Nightswimmer (23 page)

“It’s too fast. You’re in … you’re doing it too fast!”

But then in the midst of the pawing agony arrived the first hint of numbness which was the curtain before it began to feel good. “Relax,” he told me. “You’re squirming.”

“Of course I’m squirming.”

But then a chuckle escaped him.

“It’s not funny!” I growled.

He said nothing, so intent was he on his own pleasure.

“I think you should stop,” I said.

But he wouldn’t stop. I knew he wouldn’t, even when I asked him again, when I insisted.

Then suddenly there’s a bridge. Getting off no longer has to be so external. He can get me even closer to it, that ache of desire, if only he can reach it. The fullness inside me is suddenly the thing that I’ve been missing all along when I’ve come up short, when I’ve felt I could never get enough of him, of anyone, could never take in the pure pull of his outer limbs. I realize now I can have it all.

And in that moment I became like a madman, bucking and bellowing as I pulled him into me and got off like I never had before and came spiderwebs all over my own face. And perhaps he perceived my new power. He must’ve realized it because afterward, lying there, we said nothing.

I know I once said how happy I was that last afternoon, but I couldn’t admit it to you then. The truth is I wasn’t happy, the truth is I’d reached my lowest ebb. Like lying dead and rotted on the bottom of the ocean. No whispers of I love you, no exclamation that it was good. Just silence. The claustrophobic silence when you realize that your lover no longer is a mystery and that the fourth wall of the relationship is finally constructed: complete familiarity. From that silence, I now believe, dawned his desire to swim out beyond the breakwater, a night swim on which he insisted I accompany him.

Now, standing on the dock, I felt my back pocket, and after an initial moment of panic that my wallet had been lifted, I remembered I’d left it at home and that my only encumbrance was a key chain. I hid that in a convenient place between two loose boards. I shucked my clothes and was soon standing in a pair of underwear on the westernmost edge of Manhattan.

And then I was in, a sort of half-dive, half-jump; my foot grazed something hard and slimy on the bottom. I gasped, for the water was chillier than I expected, and it surprised me with a grimy odor. “What the fuck?” I heard somebody say as I did a few head-up strokes—the way Chad used to do when he first began, water polo swimming. I was still bracing against the shock of the cold, my arms already aching numb. The water temperature had to be in the mid-fifties.

I began with long easy strokes, dragging my thumb along my side, elbows high, taking some more head-up breaths to make sure nothing was bearing down on me. I could feel the yank of a current, different from the outward pull of the ocean—this was more like swimming through a constant boiling. After I ventured twenty-five yards off the pier and looked back at the waterfront, I could make out several shadowy forms waving. Their shouts came to me in a strobe-like blare. I stopped and treaded water. “Hey, man, what are you doing? Where you going? Are you nuts?”

“You trying to kill yourself or what?”

“Idiot!”

I hit things on the way out, soda and beer cans maybe. I never let myself dwell on what might be floating in the Hudson, just sliced my way through whatever there was and kept on in the cold indefinite dark. Certainly didn’t have to worry about sharks. The moment panic hit like a wall, I poured on the speed, just wanting to get two hundred yards done with in order to come back. But I just had to touch that point of no return, like a talisman, because I believed it would bring me around to something that I’d been looking for.

I finally hit two hundred, stopped and treaded water. The unguent-black water, my body cold and dumb but my throat and my head on fire. I’d brought myself out to this unsafe, unlikely place in the Hudson River at night. Perhaps I wanted to die. And an old wail left me like a ghost that has, for all these years, been feeding off a soul. The sound was kin to the howl that left me the night he disappeared, a crying out that made the Mexican family who lived below me on Mason Street bang the ceiling with the broom, just the way they had done earlier the same day when he and I had made our most raucous love.

But from somewhere up the Hudson I heard the churning noise of a huge vessel, and I turned to the bouncing glint of deck lights bearing down on me. The moment before I headed in, it all returned to me: the supreme emptiness of feeling fucked and unloved, the sense that there was nothing sacred left in me, just rawness, and all the things I wanted to tell him but never did as we strolled toward West Beach. In my very last glimpse of him, there is the look of annoyance on his face, because I was trying to stop him from swimming along the pathway of the moon. I remember shouting about the sand barge and the foreboding that pervaded me, long before the great wide ocean had separated us.

