Nightswimmer

by Joseph Olshan

  Telling myself to remain composed, I spoke softly. “What should I ask?” now looking up at the loft to find your gaze locked on mine.

  “Ask him to tell you about Bobby Garzino.”

  “I already know.”

  “I doubt it.”

  I took a deep breath. “Why don’t you tell me?”

  “Because maybe I don’t want you to be happy.”

  “Then what’s the point of calling? And how did you get this number, anyway?”

  “It’s on your other answering machine.”

  The line went dead. I was aware of the sunlight pouring into the cabin from all directions, splattering everywhere as though we were surrounded by a reflecting pool.

  I put down the receiver, turned my palms up and said, “This is getting a little tedious.” Up where you still were in the loft, your head tilted sideways, as if you were Casey trying to decipher an unfamiliar command.

  You grabbed a pair of khaki shorts and put them on hastily. “Mind if I use the phone?” You climbed quickly down the ladder.

  “By all means.” I gestured extravagantly toward it.

  “I just want to see if my place is okay.”

  But your neighbor who kept a set of keys wasn’t home.

  There was a trail that wound up through dense woods to a shack probably two thousand feet above sea level that commanded a panoramic view of the surrounding Green Mountains. From various points along the ascent we could look down into the golden pastures of a high-maintenance horse farm, and the dark burnished forms of grazing Thoroughbreds. The sound of a tractor mowing a field came to us, lazy and distant like the overhead buzz of a propeller plane. Casey kept bounding ahead of us, returning with enormous sticks in his mouth. He’d drop a stick and then streak into the woods, rooting for chipmunks and rabbits. You were hiking ahead of me, and my eyes were level with the backs of your legs.

  We climbed until the trail finally reached a level area covered with pine needles, which then led straight to the redwood shack. I could smell the damp mulch of the deep forest.

  You stopped and turned around, beads of sweat gathered above your upper lip. “Boy, I’m winded.”

  “Want to stop?”

  You shrugged. “No, we can keep going.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But before we keep going…”

  “What?”

  “I’d like to know what José—I’m assuming it was José who called—was talking about?”

  “So would I, Will, believe me.”

  “You really have no idea?”

  “If I did, don’t you think I would’ve said something?”

  “I’m … assuming. So?”

  You rolled your eyes. “Come on, Will, don’t tell me you’re going to listen to a jerk, now are you?”

  I said nothing.

  “Okay, wait a minute. You tell me: what awful thing could I have done to Bobby?” You held up your thumb. “I didn’t give him AIDS.” Then your index finger. “I didn’t mind-fuck him. I was honest with him, I broke it off in the best way I possibly could. What else could it be?”

  I hesitated a moment and then I admitted I’d tried to get José to tell me last week when he called your place. We started walking again, this time side by side on the soft floor of pine needles that led to the mountain shack.

  “I wonder if Bobby could have mentioned our sex life,” you mused aloud after a moment or so of reflection.

  “Well, what about it?” I asked nervously.

  “He wanted it to be unsafe with me. He wanted to do all the things everybody used to do back in the seventies but can’t do anymore. He said he trusted me … and that was so incredibly foolish.”

  “Well, did you … do any of the things?”

  “Even if I did, I’ve explained to you that I’ve already been tested again.”

  “Why can’t you just tell me?”

  “I guess the more you get involved with somebody, the more restrictive those restrictions feel.”

  “You’re not answering my question.”

  “No, I am, but you’re being deliberately thick.” A brooding silence came on, and as I was imagining what you might have done with Bobby Garzino, you murmured, “The price of real intimacy has never been so high.”

  “But why do you think it was that he didn’t move you?” And I couldn’t help wondering if I, too, had failed or would fail to reach you.

  You shook your head. “You know why, Will.”

  Randall Monroe.

  The name itself was forbidding, with its elite sound, the name of some powerful soul, a skilled seducer who could shatter even the most durable heart.

  Detecting my inner torment, you frowned. “Now what?”

  “Just remembering what you were telling me last night. Remembering what you told me right before you fell asleep.”

  You looked distressed. “Wait a second. I’m a little fuzzy. Because I really did nod off. What did I say?”

  I got a twinge of guilt over all that I’d read in your diary. “You were talking about your sex life with Randall.”

  “No, I wasn’t. I wouldn’t.”

  “Well, you weren’t exactly, but I’m sure it must’ve been amazing.”

  “Let’s put it this way, if it wasn’t good wouldn’t I be even more the fool to let myself get so fucked up over somebody?”

  “There doesn’t always have to be fireworks for there to be passion.”

  “I don’t know if I agree with that.”

  The shack stood before us, facing an amazing panorama of a mountain range, soft layers graduating into the horizon: bluish green peaks, dense with foliage and evergreens without a single bare spot—so unlike the California Los Padres with their sharper summits and sand-colored crotches. The cabin door was kept shut by a weight on a pulley, and we had to duck to pass over the threshold. Inside were a crude wooden table and chairs, a glass oil lamp and a guest book with names and dates and remarks from visitors going back to 1983. With a quick glance we could see that the last hikers had arrived three days before us. We signed our names, went back outside and sat on the wooden porch next to a thorny blackberry patch.

