Nightswimmer (14 page)

Used to training in pools, we reveled in the greater buoyancy of salt water. It made us believe that we could swim forever. Chad was faster and always pulled ahead of me, and I’d push myself to follow closely the splashing of his feet. But soon he’d gain enough distance so that the darkness of the water would engulf me and I was completely alone again.

Sometimes he’d get far enough ahead that I’d find him waiting for me at one of the buoys, head thrown back into the sun, hair tangled and briny. That grin on his face, and his teeth as white as bleached bones—one day, when he was waiting for me like that, he said flatly and without provocation, “You’ll probably be the only swimmer.” His normally husky voice was particularly rasped.

“Come on.” I wondered if he was trying to say that I was some great love of his.

“First and last and in between,” he added with a dreamy grin that now reminds me of you. He dove off the buoy and started swimming again.

That day, we’d begun at the beach below the cemetery, had already done a mile down the coast and were on the way back. As I continued following him, I concluded what he’d said had to do with the fact that we both could swim like demons. I was the only swimmer who could even begin to keep up with him. Sometimes it’s a lover’s strength and not his inadequacy that spooks and spoils the prospect of a future.

But I waited until we finished our swim and were toweling off before asking outright what he’d meant. He grunted and finished rubbing himself with his towel before answering, “You second-guessing me?”

“Just trying to understand.”

He bombed me with his wet towel and I found myself clutching at it so that it wouldn’t hit the sand. “Just slipped out. Like a little fish that I swallowed,” he said sheepishly. “Only meant it as a compliment.”

And so I believed. Believed that our love, like our shared obsession for swimming, was a fluke of nature. And that’s why his vanishing has kept hurting. He must’ve had an inkling of what he was going to do a few months down the line, choosing the random life of an itinerant, becoming a man-without-attachments. For all I know, he could now be a seasonal abalone diver, an oil driller working the circuit of remote derricks in the Gulf of Mexico, a chef on a shrimp trawler.

He left in increments before he vanished Big Time. When I was unable to reach him for days, I assumed at first that there was somebody else in his life besides me—a woman, even, because there
had
been women in his past. In 1980, answering machines were practically nonexistent, and falling in love with somebody hard to reach meant calling every hour, calling in the middle of the night and letting the telephone ring twenty, thirty, forty times before falling asleep with the receiver cradled in my arms.

Finally I’d resort to driving an anxiety-fraught fifteen miles from my apartment on Mason Street all the way out to Isla Vista. I tend to see the object of my fascination everywhere I go, even hundreds of miles away from anywhere that might be logical: a car parked in front of a 7-Eleven, a lone figure playing pool in the shadows of a neon-lighted bar. And sometimes when I was driving north on 101 to his place during the daylight, I actually believed that in the swarm of cars heading south toward Los Angeles, I’d see that beat-up Volkswagen with Harvard decals, fenders spray-painted black, careering away from me. I’d pull onto the shoulder and try to figure out whether it was worth continuing the drive to his place. But I always kept going.

Sometimes I’d even head out there at three o’clock in the morning when there were hardly any other cars on the freeway. In his neighborhood I’d drive aimlessly through all those streets of the student quarter, imagine all the undergraduates who were taking my writing seminar sleeping in their prefabricated apartments, innocents. What
would
they think if they knew their instructor was driving obsessively around Isla Vista, spying on his elusive lover? I drove through streets named
Camino
or
Calle:
Camino Pescadero, Camino del Sur, Calle del Barco, Calle Albrogado.

He lived on Del Playa, a street that ran along the ocean, where it was nearly impossible to find a vacancy because every house and apartment was inhabited by an extended clan of surfers. They networked among themselves and managed to squeak their bros into the vacated rooms before any became officially available. Chad didn’t surf all that much, he wasn’t part of any surfer contingency; nevertheless he had managed to keep his roommates enthralled by his ability to take on the ocean swell in any kind of weather. He’d been granted his own room and his own phone, and if I couldn’t reach him, there was no reaching his housemates, and no way of knowing if he had blown out of town, or was out somewhere, or had simply unplugged the jack.

My eyes would turn the corner of that weed-infested driveway before my car did, and I would strain to see if his beat-up Volkswagen was parked there. More often than not it wasn’t, and then at 3:00
A.M
. I’d be faced with a forlorn fifteen-mile drive back to my solitary apartment and another insomniac night.

