The Night Swimmer

by Matt Bondurant

  * * *

  By December, Fred was going almost exclusively to bourbon, which was fine as no one else at the Nightjar was drinking it. He also seemed to have developed an adversarial relationship with the local patrons, what few there were, and a positive animosity toward the other pub owners in Baltimore. Our only business came from Bill, Dinny, the woofers, and the occasional groups of tourists who wandered in. We were losing money, and the coming months would only be worse.

  Can’t figure out what these people want, Fred said. We’ve got all the usual shit, fireplace, beer, cozy little tables. Maybe we need an old dog.

  He dug around in the ice bin with his glass. He poured himself a four-count Maker’s Mark and kicked a couple pieces of stray ice under the bar. It was two in the afternoon and the cleaning service was coming in later and it was sorely needed. The Nightjar wasn’t more dirty than most pubs, but there was a growing look of disarray, especially as Fred’s projects migrated downstairs. His end of the bar was presently covered with nautical charts and lengths of rope that he used to practice his knots. The pale winter light filtered through the grimy windows. Neko Case bellowed a rockabilly tune from the jukebox.

  Maybe we should change up the music, I said. Or at least turn it down.

  No way, Fred said. We play good music here.

  We gotta do something.

  Agreed. We’ll brainstorm during the holidays, come back fresh.

  I spent the next couple weeks at the Nightjar trying to get the place sorted. As the bar traffic diminished we cut back on the keg orders and food offerings. If you wanted something to eat at the Nightjar that winter, what you got would depend on what was in the fridge and what Fred felt like cooking. Though Fred claimed he had it under control, I went through the ordering logs to make sure we would have everything we needed come January, prepping the bar to shut down for the holidays. We had a flight out of Cork to Washington, DC, to stay with my parents for a week, then to see Fred’s father up in Atlantic City.

  On our next trip into Cork I picked up some nautical histories of the waters off southwestern Ireland and Baltimore. Essentially the stretch of North Atlantic surrounding Fastnet Lighthouse was arguably one of the most dangerous seas in the world, a whirling maw of currents and weather that sank thousand-ton tankers, destroyed frigates and yachts, that drove seasoned skippers into rocks or a thousand miles off course. The history books were full of tales of smashed ships, floating wreckage, distress signals in the night, hulls ripped wide open and the drowned sucked into the void without a sound. In 1979 a Force 10 gale ripped through the area, killing fifteen men participating in a yachting race and destroying dozens of boats. On Christmas Eve in 1972 there was a storm that measured Force 12, a remarkable occurrence, which meant hurricane-force winds and waves greater than fifty feet. A Cape Clear ferry was lost trying to reach the mainland. What was most notable about this storm was the suddenness of the rising winds and seas, taking a couple hours to reach its peak fury. It was the same day that Highgate was effectively banished to the island by his family.

  As I read these horrid accounts, I strangely felt all the more confident of my ability to make the swim to Fastnet. I just knew that it wouldn’t happen to me. It couldn’t. It was as if these other people had engaged in some kind of tragic wager with the sea, putting up their lives in a foolish bet, and lost. But for me it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t about odds, or my natural ability. The ocean was not my adversary. The sea would never destroy me.

  * * *

  The pile on Fred’s desk grew each day like a fresh volcano flow, a river of paper, pamphlets, canceled checks, statements, mounds of paper clips, stapled pages crosshatched with Fred’s heavy script, hardbound journals, wads of tissue, sticky mugs rimmed with collars of coffee tar, pens and markers, takeaway containers, a few tumblers with the resin of whiskey, cantilevered stacks of books feathered with Post-it notes, and a dense thatch of paper scraps covering the whole thing.

  Do not trust your instincts. It is instinct that makes us want to lope through the night and burn down the barn. It is instinct that makes us act cruel to strangers at the breakfast table. Your instinct is wrong and because we know this we are human.

  There are several species of animals, and loads of insects, that routinely eat their own offspring. Innocence has no rights in this world. We are all capable. Eat what you need.