  “This great love,” I murmured despite myself. “This Randall Monroe.”

  “I never said he was my ‘great love.’ ”

  “The man who keeps you from loving anybody else? The man who robbed you from yourself?”

  “Sounds like you’re mocking me.”

  “I’m not. I’m jealous.”

  “Don’t be. It was intense because it was unrealistic with his being closeted. With all the threats of him—or us—being found out, of him being discharged.”

  You thought of him as a night bird. He worked at the radio station between 12:00 midnight and 6 A.M. twice a week. And you would sneak away to him, ride your bicycle past all the officers’ ranch homes, past the elementary school you attended for a year that was once a Japanese prisoner-of-war barracks, past all the traffic signs that advertised “think left” because, several years before, Okinawa had made the transition from driving on the right to driving on the left side of the road. You’d sit beside him in the DJ’s booth and listen to him talk to the people who understood English all over the island. He’d speak to them in his Harry Belafonte voice. You’d hold his hand and listen to his voice soothing thousands of insomniacs to sleep. Finally he would cue up a long set of jazz—Mingus, Duke Ellington, Tommy Dorsey—then lead you back to the couch in the green room. You’d always fuck like missionaries because he said he loved to watch your face while he was in you. He liked to talk to you, to tell you how it felt to be there, how tight you were, and how much he liked that tightness. Because that tightness let him imagine that he was the only man, that tightness was why it always hurt and why it finally became a race for the two of you to come before you had to ask him to stop.

  “I don’t think my life with Randall should matter to you,” you said. You picked off a cluster of overripe blackberries, looked at them carefully and tossed them to one side. />
  “But I’ve always sensed how powerful the connection was.”

  “I always seem to get myself in trouble around these matters. Whereas you’re such a diehard romantic.”

  “Romantic? But so are you, Sean, don’t you see? With your whole notion how someone you love can take a piece of you, make you incomplete. And then searching for what you’ve lost in someone else. And knowing all along that you’ll probably never find it.

  What do you think that is, if not romantic?”

  “I thought you saw some truth in it.”

  “I do! ‘Romantic’ doesn’t mean ‘idiotic,’ not to me.”

  With your dismal expression, you peered off toward the range of distant mountains that graduated into pastel smudges and finally blended into the horizon.

  After a while I said, “I just want you to be open to the idea of having great sex with somebody else.” With me, I could have added, but didn’t have to.

  “Will, I never complained about our sex life. Our sex life is fine.”

  “But how do you expect me to feel when you say sex ‘will never be the same’ again?”

  “I’m not saying it’s written in stone. I’m just saying that, so far, since Randall, since ten years. And yet I knew it would be great with him even before he laid a finger on me.”

  “That’s because you’d decided it would be.”

  This made you suddenly angry. “My body decided, goddammit!

  It was my body. Natural magnetism. I could smell the guy, all right?

  The smell of him made my fucking toes curl up with desire. I’ve never smelled a body like that since then, black or white or Asian. And I’ve had them all. I’ve tasted a lot of other people.”

  “But love has to be there to sustain the attraction.”

  “Yes, but at some point the attraction always dies.” I knew this much better than you knew that I knew. And yet I felt something withering inside myself, some climbing hope dying like a parched vine.

  “Come on, Will,” you said with displeasure, “wasn’t it great with him? You said it was amazing with Chad.”

  “But I’ve had great since.”

  “Well, then that’s where we’re different.”

  “No, here’s how we’re different, Sean—”

  But you threw up your hands. “I can’t take discussing this anymore! Will, if we keep on like this we’re going to kill everything good there is between us.”

  I glared at you, offended.

  “All right, go on, then. Just tell me. I know what you’re going to say, anyway. You’re going to say what other people have said, that I’ve used my thing with Randall as a barrier, or a smoke screen, something—you’ll be sure to give it a metaphor. Because if I can’t have great sex, then it follows I can’t have great love. Therefore there’s no chance that I’ll get burned again like I was burned before.”

  Of course, this had been exactly what I was about to say.

  You smiled eerily. “Yet there’s this guy I see sometimes. Comes in and out of my life. I don’t even know where he lives. He just calls me up sometimes at 3:00 A.M. and asks me what I’m doing. He comes over, we get it on like a couple of hungry pigs. And I must say, it’s pretty damn hot. It comes close. Physically. But as a person he leaves me cold.”

  I hated hearing about this. I felt queasy. “That’s because it’s like making love to a phantom,” I forced myself to say.

  You turned to me with a look of bewildered anger. “Yeah, that’s exactly what it is. And it’s just the way I like it. I told you once before that I was a better friend than a lover. And you thought I was being flip.”

  “No,” I said. “I just hoped it wasn’t true.”

