Nightswimmer (13 page)

Soon I found myself in the corner watching the Morning Party playing on the video screen. As the summer was ending and the length of daylight was beginning to dwindle, Splash, in response to popular demand, would keep reprising footage of the Morning Party. Sometimes they would even intersperse footage from the West Coast version that took place in Palm Springs. I was trying to remember what it had been like before I’d grown fixated on you, when I was open to the idea that there still could be others in my life. But that night, when I was staying at your place, when I was still hoping for the best possible things, when I believed that you would be the one whose heat would finally cure me of Chad, I riveted my attention to the video screen until I finally saw what I knew I’d come to see: you dancing with the black man. And as I watched, I tried to assure myself that I was the only one in the world who held a vaunted place in your life, the only one to whom Heart-breaker would finally tell the tale of his own heartbreak.

A hand reached from behind and grabbed my chin. I looked down at the pumped-up, freckled arm of Peter Rocca. “What is this, your new hangout?” he said.

“Looks like it’s yours.”

“Nah, I’m here with Sebastian. We just blew in for a beer before dinner.”

“Sounds like you guys are on again.”

“What’s it to you? You don’t call me anymore.”

“It’s not like you’ve been calling me, either.”

“It’s a matter of pride. The last two times I’ve seen you, you’ve blown me off for Sean Paris.” Peter looked around. “Is he here with you?”

“No, he’s out of town.”

“Hey, Sebastian!” Peter yelled. The pompadour boyfriend was standing a few feet away talking to some other guys. “Sean Paris
is
out of town.”

I instantly regretted giving out that information and vowed to return to your place immediately, in case somebody hanging out with Sebastian was or perhaps knew Bobby Garzino’s ex-lover. I asked Peter why Sebastian wanted this information. “I don’t know. Somebody was asking him before.”

A moment later Sebastian excused himself from his two buddies and moved toward us in a deliberately slow drift. “Say what?” he said in a sort of growl, edging into Peter with propriety, sparking his dark eyes at me. His face had the usual oblong handsomeness of certain Mediterranean men, his nose prominent yet well formed.

“Sean Paris
is
out of town,” Peter said.

“Who needs Sean Paris?” I asked.

“You do.” Sebastian flashed a grin of bone-white teeth, one of which was chipped. “Big time.”

“Big mouth.” I shot Peter Rocca a look of condemnation, then turned back to Sebastian. “He just told me a friend of yours was asking.”

“Yeah, so? What are you, Sean Paris’s keeper?”

“I’m taking messages for him.”

“You move in quickly, don’t you?”

“Let’s say I have my own inimitable pace.”

“I know all about your pace, man. Reminds me of some sharks I seen at the aquarium.”

The note of aggression had a familiar ring to it, and I began searching Sebastian’s expression for a sign that he might somehow know the person who’d been calling.

“And believe you me,” Sebastian continued, glancing at Peter. “I wouldn’t be talking to you at all if I knew you still wanted to be a home wrecker.”

“Do I count in this conversation at all?” Peter asked irritably.

I turned to him, remembering that cold afternoon many months ago when I’d rounded the corner of Lafayette Street to find him strangling this swarthy, brooding man. “Go ahead,” I said. “Take the floor.”

But Peter decided to pull his psychiatrist’s poker face, and his reticence allowed Sebastian and me to exchange one look of complicity before the lines were drawn again.

“Okay, let’s just set everything straight,” I resumed in earnest. “I’m sorry if I caused you any grief, Sebastian. I didn’t realize how important you were to Peter. So how about if we just say it’s behind us? Enough at least so that we can be cordial to each other.”

Sebastian calculatedly ran his fingers through his luxuriant onyx-colored hair, almost as though to make a mockery of my ever thinning pate. He said finally, “I accept your apology, okay?” Then he shoved his finger into my breastbone. “But what you did is not forgotten. Because I’m Maltese,” he added by way of explanation.

“I won’t even try to fathom that.”

“I wouldn’t if I were you,” Peter said approvingly.

Back at your place, I phoned to check the answering machine at my apartment and retrieved a message from Greg, who, citing an appointment, asked if I could come by the next morning and give Casey his midday antibiotic. In what I thought was an effort to spare his feelings, I’d explained the facts of what was going on before announcing that I was staying at your place. I now left Greg a message that I’d be by in the morning.

