Nightswimmer

by Joseph Olshan

  “It’s my fault,” I said. “I’m feeling scared.”

  You said nothing for a while and finally asked what exactly was scaring me.

  I tried to dissemble. “The usual,” I said. “Losing myself … getting hurt.”

  “Well, I’m in the same place. So at least we understand each other in that way.”

  “I suppose.”

  “I think it’ll be good for us to spend some time together out of the city in another environment.”

  “I’ve actually loved staying here,” I said, looking down at the haphazard pile of our clothing. “I’ve managed to get a lot of work done.” Then it hit me that you were now willing to leave your apartment unguarded. “What about Bobby Garzino’s ex-lover?”

  “When José calls, as I’m sure he will, I’ll just tell him that I’ve removed everything Bobby gave me out of the apartment. We’ll take it to your place, okay?”

  Why hadn’t we done that before? “But now he knows who I am, too.”

  “How does he know that?”

  I explained that apparently some of his friends had seen us leaving Splash together. “I don’t want him breaking into my apartment, either.”

  “Okay, understood. I’ll just take it all to my office.”

  From where I lay I could see the rear pocket of the fatigues and the faintest impression of block lettering MONROE. I suddenly felt a stab of guilt over my indiscretion. “While you were gone, I was looking for a T-shirt to wear and I came upon a stack of fatigues with the name MONROE on the back of them.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “Who is this Monroe?”

  You waited a moment and then you said, “Monroe was my Chad.”

  I managed to laugh, although, inside, the breathless, nauseous feeling that swept through me when I first read the letter returned. “Where’s he from?”

  “Nevis, mainly, though he was born in Michigan.”

  “Nevis, meaning the Caribbean?”

  “He’s black,” you added by way of an explanation.

  Of course! Why hadn’t I figured this? Monroe was probably just as magnificent as the guy you were dancing with on the video screen. Maybe you adored black men and everyone—including me—by comparison was inadequate and wan.

  “How long has it been since you’ve seen him?”

  “Eight years.”

  “Do you prefer black men?”

  “Not exclusively, no.”

  I hated knowing how much you once had loved this Monroe. And I hated knowing that your sex with him must have been galvanic and voracious. And now I felt miserable because our sex had already gone awry again. But then the phone began to ring, and we listened to it until the answering machine came on and recorded the babel of a street corner and then the lonely sound of dial tone.

  “So what else did he say?” you asked glumly. “Did he tell you there are still people in the city who want to ruin my face?”

  I smiled. “He says they’re waiting to do that till after you break my heart.”

  “So I guess that means yours will be the very last heart I’ll ever break.”

  “There might even be some distinction in that,” I said.

  You chuckled and snuggled in closer to me.

  “You got all those fatigues from this Monroe guy, huh?” I said.

  “Among other things.”

  That stung me for some reason. I sat up. “Like what? What else did he give you?”

  Looking at me, perplexed, you said somewhat defensively, “I don’t know. Let me think. A pre-Columbian statue. A tennis racket.”

  I glanced around the apartment. “So where’s the statue?”

  “He smashed it toward the end.”

  I patrolled your expression for a sign of distress. “So he was the violent type, huh?”

  “Not very often. And in fact, really only when he was provoked. Although we did fight a lot, verbally. Which, of course, had its dividends.”

  “You don’t need to say that!” And then, “Nothing like sex after a good fight.”

  “Like coming when your heart breaks,” you said with a gloomy smile.

  You were facing away from me, and I now could feel your lament, even in the way your dark curls softly crushed against your pillow. So after all these years this Monroe was still vanquishing you. And I now knew that Bobby Garzino was hardly responsible for the tear you shed the first night I learned who he was and how he died, the first night I’d told you about Chad. I now knew that your life had docked with this Marine long before you’d ever met the weaver.

