Nightswimmer (17 page)

He seemed to know a fair amount about horticulture, so there was always plenty to talk about. Then there was a typhoon and some minor structural damage to the lath house and he volunteered to help you repair it. Only then, when he started coming by every day to help, did you begin to realize he had another interest besides the plants. After a while he hardly seemed so interested in helping as he was in talking. Soon he started fishing for information: had you ever been in love? Were you involved with anybody back in the States?

“Wait,” I interrupted. “Involved with somebody ‘black’ in the States?”

“No”—you laughed—and repeated “ ‘back’ in the States.”

Then a month after that typhoon another storm struck the island in the middle of the night. Not a typhoon, maybe, but a pretty fierce tropical squall. And there were all these tea roses that you’d just planted outside your parents’ house.

“I woke up in the middle of the night and freaked out because I knew they were just beginning to open and were in a vulnerable phase. I also knew the damage would’ve been done and it was already too late to save them. So I just lay there until it got light, went outside and found that all the roses were pretty much gone. Petals strewn everywhere like plucked chicken feathers. So many beautiful ones and they were completely torn apart. I was heartbroken. But then among all the wreckage of petals and shredded blooms I saw this one bud. It was absolutely perfect, just beginning to open. I remember it was covered with rain. When I bent over it, I could smell … the nose was faint yet incredible. I don’t know what came over me. I just took it in my mouth. Laid it on my tongue, sucked it really gently. The scent went completely through me. And I had this weird kind of … I don’t know what you’d call it. In a way … almost like I came.

“And he saw the whole thing. He’d come over to visit and was standing there at the edge of the property.” You grinned. “Then he followed me into the lath house and told me he was in love with me.”

I lay there as you said this, speechless in a kind of jealous trance. Jealous of your sensual nature, jealous of such a romantic beginning. For some reason, our storm cleaved and the moon blazed through the skylight for an instant and its light fell on you and gave a pure alabaster wash to your pale skin.

Then you smiled your silly smile and said to me, “Bet you never met anybody who fellated a rose.”

Soon thereafter, you fell asleep.

I remained awake, listening to the rain that was booming again against the cabin, to the wind roaring through the trees. I could imagine everything because I’d read your diaries.

Sometimes when your parents go away he comes over. You laze around. You could be reading and you hear floating from the other room this amazing voice like Van Morrison’s but sexy, soulful like Marvin Gaye’s. His friends call him Belafonte. He’s one of the base DJs. You love the satiny darkness of his skin and its soapy smell that faintly hides the smell of his sweat. More musky than the other men you’ve made love to. You could recognize it anywhere. But it’s also a smell of hair oil, of this stuff he uses called Black and White, genuine pluko Hair Dressing. Long Hold Control. Lanolin-rich stuff that’s made in Tennessee.

He creams his skin. Rubs cocoa butter into it. He’s so worried about dry skin, about graying, about discoloration. Sometimes he lets you do it for him, cream his skin. When your parents are gone he comes over and you rub it into his shoulders, up and down his back and his thighs. You can’t help it but you love to keep running your fingers over his body because his skin is so taut and the ridges on his stomach are like carvings. And his pigmentation changes. The skin on his back has this warm, rosy hue to it, as does the skin on his thighs. But the skin on his cheeks and on his forehead has more of a yellowish cast. Sometimes he gets mad at the way you touch and look at him. He says you make him feel like a specimen. And you have to keep telling him he’s your first black man, and that the differences between your bodies are intriguing. His foot soles are pale, even paler than the palms of his hands; and when he gets a cut, the healing pink is much more of a contrast on his dark skin than it is on yours. He can’t shave every day or else he’ll get those gray heat bumps on his
f
ace, and his smell changes when he’s agitated or when he’s about to come.

