The Night Swimmer

by Matt Bondurant

  What I learned in those two years in graduate school was that the world is full of many, many good books, most of which sit on the shelves undisturbed for their entire existence, and yet to become part of this vast silent council required a tendency of mind that I simply did not possess. This was not devastating news to me. It was actually quite a relief. I ended up doing a thesis on the journals and stories of John Cheever, more of an appreciation than any kind of actual scholarly work.

  * * *

  Fred and I began dating quickly after that night when he showed me the picture, but we didn’t become serious until the trip to Cape Hatteras. Fred had organized a group of graduate students to take on a crumbling, unpainted four-bedroom beach house on high stilts perched in a set of rolling dunes. We got it for extra cheap because Fred somehow sold the owner on the idea that we were a group of writers there to do some important work. In reality we drank Bloody Marys and beer all day, smoked a generous pile of cheap weed, and spread out a dozen hits of Ecstasy through the week. Sure, there was some writing going on, most of it by Fred and his frantic scribbling whenever he was struck by something, mostly while hammered out of his gourd, but on the whole it was a trip devoted to that desperate sort of debauchery practiced by young adults without responsibility or real career prospects other than something we loosely categorized as “the life of the mind.”

  From the minute we arrived it was clear that Fred and I were now an official couple. We had our own room, the best room in the house, with a sliding door opening to the beach, and in the morning we slept in and listened to the sound of the waves.

  We arrived late at night, and it didn’t take long for Fred to try to rally a group to swim. The wind was strong and the water temperature near sixty-five so most refused, but after slamming another cocktail a few of us were bounding down the steps to the sand, Fred leading the way, shedding his clothes as he ran toward the water. I was wearing my suit and Fred kept his shorts on in deference to me, I think, and I followed him out into the breakers, high-stepping through white water and then diving under the head-high waves. Fred broke the surface and bellowed like an elephant seal. It was a starry night and the water oily black and shimmering, and I stroked out to where he stood.

  Look, he said.

  Back on the shore the handful of others had halted about knee deep and were now retreating to the house. I knew it would happen. I was impressed that Fred followed through with it, but I would come to never underestimate Fred.

  Blackguards! he yelled. This inconstancy of thine doth seem like the second fall of man!

  His teeth were chattering already and he gripped his torso with his arms. I wanted to wrap myself around him, to warm him up, but I didn’t want him to think that I was somehow unaffected, or stronger than he. Fred didn’t know about my skin condition at the time and so he didn’t understand that sixty-five degrees was warm for me. I didn’t want to tell him.

  We should get out, I said. It’s freakin’ cold.

  Yeah, he said. I think I could use another drink.

  We walked out of the water, the beach house glimmering like a fallen spaceship, the faint sound of music and laughing. I felt my skin swelling as the air hit our wet bodies, the blood rushing about, warming.

  Just a second, Fred said.

  He turned me so I was facing the sea and the waning moon. Then he stepped back, watching me. He fell to his knees on the sand and held up his hands in a gesture of supplication or defeat.

  Christ, Elly, he said. You are a vision.

  He actually fell to his knees!

  You are like some kind of goddess, he said. A goddess from the sea.

  The flush of modesty that comes from near nudity was unfamiliar to me. I had little embarrassment or regard for my near-naked or even naked body, inured by the many years of competitive swimming, my childhood perpetually in a suit, the year-round meets. The feeling of Lycra or nearly any other wet fabric next to my skin had become a source of familiarity and comfort. But there was always the disconcerting objective sense of my body that lurked just behind this confidence. People often talk about a swimmer’s body as if this is always a desirable thing. On occasion you will see a beautiful body on a competitive swimmer, usually at the Olympics, with the classic V-shaped torso, tiny waist, elegantly sculpted limbs. These are people who would be desirable and attractive no matter what they did and whatever sport they chose. The true swimmer’s body, on the other hand, a body that is molded only by the act of swimming, is a different thing altogether. Most competitive swimmers develop a hunched back, the source of power for their stroke, a concave chest, as except for the butterfly the pectorals aren’t required, bulbous shoulders, thinning arms and delicate wrists, no ass to speak of, and stick legs that taper away to nothing. I inherited my grandmother’s generous chest and ass, no help to me as a swimmer but they helped balance out my oversize proportions. By the time I was sixteen I avoided full mirrors and full-body photos.

  The eyes of other people, as they looked at my body, became flat and shining like blind coins. They were just characters in a painting. The portrait done in oils of the French dandy with the ostrich feathers in his hat and the brass buttons on a red tunic, the one whose eyes follow you across the room, isn’t really watching you. That’s what it felt like to me. But even a blank stare casts a thin cone of energy, and you feel it. I could never shake it entirely.

  This was different. This was the first time that the eyes of another person made me feel a part of some essential connection. I wanted his eyes on me.

  * * *

  That week I fell into the regular rhythm of a midday swim, doing an hour in the muddy chop, swimming against the current parallel to the beach, sometimes slipping into a riptide and fighting it for a bit of a challenge. The first day people lined up to watch, but after that it was largely ignored.

