The Night Swimmer (2 page)

Like automatic writing, he would say, flushed and grinning, massaging his sore ears. Like Yeats.
The Order of the Golden Dawn.

We did the shots of Patrón and slipped on our raincoats. It was October, and the cold was coming down from Canada like whitewater, and the lake effect spiked the moisture content. In another few weeks it would be snow, and by December the lake frozen in the shallow bays.

Better bring the bottle, Fred said.

It was pouring when we reached the marina and the lake was flat and oily black, perforated by the fine mist of rain, and I considered the possibilities of hurling myself into that darkness, the weight of my coat and boots, the flight and suspension, my hands dividing water.

Hamilton Frederick Bulkington Jr., or Ham, as everyone called him, was coming in too fast. The plane sashayed across the water toward the dock, the back end swinging around, spraying water in sheets. Fortunately, the marina was empty of people, but the slips were still full and the gas dock had a few boats tied up. At the last possible second Ham spun the plane around and blasted the engines, then killed the motor and coasted in. By the time the tail section bumped on the dock, he was climbing along the pontoon, a leather valise in one hand and a massive hard-sided gun case in the other. He shook hands with Fred then handed him a line to tie off. He had gained weight since I saw him last, and the flesh was loose around his chin and ears, but he still looked like a man cut away from the stake. His charcoal pin-striped suit hung on him like a sweater on a dog. He turned and smoothed back his thin swatch of hair, the rain pouring off his face, and addressed me.

Elly. You look fit as ever.

Fred hefted the gun case.

What's this?

Thought we'd do a bit of duck hunting, Ham said. First thing in the morning we'll knock some down.

You can't leave the plane just tied up here, I said.

This is a hell of a spot, Ham said, addressing the dark expanse of the lake.

Ham wanted dinner so we hustled off to the truck and Fred drove us into Burlington, to a new eco-friendly café built into the cavernous exposed brick cellar of an old timber warehouse.

Ham set his valise on the bar and took off his coat as we waited for a table. His shirt was stained down one side with something brown and fetid. He ordered us single-malt scotches, something Fred and I hated, and we clinked glasses with the somber formality of a doomed business transaction.

When'd you get the plane? Fred asked.

A guy I know lets me borrow it.

Do you have a license? I asked.

Not needed, he said slowly, in this kind of situation.

What kind of situation?

Ham waved his arms at the scene around us, as if to say,
this.

He put his hand on Fred's shoulder, something I'd never seen him do, and looked him straight in the face.

I've got something for you, Ham said, grinning. Something for my son, Hamilton Frederick Bulkington the third. And for the next Bulkington to come along, eh?

Fred blushed, surprised and clearly uncomfortable. For years Ham had barely taken an interest in Fred and now he was lobbying for progeny? We all looked away and took a swig of our drinks. Ham rattled the ice in his glass, trying to get the bartender's attention.

We got a booth by the wall. Our waiter, a young woman with dreadlocks erupting from her head stood by with her hand-whittled pencil stub, her eyes glistening and shot through with crimson. Ham perused the menu with obvious disdain. It was printed on triple-recycled paper with root ink, making it hard to read.

What's
this
shit? Ham said.

I got it, Fred said, and ordered a few rare grass-fed porterhouses, curried potato salad, and a bottle of heavy merlot. Ham was trying to light a cigarette with a packet of damp matches. Fred rapped his knuckles and pointed to the no smoking sign that was carved into the golden maple table in six-inch letters.

I've got decisions to make, Ham said to me. But first, the ducks. Four a.m. You have a suitable dog, yes?

No, I said. No dog.

Well, Ham said, with a note of asperity in his voice,
someone
is going to have to go in to retrieve. You up for it, Elly?

Fred laughed. I didn't see the humor and I put the toe of my Wellington into his kneecap, making the recycled silverware jump on the table.

Ham frowned and reached over to stroke my forearm, something he liked to do.

My favorite newt, he said, our family amphibian.

I'd like to see you get in that water, I said. You haven't the bottle for it.

Ham drained his glass and nodded.

Right you are there, Elly.

He ran his fingers along my skin. His eyes were like pinpricks of black, star-shaped and sunken.

That's why we need you.

*  *  *

I have skin like a walrus. I have a condition called congenital hypodermic strata. Essentially it is a thin, even layer of subcutaneous fat deposits under the skin all over my body, all the way down to my fingers, giving my skin a dimpled surface. This fat layer makes my total body fat around 32 percent, which is quite high for a woman of my weight, and my body density is precisely the same as seawater, which gives me loads of natural buoyancy. I'm no Lynne Cox, but I can stand water most people can't. Lynne Cox swam from Alaska to the Soviet Union in 1987 with no wet suit, five miles in forty-degree water. There is only one other known person
who can survive water that cold, and that is an Icelandic fisherman named Dahlen who in 1963 swam a mile to shore from his capsized boat in Baffin Bay.

For everyone else, anything near forty degrees Fahrenheit without a serious wet suit would feel like a million burning shocks in every pore. After five minutes your limbs would begin to lock up, the blood retreating furiously into your heart. Your lips would draw back, your mouth convulsing for air, and the exposure could cause your teeth to freeze and shatter in your skull. A few more minutes and you would enter accelerated hypothermia, your heartbeat going adrift until you went into full ventricular fibrillation, your heart literally tying itself into a tangled knot in your chest.

I guess I'm lucky that the fat layer is thin and spread so evenly. You couldn't tell unless you touched me, and I am told that it doesn't feel unpleasant, just like someone with goose bumps. For the first few weeks we were together Fred thought I was always cold, and I let him believe it, playing along and shivering with what I thought was charming, girlish delight. I couldn't pull that off for long, especially after the November afternoon when on a dare I dove into a lake in Massachusetts, Fred standing on the dock in his sweater and boots. But he came to love my skin, the feel of it, the same way I came to love the swatch of hair on his chest and his oniony smell.

My skin has helped to make me a good swimmer, as does being six feet tall with the wingspan of an albatross, but I can't say I'm glad to have it. I have coat-hanger shoulders, my deltoid muscles like loaves of bread. Fred always liked to stroke the striated fibers of flat muscle that spread from my waist, like butterfly wings, he said. Of course I wish things were different.

*  *  *

By the end of dinner and our fourth bottle of wine it was clear that Ham and Fred were planning on drinking straight through to morning. They ordered dessert and then pulled out the bottle of Patrón. I abstained and asked the waiter to bring over four liters of distilled
water with a wedge of lime. When she brought the water in carafes I stood up and chugged each one without stopping, making my stomach and bladder swell like a frog. Then I went to the bathroom to pee and wash my face and get ready to drive the Land Rover home. In the bathroom mirror my face looked hard and dry, my nose and cheeks inflamed, my pupils spinning disks. I dunked my head in the sink and tied my wet hair back in a ponytail. I was about to turn thirty, and so much about our lives was going to change. I closed my eyes and thought of the lake.

*  *  *

Anyone who has swum in a pool understands the palpable difference between the sensations of swimming in a few feet of water and in twelve feet or more. It shouldn't feel different, but it does. It is the knowledge of that vastness beneath you that cannot be shaken or forgotten, something about the drastic proportions and ratios involved. To be nothing more than a speck, a mote of flesh, traversing a vast expanse of water, a long line of horizon, and to feel at once buoyed by the bubble of elements, hundreds of feet from the bottom, is a sensation that I think must be close to flying, like a great soaring seabird, wide-ranging and steady above the clouds.

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.