If I arrived at a reasonable hour I’d always go in and try to get information from the housemates, who would scratch their sun-frizzed heads of matted hair and murmur in long-toned southern Californese, “Don’t have a clue, Will. Hey, Coz, where’s our Chad, where’s our vanishing Chad gone to this time?”

But Coz never knew and neither did Reese, nor Dino—the one named Tripp was always too stoned to know anything. They were wary of me, these roommates, and often I suspected they withheld information at his request. Had they been poets they might have said that Chad was as unpredictable as some of their favorite combers that gave great rides before switching back and turning them upside down.

But when he was around, we would spend hours, days together without ever being apart. Coexist in the library, in total silence for eight hours or more, I reading Thackeray, he reading Schopenhauer; then we’d hit the pool for 5,000 meters and return. I remember once he came to my house for black bean burritos and Spanish rice and ended up staying for three days and nights, subsisting on Haas avocados and Mexican papayas and Valencia oranges that I went out and bought for him while he devoured my Popular Library edition of
The Magic Mountain.
The novel was all he could talk about for days afterward.

After he vanished, I badgered his roommates for clues, and they railed at me for suspecting that they knew more than they were telling; for they, too, were beside themselves. It touched me to see how much his leaving affected their lives. For days they sat together in the living room, shirtless in ragged jams and tar-caked sandals, getting wasted. They made me tell the story again and again, how he’d convinced me to swim against my will and how there were no “last words” as we walked along Cabrillo Boulevard. They dissected my tale like detectives. “So you saw that boat, yeah? And you told him, right? He definitely heard you? Okay. Okay. And you didn’t even look around to see if he was there?” It always ended with, “You guys—swimming at night—what the fuck was with you guys?”

But they knew we were nightswimmers. They knew Chad. And in the end they were divided in their opinion of what might have happened to him. Reese and Tripp were sure that he was dead. Dino and Coz thought, like me, that he had purposely disappeared.

For three months the four of them divided his share of the rent, hoping he’d eventually show up, but finally they were forced to give up his room to somebody else. In the meantime all his belongings had gone to his parents—except the beloved VW. It lifted my spirits when they gave it to me, because for a while it allowed me to imagine myself as him. As I dressed in the few clothes of his that he’d left in my apartment, as I aped his slightly hunched-over posture, as I made a ring of my thumb and index finger and whistled shrilly the way he did when he was out on a board in the middle of the swell. But all that mimicry didn’t bring me any closer to the mystery of his vanishing.

The times I had actually found him at home, the times signaled by my triumphant sighting of the beat-up, decaled Volkswagen in his driveway, I’d inadvertently run my hands over its rear panel to see if the engine was still warm. Sometimes I’d find him on the back deck of his house, standing among the terra-cotta pots overflowing with herbs and cuttings of aloe, eyeing the ocean and the coastal garlands of kelp. He’d turn to me and grin without surprise and say, “Smells pretty tarry today, what do you think?” Even ten years later the smell of those tarry Pacific beaches depresses me and gives me a headache.

Or: “I was just getting ready to call. Tell you to get your bones up here. Want a beer?”

Beer was usually Corona, clear bottles with the blue-painted labels that looked so good in his sturdy veined hands and rang out against the band of his silver-and-turquoise ring. Sometimes it was Dos Equis, sometimes Carta Blanca—but always Mexican. I drank mine quickly to plane down my anxiety. As he took his bottle up for a swig, he’d tell me how he’d gone surfing up at Jalama, that he’d sat in a two-day meditation up near Point Conception, where he alternated between reading Gurdjieff and trying to “key into” the souls of the Chumash Indians before they flew across the water. Yet had he really done this?

Of course I wanted to rail at him for leaving without telling me. But a casual “You should let somebody know you’re heading out” was all that I said. “Otherwise it’s hard for any of us to know if you’ve gone in the water and just haven’t come out.”

“Look, the times we speak are the times I actually get through to you. When I try once and you’re not around, I just don’t wait.” Staring out over the combers, he bent one of his tar-flecked toes on the weathered boards of his deck. “You get very anxious about our communication, Will. You worry about me when there’s no need. If I say I’m in love with you, I’m not leaving you, I’m just living. If I croaked or something you’d definitely know it.”

