Nightswimmer

by Joseph Olshan

It was difficult to tell whether or not I imagined it, but I thought I saw male/female couples gaping at us explicitly, then glancing away. Were they disapproving or were they trying to adjust to what was quickly becoming a more commonplace occurrence? Two men walking hand in hand was now, in the 1990s, just a minor disturbance in the fiercely urban environment. A gang of teenagers floated along the streets with up-and-down tough-boy strides, swinging a metallic boom box that trumpeted the latest in hip-hop music. “Faggots,” one of them sneered. The moment the remark ripped past my ears, you turned to me with a mellow smile that eased the discomfort of being heckled.

  “They do it in Europe,” you said finally. “Guys walk hand in hand. There it’s completely innocent.”

  “But it’s all about camaraderie. Not sexual politics.”

  And I’ll never forget how, suddenly, you stopped and looked at me in sudden bewilderment. “Well, I think it’s—” You hesitated.

  “What—what are you trying to say?”

  “That finally it’s beginning to happen, Will,” you said barely audibly. “Our relationship.”

  “I’m already there,” I murmured.

  But we stumbled into silence after that and strolled along without touching. What had been as yet unspeakable between us when spoken curdled any sense of ease. Did we dread intimacy as much as or even more than death? Had the threat of dying been forged into our shield of self-protection? We walked along Tenth Street until we passed from the genteel respectability of the West Village and Fifth Avenue to the anything-goes funk of the East Village, where pierced body parts, sepulchral makeup, elaborately nihilistic hairstyles were far more cutting-edge than just a couple of guys holding hands.

  There had been trouble in Tompkins Square Park, where the homeless were trying to create their own tribal enclave. The police had been forced to intervene and close down what was quickly becoming an unruly colony of the disenfranchised. And almost as though you wanted to test me a final time, you took my hand again as we strolled along the perimeter of the park, where literally hundreds of uniformed cops were standing guard. I felt a few faces panning to follow us, heard what I probably falsely imagined to be disapproving tongue clicks, but then something inside me lifted and I nearly felt free. This was not a test of the cops, or of society. This was a test of us, of you and me. And after we crossed the street and continued downtown along Avenue A, after you let go of my hand, you put your arm around my neck for a while.

  When we began to head west toward Greg’s apartment, I asked if you wanted to go there and then walk with Casey and me. But you shook your head, kissed me on the lips and whispered goodnight. Until you vanished I watched you gliding off down Carmine Street.

  The moment I walked into Greg’s apartment, Casey began jumping up and down and licking me. No doubt he figured I was taking him back up to Vermont. I smelled something different from the normal smell of Greg’s macrobiotic cooking of cumin and brown basmati rice. I smelled something sweet and waxy like hair pomade. Sure enough, when I snooped in Greg’s medicine cabinet I found a small purple plastic jar of hair dressing cream that I’d never seen before—Sebastian’s stash for easy pompadour maintenance, I grimly imagined—as well as a huge pump canister of state-of-the-art lubricant spiked with nonoxynol-9, the ingredient that allegedly would kill the AIDS virus upon contact. The colossal size of the jar to me spelled Hot Sex with Somebody Else. “Come on, Casey,” I said irritably. “Let’s go.”

  Walking along the West Side piers with Casey loping beside me, I was peering out at the hypnotic twinkle of lights across the river in New Jersey. I was distracted by the glint of a diamond stud. A ruthless pair of eyes, a face welted in scars. Then another face, but this one fat, unnaturally swollen. They charged at me from opposite directions, and as they locked me in with their shoulders, I could hear something crunching on contact. Pains shot up and down my arms. “Let go, asshole,” one of them said. “He’s your man! He’s your man!” As Casey viciously tried to lunge at them, I wrongly yet instinctively reined in on his leash. His bark turned into a yelp.

