Renovation Heat

I teach swim lessons at a public pool in a town where the fog burns off by ten and everyone over forty has a surfboard in the garage. I've been doing it for twenty-six years. Same pool, same drills, same little kids in the shallow end pretending the kickboards are boats.

I'm fifty-four. That's not old, but standing at the edge of that pool at nine in the morning, watching the water move the same way it moved yesterday and the day before, I started to feel like I was the one doing laps. Same lane, back and forth, forever.

"Mr. Carlos, watch me!" a kid yelled. His name is DeShawn. He's six. He can swim about four feet before he stands up.

"Great job," I said. "Now do it again!"

That's my whole day. Watch me. Great job. Do it again. My girlfriend Angelica says I've been flat lately, and she's right. I get up, I drink coffee, I go to the pool, I come home, I sit down. The sitting down is the part I hate. I sit and I think about how nothing is going to happen today, and then tomorrow happens and it's the same day.

So I was standing there bored out of my mind when the pool gate banged open and Angelica walked in.

She's fifty-one, and she's been in construction since she was twenty-one, which means thirty years of hauling lumber and swinging hammers and she still looks like somebody you'd do a double take for on a beach boardwalk. That morning she had on work boots and a tank top with sawdust on the shoulder and cutoff shorts, and she smelled like lumber, the good kind, the kind that hits you in the chest.

My mouth went dry. DeShawn was in the middle of his four feet and I completely stopped watching him.

"Hey, handsome," she called from the fence.

"Oh no," said DeShawn, who has an ear for these things. "Is that your girlfriend?"

"She is. Keep swimming."

"She's pretty," he said, and then he stood up on the bottom of the pool, which was against the rules, and I let it slide.

Angelica came down to the edge and stood there with her thumbs in her belt loops. Her hair was pushed back under a bandana and there was a smear of something, caulk maybe, on one forearm. I felt a pull in my gut like I was thirty again. Then I felt it lower down, honestly, standing there in my swim trunks in front of a class of six-year-olds, and I had to angle myself toward the water.

"What are you doing here?" I asked. "You never come to the pool."

"I was on my way past." She grinned at me. She has a great grin. "Also I have a proposition."

"A proposition."

"A job. A big one, actually. The Kessler house, up on the bluff? You know it, the one with the brown shingles that everybody hates. I got the contract for the gut renovation. Whole house, down to the studs. And I need a demolition guy for the bathroom today. Just the bathroom. Sledgehammer work. Big dumb fun work."

"You want me to swing a hammer."

"I want you to swing a sledgehammer, and I want you to wear boots and not die. Can you get someone to cover your afternoon lessons?"

I looked at my class. DeShawn had climbed out and was lying on the hot concrete like a beached thing. Two other kids were doing the same thing. Nobody was swimming. Nobody was going to swim.

"Yeah," I said. "I can get Sandy to take the afternoon group. She owes me." I looked at Angelica and tried to keep my face normal. "What's the pay?"

"Zero dollars. But there's lunch, and there's the view from the deck, and there's me in those shorts all day." She leaned in a little. "Come on, Carlos. You've been moping around the house for a month. You need to hit something with a hammer. I can tell. I've been watching you sit there like a man waiting for a bus that isn't coming."

"You know that's mean."

"It's true, though. So come be mean back at a wall. It's very satisfying. Drywall doesn't have feelings."

I looked at her arms. I looked at the boots. I thought about her hands, which are rough and strong and have been on me in ways I think about during boring afternoons at the pool, which lately is all of them. Two years we've been together. Met her at a pool party when I was fifty-two, someone's backyard thing, she was there with a crew from a job and she beat me at a game of pool volleyball and then bought me a beer like I'd won something. I've been ruined for other women ever since.

"Fine," I said. "One afternoon."

"One afternoon," she agreed. "And if you love it, there's a whole summer of afternoons."

"Are you hiring me for the summer?"

"I'm feeding you for the summer. That's better than hiring you."

"Mr. Carlos," DeShawn said from the concrete. "Is she your wife?"

"Not yet," Angelica said, quick as anything, and then she winked at me and I lost the rest of the sentence.

I flagged down Sandy, who runs the lap lanes, and she took my afternoon with no argument, which is how I know Sandy has been wanting my slot. I changed in the locker room, which took longer than usual because certain parts of me were not being cooperative about going down, and I put on a t-shirt and real shoes and met Angelica at her truck in the parking lot.

It's a white F-250, dented on the passenger side, always has been. She got it before I knew her and I have never once been allowed to drive it.

"Hop in, demolition man," she said.

"Where's the house again?"

"Bluff Road. Fifteen minutes. You're going to love it. It's a disaster. Original 1974 everything, orange counter, wood paneling, a shower that's basically a coffin. We're gutting it all." She pulled out of the lot. "You're quiet. What's in your head?"

"Nothing."

"Carlos."

"I'm thinking about your hands," I said, because she kept pushing.

She laughed. "We haven't even swung a hammer yet."

"I know what I'm about."

"Well then. Let's go tear a bathroom apart and see what happens."

* * *

The house sat on a bluff with the whole ocean laid out below it, gray-blue and flat that afternoon. The deck was sun-bleached silver and the boards creaked in a friendly way. Inside, it was exactly as bad as she promised. Orange laminate counters. Paneling. A shag carpet remnant in a hallway for some reason. Dust everywhere and that smell of old house and fresh sawdust mixed.

