Nightswimmer

by Joseph Olshan

  “I remember hearing their voices as I neared the screen door. And that was strange in itself because whenever I’d come home from next door, the house was usually silent with just my mother there. I went through the back door. But they weren’t in the kitchen. So I went over to the end of the hallway that was adjacent to the kitchen. And my mom and my dad were just coming out of their bedroom. I’m standing at one end of the hallway and they are standing at the other end. The light is behind me and they’re … like these too-dark figures, these dark birds. And yet I can see that my mom is wearing a smile that I’ve never seen on her before: calm and knowing. That smile really bugs me. And I want to say to her, ‘You’ve been upset for a year, don’t act like that! Why don’t you tell him about all the times you got so angry! Why don’t you tell him about the time you mailed him that nasty letter and how we had to wait all day by the mailbox so you could get it back from the mailman?’

  “But then she said, ‘Sean, come and see your father.’ ”

  You remembered his cheeks were pink and smooth from shaving, the metal smell of his uniform and his white hair stiff and combed with oil. You got one kiss on the top of the head and then a handshake. But you and your father felt really awkward around each other. Throughout the visit, he was always polite to you, always spoke with soft control. But he was a stranger, different somehow, scarier, less tangible than his own voice that had spoken from all those reel-to-reel tapes.

  You swallowed and then you continued. “And then he died. Maybe a month after he went back from that last visit. On his way to get a haircut, he was caught in some cross fire. And his ticket got punched.”

  Neither of us spoke while the clamor of crickets and tree frogs resounded.

  “You sound so matter-of-fact when you say that,” I commented finally. Of course that was because you’d lived with it for so long now, you replied. After all, the time your father had been alive was now only a fraction of your life. His death was what you’d grown accustomed to, “like scar tissue,” you said.

  But I didn’t quite believe you. Something in me balked at the way you described a traumatic event as mechanically as a windup doll. And because you then went mute there in the cemetery and, later on, seemed irritable when we walked back to the cabin, climbed the ladder up into the sleeping loft and Casey began whining, begging to be taken up with us.

  “You mean to tell me he sleeps with you?” you asked as I made a move to climb down and retrieve the dog.

  “Whenever he’s with me, he does. He’s used to it.”

  “Don’t you think that’s a bit overindulgent?”

  I shrugged and continued climbing down the ladder. “He’s like my child,” I said, grabbing Casey under both his front legs and lifting him up, placing his paws over my shoulders. “I’m like his father.” Casey watched me with the vulnerable, miffed look in his eyes that always wrenched my heart; he licked me nervously as I prepared to climb the ladder. I held him to me with one arm and used the other to pull us up. He emitted a grunt halfway up and leapt off me as soon as we reached the top.

  I sat there for a moment, panting from the climb. Casey went directly to the end of the bed, walked a tight circle and then settled down comfortably.

  You watched Casey take his place. “I couldn’t let myself be so close … to an animal.”

  “Why?” I asked, suddenly growing aware of the rumor of moths hurling themselves against the screens downstairs and something in me turned cold to what I imagined as your indifference.

  “Because I’d get too attached.” This surprised me. “And then ten years or so down the line there’d be the loss and the grief and all the people without animals who didn’t understand that grieving.”

  “People like you?” I couldn’t help saying.

  FOURTEEN

  LATE THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON we were lying in the loft bed of my cabin, looking up through the skylights. A summer rainstorm was pelting the glass, and we’d just finished making love to the sound of water sluicing through the gutters. Sleepy and torpid and satisfied, I felt emboldened enough to say, “Won’t you even tell me a little bit about Randall?”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “I don’t know. How it ended … how it began.”

  You looked up at the rain thrumming against the glass skylight panes. Sighing, you murmured, “The typhoon. It began and ended during the typhoon.”

  “The same typhoon?”

  You scoffed. “No, of course not the same typhoon. Two different ones. A year apart.”

  “Did it end abruptly?”

