Nightswimmer (22 page)

There was a momentary shudder of hatred in your eyes, a spark of venom, and then your whole face went slack. You began rubbing your thumb over the gleaming blade of the trowel.

“You didn’t do that! You’re bullshitting me, right?”

“No, I—”

“Why would you do something like that?” you barked, completely incredulous. “Why would you read something that’s not yours?”

“But wouldn’t you?” I was surprised at your reaction. “Wouldn’t you be tempted if somebody left their diaries lying around?”

“They weren’t lying around. They were on my bookshelf!” It was as though, to you, the realm of a bookshelf was equivalent to something being kept under lock and key.

“But … if you were at all concerned that I’d read something private, wouldn’t you have put it all away?”

“Concerned?” you repeated in disbelief. “It didn’t cross my mind that you’d even be tempted. Believe me, if I had any idea whatsoever, I would’ve taken those frigging diaries to my office.”

There was now a lull in the argument, a punctuation obviously created by our mutual preoccupations. “Did you read the letters, too?” you asked finally with a desolate note in your voice.

“Just one letter,” I admitted.

“Which one?” Your voice was now barely audible.

“The one about…the one about how Randall wouldn’t call you when he was supposed to. The one about you waiting for him in front of the PX.”

You muttered something to yourself and looked momentarily bewildered and finally said, “It doesn’t ring a bell.”

“I’m really sorry, Sean,” I said. “I know it sounds self-serving and stupid, but I actually thought you almost expected me to read them.”

You dropped the trowel onto the ground and your gaze was like an X ray prying under my skin. “Are you trying to insult me now?”

“No, I’m not—”

“Why the hell would I want or expect you to read my private writings?”

I quickly explained that I was so paranoid about people reading my writings that I locked my journals in a fire box whenever my landlord needed access to my apartment. And the old man was Czechoslovakian and spoke poor English.

“But you see, you’re paranoid and I’m not! I just assumed that when you stayed at my apartment you were there to protect
me,
not to read through my private papers. I was concerned about protecting my place from José. When all along it was
you
I should’ve been concerned about.”

“Sean, remember you joked with me when you called from Montana? Remember you asked if I was leaving your stuff alone? That was when you gave me the idea that you half expected me to snoop around.”

Your stare continued, but seemed mistier now, harder to discern. Then it broke and your eyes scanned the garden, at first mildly baffled, then wildly, for something. “This is crazy,” you said finally, hurrying over to a bamboo rake clotted with what looked like wet and rotting leaves.

“What’s crazy?” I insisted as I watched you beginning to strip the mulch out of the rake.

“I’m forgetting everything I need to do here tonight. …What’s crazy is your interpreting my phone call from Montana as an invitation to snoop.” You suddenly stopped your chore and looked at me with a scowl. Your bare arms were shivering. “Will, we’re just different, that’s all.” You sighed. “Anyway, I’ve got some more work to do here. I think I’ll stay for a while longer. Why don’t you just let yourself out.”

“Look, Sean, I said I was sorry. It happened early on. And it was absolutely out of line. I admit that, okay? I apologize.”

A pause. “If it happens once, it’ll happen again.”

“No it won’t.”

You raised your arms as though I were holding you up with a gun. “All right,” you said. “It won’t happen again. And I accept your apology. But let me get something done.”

I was stunned. Being told to leave you seemed like a monstrous request. “Why don’t I just sit in one of the chairs and wait for you? Then we’ll grab a bite somewhere and chill out.”

You faced away from me and, with both hands, shielded your eyes from the shadows in order to survey the back border of the garden. “I’d rather not, Will. I’m afraid I’d rather you just go. I need some time here to myself.”

But I still lingered until it became brutally clear that you now intended to ignore me. And then, reluctantly, I retreated across the garden to the coal chute. Before I climbed down the steep ladder, I glanced back, hoping to capture your gaze. You’d already retrieved the trowel from where you’d dropped it and were kneeling again, facing away from me. On one of the green wooden-slatted garden chairs lay a gathering of pumpkin-colored chrysanthemums that had been carefully picked and sized, their long stems casually entwined. Who had you picked them for? Had you picked them for me?

