Nightswimmer

by Joseph Olshan

  “What’s wrong now?” I said almost accusingly.

  “Something just made me sad, okay?” he said defensively.

  “What is it?” I wondered if I should put my arm around him.

  He fought to steady his voice. “Just that we seem to get along better now that we’ve broken up.”

  “Is that so uncommon?”

  “But you keep your distance. In order to skip over everything that makes you feel uncomfortable.”

  “What am I supposed to do? Continue to beat my breast?”

  “I’m not saying that.”

  It occurred to me that exactly one year had passed since Greg had announced to me that he was having a summer affair. Ironically, he’d broken the news not ten feet away from where we now stood, while Casey was chasing a ball. Although it was not quite clear at the time, it turned out that Greg was retaliating for the fact that I’d left him in the city for the summer and brought Casey up to Vermont, where I had tried to write another novel in a rented house, a novel that I ended up abandoning.

  “So are you always going to keep me at arm’s length?” Greg asked me now.

  “I didn’t know that I was,” I said, although the words echoed with what some other ex-lovers had told me.

  “Come on, of course you are. And doesn’t that have something to do with the fact that you don’t want to share Casey anymore?”

  I began digging a hole into the layer of wood chips that cushioned the ground of the dog run. “We’ve been through this so many times, Greg,” I said. “I mean, as far as I’m concerned, outside of the fact that we don’t sleep together nothing is all that different. I may not trust you as much as I used to. But that’s not really required, is it?”

  Casey had plopped the ball at Greg’s feet and was still waiting for it to be tossed. As the dog’s patience began to wane, he cocked his head from side to side, as if trying to understand what we were saying. Finally a frustrated whine escaped him, and Greg picked up the ball and threw it. Casey took off.

  I said, “I’ve always held that there shouldn’t be something between us like Casey that forces contact. We should choose when we want to see each other.”

  “The thing that bugs me, though, is sometimes you give me the impression that you think this has all been so much easier on me, that I haven’t gone through it, too.”

  “Easier only in that you’ve had your diversions.”

  “Look, you’re no angel either, big guy.”

  Greg was referring to the fact that once he’d ended his affair—to my way of looking at it, conveniently at the end of the summer when I was ready to come back to Manhattan—I had had an affair myself. The Domino Theory of Retaliation. But what disturbed me was that all too quickly it seemed possible to veer beyond the crisis with Greg into self-sufficiency. Quite the opposite of what happened with him, when for too long I was marooned in depression and grief. Nevertheless, Greg and I had dutifully tried to revive the relationship with marathon conversations that seemed to go nowhere, with separate weekend vacations during which we each tried to figure out what exactly we wanted from the relationship. But what emerged was the fact that we were each polarized by distrust, by the sense of betrayal that flourished in the wake of our affairs. Our relationship finally died during the winter.

  Even so, Greg still wanted some form of contact to continue between us, whereas I leaned toward collapsing the shell of a bombed-out structure. Then there was Casey, whose unconditional devotion to each of us had become more and more insistent. It was hard to know what to do about him.

  Two and a half years ago we had adopted Casey from an animal shelter on a cold, blustery morning. Greg and I caught the Long Island Rail Road out to the North Shore of Long Island, where, among hundreds of puppies, we were both drawn to a seven-week-old Labrador with blue eyes and a whip of a tail that had a white tip like a little penlight. The train home didn’t allow dogs, and we had to take him back to the city in a cardboard box that, we pretended, held a television. Whenever Casey began whimpering I’d elbow Greg in the side, and Greg in turn would make diversionary noises.

  The first night Casey lived with us, we tried to make him a bed in the kitchen, but whenever we left him alone, he’d let loose this heartrending bleat. I never wanted the dog to bunk with Greg and me—it took a lot of convincing on Greg’s part—but once he finally convinced me to bring Casey up into bed, the dog instantly fell asleep. He’d slept between us ever since until the day Greg finally moved out.

