Nightswimmer

by Joseph Olshan

On one wall hung an all-too-familiar photograph of the moon, huge and pendant over the breakers of Monterey Bay, a photograph that I disliked but had once been forced to live with. On the fireplace mantel stood a gallery of framed snapshots, some of which were of Greg and me (cross-country skiing in Vermont, standing at Lands End on the blustery tip of Cornwall).

  On the opposite wall I noticed something new, a poster hastily affixed with Scotch tape. Squinting at it, I realized that it was the view through a microscope enlarged perhaps a million times. In the middle of the poster was a line that divided what I recognized to be enlargements of two T cells: one perfectly spherical, the tendrils of its microscopic matter all flowing efficiently in one direction; and one no longer spherical, but rather in the process of disintegration, tendrils waving every which way like dreadlocks. VISUALIZE THIS, read block lettering beneath the healthy T cell.

  “Why did you put that up?” I nervously asked.

  The last time we’d spoken, Greg was HIV-negative. He was facing away from me. Just then the tea kettle began to shrill, and he poured the scalding water through the coffee filter.

  He finally turned to me. “Well, why not?”

  “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

  “No!”

  I turned back to the poster. The dichotomy between the two cells was distressing. I couldn’t imagine, particularly after a bad night of sleep, getting up in the morning and looking at a poster of those paradigms of health and illness.

  “I look at it to keep reminding myself what’s going on,” Greg explained. “I look at it and I visualize healing and finding a cure. I think it’s important to do that.”

  I admired Greg’s mature perspective, and remembering my own recklessness at his age, I also felt chagrined. Greg was young enough never to have known sex without its direct correlation to dying. Ten years ago, someone like Greg—someone like me—might have tacked up on their wall a love aphorism, a message of inner forbearance, lines written by e. e. cummings or Kahlil Gibran. Now, looking from the decrepit, afflicted T cell to its smooth, well-heeled counterpart was like looking at the fates of two different generations.

  NINE

  WHEN I ARRIVED BACK at my apartment there were three messages from you on my answering machine, spaced an even half hour apart. It was the first time I’d ever heard you sound relatively off kilter. In light of the psychological hoops I’d already jumped through in regard to you, the worry in your voice gave me a burst of satisfaction.

  “Are you going to be there for five minutes?” you asked when I finally got through to you at work.

  I said that I would. In the interim, I sifted through my mail, switched on my computer but refrained from working. Five minutes would hardly allow me enough time to begin concentrating. When ten minutes had elapsed without your calling back, I retrieved a half-completed book review on my computer screen and finally set down to writing. After another uninterrupted ten minutes, however, I’d grown so anxious that I was unable to consolidate my thoughts. Why had you told me five minutes? Was the estimated time—of arrivals, departures, meetings—always going to be a stretch with you? Thirty-five minutes later the phone rang, and though I’d been anticipating it, I nonetheless jumped at the sound.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t get back to you right away. Some shit has hit the fan in the interim. They’ve suddenly decided to send me out to Montana. To tag some trees for a job we’re doing.”

  “When do you leave?”

  “Tonight.”

  You were to be gone for five days, just when we were getting to know each other.

  You added in a rush, “But look, I need to talk to you about something. I need to ask you a favor.”

  “What’s that?”

  And then you explained that shortly after I left at around eight thirty that morning, you’d received a call from Bobby Garzino’s ex-lover, José. After he insisted once again that you return all the objects from The Loom’s Desire, José said that if you didn’t cooperate he’d conveniently wait until you were at work and then break into the apartment.

  “So call the police,” I said, “if he’s threatening to break in.”

  “You think the police are going to pay attention to this—some dispute between two gay guys? Believe me, they won’t end up doing anything about it. And anyway, I don’t want José to be hassled by the police.”

  I grew immediately suspicious. “Why not?”

  “Because he obviously really loved Bobby. And I respect that. And it’s probably a lot easier for José to blame me for making Bobby unhappy than to accept the fact that Bobby died.”

  “So you’re just going to let him keep harassing you?”

  “I think he’ll eventually stop.”

  But you wanted me to stay at your place while you were away. If José was actually keeping track of you, he’d soon find out that no one was staying there, and that would give him his chance.

  Why didn’t I suggest that you keep all the loomed possessions in my apartment—why didn’t you suggest it, for that matter? Perhaps I was afraid that had I suggested this and you weren’t keen it would mean you had some doubts about me, didn’t trust me enough to take care of your valuables. Didn’t want us that closely connected. But all this was getting ahead of what Greg had told me.

  “Look, Sean,” I said, “before we make any arrangement, I’ve got to ask you to clarify something.”

  No response. Just silence.

  “Are you there?”

  “Uh-huh. What is it?”

  “I ran into my ex this morning on the way home. And then our dog got sick—” I began to explain the trip to the vet and was glad you interrupted to ask if Casey was okay. That interruption returned me to the point. “Before Casey got sick, Greg and I got to talking as we do sometimes … about guys we’ve been seeing, blah, blah, blah, even though it can get awkward sometimes. As it did today.”

  “Yeah?”

