Nightswimmer (2 page)

“That’s what I heard,” I said as we drove off.

“One stop before Sayville. You should’ve seen the guys trying to make the Morning Party. Fit to be tied. ‘How long does it take to remove a mangled body from some railroad tracks?’ ” he mimicked.

“Fucking New Yorkers,” I said. “So, did you see anything?”

“You mean like a severed head?”

He hadn’t.

The conversation lapsed until we were driving through the town of East Hampton with its rows of expensive clothing stores and food shops. “By the way,” my companion said, “I ran into your ex on the train. On his way to the Morning Party.”

“Was he with a dog?” I asked.

“Are you for real?”

Then I remembered it was Metro North that allowed dogs, not the Long Island Rail Road. “Forget it.”

“That’s right. I remember hearing from somebody that you guys have joint custody over your dog.”

“His name is Casey.”

“Whatever. But it’s so nineties, joint custody of a dog.”

“What else should we do if we both love him?”

I couldn’t wait to drop this drippy guy off at the house where we were both staying and head to the beach. It was a red-flag day, the combers crashing far out and unevenly, and the Atlantic’s mood was in sync with my own. The beach swarmed with people and I trekked down the strand until the oiled bodies began thinning out. I spread out my towel, dropped the hardcover that I was reading and wandered down toward the lip of the water.

There’d been plenty of men in my life since
him,
and Greg Wallace was the latest in the succession. Recent memories tended to blend together, whereas
he
of ten years past had managed to remain relentlessly distinct: the dark unruly hair matted with salt, the colorless down on the back of his neck, his scent of chlorine and sweat and eucalyptus, the ardent black eyes that perhaps he had inherited from his one Latino grandparent. In the last few weeks he’d been on my mind a lot more than usual. Ten years is a wicked anniversary.

On that crowded beach, no one dared to enter the treacherous surf past their knees. Without a second thought, I waded out to the critical point between shore and breakwater, dove through a wave and surfaced beyond, swimming. Another roller snapped on me, twirled me up like a ribbon and charged me down to the bottom. I clawed my way up through sandy darkness to the surface, just as another one was beginning to cave in. I dove right through its belly and cut out another twenty-five yards to where there was less chance of being churned up. The water was all murk and I could feel the tongue of the tide trying to swallow me as I settled into long strokes, conscious of rotating my shoulders, inviting danger.

I finally stopped swimming to tread water. I’d ended up pretty far out, maybe two hundred yards offshore, much farther than ordinary swimmers go even when the water is serene. A cluster of concerned people were already gathering at the tide line, waving me in. But there was part of me that wanted to keep swimming, for miles and miles until I was forced finally to give up. Realizing this, I started feeling panicked and swam back until I caught a wave at its curl and body-surfed in.

As I walked back to my towel, I reminded myself that things were okay, that it really wasn’t so bad to be single. For once, I didn’t have to worry about a relationship, being a part of what seemed like endless compromising. I was a free agent, right? But of course I’d think that on the day of meeting you—you who, at that very moment, were riding the ferry back from Fire Island. I remember looking at my watch, which read five minutes before five. You would tell me much later that something had compelled you to leave the Morning Party earlier than you’d planned, that you’d barely caught the five o’clock boat back to Sayville, where a medical examiner was pondering the mutilated body of a thirty-two-year-old man. Little did either of us know that you were on your way into my life. Little did we know that his death had something to do with you.

B
UT OF COURSE YOU
wouldn’t know the particulars of this death until the next morning. You would first hear general news of a suicide—I would be the one to tell you, that same night—but you still wouldn’t know who. As for the media coverage of it, I think the incident never went beyond what was probably informal newsroom gossip, an inconvenience to thousands of New Yorkers. Never was it mentioned in the
Times
or the
Journal,
papers I sometimes write for. I probably should’ve checked the Long Island coverage in
Newsday.

