Nightswimmer Page 3

  “What’s this, your Vampire Theory?” I asked.

  “But you know it’s true,” you said just as the telephone rang. We both glanced at the bedside clock, which read 12:35. “It’s kind of late. I’m not going to answer it. If they want me they’ll have to leave a message.”

  So we listened to it ring two, three, four times, waiting for a voice to print on the answering machine.

  Hello, this is Sean, can’t come to the phone right now, please leave a message. Beep. “Sean, this is Gary, Bobby’s roommate.” Pause, and then the message continued tremulously. “Look, you’ve got to call me as soon as you get this, I don’t want to speak to your tape …”

  An ember of alarm in your eyes, but the rest of your expression was frozen, cadaverous.

  Then you jumped off your chair, dashed to the answering machine, switched it off and grabbed the phone.

  “What’s going on, Gary? No, I was actually awake. What is it?” Then, in answer to whatever he said to you, your voice warbled, “Come on. You can’t be serious. Don’t tell me this!”

  I was fascinated, of course, and I noticed your gestures, how as though in some kind of trance you methodically began to order the chaos of letters and bills that were scattered all over the piano keys, categorizing them into several neat piles. But then you stopped abruptly, and with a sharp movement dispersed all that you had collected.

  “Why, Jesus Christ!” you said numbly, pivoting away from the piano. “No, what did that say?” And a silence. Then: “Okay, I’m coming now. Hold on to it until I get there.”

  You put down the phone and in a moment of indecision stared at me with your frozen look.

  “Where do you live, Will?” you said vacantly. “Maybe we can share a cab.”

  “What happened?”

  “I can’t really talk about it. There’s just something I’ve got to go deal with immediately.”

  “But will you tell me eventually?”

  “Sure, at some point.”

  “Why do I not believe you?”

  No response. You collected your wallet and keys from the cluttered dining table and then opened the apartment door and waited for me to walk out ahead of you.

  “I just want to know if that phone call has to do with some guy,” I said, stepping over the threshold.

  You followed close behind me, slammed the door shut and hurried toward the staircase. “What do you think?”

  “Aren’t you going to lock the door?”

  You stopped, glanced back and shrugged. “I don’t give a shit. Let them steal whatever they want. Everything I have of value is purely sentimental.”

  Seventh Avenue was desolate as far as taxis were concerned, and so we headed along Bleecker Street toward Sixth. Several of the Italian bakeries were taking on deliveries of bread, the whole street aromatic with yeast. You acknowledged your hunger with a grunt and then a wistful look as we passed cartons full of loaves that stood upright.

  “Can I do anything?” I asked after we’d walked half the block in desultory silence.

  “Just leave it alone for now, Will. That’s what you can do.”

  As we skirted a Korean fruit market that was surprisingly thronged for such a late hour, you suddenly said to me in a tone of wounded innocence, “I wonder what it is, anyway, about all of us, Will.”

  Unsure of what exactly you meant, I said nothing. We reached Sixth Avenue and stood for a moment at the corner, watching hordes of empty taxis wheeling by. As you raised your hand to flag one, you turned to me. “I’ll call you tomorrow, how’s that?”

  “You don’t have my number,” I said. “You don’t even know my last name.”

  And then that silly look I’ve come to expect, to hope for, capered across your face and right in front of the cabdriver I was given a swift, dazzling kiss. “I read your first book,” you told me in a near whisper. “I cried at the end of it. And I know you’re listed because I once looked up your telephone number.”

  When I arrived home, my answering machine was blinking three messages: the first from Greg Wallace, my ex, reminding me that we were supposed to meet the next day. The second two messages were from Peter Rocca: one at 11:45 saying, “You’re not home yet, give me a call when you get in. I wanted you to spend the night with me, fuckhead!” The next one at 12:30: “So it’s obviously a night of debauchery.” No trace of irony.