  “I see you’re more interested in the ending than the beginning.”

  “I’m interested in how he burned you.”

  You shook your head. “The situation itself burned me. Not him so much. In fact, he left suddenly, just like Chad.”

  “How come you didn’t tell me this before?”

  “I’m telling you now. Isn’t that good enough?”

  “But why did he leave so suddenly?”

  You paused and squirmed there next to me. “Because I cheated on him,” you said finally. “Simple as that.”

  That you’d cheated on the man who I assumed was your great love came as a blistering surprise to me. So of course I wanted to know how it had happened.

  “Because I suddenly felt him pulling back. He wasn’t ‘out’ to anyone, and we always had to meet in secret. That made it more intense and sexy, but a lot just wasn’t discussed. We’d talked about living together in San Diego when he was through with his tour. He was going to work for a company like McDonnell Douglas and I was going to go to graduate school in landscape architecture. But then he started to discuss reenlisting. Continuing to live abroad. He suddenly wasn’t even taking me into consideration. So that’s why I did it. Because I couldn’t deal with the fact that he seemed to be falling out of love with me. I started seeing this cute guy I’d met who taught martial arts.”

  “But didn’t you tell this other guy right away that you were involved?”

  “Not the first night. It was one of those situations where you suddenly find yourself in bed with somebody else. But I did the next time we got together. He seemed to accept it. Said all he wanted to do was just to spend time with me whenever we could. I went along with it. I didn’t realize it then, but the whole affair was obviously about Randall. I wanted Randall to feel something pulling me away, so that he’d be pulled back. But it backfired. Because the guy got freaked out about my unavailability and couldn’t keep himself from contacting Randall. I should’ve realized that would happen. He told Randall everything. But Randall didn’t do anything about it immediately. He waited awhile, a few days. Then one night came and confronted me about it. We had a big fight. And then he left the island without telling me he was leaving.”

  “But you were in touch with him, afterward? You said you were.”

  “Sure, I knew where he’d gone—to San Diego. But I had to find out that his tour was over and that he purposely hadn’t told me how short he’d gotten—that’s what they call it when you get close to the end of duty.”

  When you finally did get hold of Randall, he claimed he just couldn’t admit what he was about to do. Had he announced his intentions, he was afraid that he’d be unable to leave the island. And yet he managed to slip out during a Condition 3 right before they closed the airport.

  But I had to understand about typhoons. Almost always, a week before a typhoon begins to hit, the weather is brilliant. Like a taunt. It’s so clear and perfect that even if you don’t know it’s coming, you wonder what’s on the other side of such a string of gorgeous days. Like what happens in California before an earthquake and the light sharpens to the point where it seems like it’s about to fracture. In Okinawa the perfect weather then gets worse and worse and worse. As if somebody is slowly pulling a shade down on that part of the world. It rains usually about a week before the real body of the typhoon hits full force and the ocean churns into a strange tawny color. The first relentles
s rains are called Condition 4. That’s when the lawn furniture is packed away. When families stock up on sterno, candles, flashlight batteries and books to read during the confinement. When Condition 3 hits—which is when Randall got out—extra food supplies are bought and barrels are filled with drinking water. Condition 2, school closes and windows are boarded with typhoon tape—very heavy tape, like duct tape. Condition 1 means emergency. Caution. Take cover. In the middle of a Condition 1 some of the crazier Marines would actually get drunk and venture down the beach to watch the erratic seas. And often one of them would get swept into the ocean and drowned.

  “Imagine finding out you’ve been left before being forced to stay indoors for a week. It was the worst, most confining week of my life. I knew he was gone and I was going crazy because the phone lines were down and I couldn’t call him. And I was completely alone in the house for several days because, on account of the typhoon, my mother and my stepfather had been grounded on the mainland of Japan.” You sighed nervously. “I don’t think I slept at all that entire week.”

  “You think he might have met somebody else and just couldn’t deal with the conflict?”

