I had been swimming competitively for most of my life, and for much of that time I harbored a punishing desire to be an Olympic champion, or to seek some kind of greatness on an international scale. It wasn’t until I’d burned out two years into college that I discovered that what I really wanted was to be alone in the water. I began to fill the void with open-water swims in lakes, rivers, and ponds, hurling myself into any body of water I could find, day or night: a beach house in the Outer Banks with old high school friends, camping by the shores of a muddy lake with Fred, the springs of northern Florida. My natural state seemed to be damp and clammy, my hair stiff with salt or lake scum. It was my only true source of satisfaction, when I felt most complete. Until I met Fred.
The mornings on Lake Champlain were often windy and brisk, so I took to swimming in the evenings after work. The beach officially closed at dusk, but people still hung about or paddled in the shallows, mothers with small children filling tiny plastic buckets. I was constantly amazed at the willingness of New Englanders to fling themselves into a body of water in often miserable circumstances. In a dead rain, the air temperature at fifty and the water at sixty, there would be a stumpy old man hacking out some laps and a few families with umbrellas frolicking in the water. I would walk out waist deep and stretch my upper body and gaze at the New York side of the lake, the sun setting between the humped shoulders of the Adirondacks. If the air was clear, as it often was, you could see the illuminated pine trees on the peaks lit like tiny hairs on a body. It would be night before I returned.
Lake Champlain was a dream in this way, one of the deepest freshwater bodies in North America, with depths up to six hundred feet in places. That kind of depth comes at you from the black bottom like throbbing psychic waves. On a clear night when it got late and darkness began to settle in, with those booming northern stars and the endless sheets of black, it was like swimming in orbit around the earth.
* * *
Back at the house Hamilton rearranged our liquor cabinet looking for scotch, even though we told him we didn’t have any. Fred had the music cranked up, some kind of jangly techno, and I was lighting candles. Ham started sweeping bottles onto the floor with lurching movements, grunting like a bull, and finally Fred grabbed him by his arms turned him away and Ham stood there, blinking in our kitchen, the light making his face look positively withered. I poured out a measure of Early Times, our late-night garbage drink, and handed it to him.
I just found this, I said, just some blended stuff, but it’ll do.
Ham smiled deeply and held the glass up to the light, the amber liquid sparkling. A half hour later he was sprawled on the couch. The rain had quit so Fred and I went outside on the porch to smoke a joint. I had triple vision and my head felt like cement, but Fred’s music was sounding good. Fred had said on more than one occasion that one of my finest qualities was my ability to drink like a stevedore. Fred brought Ham’s gun case out on the deck and opened it up. There were three guns in there, gleaming with oil.
Jesus, he said, as he hoisted a heavy shotgun.
Even I could tell these were some seriously expensive firearms. The stock was hand-tooled and embossed with all kinds of engravings, the barrel gleaming silver, like something a Spanish nobleman riding a stallion would carry.
Fred passed me the joint and pointed the gun through the white birch trees toward the lake. The moon was shimmering low, the color of cinnamon, reflecting on the black water.
I looked back through the glass doors into the living room, where Ham lay on the couch, bathed in the glow from the television. He was on his stomach, one leg hanging off with a toe on the ground, knee bent, like a sprinter exploding out of the blocks.
Well, I am certainly not going fucking duck hunting, I said. Good luck. I’ll see you when you get back. Don’t wake me up.
You have to go, Fred said.
My husband turned to me with distant alarm in his eyes, like a baby waking from a nightmare.
Please, he said.
It was already three in the morning and we were due to climb in a boat and assassinate some ducks in an hour. This was about the time I usually began regretting our drinking habits. Fred and I had become accustomed to cocktails before dinner, something that we felt was a purposeful indicator of our nostalgic bent and general fondness for the habits of that earlier generation who populated the works of John Cheever and other postwar writers. It was a generation who drank punch bowls full of scotch and water and did obscure dances on parquet floors, who ate small piles of nuts out of cut glass bowls, everyone helping themselves to the pyramid of cigarettes that were laid out on a silver platter, the lighter a heavy, two-handed affair that gave a satisfying click and a small, efficient flame. As the night drew on the laughter would increase, and frequently that party would revolve around an inert form on the floor, always a man, wearing a nicely tailored suit and often holding a hat. In the morning everyone coughed and spat like jockeys into scraps of paper before lighting up the first cigarette of the day, still wrapped in the wadded sheets of the bed, their spouses snoring with a steady, comforting intonation.
In Burlington, Fred and I had parties for my colleagues at the college, early afternoon affairs, a tall pitcher of martinis beading sweat on a wooden table on the back patio. We were the only ones who ever drank it. Our friends clustered like frightened birds, sipping their careful glasses of wine. We stopped stocking any wine or beer in an effort to force these people to have a cocktail but they were undeterred, always trundling a bottle of some shitty ten-dollar Australian red, or a six-pack of some esoteric, locally made beer. They would regale themselves with tales of former exploits, their wild youth, a teenage drunken mission to a suburban strip mall, the rathole hostel in Amsterdam, always with murmurs of amazement and self-satisfaction. Then after an hour or two these people shutting it down to head home, talking about babysitters and papers to grade and early mornings and then it would be ten o’clock and Fred and I standing in our empty kitchen, a half pitcher of martinis left, shouting at each other.
