Nightswimmer

by Joseph Olshan

  “Me in a more hostile way,” José amended. “Though of course that’s over now.”

  I doubted that but suppressed saying so. When I reminded José I had to be going, he asked if he could take me to dinner sometime.

  I looked at him shrewdly. “What for?”

  “As a gesture of thanks.”

  “Come again?”

  “I feel I owe you. I finally got all the loomed things back. Sean brought them over one night and left them in a box at my door, and they were lying there when I came home. I figured you had something to do with their being returned.”

  I grabbed a cab hurtling along Seventeenth. Gave the address on Grove Street, leaned forward in my seat, gripping the door handle, cringing whenever we snagged any traffic. The rest happened like clockwork. A young couple who lived upstairs happened to be leaving the building the moment I arrived and, recognizing me from all the nights and mornings I spent there, let me in.

  The ruined door had been spackled and repainted, the marks of José’s anguish completely eradicated. I tried it and, to my surprise, it swung open.

  The beloved apartment was like a struck stage, hastily abandoned, and not quite denuded of props. The furniture was gone; so was the piano; the walls were bare, with gaping holes from where pictures had hung; and all the stuffed birds and butterflies had taken spectral flight. Left were a digital clock-radio and a box of moldy paperbacks. The floor was strewn with paper clips and pieces of broken tile that I recognized from the garden on Charles Street. In the closet hung a torn houndstooth jacket. An ugly brown sweater was wadded up in a ball and stuffed into a corner.

  How could you do this to me, Sean, knowing my history? Were you punishing me for not accepting you as you were, for trying to squeeze meaning out of your blighted past?

  Your drafting table had remained behind, the Tensor lamp lying on its white surface, next to a box of nearly dried watercolors and a caked paintbrush. There was also a pocket-sized photograph of a small child with blond ringlets, the pudgy face unmistakable, the eyes even then glacial and piercing. Across the front of his T-shirt was stenciled a picture of a bayonet as well as the slogan “My Daddy Is a Marine.”

  My back to the wall, I slowly let myself down until I was sitting on the bare floor. Then I broke down and my sobs echoed burlesquely. Through bleary eyes I finally noticed the telephone placed on top of the answering machine that was blinking like the last living organ in a chilling corpse. I went over and pressed the play button and this is what I heard.

  Beep. “This is a message for Sean Paris. Please call Delia at Citibank Visa 800-678-4567. It’s November fifth at five thirty-five.”

  Beep. “Sean, this is Dan Telebon from work. It’s uh, 10 A.M. on the seventh. I need to talk to you about the Santa Fe house. Can you call me as soon as you get this.”

  Beep. “Sean, this is Howie Rosen from Barneys. Remember me? How ya doing? Give me a call at work. Oh, and by the way, those pants have come in in your size.”

  Beep. “Sean, this is Robert Sirjane. November tenth. We need you to get in contact with us on several matters that are pending. Please call as soon as you get this message.”

  Beep. “Sean, this is Howie from Barneys. I understand you haven’t picked up your pants. Give me a call at home or at work. I can always bring them to you after work if necessary.”

  Beep. “This is a message for Sean Paris. Please call Sabrina at Citibank Visa. We need to speak to you by midnight on the twentieth of November.”

  Beep. “Sean, this is Robert Sirjane again. It’s the fifteenth of November. You have not contacted us as you promised you would. I’m sorry, but I’ve had to authorize accounting to withhold your final paycheck until you can help us clear up some of the loose ends here. I need you to contact the office as soon as possible.”

  Beep. “Sean, Howie from Barneys. Please call. I’d appreciate it.”

  Beep. “Sean, it’s Mom. We haven’t heard from you. We’re leaving San Diego for a month and I’d like to talk to you before we go.”

  A spooky recognition came to me: I hardly knew this man.

  Beep. The sounds of the street. Like when José used to call. “Hey, Sean …” says a jaunty-sounding man with obvious confidence. “This is Tom Whalen, the … gentleman you met on Bleecker Street. I’ve been thinking about your beautiful face. Thinking about us getting together again. Being close. I’ve walked by your apartment a few times, saw your light on, but just didn’t … well, just didn’t want to bug you. I’ll call you again. ’Bye, beautiful.”

