Nightswimmer (12 page)

After putting down the phone, I reran our conversation. On the one hand I was inclined to suspect the staggered manner in which you’d told me the story of Bobby Garzino. On the other hand, I had to remind myself that, unlike you, I’m the sort of person whose imagination gets overstimulated from very little. And sometimes I get confused between what I’ve nakedly perceived and what I’ve varnished upon that perception.

S
O THEN YOU WERE
gone and I became you. And, strangely, that was when I was happiest, alone in your apartment, those days before I met you in Vermont. Alone in your apartment when our idyll was still ahead of me like a harbor marking.

You had to leave town quickly without any time to tidy. Which suited me, because I wanted to turn the key in the door as though I were you at the end of any normal day. I wanted to shadow everything that I knew you were. To look around and sigh at the state of slowly accreting disarray. There are certain people whose natural style lends art even to their clutter. You were one of them. I found cut crystal glasses residued with Scotch; white ceramic plates encrusted with dried radicchio; a bruise of dessert wine on a ragged cotton place mat; an old tackle box filled with lead weights and flies that you’d tied by hand. And all the cut flowers that had almost immediately wilted, as though their very lives depended on your presence.

Instinctively I straightened up. Folded T-shirts, and oatmeal sweatshirts and towels. Dusted a rosy film from picture frames. Washed curdled milk from the bottom of a cocktail glass. Vacuumed. Played my limited repertory on the piano. Pulled books from the shelves, read sporadically, finding the flap of the book jacket anchored halfway through
Bleak House,
Ovid’s
Metamorphoses,
every single novel and short story by Kafka. There was a huge black leather portfolio of all your renderings, and I rifled through them, amazed that you could draw as well as you did—the esplanade along a riverfront, a museum’s arboretum, the grounds of a parochial school—even though you had told me that such drawing was merely “an acquired skill.”

We’d agreed that I’d let the machine answer the phone and would pick up only if the call was for me. But after hearing a few of your friend’s voices, and thinking they sounded interesting, I couldn’t help myself. Explaining that you were out of town on business, I suggested that messages be left with your office, for there was no forwarding number. Most of the callers were miffed to hear my voice, to hear in it the assurance with which I seemed to know you, even though they probably had known you a lot longer than I, and known you well enough to realize that it was uncharacteristic of Sean Paris to have someone answering his phone, or staying in his apartment. I felt subversive—and gleeful.

The first night I stayed at your house I noticed on the bottom bookshelf three slim, leather-bound volumes with marbleized covers made of Florentined paper. I figured they were sketch pads left over from journeys you’d made abroad. I cracked open the third one and found the lined ivory-colored pages of a diary, every page written in black fountain-pen ink. The landscape of the writing on each page had a peculiar up-and-down flourish that hardly seemed like contemporary handwriting but, rather, resembled what I imagined to be the hand of an aristocrat imprisoned for, say, heresy during the Middle Ages. Scanning the paragraphs, I noticed how the word
love
jumped out from the hedgerows of writing, and the initials R. M.

In the first volume, a few pages were filled, the rest left blank. But sandwiched among the empty pages were letters typed double-spaced on thin onionskin bond, folded carefully and placed together like entries in an accordion file. I dared to open one of them and saw that it was written to an R. M. with your signature at the bottom. I glanced at another and found that it addressed the same R. M. person—unmailed letters, I assumed. Were they to a man you once loved? To that man you had yet to tell me about? I was surprised that you trusted me enough not to have hidden the extreme privacy of this correspondence. Or perhaps you’d been in too much of a rush to leave. This made me feel guilty for snooping. I made myself put away the volumes without reading anything.

On my second night in your apartment, a call came in with the noise of a busy street in the background.

“Sean’s not here,” I said. “Can I take a message?”

“When is he due back?” asked a cultivated yet anxious voice.

“Who’s calling, please?”

“A friend. Did you say he was out tonight?”

The man’s intent was palpable. “Would you mind giving me your name?” I asked.

There was a pause, during which I thought I heard the phone getting knocked around. “I’ll be off it in a minute,” the man said irritably to someone else. “What did you say?” he asked me.

“Would you mind giving me your name?”

“My name is José Ayala.”

“I’ll tell Sean you called.”

