Nightswimmer (8 page)

“Hey, I just left you a message.”

And I actually tried to sound calm and detached when I answered, “Hey, I’m not home.”

“What are you doing
here
?”

Looking for you
is what I should have said. “I’m hanging out with Peter. You remember Peter Rocca,” I joked as we strolled over to where he was standing.

“Hey, Sean,” Peter said, clearly uncomfortable.

Your eyes bored into me. “So what’s the story, Will? Your phone isn’t listed anymore. I’ve tried to get ahold of you.”

“Didn’t you know, he’s too important now to appear in the White Pages,” Peter said.

“Now, wait a minute,” I objected. “I’m supposed to be in the latest phone book.”

But I explained how there had been an error; when the last telephone book had been printed the number was mistakenly listed only under Greg’s name. “I called to have it changed.”

“Well, it never got changed,” you said. “I finally had to go to the library to look it up in an old phone book.”

“To think that you of all people aren’t listed,” Peter murmured. “It’s kind of amazing. Considering that you’d shrivel up and die without a telephone.”

“Do you have to broadcast every one of my weaknesses?”

Peter looked annoyed. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure you out. Anyway, I think I’m going to move on. This is getting a little cozy. And”—he pointed across the crowded bar—“I see someone over there that I’d like to get to know. Catch you guys later.” He strolled away toward the muscle sea that eventually parted and took him into its steroid depths.

“What’s with
him,
suddenly?” you said.

“He spied us leaving his place together the other night. He got bent out of shape.”

“Doesn’t he see somebody?”

“You mean, is the shrink in therapy?”

“No, I’m saying doesn’t he have a boyfriend?”

“As if that means anything.” I sounded a little more cynical than I’d intended.

“Well, there are all kinds of relationships,” you said and then winked at me. “So how are you doing?”—resting your hand on my shoulder.

I wanted to tell you how difficult the last few days had been, but felt foolish—yet again—for collaborating on my own misery. “God, I wish I’d known my phone wasn’t listed,” I said. “I actually tried calling you a couple times myself.”

“Look, don’t sweat it. I don’t give a shit about the telephone, as you probably can tell.”

This sobered me. Did you know how many times I’d tried to call, had you been hiding out in your apartment, listening to it ring and not answering it, mocking my persistence?

Wanting to move on to another subject, I pointed to the cavorting bodies on the video screen. “Hey, I just saw you.”

“Saw me on the hit parade, huh?”

“You were dancing with a beautiful black man.”

“Oh yeah?” you said shyly.

“I mistook him for God.”

You laughed and the hand on my shoulder slipped around until your forearm was resting on my neck. “Let’s get out of here, Will.”

A perfect night for strolling, dry, with river wind slapping us as we headed down Seventh Avenue. We moved together gracefully, as though accustomed to walking in each other’s company. The peacefulness I felt suddenly made up for the last few days of fretting. Why had I tortured myself so?

“Been away, haven’t you?” I said finally.

A nod.

“You never bothered putting the machine back on.”

“I know.”

“Don’t you like getting messages?”

“People have my work number; they can always leave word for me there.”

“So where did you go?”

“Down to Pennsylvania … a friend of mine passed away. The funeral was held in his hometown.”

“Young?” I said, which tactfully meant “AIDS?”

You nodded.

“What a shame,” I said.

At your lead we’d turned off onto Twelfth Street and traveled west toward the Hudson. And then I had the oddest sense of the air around my ears warping as something whizzed by. A thudding sound echoed from the hubcap of a parked car. Somebody had thrown a rock.

We both jerked to a halt and saw the shadowy forms of people standing under a street lamp next to a warehouse. One of them grabbed something that looked like a pipe, banged on a car windshield until a horizontal rain of green shards showered the street like crushed ice. “Hey, Sean—ice princess!” somebody said. A warble of laughter echoed through the street as they vanished into the alleyway.

You shook your head dumbfounded and then looked at me, alarmed.

“What’s all that about?” I asked.

“How do I know what it’s all about? They’re obviously drunk.”

“Cut the bullshit. Why did they call you that?”