  I only wished it had been a night of debauchery. Pent-up and horny, not wanting intimacy with anyone else but you, only wanting to get off now, I decided to try my luck with a phone line. I picked up the receiver, dialed and got a busy signal. Here it was 1:15 A.M. on a weeknight and this particular phone line, which could handle hundreds of calls simultaneously, was overloaded with people hoping to find just the right voice to get off to over the phone.

  For years now, my phone line alias has been a guy named Jim. I’m Italian, not Jewish, an inch taller than my actual height. I tell the truth about my build, which I describe as water polo player; however, I hedge somewhat on the hairline—I say it’s thinning just a tiny bit—and lop five years off my age. When I’m asked what I like, I say muscular men, straight-acting, preferably married types who wear wedding bands. I put more bass and languor into my voice and speak with a southern California lilt that I acquired easily when I was living out there. And if they ask me what I do, I say I’m a journalist, never a novelist. It’s amazing how you can get people ready, willing and able to get off on the phone at all hours of the day or night—even early in the morning. Sometimes when I reach the line in the afternoon, guys’ voices sound constrained, clandestine, and often I hear other phones upsetting the silence around them. “Are you in your office?” I ask. “Yeah,” they murmur. “I’m looking to hook up with somebody after work.”

  “But you’d rather get off in your office, wouldn’t you?” I say. “I bet you’d like me to come up there right now and do you under the desk while you take phone calls”—a twist on Philip Roth, I joke to myself.

  There are certain voices that make me a little insane, certain timbres of male vocals that can make me come several times in succession. I like deep Southern overtones, Texans, guys from D.C.; California will always do it for me because of him. The voices have to be pure, resonant, American. When it comes to phone sex I’m incurably redneck, a white-bread-eating patriot.

  I’m always casting for a way to say things simply but potently. In a slow, confident voice I’ll tell them how they’re going to be lying on their sofas when I walk in the door, what they’re going to be wearing, how they’ve prepared themselves for my arrival. But it’s not hardcore smut talk, it’s always romantic: a promise to spend the night, to cradle someone, to kiss them with everything I possess. I never get very far with people who claim they want to be abused and debased in the act of lovemaking. Just recently I was talking to a guy about an encounter (a favored subject of phone fantasy is one’s last real-life sexual experience), and he admitted to fucking someone without a rubber. When I asked him if he was telling me the truth, he swore up and down that he was, that this other person didn’t care whether or not he was taking a risk. Abandoning all pretense now, I said evenly and sadly, “You shouldn’t do things like that. You should take some responsibility, too.” The guy slammed his phone down on me.

  That night when I finally got through to the line, I spoke to each person one-on-one. If I didn’t like whoever it was, I simply pressed the pound key (pound!) and was connected to someone else. Sort of like a computerized Rolodex of live male fantasy. In this way, I scrolled through the variety of offerings until I found a guy with a hoarse, heavy Italian-American accent calling from Queens. He claimed to be six feet two inches, a thirty-inch waist, a forty-seven-inch chest, the perfection of Tom of Finland. Big, gruff-sounding guys often start off talking all macho and dominance, but many of them finally admit that they just want to get fucked. “I want you to wrestle me to the ground,” the guy was saying. “Come on, show me you’re stronger. I want you to pin me, make me give, then I w
ant you to shove it in hard!”

  Suddenly, not more than three strokes from orgasm, I got Call Waiting. I might have ignored it, but for some reason I thought you were calling me. With a murmur of apology to my phone sex partner, I clicked over to the other line.

  “I can’t believe you finally made it home!” said Peter.

  “What do you want?” I said, looking down at my swollen cock, throbbing just shy of what had promised to be a spectacular orgasm.

  “You on the other line?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who’re you talking to?”

  “My mother.”

  “This late?”

  “She lives in California. What’s this, twenty questions?”

  “Is he there?”

  I sighed. “No, Peter, I’m all alone.”

  “Well, I hope you’ve had your fun. With your night of debauchery.