  “So are we agreed to stop trading him back and forth?”

  Greg responded almost immediately to my question, as though he’d rehearsed the entire conversation. “Your parents got divorced. You’re more used to the idea of having to give things up.”

  “You could also say it makes everything more traumatic for me.”

  “I suppose.”

  So easily does a dog become the child of two lovers who will never have children.

  “Listen to me for a second, Greg. You spend less time at home than I do.” He looked at me, alarmed. “But we both know you’re more bonded to Casey,” I added.

  “Now you sound like you don’t even want him.”

  “Come on, this is hard enough.”

  “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  I knew that Greg was grateful to have me spell everything out. “You’ll come and see him a lot, though, right?” he now said.

  “Sure, and every time I go to Vermont he can tag along.”

  For many months I tried to blame our breakup on extracurricular liaisons. And yet, in my heart, I knew that I had failed Greg in a much more fundamental way. For in the wake of losing him I’d barricaded the deepest corridor of myself from anyone else. And in a way, that was a much more profound infidelity.

  “I’m thirty-five years old, Greg,” I suddenly found myself saying. “I’m just beginning to understand things. I can’t imagine what it must be like for people who realize that when they don’t have a lot more time left.”

  “Well, of course, then their priorities change.”

  “I guess they would have to.”

  There was a sullen silence before Greg said, “Will, I don’t think our decision should be irrevocable. I think you’ll agree we should try Casey living with me and see how it works out.”

  My meeting with Greg might have exhausted me if I hadn’t been fueled by the anxiety of waiting to hear from you. However, there were no calls on my answering machine when I returned from the dog run. I kept warning myself that nothing yet had happened between us and that it was foolish to expect anything. Nevertheless, all throughout the rest of the afternoon, I felt a kind of tentative emptiness that I could identify all too well, and by the end of the day this mood had assumed its familiar ache.

  For me, expectation quickly turns into discomfort: waiting to hear from someone, knowing that as the afternoon diminishes, there are fewer chances of a call. Why do all the potent experiences reduce to this terrible yearning, the him at the center of me? It’s no wonder that in the last ten years I’ve deliberately chosen men whose emotional reach falls just shy of that region of desperate desire.

  By the time five o’clock came around, my mood had turned vile, and this, I knew, was the beginning of trouble. Then, suddenly, a remedy struck; and having a plan, a purpose, momentarily stilled my uneasiness. I recalled your mentioning that your office was in Turtle Bay; surely one of my architect friends would know a bunch of firms in that neighborhood. I managed to get hold of my friend Sheldon, who rattled off a half dozen companies until I heard the one that jogged my memory.

  “Sirjane, Wallis and Moody,” said the receptionist.

  “I’m trying to reach Sean Paris.”

  “Hold on,” she said, giving me classical music to fret by. She came back on, saying, “I’m sorry, but Sean Paris is at a doctor’s appointment.”

  “A doctor’s appointment?” I heard myself saying. (Were you okay? Was it HIV? Was that why you’d eased away from making love to me?)
>
  When the woman asked for my name, I managed to think quickly. “I’m a friend of Sean’s from graduate school who’s in town for the day.”

  She offered to relay a message but then stopped short. “Oh,” she said. “It’s marked down here that he’s leaving town afterward. I guess he won’t be back until tomorrow.”

  Leaving town? You had never said anything about leaving town.

  Now I was really on edge. I decided the only way I could gain any relief was by hurrying to the six o’clock masters’ swim practice that I attended three times a week at New York University. But I was too preoccupied to work out properly, and in the midst of leading a set, five people behind me, I ceased swimming in the middle of a lap. A very competitive woman who was trailing me slammed into my feet and roared, “What the fuck are you doing, Will?” I apologized to her, because I always hunker down when it comes time for swimming sets, then surprised everyone by vaulting from the pool.

  There were no messages when I got home.

  I tried calling your house. Still no response.