F
ROM THEN ON I
was out there again, waiting for you to come back to me the way I once waited for Chad. My appetite was deadened by remorse and I quickly shed eight pounds. When I did eat, I consumed foods I otherwise never touched, things like matzo ball soup and chocolate truffles and blood oranges. Being jilted by a lover does strange things to the body: mood swings between fits of elation and distress, cravings that can suddenly turn to disgust.

I tried not to call you so much. And when I did I always began with an apology. I’d invite you to films and other events I knew you wanted to see. But you either claimed to be busy, or kindly explained that more time needed to go by before we could see each other again with any kind of regularity. Ironically, in comparison to the uncertainty of our relationship’s early days, when I had difficulty reaching you, you now promptly responded to all my phone messages. Perhaps that was because you never intended to make plans. What else could I conclude but that you were glad for an excuse to give me up?

Every time we’d speak on the phone, I’d sleep fitfully the same night. I’d dream about losing track of you in the dark corridor of an ocean swim, in the midst of a rip tide. Whenever I’d wake up the loss of you would fall like an anvil on my solar plexus. How can I get
him
to trust me again? asked my weary mind. What should I do to reinstate myself? Yes, you were finally becoming
him,
and your becoming
him
made me wonder if that sense of absence had from the very beginning been encoded within me.

Even though you’d suddenly withdrawn from my life, I felt that I still belonged to you. I started wearing a black length of rawhide around my neck that proclaimed that my heart was still tied. I was spoken for and yet, at the same time, unattached, and something about that communicated itself to strangers. I was suddenly approached by men whom I’d seen around Manhattan for years but who never before had given me a moment of attention. In one-night stands with other men I tried to locate the parts of you that I admired: the wit, the sensuality, the dreaminess, the self-effacing charm.

I picked up a muscle man who took me into a brownstone he was renovating and, as a prelude to sex, asked me to give him a steroid injection. I met a dancer who was unable to find legitimate work and who was forced to give what he called “release massages,” the 1990s version of safe-sex prostitution. I met a nervous, angelic-looking guy who, after explaining that “a recent relationship ended abruptly,” finally admitted that the relationship had ended because his lover died of AIDS. Those encounters took away the sting of sudden loss while they lasted, but as soon as they ended I felt more despondent than ever.

Sometimes I got so agitated that I had to pace the city to ease the press of affliction. I strolled along the West Side Highway among guys in cut-off T-shirts, gold rings flashing from their pierced ears, the air spiced with frowsy colognes. Murmurs of conversation rang unintelligibly to me, and in my mood of alienation I tried to imagine the gibberish sound of English to a foreigner. Yet I felt like a foreigner. I felt exiled from your life.

A little more than two weeks after our conversation in the brownstone garden, I found myself heading out at night along the promontory of a pier, passing men walking tight nervous circles in the shadows, a hand riveted to a crotch, or the intertwining forms of guys necking out of view. Standing at the edge of the dock, I looked across at the lighted high-rises of New Jersey apartments, a patch of watery blue sky above them with plumed clouds smudged in orange by the recent sunset. I could smell the rank odor of the river. I marveled at how bodies of water constantly move as the earth itself kept moving, so simple and yet so unforgiving.

That night I was wishing that I had told you the truth about the last time with Chad. Told you how it was at my apartment, told you I was afraid what happened between Chad and me had something to do with him vanishing. Telling you would only have proved your theory that Chad had taken a part of me away from myself, a piece of my own heart that I foolishly believed that I could find in a stranger. That I might have found in you.

Until those last few weeks with him I never understood what it was like to want a man inside me. And whenever I felt the beginning of that desire I fought it. He didn’t really care that I couldn’t bring myself to be on the receiving end, although sometimes he joked that we should have a sexual democracy. I told him that I’d tried getting screwed in the past and that it had been just too painful. He said that enjoying it was more a matter of trust than anything else. And he was right. I knew he was right.

