Nightswimmer

by Joseph Olshan

  “Highly unlikely, but I could deal with it.” Self-consciously crossing his arms over his chest, Peter squinted at me and said, “There are one or two I might even take home with me.”

  I guffawed.

  Splash was brimming on a Wednesday night, late summer, only a few days beyond the full moon. White T-shirts, tans, the latest pump at the gym being advertised. The more revealing the outfit, the loftier the attitude, and, quite often, the deeper ran the rut of insecurity.

  In the late seventies and early eighties, it used to be that you could surface in such a bar and know instantly who wanted you and whom you could have. But these days, with sex-at-the-first-encounter not necessarily first on everybody’s agenda, there was more caginess, posturing, an element of wiliness. These days people basked in being sought after, being desired, not necessarily needing to make sexual contact.

  “See that pumped-up guy, the one with his shirt off?” Peter asked. “Well, he’s made himself a couple of million on Wall Street.”

  “Then I think there should be a cap on income.”

  “Why? Let the guy have his fun … as if you’re not into money and power.”

  “Peter, if I were into money, believe me, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing. I’d be trading bonds or brokering stock.”

  “Making a lot of money is just another form of vanity.”

  “Is that why you shrinks make so much of it?” I laughed.

  “I don’t know about the rest of them, but I make as much as I can so I can take my boyfriends on expensive vacations.”

  “So, if I’d hung in there a little longer, I would have hit the jackpot?”

  Peter shrugged. “Who’s to say?”

  “And just when would you have sprung the trip to Istanbul on me?”

  “Probably in another week or so.”

  “And what about Sebastian?”

  “Oh, he would’ve come along—as the towel boy … Look, why are we here together, anyway?” Peter’s tone became irritable. “We didn’t have to come here in order to squabble.”

  “We came here to see that,” I said, pointing to the television screen directly opposite us that was playing shots of the Morning Party.

  “I’ve seen it. I was there, remember?”

  “All right, so you’re keeping me company,” I said.

  I bought the first round of beer, and then Peter and I wedged ourselves into a corner and began watching the video screen. All over the bar stood clusters of men, riveted to the footage of the summer’s most popular bash, where the worship of hairless muscle was celebrated en masse. In living color, men gamboled on a huge dance floor that was erected right on the beach at Fire Island. Necklaces made with what looked like ball bearings strung together were all the rage this year. Clutching cups of frothy beer, glassy-eyed, tribes of torqued-up bodies danced together under the influence of the great friendship drug Ecstasy.

  “What a pain it must be keeping the whole body shaved,” Peter said in response to all the smooth torsos.

  I imagined thousands of guys rising at the crack of dawn, steaming up their bathrooms, shaving their balls, their assholes, their chests. Battalions of odalisques. No expense spared to create an illusion of youth. But, quite obviously, only an illusion. Fascinated by the procession of hairless guys, I said, “Jesus,, they make me feel like a fucking ape.”

  “You better not start shaving anything,” Peter warned me.

  “What difference does it make? You and I will probably never do it again,” I found myself saying.

  Peter looked at me, injured. “Why did you say that?” he demanded, clenching his jaw and raising his eyes once again to the video screen. “You know, you’re lousy to me sometimes.”

  “You’re right. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. I guess I’m in a bad mood tonight.”

  “Why are you in such a rotten mood?”

  Obviously I wasn’t going to explain. “Probably some kind of chemical imbalance,” I said. Looking around the bar, I couldn’t help wondering what someone from another culture would say upon entering this place: why are there only men here, and wearing white T-shirts; why are they all watching television monitors? “Seen yourself yet, Peter?”

  “I was in the water most of the time. Believe it or not, there was hardly anybody in the water. Five thousand guys strutting their stuff up and down a beach and maybe twenty of us were in the ocean.”

  “Obviously, they didn’t want to screw up their hairstyle,” I said, nervously patting my own thinning scalp. “Must be nice to have to worry about that.”

  Peter grinned and then took a playful swipe at me. “Don’t worry, you don’t need a full head of hair. You’re a bona fide tamale,” he said and kissed me.

  Some of the guys were fondling themselves self-consciously as they danced, looking guardedly down at their pumped torsos as if to make sure that everything was there, if it still worked, as if their bodies had been borrowed from someone else and had never be longed to them to begin with.

  Will, what are you looking for, I remember asking myself, even though I knew I was searching for your face. Your face as it would have looked only hours before you entered my life. Searching for the dark curls, for the wolverine eyes. Until I became aware of a couple of Latino hunks clustering near Peter and me. There were fast-track glances in our direction, too swift to necessarily mean interest. “What do you mean?” I heard one of them say nastily. “He did have someone. He was dating Sean Paris.”

  “Well then, it’s no wonder,” someone else murmured.

  They were peering our way, at Peter’s bulging fairness, his over-pumped cliffhanger tits.

  The reference to you made me gawk at the group of men, something one never should do at a posing bar such as Splash; gawking is immediately interpreted as some sort of self-abasement.

  “Why are you cruising them,” Peter wanted to know, and I told him why, that they’d mentioned you.