* * *
I awoke to the smell of frying meat. In the kitchen Ham was cooking a pile of bacon. It was ten minutes after four. While Fred and I got dressed he stuck the bacon between slices of white bread and wrapped them individually in tinfoil, then set them in the cooler, already packed tight with ice and beer. Fred’s johnboat was chained to a tree down at the beach, and we drove the Rover down onto the sand to unload. The sky was still obsidian but I could feel the Green Mountains at our back, casting a cold shadow. The lake had a light chop, the wind low and insistent, pushing the water into neat, angular peaks. With the three of us, the cooler, and the guns, we had about two inches of freeboard. I tried to back out again, but Ham wouldn’t hear of it. He was still wearing his pin-striped suit, his hair at odd angles.
We motored out to Crab Island and anchored in a small cove near the shore, close to some overhanging brush. There were birds everywhere, squawking in the trees, lighting out for their morning fly, hitting the water, ducks, gulls, terns, cranes, all kinds of things flying around. We could have swatted them out of the air with tennis rackets.
Mother of god, Ham said, we are gonna get a few.
Ham broke out the guns and I could tell by the way he was fumbling with them that he had only a rough idea of what he was doing. He was jamming ammo in the wrong places. He tried to hand me one, a real beautiful thing that had a kind of lacy scrollwork on the butt depicting mountain ranges, but I told him no way was I going to shoot a bird. He and Fred sorted out the shells and loaded up and got them pointed in the right direction. I grabbed a pair of earphones the size of softballs out of the gun case and clamped them on my head, bringing everything to a low hum.
What are we looking for, Fred said, what kind of duck?
That little fucker right there, Ham said, and swiveled his piece over and let go with both barrels at a fat brown bird that was paddling toward the boat, probably looking for a handout. The water exploded in a geyser in front o
f it and the bird leapt into the air. Then all the birds in the vicinity let out a collective shriek and took off in all directions, like someone let them loose at a parade. Ham was fumbling for shells that rolled across the bottom of the boat, the sharp smell of gunpowder in the air, Fred waving the barrel of his gun around like a lurching fool.
They went through the ammo in about two minutes. The only things they hit were a couple birds that never got into the air, and now several half-mangled birds struggled on the water at varying distances from us. Fred looked a bit green, gripping the edge of the boat, his shotgun broken open and the barrels hanging in the water. The fat brown duck, the one that Ham had opened up on, was closest to us, only about twenty yards away, and appeared to have been winged; he couldn’t get the flight process going. The shotgun pellets had churned up his feathers, soft downy tufts smeared with blood. I was hoping he would get up and out of there. Ham dug around in the case and sure enough came up with two more shells. I took off the headphones and the audible world rushed in.
That fucker there, he said, we are gonna have Peking style.
Fred made a noise, some kind of grunt, as Ham sighted the duck again.
For a moment I saw my hand swinging in a graceful arc, smashing my Labatt bottle across his temple, knocking his lumpy body into that cold water. Instead I decided to say something, some kind of request to let the bird live, but Ham had already let go with one barrel, knocking the duck clean out of the water, a full somersault. The duck righted himself, brayed a bit, and looked at us with something like defiance. Ham brought the gun up again but the duck bobbed his head once and went down, diving under the water in a blink.
We sat there with the water slapping against the hull, the remaining birds clearing out over the horizon as the sun was coming up over the mountains, flooding the lake with golden color. A few minutes went by. I’d seen ducks go down to feed but this guy stayed down a long time. Ham rested the gun across his legs and opened a beer. Fred had his head in his hands, his back humped over and I could tell he was going to be sick.
I’ve seen this before, Ham said. The blue grip. Happened to me in the Philippines, and once in Missouri.
What? I said. What are you talking about?
When a duck is wounded, Ham said, they sometimes know they will be shot again so they dive to the bottom. Grab hold of something with their beak. They hang on down there, trying to wait us out. It’s called the blue grip.
I looked into the water, dark and coppery, the dusty beams of sediment drifting in the unseen currents. We weren’t far off the shore, but the water must have been at least twenty feet.
Grab on to what? I said.
You know, Ham said, like a tree limb or something. Something on the bottom.
Fred was retching over the side of the boat, a pitiful sound, and I wanted to reach across and put my hand on his shoulder, comfort him. But I was on the other side of the boat, with Ham between us, spent shells, the cooler, the gun case all in the way. Fred’s vomit spread like a pool of oil around the boat, glossy and rainbowed. Ham was watching the water and trying to light a cigarette with another pack of wet matches. The duck was still down there, clinging to something. I leaned over the side, staring into the water, trying to see to the bottom.
He won’t come up, Ham was saying. They hang on down there until they drown.
* * *
At first I had the vague idea that I would swim down and save the bird, that maybe I could protect him. But after a few feet the darkness of the water made clear the impossibility of this task. Instead I stayed under and swam away from the boat and down, out toward the middle of the lake, into deeper water, where it remained the same temperature all year round, feeling that strange suspension, the crackle and thrum of that impenetrable, living water, the cold that cuts right through to the bone.