T
WO COPS WERE WAITING
on the pier.

As soon as I saw them, I took one backstroke with the idea of turning around and sprinting off down the shoreline, when I heard one of them speaking through a bullhorn. “Hey, buddy, you better get out of that water, now. Right now!”

Flashlights stunned my vision. What could they do to me? I hadn’t committed a crime unless swimming in the Hudson River was my crime. But just in case.

I tried to summon up my own voice of authority. “Look, I know what I’m doing! I’m training, okay? For the Around Manhattan Swim.”

Although the light beaming in my eyes induced a halo of blindness, I sensed nevertheless that the police activity was attracting a crowd of people to the end of the dock.

“Are you going to get out of the water, or are we going to call a boat and frogmen?”

With a few strokes I was bobbing below them, near the pilings, and any reservation I had about climbing out quickly dissipated when I brushed up against what felt like a floating dead rat.

I was soon standing, like an idiot, smothered with a police blanket, dripping onto the wooden planks of the pier. The cops were squinting at me in a kind of condemning disbelief. I was aware of a crowd of people standing beyond them, but for some reason I didn’t care whether or not I came off like a maniac. “You’re lucky you’re not dead,” one said. “Now, I don’t want to see you in this water here again. You got that? The next cop will haul you to Bellevue, no questions asked.”

With that they took the blanket and left me standing there. The bystanders began to disperse. It occurred to me as I put on my jeans and sweatshirt that the real danger of the whole episode was the possibility that my clothes could have been stolen, leaving me in a Freudian nightmare, naked in a public place. And I hadn’t even considered such a possibility before jumping in the water.
Was
I going a little crazy?

Just as I was leaving the pier, I was grabbed by the forearm. It was you. What were
you
doing here? I was elated. Swimming at night could not bring back Chad, but it could bring back
you.

Dressed in work clothes—a blue blazer and a pair of pleated khaki pants—you’d just left a business dinner and were heading along the piers on the way back to your apartment when you noticed several people scurrying out onto a dock and heard rumors that somebody had drowned. “Normally I’m not the rubbernecking sort, but when they said there was this guy in the river, of course I had to look.”

“Did it cross your mind that it might be me?”

You raised your eyebrows and I now noticed that your cheeks had reddened. “Yeah, it did, unfortunately. And I was hoping it wasn’t.

You were quite obviously perturbed, whereas I was just delighted to see you. And so I asked you what was wrong.

“What’s wrong?” you mocked me. “Come on, what do you think is wrong? I’m concerned, can’t you see that? I want to know what you were doing.”

Your reaction was, at first, bewildering to me. I was swimming—what did you think I was doing?

“Come on, Will, you’re talking to
me.
Why are you giving me a line?”

“I’m not giving you a line.” After all, it hadn’t been the first time that I’d done something similar to this.

“In the Hudson River, in November no less.” You abruptly turned away from me and exhorted, “Come on, we better start moving. You’re soaked!”

I had been unable to towel off and my clothes were showing huge damp blots, although by now my hair was almost dry. The wind drawing in from the river was surprisingly arid and buffeted our backs.

“So how have you been?” I asked after we had walked away from the pier and were heading along Christopher Street.

“Been the same. What about you?”

I tried to sound hopeful. “Getting better.”

A pause. “Well, that’s good.”

“Dating anybody?” I couldn’t help asking.

You turned to me with a scowl. “You know I’m not dating anybody, Will.”

“How would
I
know?”

“What would be the point of getting involved immediately with somebody else?”

“It happens. I mean, you’re the one who withdrew.”

We walked a few paces before you responded. “You know why I had to withdraw. I saw that I was driving you crazy. And that was driving
me
crazy.”

Your attempt at such an oversimplification was maddening, but I didn’t want to begin a heated discussion so soon. We strolled another half block in silence before you finally spoke again. “Look, I just don’t want you to suddenly start acting weird because we’re not seeing each other.”

