We never quite understand how this adulting thing works, even when we step into it. It's this thing called growing up and aging and additional responsibilities of keeping ourselves alive in this world. So This is 'The Pool' by T. Coraghessan Boyle, published in The New Yorker on September 14, 2025.
'The Pool' will be the final story in the author's next set of short stories (his thirteenth collection) titled, 'The End Is Only a Beginning' (to be published in 2027).
A third-time pregnant young couple and their two young children, Molly and Jordan, bought and moved into a house with a swimming pool in suburban Los Angeles. Then a line from the father makes us aware of many potential dangers lying around the house. I was like, ermm.... yes. Even for dogs too. The unnamed narrator is the husband. He wasn't worried that the kids would drown. The potential is there, but they would teach the kids to swim.
We threw a party soon after we moved in, just as the days were beginning to heat up, and we told everybody to bring swimsuits. “Our first pool party,” I said to my wife, riding a swell of pride. None of our friends had a pool. Or a house, for that matter. None of them had parents who were willing or able to loan them the money for a down payment, as Lacey’s parents had done for us. We were in the newly painted kitchen (Navajo white, with cabinets two shades darker). I crossed the room to hold her in my arms, the hard bump of her pregnancy right there to emphasize the covenant between us.
At the couple's very first pool party, in the chaos of guests arriving, the couple's son, two-year-old Jordan, fell into the pool and sank down. It was a scare. The toddler was fine. He was rescued by the couple's friend, Malcolm. For some reason, the pool became this proud point with the husband. He views it as his pride and joy of being a houseowner. He has no intentions of giving up that pool, even with this scare.
All summer, that pool became a meeting point for the couple's friends. They simply turned up and had easy pizzas and gin tonics. Pregnant Lacey would retire to bed first, along with their children, and the friends would carry on hanging out and drinking.
Even those who arrived later, who hadn’t witnessed the tipping of the balance, couldn’t stop talking about it. We were lucky, that’s what they said. One of our friends, Josie, who was just out of law school, informed us that, in legal terms, a pool was an “attractive nuisance,” and it wasn’t just our own kids we had to worry about. “My advice?” she said. “Drain it and pave it over.” I looked right into her eyes and smiled. “Very funny,” I said.
A few months later, the couple's youngest son Danny was born. Malcolm came over to celebrate with the proud father. They popped bottles of champagne, and the narrator decided it would be a great idea to go to the bedroom, get to the roof, and dive into the pool from there, to celebrate. That was foolhardy. The narrator himself said, "and then I did something that still makes me shrink inside after all these years."
He could easily have died, and left Lacey with the newborn Danny, and to raise all three children on her own. There was a six-foot expanse of concrete walkway to clear in that leap from the roof to the nine-feet-deep pool. He was damn lucky he didn't die, break his spine or maim himself.
In an interview with the same journal, the author spoke about the conundrum of danger and self-delusion that we all have, and we stoically trudge on with our choices. It might not always be denial.
Is the narrator’s mind-set also that of many Californians—aware of the risk of earthquakes, fires, mudslides, and other dangers, who nevertheless choose to continue living there? Or, for that matter, that of any of us who live in areas with the potential for natural or unnatural disasters to happen? Are we all in denial?
The California mentality with regard to natural disaster is a variety of how any of us anywhere try to get through each day without the worst happening. It’s called self-delusion. Our lives are a tenuous balance between living in the world—embracing it—and living in fear of its lethality and indifference. Do you have insurance on your car? Your house? Your life? As our narrator is beginning to discover, parenthood brings all the risks and hazards of quotidian life to the fore.
Ahhhh. California. Ahhh Los Angeles. The city is particularly vulnerable to wildfires, flooding, mud slides, earthquakes and extreme heat. The wildfires in January 2025 devastated huge swathes of urban areas in Palisades and Eaton in Los Angeles county, fueled by severe drought conditions and Santa Ana winds. The wildfires are an annual occurrence — it's just a matter of how widespread and which direction they're going. People still live there, with or without house insurance. I don't even want to think about the impending earthquake, the Big One.
The author, who sometimes signs off as TC Boyle, was also asked what he had hoped to achieve with this story and why he chose this story to close out the next collection. He said he wanted a powerful story to close out the whole set of short stories,
“The Pool,” I hope, achieves a kind of grace and power in its final lines, drawing the reader back into the story to wonder all over again about the narrator’s psychological state and what it might mean for his wife and children moving forward. How do you get to become mature, anyway? And, once there, how do you express it?
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