  PART TWO

  Marine

  TWELVE

  WE WOULD SWIM DURING daylight hours, too, but he liked there to be a swell, preferably a red-flag day with several tiers of combers breaking simultaneously. I preferred late afternoons of calm when the Pacific turned cobalt blue and rays of sunlight bounced in from the west and the foam glowed like phosphorus. We’d follow the string of swimmers’ buoys that stretched for two miles down the Santa Barbara coastline, past the Mediterranean bathing pavilion of East Beach, past the marine cemetery looming above the limestone cliffs that plummeted to the nude beach, past the stone balustrades foreshadowing the Biltmore Hotel.

  Used to training in pools, we reveled in the greater buoyancy of salt water. It made us believe that we could swim forever. Chad was faster and always pulled ahead of me, and I’d push myself to follow closely the splashing of his feet. But soon he’d gain enough distance so that the darkness of the water would engulf me and I was completely alone again.

  Sometimes he’d get far enough ahead that I’d find him waiting for me at one of the buoys, head thrown back into the sun, hair tangled and briny. That grin on his face, and his teeth as white as bleached bones—one day, when he was waiting for me like that, he said flatly and without provocation, “You’ll probably be the only swimmer.” His normally husky voice was particularly rasped.

  “Come on.” I wondered if he was trying to say that I was some great love of his.

  “First and last and in between,” he added with a dreamy grin that now reminds me of you. He dove off the buoy and started swimming again.

  That day, we’d begun at the beach below the cemetery, had already done a mile down the coast and were on the way back. As I continued following him, I concluded what he’d said had to do with the fact that we both could swim like demons. I was the only swimmer who could even begin to keep up with him. Sometimes it’s a lover’s strength and not his inadequacy that spooks and spoils the prospect of a future.

  But I waited until we finished our swim and were toweling off before asking outright what he’d meant. He grunted and finished rubbing himself with his towel before answering, “You second-guessing me?”

  “Just trying to understand.”

  He bombed me with his wet towel and I found myself clutching at it so that it wouldn’t hit the sand. “Just slipped out. Like a little fish that I swallowed,” he said sheepishly. “Only meant it as a compliment.”

  And so I believed. Believed that our love, like our shared obsession for swimming, was a fluke of nature. And that’s why his vanishing has kept hurting. He must’ve had an inkling of what he was going to do a few months down the line, choosing the random life of an itinerant, becoming a man-without-attachments. For all I know, he could now be a seasonal abalone diver, an oil driller working the circuit of remote derricks in the Gulf of Mexico, a chef on a shrimp trawler.

  He left in increments before he vanished Big Time. When I was unable to reach him for days, I assumed at first that there was somebody else in his life besides me—a woman, even, because there had been women in his past. In 1980, answering machines were practically nonexistent, and falling in love with somebody hard to reach meant calling every hour, calling in the middle of the night and letting the telephone ring twenty, thirty, forty times before falling asleep with the receiver cradled in my arms.

  Finally I’d resort to driving an anxiety-fraught fifteen miles from my apartment on Mason Stree
t all the way out to Isla Vista. I tend to see the object of my fascination everywhere I go, even hundreds of miles away from anywhere that might be logical: a car parked in front of a 7-Eleven, a lone figure playing pool in the shadows of a neon-lighted bar. And sometimes when I was driving north on 101 to his place during the daylight, I actually believed that in the swarm of cars heading south toward Los Angeles, I’d see that beat-up Volkswagen with Harvard decals, fenders spray-painted black, careering away from me. I’d pull onto the shoulder and try to figure out whether it was worth continuing the drive to his place. But I always kept going.

  Sometimes I’d even head out there at three o’clock in the morning when there were hardly any other cars on the freeway. In his neighborhood I’d drive aimlessly through all those streets of the student quarter, imagine all the undergraduates who were taking my writing seminar sleeping in their prefabricated apartments, innocents. What would they think if they knew their instructor was driving obsessively around Isla Vista, spying on his elusive lover? I drove through streets named Camino or Calle: Camino Pescadero, Camino del Sur, Calle del Barco, Calle Albrogado.

