The Night Swimmer (12 page)

T
here isn't much to pouring a perfect pint. Anyone who practices a bit can get the appropriate timing down. You have to get the foam to settle right, a nice cap an inch or so, a gently swelling meniscus of cream just over the rim of the glass. The difference maker in this contest was the foam design, or what you can draw in the foam in the final seconds of pouring. The choices are limited as you have only a second or two to steer the flow of the beer into a design that will stay on the cap and not push it over the edge or cause it all to run together. A panel of distinguished bartenders from Murphy's pubs all over Ireland was gathered to judge the contest. No practice rounds, no do-overs. There would be only one shot.

We knew the prize pub was in County Cork on the southern coast, and so Fred had done a lot of research on the history and commerce of the area to stir up some ideas. He settled upon an Irish cross surrounded by a fish, to signify the famous medieval monks of southern Cork and the fishing industry.

Fred said that he learned to pour a beer from watching his father, Ham, who couldn't stand the sight of a sloppy pour. I'd seen him berate a poor cocktail waitress or bartender on a few occasions for spilt alcohol or even a dribble down the side of a glass. Ham always praised the bars of Britain, those men know how to pour a beer, he said. Can't make a mixed drink to save their fucking lives, but for a beer they never miss.

Murphy's provided the contestants with time at local Cork pubs
to practice, but Fred had already put in plenty of time at a place we frequented in Burlington. There was the problem of differing levels of pressure, the mix of carbon dioxide in the tanks, the circumference and cleanliness of the hoses, temperature, the seal of the keg, the variations in the glass surface, such as contours and shape, microscopic fractures or bends, and atmospheric and barometric pressure. Fred sifted through these problems on his scraps of paper without any result other than to expose the maddening improbability of the task. But he was well prepared regardless.

The lights were dimmed, and a single spotlight at the tap illuminated each contestant as he stepped forward to pour. There was a smaller crowd of supporters this time, but the room was filled out with media, including a few television cameras. Sure enough, all the other contestants went for the obvious choices: a three-leafed clover, the three bands of the Irish flag. A sunburst or shining sun. A few even tried the Murphy's seal, with disastrous results.

I couldn't see the pint as Fred poured, but when he flicked the tap back to shut it off and raised his hands up in triumph, fixing me with that broad grin, I knew he had done it.

*  *  *

When I first met Fred, his father hadn't yet acknowledged him as his son. It's hard to believe, but Ham insisted that he was not Fred's father. Fred's parents separated when he was a baby and he never had any real contact with his dad, other than a few letters to his mother, which she would never share with Fred. His mother died from lymphatic cancer when he was eighteen.

There was a picture at the heart of the matter, a little black-and-white photo taken in 1971, a young Ham standing in a white T-shirt on a sidewalk somewhere holding a baby in one arm like a football. He is looking directly at the camera, a kind of stunned, openmouthed look. The baby is tiny, swaddled in white hospital blankets, just the tuft of black hair emerging from the top.

How could he deny it? I said. You have a photo.

Fred shook his head, his eyes wet and shining.

He says that it was a doll he was holding. It's not me.

What?

A doll, Fred said. My father said the baby isn't real.

*  *  *

Fred said he fell in love with me the first time he saw me. We were standing outside the English Department, the first week of school, a loose group of new graduate students waiting to go inside for class. It was a raw September morning, the ground damp, and we were small-talking and trying to be coolly intellectual, smoking cigarettes and gently probing for potential friends among the shrewish and haggard gathering. Graduate students, on the whole, are a remarkably unattractive group, and we were a particularly sad case of toadstools.

Right there, he said to his buddy Seth, nodding at me.
That
is the girl I want.

This is the story that Fred told me, and I believe him as it sounds precisely like something he would do. He was fond of bold predictions, and this was one rare case where he was right.

I hadn't even noticed Fred that day, but that was mostly because I had the tunnel vision of the extremely self-conscious individual, seeing the world through the wrong end of a telescope, each word and gesture a macro decision that involved all my mental faculties. But that same week, when we had our first class together, American Romanticism, I certainly noticed him. From the first question thrown to the class it was clear not only that Fred had already read all of the assigned material but that he had actually pondered the vagaries of Romanticism and worked out an ordered explanation and definition. By our second class it was clear that Fred could also be an intellectual bully who steamrollered those who stood up to his onslaught. He would flare up, lean forward, and jabbing one finger into the table he would use words like
clearly
and
obviously
to make it seem like what he was saying was gospel and anyone who opposed this was an idiot. Still, his declarations were cloaked in an easygoing friendliness that made him hard not to like, as long as you weren't the one fixed in his sights at that moment.

In retrospect it was quite silly, the whole act, as we were merely half-assed graduate students at a second-rate university, having debates of minimal import. Yet Fred made it seem important and somehow elevated the entire program. He had a way of doing that, making the mundane and ordinary shine with a kind of holy light. Even when I was behind the curtain and learned about his damaging sense of nobility and belief in the importance of candor at all cost, even then, sitting at a small table in a diner, Fred's jiggling knees making our coffee cups rattle, Fred gesticulating at the rest of us with a fork speared with pancakes, I would find myself feeling as if I was participating in something of real import, that this conversation, this moment, and these people
meant
something.