By weird, did you mean swimming treacherously?

“You know what I’m talking about.”

And then it dawned on me, that you were assuming that my despondency over you had driven me out onto the pier and into the water. Maybe you thought I was in the process of killing myself—like Bobby Garzino. And I was about to explain how you’d completely misconstrued my actions—that, if anything, my swimming out there had a lot more to do with Chad—when I realized that you would never understand. What drove me to swim couldn’t enter your comprehension because you never really grasped how much that relationship or his vanishing has affected my life.

Your face was full of caring and concern when you suddenly turned to me and said, “You must be cold.”

“I am a little bit.”

“Do you want my jacket?”

“No, Sean, I’m fine.”

“You sure? I don’t want you to get sick or anything. The Hudson is no swimming pool.”

“I’ll take a hot shower as soon as I go home.”

We walked a few more paces. “You know, it’ll probably take a while for you to get across town to your apartment. Wouldn’t you rather come by my place …
just
to take a shower?”

Just to take a shower.

You wanted to help but also wanted me to know that any such gesture was purely platonic.

“That’s not necessary.”

“There’s no reason to stand on ceremony.”

“Believe me, I can wait until I get home.”

You shrugged, somewhat miffed by my refusal.

“Clearly a
friendly
offer,” I couldn’t help saying.

“You don’t have to be so cynical.”

I stopped walking and faced you. “You know, Sean, it’s true I’ve been pretty depressed these past few weeks. But, believe it or not, the prospect of a friendship is not going to kill me.”

“Never said it was going to kill you.”

Well, you certainly act like it, I almost said, but didn’t.

“In fact,” you went on, “I was perfectly happy the way everything was. I only pushed for a change when I saw you couldn’t handle a relationship.”

“No, because you were angry about my snooping around, because you were angry about my intrusion.”

“I got over that pretty quickly.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear it.” I forced a lighthearted tone.

“Will, the point I’m trying to make is that I’m not relieved to be out of this, the way I think you imagine I am.”

I didn’t believe you. It seemed that there was still a part of you that expected, perhaps even wanted me to remain fixated, which made it difficult for you to believe my explanation that I had merely been swimming the Hudson River in the middle of November.

You said, “I just wish you’d stop trying to figure out everything about me. It scares me off. It’s not going to make you feel any better. And it’s certainly not going to get rid of any ghosts.”

I digested this for a moment and then said, “Giving up, letting go happens naturally, Sean. It’s human to give up the spirit of one love only when we finally commit to another.”

“No, I don’t agree. We have to give up the ghost first. Be free. Only then be with somebody new. Otherwise one ghost-love gets replaced with another ghost-love. There’s no real content. Just another form, another outline that we fill in with the same exact longing we had before.”

We continued in silence along Christopher Street and down Bedford until it was necessary for you to veer off toward Grove. You explained that you had an early day tomorrow, said goodbye and kissed me gently on the lips. And that kiss was a lot more than I’d expected, having expected nothing.

“Y
OU’RE NOT GOING TO
dump all over me,” Greg said. “Just because … of what happened with Sean. I’m not your fucking scapegoat! And for the millionth time, I didn’t give Sebastian your telephone number. He could’ve found it out in any number of ways. He could’ve looked me up once and saw the two listings and put two and two together. Either that, or he pressed star 6-9 once when he was over at my apartment right after you called.”

“Star 6-9?”

A new phone feature traced the last person who had called and called them back directly. Hadn’t I heard about it?

I’d heard about it but was unaware that it was now saturating the consumer market. But apparently star 6-9 had been available for the last six months. Greg had signed on for it because his phone already came equipped with a digital readout. And Sebastian, who’d been there several times when I’d called, conceivably could’ve scanned the monitor and jotted down my phone number.

We were having this contretemps at Greg’s apartment as he was getting ready for his night job. Wearing only his boxer shorts, he was ironing a dress shirt. He was clearly getting nervous about being late for work. “And in fact,” he went on, “for your own self-protection, if somebody gives you their home number off a phone sex line and you call them directly, it means that they could conceivably get your number and call you back after that at all hours of the day or night.”