Nightswimmer (3 page)

“Me too,” I chimed in, standing also. Peter cast me a baffled glance and I claimed that I was tired.

Finally alone as we stood together in front of Peter’s building, you and I were making up our minds. It’s amazing to think how the outcome of a single conversation can break open a whole new territory.

“So which way are you headed?” you said.

“I can head your way.”

“Come on, then.”

And somehow I knew that fourteen stories above us, Peter was watching to see if I’d accompany you. At one point, halfway down the block, I even swerved to look back; and Peter saw that, too, the guilty gesture, the futile wish to cover my tracks. Later on, Peter would tell me that that image of me walking away with you, then swiveling around in a moment of hesitation, would be the one summer memory that would stay with him. Not the rooftop barbecues on Twenty-third Street, not the pickups at Splash and Fire Island, not even the Morning Party. No, the remembrance of two dark figures walking away, and then one turning around like Lot’s wife looking back at the cities of the plain.

W
E WERE STROLLING WEST
toward your neighborhood of crooked brownstones with chipping paint and quiet, in some cases neglected, gardens. We were walking through what seemed like a fissure of the night. The full moon brushed the streets with a tingling opalescence and a hot wind spiraled through the rest of Greenwich Village. Gates of town houses squeaked and cawed as people passed through, their muted conversations just beyond us. The whole city seemed to become our encounter, or, better than that, our encounter seemed to be at its heart.

“So who is he?” you asked after several minutes of silence.

“What do you mean,
who is he
?”

You could have meant Peter. Or even the railroad suicide. But, most mysteriously, you had guessed the secret of ten years. “The guy that burned you,” you said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Nobody burned me.”

Your eyes held me steadily. “I don’t believe it.”

So strange, your insistence, and so frightening. Such a twist on the fact that I am usually the one who makes overly pointed conversation with complete strangers. You walked along a few paces ahead of me, leading the way to wherever we were headed, and your question continued to fluster me even though you said nothing more. You were the first person who had ever sensed immediately that his life still stalked mine.

“I loved him like a fucking idiot,” I said finally. “Okay? Like nobody before or after.”

“So what happened?”

“What difference does it make? I’m here, aren’t I? He’s obviously not in my life anymore.”

“Is he still alive?”

I told you right away that I didn’t know and declared that I would speak no more about him.

As we walked along Seventh Avenue you told me that you’d developed a skill at “sussing out” new people. As a child of a military father, you’d grown up in different parts of America, as well as in Okinawa, and that meant sitting around lots of dinner tables where you were expected to be quiet. And so you became astute at observing peccadillos, picking up the telltales of people’s character. Sometimes you’d even been able to sense which of your parents’ friends were cheating on their spouses.

As you spoke to me, however, all I could think about was the first electric touch of you, a caress of my fingers along your pale, beautifully formed arm after a soft collision of our shoulders. We finally reached your place on Grove Street, and just outside the building entrance you turned to me.

“Will, I’d like to invite you in. For a few minutes. But for an innocent few minutes.”

I frowned. “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just what it says.”

Finding you even more compelling now that I was beginning to strike the flint of a personality, I told myself I would not take no for an answer, and that I would have you. I would have you that very night.

You lived in a fourth-floor walkup, whose stairwell was paved with a runner of red carpeting and hung with antique Buddhist tankas. As we climbed to the top floor, I confessed to owning several tankas myself.

“I used to follow Buddhism,” I said, explaining that for me it had been an erotically driven interest. One of my ex-lovers was Buddhist, and by following his religion, I had once made myself indispensable to him.

“The same guy that burned you?”

“No. Somebody else.”

“Been busy in your life, haven’t you?” You grinned.

A tall door opened into an apartment with high ceilings and grand windows facing Grove Street. We were hit with a gust of pent-up heat and the smell of laundry starch that would soon become one of the scents of you. You crossed the room to raise all the windows and lean out for a moment. The night was sonorous with the drone of air conditioners, Manhattan’s own species of cicada. Full moonlight was reaching through the massive arms of an ailanthus tree that loomed up from the small courtyard below. In the dim glow I noticed the dark shape of a piano, its sullen gleam.

