The Night Swimmers

by Peter Rock

  (Who was I, and what was wrong with me?)

  There I was, trying to convince my girlfriend to help me not be alone:

  [Sent from Montana to New Haven, 1991]

  July 31

  I’m sitting on my steps and a sparrow’s building a nest above me, dropping little pieces of mud.

  August 27

  Today a strand of barbed wire got loose and tore up my nose.

  September 15

  I want to live somewhere with a real table. What do you wish we could talk about that we can’t because everything is not more ok?

  September 19

  You’ve written me a lot of nice letters and they help when I’m lonely. I especially like the one about us being cows with brushes on our tails, potentially hemmed in by cattle guards painted on the highway that wouldn’t really grab our hooves. I hope we’re not like those cows. I don’t think so.

  September 25

  At this point, as far as writing I feel all I can do is talk tough. Meanwhile, the moon has been crazy, here, a big blue and orange hole rolling along the mountains.

  October 8

  I found a two-bedroom house in Livingston with a garage for $320 a month.

  October 14

  Sending two letters in one day is something that lovers do, I think. I’m going to get a book about how to make furniture. You do have very large and beautiful breasts; we have to find that shirt.

  November 29

  I don’t know if I’d say you write coldly; with authority and confidence, poise: that is true. When I read this, as usual, I am left feeling that you can put your finger on it, where you want . . .

  December 6

  Yesterday I went and spent some time in the house and it tickled me even more. There’s so much room—closets everywhere, drawers coming out of the wall in the bathroom. Amazing.

  December 9

  I even got new Montana plates for the truck, and a new driver’s license. I seek authenticity.

  When she finished college and moved out to Montana, we lived in the little house with the pink kitchen and worked our jobs—me on the ranch, she at the bowling alley, then waitressing at the Livingston Bar & Grille—and played house, and tried to write. To imagine places and people, to come up with all their names. She cut her hair short, and had a Carhartt jacket, like mine, that I’d given her. A fly-fishing cap, too, and heavy boots. It is sharply, tenderly embarrassing to imagine how we must have looked. Perhaps we dressed like this to suggest or create a similarity, a uniform, to convince ourselves that we were the same or to camouflage our differences.

  One day in Livingston we were grocery shopping at John’s IGA and in the checkout line we saw a little book of baby names and threw it down on the conveyor belt with our meat and broccoli and beer.

  “Congratulations!” the cashier said, and we looked at each other obliviously, suddenly awkward.

  “We’re writers,” my girlfriend said.

  “Still,” the cashier said. “That’s great.”

  I said, “It’s just that we have to make up so many names all the time, for our characters.”

  In that moment, did we feel the possibility that we might have a child together, children? I don’t think I considered that possibility, consciously (September 2, 1991: Last night I dreamed we (you) had three babies in rapid succession (within a couple days, though they were not triplets and were quite different ages). It all took place in a snowy/ice field landscape and I’d walk carrying the babies, changing their names. Naming was my job . . .”); in any case, I know I wasn’t ready, probably felt that we, she and I were not ready. I knew even then that we wouldn’t have children together.

  Still, I admired her, I admire her—the startling combination of her lisp that could make her seem so young and the incredibly smart things she said that made it all sound so wonderfully precocious. I remember a paper she wrote about John Ashbery (“It’s this crazy weather we’re having:/ Falling forward one minute, lying down the next . . .”); I remember holding its dot-matrixed pages in my hands and reading with envy and wonder the easy, conversational way of her intelligence: “There is no certainty that this poem is about weather as we typically understand it, yet its craziness is difficult to dispute.”

  These letters—an attempt to communicate with this one other person—are far better written and more interesting than any fiction I wrote, in those years. They are where I learned to write.

  To read them describes, plots the points of a relationship—beginning, middle, end—in a way that is, in hindsight, almost comical, preordained. And to excerpt them as I have here is obviously to curate a certain narrative, to leave so much out, to present a self.

  Yet I’m also aware of how often I made similar choices, back then; how I left things out when writing the letters themselves. I don’t mention other infatuations or romantic possibilities. There’s no mention of Mrs. Abel at all, even though (and this surprised me) the letters revealed that not only had I fled to Wisconsin from the end of a relationship that hadn’t even quite ended, I had also, during that summer of Mrs. Abel, still been writing letters to the same girlfriend.

  [Sent from Wisconsin to Toronto, 1994]

  July 27

  Just got off the phone and am troubled to hear you so troubled. I think as far as the move and everything you made the right choice and I’m sure it seems strange. I know (or hope) I’m cause for concern, too; I’m not sure what to say. I love you and I need to get some self-respect and impetus back. My flailing isn’t your fault, of course, and it’s not even that tragic . . . Anyway, meanwhile the rain is coming down again and my radishes are exploding upward.

  August 10

  I don’t know if it’s so much a need of yours to get things straight/talk things out as it’s been you who does a lot of hard work and meanwhile I wait and let you.

  August 20

  (I have a great aunt who always writes two letters—one normal, the other apologizing for anything in the first one that could be misconstrued.)