  And then I was sitting on the ground, more dazed than hurt, my head throbbing from hitting the pavement, my arms scraped. It took me a moment to realize that Casey wasn’t there licking my face as he did whenever I’d fall. The sense of his absence instantly became overwhelming. On one side of me, the molten Hudson River, and on the other side, slow-moving traffic, threads of music piping out tinnily from cars, streams of guys homing between the bars and the water, leaving behind tendrils of obnoxious perfume.

  Panic came on me like fever.

  “Casey!” I screamed out. “Casey!” People peered at me, alarmed.

  “My dog!” Shouting and creating a stir was the only way. “My dog! My dog!” It was possible that Casey, with the sweetest, most trusting face in the world, at that very moment was being dragged along, even tortured by someone, soon to be sold to some illegal lab, held captive, starved, kept in a state of painful neglect for the rest of his short life.

  “Casey! Casey! My dog’s been stolen!”

  In the midst of my shouting, a gruff-looking guy wearing a blue bandanna on his head ran up to me and said he had seen a gang of kids with a dog.

  “A black dog?”

  Nodding, the man explained that the dog had been trying to get away from them.

  This I could not bear. Could not bear the idea of a gang of kids subjecting a dog that only knew the love that Greg and I gave him to the shock of cruelty. I ran in the direction the man indicated, screaming “Casey! Casey! Casey!” before succumbing to the inevitable: calling Greg at work.

  He sounded frosty when he first got on the phone, no doubt a holdover from our argument earlier in the afternoon. But when I told him that I’d been mugged and Casey had been taken, Greg’s wail of tormented disbelief reminded me that once before he’d been ripped away from a dog. And for an instant I forgave him everything that had happened over Sebastian. “I just don’t understand!” he cried. “How could they have gotten him away from you?”

  “Greg, aren’t you listening? They knocked me down. I must’ve … blacked out. Because they ran away with him.”

  Once Greg learned where I was, he asked me to call the police while he cabbed it over. It took everything I had to slow down and coherently explain to the police what had happened; then luckily I managed to find you at home.

  “Marine mode,” is what you called it later. How you ever came up with your plan I’ll never quite understand. After taking down the number of the pay phone, you then asked if the other keys on the set I’d given you to the Vermont house were the keys to my apartment, and if the list of the dog owners from the Washington Square dog run was something that could be easily found in my desk. At 11:00 P.M. on a weeknight, surely most of the other dog owners would be home.

  Greg arrived shortly before the police, and in the midst of their taking a report the pay phone rang. You’d managed to contact fifteen people on the dog run list before speaking to someone who, as he was walking his own dog, thought he might have recognized a dog like Casey at Fifteenth Street and Third Avenue in the hands of such a group of teenagers. But he hadn’t been close enough to make a positive identification and just figured that this particular dog bore an uncanny resemblance to our Casey. The police made a call over to the appropriate precinct, and Greg promptly took off on foot while I was forced to finish giving my report.

  “He’s pretty good under pressure, isn’t he?” Greg said the following afternoon. We were sitting on the futon sofa in his apartment, Casey snoozing between us, his head comfortably lodged on Greg’s lap. Greg was referring to your idea to call the other dog run owners, most of whom knew Casey better than they knew Greg or me.

  “We were too frantic to think straight,” I reassured him.

  Greg shrugged and then winced from the black track of stitches embedded in the left hemisphere of his forehead, the result of a gash he’d sustained when he’d gone ballistic and aggressively dove at the group of kid
s, screeching at the top of his lungs that they’d stolen Casey. It was a smart move on his part because by attracting so much attention he forced them to release the dog and scatter in all different directions.

  “The doctor said there’s a good chance I’ll scar. But I don’t care. It’s worth it … not to have lost him.” His voice cracked as he patted Casey, who let out a pleased grunt and seemed relatively unaffected by what had happened. “I want to call Sean and thank him. Maybe I could take the two of you out to dinner sometime.”

  “That’s not necessary.”

  “Would it be awkward for you?” Greg asked me.

  “Not if you felt okay about it.”