  That message singed me like hot acid, but I quickly went numb when I heard the following:

  Beep. Pause and a sigh, but this time a sigh that I recognized. “Hey, Will, it’s Sean. I don’t know why I think you’re going to hear this but I somehow think you are.” Your voice rose on the last word. “I wonder why. Obviously I’ve left. I … had to leave. Where am I, you might ask. Well, right now I’m at a pay phone at a truck stop outside Minneapolis. In fact, from where I am I can see Lake Superior. I’m driving out to Seattle to visit an old friend of mine. Anyway, here’s what I’m asking you to do. There’s a pile of mail that I left behind. On top of the mantel. I mean, it should be there, I’ve paid rent until the end of the month, so the apartment should still be how I left it. There’s a letter that’s been opened. It’s the letter. I finally read it. If you could just read it yourself, okay? It explains everything better than I can, why I’ve been acting weird, why I had to leave.” A sigh. “Why I couldn’t admit something, something that I should’ve told you from the very beginning, but couldn’t. I’m gutless, I guess. Right now I’m not in the best of circumstances to go into any explanation. If it makes you feel any better, nobody else knows that I’ve left. Nobody knows where I’ve gone. But I … I love you. And I’m sorry.” Beep.

  July 31, 1990

  Dear Sean:

  The doctor says I’m in perfect health. My blood count is fine, HIV negative, normal T cells, normal everything, but I still want to die. I feel guilty because I know there are guys right now in the hospital who would trade places with me, guys who would willingly exchange their sickness for this…how else do I call it—unrequited love? But everything is relative and since I haven’t lived through a life-threatening illness I can’t make use of that contrast to get myself back on track. It doesn’t help me to think about them, even to force myself to visit the ones who won’t make it beyond a few more weeks, because my own misery still won’t go away.

  And my misery is living without you and the rest of my life now seems like too long a stretch to go. Yeah, maybe it won’t always be this way, but the fact of the matter is I’m completely exhausted. There’s nothing left in me. I can’t last.

  What makes it so bad is that I know you’ve never felt the same about me. I still can’t believe it. I still can’t get over the fact that it didn’t work out with us. Because once when we were together, I felt that we belonged, that you were the one I was always meant to be with. How could I feel this so strongly if it weren’t true? How can I ever trust myself again? José is the only man who has ever completely loved me, he deserves this devotion, but I find that I cannot give him what he wants. So, in the end, I can blame no one but myself. And that’s another reason why I want to do this.

  Sean, you feel nothing for me. And I still can’t accept that, try as I might. I still can’t quite believe your reaction last night when I finally told you that I wanted to die if we couldn’t be together. How can you be so cold to somebody who cares so much for you?

  Maybe by doing this I will make it possible for you to feel again, maybe I will make it possible for you to treat someone else the way you should have treated me. Maybe I will force you to reckon with the power of yourself on someone else. And if I can accomplish that, I do accomplish something in this life.

  And I would like you please to return to José all the loomed things that I made for you. Selfish perhaps, I just want him to have them since he can’t have me.

>   Bobby

  TWENTY-FIVE

  I TOLD NO ONE about Bobby’s letter. I lived with it like a sacred relic. Kept it in a compartment in my desk. Took it out sometimes and reread it. Bobby’s final implication mellowed the pain of my losing you; I could understand how imperative it was for you to withhold the truth. For had I known the truth any earlier I certainly would’ve doubted you; it would’ve been too scary to relax in your open arms, even to rest my head on your shoulder. I now knew that you would never change.

  A long time after you left town, I had these recurring dreams. The dreams began with Chad, who has become one of Loie Fuller’s Chinese dancers in the Yeats poem “Lapis Lazuli.” Dressed in Asian silks, he wears a long black braid down his back. He whirls around my apartment, then sits down at a piano. “Spirited fingers begin to play.” And after sounding the few notes of a nocturne, he turns to me. His dark Latino eyes now become your fatal arctic-blue eyes. And those eyes tell me to drive to the coast, to undress on a dark beach, to take on the Atlantic’s dark freezing rollers until my body goes numb.

