Nightswimmer

by Joseph Olshan

  Even though you’d suddenly withdrawn from my life, I felt that I still belonged to you. I started wearing a black length of rawhide around my neck that proclaimed that my heart was still tied. I was spoken for and yet, at the same time, unattached, and something about that communicated itself to strangers. I was suddenly approached by men whom I’d seen around Manhattan for years but who never before had given me a moment of attention. In one-night stands with other men I tried to locate the parts of you that I admired: the wit, the sensuality, the dreaminess, the self-effacing charm.

  I picked up a muscle man who took me into a brownstone he was renovating and, as a prelude to sex, asked me to give him a steroid injection. I met a dancer who was unable to find legitimate work and who was forced to give what he called “release massages,” the 1990s version of safe-sex prostitution. I met a nervous, angelic-looking guy who, after explaining that “a recent relationship ended abruptly,” finally admitted that the relationship had ended because his lover died of AIDS. Those encounters took away the sting of sudden loss while they lasted, but as soon as they ended I felt more despondent than ever.

  Sometimes I got so agitated that I had to pace the city to ease the press of affliction. I strolled along the West Side Highway among guys in cut-off T-shirts, gold rings flashing from their pierced ears, the air spiced with frowsy colognes. Murmurs of conversation rang unintelligibly to me, and in my mood of alienation I tried to imagine the gibberish sound of English to a foreigner. Yet I felt like a foreigner. I felt exiled from your life.

  A little more than two weeks after our conversation in the brownstone garden, I found myself heading out at night along the promontory of a pier, passing men walking tight nervous circles in the shadows, a hand riveted to a crotch, or the intertwining forms of guys necking out of view. Standing at the edge of the dock, I looked across at the lighted high-rises of New Jersey apartments, a patch of watery blue sky above them with plumed clouds smudged in orange by the recent sunset. I could smell the rank odor of the river. I marveled at how bodies of water constantly move as the earth itself kept moving, so simple and yet so unforgiving.

  That night I was wishing that I had told you the truth about the last time with Chad. Told you how it was at my apartment, told you I was afraid what happened between Chad and me had something to do with him vanishing. Telling you would only have proved your theory that Chad had taken a part of me away from myself, a piece of my own heart that I foolishly believed that I could find in a stranger. That I might have found in you.

  Until those last few weeks with him I never understood what it was like to want a man inside me. And whenever I felt the beginning of that desire I fought it. He didn’t really care that I couldn’t bring myself to be on the receiving end, although sometimes he joked that we should have a sexual democracy. I told him that I’d tried getting screwed in the past and that it had been just too painful. He said that enjoying it was more a matter of trust than anything else. And he was right. I knew he was right.

  I started fantasizing about it, especially when he’d gone on one of his jaunts and I didn’t know where he was. I would lie there on my bed and let my legs drift apart, imagining. Remembering some of the women in my life whom I’d made love to, and a certain crucial moment when they let me know that they’d been aroused to the point that they wanted me inside them. Now, alone, I discovered what that was. Touching myself ignited something in the lowest pit of my being. And then I wondered what it might be like after a bottle of Zinfandel, or after several Coronas. But I was scared because in some way it meant total submission, giving up to him something that had seemed impossible to give.

  My apartment on Mason Street. Late afternoon, the sun dipping behind the King palms and jacarandas and the shadows in my bedroom as long-limbed as the trees that cast them. He’d cycled down from Isla Vista, his backpack chock-full of books for studying; he was wearing a pair of rainbow-tie-dyed rugby shorts that rode high on his bronzed legs. “I’m starved,” he grunted as he breezed through the door. “What’s to eat?”

  “Just some Jack cheese and a couple of avocados.”

  “They ripe, the avocados?”

  “I think one is.”

  His hair was tangled from being blown around by the Santa Ana winds. I asked if he’d practiced water polo and he shook his head and said that there was too much studying to do. Oral exams were coming up. Then he reached into his backpack, pulled out a sourdough round, threw it at me like a football and said, “This should go nicely with the avocados and the cheese.”

  I forgot to respond because I was already thinking about sex and feeling scared of wanting it as much as I did.

  “All right, what’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Nothing is wrong.”

  “You’re sulking. I know that sulking puss.”

  “You might know it, but that’s not what you’re seeing.”

  “Okay, what am I seeing?”

  He hadn’t shaved in a day or so and the growth on his face was thickening. His T-shirt, one of his old Stanford ones, was so worn it was coming apart in places, and I could see bits of his torso through some of the holes. I walked over, kissed him once and then tried to pry his mouth open with my tongue. He chuckled and said, “Oh, you’re horny, so that’s why you’re acting so serious.”

  “Yeah,” I whispered, kissing down the cords of his neck.

  “What happens if I’m not in the mood?”

  I said nothing, just continued kissing him. Finally I brought one of his hands around to one of my ass cheeks. And then he took a capricious sniff. “Have you been drinking?”

  “Just a couple of beers.”

  A look of bewilderment on his face, but then he grinned.

  The hurt: how can I describe that first moment when he tried to push inside. It cut through me like a blade. I tensed up and he popped out and shrugged and giggled.

