Nightswimmer (7 page)

I ran my tongue along his tan line, buried my face in the tangle of pubic hair, gulped the sac that was as tight as a pear. “Baby, we’ve got to stop,” he moaned finally, giving a long tender kiss. “For crying out loud, we can’t do this here.” A moment later, I was watching him dive in and disappearing through a crashing comber.

I hesitated, of course, but I had to follow.

Once I’d broken through the chill black wall of the first wave set, I sobered up. As I swam out beyond the breakwater, the ocean still seemed so amorphously deep and wide, an even greater mass than it appeared by daylight. Waves rolled over me like tall dark shadows. And there were times during that first reckless swim that I lost track of where I was in relation to the beach or the outer islands thirty miles across the channel.

But he was vigilant, never swam too far ahead of me. That first night, with each stroke away from shore, I felt as though I was trespassing beyond my own instinct for survival. Even though in the coming weeks we’d venture out even farther, sometimes with surfboards, sometimes sharing a single raft, I knew we could commit a fatal error of judgment that would allow us to be swept under, hauled back to our moment of entry into the world. The whole uncertain future could be decided by a single, wayward glance.

That first feast of another man’s body is both joyful and confusing. I want to fill myself with everything, every nipple and biceps and every inch of cock, but I want to savor it and that demands more than one occasion. When I know a man for a while, when the parts of his body become familiar to me, as his own scent that I carry on my clothes, on my forearms, when he ceases to become just a name and becomes a familiar man, that’s when the real sex begins. By then he’s told me private things, and I know something of his story; and when I reach over to touch him in a bed that we’ve both slept in night after night, nothing casual, no matter how galvanic, can rival the power of that touch. For that touch is now encoded with the knowledge that I could lose everything, and movement by movement, as I make love, I’m more completely aware of what I stand to lose.

T
HE TELEPHONE RANG. DRENCHED
in my own sweat, I kicked off the quilt and grabbed the receiver. “Hello,” I said, “hello,” as I heard the noisy background of what I assumed was a bar. “Is
he
there?” somebody finally asked.

“Is who here?”

“You know who.” The person sounded more sad than menacing.

“What number are you trying to get?” I asked and then whoever it was slammed down the phone.

I was unable to sleep after that. I do get my share of crank phone calls and wrong numbers. This must happen more in cities, where within a single exchange there is a higher density of numerical sequences that are slight variations of one another, and it’s easier to reach a working number if anyone dials incorrectly, or randomly. However, I had the feeling that the person who’d called somehow knew me.

I tried to get up and begin working on a travel article that I was writing for the
Los Angeles Times,
but felt too weary and distracted to concentrate. I ended up heading over to the New York University pool. I swam a straight 2,500 meters, pushing the last 500 as hard as I could, in pursuit of an endorphin fix. I was toweling off in the locker room when I overheard two guys discussing Splash, a recent addition to the bar scene that, on certain nights of the week, featured go-go boys in G-strings who took showers in front of the patrons. Splash was also known to play video footage from previous weekends at Fire Island. “Last night I saw myself at the Morning Party,” one of them remarked.

Listening to them, I realized that Western life was truly becoming saturated with all new kinds of media. And that people were becoming less selective about what images they chose to preserve—now every stupid bacchanal weekend at the Fire Island Pines was certain to be recorded by somebody. I tried to imagine the sheer space taken up by memorabilia all over the world, and it occurred to me that the ratio of what was recorded to what had actually happened was constantly growing at an alarming rate.

Not much of a barfly myself, I’d never actually been to Splash. But now I was curious to see what it had to offer in the way of Morning Party footage. I left word on Peter Rocca’s Voicemail, suggesting that we go out for a drink later that night.

“Gee, I wonder if that T-shirt could be any tighter on you,” I said to him the moment he strolled in and gave the crowd his onceover. He grinned tensely at me, then glanced down at his chest straining against a skin of gray cotton, and at the tips of his shiny cowboy boots. “Shaddup,” he said. “You don’t come to these places to be inconspicuous.”

“So you’re going to start man-hunting right in front of me.”