The two of you leave your parents’ compound. Go up to the cliffs beyond the coral beds. The brush tangles into jungle and it’s isolated though you can hear the Pacific. He has the most tender mouth, large and pink and powerful. His kisses set off these detonations inside you and he can easily take your cock all the way down to its root and slap it back and forth with the inside of his mouth. He loves it when you lean against a tree and screw his face and sometimes as you’re getting there you can feel the mosquitoes biting your shoulders and your stomach and it makes it more intense when you finally come. When he’s about to come, his eyes actually film over. And then you both lie there, staring up at the strange-looking trees in the Asian forest. As the daylight bleeds away, you watch how he vanishes next to you, this lovely black man, he just disappears into the darkness.

T
HAT YOU HAD BELONGED
so completely and so willingly to someone else made you more precious to me now. I felt so vulnerable to you. I felt so afraid.

And then early the following morning, a windswept, cloudless morning, the telephone startled us. It hadn’t rung since we’d been there. It rang and rang until finally I climbed down the ladder naked to answer it. For a moment there was silence; sometimes because of electrical interference the telephone would shrill of its own accord. I was just about to hang up when somebody finally spoke: “So why don’t you ask him.” The momentary confusion suddenly burned off like fog.

Telling myself to remain composed, I spoke softly. “What should I ask?” now looking up at the loft to find your gaze locked on mine.

“Ask him to tell you about Bobby Garzino.”

“I already know.”

“I doubt it.”

I took a deep breath. “Why don’t you tell me?”

“Because maybe I don’t want you to be happy.”

“Then what’s the point of calling? And how did you get this number, anyway?”

“It’s on your other answering machine.”

The line went dead. I was aware of the sunlight pouring into the cabin from all directions, splattering everywhere as though we were surrounded by a reflecting pool.

I put down the receiver, turned my palms up and said, “This is getting a little tedious.” Up where you still were in the loft, your head tilted sideways, as if you were Casey trying to decipher an unfamiliar command.

You grabbed a pair of khaki shorts and put them on hastily. “Mind if I use the phone?” You climbed quickly down the ladder.

“By all means.” I gestured extravagantly toward it.

“I just want to see if my place is okay.”

But your neighbor who kept a set of keys wasn’t home.

There was a trail that wound up through dense woods to a shack probably two thousand feet above sea level that commanded a panoramic view of the surrounding Green Mountains. From various points along the ascent we could look down into the golden pastures of a high-maintenance horse farm, and the dark burnished forms of grazing Thoroughbreds. The sound of a tractor mowing a field came to us, lazy and distant like the overhead buzz of a propeller plane. Casey kept bounding ahead of us, returning with enormous sticks in his mouth. He’d drop a stick and then streak into the woods, rooting for chipmunks and rabbits. You were hiking ahead of me, and my eyes were level with the backs of your legs.

We climbed until the trail finally reached a level area covered with pine needles, which then led straight to the redwood shack. I could smell the damp mulch of the deep forest.

You stopped and turned around, beads of sweat gathered above your upper lip. “Boy, I’m winded.”

“Want to stop?”

You shrugged. “No, we can keep going.”

“Okay,” I said. “But before we keep going…”

“What?”

“I’d like to know what José—I’m assuming it was José who called—was talking about?”

“So would I, Will, believe me.”

“You really have no idea?”

“If I did, don’t you think I would’ve said something?”

“I’m … assuming. So?”

You rolled your eyes. “Come on, Will, don’t tell me you’re going to listen to a jerk, now are you?”

I said nothing.

“Okay, wait a minute. You tell me: what awful thing
could
I have done to Bobby?” You held up your thumb. “I didn’t give him AIDS.” Then your index finger. “I didn’t mind-fuck him. I was honest with him, I broke it off in the best way I possibly could. What else could it be?”

I hesitated a moment and then I admitted I’d tried to get José to tell me last week when he called your place. We started walking again, this time side by side on the soft floor of pine needles that led to the mountain shack.

“I wonder if Bobby could have mentioned our sex life,” you mused aloud after a moment or so of reflection.

“Well, what about it?” I asked nervously.

“He wanted it to be unsafe with me. He wanted to do all the things everybody used to do back in the seventies but can’t do anymore. He said he trusted me … and that was so incredibly foolish.”

“Well, did you … do any of the things?”