“How?” I cried. “How would I know?”

He shrugged. “I’d send you a sign.” Then he grinned and fixed his black eyes hungrily on me and said, “But even dead I’d fuck with you somehow. Become an incubus and suck your dick in the middle of the night.”

“But you’d have to suck it the way I like it. Or else I wouldn’t know it was you.”

Chad took a huge slug of beer and seemed to reflect for a moment. “I just got this thing about me, Will. I like to go roaming. That’s all. I like the idea of being at large, or between two places.” He now drained the rest of his beer and brought the bottle down with a hard smack on the wooden railing of the deck and grinned. “I always think about you when I’m gone, anyway.”

With that he led me into his bedroom filled with collected driftwood that resembled biblical figures, with ashtrays overflowing with sea glass he’d found up and down the California coast, an entire wall taken up with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. He drew makeshift curtains made of dyed Indian cotton, lighted several stubby candles that smelled like sandalwood and, facing me, untied the leather thong around his neck that held three blue African glass beads. He put Sting on the record player, gulped his beer and then very gently swept the crumbs of sand from my shoulders. At first our bodies slapped together so hard that the friction of sex raised the room temperature, made the smell of eucalyptus even stronger. As though to cool things down, he grabbed his Corona and poured a line of beer between my pecs down to my crotch, slurped it off me and then put his ocean-cold mouth on my cock.

After that he was much better about calling to let me know when he was leaving town on a whim. In fact he’d make a point of calling me from weird places like Los Alamos, where he supposedly spent an afternoon contemplating the military jets flying in and out of Vandenburg. And I believed him. At Pismo Beach, he swam around the rock formations; at Atascadero, he spent a few days doing volunteer work at the men’s prison. The calls were reassuring then. But maybe the reason why he suddenly changed for the better was that he’d already decided what he was going to do. And once he made up his mind, he no longer needed to make his day-to-day whereabouts a painful tease. He was preparing for the cruel mystery of total vanishing.

I
TOLD YOU THIS
in Vermont while we were standing on an incline above the Ottauquechee River, a mile or so before the Taftsville covered bridge. I’d shown you the River Road because I loved its eeriness, the banks overhung with willows, the dark-shingled cabins with spindly steps that scaled down to brackish-looking water that swirled along like televised weather patterns. We’d stopped my car at a rope swing and now I climbed on the hood to gain some more height. Casey sat on his haunches by the rear wheels of my car, his lanky body erect and attentive, waiting to see what I’d do next.

I jumped up and swung down and out over the river like a pendulum, and as I gained the top of the far arc, I let go and plummeted into the water. A moment later there was a splash nearby; Casey had bounded down the bank and leapt in. He swam determinedly toward me, his beautiful hound’s head above the water, breasting the slight current with his white chest and the white tips of his paws.

“Good going!” you crowed down to me through your cupped hands. Then you clambered down the bank, grabbed the rope, climbed up again, swung out and dropped into the water next to me.

Farther downstream we could see a rope line of big orange foam buoys draped like a necklace from one bank to the other, preventing pleasure boats, as well as swimmers like us, from going over the steep falls just beyond the bridge.

“This was my favorite thing to do last summer,” I explained as we stood in shallow water and as Casey paddled leisurely back and forth between us. “I used to come here and swing out when I got really depressed.”

“Depressed? You mean, over Greg?”

“I even jumped from a few railroad bridges into the White River.”

“What were you doing, simulating suicide?”

“Sometimes a little exhilaration is a quick pick-me-up.”

You looked doubtful for a moment but then you nodded.

I took you to a place called Lake Echo for a longer swim. There, as we made our way out toward the middle, I could see that you had a fairly even stroke, just needed to keep your elbows higher, to relax and shoulder-roll a bit more, but basically it was all there. I swam a long, easy crawl, watching how the water deepened vaultlike while shafts of sunlight trolled the depths. At one point I dove way down. With my back to the bottom I watched the surface glittering above me like a living mirror, whose silvery skin was broken by Casey swimming in vigilant circles as he waited for me to surface. When finally I could see your body crossing above, I came up for air. “Do you know how to eggbeater?” I asked.