Nightswimmer

by Joseph Olshan

  But then as I waited for the light to change, I wondered why I was hurrying. We’d have this discussion later, if not now, and I would find out whether or not you’d lied to me. Did I really need to know so fast? And so, when the light finally changed, I continued standing on the corner.

  It certainly was a warm night, the last lick of Indian summer, nearly as warm as that day back in August when on a whim you made the ferry crossing back to Long Island. What had made you leave the island? What had you been homing to when you waited at the dock with only a handful of people? After all, the Morning Party had still been in full swing. Why weren’t you back there dancing in the froth of summer hedonism? Dancing with that black man? And surely among those thousands there was another compelling man who’d willingly enter your life as swiftly, as completely as I did. But instead you climbed on a boat that crossed the Great South Bay, met Peter Rocca, took a train back with him into Manhattan and strolled into my life.

  On your ruined apartment door a note had been written to me in your characteristic imprisoned-aristocrat scrawl. Change of plans. You weren’t going to the gym. I should meet you over at the garden on Charles Street.

  I headed down Bleecker Street, past our favorite Thai restaurant, which, as a result of the warmer weather, had perspicaciously put out white slatted chairs and flimsy round tables on the sidewalk. The place was mobbed with customers eager to hold on to the idea of summer, particularly buffed-out men in tight T-shirts, with fading tans that would soon need to be augmented by trips to the sun booths.

  Outside the brownstone, a pair of iron doors that fitted into the sidewalk were propped open on a pole. I clambered down the metal rungs of stairs that were anchored in cement, then made my way through a dank and narrow basement, with a moldering ceiling just a few inches from my head. Against the cracked cement walls were laid rusted components of old boilers, broken rakes, coiled fluorescent-green hoses. I passed newer materials: gleaming white bags of manure and seeds and, amidst all these relics, a new, shiny metallic shovel. I quietly climbed the stairs attached to the trapdoor on the other side.

  And there you stood in profile in the center of a garden steeped in shadow. On a herringbone-brick quadrant bordered in boxwood, whose center, earlier in the summer, had bloomed with begonias. It was nearly dark, and the flanks of plants were irradiated by a blaze of light from the kitchen that overlooked it, a kitchen that was reached by a winding wrought-iron staircase festooned in clematis. You stood there motionless in a pose of bedeviled bewilderment, the most beautiful I think I’d ever seen you.

  I watched the dawning of a silly smile. “Hey, you.”

  “Hey, yourself.”

  One segment of a flower bed had been hoed up and your knees showed dirt stains from kneeling. I assumed you were planting bulbs. You were soon telling me that, no matter what you did, the garden would never be quite right. One had to tend a garden the way one would take care of a lover. That last remark irked me. Was I such a bother?

  You said there were just a few more minutes of work to do and then how about brick oven pizza on Houston Street. Although I tacitly agreed, you knew me well enough by now to sense that something was wrong. But you didn’t ask right away. You grabbed your trowel and bent down next to what you’d taught me was a caladium, a leafy, banana-like plant with bloodred arterials.

  Silent, I watched you making turn-over incisions in the composted soil. There was a great tugging at the center of me, a longing that I was afraid would haunt me for the rest of my life. Finally you stopped digging and looked at me warily. And I told you that I was upset. “José Ayala called me.”

  “Yeah?” You stood and shuttled the trowel between hands as you wiped each of them carefully on your pants.

  “José claims that Bobby Garzino was actually HIV-negative.”

  You laughed. “The guy will never let up. He’ll think of anything to get what he wants.”

  “I don’t think José is lying.”

  You pivoted away and faced the garden wall that you’d trellised. A bower of grapevines was spilling over the top, just beginning to yellow in the season. “Why are you doing this? Stop getting involved in something that’s not your concern.”

  “The guy called me, Sean. I was minding my own business.”