  SIXTEEN

  HE COMES TO SEE you one last time before he disappears. Comes at night during the typhoon because he knows your parents are away. Even though the storm is about to be upgraded to Condition 3, your parents decide to travel by helicopter to some important function on the mainland of Japan. Your mother holds an umbrella against the diagonal drapery of rain and walks clumsily in her sequined ball gown and trips as she tries to hold the umbrella and maneuver herself up into the cockpit. You’re alone in your room, drawing a plan for a gazebo at the officers’ club, when you see him in silhouette at the window. He’s pressed up against the pane like a mask, dripping water. And somehow you know, even though he’s never done it before, that he’s going to barge into the house and hurt you. It’s weird when the one most beloved in the world turns violent. When the lover’s embrace becomes a stranglehold.

  He confronts you about cheating on him. Tells you he heard about it a few days ago and then he socks you in the chest. You can’t breathe. It’s as if you’re a kid again, falling off a bicycle and getting the wind knocked out of you. You feel all cottony and numb because it’s so outrageous. And yet somehow you’ve expected it, you’ve known the moment would come. And you can’t fight back. You’re crippled because you’re in love with him. And it occurs to you that this is the end, the relationship will never be the same, even if he lets you live. That if anything continues there will be no difference between pleasure and pain, and he will crave violence with you like a drug addict craves a fix.

  He beats on you until finally you wrench your arms around him to keep him from punching anymore. You scream that you won’t fight back. You scream until finally he stops and you both lie there on the rug, both crying. Then he makes the move. You can’t believe it, how you just let him do what he wants. And yet, the moment he begins to touch you in the old way, you know that you’re losing him. He never utters the words that he’s leaving, but you sense he will as he clutches you, finally spits on his hand, lubricates himself and forces in. And you watch his face as you’ve watched it in the past. Remembering other times. Remembering how his eyes would always lock hungrily with yours, measuring your pain for his own gratification. Remembering how when it was over, and he slipped out, your whole lower half would burn. But knowing this, knowing how it hurt, he would kiss your neck and your chest until you revived and could stand it again. That was how it was.

  But now his thrusts are hollow and without love. Now he doesn’t even consider that he might be rubbing you raw. And when he finally closes his eyes, it’s the loneliest moment of your life.

  SEVENTEEN

  I ARRIVED BACK AT my building to a slew of mail, including what I thought were several Jiffy bags stuffed with review copies of books that were leaning against the wall of the vestibule. One of the parcels for some reason immediately caught my eye. Instead of having a typed label as most of these packages do, it had my name scribbled right on it. There was no return address. Alerted to something odd and offbeat, I tore open one end and reached inside, feeling something soft and scratchy and jerked my hand out. What could this be?

  Tilting the package up to the light, I peered in and saw what I first thought were wood flakes, but then noticed that the pieces were too large and looked more like torn newsprint. A gift, perhaps, that needed a lot of buffering? I again reached in to grope around the roughage, but still came up with nothing. Bewildered now, not even thinking about what I was doing, I punched the bag and a clump of its ripped contents dumped out. Slips of ragged-edged paper caught the air and fluttered delicately down to the floor of the vestibule. Something about that cascading cloud of print now reminds me of a magical moment up in Vermont when I’d once been lucky enough to witness the exfoliation of a larch tree.

  Then I realized exactly what I was looking at. Fragments of color and cardboard gave it away. My second novel. It was a copy of my second novel, its cloth cover obviously shorn off and the entire 307 pages shredded.

  Gripping the package with both hands, I stood there for a moment, reeling. Who had done it? Not hundreds but thousands of torn pages now seemed to be dusting the floor of the vestibule like snow. I slowly bent down and dutifully swept the floor with my hands until I managed to retrieve every last bit of lacerated print and refilled the Jiffy bag. I clutched the pulverized boo
k to my chest as I walked up the single flight to my second-floor apartment, noticing how the book actually seemed to weigh less now that it was in complete tatters.

  Just as I was passing through the apartment door, the phone began ringing. Startled, I dropped the package down on my desk and lifted the receiver.

  “You’re back.”

  Brimming with suspicion, I asked, “Who’s this?”

  “It’s Greg, who do you think it is?”

  I hadn’t recognized his voice at all.

  “You sound strange,” he said. “Are you okay? Is somebody there?”

  “No to both questions.”

  “Well then, what’s wrong?”

  I explained.

  “That’s really sick!” Greg intoned. “Only a … Jesus Christ, only a certified fucking lunatic would think of doing something like that.”

  I pressed my palm against the Jiffy bag, making a dent in the bulging material.

  “You there, Will?”

  “Yeah, I’m here,” I said, barely audibly.

  “Are you freaking out?”

  “What do you think? I mean…I just literally got home and found it!”

  “Could it be the guy you mentioned, the one who’s angry at Sean Paris?”

  “Perhaps that’s preferable to thinking it was somebody who hated my book.”

  We both laughed. But then Greg’s saying “At least you haven’t lost your sense of humor” annoyed me.

  I couldn’t help saying, “Your name is in there somewhere, you know. Your dedication. Although by now it’s an anagram.”

  “You didn’t say it was my book!”

  “As if that makes a difference … So what’s up with you, Greg?” I really wanted to get off the phone.

  “I got home and found Casey but no note. I’m just calling to see how your trip was.”