soundtrack of the formerly private dramas that surround them, of illness and marital strife, and listening to it they go somewhat mad—a touch of urbane magical realism that is now, thanks to Silicon Valley, simply our collective reality. “We’re happy, aren’t we, darling?” the wife desperately asks her husband toward the end, echoing the sensation stirred today by scrolling through strangers’ lives on social media.

Every writer operates inside a limited sphere, a prism that changes color as it gets turned by time. In Cheever’s lifetime, the world of his stories—the fedora-clad men, the prim wives at home, the napkin-tidy lawns—was heralded as symbolic for universal longings, as the United States writ small. Today, that world represents something else: the America some desire to return to, the one evoked by those who want to “make it great again,” a place where the men who are central to Cheever’s fiction were always insulated from the pain they delivered, tacitly or directly, to others. In this context, “The Swimmer” and so many of Cheever’s stories amount to a declaration, even a plea, from that supposedly halcyon era. This is far from great, he is telling us. Surely, there must be something better.

But what?

It’s the question that haunts his fiction, as it haunted his life. Cheever was the ultimate Cheever character, and maybe the reason so many of his characters feel interchangeable—not designed to be appreciated as fully formed people but as vessels for yearning, for the expansive and piercing sadness that, ultimately, I came to think of as his primary protagonist. He wore the tweed jackets, the khakis. He lived in the rambling house with the wife, the son and daughter. He was deemed, in that Time profile, someone who “celebrates the glories and delights of monogamy.” In addition to being a vexing analysis given the romantic disharmony at the core of so much of Cheever’s fiction, we now understand it to be flat-out false. Upon his death came the inevitable cultural autopsy—the publication of his journals in The New Yorker, of his daughter Susan’s terrific memoir Home Before Dark (1984)—that revealed a man prone to exquisite cruelty, who had numerous affairs with women and men, and who never figured out, as they say today, how to live his truth.

The host of the Swimply in Beverly Hills was a man named Greg. Stocky, fiftyish, he greeted me wearing rumpled cargo shorts and an oversize faded T-shirt. With Cheever coursing through my veins, I found myself searching for the story behind the story, wondering if Greg could relate, say, to “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” (1956), in which a man facing financial ruin—but desperate not to tell his wife—steals money from his wealthier neighbors and spirals into a vortex of shame. Some tragedy, surely, had resulted in Greg renting his pool to us, rather than enjoying it himself. Was the big house in need of a new roof? Were there divorce papers waiting to be signed in the study? A final notice from the Securities and Exchange Commission?

But really, Greg just seemed like a nice guy who sincerely enjoyed meeting new people. Time, as it happened, would soon reveal that I was the one blithely relying on his swimming pool to repress some unpleasant facts. My own relationship ended shortly after that day. The home I was swimming toward became a place where I once lived. My little experiment with Cheever was recast in a different light. Maybe from the start it had been motivated, at least in part, by something at the heart of “The Swimmer” and much of Cheever’s prose: the deeply human impulse to hold on to something, even as it turns to water.