I started fantasizing about it, especially when he’d gone on one of his jaunts and I didn’t know where he was. I would lie there on my bed and let my legs drift apart, imagining. Remembering some of the women in my life whom I’d made love to, and a certain crucial moment when they let me know that they’d been aroused to the point that they wanted me inside them. Now, alone, I discovered what that was. Touching myself ignited something in the lowest pit of my being. And then I wondered what it might be like after a bottle of Zinfandel, or after several Coronas. But I was scared because in some way it meant total submission, giving up to him something that had seemed impossible to give.

My apartment on Mason Street. Late afternoon, the sun dipping behind the King palms and jacarandas and the shadows in my bedroom as long-limbed as the trees that cast them. He’d cycled down from Isla Vista, his backpack chock-f of books for studying; he was wearing a pair of rainbow-tie-dyed rugby shorts that rode high on his bronzed legs. “I’m starved,” he grunted as he breezed through the door. “What’s to eat?”

“Just some Jack cheese and a couple of avocados.”

“They ripe, the avocados?”

“I think one is.”

His hair was tangled from being blown around by the Santa Ana winds. I asked if he’d practiced water polo and he shook his head and said that there was too much studying to do. Oral exams were coming up. Then he reached into his backpack, pulled out a sourdough round, threw it at me like a football and said, “This should go nicely with the avocados and the cheese.”

I forgot to respond because I was already thinking about sex and feeling scared of wanting it as much as I did.

“All right, what’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing is wrong.”

“You’re sulking. I know that sulking puss.”

“You might know it, but that’s not what you’re seeing.”

“Okay, what am I seeing?”

He hadn’t shaved in a day or so and the growth on his face was thickening. His T-shirt, one of his old Stanford ones, was so worn it was coming apart in places, and I could see bits of his torso through some of the holes. I walked over, kissed him once and then tried to pry his mouth open with my tongue. He chuckled and said, “Oh, you’re horny, so that’s why you’re acting so serious.”

“Yeah,” I whispered, kissing down the cords of his neck.

“What happens if I’m not in the mood?”

I said nothing, just continued kissing him. Finally I brought one of his hands around to one of my ass cheeks. And then he took a capricious sniff. “Have you been drinking?”

“Just a couple of beers.”

A look of bewilderment on his face, but then he grinned.

The hurt: how can I describe that first moment when he tried to push inside. It cut through me like a blade. I tensed up and he popped out and shrugged and giggled.

“What are you laughing at?” I accused him.

“The look of pure agony on your face.”

“Well, what do you expect?”

“I know it hurts. It hurt me the first time with you,” he said. “Look, you’re the one who wants to do this.”

“I know! But can’t you go easy?”

He chuckled. “I
am
going easy.”

“Then don’t get so pissed off.”

“I’m not. Don’t be so sensitive.”

“Just shut up and do it!”

“Jesus Christ, can you at least be sexy about it?”

“It’s hard to be when it’s killing me.”

“I think we’re losing the mood here.”

And then I grabbed him by the arms. Grabbed him like I would refuse to let him off me until we’d finish what we’d started. “I want to do this,” I insisted.

Now I remember that there was a look of dread on his face.

I wish I had a photograph of him precisely at that moment. For in that look I believe lies the answer to everything that I need to know, the riddle of his vanishing.

Why he should have felt dread I don’t quite understand. I was the one about to withstand pain for pleasure. He asked me if I had any tequila and I told him there were a few swallows left. He went and grabbed the bottle off the top of the refrigerator, came back into the room, his hard-on bounding between his legs, a line of salt on the crown of his hand. I licked his hand and drank what he poured in a tumbler and what I didn’t drink he swallowed. His breath was fiery when he kissed me again, and we didn’t try anything for a while, just ground together and kissed and gave each other head. But finally I felt his finger beginning. He leaned over one side of the bed and grabbed the tube of lubricant jelly. I felt his finger again, slicked like an ice-cold probe, and then I shut my eyes and waited.

Hardly as gentle as he promised, he was suddenly all the way in, and the splitting feeling was pure pain, clear as water. I was afraid that I was going to die right there beneath him. I almost wanted to, strangely enough. He grunted something about its being the only way, but by now I was so enraged that I found myself shoving him off. “Wait!” he cried out. “Just wait. Hold on.” Now he was the one clawing at me, pinning me, insisting.