“Wait a second. Wait a second. Who are
you
?”

I decided to act as though I didn’t know who he might be. “I’m a friend of Sean’s. I’m staying with him for a while.”

“Are you … oh, I’ve actually got to go. Goodbye,” the man said and signed off.

And I immediately sensed, no doubt the way you did, that he wasn’t as dangerous so much as despairing, and although he might be capable of doing harm, he probably was not evil.

Then again, early the next morning around 7:00
A.M
.

“May I speak to Sean now, please?”

“I’m sorry, I’ll have to take a message.”

“He’s gone, isn’t he? He’s out of town.”

“Does that really make a difference? He’ll get the message,” I said. “I promise.”

“I’m sure you must know all about me. I’m sure he told you that I’ve been calling. He wouldn’t just leave and not explain what has been going on here.” The man sounded on the verge of tears. “Please just tell me if he’s out of town.”

“I’ll give him your message, okay? Maybe he’ll call you back. I’m going back to sleep now.” Of course I was fully awake.

“Don’t get off the phone. Talk to me for a moment. Just for a moment.”

I said nothing. I waited.

“He’s a bad person. I just want to tell you that if you don’t know that already.”

“Okay. Anything else?”

“He’s the most charming man in the world, completely charming, but he’s got no heart.”

“You don’t really know him.” I merely projected my own concern.

“You’re the guy he’s been dating, the writer.”

I did not respond.

“I know who you are. You’re the guy people saw him leaving Splash with the other night, aren’t you?”

“Perhaps.”

“I’d like to come over there and talk to you.”

“About my writing?” I couldn’t help asking.

“No, about Sean Paris.”

“I’m sorry, but that’s not possible.”

“Sean has things that belong to me that I need as soon as possible.”

I deliberated over whether or not to let on that I knew what was between you and José. Finally I said, “You know that’s a distortion of the truth. So don’t try and trick me.”

“So you
do
know what’s going on.”

I admitted that I’d been told.

“I have this letter from Bobby saying I should get all his stuff back. I have this letter that says—”

“Look, sir, this is not my business.”

“Suddenly so formal.” He sounded disgusted, but not hostile.

“I want this argument to be between you and Sean.”

José suggested I could do everyone a favor by acting as a mediator. “I’m going to call back and read you—”

I said, “If Bobby wanted anything back, he should have asked Sean for it directly.” I realized that I’d gone too far with the conversation, indeed, had way overstepped my bounds. I’d ceased to be somebody protecting your apartment and was swiftly becoming an active participant in your affairs, someone you might end up resenting.

“Bobby
did
ask for it—”

“Look, I’m just staying here for a while, okay?” Then I found myself lying. “Sean lent me this apartment as a favor.”

“I’ll just wait until you leave and then I’ll pry my way in.”

“That’d be breaking the law.”

“Call the police, I don’t care,” José said. “Because there are too many Sean Parises around. Too many guys getting away with hurting sweet wonderful people like Bobby.”

“That’s not fair. It’s not fair to blame his death on Sean.”

“I guarantee that you don’t know the whole story.”

“Of course you’d say that. You’ve got an agenda,” I said and quietly replaced the receiver.

I stood there in the gathering twilight. All the things I loved in your apartment—the stuffed wood ducks, the collections of smooth sea-tumbled stones, shells and fossils on the mantel—everything vibrated with a cryptic intensity, as if there were clues to your enigmatic past. José had clearly tried to undermine my sense of trust in you. Why should I be permitting him to put doubts in my mind? I tried to be glad I’d hung up when I did.

But there were doubts simply because I’d already sensed something remote in you, something as inaccessible as the yet untold story of your broken heart. In my agitation, I went to the open window and leaned out over Grove Street the way you had done the first night I ever visited. Then I stepped away, stripped myself down to nothing and wandered around the apartment naked. Hot Hudson River wind spiraled through the windows. I felt bereft of something that I couldn’t quite name. I went into your closet and picked through the clothing, searching for something of yours to wear.

I found T-shirts silkscreened with places from your past. I admired one from a golf course in Okinawa, but it was the name of a bowling alley in San Diego that I finally brought out and laid on the bed. As I was restacking the pile, I came upon a mound of military fatigues, all block-printed over the rear pocket with the name Monroe. Monroe. A surname? The surname of the R. M. addressed in your letters? Goaded by jealousy, I wondered how exactly you’d come by them, finally imagining that he’d given you one pair every time he made love to you until there were none left. Who was this man? And where was he now?