  This made me yell out, “A little less teeth! That’s better! More lip action. Use the roof of your mouth!”

  Peter waited for me to quit teasing and then said somberly, “You meet a friend of mine and then nab him for yourself. Right before my eyes.”

  “He’s hardly a friend of yours, Peter. You were trying to pick him up yourself.”

  “Who could get anywhere with a barracuda like you around? I asked you to come along with us because, believe it or not, I was actually hoping that you and I could spend the night together. I figured Sean would buzz off eventually. But instead—”

  “Peter. Come on, let’s not do this.” I tried to be compassionate, having lost my hard-on and all but abandoning any hope of getting off with the guy from Queens. “Nothing happened, okay? All we did was talk.”

  There was a pause on Peter’s end and then he said, “When I saw you guys walking away and you, obviously feeling guilty, looking back like that, I went nuts. I couldn’t sleep after that.”

  “I’m sorry. You should’ve jacked off.”

  “I did twice. I just don’t understand why you didn’t spend the night with me, Will.”

  “Because I got distracted. You get distracted sometimes … by Sebastian.”

  “We’ve got a long history, Seb and I. Besides, this guy Sean, he’s a pretty loose cannon, you know.”

  “Come on, now, don’t malign him.”

  “I’m just repeating what I’ve heard at the gym. Sean Paris gets around.”

  “Suddenly you’re taking what those queens in spandex are dishing for gospel?”

  “It’s convenient.”

  “And like you don’t sleep around?”

  “All right, so I’m jealous!”

  “Fair enough. I accept that. Now, why don’t you try to get some sleep? I’m alone. I didn’t do anything.”

  “Sure you don’t want to come over and keep me company?”

  “It’s late and I want to sleep in my own bed. Good night, beautiful.”

  I clicked off from Peter, completely wired, and figured I’d call back the phone line for a quick release. As I started punching in the numbers, I heard somebody trying to talk to me: “Hey, hey!”

  “Hello?”

  “It’s me,” said the voice. “I’m still here.” The man from Queens had latched on to Call Waiting.

  I’d already forgotten his name. Not that it mattered, because he’d probably given me a phony name anyway.

  “Wow,” I said, “you waited!” I felt an amazing tenderness for this disembodied voice who probably lied about the way he looked, but who was obviously patient, maybe even steadfast. Suddenly I thought I could feel his loneliness there in the outlying borough that bordered La. Guardia Airport and Flushing Bay, a residential area dismissed by the Manhattan elite as being déclassé. And it occurred to me, as I began urging myself and this guy toward a late-night climax, that perhaps I could persuade him to become my monogamous phone lover.

  FOUR

  THE NEXT MORNING AT ten o’clock I was awakened by my editor at the Wall Street Journal. I had neglected to file a review the previous Friday. Promising it by noon while simultaneously flipping on my computer, I sat for twenty minutes trying to compose my lead paragraph. But my thoughts kept roaming back to you and your apartment and the strange phone call that had interrupted us. You said you’d call, but maybe that was just a line. On impulse I punched Information and asked for a Sean Paris on Grove Street. Nervous that the number might be unlisted, I was relieved to hear the operator say, “Hold for the number,” and quickly jotted it down.

  I fought off the urge to call until after I’d downed a mug of coffee and cranked out the first draft of my critique of a long-winded Danish novel. When I first dialed I figured I’d probably reach your recording, it being Monday morning and you would be, like the vast majority of Manhattanites—everyone except me, it seemed—at your office. But your phone rang and rang until I remembered that you’d switched off the answering machine.

  I tried to tackle the review again, but got nowhere. I remembered your saying that you’d cried over my book. It almost made me want to start writing another one. Almost. People think that I started writing journalism because I “lost it” as a novelist. I find this irritating.

  My first book had been relatively successful, both in America and abroad. I’d almost dedicated that first book to him, but was advised by a friend that it would put too much pressure on him to contact me. Better to let him think that I’d gone on with my life, had even found a certain degree of success, better to let him think I had flourished without him.