  August 31

  It’s hard to write—either it seems like I’m avoiding something by passing on news or I’m complicating an already complicated problem. I feel I’m letting you down by not being clear enough or not saying something I should have.

  September 9

  I’m not sure how I should explain my silence. I don’t feel too silent, but then I don’t have much to say. It’s hard to write or talk on the phone because I’m self-conscious, in the sense of being conscious of presenting a self. You say you don’t know me and you don’t know what it’s like to be me. Before when I wrote I said I was glad you knew me better than anyone and I believe that. I’m sorry I haven’t been adequately able to say or even know how I feel, however I think that’s what everyone’s working on all the time. I’m not holding anything back! I always try to be honest, I try to be a good person. Sometimes that’s not so easy to do. It hurts me to get some of your letters (like the one full of questions), it makes me feel insufficient and a little cornered. Yes, I get angry and relieved and lonely. All that’s all right. Now’s a hard time for us and I hope we can make it better than this.

  Four

  —

  - 31 -

  Whether thinking of or consciously not thinking of my old girlfriend, I drove alone from Utah to Wisconsin, early in the summer of 1995, the summer after the summer of Mrs. Abel, about whom I was thinking.

  I felt so strongly about her and I was uncertain of how I felt, really, or exactly what had happened, the summer before; I believed we might swim again, continue what we’d been doing—that at least things between us would settle in a way that I could understand.

  My first night back, I walked down the beach to where the segments of Mrs. Abel’s pier were stacked on the stones. The doors to the space beneath her cabin were locked; I crept around to her back porch and peeked in the windows
, into darkness and shadows.

  The door rattled when I tried the knob. It was only locked by a hook and eye, and I went into the woods and broke off a twig, then worked it through the gap between door and frame; I lifted the hook free, heard its tiny cold settling.

  Inside, sheets covered the furniture, the piano. Yellow boxes of mouse poison were torn open, bait scattered across the floor.

  I pulled the sheet from the table Mr. Zahn had made and kneeled down. Taking hold of the lions’ wooden faces, I opened the drawers and secret compartments, all still empty except for the one that held Mr. Zahn’s heavy pocketknife. I picked it up, pulled the stubborn blade open; cloudy, yet its edge still sharp. I folded it again, put it in my pocket, then closed the drawer, and covered the table with the sheet again.

  She’d taken the carved airplane with the bluebird on it; the hook where it had hung pierced the air, sharp and empty beneath the loft. I stepped closer, I climbed up the ladder and peeked at the empty mattress, stripped bare, its striped ticking, the metal of its buttons worn through.

  Out the window, the silent lake was the same color as the sky, the line between them impossible to see. Tacked next to the window, the same picture of the fire in the forest, the leaves tossed above those flames, the trees’ branches alight. At the bottom of the slope, the little cabin with its one window. In the foreground, puddles of fire; overhead, a tilted crescent moon.

  I took hold of that stiff, fragile sheet and pulled it loose, tearing a short line in the top margin, where the nail had been. Carefully, I folded the picture and put it in my back pocket.

  - 32 -

  One of the first things I did—that summer of 1995, before my parents arrived—was to ride my rattly old bike down to the post office.

  I couldn’t remember the name of the postmistress, but she knew who I was, and was surprised to see me.

  “All your family’s mail is forwarded,” she said. “All to Utah, I believe.”

  “I know,” I said. “That’s not why I’m here.”

  “So how can I help you?”

  “I was hoping you could give me someone’s forwarding address.”

  “I can’t,” she said. “That’s not something I can do.”

  “It’s a friend,” I said.

  “If you give me a letter for someone, then I can forward it, but we don’t give out addresses.”

  “This is for my neighbor,” I said. “Claire Abel?”

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said, but she turned around, as if looking for something. And then she held a flat box in her hand. In it, I could see envelopes with my handwriting on them.

  “She didn’t leave a forwarding address. If I had one, I still couldn’t tell you, though.”

  I stood uncertain whether to claim the letters, to say that they were mine and try to take them back, knowing also that I wanted Mrs. Abel to receive them, if she ever returned.

  “So what happens,” I said, “to the letters, then?”

  “We hold them,” the postmistress said. “Until she comes back for them.”

  “Did she ask you to hold them?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Again, that’s not something I can say.”

  “What if she never comes back for them?” I said. “Do you keep them forever?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Could you step aside? There’s people waiting behind you.”

  I rode away from the post office, up the slope and past the yellow slow blind child sign. When we were young we always laughed at that sign, at this child, doubly afflicted; later, I saw a photograph of my brother’s dorm room in college, where that sign, stolen, was proudly displayed. Still later, my friend Steve Sauter bought and moved into the house of the slow blind child, a house with a broken elevator that took Steve ten years to renovate.

  I pedaled on; the bluff rose on my right and for a moment I imagined I was underwater, my legs pedaling in slow motion. Up another slope, through the intersection, I rode up onto Moravia Street where the trees’ branches met like an arch overhead, the shade deep beneath them.