You frowned at me and said grimly, “Your guess is as good as mine.” Hesitating another moment, you eventually said, “But I think I recognize one or two of them from the funeral. They all seem to know one another.”

“So what’s that got to do with you?”

“You certainly ask a lot of questions.”

“Come on, what’s going on here? What’s the story?”

You sighed. “I dated the guy, the guy who died, for a while.”

“How long ago?”

“We met around a year ago. It took a few months to get involved. The last time I saw him was way back in February.”

I couldn’t help asking, “Are you at all worried about yourself, your health, I mean?”

You shook your head slowly as you fitted the toe of your tennis shoe on a single fragment of glass that had managed through the impact to scatter like a seed as far as where we stood. You tried to break it down even further, but it refused to pulp. “I recently got tested again … I was negative.”

I waited for you to ask me my status, and when you finally did I stammered, “I’ve never taken the test.”

“How come?”

Like a recording on an answering machine, I announced how there was no tried and true early intervention, how for years I’d been practicing sexual behavior that assumed either I or my partner might be HIV-positive. That there were just too many opinions of what safe sex was, too many variable possibilities of becoming infected. Which meant, if one stayed single, running on the treadmill of having to get tested every six months. HIV-negative or -positive were labels that reminded me of Jews being constrained to wear yellow stars during World War II. No matter what anybody said, HIV-positive still spelled discrimination—outside as well as within the gay community. For the sad fact remained that many HIV-negative people were finding it difficult to make love to an otherwise healthy HIV-positive man. This made the otherwise healthy HIV-positives feel like outcasts.

And finally I explained that, for myself, keeping my HIV status a mystery made me live harder, kept me aware that I could not necessarily count on being in the world for more than the next few years and let me identify with both camps.

You were looking straight ahead, toward the West Side Highway, and I almost thought that you’d lost the thread of our conversation. But then you said, “Sounds like a lot of justification to me, Will. Sounds like you’re just afraid of getting it—getting the test.”

It was difficult to disagree, because I knew there was some truth in what you said.

We started walking again and the silence held sway over us until I remembered the point we’d been arguing before we hit the subject of HIV. When I remarked that I still didn’t understand why anybody would blame you for a man’s death, you shrugged and said you couldn’t think of any other reason than you were the last person he’d been involved with. And that it didn’t work out and that he was really upset for a long time afterward.

“Was he sick when you dated?”

“Not at all.”

I thought how horrible it would be if your lover, whom you hadn’t really loved, had sickened. Then you’d be faced, morally, with caring for him, but not caring—the most horrible paradox.

You were now gazing at me with the dismal expression I’d seen at Splash. “Things ended badly between us. I mean, I was only involved with him for around four months. But I was honest with him the whole way, honest from the very beginning.”

The guy just never believed that you wouldn’t eventually fall in love with him.

Yet I sensed something was being withheld about this man. I felt I was trying to grope my way along the dark borders of your story. But then you told me the real reason why you’d left your machine off, why you weren’t answering the phone. This man’s ex-lover, someone he’d been involved with before he met you, had been calling and harassing you.

We’d reached the West Side Highway, the body of the Hudson a dark void pearled with searchlights from Circle Line boats. I thought I heard music being piped in from somewhere.

Remembering the phone message the first night I met you, I said, “This guy who died, his name was Bobby, right?”

“His name was Bobby Garzino.”

“So how exactly is Bobby Garzino’s ex-lover harassing you?”

“Well, he’s basically trying to get stuff back. Stuff that Bobby gave me. This guy thinks he deserves it all back because he really loved Bobby and I didn’t. And I’ve refused because Bobby made them as gifts for me. Naturally I consider what Bobby gave me is mine.”

Earlier in. the day, Bobby’s ex had managed to get through, and when you’d balked at his demands, he told you there were people he knew who wanted to ruin your face forever.

The horror of this idea stunned me for a moment and then I growled, “Not while I’m around.”

“Come on, Will, he couldn’t have been serious. He was just trying to scare me. And I certainly don’t need you to be my protector. I can deal with this on my own.”