Lying in your bed, anxious, it occurred to me that an unslakable curiosity about my lover’s past has all too often contaminated my happiness in relationships. Your Florentined diaries held what you’d felt for R. M., whom I did not know, but was curious to discover. Weighing against that was the realization that whatever I might read, besides being out of context, was likely to perturb me even more. And so I lay in your bed, wrestling with my urge to absorb your most private thoughts, and my fear of them, watching the lights of the city stippling the ceiling, looking out into the branches of the courtyard ailanthus. Finally I made my decision.

As I climbed out of bed and crossed through the shadows, I guiltily imagined you sleeping in a motel somewhere in the northern part of Montana, a tall graph of evergreens visible from your window, and beyond that, a dark horizon of mountains with white beards of snow. Like a supplicant, I kneeled down to the musty bottom bookshelf and put my hands on the slim first volume, cracking it to where it held the series of onionskin letters. I selected one and took it to the window to read by moonlight. One random letter, I told myself. No more, no less. This was my final bargain with the Devil of Curiosity. Or so I thought.

Before I began reading, however, I smelled the page: the faint yet distinctive odor of laundry rooms, of a mother’s hands scrubbing collars and cuffs, the sweeter smell of a younger man who was better cared for, different from the starchier fragrance of you now, a guy with a nine-to-five job who sent his whites and linens out to be commercially laundered.

Okinawa, July, 1982

Dear R. M.,

The second time you’ve stood me up in ten days. Why can’t you just call and say you’ve chickened out? Don’t you realize how fucking nerve-racking it is, not to mention humiliating, for me to keep standing there like a dummy in front of the PX and having to see all my stepfather’s friends? And the fact that they might he home when you call is no excuse for not calling to say you can’t make it. There could he any number of reasons why you’d call me. I’m of age. I’m allowed to have friends…

I stopped reading long enough to calculate that in 1982 you would’ve been twenty-one.

You keep bringing up the possibility of my stepfather finding us out. I know it’s a smoke screen. And you know it is, too, you know there are plenty of places we can still meet with anonymity. I hate it when you can’t be honest; it makes me feel like a kid. And I’m not a kid anymore, R. M.; I’ve taken this on completely. I’ve known you long enough to know that I want to be with you and only you. And you know it, too, and that’s why you’re afraid that if my parents suspect anything, if my father asks, that I won’t lie about it. But of course I’d lie, I’d lie for you.

You’ve said that I can’t really be in love with you, for some reason you don’t believe me when I tell you. So then explain to me what is it that keeps me up nights, what is it that steals my appetite, makes my heart race in the middle of doing absolutely nothing? And why is it when you don’t call at the appointed hour, I begin to feel like a prisoner of myself, knowing I have to get through another eternity of an evening until I’m alone again and you can call? And even then I can never call you.

My parents keep asking me when I’m going back to California; they can’t understand why I’m procrastinating finding a real job or making up my mind about grad school. They realize I’ve put my life on hold, they can sense that I’m waiting for something.

Meanwhile, I’m beginning to lose hope. Because you’ve stopped talking about getting transferred back to San Diego. Because you’ve stopped talking about our future together. And because the only time you ever tell me you love me anymore is when you’re inside me and it’s hurting me and you just plain forget to hold the words back.

I’m still waiting to hear from you.

Love Always,

S.P.

W
E TRIED TO MAKE
love again, shortly after you arrived back in the city, smelling of stratospheric travel, of jet fuel and that sweet reek of plastic audio headsets. You came in wearing your fatigues, your neck branded with a blue-collar worker’s sunburn. You threw your arms around me and I was terrified. I kept trying to lick the red line of the sunburn where it bordered pale skin. But all too soon I felt the Marine coming between us, the Marine who once had the power to catapult you into such a state of expectation and desire, the Marine who fucked you until it hurt. Something made me hold back, and then you picked up on it and we ended up lying there, disconcerted.

“God,” you said finally, “it’s so bizarre because all I could think about on the plane was getting home and jumping on your bones.”

“It’s my fault,” I said. “I’m feeling scared.”