  In late January I got reinvolved with Peter Rocca, basically because there was no one else even remotely interesting and I was lonely and because Sebastian had gone off to Malta for a few months. Peter was familiar ground, and that was much less threatening than sounding a whole new relationship. On Valentine’s Day, he and I went for a Dutch-treat dinner at Provence, then back to his place for sex, our usual wild Sexual Stations of the Cross. In the midst of it all there was no mention of valentines.

  Afterward, when we were lying in his bed, shrouded in oxford cotton sheets, I was actually looking forward to spending the whole night with someone I admired who was warm and familiar. And I found myself relating Bobby’s letter, which by now I’d read so many times I could recite it verbatim. Peter couldn’t understand why I’d kept the letter to myself for the past few months. I insisted that I’d wanted to keep it to myself. Besides, Peter hardly told me everything that went on with him.

  “Well, pardon me for being thick. But I’m not quite sure what Bobby was going on about. Sean told him he never loved him. What was Sean supposed to do: get back together with Bobby because Bobby was threatening to do himself in?”

  “It’s not that,” I said. “Sean just kept a lot of things from me. He wanted to make it seem that Bobby killed himself because he was sick. I asked Sean several times if he was telling me everything. He said he was. And yet, he never told me about that last desperate phone call.”

  “Sean probably just convinced himself that Bobby was using him as an excuse.”

  I glanced out the window at the Empire State Building, whose upper stories were lighted crimson in honor of the defrocked saint. “But sometimes I wonder if Sean suspected or even knew that Bobby was actually HIV-negative.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Peter said.

  “It’s not so simple. Sean’s not that much of a liar, Peter,” I said.

  “Never said he was a liar. He just believes what it’s convenient to believe.”

  I remembered what had been revealed to me in the garden on Charles Street, the “never come back” story. But I refrained from telling Peter because I was afraid he’d cast doubt on that, too.

  “Believe it or not, I haven’t once stopped thinking about that night you went off with Sean,” Peter resumed. “Seeing you guys walking away, seeing you brushing up against each other. I wonder why I can’t get it out of my mind. That night … you and Sean made me feel like I was going crazy.”

  I leaned over and kissed him. I said, “That night I was cavalier. I’m sorry. I promise I’ll never do anything like that to you again.”

  Seemingly satisfied, Peter lay back, arms cocked behind his head, his stomach glistening with the sweat from our sex. Although he was loath to admit it, he’d finally buckled under the pressure of fashion and now shaved the little bit of hair there was on his chest. Fucking hypocrite, I’d said to him the first time he seduced me again and I noticed the stubbly difference. He explained to me that while Sebastian had been away he’d had a brief fling with a model who got him high one night and shaved him, and now he was forced into keeping those superhero tits trimmed. Growing it back was unbearable—all the itching.

  “You miss Sean, don’t you?” Peter asked gently.

  “I hate to say it, but I do,” I admitted just as the downstairs buzzer rang.

  Peter sprang out of bed to answer it. I was staring at his naked butt when I heard him exclaim, “Oh, my God. No! Tell him no! Tell him that I’ll get it from him tomorrow. Tell him I’m sleeping.” There was a pause. “Well, then tell him I fell asleep with the light on.”

  “Sebastian,” he said when he turned around again, as if I couldn’t figure that one out. I’d been operating under the impression that Sebastian was gone until March. “Shit! I should’ve realized he’d come home early just to spy on me.”

  “Well, after all it is Valentine’s Day,” I couldn’t help pointing out, noticing how orange Peter’s pubic hairs looked in the direct light.

  He sat on the edge of his bed, clearly perturbed. Finally he murmured, “He knows you’re here. That’s the problem.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Because that’s what the vacuum cleaner is all about.”

  “The vacuum cleaner?”

  “Oh, I forgot to mention that. He’s downstairs with my vacuum cleaner.”