R. M.’s fatigues had the same impoverished softness of the T-shirts Chad used to wear. After Chad vanished, in order to mourn his vanishing, I had worn his clothes and only his clothes, dressing exclusively in what was his and clearly not mine. In the wrath of my temporary madness, I actually used to believe that dressing like him would bring him back, as though a swath of fabric could actually be patched onto what the fates had already woven. Come back, Sean Paris; come back, R. M.; come back, Chad.

In the closet I also unearthed a small gift box containing two things I assumed had been made by Bobby Garzino: a nubby scarf fashioned of eggplant-and-black silk threads that had a rich texture; a small pillow sewn from a similar fabric with a printed tag on the side that said:
A Dream Pillow, handmade by “The Loom’s Desire.”
The scarf was extravagantly long. I wrapped it once around my neck and draped it across my chest like a banner. Grabbing the pillow, I walked toward your bed. Noticing a sweet, earthy fragrance, I put the pillow to my nose. It was the smell of mugwort, a gentle soporific herb that I used to take during the time when I had such trouble sleeping. I lay down on your bed, put the pillow behind my head, draped the soft scarf over my groin.

I’d just begun masturbating when the phone rang. I let the machine answer, and after the announcement played, I listened to the message. “Hey,” you said. “Are you there?” I stopped playing with myself and picked up. “Hey, yourself,” I said.

“What are you doing?”

“Jacking off.”

“Uh-oh. Bad timing, I’m sorry. Do you want to speak later?”

“No, I want to speak now. It’s always there, so it can wait. Where are you?”

“In the boonies, way up at the top of Montana. Almost in Canada.”

“Nice?”

“Dry and cloudless. A perfect way to put all the shit in Manhattan behind me.”

“Sounds like you don’t want to come back.”

“No, I
do
want to get back. Although it
is
rather grand up here in the woods. In fact, it’s priming me for Vermont.”

“And how’s tree tagging?”

“We got some real beauties. How’s the old homestead?”

I looked around the room: the rinsed and dried cocktail glasses clustered on a kitchen shelf, the mahogany breakfast table gleaming with its new layer of lemon oil, the neatly arranged stack of bills that I’d put on top of your piano.

“In better condition than when you left.”

“You didn’t!” You sounded aghast.

“It’s different when it’s not your own place.”

“Sleeping okay in my bed?”

“Seem to be.”

“Are you leaving my stuff alone?” You chuckled as you said this, which, I must say, sounded as though you were teasing me, or even making light of what you’d already perceived to be my weakness.

“I’ve been wearing your clothes, if that’s what you mean … and there have been lots of calls.” I deliberately moved onward. “Everybody’s miffed. You certainly do seem to have a lot of friends.”

A sigh. “It’s been said that I’m a lot better friend than lover.”

“Is that a warning?”

“And
you’ve
sounded tense throughout this whole conversation. Is it only because you were … interrupted?”

“No, it’s because … that guy called, the ex-lover, José Ayala.”

There was a lull on your end and I could hear something that sounded like a white-noise machine in the background. “Well, I figured he would.”

I relayed the gist of the conversation. However, I found myself omitting the man’s attempt to get together to talk things over with me, to discuss you.

“He’s jerking your chain, Will. He’ll do anything to give me a hard time.”

“I realize that. He tried to convince me that you were bad news.”

“That would be the thing to do.”

“Yet you’re sounding pretty unflappable.”

“What choice do I have? Anyway, tomorrow I’m coming back. Then we’ll log in some time. And you can make up your own mind about me.”

But after I said goodbye to you I felt unsettled by our conversation and by the desperation of José who loved Bobby Garzino. I decided to go for a walk and soon was strolling along sultry Seventh Avenue in the direction of Splash. The place was even more crowded than the last time I’d been there. Your T-shirt was tight on me; I’d rolled up the sleeves with the idea of soliciting attention from others. Then maybe I could avoid feeling so vulnerable to you. A steroid-swelled bartender served me a cold Rolling Rock with a leer that instantly perked up my mood.