  I passed the house and studio of the watercolor painter Charles Peterson, who is well-known for painting ghost images, wherein benign spirits, past people, coexist in present times, sharing space with the living. The faded figure of a woman looking out a window, caught in the reflection of the glass; a seemingly empty rocking chair that, upon closer inspection, holds a mother reading to her child; an abandoned schoolhouse full of transparent students.

  Peterson painted my portrait once, when I was ten years old. For some reason my parents had each of us—my two sisters, my brother and me—painted when we were ten years old. And these spectral portraits always hung in the living room in Salt Lake City, as if we are the same age, uneasy quadruplets—only now my parents have sold that house, dispersed its contents. The portrait of my younger self now hangs in this room, watching me while I write these words.

  I look serious, uneasy, trying to hold my head steady, not to blink while I was being painted. (Shortly after my portrait was delivered from Wisconsin to Utah, it was discovered that someone (definitely my older sister) had penciled in my nostrils and it had to be sent back, repaired.) Also, I look hopeful.

  - 33 -

  No one had heard from or about Mrs. Abel, when or whether she planned to return. As the weeks stretched on into July, my hope for her return lapsed, and I reverted to my old ways. I drank beer at the AC Tap, ate innumerable bratwurst, and didn’t swim much at all. I’d been granted a writing fellowship, in California, where I would move in September—that fact relieved any sense of responsibility or anxiety regarding what I should be doing.

  A suspicion festered in me, however; I kept thinking about how Mrs. Abel had offered Mr. Zahn’s house to me, how eager she’d seemed that I stay there.

  I began to watch Mr. Zahn’s house. I’d sneak up the cow path, climb into the old wooden fishing boat in the trees, the Anne Marie. From there I could see across the yard and into the lighted windows; I could see the dark shape of a young man as he moved from room to room, the blue flicker of his television inside that space.

  He’d taken my place, stayed in the house all through the winter and was still living there. His name was Doug Plouff. I wondered about him, how well he knew Mrs. Abel, or if he’d merely answered an advertisement.

  Years before, Doug and I had worked together, as dishwashers at the Carroll House Restaurant, but we’d not stayed in touch; he was a local, not a summer person. In the years since I’d known him, he’d lost one hand in a motorcycle accident, but was still washing dishes—at the Edgewater, that summer of 1995, where my younger sister was working as a waitress.

  From inside the fishing boat, squinting across the yard, I could also see that the rooms were mostly empty, that all of Mr. Zahn’s animals had been removed. Mrs. Abel had had them all moved, had hired people to carefully wrap everything, to put it all in storage. Back then, that made no sense to me, or anyone, but if you research Robert Zahn now you’ll find him referred to as “The Birdman of Door County,” and learn that his work is collected by experts, and in the collections of the Guggenheim, the American Folk Art Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art. I recently purchased a book about him; the preface says: “Folk artist? Outsider? Visionary? Vernacular artist? The labels point to a unique genre of art—art made by natively talented, untrained artists whose work contains a unique vision.”

  When I think of Mr. Zahn, what I remember is his open eyes, the knife in one hand and the half-carved bird in the other, the wood shavings on the floor and Mrs. Abel and myself, both alive, in that screen porch with him.

  And now my daughter slides the door open, peers into this room.

  “Daddy,” she says, “if you die while you’re having a dream, do you get to keep the dream?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  I suppose that I could have befriended Doug Plouff
again, managed to get into Mr. Zahn’s house that way, yet that seemed more deceitful somehow, and I did not want to be inside if he was going to be there, watching me, asking questions.

  One night I watched Doug—a weekend night, when I suspected he’d go out drinking (my sister had recounted some of the misadventures he’d told her about, out all night with a friend named Fat Pat). I waited until he came out of the house, climbed into his car (an old brown Pinto that had actually belonged to my family, once, that my father had sold him for two hundred dollars, that had no floorboards on the passenger side, so you’d be splashed by any puddle) and drove away.

  I stole across the overgrown yard, lifted out a screen, and climbed in an open window.

  Inside, there was a mattress on the floor covered in tangled sleeping bags. Two beach towels—one Packers, one Leinenkugel beer—were attached to one wall, like banners. A bean bag chair and a canvas camping chair faced two television screens—one large, one very small, both balanced on blue plastic milk cartons.

  In the kitchen, beer cans, pizza boxes, a sink full of dirty dishes. I pulled out the drawers, and they were mostly empty. Plastic forks, tangles of rubber bands, fishing hooks. Nothing there—I spun around, searching, my eyes everywhere—felt how I remembered it; it didn’t seem at all like the place where those wooden animals had been, crowded together, where the old man had lived.

  I crossed out through the doorway to the screen porch and switched on the light: a metal folding chair, a cardboard box with an overflowing glass ashtray atop it, next to an orange bong covered in Kawasaki and Harley–Davidson stickers. I switched off the light and stood there, listening to the wind in the trees, looking out through the screens at the shadows in the branches, the darker blackness where the cow path descended along the cliff. This is where we’d been, a year before, and now I was the only one left.