The Night Swimmer (31 page)

How the world shines with light.

The Journals of John Cheever

T
he final event of the contest, the poetry reading, took place at the Old Crown and Anchor in Cork, a giant pub with a stage and seating for a hundred. The three finalists stood on the stage along with the president of Murphy's, who was wearing an improbably green stovepipe hat. The first three rows were taken up with media and the podium had a dozen microphones sprouting from the front like a bouquet. Fred was glowing, seemingly expanding every moment with power. He was in his element. Fred always had the ability to transmit emotion in a glance or steady gaze. It was part of the secret to his strange charisma.

The others had come to the podium clutching sheaves of notes, sweating and mouthing their memorized lines. Fred bounded up and swept the crowd with eyes that shone like a funnel of light, over the guests, other contestants, the judges, until his eyes rested on me. He paused a moment, swallowed, his eyes softening slightly.

Shy one, shy one,

Shy one of my heart,

She moves in the firelight

Pensively apart.

She carries in the dishes,

And lays them in a row.

To an isle in the water

With her would I go.

She carries in the candles,

And lights the curtained room,

Shy in the doorway

And shy in the gloom;

And shy as a rabbit,

Helpful and shy.

To an isle in the water

With her would I fly.

He was reading it to me. I wanted to reach out across the room and hold him. I could feel his heart steadily thrumming in my ears like the sea.

*  *  *

The day following 9/11 Fred retreated into his office with a few bottles of whiskey. After he didn't come to bed the first night I knocked softly, and when no one answered I opened the door. Fred was in his underwear, huddled at his computer with his headphones on, rocking back and forth, making a strange low moaning sound. The only light was the flickering blue of the computer screen. The desk and floor were covered in paper; Fred had taken his novel manuscripts out of their boxes and strewn them all over the room, as if he was looking for something. I closed the door and went back to the bedroom and crawled into our bed.

I didn't see him for three whole days. There was evidence in the kitchen, food left on the counter, empty bottles, that he emerged sometimes in the night. I figured I would let him go. On the fourth night he woke me when he crawled into bed. He was naked and urgent for me and we made love quickly. Afterward we lay on our backs in the dark, listening to the whir of the ceiling fan, the house settling.

Duncan Avery is dead, he said.

I know. It's terrible.

It should've been me.

It doesn't work like that, I said. If you are to blame for his death then we are all to blame. For all of them.

How?

Every decision can be traced forward to some tragedy. You know this. The world doesn't end at our fingertips. We affect the world every moment.

Fred turned to me and put his lips against my ear.

I can't shake it, he said.

You will. You have to.

Something will happen. Something good.

We will make it happen.

I hope so, he said. I . . . don't feel alive.

I wrapped myself around him, pressing us together.

You are alive, I said. You are here with me. And I am so grateful for that. If it had been you . . . I'm happy it wasn't you.

It feels wrong, he said. To be happy that it wasn't me. It feels wrong to be alive.

*  *  *

The next morning Fred got up early and burned all of his writing, his novels, everything, in the fireplace. I was awakened by the smell, and when I came in the living room he stood in his bathrobe before the fire as the flames roared up the chimney. The heat was incredible, and Fred's body was slick with sweat, his eyes bloodshot. Outside charred paper and flaming bits of pages fell like snowfall, catching on the trees, falling in the yard, drifting out over the lake.

Fred! What are you doing?

He tossed in a fat stack of paper and the fire whooshed and sparkled.

I never had a real story to tell, he said. Until now.

He walked over to me and kissed me on the forehead.

I'm fine, he said. It's over.

Then Fred showered, shaved, put on a suit, and went into his Burlington office.

*  *  *

A few weeks later his father Ham came buzzing low over the trees in his seaplane, looking for a place to land. Within the year we would be living on the Irish coast, an outpost at the end of the world.

*  *  *

The afternoon after the incident in the school bathroom I met my sister Beatrice at her car for a ride home like usual. Her face was sullen, inert, in a sort of frozen state, and it was so striking that I was scared to speak and we drove home in complete silence. When we pulled into the driveway, Beatrice asked me to wait a moment, still holding the wheel, staring through the windshield at the garage door. Finally she turned to me and in her face, just for a second, I saw an expression of such sorrow that I had never seen up to that point in my life. It was a look of mourning, as if she had been abandoned here, alone. Then covering her face with her hands she burst into tears. Beatrice leaned over and I held her as she sobbed in my arms, but she would not say what had happened to her.

That evening at dinner she had to be asked twice to pass anything and she stirred her pasta around her plate. Her presence made us all feel clumsy and irritated.

What on earth is the matter with you? my mother said with a note of exasperation in her voice. Will you please straighten up?

Go to hell, Beatrice said, her face calm.
All of you can go to hell.

*  *  *

The next morning at swim practice my teammates doggedly stripped down to their suits, staggered out onto the deck, cursing the cold tiles, the cold water, the coming hour and a half of toil. I had slept little, but everything seemed in sharp focus, the fluorescent lights casting us all in stark relief, standing at the pool edge, our sleepy coach scratching a workout on a portable blackboard. The other
girls huddled together, arms crossed, sullen-faced, shivering. I flung myself into the air and attacked the water. Our coach always worked us hard but I went at the timed sets like a frantic machine, coming in way under the interval, lapping the other swimmers in my lane, slapping at their feet so they would get out of the way and if they didn't I swam over them. At the end of the last set I was panting like some kind of hysterical animal, my chest heaving, my skin blooming with flowers of blood, and my arms felt hard as iron. My coach knelt by the pool in his flip-flops, his jeans wet to the knees, and gave me a small pat on the shoulder. Everyone else was out of the pool, standing there, looking at me. My goggles were fogged but it didn't matter; they looked like ghosts on the edge of a deep wood. I was fifteen years old.