“Even if I did, I’ve explained to you that I’ve already been tested again.”

“Why can’t you just tell me?”

“I guess the more you get involved with somebody, the more restrictive those restrictions feel.”

“You’re not answering my question.”

“No, I am, but you’re being deliberately thick.” A brooding silence came on, and as I was imagining what you might have done with Bobby Garzino, you murmured, “The price of real intimacy has never been so high.”

“But why do you think it was that he didn’t move you?” And I couldn’t help wondering if I, too, had failed or would fail to reach you.

You shook your head. “You know why, Will.”

Randall Monroe.

The name itself was forbidding, with its elite sound, the name of some powerful soul, a skilled seducer who could shatter even the most durable heart.

Detecting my inner torment, you frowned. “Now what?”

“Just remembering what you were telling me last night. Remembering what you told me right before you fell asleep.”

You looked distressed. “Wait a second. I’m a little fuzzy. Because I really did nod off. What did I say?”

I got a twinge of guilt over all that I’d read in your diary. “You were talking about your sex life with Randall.”

“No, I wasn’t. I wouldn’t.”

“Well, you weren’t exactly, but I’m sure it must’ve been amazing.”

“Let’s put it this way, if it wasn’t good wouldn’t I be even more the fool to let myself get so fucked up over somebody?”

“There doesn’t always have to be fireworks for there to be passion.”

“I don’t know if I agree with that.”

The shack stood before us, facing an amazing panorama of a mountain range, soft layers graduating into the horizon: bluish green peaks, dense with foliage and evergreens without a single bare spot—so unlike the California Los Padres with their sharper summits and sand-colored crotches. The cabin door was kept shut by a weight on a pulley, and we had to duck to pass over the threshold. Inside were a crude wooden table and chairs, a glass oil lamp and a guest book with names and dates and remarks from visitors going back to 1983. With a quick glance we could see that the last hikers had arrived three days before us. We signed our names, went back outside and sat on the wooden porch next to a thorny blackberry patch.

“This great love,” I murmured despite myself. “This Randall Monroe.”

“I never said he was my ‘great love.’ ”

“The man who keeps you from loving anybody else? The man who robbed you from yourself?”

“Sounds like you’re mocking me.”

“I’m not. I’m jealous.”

“Don’t be. It was intense because it was unrealistic with his being closeted. With all the threats of him—or us—being found out, of him being discharged.”

You thought of him as a night bird. He worked at the radio station between 12:00 midnight and 6
A.M.
twice a week. And you would sneak away to him, ride your bicycle past all the officers’ ranch homes, past the elementary school you attended for a year that was once a Japanese prisoner-of-war barracks, past all the traffic signs that advertised “think left” because, several years before, Okinawa had made the transition from driving on the right to driving on the left side of the road. You’d sit beside him in the DJ’s booth and listen to him talk to the people who understood English all over the island. He’d speak to them in his Harry Belafonte voice. You’d hold his hand and listen to his voice soothing thousands of insomniacs to sleep. Finally he would cue up a long set of jazz
—
Mingus, Duke Ellington, Tommy Dorsey
—
then lead you back to the couch in the green room. You’d always fuck like missionaries because he said he loved to watch your face while he was in you. He liked to talk to you, to tell you how it felt to be there, how tight you were, and how much he liked that tightness. Because that tightness let him imagine that he was the only man, that tightness was why it always hurt and why it finally became a race for the two of you to come before you had to ask him to stop.

“I don’t think my life with Randall should matter to you,” you said. You picked off a cluster of overripe blackberries, looked at them carefully and tossed them to one side.

“But I’ve always sensed how powerful the connection was.”

“I always seem to get myself in trouble around these matters. Whereas you’re such a diehard romantic.”

“Romantic? But so are
you,
Sean, don’t you see? With your whole notion how someone you love can take a piece of you, make you incomplete. And then searching for what you’ve lost in someone else. And knowing all along that you’ll probably never find it.

What do you think that is, if not romantic?”

“I thought you saw some truth in it.”