  That night I attended a book publication party held at a SoHo art gallery for an outspoken Latin American novelist whom I’d profiled for a glossy magazine. I had several drinks, tried to make conversation with the people I bumped into, but all I really wanted to do was rush home and see if the message light on my answering machine was flashing seductively. No such luck.

  My frustration got channeled into the annoyance of two takeout menus slipped under my door in my short absence—a pet peeve of mine—in defiance of the sign I had posted downstairs in ten languages, including Chinese and Korean, asking that all printed matter, including menus, be left in the vestibule. I promptly picked up the telephone and called both restaurants and warned that if another menu was shoved under my door I would call back with a hundred-dollar delivery order and leave a phony address. When I put the phone down I felt powerful and righteous, but only for a few minutes. Until I tried you again and your phone just rang and rang and rang. Perhaps it was better if you never contacted me again, for surely, after a week of separation, you’d clear out of my system like an airborne malady and my emotional temperature would drop to normal.

  Nevertheless, I barely slept that night. At some point midway between midnight and dawn, I woke up and saw the red 0 on my answering machine. A red zero on an answering machine is like an infinite ellipse of loneliness. A 1 digital readout looks like a strike or a hit, a glimmer of possibility that there might be interest from someone else. A 2 spells an even greater hope of probably one business or unimportant call and the call that you’re really waiting for. A 3 message is more promising and subversive in its suggestion of at best two romantic possibilities. A 4 is definite popularity, business and love all mixed together. And a 5 with its S squiggle promises a full life to someone who is as swift as Mercury. Beyond 5 is pure chaos.

  I’m obsessed with the telephone. But it has to do with the inordinate amounts of time I spend working alone. Alone. I know that during certain months when I’m depressed or anxious, my phone bills rise. For two weeks after Greg broke the news of his affair, I hardly slept and ran up quite a phone bill calling far-flung friends who lived in time zones so distant from my own that calling them at four o’clock in the morning didn’t seem, in their time, like such an act of desperation. To have neurotic conversations relayed by satellite beguiles me. The latest advances of science can touch the backward human heart.

  I try to imagine the nineteenth century when lovers were sometimes separated by great continental and oceanic distances, when, in some cases, letters required weeks to voyage back and forth between the tolerant and the cherished. How did people wait so patiently for word? What sustained them during those long, attenuated silences? What made them keep believing that at the end of a long separation they would still be loved?

  FIVE

  ONLY THREE DAYS WITHOUT word, and I actually started wondering if I’d invoked you like some kind of demon lover, if you even existed at all. For there had been a time in my life ten years ago, the dark August after he vanished, when I was having trouble untangling real events from my fantasy life, a time when all the edges seemed to blur.

  For the first few months his memory became like the phantom feelings of an amputated limb that injured war veterans talk about. I felt his presence tingling just beyond my fingertips, the eucalyptus/sweat smell of him coming to me at odd times. As I took long, solitary walks along the Rincon’s curving beach, I thought I saw him out with the surfers, the glints of the sun’s filigree in his salt-glossed hair. At night I could swear he climbed in bed and brushed up against me with the silken muscles of his cobra’s-hood back.

  I began pondering the idea that he might have unwittingly slipped into some parallel world. Sometimes, after driving for hours at a time, I suddenly have no recollection of navigating my car. I wonder if I’ve been in an accident, catapulted into a dimension of those who have also died in auto wrecks and who keep driving on some celestial high-speed road, as yet unaware of their sudden transmigration.

  In my mourning, I became a solitary nightswimmer. Swam alone out to the two-hundred-yard buoys and beyond, breaking the cardinal rule that he and I laid down. Swam that dark half mile, swam until I panicked that the ocean had become my own private black hole. Swam recklessly close to the shoals because only when I feared for my own life was I able to dull the pain.