  You finally turned back to me and I saw the glistening residue of tears on your cheeks. In a moment I gathered that you hadn’t lied about Bobby killing himself because of AIDS, that you’d believed it yourself. “And how do we know José’s not lying?” you asked in a broken voice. “That it isn’t just another ploy to get some kind of retribution, to make me give up the things Bobby loomed for me? I don’t care what José does, or what he says. I won’t give any of it back to him. Because it means something to me.”

  I mentioned the letter that supposedly revealed Bobby’s wishes.

  You looked at me without wavering and said, “I never read that letter.”

  I was dumbfounded. “Are you saying that you have it?”

  “Yeah, I have it.”

  “Why didn’t you read it?”

  “Because I’m afraid of what it says.”

  But why hadn’t you ever told me there was a letter outstanding? In all our discussions about José’s phone calls, about his insinuations, you never mentioned the fact that there was this unopened message from Bobby.

  Your breath was coming fast and your eyes smoldered in the gloom of the garden. Under your arms there were half-moons of sweat stains from all your hard work. “I kept from telling you about the letter. Simply because I knew that you’d try to coerce me into opening it.”

  “Of course I would. Because opening it would resolve a lot of things that we don’t understand.”

  “I knew this would happen!” You balled your hands into fists. “I knew that José would do whatever he could to put doubts in your mind. That’s exactly what he wanted to do, and exactly what I hoped we’d avoid.”

  “The only doubt he put in my mind was whether or not you knew if Bobby Garzino was HIV-negative.”

  “I haven’t lied! And how can you even suspect that after everything I’ve told you?”

  “Told me what?”

  “Told you that the last time I communicated with him was before he got the test!” Your eyes were flashing with anger.

  “But Sean, now there’s information that you’ve been deliberately ignoring.”

  “Why does that amaze you so much?”

  “Wouldn’t you want to know the truth whatever it was? Wouldn’t you want to end all this speculating?”

  “You’re the only one who’s speculating.”

  I couldn’t even fathom the idea of getting a letter from somebody, knowing it might contain a last wish and just not opening it.

  “Well, that’s how you and I differ.”

  “Okay, but why is it that every time I talk to José he keeps coming back to the same thing: that something in particular happened between you and Bobby Garzino, something that I don’t know about?”

  “What could’ve happened?” you roared. “Just tell me! What terrible thing could I have done?”

  I pondered this for a moment and then I said, “It’s probably all in that letter.”

  “Look, I don’t give a fuck what the letter says! Nobody can hold me responsible for the fact that somebody else might have killed himself. Whether or not Bobby was positive, dying was his own choice. He drove himself around that bend. He was sick enough to make it happen.”

  I had trouble believing you actually meant this. “If that’s true,” I countered, “then what’s stopping you from reading his letter? A sick man wrote it, whatever it says.”

  You said nothing in response to this. Moments passed and with them a flock of Canadian geese wheeled overhead, an expansive natural occurrence in the midst of a city where buildings edged plant life into small, cultivated plots. We watched the birds honking noisily along, and when their cries were finally drowned out by the din of traffic, I looked over at you and felt pity. �
�You’ve been hiding something from me, Sean. I’ve known it all along. I feel it between us even now. So please.”

  Then surfaced on your face that look of affliction that began long before I knew you, in another country on the other side of the same ocean in which I lost Chad. You extracted a stained rag out of your back pocket, grabbed the trowel, dusted off excess dirt and began polishing the blade until the metal shone. And I waited.

  Finally, you said, “I couldn’t bring myself to read that letter … because I knew that he’d try to make me feel guilty about his choosing to take his life. And I can’t handle that. But you’re right. There’s something else, something that I haven’t been able to tell you.”

  Fear crashed down on me like an icy swell. But I was able to say, “These days when somebody says something like that it usually means one of two things: either ‘I’ve got AIDS’ or ‘I’ve got a boyfriend I haven’t told you about.’ ”

  “It’s neither,” you explained glumly. “It’s something to do … with my father.”

