Decades before I first picked up a shelter/lifestyle magazine or a Restoration Hardware catalogue, Al Pacino taught me the art of luxurious multi-tasking while having a long soak in a tub.
Image found here.
Smoking, conducting business on the phone, catching up on mail. This was exciting news. Bathtubs, which I’ve always loved, were no longer lifeless vessels for hygiene but now an indispensable adjunct for running your own personal empire. All you needed was a tray cleverly designed to span the watery abyss.
(Al is bathing here in a really awful movie about a race car driver titled Bobby Deerfield. No need at all to rush to your Netflix queue and add this one.)
Al has since gone on to have another memorable bathtub scene in the old cult favorite Scarface, which I haven’t seen and most likely never will. I’m a complete wimp where movie violence is concerned. Here he bathes while watching television, smoking a cigar, phone and drink within easy reach.
A narrow bath house similar to a screened-in porch was added off our bedroom a couple years ago, jutting out into the garden just under the fringe tree’s canopy.
In a house with one shower for four people, it’s not exactly a luxury, but I’m really the only one who uses it. (Ah, sanctuary!)
The cramped quarters give me a feeling of being on board a ship, soaking and steaming to parts unknown. In the spring, we take down the windows and leave just the screens in. With shades down, I stare at the patterns of leaves against the linen shades. Shades up, I look out into the garden. I bet Al never had his bath in a garden. I’ve yet to smoke a cigar in the tub, but I may have to one day, as an homage to Al.
I need two trays to corral all the stuff that a well-used bath tub generates.
Maybe this bath house is not quite up to Al’s sybaritic standards. (Am I really using a deflated blue balloon for a book marker?)
And unlike Al’s efficient multi-tasking, the only other activity that takes place besides soaking is reading. My little bath house also doubles as the reading room. Magazines and plant catalogues get crinkly in here on Sunday afternoons (as do I).
But sometimes, like this especially brutal workweek, a tub is once again just a tub. No trays full of books, just exhausted, grateful immersion in hot, bubbly water.
Like.