"Here's your victim," Angelica said, and pushed open a door onto a small bathroom with yellow tile and a vanity that had to be original to the house. She handed me safety glasses and ear protection like a nurse handing over instruments. "Tub comes out today. Vanity too. You start on the tile, I'll pull the toilet."

"You get the fun part."

"I always get the fun part. That's the deal when it's my job site."

I put the glasses on. She put hers on. She looked ridiculous and great at the same time, bandana and boots and safety glasses, and I told her so.

"You look ridiculous and great," I said.

"You look like a swim teacher who's about to have the best day of his year," she said. She kissed me, quick, and her mouth tasted of the coffee she'd had in the truck. "Ready?"

"Ready."

She handed me the sledgehammer. It was heavier than I expected. I took my stance like I was going to return a serve, and I swung at the tile wall, and the world changed.

The tile cracked and half of it came off the wall in a sheet and crashed into the tub and it was, and I don't use this word much, glorious. I hit it again. More tile. I hit it again and the whole wall made a sound like it was giving up.

"See?" Angelica yelled over the noise, already prying at the toilet. "Told you."

"THIS IS THE BEST THING THAT'S EVER HAPPENED TO ME," I yelled back, and I meant it, and I could see her laughing behind her glasses while she worked, and the afternoon stretched out in front of us, wide open, nothing like a pool lane at all.

The second hour went by fast. I had the tile wall down to the plaster and the plaster down to the studs in three places, and Angelica had the toilet out and the vanity disconnected and half out the door. My arms were shaking in a good way. My shirt was stuck to me. There was dust in my eyebrows.

I wound up for another swing, big one, right at the last strip of tile over where the mirror used to be, and somewhere in the middle of the swing her hand closed on the handle and stopped it.

"Hey," she said.

"Hey what, I had that one lined up."

"Put the hammer down, Carlos."

I put the hammer down. She pushed her glasses up onto her bandana and looked at me, and she was covered in dust from the toilet pull and her forearms were filthy and she had that look. You know the look. Every long-term couple has one look that ends all conversation, and that was hers.

"See something you like?" I said.

"I see a fifty-four year old man who's been swinging a sledgehammer for two hours and hasn't once checked me out, which is a waste of a good outfit."

"I've been checking you out. You just can't tell because I'm being professional. This is a job site."

"This is a job site," she agreed, "with no toilet in it, and a locked front door, and about four more hours before the dumpster guy comes." She stepped closer. "So. Question."

"Ask it."

"Do you want to fool around in this bathroom, on that tarp, right now, in the middle of the workday, like a couple of degenerates?"

"Yes," I said, fast enough that it was embarrassing. "Yes, obviously, yes!"

"That's what I figured, but I like hearing it." She pulled her glasses off all the way and dropped them on the vanity. "Come here."

I came there. She was up against a stud wall with the plaster torn off it, rough two-by-four behind her, and she grabbed the front of my dusty shirt with both hands and pulled me in and kissed me like she was trying to win something, which is her whole personality, come to think of it. Pool volleyball. Pool. Construction. Everything with her is a contest and I keep losing and it keeps being great.

"You taste like sawdust," she said against my mouth.

"You taste like sawdust too."

"Then we're even."

She got my shirt off over my head and I got her flannel off, and under it she was wearing a sports bra and nothing about that was romantic but everything about it was hot anyway, and I told her so.

"It's a work bra," she said. "Don't romanticize it."

"Too late. Romanticizing. It's done."

"Help me with it then, romantic boy."

I got the bra over her head and her arms are stronger than mine, thirty years in construction since she was twenty-one, and I am not going to pretend that's not part of it for me. Her skin was warm and gritty with dust and I put my mouth on her neck and she made a sound and grabbed a fistful of my hair.

"Off," she said, meaning my pants, so off they came, shoes too, because I'm not an animal. She pushed her jeans down over her boots and kicked them somewhere into the debris field and then we were just standing in a gutted bathroom with no floor covering except a canvas drop cloth and no walls except half walls, naked in the afternoon, and I started laughing and couldn't stop.

"What?" she said.

"We're naked in a bathroom with no door. There's a hole in the wall. There's a hole in the wall and we're naked."

"The hole is why I picked this room." She looked at me over her shoulder at the ocean through the missing window glass. "Best view of any bathroom in the county and it's going to be even better when I'm done with it. Now get down here."

She spread the tarp wider with her foot and got down on it on her knees and I got down with her, and the canvas was stiff and crackly under us and smelled like paint and dust, and she reached between us and took me in her hand and I stopped laughing.

"Still good?" she said.

"So good. Please don't stop."

"Wasn't going to."

She worked me with her hand for a while, slow, which was a trick, because everything all afternoon had been fast and loud and this was slow and quiet and the difference was going to kill me. I got my fingers between her legs and she was already wet, which she claimed later was the sledgehammer thing and I choose to believe her.

"Okay," she said. "I need you now. Come on."

"How do you want it?"

"Fast and rude. We'll do slow tonight in an actual bed." She pushed me back onto the tarp, and I dug a condom out of my wallet, and she rolled it on me with a grin, her rule, and then she got over me, one knee on either side, and held me and lowered herself down and we both made noises I'm not going to describe because I have some dignity left.

"You okay?" she said.

"I'm perfect. You're perfect. Move."

She moved. She rode me hard, hands on my chest, dust in her hair, bandana crooked, and every time she came down the tarp slid a few inches on the subfloor so we were migrating slowly toward the tub, which struck her as hilarious about halfway through and she started giggling, actually giggling, this fifty-one year old woman, and I grabbed her hips to slow her down and said, "We're