  You shrugged. “I’ll never know, will I? Sometimes it’s better to be in the dark than to know the truth. Because you can never know the complete truth about anyone. In fact, you can never know the complete truth about yourself.”

  And then you told me that he sent back all your letters.

  The letters in your apartment! So you had mailed them. They’d actually been his. Maybe he’d read them over and over again. Read them and then hid them, in a special compartment or a drawer—because he was afraid of somebody finding them. And maybe he had trouble deciding whether or not to mail them back to you. And once he mailed them, perhaps he regretted his impulse, the way you said your mother regretted mailing an angry letter to your father in Saigon and ended up waiting with you all day by the mailbox in order to intercept the postman.

  I knew I should confess to having read your private letter, as well as the diaries. But right now, it seemed too risky. Instead, I asked how exactly you’d met Randall.

  “He worked for a while in my stepfather’s office—my mother remarried one of my dad’s fellow officers, a colonel, a few years after my dad died. My stepdad was the one who taught me to love plants and he always encouraged me to build greenhouses when I was growing up in San Diego. Ironically, he got transferred back to Okinawa during my last year of college. Before going to grad school I decided to take a year off, to live in the South Pacific with him and my mother and teach English. A few months after I arrived there I decided to build a lath house so I could grow orchids and protect them from the elements. My stepdad lent me a couple of his staff Marines to help, and Randall was one of them.”

  “But wait a minute. Didn’t your parents know your story?”

  A sigh. “I tried to tell them when I was eighteen. Or, I should say, I tried to tell my mother. But she deflected it; all she cared about was that I didn’t tell my stepfather. It never came up after that. And I’ve lived so far away from them that they haven’t been confronted with any of my so-called relationships. Randall was so paranoid that he insisted whenever I saw him my parents could never be anywhere near us. Then again, he had a good reason. He did work for my stepfather.”

  I asked if Randall were really amazing-looking, like the guy at the Morning Party.

  You shook your head emphatically and exclaimed that you’d never be interested in somebody so perfect-looking as the guy at the Morning Party, that Randall was rather ordinary, as a matter of fact, but there had been a kind of nobleness in his face. His eyes had been incredibly expressive and bright behind Marine-issue wire-framed glasses.

  You didn’t much notice him at first when he was helping with the lath house. You were intent on making sure the ventilation was right and the lighting. But then he came back one afternoon when you were tending some fledgling dendrobiums. He’d changed out of his uniform into a pair of tight jeans that showed off everything he had: a wonderful, sinewy body that was tight, compact. He said he’d always loved plants, described his family’s sugarcane fields on Nevis—having been born in Miami, he had a dual citizenship. His family sounded pretty interesting: black landowners, a few had been politicians on the island, some white ancestry although he was pretty dark—one couldn’t tell by looking at him that he was a racial mix. And he had the most beautiful voice, with a Caribbean accent; he always spoke softly, even when he got angry, and his voice resonated like a wooden instrument. He could sing like an angel.

  He seemed to know a fair amount about horticulture, so there was always plenty to talk about. Then there was a typhoon and some minor structural damage to the lath house and he volunteered to help you repair it. Only then, when he started coming by every day to help, did you begin to realize he had another interest besides the plants. After a while he hardly seemed so interested in helping as he was in talking. Soon he started fishing for information: had you ever been in love? Were you involved with anybody back in the States?

  “Wait,” I interrupted. “Involved with somebody ‘black’ in the States?”

  “No”—you laughed—and repeated “ ‘back’ in the States.”

  Then a month after that typhoon another storm struck the island in the middle of the night. Not a typhoon, maybe, but a pretty fierce tropical squall. And there were all these tea roses that you’d just planted outside your parents’ house.