  Once the novel appeared, I was contacted by all sorts of people I used to know, some of whom I hadn’t heard from as far back as kindergarten. The moment I received each letter from my publisher and glanced at my name scrawled in handwriting, I half hoped that he had seen the book in a shop somewhere, read it and now was compelled to contact me. But I never heard from him.

  In the midst of writing my second novel, I suddenly realized that one of the driving forces behind the first one was that without knowing, I’d been writing it to him. In a way it was as though I were sending out a message in a bottle, a message that would never be found.

  I dedicated the second novel to Greg Wallace. The reviews were lukewarm, and I was so disenchanted with myself and the public’s response that I decided for a time to focus on journalism.

  My phone began ringing and I pounced on it.

  “What’s going on? You didn’t call me back. Are we on or not?” Who else but Greg.

  “We are, I’m sorry. I’ve been on deadline.”

  “I’m about to go to the park.”

  “I’ll meet you,” I said.

  I grabbed my keys and walked one flight downstairs and out the door of my apartment building. I was all too aware that a phone call from Greg, who once meant everything to me, had become just another perfunctory communication.

  Nevertheless, for the last eight months, our Casey, a Labrador mix, had been shuttling between Greg and me. There had been times when, because of logistics involving the dog (separate sets of keys to each other’s apartments), Greg and I had been forced to witness telltales of sexual activities: a packet of open condoms, a crusty towel lying next to the bed. Once I even discovered a blurry black-and-white Polaroid of a muscle man with his white shirtsleeves trashily rolled up. As far as I was concerned, sharing the dog equally had been forcing too much contact between us, and now it was time to map out the future.

  The moment Casey saw me, he began taking great leaps, trying to scale the fence of the dog run. I stuck my hand through and let him lick me.

  “You coming in?” Greg asked.

  “Yeah, in a second. Let him calm down first.”

  At first glance one never would have thought Greg was twenty-seven. Already lines were etched around his eyes; his pale skin was starting to freckle, and there were even thinning patches visible in his blunt-cut fair hair. He wore a plaid button-down shirt cut off at the shoulders, a fad that made the arms look bulkier, more chiseled. The shirt was open to the navel. He looked like a wild hot M
arine.

  “I heard you were at the Morning Party,” I said after we’d embraced over the top of the fence, after I’d smelled Greg’s familiar sweet scent that gave me a stab of confusing desire.

  He frowned. “Who told you that?”

  “What difference does it make? Half of New York City was there.”

  “I decided to go at the last minute,” he admitted bashfully. “I was bored.”

  “So how was it? Did you … enjoy yourself?” I asked, wanting but not wanting to know if Greg had met anybody. Eight months into a breakup, on a migration toward emotional autonomy, we’d traveled enough distance from each other by now not to cave in emotionally at the thought of the other making love with someone else. And yet we hadn’t gone quite far along enough for our romantic adventures to be an easy topic of conversation.

  “How could you meet anybody at one of those events? Or I should say, how could you believe you’d meet anybody, since nearly everyone except me was on Ecstasy?”

  “I’m your best friend,” I mocked.

  “Your best girlfriend,” Greg said.

  “Who are you, again? Where did we meet?” we both said in unison and laughed.

  “Fucking grim, isn’t it?” Greg said.

  “Fucking grim to be single again.”

  For some reason I remembered the first time we’d ever made love, how Greg had presented me with a gift-wrapped condom and how corny I thought it was at the time. I’d gone through that period where I thought it was charming, but now it seemed corny again.

  I walked the length of the dog run and passed through the gate. Casey rushed me, jumped up and gleefully placed his paws on my shoulders. He had a taller, lankier frame than most Labradors, splashes of white on each of his paws as well as on his chest; his head was slim like a hound’s. The blue squash ball in his mouth was dropped at my feet, and I picked it up and heaved it. By the time I reached Greg, he was looking wistful.