  I found myself once again looking at Greg’s T-cell poster, but this time I wasn’t so unnerved by it. Noticing me eyeing the poster, Greg said, “You know, I still want you to be the one who makes decisions if anything happens to me—if decisions have to be made.”

  “Okay,” I said somewhat uncomfortably.

  “Should we put it all in writing? There’s somebody at my firm who will do it pro bono. It’s probably even more important that we do something like that now that we’re no longer each other’s significant other.”

  “I don’t want to be resuscitated,” I found myself telling him. It struck me how healthy we looked, and felt, two young men on a couch talking, and Greg was only twenty-seven.

  “I don’t want my parents to come into the city, claim my body and bury me in some dreary place, either.” Greg wanted to be cremated.

  I began squirming. “Okay, but no more morbid stuff right now.”

  “What better time is there to get things straight? Especially after what’s happened?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And I want my ashes spread near—”

  “Come on, Greg, please!”

  “Listen to me,” he insisted. “I want my ashes spread….in that pine glade where we used to go cross-country skiing. And maybe even some around the red schoolhouse.” He paused for a moment and then added, “Although the red schoolhouse has now become your new love den.”

  I told him that shouldn’t affect his decision.

  Greg sighed, pausing before he said, “It doesn’t. Obviously it doesn’t, but it’s just that it used to be our place. Our little romantic place.”

  “Probably a lot of other people’s, too.”

  “But I never knew any of them.” Greg’s eyes filled and his chin quivered.

  “Come on, don’t!”

  “You know, Will,” he went on, “they only had Casey for a half hour, but during that half hour a million awful things went through my mind. I was really afraid we were going to lose him and just … never know what happened.”

  “I was afraid of that, too.”

  “I couldn’t have handled that.”

  “I couldn’t have either.”

  NINETEEN

  THROUGHOUT SEPTEMBER YOU SPENT much of your free time in the brownstone garden you’d designed on Charles Street. Most afternoons you’d get home from work, change into a pair of loose faded jeans and a plain white T-shirt, walk the few blocks between your place and the garden, then weed and dig into the twilight. You enriched the soil with emulsifiers and planted bulbs for the spring. Usually two or three times during the week I’d meet you at Charles Street near the time when you expected to finish. More often than not you’d have lost track of the hour and I would either peruse the Times or plow through a few chapters of a book I was reviewing until you finally put away all your gardening tools. Then we’d decide between having dinner at a certain healthy Thai restaurant or picking up ingredients for a quick meal back at your apartment, where on a few evenings, it even got chilly enough for us to build a fire in the fireplace.

  Toward the end of October I received a phone call from a man who claimed to be José Ayala. When he explained that he needed to speak to me about Sean Paris, I told him there was nothing to discuss and that I hardly thought he had my—or your—best interests in mind. I shouldn’t necessarily assume that, he said. At this point I couldn’t help but ask where he was from.

  “Originally from the Philippines.”

  I mentioned that the last time we’d spoken up in Vermont I didn’t remember his having an accent. There was a reflective pause. And then he said quite definitely, “I never called you in Vermont. I didn’t have your number there.”

  “It was on my answering machine here in New York.”

  “Ah, but your New York City phone number is unlisted. That’s why I haven’t called you. Until tonight. Believe me, it’s taken this long to find somebody who had it or who could get it.”

  I let this settle for a few moments. I had still somehow forgotten to ask Directory Assistance to add my name and number to their roster.

  Then who had called me in Vermont?

  “So how did you end up getting it?” I asked suspiciously.

  “Sebastian Seporia,” he said without missing a beat.

  That son of a bitch Greg! Why would he give Sebastian my number? But instead of venting this, I decided now was the time to ask point-blank about my novel.

  José said, “Shred your book and send it to you in the mail?” He laughed.

  “Don’t sound so patronizing. I’m not forgetting what happened to Sean’s door.”

  “Oh … of course. I should’ve realized.” José hesitated for a moment, then said, with seriousness, “I did not shred your book. I now regret what I did to his door. But I did it out of frustration. Because Sean Paris is still in possession of the things that I should have.”