  “What are you laughing at?” I accused him.

  “The look of pure agony on your face.”

  “Well, what do you expect?”

  “I know it hurts. It hurt me the first time with you,” he said. “Look, you’re the one who wants to do this.”

  “I know! But can’t you go easy?”

  He chuckled. “I am going easy.”

  “Then don’t get so pissed off.”

  “I’m not. Don’t be so sensitive.”

  “Just shut up and do it!”

  “Jesus Christ, can you at least be sexy about it?”

  “It’s hard to be when it’s killing me.”

  “I think we’re losing the mood here.”

  And then I grabbed him by the arms. Grabbed him like I would refuse to let him off me until we’d finish what we’d started. “I want to do this,” I insisted.

  Now I remember that there was a look of dread on his face.

  I wish I had a photograph of him precisely at that moment. For in that look I believe lies the answer to everything that I need to know, the riddle of his vanishing.

  Why he should have felt dread I don’t quite understand. I was the one about to withstand pain for pleasure. He asked me if I had any tequila and I told him there were a few swallows left. He went and grabbed the bottle off the top of the refrigerator, came back into the room, his hard-on bounding between his legs, a line of salt on the crown of his hand. I licked his hand and drank what he poured in a tumbler and what I didn’t drink he swallowed. His breath was fiery when he kissed me again, and we didn’t try anything for a while, just ground together and kissed and gave each other head. But finally I felt his finger beginning. He leaned over one side of the bed and grabbed the tube of lubricant jelly. I felt his finger again, slicked like an ice-cold probe, and then I shut my eyes and waited.

  Hardly as gentle as he promised, he was suddenly all the way in, and the splitting feeling was pure pain, clear as water. I was afraid that I was going to die right there beneath him. I almost wanted to, strangely enough. He grunted something about its being the only way, but by now I was so
enraged that I found myself shoving him off. “Wait!” he cried out. “Just wait. Hold on.” Now he was the one clawing at me, pinning me, insisting.

  “It’s too fast. You’re in … you’re doing it too fast!”

  But then in the midst of the pawing agony arrived the first hint of numbness which was the curtain before it began to feel good. “Relax,” he told me. “You’re squirming.”

  “Of course I’m squirming.”

  But then a chuckle escaped him.

  “It’s not funny!” I growled.

  He said nothing, so intent was he on his own pleasure.

  “I think you should stop,” I said.

  But he wouldn’t stop. I knew he wouldn’t, even when I asked him again, when I insisted.

  Then suddenly there’s a bridge. Getting off no longer has to be so external. He can get me even closer to it, that ache of desire, if only he can reach it. The fullness inside me is suddenly the thing that I’ve been missing all along when I’ve come up short, when I’ve felt I could never get enough of him, of anyone, could never take in the pure pull of his outer limbs. I realize now I can have it all.

  And in that moment I became like a madman, bucking and bellowing as I pulled him into me and got off like I never had before and came spiderwebs all over my own face. And perhaps he perceived my new power. He must’ve realized it because afterward, lying there, we said nothing.

  I know I once said how happy I was that last afternoon, but I couldn’t admit it to you then. The truth is I wasn’t happy, the truth is I’d reached my lowest ebb. Like lying dead and rotted on the bottom of the ocean. No whispers of I love you, no exclamation that it was good. Just silence. The claustrophobic silence when you realize that your lover no longer is a mystery and that the fourth wall of the relationship is finally constructed: complete familiarity. From that silence, I now believe, dawned his desire to swim out beyond the breakwater, a night swim on which he insisted I accompany him.

  Now, standing on the dock, I felt my back pocket, and after an initial moment of panic that my wallet had been lifted, I remembered I’d left it at home and that my only encumbrance was a key chain. I hid that in a convenient place between two loose boards. I shucked my clothes and was soon standing in a pair of underwear on the westernmost edge of Manhattan.

  And then I was in, a sort of half-dive, half-jump; my foot grazed something hard and slimy on the bottom. I gasped, for the water was chillier than I expected, and it surprised me with a grimy odor. “What the fuck?” I heard somebody say as I did a few head-up strokes—the way Chad used to do when he first began, water polo swimming. I was still bracing against the shock of the cold, my arms already aching numb. The water temperature had to be in the mid-fifties.

  I began with long easy strokes, dragging my thumb along my side, elbows high, taking some more head-up breaths to make sure nothing was bearing down on me. I could feel the yank of a current, different from the outward pull of the ocean—this was more like swimming through a constant boiling. After I ventured twenty-five yards off the pier and looked back at the waterfront, I could make out several shadowy forms waving. Their shouts came to me in a strobe-like blare. I stopped and treaded water. “Hey, man, what are you doing? Where you going? Are you nuts?”

  “You trying to kill yourself or what?”

  “Idiot!”

  I hit things on the way out, soda and beer cans maybe. I never let myself dwell on what might be floating in the Hudson, just sliced my way through whatever there was and kept on in the cold indefinite dark. Certainly didn’t have to worry about sharks. The moment panic hit like a wall, I poured on the speed, just wanting to get two hundred yards done with in order to come back. But I just had to touch that point of no return, like a talisman, because I believed it would bring me around to something that I’d been looking for.