  Fred assured me that all was well. The mess on his desk, he contested, was mostly his novel. Or the first part of a three-novel triptych as he called it. He had over three hundred thousand words in first draft, another two hundred thousand in notes and scraps, and then there was all the stuff he had yet to transcribe. Fred blew his nose into a paper towel and tossed it behind his computer monitor. I was worried about our finances.

  We’re gonna be okay, he said. Hey, Bill said he’d give my manuscript to his publisher.

  How are we gonna be okay? I asked. We haven’t taken in any money.

  It was after midnight and the wind rattled the windowpanes. Fred used a kitchen knife to open a box of books he’d ordered. He sifted through them, muttering, stacking them on a corner of his desk. I knew that since we had no mortgage on the place, including no rent on our apartment, and the taxes and insurance were already paid up for three years by Murphy’s, we simply needed to pull in enough to cover expenses and our own living costs. We had almost no savings except what we made on the sale of the Vermont house, and I knew that must have been gone by now. The trickle of money coming in couldn’t possibly offset our expenses, especially several thousand dollars for holiday travel.

  We can skip the holidays, I said. My parents will understand.

  Fred held up a finger, head down in a book.

  Let me worry about it, he said.

  No, I’m worried, too.

  He slapped the book closed and stacked it with the others.

  Okay, he said, Ham sent me a check for it.

  Ham is paying for our trip.

  It’s not a big deal. We just have to hold on till summer. Then we will rake it in. That’s how everyone operates here.

  Fred stood and hitched up his shorts. It was fucking fifty degrees out and my husband was wearing flip-flops. He was dressed like he was on vacation. His eyes were large and swimming, and I stepped into his bearish embrace.

  Hang in there, little buddy, he said. Just hang in there. All under control.

  He fell on the bed, put his feet up, and covered his face with the top book on the pile. DeLillo’s White Noise.

  Fred was one of those readers that the writer dreams of: deeply serious, willing, and indefatigable. When he read an author he read every book in the oeuvre, regardless of reputation or worth. He consumed books, reading at all hours, through the night and into the morning, and Fred read fast. He could read a three-hundred-page novel in an afternoon. His retention, however, as he was quick to note, wasn’t quite so admirable. This problem plagued him in nearly all things.

  My sense of myself as a reader and writer in graduate school was shaped by Dr. Mark Facknitz. It was Facknitz who helped me understand that I am no writer; rather I am a reader, and that is where my talents lie. He was a surly man, with a vast intellect and a broad red face and the habit of massaging his temples as he spoke, particularly when some simpleton graduate student tried to contest some notion about Hegel or Keats. Facknitz taught a fiction-writing class, and after reading my first attempt at a story, he rubbed his massive brow as we sat in his office and told me to read John Cheever. I went to the downtown bookstore that day and found solid hardback editions of his collected stories and journals. I still do not know what it was that Facknitz saw in my writing that suggested Cheever, more likely he was actually identifying my urges as a reader, and the next three years were so heavily imbued with Cheever that I cannot honestly separate him out from my waking life.

  What I’m doing here is an act of admittance, something Fred would have approved of. Cheever’s value to me is not merely as a storyteller but also as a mod
el of the difficulties of navigating morality in an immoral world. Everyone has their moments of glad grace, the sudden clarity of vision, when all the world seems like crystal and wine, music from the hall, a man with a cigar on the balcony, the moon and the rain at the depot with a small child holding a basket of flowers. Those times when you are gifted to be alive in this terrible and unrelenting world of desire. His voice is the narrator of my life, and even now when I read his lines or just think of the gentle cadence of his syntax, my heart is rent with astonishing gratitude. As long as his work exists I have no need of a biographer.

  Fred understood my compulsion for Cheever, and had a decent amount of respect for him, but Fred preferred the snarky postmodernism of Martin Amis, the catalogs of grit and filth, the juxtapositions of science and shit, math and murder, the endless puzzle of fragmented narratives. To me it too often seems like a lock to pick. Or an exercise in self-flagellation.