Once you switched on the lights, I could see that the piano keys were covered with all sorts of bills and papers, the piano bench was strewn with underwear and socks and workout shorts—the apartment was a holy mess. The floor was littered with T-shirts, canvas carry bags, army fatigues—both full-length and cut-off—a Patagonia shell that hinted a sporting life, and all sorts of dog-eared seed and bulb catalogues. One wall held framed mounts of exotic butterflies; and on the fireplace mantel, on either side of a curious-looking basket that looked to be woven out of 16-millimeter film, were two stuffed wood ducks with emerald heads and rings around their throats.

“I see you like dead things.”

“Well-preserved dead things. My uncle was a taxidermist.”

Beneath one of the windows sat a square mahogany dining table that was covered with jelly glasses sullied with fruit pulp, white plates bearing remnants of several-days-old salad. Quite a contrast to the fastidious preservation of taxidermy. Next to the dishes was a small pile of slim blue aerograms, those nearly weightless letters that, I imagined, had been written by old lovers.

Every single guy I’d ever loved had been meticulously neat and had always derided me for being a hardcore slattern. When I remarked, “You’re even messier than I am,” you surveyed the room with a bemused expression and said, “Lately it’s gotten out of hand.” Most people would have apologized; you hardly seemed to care that I might judge you.

There was no sofa, and so you sat down in one dining chair and offered the other one to me. The place had been very run-down when you first took over the lease. That you renovated, scrubbed the fireplace, scraped the walls and repainted them (and probably ingested lead)—all this was explained to me. And as you talked I noticed a blush in your cheeks that usually vanishes by the age of twenty-five, but whose lovely tint had obviously remained with you at least as far as thirty-one. Soft tight dark curls, those pale wolverine eyes.

Jesus Christ, he’s really stunning, I said to myself. Not the sort of beauty that turns heads in the street, but rather the wan beauty that gains dimension the more you look at it.

I found myself unable to make any more superficial conversation. All I cared about was making my move in full challenge of the fact that I’d been invited to this apartment “for an innocent few minutes.” I managed to cantilever myself forward and squeeze my two knees around one of your massive legs. I was rewarded with a wary look. “You think I’m going back on what I said?”

“People do.”

“Not this people.”

“So you’re stubborn.”

A shrug. “I’d like to have dinner with you sometime.”

“So what’s precluding that?”

“Nothing at all. Except, uh, you’re squeezing my leg.”

I must have looked pretty crestfallen because you went on to say, “Look, Will, I think you’re attractive. What’s the big rush?”

“We could have fun now and eat later,” I suggested.

The wary expression ripened into annoyance. “Are you always so insistent? Do you always expect to have everyone you want?”

“Do you always expect people to tell you their secrets?”

“I left off, didn’t I?”

“For the time being.”

You wrenched your leg out from between the press of my knees, leaned back in your chair. “This is going to be a tough tournament.”

“Why does it have to be a tournament?”

“I’m just calling it the way I see it.”

One look at me, you now explained, and you knew we were suffering the same affliction: that a part of ourselves had been torn out, stitched to some stranger’s heart and gone molten in the heat of other loves. There were others like us roaming the cities of the world, the broken homeless ones sifting through the litter of one-night stands, of short-term loves, for that missing piece. You said that our hunt would probably take us to the ends of our lives and that in all likelihood we’d never become whole again.

“What’s this, your Vampire Theory?” I asked.

“But you know it’s true,” you said just as the telephone rang. We both glanced at the bedside clock, which read 12:35. “It’s kind of late. I’m not going to answer it. If they want me they’ll have to leave a message.”

So we listened to it ring two, three, four times, waiting for a voice to print on the answering machine.

Hello, this is Sean, can’t come to the phone right now, please leave a message. Beep.
“Sean, this is Gary, Bobby’s roommate.” Pause, and then the message continued tremulously. “Look, you’ve got to call me as soon as you get this, I
don’t
want to speak to your tape …”

An ember of alarm in your eyes, but the rest of your expression was frozen, cadaverous.

Then you jumped off your chair, dashed to the answering machine, switched it off and grabbed the phone.