  “Sean Paris?” Peter looked irked. “You seem inordinately interested in Sean. You seen him since that night?”

  I shook my head.

  “Seriously?”

  “I told you, no.”

  “How come?”

  “Just haven’t seen him, that’s all.”

  “So, is he your next quarry?” Peter was someone who had already inspired deranged behavior in another man, yet he knew that I’d gone cool on him in the heat of you. He wasn’t used to being in this predicament.

  “Quarry,” I repeated, “that’s an odd way to put it.”

  “Not really. Because you can’t completely immerse yourself in an experience, you’re always one step back, studying it. You’d have made a great doctor,” he exclaimed, looking at me solemnly. “A much better shrink than I’ll ever be.”

  “You make me sound awful, you know that?”

  “It’s true, though, isn’t it?”

  I hesitated and then I said, “I think it might be why all my recent relationships have ended.”

  “So then where exactly does Sean fit into all this?”

  “Don’t be jealous of him.” I tried to soothe Peter. “You’re a good friend.”

  “Oh, Jesus, now I’m just a good friend to you. That’s not what you were saying last week when I had your dick in my mouth.”

  “I just want to get to know Sean Paris, that’s all. There’s something about him—”

  “I’ll tell you what it is about him.”

  But Peter never got a chance to say. Time and space collapsed as I looked up to the video screen and saw a flash-frame of you grind-dancing with a black man, both of you glistening, two so distinct from those surrounding you. Your eyes were closed, lust scrawled all over your face, and the other man was more divine than any line that I could ever write.

  “Shit, there he is, that fucking little heartbreaker, that bitch!” one of the Latino boys cackled. “She deserves a cannonball up her humpy little ass.”

  Bewildered, I glanced over at the group of them again. Why were they so an
gry? But then an almost psychic current swerved my attention toward the door, where, completely unaware that your video doppelgänger was making an appearance on twelve different television monitors all over the bar, there you stood. You were dressed in a loose white T-shirt and the cut-off army fatigues I’d noticed the other night when I was riding in the taxi, when I was unsure whether or not I’d spotted you. So you had been in the city all along, you just hadn’t called me!

  As you scoured the far corners of Splash with the most dismal of expressions on your face, the moment you noticed me, the silly grin appeared. Without even considering whether or not it would be a romantically politic move, I began walking toward you, and as soon as I arrived you gave my shoulder a playful squeeze.

  “Hey, I just left you a message.”

  And I actually tried to sound calm and detached when I answered, “Hey, I’m not home.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  Looking for you is what I should have said. “I’m hanging out with Peter. You remember Peter Rocca,” I joked as we strolled over to where he was standing.

  “Hey, Sean,” Peter said, clearly uncomfortable.

  Your eyes bored into me. “So what’s the story, Will? Your phone isn’t listed anymore. I’ve tried to get ahold of you.”

  “Didn’t you know, he’s too important now to appear in the White Pages,” Peter said.

  “Now, wait a minute,” I objected. “I’m supposed to be in the latest phone book.”

  But I explained how there had been an error; when the last telephone book had been printed the number was mistakenly listed only under Greg’s name. “I called to have it changed.”

  “Well, it never got changed,” you said. “I finally had to go to the library to look it up in an old phone book.”

  “To think that you of all people aren’t listed,” Peter murmured. “It’s kind of amazing. Considering that you’d shrivel up and die without a telephone.”

  “Do you have to broadcast every one of my weaknesses?”

  Peter looked annoyed. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure you out. Anyway, I think I’m going to move on. This is getting a little cozy. And”—he pointed across the crowded bar—“I see someone over there that I’d like to get to know. Catch you guys later.” He strolled away toward the muscle sea that eventually parted and took him into its steroid depths.

  “What’s with him, suddenly?” you said.

  “He spied us leaving his place together the other night. He got bent out of shape.”

  “Doesn’t he see somebody?”

  “You mean, is the shrink in therapy?”

  “No, I’m saying doesn’t he have a boyfriend?”

  “As if that means anything.” I sounded a little more cynical than I’d intended.

  “Well, there are all kinds of relationships,” you said and then winked at me. “So how are you doing?”—resting your hand on my shoulder.

  I wanted to tell you how difficult the last few days had been, but felt foolish—yet again—for collaborating on my own misery. “God, I wish I’d known my phone wasn’t listed,” I said. “I actually tried calling you a couple times myself.”

  “Look, don’t sweat it. I don’t give a shit about the telephone, as you probably can tell.”

  This sobered me. Did you know how many times I’d tried to call, had you been hiding out in your apartment, listening to it ring and not answering it, mocking my persistence?

  Wanting to move on to another subject, I pointed to the cavorting bodies on the video screen. “Hey, I just saw you.”

  “Saw me on the hit parade, huh?”

  “You were dancing with a beautiful black man.”

  “Oh yeah?” you said shyly.

  “I mistook him for God.”

  You laughed and the hand on my shoulder slipped around until your forearm was resting on my neck. “Let’s get out of here, Will.”