  But Fred thought it was fantastic, and he always accompanied me to the water and waited for me on the sand in a beach chair. When I got out he held open a towel and made a great show of rubbing me down vigorously, sitting me in the chair and covering me with towels while he massaged my shoulders, arms, and legs, like I had just finished swimming the English Channel. He made up a special hot whiskey drink with nutmeg and cumin in a thermos and watched me sip it with earnest attention. When he was satisfied that I had recovered, he put his arm around me and guided me back to the porch of the house, where some goggle-eyed lunatic poet was grilling oysters basted with herbed butter and white wine while other young writers and scholars shuffled about grinning, sunburned and high, making proclamations about the sea, the sand, the sky. Fred would make some grand announcement concerning my epic swim, then we’d do giant bong hits and settle into deck chairs with beers and margaritas and face the coming evening.

  That week we discovered the common threads that would bind us together. We were always the last to go to bed, the ones that people were always coming out of their rooms to tell to turn the music down and shut the fuck up. We spent a lot of time on the beach, in and out of the water. Fred wore himself out trying to spend time in the water with me. He would be grinning, neck deep in the ocean, teeth clacking and his hands going white. I would take him up to our room and nurse him back to warmth with my hands, my mouth. What Fred and I had in common was that we never wanted to do anything halfway.

  Our most powerful experiences in bed came when we read novels to each other late at night until we both dropped off to sleep. I read him Pride and Prejudice, Fred loved my hackneyed English accents; and he read me Charles Baxter’s The Feast of Love, which brought us both to tears nearly every night. I like to think this is when we fell in love.

  One morning we lay in bed twined together. Fred had moved the bed and arranged the curtains and screen door so that I could wake up looking out at the ocean. The sea was blue-gray and formal, the lines of surf advancing with military precision. The inshore breeze was strong, creating big shore break, and the waves’ pounding crunch reached us a second after we saw them hit the sand.
The curtains billowed into the room, striping us with rising sunlight, and the sweet briny smell of the ocean. I took his arm and gripped it, holding his fingers up to my lips.

  I could hold you like this forever, he told me.

  This is nice.

  Don’t ever let me go, he said.

  I won’t.

  Then he jumped out of bed and ran into the kitchen in his boxers and made everyone gingerbread pancakes and pitchers of mimosas, a cigarillo clenched in his teeth, his eyes shining with delight.

  Oh, I was gone, gone, gone. He was all I wanted in this world.

  * * *

  By the time we were married I would begin to miss Fred almost the instant he would leave my sight. The closing door, the car driving away, and this dull ache, like a panic, would settle in my chest, a sensation that felt something like being in a descending elevator. I went about my life, in the world, a mask of complacency or even happiness on my face, my body like a shield, but my joints ached like old stone with every step, every turn of the handle, every chattering conversation. He was like a source of heat or energy that I had grown used to, and when it was gone the world seemed cold. Fred had such passion for me, for everything. I fed on it and became addicted to it in all its fucked-up glory.

  There was some solace in the suspension of water, and my desire to swim was magnified until it was nearly all I thought of. I could somehow crowd the panic of Fred’s absence back down to a manageable burning knot when I was immersed and churning through a body of water.

  When Fred traveled for business I had to exercise a lot of restraint. I had to hold myself to two swims a day or else even I would feel like some kind of freak. After my late swims, pulling myself out of the lake in the darkness, driving up the hill in my suit, the truck seats slippery with lake water, I would strip down and build a large fire, the wood stacked far too high, and when it was raging hot I would pour myself a drink and stand in front of it like a campfire, trying to breathe normally. I never told him about this of course. Instead I just tried to manufacture reasons and ways to be with him.

  When he returned from a trip he seemed to sense this and would spend the first couple hours holding me, without saying anything. Then he would talk about children.

  They will never know this, he said. I’ll stop traveling. I’ll work from home. They will never feel what it’s like to have a parent leave.

  But not yet, I’d say. I’m not ready.

  I know, he said. I can wait. ’Cause when you are it’s gonna be awesome.

  * * *

  On the final evening of the Cape Hatteras trip we all took the last of the Ecstasy during a thunderstorm. The rain was light and warm, so we huddled on the beach and watched the terrific flash and stroke of lightning at sea. Fred brought the stereo onto the porch covered with a towel and cranked up Moby’s Play album. When we started rolling hard, everyone else began to freak out and ran inside, but Fred and I shucked off our clothes and sprinted along the shoreline, Fred chasing me through the surf, the flashes of lightning suddenly illuminating us in various poses and contortions. He caught up to me and tackled me in thigh-deep water, a set of waves knocking us down. We stood in the water with the rain, the lightning, the distant thunder coming down around us, Fred’s face and body slick with sweat, clutching each other, kissing deeply, the taste of salt all over. His penis was large and urgent between my legs, and he reached down under my ass and picked me up, walking into the water. He carried me out like he knew exactly what I wanted. Out past the breakers he found the sandbar, and Fred planted his feet and moving with the ragged swells I took him inside me in the storming ocean.

