The Bath
I recently took my first bath ever in this apartment. I've been living here for almost three (!) years now — this apartment on the fourth floor of a prewar building with its Busby Berkeley-style lobby tiles, my third New York apartment since I moved here almost four years ago. For the longest time, I was under the impression that I couldn't take a bath here; that my tub was faulty. You see, it's one of those old-fashioned jobs that has no plug for the plughole. Instead, you release a trip lever about half a foot away from the tub — something I had never seen before! — and the tub begins to fill. When M, my building super, explained how it works, he gave me a look that suggested I was unique, but not in a good way.
I am currently recovering from flu. I returned to New York from London after the Christmas break and almost immediately fell ill. It came crashing down with no preamble. One day, I was selecting juicy-looking chicken legs so I could cook this Alison Roman recipe on New Year's Eve, and the next day I was pinned to my bed, shivering but sweating through both my pyjamas and the bedclothes, hacking horribly and aching so painfully I began laughing hysterically from the discomfort.
Flu is one of those diseases I am very fortunate to have had maybe only thrice so far — every time I have flu, I think about how every winter, people wrongly diagnose their colds as flu, and laugh. Flu feels like a fight with a vengeful spirit, like your own body is angry with you but won't tell you what you did wrong... it just wants you to know automatically, and it will punish you for the foreseeable future because you don't. When you have flu, you remember that its full name is influenza, which sounds like a powerful spell cast by practitioners of magic far greater than you. You remember also, that flu can and did in fact kill, on a large scale, multiple times in the history of humans. Idly, in the middle of sinus pain that will make you cry silent pathetic tears as it feels like someone is literally breaking your face, you will recall that it was actually a kind of flu — the fictional "Georgia flu" — that caused the extinction level event at the centre of Station Eleven, the most indelible book you ever read. Flu reminds you that you are an animal — no more, no less — and that you do all the things animals do. You smell and snarl like an animal, you sweat and whimper like one too. In the depths of flu, everything seems to trigger the fight or flight response, but you are too weak to do anything but lay there. Flu makes you soft and spongy. Flu is humbling.
On the third day of being largely prone and sweaty, I peeled off my nightclothes that had become merely 'clothes' at that point, released the trip lever, ran a bath, and stepped inside it. The water was blistering, because the only way to feel alive is to climb inside liquid fire. I welcomed the burn; on my feet, up my legs, on my stomach and chest, right up to my neck. I placed my laptop on the toilet lid and fired up Netflix, letting Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini keep me company. It was my first bath of the year. The first underwater immersion of any sort of 2020. I used a soft sponge at my neck, under my arms, behind my ears and my knees; all the places sweat and dirt like to live in sin, and let the fragrance of the tiny bath tablet take away my accrued animal scent.
Years ago, at the Whitney, I saw The Bath, a 1951 painting by Paul Cadmus. There are two naked male figures in it, one inside a filled tub, scrubbing bubbles at his bum and back, while the other combs his hair at the mirror. To me, it oozes domestic efficiency and the mild, low level hum of the eroticism that comes with being partnered. I love that painting. My bath on the third day of January was not like that; there were no bubbles. It was a bath of functional necessity. Afterwards, I got winded cleaning the tub. But that I had energy enough to run a cloth around the bath was down to the healing properties of the soak in the first place. Witchcraft!
Two days later, I took another bath. This time with lavender-infused Epsom salts. This was a more pleasurable affair, but still far from luxury. This time, I noticed the steam soothing my gritty eyes and frizzing my hair, and once again, the ring around the tub afterwards revealed my animalness. Despite knowing better, I had always thought of baths as indulgent time-wasters. Obviously not true. Is this the year I become a bath wanker, sinking into post-work liquid fire at the drop of a hat? Maybe. Right now, I can hear the world through cotton wool ears and my throat still burns because of invisible germs. I am recovering from flu.
Happy New Year.