“No better, no worse than somebody else I know.”

“Now, wait a second, Peter, let’s get this straight. You’re the one who said ‘no commitments.’ ”

“Only because I’m not yet commitment-free … Jesus, what’s with you tonight, anyway?”

“I’ve been having trouble sleeping, for one thing.”

“Well, if it stays like this and you need a prescription, let me know.”

It dawned on me that having a doctor for a friend could be handy. “Do any drugs exist that can wipe out selected memory?” I asked.

“Believe it or not, the best way is still electroshock.”

Electroshock, I admitted, might be pushing it just a little bit.

“Particularly if memory is how you make your living.” Peter put his elbow on my shoulder. “So why haven’t you been sleeping?”

“Let me ask
you
something. What would
you
do if one of your patients came in here right now and saw you dressed like this?”

“Highly unlikely, but I could deal with it.” Self-consciously crossing his arms over his chest, Peter squinted at me and said, “There are one or two I might even take home with me.”

I guffawed.

Splash was brimming on a Wednesday night, late summer, only a few days beyond the full moon. White T-shirts, tans, the latest pump at the gym being advertised. The more revealing the outfit, the loftier the attitude, and, quite often, the deeper ran the rut of insecurity.

In the late seventies and early eighties, it used to be that you could surface in such a bar and know instantly who wanted you and whom you could have. But these days, with sex-at-the-first-encounter not necessarily first on everybody’s agenda, there was more caginess, posturing, an element of wiliness. These days people basked in being sought after, being desired, not necessarily needing to make sexual contact.

“See that pumped-up guy, the one with his shirt off?” Peter asked. “Well, he’s made himself a couple of million on Wall Street.”

“Then I think there should be a cap on income.”

“Why? Let the guy have his fun … as if
you’re
not into money and power.”

“Peter, if I were into money, believe me, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing. I’d be trading bonds or brokering stock.”

“Making a lot of money is just another form of vanity.”

“Is that why you shrinks make so much of it?” I laughed.

“I don’t know about the rest of them, but I make as much as I can so I can take my boyfriends on expensive vacations.”

“So, if I’d hung in there a little longer, I would have hit the jackpot?”

Peter shrugged. “Who’s to say?”

“And just when would you have sprung the trip to Istanbul on me?”

“Probably in another week or so.”

“And what about Sebastian?”

“Oh, he would’ve come along—as the towel boy … Look, why are we here together, anyway?” Peter’s tone became irritable. “We didn’t have to come
here
in order to squabble.”

“We came here to see that,” I said, pointing to the television screen directly opposite us that was playing shots of the Morning Party.

“I’ve seen it. I was there, remember?”

“All right, so you’re keeping me company,” I said.

I bought the first round of beer, and then Peter and I wedged ourselves into a corner and began watching the video screen. All over the bar stood clusters of men, riveted to the footage of the summer’s most popular bash, where the worship of hairless muscle was celebrated en masse. In living color, men gamboled on a huge dance floor that was erected right on the beach at Fire Island. Necklaces made with what looked like ball bearings strung together were all the rage this year. Clutching cups of frothy beer, glassy-eyed, tribes of torqued-up bodies danced together under the influence of the great friendship drug Ecstasy.

“What a pain it must be keeping the whole body shaved,” Peter said in response to all the smooth torsos.

I imagined thousands of guys rising at the crack of dawn, steaming up their bathrooms, shaving their balls, their assholes, their chests. Battalions of odalisques. No expense spared to create an illusion of youth. But, quite obviously, only an illusion. Fascinated by the procession of hairless guys, I said, “Jesus,, they make me feel like a fucking ape.”

“You better not start shaving anything,” Peter warned me.

“What difference does it make? You and I will probably never do it again,” I found myself saying.

Peter looked at me, injured. “Why did you say that?” he demanded, clenching his jaw and raising his eyes once again to the video screen. “You know, you’re lousy to me sometimes.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. I guess I’m in a bad mood tonight.”

“Why are you in such a rotten mood?”