  Apparently Sebastian had borrowed one of Peter’s vacuum cleaners before he left and had never bothered to return it. Once before when he brought back something he’d borrowed, the doorman let him through without buzzing Peter. “He figures with any household item he can get upstairs without my knowing he’s in the building.”

  “But wait a minute, why does he think you’re here with somebody? Or is he just that suspicious?”

  “Didn’t you take a piss after we had sex?”

  “So.”

  Even though we were so high up, there was a place uptown from Peter’s building where, with a pair of binoculars, Sebastian could actually peer into the bathroom. “From there he’d be able to see that whoever took the piss wasn’t me.”

  I stared at Peter dumbstruck. “You’re joking.”

  “I wish I were.”

  “I can’t believe you put up with this nonsense!”

  “Well, ‘this nonsense’ is about to come to an end,” Peter said, just as the buzzer blared again. I shook my head because I knew such nonsense would never end. All I could do was watch this beautiful naked man, afflicted by unholy love, hurrying across his pristine apartment toward the intercom. Did he and I and Greg and everybody we knew choose unwisely because we were by nature more comfortable with unhappiness? “Yeah,” Peter said into the intercom phone. “Tell him absolutely not!”

  “They say he wants me to come to the window,” Peter declared.

  “So talk to him.”

  “I don’t want to!”

  “You’ve got to deal with this sooner or later.”

  In a reluctant fury, naked Peter threw open his window and leaned out into the cold February night. “What do you want from me?” he yelled down to the street.

  “You fuck!” Sebastian shouted back. “I come all the way back to be with you and you’re with somebody. And I know who you’re with! You’re with that fucking asshole Kaplan!”

  Some pair of binoculars he’s got.

  “Well, why didn’t you tell me when you were coming back?”

  “I wanted to surprise you, okay?” Sebastian screamed and then broke down into frustrated sobs right there on the sidewalk.

  When Peter glanced back at me he looked aggrieved. He leaned out again into the cold, his body by now crimsoned from exposure. “Come on, don’t do that, Seb,” he now hollered with surprising tenderness. “Just go home. I’ll call you in a half hour.”

  I ventured to look out the bedroom window and saw the most pitiful sight in the world: Sebastian bent over and blubbering, gripping an upright vacuum c
leaner as though it were a life preserver. He finally began trudging along the sidewalk, the vacuum cleaner trailing behind, bumping over ice patches and the irregularities in the concrete. Watching the finale of his jealous rage, I suddenly knew with great certainty that, of course, he had to be the one who’d shredded my novel.

  “Why don’t you just go be with him,” I said once Peter had closed the window and was standing before me, shivering, with his arms crossed over his chest.

  “You see what an infant he is?”

  “But he loves you,” I pointed out. “As a matter of fact he adores you. And infants do grow up eventually.”

  Peter shook his head. “It’s so hard with him. Even the simplest things with him turn complicated.”

  “That’s what it’s all about, Peter. Relationships. You must see something in him; after all, you’ve been with him for a few years now.”

  Peter suddenly noticed I was beginning to get dressed. “Hey, where you going?”

  “Home—where else do I have to go?” I said, resolving to myself that this would be the last time I ever slept with Peter Rocca.

  TWENTY-SIX

  WE WERE CROSSING TO Fire Island on the ferry when Greg declared that he had applied to law school. He listed all the universities, some of which were located outside of New York City. We were sitting down next to each other and Casey was wedged in between us.

  “Does that mean you’re going to take my dog away from me to another city?”

  “Suddenly he’s just your dog.”

  “You know exactly what I mean.”

  “Well, not if I get into Columbia or NYU. They’re my first choices. I don’t want to leave New York. Unless I happen to snag Harvard or Yale.”

  I asked Greg if he stood a prayer of getting into those schools and he tried not to look too proud as he announced that he was 99th percentile on his LSATs.

  “You make me sick,” I said, elated for him. “Ninety-ninth percentile? One day you decide to go to law school and the next day you’re in the ninety-ninth percentile! You’re going to be a lawyer, Jesus Christ, you’re going to be a lawyer just like the rest of New York City!”