  I finally hit two hundred, stopped and treaded water. The unguent-black water, my body cold and dumb but my throat and my head on fire. I’d brought myself out to this unsafe, unlikely place in the Hudson River at night. Perhaps I wanted to die. And an old wail left me like a ghost that has, for all these years, been feeding off a soul. The sound was kin to the howl that left me the night he disappeared, a crying out that made the Mexican family who lived below me on Mason Street bang the ceiling with the broom, just the way they had done earlier the same day when he and I had made our most raucous love.

  But from somewhere up the Hudson I heard the churning noise of a huge vessel, and I turned to the bouncing glint of deck lights bearing down on me. The moment before I headed in, it all returned to me: the supreme emptiness of feeling fucked and unloved, the sense that there was nothing sacred left in me, just rawness, and all the things I wanted to tell him but never did as we strolled toward West Beach. In my very last glimpse of him, there is the look of annoyance on his face, because I was trying to stop him from swimming along the pathway of the moon. I remember shouting about the sand barge and the foreboding that pervaded me, long before the great wide ocean had separated us.

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWO COPS WERE WAITING on the pier.

  As soon as I saw them, I took one backstroke with the idea of turning around and sprinting off down the shoreline, when I heard one of them speaking through a bullhorn. “Hey, buddy, you better get out of that water, now. Right now!”

  Flashlights stunned my vision. What could they do to me? I hadn’t committed a crime unless swimming in the Hudson River was my crime. But just in case.

  I tried to summon up my own voice of authority. “Look, I know what I’m doing! I’m training, okay? For the Around Manhattan Swim.”

  Although the light beaming in my eyes induced a halo of blindness, I sensed nevertheless that the police activity was attracting a crowd of people to the end of the dock.

  “Are you going to get out of the water, or are we going to call a boat and frogmen?”

  With a few strokes I was bobbing below them, near the pilings, and any reservation I had about climbing out quickly dissipated when I brushed up against what felt like a floating dead rat.

  I was soon standing, like an idiot, smothered with a police blanket, dripping onto the wooden planks of the pier. The cops were squinting at me in a kind of condemning disbelief. I was aware of a crowd of people standing beyond them, but for some reason I didn’t care whether or not I came off like a maniac. “You’re lucky you’re not dead,” one said. “Now, I don’t want to see you in this water here again. You got that? The next cop will haul you to Bellevue, no questions asked.”

  With that they took the blanket and left me standing there. The bystanders began to disperse. It occurred to me as I put on my jeans and sweatshirt that the real danger of the whole episode was the possibility that my clothes could have been stolen, leaving me in a Freudian nightmare, naked in a public place. And I hadn’t even considered such a possibility before jumping in the water. Was I going a little crazy?

  Just as I was leaving the pier, I was grabbed by the forearm. It was you. What were you doing here? I was elated. Swimming at night could not bring back Chad, but it could bring back you.

  Dressed in work clothes—a blue blazer and a pair of pleated khaki pants—you’d just left a business dinner and were heading along the piers on the way back to your apartment when you noticed several people scurrying out onto a dock and heard rumors that somebody had drowned. “Normally I’m not the rubbernecking sort, but when they said there was this guy in the river, of course I had to look.”

  “Did it cross your mind that it might be me?”

  You raised your eyebrows and I now noticed that your cheeks had reddened. “Yeah, it did, unfortunately. And I was hoping it wasn’t.

  You were quite obviously perturbed, whereas I was just delighted to see you. And so I asked you what was wrong.

  “What’s wrong?” you mocked me. “Come on, what do you think is wrong? I’m concerned, can’t you see that? I want to know what you were doing.”

  Your reaction was, at first, bewilderi
ng to me. I was swimming—what did you think I was doing?

  “Come on, Will, you’re talking to me. Why are you giving me a line?”

  “I’m not giving you a line.” After all, it hadn’t been the first time that I’d done something similar to this.

  “In the Hudson River, in November no less.” You abruptly turned away from me and exhorted, “Come on, we better start moving. You’re soaked!”

  I had been unable to towel off and my clothes were showing huge damp blots, although by now my hair was almost dry. The wind drawing in from the river was surprisingly arid and buffeted our backs.

  “So how have you been?” I asked after we had walked away from the pier and were heading along Christopher Street.

  “Been the same. What about you?”

  I tried to sound hopeful. “Getting better.”

  A pause. “Well, that’s good.”

  “Dating anybody?” I couldn’t help asking.

  You turned to me with a scowl. “You know I’m not dating anybody, Will.”

  “How would I know?”

  “What would be the point of getting involved immediately with somebody else?”

  “It happens. I mean, you’re the one who withdrew.”

  We walked a few paces before you responded. “You know why I had to withdraw. I saw that I was driving you crazy. And that was driving me crazy.”

  Your attempt at such an oversimplification was maddening, but I didn’t want to begin a heated discussion so soon. We strolled another half block in silence before you finally spoke again. “Look, I just don’t want you to suddenly start acting weird because we’re not seeing each other.”

  By weird, did you mean swimming treacherously?