“What’s going on, Gary? No, I was actually awake. What is it?” Then, in answer to whatever he said to you, your voice warbled, “Come on. You can’t be serious. Don’t tell me this!”

I was fascinated, of course, and I noticed your gestures, how as though in some kind of trance you methodically began to order the chaos of letters and bills that were scattered all over the piano keys, categorizing them into several neat piles. But then you stopped abruptly, and with a sharp movement dispersed all that you had collected.

“Why, Jesus Christ!” you said numbly, pivoting away from the piano. “No, what did
that
say?” And a silence. Then: “Okay, I’m coming now. Hold on to it until I get there.”

You put down the phone and in a moment of indecision stared at me with your frozen look.

“Where do you live, Will?” you said vacantly. “Maybe we can share a cab.”

“What happened?”

“I can’t really talk about it. There’s just something I’ve got to go deal with immediately.”

“But will you tell me eventually?”

“Sure, at some point.”

“Why do I not believe you?”

No response. You collected your wallet and keys from the cluttered dining table and then opened the apartment door and waited for me to walk out ahead of you.

“I just want to know if that phone call has to do with some guy,” I said, stepping over the threshold.

You followed close behind me, slammed the door shut and hurried toward the staircase. “What do you think?”

“Aren’t you going to lock the door?”

You stopped, glanced back and shrugged. “I don’t give a shit. Let them steal whatever they want. Everything I have of value is purely sentimental.”

Seventh Avenue was desolate as far as taxis were concerned, and so we headed along Bleecker Street toward Sixth. Several of the Italian bakeries were taking on deliveries of bread, the whole street aromatic with yeast. You acknowledged your hunger with a grunt and then a wistful look as we passed cartons full of loaves that stood upright.

“Can I do anything?” I asked after we’d walked half the block in desultory silence.

“Just leave it alone for now, Will. That’s what you can do.”

As we skirted a Korean fruit market that was surprisingly thronged for such a late hour, you suddenly said to me in a tone of wounded innocence, “I wonder what it is, anyway, about all of us, Will.”

Unsure of what exactly you meant, I said nothing. We reached Sixth Avenue and stood for a moment at the corner, watching hordes of empty taxis wheeling by. As you raised your hand to flag one, you turned to me. “I’ll call you tomorrow, how’s that?”

“You don’t have my number,” I said. “You don’t even know my last name.”

And then that silly look I’ve come to expect, to hope for, capered across your face and right in front of the cabdriver I was given a swift, dazzling kiss. “I read your first book,” you told me in a near whisper. “I cried at the end of it. And I know you’re listed because I once looked up your telephone number.”

When I arrived home, my answering machine was blinking three messages: the first from Greg Wallace, my ex, reminding me that we were supposed to meet the next day. The second two messages were from Peter Rocca: one at 11:45 saying, “You’re not home yet, give me a call when you get in. I wanted you to spend the night with me, fuckhead!” The next one at 12:30: “So it’s obviously a night of debauchery.” No trace of irony.

I only wished it
had
been a night of debauchery. Pent-up and horny, not wanting intimacy with anyone else but you, only wanting to get off now, I decided to try my luck with a phone line. I picked up the receiver, dialed and got a busy signal. Here it was 1:15 A.M. on a weeknight and this particular phone line, which could handle hundreds of calls simultaneously, was overloaded with people hoping to find just the right voice to get off to over the phone.

For years now, my phone line alias has been a guy named Jim. I’m Italian, not Jewish, an inch taller than my actual height. I tell the truth about my build, which I describe as water polo player; however, I hedge somewhat on the hairline—I say it’s thinning just a tiny bit—and lop five years off my age. When I’m asked what I like, I say muscular men, straight-acting, preferably married types who wear wedding bands. I put more bass and languor into my voice and speak with a southern California lilt that I acquired easily when I was living out there. And if they ask me what I do, I say I’m a journalist, never a novelist. It’s amazing how you can get people ready, willing and able to get off on the phone at all hours of the day or night—even early in the morning. Sometimes when I reach the line in the afternoon, guys’ voices sound constrained, clandestine, and often I hear other phones upsetting the silence around them. “Are you in your office?” I ask. “Yeah,” they murmur. “I’m looking to hook up with somebody after work.”