  He lived on Del Playa, a street that ran along the ocean, where it was nearly impossible to find a vacancy because every house and apartment was inhabited by an extended clan of surfers. They networked among themselves and managed to squeak their bros into the vacated rooms before any became officially available. Chad didn’t surf all that much, he wasn’t part of any surfer contingency; nevertheless he had managed to keep his roommates enthralled by his ability to take on the ocean swell in any kind of weather. He’d been granted his own room and his own phone, and if I couldn’t reach him, there was no reaching his housemates, and no way of knowing if he had blown out of town, or was out somewhere, or had simply unplugged the jack.

  My eyes would turn the corner of that weed-infested driveway before my car did, and I would strain to see if his beat-up Volkswagen was parked there. More often than not it wasn’t, and then at 3:00 A.M. I’d be faced with a forlorn fifteen-mile drive back to my solitary apartment and another insomniac night.

  If I arrived at a reasonable hour I’d always go in and try to get information from the housemates, who would scratch their sun-frizzed heads of matted hair and murmur in long-toned southern Californese, “Don’t have a clue, Will. Hey, Coz, where’s our Chad, where’s our vanishing Chad gone to this time?”

  But Coz never knew and neither did Reese, nor Dino—the one named Tripp was always too stoned to know anything. They were wary of me, these roommates, and often I suspected they withheld information at his request. Had they been poets they might have said that Chad was as unpredictable as some of their favorite combers that gave great rides before switching back and turning them upside down.

  But when he was around, we would spend hours, days together without ever being apart. Coexist in the library, in total silence for eight hours or more, I reading Thackeray, he reading Schopenhauer; then we’d hit the pool for 5,000 meters and return. I remember once he came to my house for black bean burritos and Spanish rice and ended up staying for three days and nights, subsisting on Haas avocados and Mexican papayas and Valencia oranges that I went out and bought for him while he devoured my Popular Library edition of The Magic Mountain. The novel was all he could talk about for days afterward.

  After he vanished, I badgered his roommates for clues, and they railed at me for suspecting that they knew more than they were telling; for they, too, were beside themselves. It touched me to see how much his leaving affected their lives. For days they sat together in the living room, shirtless in ragged jams and tar-caked sandals, getting wasted. They made me tell the story again and again, how he’d convinced me to swim against my will and how there were no “last words” as we walked along Cabrillo Boulevard. They dissected my tale like detectives. “So you saw that boat, yeah? And you told him, right? He definitely heard you? Okay. Okay. And you didn’t even look around to see if he was there?” It always ended with, “You guys—swimming at night—what the fuck was with you guys?”

  But they knew we were nightswimmers. They knew Chad. And in the end they were divided in their opinion of what might have happened to him. Reese and Tripp were sure that he was dead. Dino and Coz thought, like me, that he had purposely disappeared.

  For three months the four of them divided his share of the rent, hoping he’d eventually show up, but finally they were forced to give up his room to somebody else. In the meantime all his belongings had gone to his parents—except the beloved VW. It lifted my spirits when they gave it to me, because for a while it allowed me to imagine myself as him. As I dressed in the few clothes of his that he’d left in my apartment, as I aped his slightly hunched-over posture, as I made a ring of my thumb and index finger and whistled shrilly the way he did when he was out on a board in the middle of the swell. But all that mimicry didn’t bring me any closer to the mystery of his vanishing.

  The times I had actually found him at home, the times signaled by my triumphant sighting of the beat-up, decaled Volkswagen in his driveway, I’d inadvertently run my hands over its rear panel to see if the engine was still warm. Sometimes I’d find him on the back deck of his house, standing among the terra-cotta pots overflowing with herbs and cuttings of aloe, eyeing the ocean and the coastal garlands of kelp. He’d turn to me and grin without surprise and say, “Smells pretty tarry today, what do you think?” Even ten years later the smell of those tarry Pacific beaches depresses me and gives me a headache.

  Or: “I was just getting ready to call. Tell you to get your bones up here. Want a beer?”