  Three days without word from you, and then I was riding in a taxi up Sixth Avenue, late for a dinner engagement with a German publisher. Waiting at a red light, I suddenly thought I spotted you sailing along the street in a pair of cut-off army fatigues. At such a pace your body had now assumed the perfect balance of its proportions. Like a ray of light you effortlessly rent the slower-moving clouds of city dwellers. And through the window of the cab I just watched, stupefied, afraid that I was imagining you, afraid that my voice would fail me if I called out. Even if I did call out—“Sean Paris!”—I’d only watch you pivot and look around. And that would be even worse, to see you search for me. However, once the taxi started moving again, I realized that at least I should’ve tried to get your attention. Because now in addition to not knowing why you hadn’t called, I would never know for sure if I’d actually seen you. The moment I reached the restaurant, I used the phone. No response on your line—and still no answering machine.

  I stood there, composing myself before sitting down with the publisher. It was a Vietnamese place, the telephone located in a small enclosure whose walls were covered in rattan and drawings of sampans gliding along swampy rice paddies. Whether or not I’d seen you, either way the situation was grim. If I had seen you then you weren’t out of town (as the receptionist had claimed) and purposely you were choosing not to call me. If I’d imagined you, that meant…ten years ago was happening all over again.

  Six months after he left me, I thought I began to see him all over Santa Barbara—the first time, weaving in and out of the crowd at the Summer Solstice Parade, wearing a loosely fitting Hawaiian shirt. I rushed after him, knocking into people, who cursed and grappled with me until I just plain lost him. And even after I called his family, who’d gone ahead with the funeral and had accepted the fact that he would never wash ashore, who kept assuring me that it was unlike him just to disappear, I couldn’t sleep for days, suddenly believing that he’d been deliberately avoiding me.

  Then one night I was driving past the Paradise Café. I was driving in his Volkswagen, given to me because his parents could not bear to keep it. I thought I spotted him with a woman; I recognized his swaggering movements, his unique gesture of patting the scruff of his neck. When I slammed on the brakes and screamed his name, he darted into an alleyway. I quit the car in the middle of crowded Anacapa Street and sprinted after him. But he was nowhere. Cars were honking at the Volkswagen abandoned in the middle of traffic as I ran back to the Paradise Café and described him: a guy wearing a black T-shirt and turquoise drawstring pants. But no one seemed to remember him. And that wa
s when I finally began staying home.

  For six months I barely left my apartment. Listless, totally without energy, I suffered from strange night fevers that hovered around a hundred degrees. In those days, the early eighties, it was one’s privilege to come down with a fever and not be frightened of what that fever might forecast. Mornings I’d wake up completely doused in my own sweat. A doctor at Student Health Services told me that I had some kind of low-grade blood infection, for which I was given a course of colorful-looking antibiotics. But the medicine did very little. For other reasons, mainly that I didn’t like any of the professors in my graduate program, I ended up leaving the University of California without completing my master’s.

  I slowly got better but my funds dwindled. The days accumulated as slowly as prisoners’ scratches on the walls of a holding cell. I did absolutely nothing day in day out, pent up in my own little hell while, just outside my Roman-arched windows, the southern California weather remained unblemished and dry. The same whetted-looking leaves of the fan palm trees kept scraping against the window glass. Down in the front garden, the birds of paradise menaced me with their orange beaks; and a century plant began perishing right before my eyes, a last spurt of life shooting up from its dying heart, a spear that looked silly, too much like an asparagus.

  The publisher sensed immediately that something was amiss but said nothing at first. His accent was quite heavy at times, and I had difficulty understanding him. And since I tend to speak rather quickly, particularly when I’m perturbed, the man kept asking me to repeat myself. “You don’t look very well, Mr. Kaplan,” I was told as we were waiting for the check.

  “I think I’m a little under the weather. I’m actually feeling somewhat feverish,” I explained.

  “I hope I don’t get sick from you. Because there are many people I have to see on this trip,” the man said rather irritably. I knew that his sudden impatience in part had to do with his discovery that I had not yet begun writing another book.