Afterthought
By ALAN BRIEN
I HAVE not been to my Health Club for over a fortnight and already I feel like a deserter—one of those lazy rotters who stayed at home for Agin- court and so forfeited the right to parade annually on his crutches each St. Crispin's day until the end- ing of the world. Down in that cosy womb of Narcis- sus uhder Hanover Square, I imagine the other fellows (now an unbeatable fourteen days ahead of me in the race to the Herculean physique, all of them already twice my size and half my weight) are beginning to write me off as ,a quitter_ 'Pity,' I hear them mutter in the sauna. 'Chap was like a Greek god run to seed. Did you notice the way he used to swing the weights casually up from his.thigh to his shoulder as though he hardly realised they were in his hand?' Yes,' chimes in another. 'Do you remember how he kept a half-smile on his face even as he pushed the bar thing up from his chest for the fifteenth time? Sometimes he even whistled through his half-smile. We shall not look upon his like again.'
Well, I hope they did notice, and do remem- ber, because that was the most difficult part of the routine. Anybody can do the exercises (any body like a Greek god run to seed, that is), but to be able to do them, to feel the muscles separating strand by strand like the flakes of a perfectly fried fish, to sense the sinews stretching like dough on a hook, to be conscious of the immense, obstructive, crushing inertia of all solid objects compared to the tiny, fluttering gnat-like impetus of humanity, and still radiate the general air of Cary Grant mixing a martini or Jack Lemmon blowing a kiss—that is the test of the true ex- hibitionist. Vanity is the fuel which gets the best performance from the human machine. Almost impossible as it is to credit, everybody else loves flattery just as much as you do. David Morgan, who owns my Health Club, obviously realised quite quickly that the kind of self-admiring slobs who would be his customers could not be left to themselves to creak their joints. (I do wish I could persuade him to call it some other name but Health Club. The first association is with one of those cut-throat firms which sell you £500 of tuition, and extract a hefty down-payment on an electric vaulting horse, before you cross the foyer. Secondly, I dislike the word 'health' be- cause it immediately suggests the idea of illness. I do not want it to be rumoured that I am club- bing together with some other invalids, like a group entry on the pools, to win a share of salubrity. I am healthy. I have always been healthy. I simply want to be fit as well—I want to be healthy and enjoy it. And so I always say 'I'm going off to my gym' or 'I've just been down to my gym'—though this, too, can be misunder- stood. As with the corset ad which was to have the slogan 'YOU CAN DO GYM IN IT' until a lewd- minded copywriter suggested the balancing clause 'AND JIM CAN DO YOU IN IT.')
When they first turn up at a gym, most men would assert that they preferred to carry out the various exercises with as few other people around as possible. Even an instructor, ludicrously slim and robust, seems an intrusion, an unnecessary hint that you cannot be trusted to go through the ritual you have paid good money for without a teacher to supervise. Soon you have to admit to yourself that you cannot be trusted not to cheat yourself. Such is the limitless power of self- deception that most of us would be content, after a few sessions, to mime a Marcel Marceau im- pression of a man keeping fit and then rely on
our venal friends and relatives to perjure them- selves in swearing that we look much more vigorous and sound, We all of us do want to please teacher, to remain in statu pupillari in some field however much we are tycoons and administrators in the rest of our existence. And so we go on, sitting up for the twentieth time with our hands locked behind our heads and pushing against an atmospheric pressure which seems to be fourteen tons to the square inch, simply to hear his flat 'very good.'
The astonishing revelation, which never ceases to surprise me, that ten minutes after you have been lying on your back like a crushed worm, you are striding along Regent Street hoping to bump into a smash-and-grab thief so that you can hold him in the air with one hand, soon goes to your head. You want a larger audience and yOu feel a pleasant tingle of competitive excitement when you find there is another mem- ber near by as you begin the ritual. It is hard luck if he is a young, athletic type who has been coming for a long time—you slide back down the snake as you see how many more of each exer- cise he does and how the equipment has to be scaled down for your weaker powers. But forty seems to be the most popular age and the majority of your competitors are in exactly the same state of torpid slackness as you. There is always the chance of a really cheering contrast with some sixty-year-old who has let himself go' and carries his belly-fat around him like Diogenes carried his tub. At such moments you can usually manage an extra press up or a showy curl of the arm just to discomfit him. With the others, you are on even terms which is why I invented my elaborate series of devil-may-care expressions and Fred Astaire nonchalance (come to think of it, both he and Grant are over sixty, curse them). I might not be able to do more difficult things but I could at least look as if I could do them if I cared to extend myself. There are also times, I must confess, when I welcome the appearance of another member so that the in- structor's attention will be divided and, as I pro- gress through those inferrial, internal agonies of sit-ups, I can craftily slide from 'thirteen' to 'nineteen.'
The holiday is over. If I wait another week, I will not dare to plunge down those steps, full of fake valour, and leave, -around an hour later, hissing with genuine vigour.
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