When I arrived back in Manhattan that Sunday evening, I parked in a lot on Lafayette, across from World Gym. I grabbed my overnight bag and was heading across the street when I spotted Peter Rocca, a red-haired psychiatrist whom I’d been dating on and off over the summer. Wearing the sheerest of orange tank tops, he was standing in front of the gym’s huge plate glass windows, as if waiting for someone. I thought, he’s back from the Morning Party conspicuously early. Stopping to watch who might be joining him, thinking how throughout the past few months with Peter I’d been waiting for the single act of tempestuous lovemaking, the act of casual cruelty that would seed a romantic obsession, I stood there on the curb.

Then you. You walked out of World Gym.

Peter nudged you playfully with his shoulder and you both began strolling along Lafayette. I thought jealously, How sweet: they went to pump up together before getting it on. This must be some hunk Peter snagged at the Morning Party; no wonder he got back so early.

Sure, I would have liked to subvert this pickup, but I knew there were no grounds for doing so. Peter Rocca and I had never had any real commitment. Throughout our fling, he’d remained attached to another man with whom he’d been involved intermittently for a couple of years. What first drew me to Peter, in fact, was the Saturday afternoon I was walking down this very street when I saw his superhero’s build tumble out of World Gym, closely trailed by a compact swarthier version, a man who wore his hair in an exaggerated pompadour. The other man, whose name, I learned, was Sebastian, began screaming obscenities at Peter. Initially Peter tried to walk away, but when the litany kept up, he finally whirled around, rushed back and tackled Sebastian right there on the sidewalk. I watched them struggle until Peter seized the advantage, pinned Sebastian and began strangling him. “I love you, Peter, I’ll always love you,” Sebastian garbled as he was being choked. Yet before I could figure out what to do, a couple of other guys from the gym came out and broke up the fight.

What compelled me was how the pompadoured man, in the midst of being throttled, could keep declaring his love. Some might call this a sick desperation, but I have to say there’s something in me that respects people who put themselves on the line, who risk appearing like complete fools.

From my distance I could see that you were broadly built with ashen coloring and tight black curly hair. I was as yet too far away to see your small piercing eyes. Peter spotted me immediately, however, and waved. I tried to keep walking.

“Come on, Will, stop acting like an asshole and get over here!” he trumpeted. “This is Sean.” He introduced us immediately. “Sean Paris.”

You barely said hello; it was hard to tell if you were shy or arrogant, and I dismissed you the way I figured you dismissed me. Good solid body, I’d give you that. Great legs of the hockey player variety—okay, so legs are my particular weakness. I figured that Peter was in the midst of leading you back to his apartment, fourteen stories above Sixth Avenue, with panoramas of downtown and of the Empire State Building, whose upper-story lights would die out romantically on the stroke of midnight. Those were the lights that he and I had often watched expire after sex.

When Peter invited me to walk with the two of you along Waverly Place, it was an invitation that both confused me and created for us all an awkward silence. I remember noticing the way you floated along the street, wide shoulders slumped slightly forward, the sort of body whose gangly magnificence at rest would come gracefully alive with speed. You inhabited every inch of your body, unlike Peter, who, though bigger and sexier by gym standards, would always strike me as a skinny boy silhouetted at the core of a muscle man.

Once we reached Peter’s building, he invited us both upstairs. I accepted, you declined and then we all said goodbye. Peter and I proceeded into the lobby. “I’m glad you’re coming up, because I think that guy was after me.”

“I think it was mutual attraction, Peter.”

“I’m not bullshitting, I’m telling you the truth.”

“Truth notwithstanding, he’s beautiful.”

“Shaddup, you.” Peter punched me in the arm and then bit my shoulder. He was fidgety and I could tell that he was horny. Fine with me, I thought in a sudden rush of arousal as Peter rang for the elevator.

Then came the knock on the outside lobby door. You’d changed your mind.

You’d left the Morning Party on a hunch that something was supposed to happen back in New York City. At first it seemed what was going to happen was Peter Rocca, whom you’d met on the ferry crossing back to Sayville. But then the moment you began walking away from his building that night you realized that what was going to happen was me.

And so we all sat in Peter Rocca’s pristinely decorated living room—you and I on a chintz-covered sofa. There was a lamp made from a carved crystal globe and a reproduction Louis XIV writing desk. The gleaming parquet floor was covered by a Turkish area rug that had burned my knees the first time Peter and I went at it with the abandon of complete anonymity. He was hardly a stranger to me by now, and yet, Peter’s double invitation made absolutely no sense at all.