You said nothing for a while and finally asked what exactly was scaring me.

I tried to dissemble. “The usual,” I said. “Losing myself … getting hurt.”

“Well, I’m in the same place. So at least we understand each other in that way.”

“I suppose.”

“I think it’ll be good for us to spend some time together out of the city in another environment.”

“I’ve actually loved staying here,” I said, looking down at the haphazard pile of our clothing. “I’ve managed to get a lot of work done.” Then it hit me that you were now willing to leave your apartment unguarded. “What about Bobby Garzino’s ex-lover?”

“When José calls, as I’m sure he will, I’ll just tell him that I’ve removed everything Bobby gave me out of the apartment. We’ll take it to your place, okay?”

Why hadn’t we done that before? “But now he knows who I am, too.”

“How does he know that?”

I explained that apparently some of his friends had seen us leaving Splash together. “I don’t want him breaking into my apartment, either.”

“Okay, understood. I’ll just take it all to my office.”

From where I lay I could see the rear pocket of the fatigues and the faintest impression of block lettering MONROE. I suddenly felt a stab of guilt over my indiscretion. “While you were gone, I was looking for a T-shirt to wear and I came upon a stack of fatigues with the name MONROE on the back of them.”

“Yeah, so?”

“Who
is
this Monroe?”

You waited a moment and then you said, “Monroe was my Chad.”

I managed to laugh, although, inside, the breathless, nauseous feeling that swept through me when I first read the letter returned. “Where’s he from?”

“Nevis, mainly, though he was born in Michigan.”

“Nevis, meaning the Caribbean?”

“He’s black,” you added by way of an explanation.

Of course! Why hadn’t I figured this? Monroe was probably just as magnificent as the guy you were dancing with on the video screen. Maybe you adored black men and everyone—including me—by comparison was inadequate and wan.

“How long has it been since you’ve seen him?”

“Eight years.”

“Do you prefer black men?”

“Not exclusively, no.”

I hated knowing how much you once had loved this Monroe. And I hated knowing that your sex with him must have been galvanic and voracious. And now I felt miserable because
our
sex had already gone awry again. But then the phone began to ring, and we listened to it until the answering machine came on and recorded the babel of a street corner and then the lonely sound of dial tone.

“So what else did he say?” you asked glumly. “Did he tell you there are still people in the city who want to ruin my face?”

I smiled. “He says they’re waiting to do that till after you break my heart.”

“So I guess that means yours will be the very last heart I’ll ever break.”

“There might even be some distinction in that,” I said.

You chuckled and snuggled in closer to me.

“You got all those fatigues from this Monroe guy, huh?” I said.

“Among other things.”

That stung me for some reason. I sat up. “Like what? What else did he give you?”

Looking at me, perplexed, you said somewhat defensively, “I don’t know. Let me think. A pre-Columbian statue. A tennis racket.”

I glanced around the apartment. “So where’s the statue?”

“He smashed it toward the end.”

I patrolled your expression for a sign of distress. “So he was the violent type, huh?”

“Not very often. And in fact, really only when he was provoked. Although we did fight a lot, verbally. Which, of course, had its dividends.”

“You don’t need to say that!” And then, “Nothing like sex after a good fight.”

“Like coming when your heart breaks,” you said with a gloomy smile.

You were facing away from me, and I now could feel your lament, even in the way your dark curls softly crushed against your pillow. So after all these years this Monroe was still vanquishing you. And I now knew that Bobby Garzino was hardly responsible for the tear you shed the first night I learned who he was and how he died, the first night I’d told you about Chad. I now knew that your life had docked with this Marine long before you’d ever met the weaver.

W
E WOULD SWIM DURING
daylight hours, too, but he liked there to be a swell, preferably a red-flag day with several tiers of combers breaking simultaneously. I preferred late afternoons of calm when the Pacific turned cobalt blue and rays of sunlight bounced in from the west and the foam glowed like phosphorus. We’d follow the string of swimmers’ buoys that stretched for two miles down the Santa Barbara coastline, past the Mediterranean bathing pavilion of East Beach, past the marine cemetery looming above the limestone cliffs that plummeted to the nude beach, past the stone balustrades foreshadowing the Biltmore Hotel.