Watching his wife do her ‘laps’ in the pool at the David Citadel hotel, Dov was struck yet again by her level of sheer self-delusion. He knew that most people suffered from it on some level; he certainly did, kidding himself that he’d be the next Weegee (‘Don’t you mean ‘squeegee’ when you’re reduced to cleaning cars in the street for shekels?’ - Josh Solomons) but that sort of self-delusion could be seen as absolutely vital to the business of getting up and facing the world each morning. If we didn’t believe that our dreams were to some degree obtainable, wouldn’t we be tempted to just lie down and consume our body weight in baklava until the powers that be had to remove the roof of our dwelling in order to winch us away to a pauper’s grave?
But what was the biological imperative for Jackie to kid herself that she ‘swam a mile every day before breakfast’? You only had to look at the fat fool to know it wasn’t true. A mile was 33 laps! She might swim a mile to breakfast if there was no other way to get her pudgy paws on the groaning buffet - but before? Yes, she might move from one end of the pool to the other a few times, maybe even as many as twenty - but she wasn’t actually swimming. Her laps certainly weren’t laps as most people would recognise them; she simply walked in the water until this was no longer possible, then upon reaching the deep end splashed forward enthusiastically for a few minutes, was then distracted by a long gossip with a pool-dawdling stranger which couldn’t wait one moment longer, then launching herself length-ways once more waving and kicking her feet at him (which he had once found adorable but which now inspired in him with a strong impulse to jump in and drown her) and of course the many returns to the poolside in order to carry out what she called her ‘Pet Rescue’ but was in fact the ferrying of various germ-laden winged bugs from an imminent watery grave.