When it came to sex, Peter certainly had his share of quirks. He was a morning-sex person. Whenever I would spend the night he’d wake up early and, before we did anything, would jump out of bed, and, still naked, vacuum the rugs in his apartment and polish the glass coffee table and furniture with a vengeance. Then after he was done cleaning and before he rushed off to patients suffering from phobic disorders, he’d be ready for a berserk ten-minute quickie. He loved getting it on all over the apartment. Standing by the picture windows in full view of the apartment house across the street, either he’d lift me up or I’d lift him up and we’d hike to the next location. We did it on the kitchen counter, on the kitchen floor, and then finally, predictably, ended up in the shower. I called this routine our Sexual Stations of the Cross. Thinking about all this, I chuckled.

“What’s with you?” he said.

“Nothing, leave me alone.”

“Then tell me, what do you want to drink?”

“Beer.”

“How about you, Sean?”

“Do you have Red Label and soda?”

“Sure do.”

God, are you as pretentious as your taste in alcohol, I nearly asked. “So, where are you from, Sean Paris?” I said instead.

Detecting my sarcasm, you frowned at me. “From here.”

All transplanted New Yorkers get defensive when you ask them this question. “I mean, from originally.”

“A lot of places. My father was military. The last place I ever lived with my parents was Okinawa.”

“How long in the city?”

“Four years.”

“You’re still in the honeymoon period,” I concluded rather abruptly and then asked what you did for a living.

“Landscape architecture.”

“Must be slim pickings in all this concrete.”

You rolled your eyes. “Everybody always says that.” Then you explained that most of the firm’s work was out-of-town business.

I pegged you for one of those really cute but ultimately boring out-of-town boys, ones who have come to the city to reinvent themselves, who can’t stop reveling in all the heathen pleasures: late-night discos, jack-off clubs, designer drugs. Had you learned to commit all the sins of the eye? Perhaps you were just shy—I tried to give you the benefit of the doubt—not the sort of man to effuse conversation.

Suddenly the phone rang and Peter grinned maniacally over his shoulder as he went to answer it. Overhearing his frantic chatter, I knew he was speaking to Sebastian, the pompadour. You were now sitting slightly hunched over, staring rhapsodically into the cut crystal glass of good Scotch. Slowly, however, you shifted your vulpine gaze and caught mine. And I think that must’ve been the first time I ever saw you straight on. I was singed by that split-second glance before you looked away.

“Were you at the Morning Party?” you said.

Suddenly nervous about meeting that eerie gaze again, I was barely able to explain that I’d decided not to go, that I have difficulty with crowds. What was wrong with me? I now ventured to look at you, and this time your stare forcibly struck. Then I knew who you were. I knew why you’d changed your mind. I knew why you had to come back.

“Is he heading over now?” I asked when Peter returned from his telephone call.

“I explained that the two of you were here and told him I’d call back later.”

“You sure he’s not going to just show up like he did last time?”

“Why should he? He doesn’t like you.”

“And who could blame him?” I laughed.

“He thinks Will is keeping us apart,” Peter explained to you.

“Certainly it’s easier for him than facing the fact that
Peter
is keeping the two of them apart,” I quipped. Turning to Peter, I said something like “I don’t know why you put yourself through all of this nonsense. Either marry him or move on,” when behind me you said, “Leave him alone, Will!”

I spun back around, but was paralyzed by your dimpled, mischievous grin. And by something else, too; something that you gave off—a loaded calm. A midwinter feeling, like standing in a pine forest, watching the snowflakes fall, hearing their soundless bedlam.

“Part of the reason why Sebastian wants to come over is that we were supposed to meet out on the Island,” Peter went on, “but he could never get there. Apparently, all the trains got screwed up.”

“That’s because somebody jumped in front of one of them.”

Then I explained how I’d come by the news.

I distinctly remember that you looked perturbed for a moment and then the placid look resurfaced. Suddenly you were standing. “Well, guys, got to go.”