  Beer was usually Corona, clear bottles with the blue-painted labels that looked so good in his sturdy veined hands and rang out against the band of his silver-and-turquoise ring. Sometimes it was Dos Equis, sometimes Carta Blanca—but always Mexican. I drank mine quickly to plane down my anxiety. As he took his bottle up for a swig, he’d tell me how he’d gone surfing up at Jalama, that he’d sat in a two-day meditation up near Point Conception, where he alternated between reading Gurdjieff and trying to “key into” the souls of the Chumash Indians before they flew across the water. Yet had he really done this?

  Of course I wanted to rail at him for leaving without telling me. But a casual “You should let somebody know you’re heading out” was all that I said. “Otherwise it’s hard for any of us to know if you’ve gone in the water and just haven’t come out.”

  “Look, the times we speak are the times I actually get through to you. When I try once and you’re not around, I just don’t wait.” Staring out over the combers, he bent one of his tar-flecked toes on the weathered boards of his deck. “You get very anxious about our communication, Will. You worry about me when there’s no need. If I say I’m in love with you, I’m not leaving you, I’m just living. If I croaked or something you’d definitely know it.”

  “How?” I cried. “How would I know?”

  He shrugged. “I’d send you a sign.” Then he grinned and fixed his black eyes hungrily on me and said, “But even dead I’d fuck with you somehow. Become an incubus and suck your dick in the middle of the night.”

  “But you’d have to suck it the way I like it. Or else I wouldn’t know it was you.”

  Chad took a huge slug of beer and seemed to reflect for a moment. “I just got this thing about me, Will. I like to go roaming. That’s all. I like the idea of being at large, or between two places.” He now drained the rest of his beer and brought the bottle down with a hard smack on the wooden railing of the deck and grinned. “I always think about you when I’m gone, anyway.”

  With that he led me into his bedroom filled with collected driftwood that resembled biblical figures, with ashtrays overflowing with sea glass he’d found up and down the California coast, an entire wall taken up with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. He drew makeshift curtains made of dyed Indian cotton, lighted several stubby candles that smelled like sandalwood and, facing me, untied the leather thong around his neck that held three blue Afric
an glass beads. He put Sting on the record player, gulped his beer and then very gently swept the crumbs of sand from my shoulders. At first our bodies slapped together so hard that the friction of sex raised the room temperature, made the smell of eucalyptus even stronger. As though to cool things down, he grabbed his Corona and poured a line of beer between my pecs down to my crotch, slurped it off me and then put his ocean-cold mouth on my cock.

  After that he was much better about calling to let me know when he was leaving town on a whim. In fact he’d make a point of calling me from weird places like Los Alamos, where he supposedly spent an afternoon contemplating the military jets flying in and out of Vandenburg. And I believed him. At Pismo Beach, he swam around the rock formations; at Atascadero, he spent a few days doing volunteer work at the men’s prison. The calls were reassuring then. But maybe the reason why he suddenly changed for the better was that he’d already decided what he was going to do. And once he made up his mind, he no longer needed to make his day-to-day whereabouts a painful tease. He was preparing for the cruel mystery of total vanishing.

  THIRTEEN

  I TOLD YOU THIS in Vermont while we were standing on an incline above the Ottauquechee River, a mile or so before the Taftsville covered bridge. I’d shown you the River Road because I loved its eeriness, the banks overhung with willows, the dark-shingled cabins with spindly steps that scaled down to brackish-looking water that swirled along like televised weather patterns. We’d stopped my car at a rope swing and now I climbed on the hood to gain some more height. Casey sat on his haunches by the rear wheels of my car, his lanky body erect and attentive, waiting to see what I’d do next.

  I jumped up and swung down and out over the river like a pendulum, and as I gained the top of the far arc, I let go and plummeted into the water. A moment later there was a splash nearby; Casey had bounded down the bank and leapt in. He swam determinedly toward me, his beautiful hound’s head above the water, breasting the slight current with his white chest and the white tips of his paws.