  I couldn’t believe how nervous the conversation was making me. My heart was fibrillating as it did when I finished a hard set in the pool. “When I mentioned your name he immediately knew who you were.”

  “What’s his full name?”

  “Greg Wallace.”

  “Can’t say that I’ve heard of him.”

  “He told me something that I’m hoping is untrue.” I took a breath and exhaled. “That you’d been involved with the guy who threw himself in front of that train a week ago.”

  “That’s right, I was involved with him … at one time.”

  “Well, I mean, who was he, this guy who killed himself?”

  “It was Bobby Garzino,” you said without any noticeable hesitation.

  Of course, I’d already linked the two deaths, immediately, the moment Greg told me. How eerie it all seemed, the instant feelings that arose in me the moment I heard about the train death, how I imagined that it was a man suffering from love, a man who couldn’t be cared for.

  “Now, wait a second, Sean,” I said hoarsely. “You told me Bobby Garzino died of AIDS.”

  “No, I didn’t tell you, you assumed he died of AIDS. And so I let you assume that because you weren’t that far off. He was sick, and he would’ve died. And I was planning to tell you how he actually did die.”

  “But until that time, you would’ve withheld something pretty important.”

  “Well, okay, so I would have. But that was partly because it unnerved me that the first I’d heard of him dying was through you, of all people. I could’ve mentioned his suicide last night, and of course it’d crossed my mind any number of times. But last night was really our first night together. And I didn’t end up saying anything because I was afraid it would … ruin the evening.”

  No, only the morning, my morning, I thought. I said, “Yeah, but look how open I was about myself and my own past.”

  “Precisely, because it was the past. This is the present. This is something that’s going on, something I’m still trying to understand. I mean, in your friend’s apartment,
the moment you told me about a person who threw himself in front of the train, I went completely cold. I suddenly felt really queasy, and I couldn’t figure out why. That was the reason I wanted to leave. Imagine later on that night when I found out I knew the person, and that it was Bobby. It was all too strange and creepy that I knew it before I knew it.”

  “But I felt creepy, too. That’s why I brought it up to begin with. That’s why you should’ve said something.”

  “I was afraid you’d make assumptions like the people starting these rumors.”

  “But who do you think started the rumors?”

  You groaned and then concluded, “People always love this kind of drama. They’d love to assume that I had something to do with him dying, that he got AIDS from me.”

  A question flared, but I waited a moment before asking, “Are you really negative?”

  “Yes, I’m negative.”

  “But you’re supposed to wait six months.”

  “I did, but people don’t know that. And even if they could know, they might assume that the stress of our relationship made him get sick a lot faster than he would have.”

  You repeated that you had not actually seen Bobby Garzino since that night last February when he lay in the middle of your pile of clothing. Since then he had written several letters to you that claimed he couldn’t get you out of his mind, letters asking you to get back together with him. Rather than encourage him with any response, you chose not to contact him at all. Finally, one night toward the end of July, when the city was suffering from a heat wave, he called you out of the blue. Told you his health seemed to be going downhill and that he had scheduled an AIDS test. You made him promise to call you with the results. Throughout the conversation, he kept asking you to meet with him, and finally you agreed and set an actual date for dinner. But that was the last time you’d ever heard from him. On the day of the dinner he never even returned your phone call.

  “So this is all assumption on your part. You never heard from him and so you’re presuming he got bad news?”

  “What would you think? Especially when he’d been insisting on getting together and I’d finally agreed to it.”

  “But why can’t you ask around?”

  “Who am I going to ask—José, who’s been harassing me? You think he’s going to be honest?”

  There was the roommate who’d lived with Bobby, but the roommate had moved to the Midwest almost immediately after the incident. And yet, the more you thought about it, the more it made sense that Bobby wouldn’t necessarily want you to know that he had HIV—anyone, for that matter, but you in particular. Because he knew you were HIV-negative and probably believed that if you knew that he was HIV-positive, the idea of a relationship would be an even more remote possibility.

  Viral apartheid, I thought to myself.

  “He chose not to go through all that suffering,” you said with admiration. “He chose to die perfect.”

  I could tell that you were impressed by the fact that someone had taken control of his own death, had subverted the inevitable decline into emaciation, into ugliness, and had circumvented the renowned suffering of this disease.

  But if Bobby had wanted to die perfect, why did he choose to throw himself in front of a train? I wondered. But it was too mean a question ever to voice.

  From that pause, you conveniently eased us along to another subject, the fact that after the five-day business trip you were owed a week’s vacation. How would I like to go away with you somewhere? Someplace quiet. “I have to catch up on a backlog of land drawings, but I can also work on them while I’m away and FedEx ’em back to the office as I finish.”

  “As a matter of fact, yes.”

  And so I explained how every summer for the past three years I’d been renting this little cabin in Vermont that used to be a one-room schoolhouse. You agreed it sounded perfect.

  After putting down the phone, I reran our conversation. On the one hand I was inclined to suspect the staggered manner in which you’d told me the story of Bobby Garzino. On the other hand, I had to remind myself that, unlike you, I’m the sort of person whose imagination gets overstimulated from very little. And sometimes I get confused between what I’ve nakedly perceived and what I’ve varnished upon that perception.