  Chapter Seven

  The BBC shipping report was clear that Friday morning. I ate a double breakfast of fried eggs and sausages washed down with a carafe of Nora’s bitter coffee. I thought of my husband snoring through a hangover in a pile of blankets back on the mainland, his jug of filtered water and aspirin on the nightstand. The wind whistled thinly through the muslin curtains and my skin began to hum. I missed Fred. In my room I snapped on my orange tank suit, then my jeans and sweater. In the kitchen I mixed up a protein shake in a squirt bottle and a thermos of chicken soup for O’Boyle to feed to me in the water. Nora watched me curiously as she rucked the dishes and made tea for her husband who was reading the paper, the parlor fire crackling with fresh peat.

  Out for a trek again, I said to her.

  Ah, Nora said, well enjoy it then.

  Dinny’s boat was tied up at the quay, the motor running, he and O’Boyle sitting on the steps drinking tea out of large clamshells. Dinny’s boat was a short fishing trawler of the kind you see rotting in boatyards and harbors all around Ireland, chipped red and white paint, a short cabin to shelter in for sudden blows, a flat transom good for hauling up nets and traps.

  What say we call it off, O’Boyle said. Instead go back to my caravan and have a few cans?

  No way, I said. We have good weather.

  The day was chilled and gray, but the seas running only a foot in the harbor, and the reports called for a calm, slightly overcast day, winds mostly westerly, which meant I would be fighting a headwind on the way out but would be pushed in on the way back. O’Boyle poured some tea in a shell and held it out to me.

  In honor of your voyage, he said. A shell for the maiden of the sea.

  I drank a bit, it was gritty and sour, but tasty. I finished it off then drank from my water jug, loading up on fluids. When I disrobed O’Boyle turned away and shuffled the nautical charts, but Dinny sat on the wooden stool that served as the captain’s chair and watched me, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, his face composed and serious. He tapped the ash on the deck, the white stubs of his fingers like grubs. His watch cap was cockeyed, and you could see the mottled remains of his ear, now just a swirl of scar tissue. He didn’t miss a bit of my preparations, and I suppose it is possible that Dinny hadn’t seen a real woman this close to naked before.

  I put on latex gloves and slathered myself with lanolin, getting it extra thick in my underarms and neck area, where the chafing was worst, with a healthy dose between my legs. In the open ocean the sea lice would try to burrow into your warm parts, and heavy lubricants kept them from attaching. I slipped on a Hothead insulator cap and then a latex cap over that. Most people who drown on long ocean swims, such as the English Channel, die of hypothermia because their brain temperature drops. They feel fine; their minds are telling them they are okay, there isn’t much pain, and so they stay in the water until their bodies shut down and they go under. I knew that my arms and legs would go numb as the blood retreated into my chest, but if I kept my head warm I would be less likely to suffer such dangerous delusions. It would take a lot longer for me to become hypothermic than most people, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t happen. There is a reason why far more people have reached the summit of Everest than have swum the English Channel. A dying mind is a strong magician, especially in the water. When I swam I paid attention.

  I hit my wristwatch chrono and dove into the harbor. O’Boyle and Dinny would lead the way, staying a bit off to my left so that I could see them in my normal left-side breathing pattern and so that I wouldn’t spend the whole swim eating diesel fumes.

  I stroked out while Dinny drew the boat up ahead of me in position. At the harbor mouth I stopped for a moment and fixed Fastnet in my sight line. The sky over the lighthouse hung low with cirrus clouds, swirling like a river, heavy with rain. The swells were perhaps up to two feet, and I could feel the gentle tug of the northern current. The water was cold enough that I would need to keep moving, so I motioned the boat on and started stroking, going into a five-stroke breathing pattern, stretching it out and rolling my shoulders.

  As I swam away from the island, the water moved from soft jade to forest green. A quarter mile out of the harbor the visibility was shot, the water murky black speckled with particle matter, krill, and the occasional drifting wrack or other seaweed, solitary circular jellyfish doing their slow convulsions. I
did the first mile in twenty minutes, which was a bit quick but I felt strong. I hit a few heavy patches of floating weed, and at one point I had to climb up and crawl over the stuff, my body out of the water, shuffling along on my elbows and knees. On the boat O’Boyle was sitting in a folding chair drinking a can of beer. Dinny had a transistor radio tuned in to a mainland pop station, and the baleful anthems of Robbie Williams floated across the water, alternating with the crackling of the sea and the rushing sound of my own body.

  When I reached the mile-and-a-half mark, I knew something was wrong. A warmth in the pit of my stomach, intestinal churning, and at first I thought I may have to endure the humiliation of an open-ocean defecation with O’Boyle and Dinny circling nearby. I wasn’t fatigued, but my arms felt wooden and disconnected, I started losing my stroke count and my breathing became lopsided. I looked at my hands, and they were still fleshy and pink. Flaming red meant the body was struggling to fight the cold, and white meant numbness and real danger. The lighthouse didn’t look any closer, but that was a common optical illusion for open-water swimming. The weather was good, the water conditions decent, I knew I wouldn’t get many chances. There was a gentle tug that pulled through the center of me, a subtle current that kept my arms moving, my eyes on Fastnet. I just had to keep going.