  “But Bobby gave all that stuff to Sean.”

  As though he didn’t hear me, José continued, “We do reckless things when we’re in love.” There was a pause. “I always loved Bobby. I guess I can’t help despising a person who made him miserable. But it was also his will to get those things back. And that’s what I can’t get through to Sean. Or to you either, for that matter.”

  “Wait a minute, you’re saying it was in a will?”

  Not exactly, José explained, but rather one of Bobby’s last requests before he ended his life. He’d written two letters—one to José and one to you. According to José’s letter, Bobby’s letter to you instructed you to give José all the woven things.

  “Sean did mention getting letters from Bobby, but not that particular one. Perhaps he never received it?”

  You’d received it, José explained, because it was left for you at Bobby’s apartment. At the funeral Bobby’s roommate had reported you got it the night you heard the news.

  “So he must’ve read it. He’s just not telling you the truth.”

  Then I remembered the bizarre phone call the first night I ever met you, you asking ‘What did that say?’ and the way you had rushed off into the sweltering late night with the least amount of explanation. Had you been lying to me all this time?

  When José spoke again, his voice quavered. “Bobby felt so unloved.”

  “If Bobby felt so unloved, then why did he purposely give away so many beautiful things?”

  “I think you can answer that question better than I can, Will.” José paused for a moment and then resumed. “Each gift had a way of saying, I am this beautiful thing. Love me and love the person who gave me to you. Just like some people read books and then fall in love with who wrote them.”

  José frankly didn’t seem a likely candidate for a book shredder. But if not him, who, I puzzled dismally. And why had you never mentioned your last letter from Bobby Garzino?

  Almost as though reading my doubts, José said, “If I were you I’d ask Sean about that letter. And if he denies having it, then you’ll know he’s lying.”

  But I was afraid of following the lead of someone at such cross-purposes with you, and more afraid of your lying.

  “You should know what a person like Sean Paris is capable of,” José went on.

  “Why don’t you stop being so mysterious and just tell me what you think he’s capable of.”

  “An
d you don’t think it’s enough—to drive another man to kill himself?”

  “That’s a little convenient, blaming Bobby’s death on him.”

  “Convenient?”

  “Yeah, I mean …” I wanted to be delicate. “In light of the fact that Bobby preferred suicide to dying slowly, dying by degrees.”

  “I don’t think I know what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m talking about the fact that he tested HIV-positive.”

  A lewd chuckle erupted from José’s end of the line. “Oh, really,” he said exaggeratedly. “Well, that’s news to me.” And then his voice turned malignant. “Then he must’ve tested HIV-positive post mortem. Because while he was alive he was HIV-negative.”

  I went quiet. Just sat there with the phone to my ear and tried to keep breathing. Distracted by a vision, very much like one of those daydreams that appear when I’m driving long distances, a flash of unfamiliar sequences, a burst of conversation that suddenly provides a missing link, a pair of gleaming yet corrupted train tracks laid down in the middle of some northern wilderness.

  My mind was reeling. “Wait a minute, you’re sure that Bobby was HIV-negative?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought that a positive-HIV status was why he killed himself?”

  There was a steely moment of silence.

  “If that’s what Sean Paris told you, then you’ve been had.”

  No, like me, you assumed it was because of the HIV test results. Because you and Bobby were supposed to get together. Because Bobby was supposed to call you back after the test. And he never did.

  “Sean knows exactly why Bobby did it. You just ask him. He’s been lying to you.”

  TWENTY

  I HURTLED ACROSS THE Village, across the very streets we had walked along that first night when the summer was peaking, when you seemed to know all about him and who he was to me before I’d ever told you anything. I was sweating by the time I reached Sixth Avenue and noticed the bell tower of the Jefferson Market Library and, particularly, the clock face half hidden by scaffolding. With the Halloween parade just a few days away, preparations were under way to build a track for the black spider that would ascend and descend the clock face.