THE PERFECT SHOWER requires very hot water and a great deal of steam. It needs extra nozzles to surround you with spray, a hot-water heater big enough to run for ages, and a place to lounge while contemplating the enormity of God’s creation and placing bets with yourself about which condensed-steam droplet will slide down the tile to reach the soapdish first. A shaving mirror is also nice, and the whole thing has to be quiet enough that you can hear yourself sing all ninety-three verses of “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” while making the correct sound effects for lines like The wind in the wires made a tattletale sound / As the waves broke over the railing. / And every man knew, as the captain did, too, / ‘Twas the Witch of November come stealing. The perfect shower, in other words, is a bath.
Somewhere in the “Ashenden” spy stories, Somerset Maugham says a bathtub should be large enough that you have to stretch, just a little, to reach the faucet with your toes when you need to dribble in more hot water. Personally, I’ve always preferred side-mounted faucets, and I am, if I say so myself, a connoisseur of bathtub fixtures. Shop assistants in places like Restoration Hardware run away when they see me browsing their plumbing-supply shelves. In friends’ houses–in mere acquaintances’ houses, for that matter–I always take a look at the bathtub to see if they’ve discovered anything I’ve missed.
Still, there’s no denying that Edwardians like Maugham knew a thing or two about baths. The tiny, molded-plastic things typically installed in bathrooms these days–often in some would-be color like avocado or dusty rose–aren’t bathtubs. They’re wading pools for people who think three minutes in a wobbly sitz tub is a bath.
No, a proper bathtub is a monstrous cast-iron object that looks as though the Edmund Fitzgerald ended up in your bathroom instead of at the bottom of Lake Superior. It should be enameled white on the inside and black on the outside, with big claw feet to hold it up. It should have brass fixtures, with a hand-held nozzle on a flexible hose. Most of all, it needs to have two handles on the faucets, one for hot and one for cold, so you can get the heat exactly right. Does anyone actually like those single-handle, dial-a-temperature controls that plumbers seem to love to put in bathrooms? I get a wrong number every time I try to use one, alternately scalding and freezing myself.
Besides, a bath is really about leisure rather than ablution. Showers are to baths as wristwatches are to pocketwatches: an improvement, easier and quicker–and a decline, somehow, in taking time to smell the bath salts. Baths are about getting away from it all, by which I think I mean mostly getting away from children. My daughter (like my wife, I must say) apparently believes a man should finish a shower in under two minutes. It’s ridiculous, of course. You can barely get the mirrors fogged in two minutes. But while I’m showering, my daughter will sit outside the door calling plaintively every fifteen seconds to ask if I’m done yet. When I take a bath, she gives up and wanders away in despair.
That’s what gives me the chance to play with her bath toys. Her bubble bath, too, although it’s not like it used to be. Children today will never know how truly monumental bubble bath could be before the Environmental Protection Agency banned phosphates in soap. When I was a child, a good dollop of Mr. Bubble made something like a two-foot-thick layer of Styrofoam. The captain and crew could have floated halfway across Lake Superior on the stuff.
Bath crayons, though, are a major advance. I don’t remember these from when I was young, but they’re perfect for scribbling on the tile the deep thoughts that come only in a bathtub. Or drawing caricatures of the neighbors, or playing tic-tac-toe against yourself, or writing out the opening of the “Canterbury Tales,” if that’s your preference.
And no bath is complete without a ship to sail across the treacherous seas, by the Scylla of your feet, and safely past the Charybdis of the drain. The iron boats go, as the mariners all know, with the gales of November remembered. Of course, the legend lives on, from the Chippewa on down, of the big bath they call Gitchee Gumee. The bathtub, they say, never gives up her dead when the gales of November come early. And all that remains are the faces and the names of the wives and the sons and the daughters–which reminds me, it’s probably time to get out. Maybe just one more dribble of hot water and one more time through “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”
–Joseph Bottum