* * *
Fred’s last job was in August 2001, in Newark. His travel was heavy, but mostly on the northeast coast, New York, Philadelphia, Newark, and occasionally I’d fly out to spend the night with him. I flew in on a Friday evening and we had dinner in the corporate fern bar attached to the hotel, and Fred drank four double bourbons with dinner and he ordered the largest steak they had and barely touched it. Afterward he was clearly disconcerted and seemed unwilling to give in to something, so back in his room we smoked a joint that we rolled with some organic face-oil blotters I had in my bag. The pot was so overpowered by lavender that I don’t think it worked at all. I was watching Conan O’Brien while Fred stood by the window, peering through the tall vertical blinds, looking out over the parking lot, muttering to himself.
You don’t have to do this anymore, I said.
He turned quickly and regarded me with a shocked eye. I noticed that his beard was lopsided, the bottom trailing off to one side of his neck. The ice maker in the hall outside rumbled. On the TV a woman was whooping like a monkey at sunrise, while Conan duckwalked across his desk.
Quit traveling, I said. Send other people. The business won’t collapse.
He relaxed, his shoulders slumping, and he came to the bed and dropped his body across mine. The whine of cars on Interstate 95 made the windows hum like an organ, and I thumbed off his pants and we made love on the rough bedspread, the TV bathing us in the blue-white glow of sleepless midnight.
That next week Fred took himself off the schedule and split his jobs, which consisted of the high-end clients, among the two most senior trainers. The first job he assigned out was a training session at an Italian investment firm with offices on the eighty-sixth floor of the World Trade Center. A man named Duncan Avery, who had been with the company for twelve years, went in my husband’s place to deliver a presentation on interoffice communication techniques.
* * *
That morning Fred had convinced me to play tennis, doubles, with his friend Martin and his wife. I was terrible at anything that involved a ball or racket, but I wanted to support Fred’s decision to stop traveling and to spend time with him.
This was back when we didn’t have a TV and loved to tell people this fact. NPR was saying that a plane had crashed into a building in New York City, some kind of accident. Disconcerting, but we walked to the park down the street, Fred with a fresh can of balls, our rackets in hand, silently trying to connect the simple beauty of a morning of casual sport with churning industrial death. I will never forget the clean, fresh smell that came through the pine trees, the light touch of cool air on our faces, the scuff of our tennis shoes on the asphalt.
Martin and his wife were waiting for us, looking anxious and completely absurd in their tennis whites. On the courts a doubles game of elderly ladies was interrupted by a cell phone call, and they gathered together with anguished expressions. I think Martin said something to Fred about the planes, New York City. I remember his wife was looking at me with an expression of condolence, as if I had already personally suffered something.
We agreed to go over to Martin’s house to watch TV, and we spent the rest of the day there, Martin’s wife whimpering quietly and blowing her nose as we watched the towers fall again and again. Fred was in the kitchen shouting into the phone, pounding his hand on the counter. His eyes were red and his face a mask of rage, and we all left him alone.
* * *
Fred’s throw looked good from the start, the way he measured the board with a practiced eye and balanced the metal-tipped dart, flexing his elbow a few times, and then with a flick of his wrist let it fly. I’d seen him throw a thousand darts. He was good, but not so good that he could hit the bull’s-eye every time. After each throw the contestant’s friends and family erupted in a cheer or groan. Fred’s cheering section consisted of me, Eleanor Bulkington, his wife of three years.
When Fred’s dart hit bull’s-eye I roared, spilling my Murphy’s all over my hands. Only nine men hit the bull’s-eye, which meant they would go on to the next round, the pouring of the pint. The top three would go on to the third event, the poem recital. Fred turned to me with a look of astonishment,
a look that said, this is it, this is really happening! We both knew the darts portion would be the toughest test for him, and in that second I believe he experienced one of those moments of real joy that come so rarely in this life.
* * *
I won’t be living in the bar, Fred said. I’m gonna write. Do some sailing.
That water is seriously cold, I said. I’d have to get a new wet suit.
Sure, he said. Whatever you need.
The truth is that from the moment Fred was announced as a finalist I had been mostly thinking about the North Atlantic Ocean. The steep green swells, foaming wave faces, the briny smell, the shock of the cold, the massive depth. The idea of it seized my heart in a cold fist, my skin vibrating with anticipation.
In our bed at night, the snows of Vermont whipping over the roof, Fred used to always talk about—maybe, someday—the little cottage we’d have, something with no real address and one of those delightful names like Three Chimneys. Our children would grow up tumbling across the heath and moor chasing a setter, and we would observe the quaint customs of the country, a narrow grassy lane bordered with box hedges, the battered Range Rover, scarves and tweeds and Wellingtons. In the summers we would steep our tea out in the small brick garden, snacking on cucumber and butter sandwiches. Slow afternoons at the local, having a pint. Some willowy brook where I would float like Ophelia.
A couple of kids, Fred said. We could name them Basil and Evelyn. They will grow up with charming accents and a fondness for lawn tennis.
The Night Swimmer Page 2