  The expression on my face must’ve been comical because you grinned and said, “It’s not what you think. It’s not sexual.”

  Two weeks after your father went back to Vietnam that last time, your mother was supposed to get a phone call from him. A phone call that never arrived. She had never seemed so distraught. She kept pacing the house, watching the clock, calling her friend Roseanne for support and bursting into tears. Each day she didn’t hear from him she grew more and more agitated. After three days of waiting she was hardly sleeping; she was sure that something had happened to him and couldn’t bear not knowing what that was, and wondering if he was dead or alive. She finally reached an emergency communication point in Saigon. Word got back to her that there’d been some sabotage of the village’s telephone lines and temporarily all communications had to be made on official radio frequencies. But even after she received that information she kept worrying. She couldn’t sleep.

  And you couldn’t understand it at all. Your father was obviously making her miserable. He’d forgotten to call. He had abandoned you both. Why had he done that? You were angry with him.

  Finally the phone call came. And when it did she gushed and blathered in this fake voice. She told him—you couldn’t believe this—she told your father that she hadn’t been too concerned, that she’d assumed something must’ve happened to the phone lines and that all along she’d trusted that things would work themselves out.

  “I stared at her while she lied to him,” you said. “I couldn’t believe that she could be so dishonest. And then my father asked to say hello to me. So she put me on. He told me immediately that he missed me and that even though he’d just been back in Vietnam for two weeks it seemed like such a long time and that he was looking forward to seeing me again.”

  You paused at this point, greatly agitated. Your shoulders pinched inwardly, a sudden hunching over as though you wanted to crumple down.

  “But I told him to stay there. I was furious, you see. I told him I hated him. And I told him never to come back to Okinawa.”

  You stood there silent. Darkness had infiltrated the garden. The damask roses and the Southern magnolias that you’d planted, the copper lanterns began to ebb into the shade. Finally your wounded glance found mine. “The unfortunate thing, Will, is that ‘never come back’ was actually the very last thing I ever said to him.”

  Never come back! as the last thing you ever said to your father? Never come back!

  So you believed that you carried with you the power to kill. And maybe I thought that I could help you let go of that belief.

  But I didn’t tell you this directly; instead I said I knew that you were capable of great feeling and how it made me sad that you felt it necessary to shut down. I explained that I’d uncovered this tender part of you when I’d read your diaries. I confessed as easily as that.

  There was a momentary shudder of hatred in your eyes, a spark of venom, and then your whole face went slack. You began rubbing your thumb over the gleaming blade of the trowel.

  “You didn’t do that! You’re bullshitting me, right?”

  “No, I—”

  “Why would you do something like that?” you barked, completely incredulous. “Why would you read something that’s not yours?”

  “But wouldn’t you?” I was surprised at your reaction. “Wouldn’t you be tempted if somebody left their diaries lying around?”

  “They weren’t lying around. They were on my bookshelf!” It was as though, to you, the realm of a bookshelf was equivalent to something being kept under lock and key.

  “But … if you were at all concerned that I’d read something private, wouldn’t you have put it all away?”

  “Concerned?” you repeated in disbelief. “It didn’t cross my mind that you’d even be tempted. Believe me, if I had any idea whatsoever, I would’ve taken those frigging diaries to my office.”

  There was now a lull in the argument, a punctuation obviously created by our mutual preoccupations. “Did you read the letters, too?” you asked finally with a desolate note in your voice.

  “Just one letter,” I admitted.

  “Which one?” Your voice was now barely audible.

  “The one about…the one about how Randall wouldn’t call you when he was supposed to. The one about you waiting for him in front of the PX.”

  You muttered something to yourself and looked momentarily bewildered and finally said, “It doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “I’m really sorry, Sean,” I said. “I know it sounds self-serving and stupid, but I actually thought you almost expected me to read them.”

  You dropped the trowel onto the ground and your gaze was like an X ray prying under my skin. “Are you trying to insult me now?”