  “I woke up in the middle of the night and freaked out because I knew they were just beginning to open and were in a vulnerable phase. I also knew the damage would’ve been done and it was already too late to save them. So I just lay there until it got light, went outside and found that all the roses were pretty much gone. Petals strewn everywhere like plucked chicken feathers. So many beautiful ones and they were completely torn apart. I was heartbroken. But then among all the wreckage of petals and shredded blooms I saw this one bud. It was absolutely perfect, just beginning to open. I remember it was covered with rain. When I bent over it, I could smell … the nose was faint yet incredible. I don’t know what came over me. I just took it in my mouth. Laid it on my tongue, sucked it really gently. The scent went completely through me. And I had this weird kind of … I don’t know what you’d call it. In a way … almost like I came.

  “And he saw the whole thing. He’d come over to visit and was standing there at the edge of the property.” You grinned. “Then he followed me into the lath house and told me he was in love with me.”

  I lay there as you said this, speechless in a kind of jealous trance. Jealous of your sensual nature, jealous of such a romantic beginning. For some reason, our storm cleaved and the moon blazed through the skylight for an instant and its light fell on you and gave a pure alabaster wash to your pale skin.

  Then you smiled your silly smile and said to me, “Bet you never met anybody who fellated a rose.”

  Soon thereafter, you fell asleep.

  I remained awake, listening to the rain that was booming again against the cabin, to the wind roaring through the trees. I could imagine everything because I’d read your diaries.

  Sometimes when your parents go away he comes over. You laze around. You could be reading and you hear floating from the other room this amazing voice like Van Morrison’s but sexy, soulful like Marvin Gaye’s. His friends call him Belafonte. He’s one of the base DJs. You love the satiny darkness of his skin and its soapy smell that faintly hides the smell of his sweat. More musky than the other men you’ve made love to. You could recognize it anywhere. But it’s also a smell of hair oil, of this stuff he uses called Black and White, genuine pluko Hair Dressing. Long Hold Control. Lanolin-rich stuff that’s made in Tennessee.

  He creams his skin. Rubs cocoa butter into it. He’s so worried about dry skin, about graying, about discoloration. Sometimes he lets you do it for him, cream his skin. When your parents are gone he comes over and you rub it into his shoulders, up and down his back and his thighs. Y
ou can’t help it but you love to keep running your fingers over his body because his skin is so taut and the ridges on his stomach are like carvings. And his pigmentation changes. The skin on his back has this warm, rosy hue to it, as does the skin on his thighs. But the skin on his cheeks and on his forehead has more of a yellowish cast. Sometimes he gets mad at the way you touch and look at him. He says you make him feel like a specimen. And you have to keep telling him he’s your first black man, and that the differences between your bodies are intriguing. His foot soles are pale, even paler than the palms of his hands; and when he gets a cut, the healing pink is much more of a contrast on his dark skin than it is on yours. He can’t shave every day or else he’ll get those gray heat bumps on his face, and his smell changes when he’s agitated or when he’s about to come.

  The two of you leave your parents’ compound. Go up to the cliffs beyond the coral beds. The brush tangles into jungle and it’s isolated though you can hear the Pacific. He has the most tender mouth, large and pink and powerful. His kisses set off these detonations inside you and he can easily take your cock all the way down to its root and slap it back and forth with the inside of his mouth. He loves it when you lean against a tree and screw his face and sometimes as you’re getting there you can feel the mosquitoes biting your shoulders and your stomach and it makes it more intense when you finally come. When he’s about to come, his eyes actually film over. And then you both lie there, staring up at the strange-looking trees in the Asian forest. As the daylight bleeds away, you watch how he vanishes next to you, this lovely black man, he just disappears into the darkness.

  FIFTEEN

  THAT YOU HAD BELONGED so completely and so willingly to someone else made you more precious to me now. I felt so vulnerable to you. I felt so afraid.

  And then early the following morning, a windswept, cloudless morning, the telephone startled us. It hadn’t rung since we’d been there. It rang and rang until finally I climbed down the ladder naked to answer it. For a moment there was silence; sometimes because of electrical interference the telephone would shrill of its own accord. I was just about to hang up when somebody finally spoke: “So why don’t you ask him.” The momentary confusion suddenly burned off like fog.