Nightswimmer
Authors: Joseph Olshan
A Novel
Joseph Olshan
For Margaret Edwards
and
for Charlet Davenport
And there’s another reason for my sorrow:
it’s no great sea that sunders him from me,
no endless road, no mountain peak, no town’s
high walls with gates shut tight: no, we are kept
apart by nothing but the thinnest stretch of water.
—OVID,
METAMORPHOSES,
BOOK III
PROLOGUE
E
VEN NOW, TEN YEARS
later, I’m waiting for him to come back. Still out there at the buoys, treading water, I’m waiting for the sun to rise over the Los Padres, for the far horizon of the Channel Islands to reappear. I know that he’ll surprise me, the way he used to, and I’ll give him a hard time for scaring me, for staying out in the Pacific so many years.
As I picture it, he suddenly surfaces, swims over and slips his arms around my shoulders. We take the last two hundred yards leisurely into the beach, throw on our jams, stroll along the boulevard back to my apartment, make love like the familiar strangers we have become, then sleep through the day.
The first to awaken, I lie there listening to the cackling Santa Ana winds, to the frenzied blades of fan palms outside my window. Finally I look over at him. He sleeps on his stomach, and his back, stretching wide like a cobra’s hood, rises and falls in the proof that he’s actually alive.
The first time I ever saw him was at the campus pool the day I quit working out with the swim team. The water polo players were milling on the Astroturf deck, strands of chlorined platinum glinting in their hair as they clowned and shoved one another into the water. I’d gone into a dark office, told an unconcerned coach that swimming 15,000 meters a day was interfering with my studies, and was just leaving when I locked eyes with a man. Something inside me was stilled as he pivoted away from me, raced along the deck and leaped up in the air. One of his friends lobbed a yellow polo ball in an arc over the water. He caught it with one arm back, and then, cradling it to his chest, plunged into the aquamarine.
Now ten years have passed and I have been loved by others. And yet, after all this time, there’s a part of me that believes he’s out there swimming the thirty miles across the channel to Santa Rosa. There’s a part of me that believes one day he’ll break the cryptic embrace of that ocean. And so, no matter where I am, I remain exactly where I lost him.
Weaver
ONE
S
OMETIMES I GET CONFUSED
and think you’re
him. You him.
Just as I get confused when I swim beyond the breakwater and forget what ocean I’m in: the Atlantic, the Pacific. Or when I wake up in the arms of a stranger and it’s too dark in the room to see a face that I suddenly cannot remember.
You asked me to tell you what happened, and so I will. It starts, of course, the day you began. Sunday a year ago, August, I was a houseguest out on eastern Long Island, on what the newscasters were calling the perfect weekend of the summer. I’d volunteered to pick up someone arriving by train and was waiting at the station among a crowd of impatient Manhattanites, who were anxious to collect their visitors and head to the beach. Leaning against my car, reading a
New Yorker
article about surfing, every so often I looked down the fretwork of tracks shimmering in the heat as they slowly bent toward Southampton.
I was thinking about the “Morning Party” going on right then in Fire Island. Thinking about the parade of men who’d worked out for this day, and even shaved their chests for the occasion. Thinking how the Morning Party must also be the
Mourning Party
inasmuch as while there were thousands of men dancing, there were also, hovering above them, the thousands of souls of the newly dead who had danced on that beach just a year or two before. Thinking, as I had been vaguely all summer, about falling in love again.
Those first few days and weeks with someone new makes the whole world feel like a Tanqueray ad: everyone is dressed in loose linen and holding their martinis at the edge of the cobalt-colored bay. If I met someone, I knew I’d spend the first possible weekend in Vermont in the converted red 1800s schoolhouse I was renting at the time, making love in the loft beneath a skylight, going for late-night walks in a cemetery across the road among the old Revolutionary War tombstones.
But the train did not arrive. A woman wearing a black sleeveless blouse and cut-off jeans began complaining to me, and she decided that I should call the Long Island Rail Road from the pay phone. I was put on hold and just as my change was about to run out, a clerk came on and said that the train was being held one stop before Sayville. I asked what was causing the delay and he told me quite matter-of-factly, “Some guy threw himself in front of the train.”
These words were spoken just as my money ran out. Because I really don’t know what happened to him, I reel from stories of untimely deaths, of disappearances. I make grim assumptions. I felt shaken as I came out of the booth. “So what happened?” asked the woman in black.
“Somebody apparently threw himself in front of the train.”
“Oh, for crying out loud!” exclaimed a middle-aged lady dressed in a caftan who was standing nearby.
“Boy, that really fucks everything up!” said a guy holding a motorcycle helmet under his arm.
As news of the delay spread, many people began leaving the train station. Deciding to wait for a while longer, I took off my shirt and put on some sunscreen. When I tried to finish reading the surfing article, I found myself unable to concentrate. I imagined a whole life for the dead man, his awakening on this the last morning of his life with the realization that without warning, his lover had arisen earlier than was ever customary on a Sunday and had gone to the Morning Party. And such a furtive departure could only mean that among the five thousand men converging on the beach, the errant lover was planning to meet and steal away with someone else, perhaps to a guest room of one of the gray pine houses rented out in half shares.