  “No, I’m not—”

  “Why the hell would I want or expect you to read my private writings?”

  I quickly explained that I was so paranoid about people reading my writings that I locked my journals in a fire box whenever my landlord needed access to my apartment. And the old man was Czechoslovakian and spoke poor English.

  “But you see, you’re paranoid and I’m not! I just assumed that when you stayed at my apartment you were there to protect me, not to read through my private papers. I was concerned about protecting my place from José. When all along it was you I should’ve been concerned about.”

  “Sean, remember you joked with me when you called from Montana? Remember you asked if I was leaving your stuff alone? That was when you gave me the idea that you half expected me to snoop around.”

  Your stare continued, but seemed mistier now, harder to discern. Then it broke and your eyes scanned the garden, at first mildly baffled, then wildly, for something. “This is crazy,” you said finally, hurrying over to a bamboo rake clotted with what looked like wet and rotting leaves.

  “What’s crazy?” I insisted as I watched you beginning to strip the mulch out of the rake.

  “I’m forgetting everything I need to do here tonight. …What’s crazy is your interpreting my phone call from Montana as an invitation to snoop.” You suddenly stopped your chore and looked at me with a scowl. Your bare arms were shivering. “Will, we’re just different, that’s all.” You sighed. “Anyway, I’ve got some more work to do here. I think I’ll stay for a while longer. Why don’t you just let yourself out.”

  “Look, Sean, I said I was sorry. It happened early on. And it was absolutely out of line. I admit that, okay? I apologize.”

  A pause. “If it happens once, it’ll happen again.”

  “No it won’t.”

  You raised your arms as though I were holding you up with a gun. “All right,” you said. “It won’t happen again. And I accept your apology. But let me get something done.”

  I was stunned. Being told to leave you seemed like a monstrous request. “Why don’t I just sit in one of the chairs and wait for you? Then we’ll grab a bite somewhere and chill out.”

  You faced away from me and, with
both hands, shielded your eyes from the shadows in order to survey the back border of the garden. “I’d rather not, Will. I’m afraid I’d rather you just go. I need some time here to myself.”

  But I still lingered until it became brutally clear that you now intended to ignore me. And then, reluctantly, I retreated across the garden to the coal chute. Before I climbed down the steep ladder, I glanced back, hoping to capture your gaze. You’d already retrieved the trowel from where you’d dropped it and were kneeling again, facing away from me. On one of the green wooden-slatted garden chairs lay a gathering of pumpkin-colored chrysanthemums that had been carefully picked and sized, their long stems casually entwined. Who had you picked them for? Had you picked them for me?

  PART THREE

  Swimmer

  TWENTY-ONE

  FROM THEN ON I was out there again, waiting for you to come back to me the way I once waited for Chad. My appetite was deadened by remorse and I quickly shed eight pounds. When I did eat, I consumed foods I otherwise never touched, things like matzo ball soup and chocolate truffles and blood oranges. Being jilted by a lover does strange things to the body: mood swings between fits of elation and distress, cravings that can suddenly turn to disgust.

  I tried not to call you so much. And when I did I always began with an apology. I’d invite you to films and other events I knew you wanted to see. But you either claimed to be busy, or kindly explained that more time needed to go by before we could see each other again with any kind of regularity. Ironically, in comparison to the uncertainty of our relationship’s early days, when I had difficulty reaching you, you now promptly responded to all my phone messages. Perhaps that was because you never intended to make plans. What else could I conclude but that you were glad for an excuse to give me up?

  Every time we’d speak on the phone, I’d sleep fitfully the same night. I’d dream about losing track of you in the dark corridor of an ocean swim, in the midst of a rip tide. Whenever I’d wake up the loss of you would fall like an anvil on my solar plexus. How can I get him to trust me again? asked my weary mind. What should I do to reinstate myself? Yes, you were finally becoming him, and your becoming him made me wonder if that sense of absence had from the very beginning been encoded within me.