  * * *

  I called my parents to talk about plans for the holidays. My mother sounded stricken and tearful.

  Oh, Elly. We think Beatrice lost the baby.

  Oh god, no! What happened?

  She hasn’t told us anything. She just all of a sudden stopped talking about it. She’s drinking, smoking again. It’s not there.

  What?

  She . . . she was showing, you know? A nice round . . .

  My mother blew her nose. In the background I could hear my father watching football.

  Now it’s gone, she said. It’s gone.

  Chapter Ten

  In the first week of December the temperature was hovering around forty-five in the Ineer, and I had taken to wearing my 3/2 mm full-body wet suit, and even then I could only do about an hour before I lost sensation in my face. I was doing laps across the mouth of the bay, and after about a mile my eyes began to swell, filling my goggles, my fingers and toes sending faint prickling warnings like distant satellites. I told O’Boyle that I was going to reattempt the Fastnet swim in the spring, as soon as the gale season died down enough, and I wanted to get as much time in as possible before the Christmas holiday.

  On my last day I staggered up the steps, slipped into the notch behind the Illaunfaha or Giant’s Causeway, and stripped off my gear and laid it on the rocks to dry. The sun was out, so I spread myself on the rocks as well, my skin flushed beet red, letting my swimsuit dry on my body.

  I was thinking about Virginia, the trip home, when I heard a scuffling of rock and realized someone was climbing over the causeway to my hidden spot. Occasionally a tourist or bird-watcher came across me while I was entering or leaving the water, and I often got bemused looks or even staring uncomprehension. We usually exchanged polite greetings and then continued on our way. A shadow raised itself above me, a man, and I tried to smile warmly, my face still mostly numb.

  Hello, Elly, he said.

  I sat up, trying to focus on his face. He had a bag slung around one shoulder, one hand on the rock, a knee bent.

  It’s me, he said. Sebastian.

  Oh, Christ!

  I sat up, bringing my knees to my chest, and wrapped my arms around my shins.

  Sorry, he said. I didn’t mean to . . . sorry.

  But he didn’t move, still standing there on the rock, looking down at me. I suddenly felt twelve again, an awkward crane stooping on the pool deck, my nipples burning in my suit.

  It’s okay, I said, grabbing a towel and my sweatshirt, I’m just drying off. While the sun is out.

  Yes, he said, hell of a day.

  Sebastian rearranged his position on the rock. I put on my sweatshirt and tied the towel around my waist.

  I saw you swimming, he said, from over on Ballyieragh.

  He patted his bag.

  Have a pretty good lens so I could tell it was you. Though I don’t know who else it would be. At first I figured you for a seal. I was going over to the Five Bells for some lunch and I saw you come out, so I figured I’d walk over.

  Oh yeah?

  I slipped my jeans on and fumbled with my shoes. I stood and tied my hair back while facing the water. The ocean was brisk and white-capped, the breeze westerly, insistent.

  So, he said after a few endless moments, I guess I was checking to see if you needed a bite. A bit of lunch, anyway. Care to?

  He stammered slightly. I watched him, his eyes round and alive.

  I could eat a horse, I said. Starving.

  Me too, he said. Right, off we go then?

  * * *

  Ariel brought us each a crowded plate containing a pair of whole roasted potatoes, a baseball-size clump of sautéed leeks with bacon, and a mound of spicy coleslaw. Two pints of Murphy’s. My wet suit was hanging over a few chairs, steaming by the peat fire. I went after the potatoes with my hands, breaking them open, and plying them with butter and sour cream. While they cooled I picked at the coleslaw, trying to resist gorging myself.

  Just the thing, Sebastian said, after a long swim in the cold chop?

  I could tell by his collar that he had been sweating that morning, and there were brambles and gorse thorns scattered across his sleeves. He couldn’t have been older than thirty-five, yet he carried himself with the calm assurance of a much older man.

  I was dragging myself, he said, across the Ballyieragh most of the morning.

  See anything good?