Obviously I wasn’t going to explain. “Probably some kind of chemical imbalance,” I said. Looking around the bar, I couldn’t help wondering what someone from another culture would say upon entering this place: why are there only men here, and wearing white T-shirts; why are they all watching television monitors? “Seen yourself yet, Peter?”

“I was in the water most of the time. Believe it or not, there was hardly anybody in the water. Five thousand guys strutting their stuff up and down a beach and maybe twenty of us were in the ocean.”

“Obviously, they didn’t want to screw up their hairstyle,” I said, nervously patting my own thinning scalp. “Must be nice to have to worry about that.”

Peter grinned and then took a playful swipe at me. “Don’t worry, you don’t need a full head of hair. You’re a bona fide tamale,” he said and kissed me.

Some of the guys were fondling themselves self-consciously as they danced, looking guardedly down at their pumped torsos as if to make sure that everything was there, if it still worked, as if their bodies had been borrowed from someone else and had never be longed to them to begin with.

Will, what are you looking for,
I remember asking myself, even though I knew I was searching for your face. Your face as it would have looked only hours before you entered my life. Searching for the dark curls, for the wolverine eyes. Until I became aware of a couple of Latino hunks clustering near Peter and me. There were fast-track glances in our direction, too swift to necessarily mean interest. “What do you mean?” I heard one of them say nastily. “He did have someone. He was dating Sean Paris.”

“Well then, it’s no wonder,” someone else murmured.

They were peering our way, at Peter’s bulging fairness, his over-pumped cliffhanger tits.

The reference to you made me gawk at the group of men, something one never should do at a
posing bar
such as Splash; gawking is immediately interpreted as some sort of self-abasement.

“Why are you cruising
them
,” Peter wanted to know, and I told him why, that they’d mentioned you.

“Sean Paris?” Peter looked irked. “You seem inordinately interested in Sean. You seen him since that night?”

I shook my head.

“Seriously?”

“I told you, no.”

“How come?”

“Just haven’t seen him, that’s all.”

“So, is
he
your next quarry?” Peter was someone who had already inspired deranged behavior in another man, yet he knew that I’d gone cool on him in the heat of you. He wasn’t used to being in this predicament.

“Quarry,”
I repeated, “that’s an odd way to put it.”

“Not really. Because you can’t completely immerse yourself in an experience, you’re always one step back, studying it. You’d have made a great doctor,” he exclaimed, looking at me solemnly. “A much better shrink than I’ll ever be.”

“You make me sound awful, you know that?”

“It’s true, though, isn’t it?”

I hesitated and then I said, “I think it might be why all my recent relationships have ended.”

“So then where exactly does Sean fit into all this?”

“Don’t be jealous of him.” I tried to soothe Peter. “You’re a good friend.”

“Oh, Jesus, now I’m just a
good friend
to you. That’s not what you were saying last week when I had your dick in my mouth.”

“I just want to get to know Sean Paris, that’s all. There’s something about him—”

“I’ll tell you what it is about him.”

But Peter never got a chance to say. Time and space collapsed as I looked up to the video screen and saw a flash-frame of you grind-dancing with a black man, both of you glistening, two so distinct from those surrounding you. Your eyes were closed, lust scrawled all over your face, and the other man was more divine than any line that I could ever write.

“Shit, there he is, that fucking little heartbreaker, that bitch!” one of the Latino boys cackled. “She deserves a cannonball up her humpy little ass.”

Bewildered, I glanced over at the group of them again. Why were they so angry? But then an almost psychic current swerved my attention toward the door, where, completely unaware that your video doppelgänger was making an appearance on twelve different television monitors all over the bar, there you stood. You were dressed in a loose white T-shirt and the cut-off army fatigues I’d noticed the other night when I was riding in the taxi, when I was unsure whether or not I’d spotted you. So you
had
been in the city all along, you just hadn’t called
me
!

As you scoured the far corners of Splash with the most dismal of expressions on your face, the moment you noticed me, the silly grin appeared. Without even considering whether or not it would be a romantically politic move, I began walking toward you, and as soon as I arrived you gave my shoulder a playful squeeze.