The Swimmer

Ned Merrill, a former stockbroker from the valley, has been released from a mental hospital after suffering a breakdown. No longer having a car, he develops in his mind that his former wife and estranged grown daughters are leaving to play tennis. Delusional, he thinks he has left his car on a quest to swim to his boarded up home in an imaginary 'river' of the valley's numerous swimming pools. At first a stranger, as he nears his former residence people start to put him down: a mentally-ill alcoholic, not at all a good family man. He becomes challenged at a pool gathering that his wife and daughter sold off the estate months ago. He shivers from hypothermia as rain sets in. He climbs a steep hill in back of the club's pool and finds the tennis court overgrown and the house locked and boarded. He collapses in his swim trunks in the rain.