“Now, wait a second, Sean. Just one second!” I stopped walking to emphasize what I had to say. “If somebody came up to us right now, am I supposed to just stand back? Let them hurt you?”

You laughed scornfully and faced the Hudson.

We continued to stand there in suppressed indignation, bracing ourselves against the wind. The moment passed, and when we started walking again, you turned to me, your eyes glistening.

“What would you do if I came up to you one day and my face was completely wrecked? Would you dump me then?”

“I didn’t even know I had you to get rid of.”

“Come on, you know what I’m saying. Let’s say you did have me … to get rid of.”

“How about this, Sean: I’d blind myself so I wouldn’t have to see what had been done to you.”

You threw your head back and howled with laughter. “Oh, God, so grandiose. So nineteenth-century.”

“Don’t knock the nineteenth century. Some great novels came out of the nineteenth century.”

“Yeah, and so did some bad operas,” you said.

Y
OUR APARTMENT WAS EVEN
messier than it had been several days ago. The pile of clothing and magazines in the middle of the floor had continued to gather and there was a daunting collection of dirty dishes on the dining table. Yet there you sat wearing a crisp white T-shirt and those military shorts with a razor-sharp crease down the front. I noticed clusters of cut flowers everywhere: on the mantel white roses floated like lilies in a glass bowl; the violet faces of pansies draped over a short stubby vase, their thin stems bobbing on the surface of the water. All the flowers looked as if they’d come from a backyard, not from a store, a fact confirmed when I learned that you spent weekends tending a brownstone garden that you’d designed on Charles Street.

You retreated into the small dressing area, where there was a drafting table and a bulletin board filled with photographs of yourself with friends, a single hanging strand of pearls that once a drag queen had thrown around your neck; a chain dangling a rainbow assortment of freedom rings; a pair of blue undershorts that had belonged to an especially memorable sexual encounter. You removed a thumbtack from a snapshot and brought it over to me. “That’s Bobby Garzino.” I flinched, half-expecting to see an emaciated face, an ethereal portrait of someone fast leaving the world behind. But this turned out to be a photo of a healthy man, no doubt taken before your first acquaintance with him. I contemplated a goofily handsome man whose chin had an appealing spoil of cross-hatched acne scars, whose ears were a bit large, whose dark eyes were soulful and turbulent. In them it was easy to see the glint of a wounded past.

“He was a gifted man,” you explained. “He was a weaver.” I frowned. “You know, like weaving baskets and silk fabrics. All these woven things he made.” You led me to a closet near your front door where there was a small, square wall hanging composed of threads of varying thicknesses that were woven in a Hopi-like design. “That Egyptian-looking basket on the hearth, the one made of sixteen-millimeter film? That’s his work. I’ve got scarves made out of nubby silk. A couple of lamb’s-wool sweaters. Anyway, Bobby had his own custom-weaving business. He called it ‘The Loom’s Desire.’ ”

It was now hard for me to look at the photograph, which I still held. Almost like looking at a photograph of myself after you’d told me that I could never be your lover.

“He has—
had
—two looms in his apartment. They took up most of the main room. He could spend hours weaving the most amazing things.” You frowned and then shrugged. “Probably why his old lover wants it all back. Anyway, I used to hang out with him while he worked and do some of my own drawings. He would go into a kind of trance. Almost like he was playing a silent harp.”

The last time you’d seen Bobby Garzino was when he showed up at your apartment unannounced late one night in February in the middle of a severe snowstorm. You’d been out of touch with him for over two months, although somebody had been calling you at home and at work, hanging up as soon as your voice could be heard on the line.

You faltered for a moment. “He did the wildest thing, Will. He sat down in the middle of this floor, in that pile, although it was a different pile then, and he told me … he told me that this apartment was the most beautiful place he’d ever been to in his entire life. He said it was like being at a shrine.”

I know exactly what he means, I thought, as I looked at the wings of the butterflies, veins of exotic deep pastels that would be impossible to re-create on any palette, the likes of which I’d seen only in tropical fish. And from across the room, the iridescence of the wood ducks’ heads.