Such fantasies led me to remember the last night before
he
disappeared. We lay in bed after making love. Outside, the Santa Anas whined like a turbine, but I was feeling calm because he was with me. No arguments, no emotional tug-of-war, just our limbs casually entwined. He lay there, his arms cocked behind his head, eyes flitting around the room. He was restless.
“Hey, Will,” he said in his sweet, hoarse voice as he leveraged himself up onto his elbows and scissored his legs away from mine, “how about a half mile out.” He leaned his head toward the Pacific.
“Not tonight,” I told him. “I’m exhausted. And it’s too windy besides.”
He shook his head and grinned. “Come on, let’s just get in for a while.” He took a playful swipe at me and sprang off the bed, naked. Cupping his hands around his eyes, he peered out the window. His back was casually bronzed from being outdoors, thickly corded with muscle, elongated from swimming so many millions of meters, his buttocks a white band of flesh preserved from tanning by a Speedo.
He
was the more beautiful.
“Why does it always have to be at night?” I asked him.
“It’s more of a kick at night.” He flattened his forehead against the window, staring out into the darkening red-roofed city of Santa Barbara. “You said so yourself. You even bragged once that we were probably the only ones in California who swim at night beyond the breakwater.”
“But I also said we were crazy. A stunt like that quickly loses its appeal.”
“Not for me.”
“Then go by yourself.”
He turned around and looked doubtful. “Come on, Will,” he said softly. “You know it’s cardinal never to swim alone.”
“Swimming after dark isn’t exactly forgiven.”
“Just an easy half mile, out and back. It’ll be over in twenty minutes. Over before you know it.”
I told him he would make a good proselytizer, and that made him keep on.
“Yeah! Swimming at night. Think of it! Being out there in the swell, in the black belly. Not seeing ahead of you or behind you and just counting strokes until you know you’ve done your half.”
“Can’t we just go to the pool?”
He remained resolute, crossing his arms. “You know it’s not the same thing, Will.” His eyes told me we’d make love again if I gave in to what he wanted.
That mid-November night, the last night we ever swam, he held my hand as we descended the tile steps from my apartment onto Mason Street. Below me lived a rowdy Mexican family who would good-naturedly broom-handle their ceiling whenever we got too loud, and they snickered as they saw us leaving. We wandered shirtless along the waterfront of West Beach, among the palms and jacarandas, where construction had stopped for the day on the old harbor pier. Santa Barbara was pouring money into the refurbishment of its wharf, and it was only a matter of time before there’d be restaurants out there teeming with tourists and local pleasure seekers, in their faded Hawaiian shirts and sunburnt hair, getting blitzed on tequila and rum. But that night the wharf still held its condemned abandoned look, and the only people venturing out there were true derelicts, the drug addicts and the fair-weather bums who commuted from one mild southern California town to another.
The moon rising over the Los Padres frosted the water, and we could see the dark landmass of the Channel Islands twenty miles across.
He turned to me with a jittery smile. “Ready?”
A moment later I was watching him dive through the middle of a wave. Then I was right behind him, yelling from the shock of the temperature. Whenever we went in at night, I felt as if I were testing something, or teasing the temperamental universe. I started counting how many strokes it would take to reach the white plastic buoy line. It was two hundred yards offshore, a line used by the long-distance fanatics who always swam the stretch between the beaches of Ledbetter and Coral Casino. Those buoys were nearly halfway to our imaginary destination.
We ran into several kelp beds on the way. The instant I felt those slimy necklaces of seaweed I thought for sure I’d run into a shark. Why do you keep doing this, Will, I kept asking myself as I swam farther from shore. Months before, when we’d first met, I had felt the need to swim with
him
at night because I thought it would guarantee his love. But now I believed he would refrain from being more daring if he were forced to reckon with the company of another swimmer.
Just as we were closing on the half mile, I heard a kind of churning explosion. I stopped swimming and eggbeatered my legs and peered around until I saw, coming straight toward us, a whale-shape of boat outlined with what looked like Christmas lights. I gaped at it until I realized it was a barge dredging sand from one part of the harbor and dumping it in another. The boat would suck up whatever it came across: kelp, fish—and us if we happened to be within range. He somehow didn’t hear it because he kept swimming, and I had to race to catch him, until I could grab his arm and scream, “Look at that fucking boat! Let’s get out of here!” He mumbled something and I thought he’d said, “Okay.”
I began sprinting back to shore. I swam my guts out until I finally hit the white buoy line. Stopping for a moment to recover my breath, I peered around, looking for him. Listening for him.
Admittedly, my circle of perception was limited by darkness and by the sound of surf pounding the shore, but in an instant I realized he wasn’t with me, that I was completely alone out there.
Now, ten years away, and three thousand miles, I suddenly heard a railroad bell tolling the train’s arrival. When the cars finally pulled into the station, I watched all the disgruntled passengers getting off until I finally spotted the guy who was getting a ride from me. He was one of these eternally pale East Village types who dress from head to toe in black. We barely knew each other.
“Hey, Will, sorry about the delay.” He tossed an overnight bag in the backseat of my car and climbed in front. He had a long pointy face, small glittering pebble-gray eyes. “Hope you didn’t have to wait too long. The Summer Express turned into the Suicide Special.”