  Not yet, he said, a few petrels, Manx shearwater, some other things I couldn’t get a fix on. But I’m headed to the Bill this afternoon, and that is nearly always a guarantee to catch something coming west across the ocean.

  We talked about life in Baltimore, the Nightjar, and about winning the contest. Sebastian seemed to regard this bit of my history with a bemused tolerance, as if he didn’t really believe me. I started asking him about his background and how he came to be here, and he told me that he had been coming regularly to the Cape for about six years. He managed to get here several times a year, for a few weeks each time. He was evasive on the question about work, saying something about how he read biology at Cambridge, and apparently for a time specialized in single-celled organisms and invertebrate species. He talked about teaching at Cambridge, going through the rudimentary elements of cell division and reproduction with glassy-eyed undergraduates, but it was all years ago.

  What about now? I said. What are you doing now?

  Not much of anything, he said with a sheepish grin.

  Unemployed?

  Something like that.

  I found myself watching his hands, playing with his notebook and pen, flipping through the pages, tucking it away in his bag only to take it out again a moment later. He had long, slender fingers, smooth and umblemished, the hands of a young boy, and he kept giving me an inquisitive glance, as if he was checking to see if I desired his notice. He had a generous cone of attention, like a wand of light, and it never faltered. Being in it was like being carefully studied, though not in a way I was used to.

  Isn’t it a bit late in the bird season? I say.

  He was cutting his potatoes in chunks, using that curious overhand fork maneuver you see so many Europeans employ. He swatted at his throat for a moment and looked away. Was he nervous?

  Yes, he said. That’s true.

  Decided to take one last shot at it, I said. Just in case?

  Sebastian fixed me with his eyes, blue like the Ineer in early fall, a hint of steel, gray, cold, but full of depth. He smiled.

  Yes, that’s right. Thought I’d get one more look. Just in case.

  * * *

  I left my gear at the the Five Bells and after lunch we trundled along the western edge of the Ineer, up to the East Bog, across the bleak windswept highlands of Ballyieragh.

  The Bill of Clear, Sebastian said, is the best spot in the world for migrating birds.

  Once we reached the plateau of Ballyieragh the wind howled from the west, flattening our jackets against our bodies. We leaned into it, trudging along, occasionally exchanging smiles as it was too loud to say anything. At the West Bog we took the small
raised footpath that led through the spongy ground, ahead the line of cliffs and the North Atlantic beyond, a dim pounding beneath the roar of wind. The Fastnet Lighthouse came into view, a hazy smudge, the beckoning finger. Sea spray came in occasional gusts, vaulting over the cliffs and tumbling over us.

  The western point of Cape Clear is like a deeply serrated knife edge, with peaks of basaltic rock jutting into the ocean, coming to a sharp point where the most resilient veins of rock resisted the everlasting beating of the sea. As we came to the cliff edge the difference in the water from the Ineer or Roaringwater Bay was shocking; this was the North Atlantic in full winter mode, and looking out to the lighthouse I was amazed that just a short time ago I had swum out there and nearly made it back.

  Sebastian tapped my arm and pointed to the north. A long, flat ship of black iron with a squared prow was chugging into Roaringwater Bay towing the shattered remains of a large wooden sailing yacht. The sailboat was demasted and had a gaping hole punched in the hull near the stern, just at the waterline, and it was clearly taking on water. It bobbed like a fishing cork as it was dragged landward. The black ship had a pair of heavy cranes and other lifting tackle on the forward deck, a small pilothouse midship with a single battered smokestack belching raw exhaust. A few men shuffled through a pile of materials, what looked like sails, duffel bags, boxes.

  Salvage ship, Sebastian said. That sailboat must have come up on some rocks. The locals scavenge everything the sea gives up.

  A single figure stood on the bow of the wrecked sailboat with a hand on the towing lines. Even at this distance we could tell he was an enormous man, bareheaded and wearing brown coveralls. He turned his head toward the island and seemed to immediately find us on the cliff top, as if he already knew we were there. Sebastian raised a hand, but his greeting was not returned.