I went down and pushed off the wall and dolphin-kicked halfway across the pool and exploded into butterfly, tearing through a two hundred. I finished hard into the wall and immediately vaulted out of the pool as I could feel my muscles about to seize. I was crawling on all fours on the tile in a world of smoke. On the deck there was a white bucket with a twenty-dollar bill in the bottom. If you filled the bucket you got the money. I grabbed the rim with both hands and heaved everything I had. My body was convulsing, and I buckled over into a fetal position, my bladder spasmodically releasing. I covered my face with my hands and wailed. An indoor pool is a world of echoes, and the sound was deafening. I didn't care about anything.

You see that? my coach said.

He was standing over me, addressing the rest of the team.

That's
what it takes, he said. To win.
That
is what's required.

*  *  *

Until now I have never told anyone other than Fred the story of what happened to my sister, or how her life seemed to spiral away from her that day. Her last year of high school was a calamity of conflict, long hours of shouting at my parents, a sudden change of friends, quitting the field hockey team, staying out all night. Her face became hard,
her voice cold and sarcastic, and she bickered with me over nothing at all. For so many years all I wanted was to be more like her. All my young life I had lived happily in her shadow. And then she drifted away to a place I couldn't find. It was like a great light had gone out, and as I moved into adulthood the world seemed cast with a silver glow, rippling like water, something always slipping furtively away just out of the corner of my eye.

Beatrice began bartending in ski towns and waiting tables at summer resorts, and rarely called our parents, who became like lost birds, wandering around the house in a daze, unable to comprehend what they had done.

*  *  *

Two years after she left home, when Beatrice was twenty, she called my mother one night, laughing hysterically into the phone, to tell her she was pregnant. It was well after midnight, and I heard the strident tone in my mother's voice in the kitchen. I crept out of my bed and watched her shout into the phone from the darkened doorway, the echo of my sister's tinny laughter filling the room.

We didn't hear from her until four months later. She called late at night again, and this time I answered the phone. She kept pausing to talk to someone else who was there with her. In the background I could hear music and shouting, the clink of glasses.

You all should be happy, Beatrice said. You all got your way.

What do you mean? I said.

The baby's gone, she said. Done.

What? How?

Don't be an idiot, Elly, she said. I lost the baby. Had a fucking miscarriage.

She covered the phone for a moment and I could hear her arguing with someone.

Do you even know what that is? she said.

Yes, I said.

You don't ever want it, she said. I wouldn't wish that shit . . . You
don't
want it.

There was a crack in her voice and she covered the phone again.

Beatrice?

A muffled sob. A woman screamed with joy in the background.

Yeah.

Are you okay?

Oh . . . fuck, Elly. Listen. I gotta go.

*  *  *

Heartbreak is often described in stories as something like getting hit in the chest with a heavy object, a kind of blunt trauma of the heart. For me it is more like the furtive scraping of a branch, as if someone were digging around my ribs, poking about looking for something soft to stab. A finger rattling around my spine, unexpected but always present, like a dry cough. Its touch is dead-dry and without feeling, like something without a human concern, the passionless expressions of lizards and stone.

*  *  *

The man who died in Fred's place fell from the eighty-sixth floor of the World Trade Center. Duncan Avery clung to the smashed window frame with a group of people until the heat became too intense. He spoke with his wife on his cell phone just before he fell. He told her that he was sorry but that he had to let go.

The Averys lived in Jersey City with their three small children. His wife, Marie, was a pediatric nurse who one Christmas gave us a baby blanket she'd knitted, the pattern a pale green shamrock on a field of blue. It was shaped like a lopsided hourglass. Fred had it folded neatly in an old seaman's chest. Marie told Fred she hoped that it would bring us luck, that it would bring us healthy children.

T
he builders came in first, skulking off the street, the rain running off their clothes. They spread out around the room, a couple by the fire, a few others drawing up to the bar. Fred poured them lagers and they sat in their squinty groups, sipping their beer and muttering in Irish. We had a half hour till closing and we didn't have any other customers. Fred went back to reading while I went in the kitchen and made up a couple of turkey and cucumber sandwiches. I had an hour of Patty Griffin in the jukebox, the entire
Flaming Red
album, and in the kitchen I heard the steady thump and swing of “Tony” warming up as the door opened again, the sound of rain and the sea, then silence again save for the music.

When I came into the main room there were two men in ferry gear, one of them Eamon Corrigan, standing inside the door, shaking off their wet jackets. Fred set his book down and stood behind the bar, smiling gamely, waiting for drink orders. I set the sandwiches on the bar.

What'll it be, gents? Fred said.

The Corrigans looked around for a moment, taking in the surroundings. I put my hand on Fred's arm.

Hey, I said to him, I think we ought to—

One of the builders at the bar reached over and flipped the plate of sandwiches across the room, shattering it against the wall.

What the fuck? Fred said.

I had an idea that maybe we could back out into the kitchen, lock
the door, escape into the back alley. Eamon Corrigan stepped forward, his survival suit crinkling. He had that wide, gap-toothed Corrigan smile of a child, his black hair wet against his forehead.

What? Fred said. What is it?

Fred's chest was heaving, his breath coming fast. Eamon muttered in Irish, and a builder at the front door flipped the open sign around, and turned off the main room lights. The only light came from out of the kitchen and Fred's reading lamp behind the bar. The builders gathered around us.

What do you want? Fred said.

The door opened with a whoosh of air and water, and Conchur stooped under the doorframe. Water came off his oilskin trench coat in sheets, and he took off his hat and scratched his head with a distracted air, as if he had just come in for a beer. When he saw me he gave me a nod and an almost apologetic expression.