  A perfect night for strolling, dry, with river wind slapping us as we headed down Seventh Avenue. We moved together gracefully, as though accustomed to walking in each other’s company. The peacefulness I felt suddenly made up for the last few days of fretting. Why had I tortured myself so?

  “Been away, haven’t you?” I said finally.

  A nod.

  “You never bothered putting the machine back on.”

  “I know.”

  “Don’t you like getting messages?”

  “People have my work number; they can always leave word for me there.”

  “So where did you go?”

  “Down to Pennsylvania … a friend of mine passed away. The funeral was held in his hometown.”

  “Young?” I said, which tactfully meant “AIDS?”

  You nodded.

  “What a shame,” I said.

  At your lead we’d turned off onto Twelfth Street and traveled west toward the Hudson. And then I had the oddest sense of the air around my ears warping as something whizzed by. A thudding sound echoed from the hubcap of a parked car. Somebody had thrown a rock.

  We both jerked to a halt and saw the shadowy forms of people standing under a street lamp next to a warehouse. One of them grabbed something that looked like a pipe, banged on a car windshield until a horizontal rain of green shards showered the street like crushed ice. “Hey, Sean—ice princess!” somebody said. A warble of laughter echoed through the street as they vanished into the alleyway.

  You shook your head dumbfounded and then looked at me, alarmed.

  “What’s all that about?” I asked.

  “How do I know what it’s all about? They’re obviously drunk.”

  “Cut the bullshit. Why did they call you that?”

  You frowned at me and said grimly, “Your guess is as good as mine.” Hesitating another moment, you eventually said, “But I think I recognize one or two of them from the funeral. They all seem to know one another.”

  “So what’s that got to do with you?”

  “You certainly ask a lot of questions.”

  “Come on, what’s going on here? What’s the story?”

  You sighed. “I dated the guy, the guy who died, for a while.”

  “How long ago?”

  “We met around a year ago. It took a few months to get involved. The last time I saw him was way back in February.”

  I couldn’t help asking, “Are you at all worried about yourself, your health, I mean?”

  You shook your head slowly as you fitted the toe of your tennis shoe on a single fragment of glass that had managed through the impact to scatter like a seed as far as where we stood. You tried to break it down even further, but it refused to pulp. “I recently got tested again … I was negative.”

  I waited for you to ask me my status, and when you finally did I stammered, “I’ve never taken the test.”

  “How come?”

  Like a recording on an answering machine, I announced how there was no tried and true early intervention, how for years I’d been practicing sexual behavior that assumed either I or my partner might be HIV-positive. That there were just too many opinions of what safe sex was, too many variable possibilities of becoming infected. Which meant, if one stayed single, running on the treadmill of having to get tested every six months. HIV-negative or -positive were labels that reminded me of Jews being constrained to wear yellow stars during World War II. No matter what anybody said, HIV-positive still spelled discrimination—outside as well as within the gay community. For the sad fact remained that many HIV-negative people were finding it difficult to make love to an otherwise healthy HIV-positive man. This made the otherwise healthy HIV-positives feel like outcasts.

  And finally I explained that, for myself, keeping my HIV status a mystery made me live harder, kept me aware that I could not necessarily count on being in the world for more than the next few years and let me identify with both camps.

  You were looking straight ahead, toward the West Side Highway, and I almost thought that you’d lost the thread of our conversation. But the
n you said, “Sounds like a lot of justification to me, Will. Sounds like you’re just afraid of getting it—getting the test.”

  It was difficult to disagree, because I knew there was some truth in what you said.

  We started walking again and the silence held sway over us until I remembered the point we’d been arguing before we hit the subject of HIV. When I remarked that I still didn’t understand why anybody would blame you for a man’s death, you shrugged and said you couldn’t think of any other reason than you were the last person he’d been involved with. And that it didn’t work out and that he was really upset for a long time afterward.

  “Was he sick when you dated?”

  “Not at all.”

  I thought how horrible it would be if your lover, whom you hadn’t really loved, had sickened. Then you’d be faced, morally, with caring for him, but not caring—the most horrible paradox.

  You were now gazing at me with the dismal expression I’d seen at Splash. “Things ended badly between us. I mean, I was only involved with him for around four months. But I was honest with him the whole way, honest from the very beginning.”

  The guy just never believed that you wouldn’t eventually fall in love with him.

  Yet I sensed something was being withheld about this man. I felt I was trying to grope my way along the dark borders of your story. But then you told me the real reason why you’d left your machine off, why you weren’t answering the phone. This man’s ex-lover, someone he’d been involved with before he met you, had been calling and harassing you.

  We’d reached the West Side Highway, the body of the Hudson a dark void pearled with searchlights from Circle Line boats. I thought I heard music being piped in from somewhere.

  Remembering the phone message the first night I met you, I said, “This guy who died, his name was Bobby, right?”

  “His name was Bobby Garzino.”

  “So how exactly is Bobby Garzino’s ex-lover harassing you?”

  “Well, he’s basically trying to get stuff back. Stuff that Bobby gave me. This guy thinks he deserves it all back because he really loved Bobby and I didn’t. And I’ve refused because Bobby made them as gifts for me. Naturally I consider what Bobby gave me is mine.”