In my senior year of high school, I tried to date a swimmer. I’ll call her Tracy, after Tracy Caulkins, the first swimmer to set an American record and win an American title in each of the four swimming strokes (butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke, freestyle). As a junior, my Tracy was the best swimmer on the girls’ team. According to my sister, she wasn’t beautiful, but I disagreed. She had straight blond hair, her bangs cut to hang a centimeter over her eyebrows, and a sweet, if also stingy, smile. She and I had little in common, something she probably knew from the start but which I was blind to. She and I didn’t even have swimming in common. She swam in a profoundly different fashion than I did. For starters, she was faster than I was—faster the way a Learjet is faster than a biplane. More significant, she knew what she was doing in the pool. Her strokes—and she swam all four competitively—were refined, with no excess use of arms, legs, or energy. In contrast, my flip turn had all the languid sloppiness of a hippie rolling a joint—a hippie who is already high.

Perhaps I was attracted to the swimmer in her more than anything else. If I couldn’t be a great swimmer myself, maybe I could kiss one?

After practice ended each weekday evening, I waited for her in the hallway outside the locker rooms, which smelled more powerfully of chlorine than the pool did. This was the year I read Russian novels; I spent all winter on The Idiot, which, given my hopeless romantic quest, was an appropriate choice. Sometimes I broke from my reading to gaze into the trophy case in the wall in the middle of the hallway. I considered all the prizes I’d won. I didn’t have to consider long. My swimming trove included only a single ribbon, which I’d received for finishing in sixth place in the backstroke in the D.C. Inter-High Championships in my junior year. The ribbon was pink.

Sometimes I waited in the hallway for as long as half an hour for the shark-fast object of my affection to appear. Inevitably, she was the last woman to leave the locker room. If I wondered why, I never reached the obvious conclusion: She was hoping I would grow tired of my vigil and leave.

“Would you like a ride home?” I would ask. I had a car, an unromantic but reliable Datsun, and she usually walked or rode the bus home.

“Sure,” she would say, in a tone of voice she might have used to agree to a bloodletting. I would drive her the ten minutes to her apartment building, and if we said a hundred words to each other, it would have been a record.

I invited her to see movies, to go ice-skating, to have ice cream. I invited her to the National Gallery of Art, and as we walked among the paintings, I told her how when I saw an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York with my best friend, who was minoring in art history at Brown, all he could say about any of the paintings was “very aesthetic.”

This was, however, more than I could say about the art Tracy and I saw. For long, solemn stretches, it was more than I could say period.

She was extraordinarily polite. Or she enjoyed awkward encounters with over-earnest boys. Or she was serving penance for all the sins she had committed in a previous life. She said yes to all the dates I proposed. All but one.

When I asked her to my prom, she said no.

The most animated Tracy ever became in my presence was after I won my only race. I picked a good time to triumph: in the Inter-High Championships, in the 400-meter freestyle, in my senior year. Because it was a long race, it was held the day before the other events, and only our captain, our coach, and one of my teammates were on hand to witness my unexpected success. On the team bus the next afternoon, as we drove to Roosevelt High School to complete the championships, our coach announced my victory.

My would-be girlfriend, would-be lover, would-be conversational partner turned around in her seat and, a smile rising on her lips like a sunrise, said, “Really? You won? Really? Wow. Wow.” A pause. “Really?”

Really. But this and all the very aesthetic paintings in the world weren’t going to get me so much as a kiss on the cheek from her.

I saw her once more, before the start of my junior year in college. I was feeling bold, so I called her up, and she agreed to have coffee with me. Our date was at three in the afternoon. At one-thirty, my mother told me she had a pass to the local YMCA. Did I want to use it to go swimming?

I did.

I was twenty-five minutes late for my date.

But of course Tracy understood. She was a swimmer, after all.