  TEN

  SO THEN YOU WERE gone and I became you. And, strangely, that was when I was happiest, alone in your apartment, those days before I met you in Vermont. Alone in your apartment when our idyll was still ahead of me like a harbor marking.

  You had to leave town quickly without any time to tidy. Which suited me, because I wanted to turn the key in the door as though I were you at the end of any normal day. I wanted to shadow everything that I knew you were. To look around and sigh at the state of slowly accreting disarray. There are certain people whose natural style lends art even to their clutter. You were one of them. I found cut crystal glasses residued with Scotch; white ceramic plates encrusted with dried radicchio; a bruise of dessert wine on a ragged cotton place mat; an old tackle box filled with lead weights and flies that you’d tied by hand. And all the cut flowers that had almost immediately wilted, as though their very lives depended on your presence.

  Instinctively I straightened up. Folded T-shirts, and oatmeal sweatshirts and towels. Dusted a rosy film from picture frames. Washed curdled milk from the bottom of a cocktail glass. Vacuumed. Played my limited repertory on the piano. Pulled books from the shelves, read sporadically, finding the flap of the book jacket anchored halfway through Bleak House, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, every single novel and short story by Kafka. There was a huge black leather portfolio of all your renderings, and I rifled through them, amazed that you could draw as well as you did—the esplanade along a riverfront, a museum’s arboretum, the grounds of a parochial school—even though you had told me that such drawing was merely “an acquired skill.”

  We’d agreed that I’d let the machine answer the phone and would pick up only if the call was for me. But after hearing a few of your friend’s voices, and thinking they sounded interesting, I couldn’t help myself. Explaining that you were out of town on business, I suggested that messages be left with your office, for there was no forwarding number. Most of the callers were miffed to hear my voice, to hear in it the assurance with which I seemed to know you, even though they probably had known you a lot longer than I, and known you well enough to realize that it was uncharacteristic of Sean Paris to have someone answering his phone, or staying in his apartment. I felt subversive—and gleeful.

  The first night I stayed at your house I noticed on the bottom bookshelf three slim, leather-bound volumes with marbleized covers made of Florentined paper. I figured they were sketch pads left over from journeys you’d made abroad. I cracked open the third one and found the lined ivory-colored pages of a diary, every page written in black fountain-pen ink. The landscape of the writing on each page had a peculiar up-and-down flourish that hardly seemed like contemporary handwriting but, rather, resembled what I imagined to be the hand of an aristocrat imprisoned for, say, heresy during the Middle Ages. Scanning the paragraphs, I noticed how the word love jumped out from the hedgerows of writing, and the initials R. M.

  In the first volume, a few pages were filled, the rest left blank. But sandwiched among the empty pages were letters typed double-spaced on thin onionskin bond, folded carefully and placed together like entries in an accordion file. I dared to open one of them and saw that it was written to an R. M. with your signature at the bottom. I glanced at another and found that it addressed the same R. M. person—unmailed letters, I assumed. Were they to a man you once loved? To that man you had yet to tell me about? I was surprised that you trusted me enough not to have hidden the extreme privacy of this correspondence. Or perhaps you’d been in too much of a rush to leave. This made me feel guilty for snooping. I made myself put away the volumes without reading anything.

  On my second night in your apartment, a call came in with the noise of a busy street in the background.


  “Sean’s not here,” I said. “Can I take a message?”

  “When is he due back?” asked a cultivated yet anxious voice.

  “Who’s calling, please?”

  “A friend. Did you say he was out tonight?”

  The man’s intent was palpable. “Would you mind giving me your name?” I asked.

  There was a pause, during which I thought I heard the phone getting knocked around. “I’ll be off it in a minute,” the man said irritably to someone else. “What did you say?” he asked me.

  “Would you mind giving me your name?”

  “My name is José Ayala.”

  “I’ll tell Sean you called.”

  “Wait a second. Wait a second. Who are you?”

  I decided to act as though I didn’t know who he might be. “I’m a friend of Sean’s. I’m staying with him for a while.”

  “Are you … oh, I’ve actually got to go. Goodbye,” the man said and signed off.

  And I immediately sensed, no doubt the way you did, that he wasn’t as dangerous so much as despairing, and although he might be capable of doing harm, he probably was not evil.

  Then again, early the next morning around 7:00 A.M.

  “May I speak to Sean now, please?”

  “I’m sorry, I’ll have to take a message.”

  “He’s gone, isn’t he? He’s out of town.”

  “Does that really make a difference? He’ll get the message,” I said. “I promise.”

  “I’m sure you must know all about me. I’m sure he told you that I’ve been calling. He wouldn’t just leave and not explain what has been going on here.” The man sounded on the verge of tears. “Please just tell me if he’s out of town.”

  “I’ll give him your message, okay? Maybe he’ll call you back. I’m going back to sleep now.” Of course I was fully awake.

  “Don’t get off the phone. Talk to me for a moment. Just for a moment.”

  I said nothing. I waited.

  “He’s a bad person. I just want to tell you that if you don’t know that already.”