The Human Soup

There was a man I saw once or twice a week in the hot tub at the YMCA who talked boisterously, as if he were in a bar, as if he wanted everyone to know his business. His voice was too loud for the intimate setting, where barely clothed strangers sat together in hot water, skin cells sloughing off, simmering in the steaming cauldron. He talked about his fiancée, whom he was bringing over from Russia, about the crazy red tape she had to untangle to get her visa. "She's twenty-five," he said, though he looked late fortyish. He was fat, though handsome, with a fine nose and good straight teeth. He wore gold-rimmed glasses that never fogged. The fat man had been growing less fat over the past few months, perhaps because he didn't want his Russian bride to be shocked when she arrived.

I disdained this man, but my feelings were disproportionate to my annoyance, and so I wondered, what aspect of myself did I see reflected in him? What self-loathing was I projecting onto his large pale torso? Maybe he irritated me because he participated in an economy in which women trade youth, beauty, and sex to men with means for a life free from poverty. Maybe I disliked his naiveté, his belief that love might motivate his Russian fiancée, not economic gain. Or maybe his bid for companionship was too public, too much on display, and thus forced me to consider my own aloneness.

When the hot tub broke and was closed for a few weeks, I didn't see the fat man for a while, and part of me missed him, or missed the guilty pleasure of disliking him. I'd cultivated an elaborate disinterest around his frequent talk of the Russian fiancée. I'd strive for an expression that conveyed, I'm not listening. You can't impress me. I'm preoccupied with my own important contemplations.

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In ancient Rome, bathing was practically an art form, a religion. After temples, bathhouses were the most common buildings. A fourth-century census recorded 856 public bathhouses for Rome's million or so citizens, which would be the equivalent of 900 public bathhouses in Dallas, Texas, today. The Baths of Caracalla, a twenty-seven-acre complex that took 9,000 laborers five years to complete, exemplified Romans' devotion to bathing. It included sports fields, an Olympic-sized swimming pool, gardens, fountains, and a four-story bathhouse that accommodated 1,600 people, with massage rooms, saunas, perfumeries, and a hair salon. The interior walls were adorned with mosaics and gilded carvings, and a hundred alcoves for statuary. There was a hypocaust (literally fire underneath) to warm the tiled floors, and to heat the tub waters, fifty furnaces burned ten tons of wood daily.

On a typical day in ancient Rome, a tintinnabulum rang to summon men and women to the baths—mixed-sex bathing was common. Entrance fees were free or low, so the poor could bathe, too. They soaked in the warm tepidarium or the hot caldarium, or dipped into the bracing frigidarium, all while being entertained by jugglers, acrobats, musicians, and poets. Vendors hawked wine, pretzels, cake, eels, and quail eggs. You could hire a depilator to pluck unwanted hair, or someone to oil, sand, and scrape your skin. All this bustle created a cacophony that "could make you hate your own ears," wrote Seneca, the first-century rhetorician. Musclemen pumping weights emitted "squeaking, squealing sound[s]." Masseuses slapped flesh, pickpockets were noisily arrested, and bathers yelped from having hair yanked from their armpits. "Sausage sellers, the pastry bakers and the barmen" cried their wares, and there was always a man, Seneca bristled, "who likes to hear himself singing in the bath."

Aside from giving him headaches, Seneca believed that communal bathing inspired "sexual licentiousness and moral delinquency," which was probably true. The Roman baths were designed for voluptus—delights of the flesh. Erotic frescoes at a Pompeii bathhouse depicted people having sex in graphic detail, and an epigram at the entrance to the Baths of Caracalla...