*  *  *

A few weeks later I was nervously small-talking my way through a somnambulant dinner party when Fred burst through the doors wearing his black watch cap and scarf. He plunked down a liter of Jack Daniel's on the table and loudly demanded to know who among the gathered crowd was a sophist. We laughed, nervously, but there was a palpable sound of relief as we rose from our chairs and gathered around him, as if he were bearing literal gifts. Within a few minutes the music rose from the background into something vital, the talk became animated and even volatile. I watched Fred interrogate a poor invertebrate zoologist by the kitchen range top about his research project involving spiral-shelled mollusks that he collected and killed by baking in a kiln. Then we were smoking a joint with a jazz flautist. Fred was blunt about his disdain for the instrument but somehow couched his insults in such a way that the flautist laughed with us until he shot beer out his nose. Then a group of us took a cigarette break on the front steps, sitting under a single bare yellow bulb listening to the pattering of moths. Fred was making notes on a folded-up piece of paper.

That was some good shit from the mollusk guy, he said. He's like some kind of invertebrate Nazi. He's got a shellfish holocaust going on there. Priceless stuff.

Fred was taking it all in, saving it up for something, always adding to his pile of esoteric flotsam, while the rest of us nodded and smiled and drank our cocktails with due attention. Things
mattered
when you were around Fred.

He tucked his pen and paper into his blazer pocket and turned to me. The others had stumbled back inside, where a circle of people danced around a coffee table to a Stone Roses song.

Are you a writer? he asked.

No, I said. I mean, I'd like to be.

Me too, he said. Definitely.

I hadn't thought seriously about being a writer, but suddenly it seemed like a real possibility. The idea shivered through me like a sheet of ice. I loved to read, I loved stories.

But, Fred said, you are clearly an athlete. Tell me. I want to know all about it.

I murmured a few things about swimming and he snapped his fingers.

Perfect, he said, you must go to the beach with us. Fall break. Cape Hatteras. I need someone to get in the water with me.

He jerked his thumb at the apartment door.

These fools are afraid. They think the water's too cold. You have a problem with cold water?

No, I said. I don't.

He stared at me for a moment, a faraway smile on his lips. I shrugged nervously.

I believe you, he said. I can see it.

I told him that there was no way I could afford it or spare the time, but Fred was relentless. It was the off-season, a bunch of people going, it would be cheap. We would road-trip, I could ride in Fred's old Saab. By the end of the night he had me committed to the trip and we kissed awkwardly in the darkness of the backyard. He was shy about it, coming at me like a small bird, and my fascination with him began to deepen into something else.

*  *  *

Fred showed me the picture a few weeks later when we were at a little Greek place that the grad students used to frequent because the beer and gyros were cheap. The university graduate jazz program played in small trios and quartets there in the evenings, led by a serious, bearded professor who played a decent alto sax. I ended up at one end of a long table, sitting next to Fred, who was holding court. He gestured with a cigarette in one hand, in his other a fat, dripping double-stacked hamburger called the Maximilian, a pitcher of Budweiser before his plate as he extolled the virtues of his favorite Pre-Raphaelite painter (Millais) and denounced his least favorite (Rossetti). He was thick in that generally masculine way, powerful without being particularly fit, swarthy, and his jigging knees vibrated against mine. He made me feel
small.
He stuck a fiver in the band's jar and asked them to play “Someone to Watch Over Me,” and the bearded professor bent over his horn and hooted a low, meandering version that nearly made me climb into Fred's lap and fall asleep. It was a wonderful night.

When we were the only ones left, Fred began talking about his father. If Fred drank enough he got remarkably emotional, and at that time this seemed like a revelation to me. I kept his glass filled with beer so he would continue. He had the photo in his wallet, sealed in plastic. It was creased and worn, but you could clearly see a young man holding a baby. Fred said that the man in the photo was his father, and that the baby was him, but that his father wouldn't admit it.

We sat silently for a few minutes, watching the saxophonist warble through a variation of “A Love Supreme” with moderate success. I thought of my own father, in my parents' house in Virginia, stretched out in his recliner, watching the History Channel. His murky, labored breathing, the linty smell of socks and peanuts, his hairy ears. His wide-set, calm eyes, the way they flitted over you when you addressed him. He had always been there, a stable, looming figure throughout my childhood and early adulthood.

I opened my mouth.

*  *  *

When I was a freshman in high school, my sister, Beatrice, was in the junior class homecoming court and rode sitting on the backseat of a convertible Corvette around the football field at halftime, a bouquet of purple pansies in her lap. I took her picture, a Polaroid instant, while I was standing along the chain-link fence that separated the stands from the field, the stadium lights behind her shrouding her in white light. Her dress was a deep green, her hair a more subtle version of my flaming red, and her smile twelve-toothed and electric.

After school Beatrice taught me how to smoke cigarettes by letting the smoke drift out of your mouth while you sucked it through your nose, which she called French inhaling. She claimed she did this so that I would not embarrass her socially, but even then I was aware that she was protective and somewhat proud of me.

Toward the end of that year there was an incident in the junior class locker-bank bathroom. Someone saw part of this happen, or Beatrice told someone, but not me. By the time the story filtered down to me, the origins were lost.

There were three boys hanging about the locker bank. Beatrice had left her fourth-period chemistry class, a hall pass in hand, her hair tied up in a thick, high ponytail, her two crisp polo shirts, pink and white, with the collars up. I imagine her chewing a stick of spearmint gum, thinking vaguely about the periodic table and the coming weekend. These three boys followed her into the bathroom, locking the door behind them.

*  *  *

Fred didn't say anything, just took me by the hand and led me out of there and across the silent court square, the lamplight flickering and the sound of the train yard booming in the distance. I guess I was a bit drunk. We drove to the old Victorian house where he had a tiny room and lay on his bed, and Fred held me, stroking my hair and arms, until I fell asleep.

Fred lived in a house full of Phish heads with a serious pot-growing operation in the attic. His books were stacked hip deep and he slept on a blow-up mattress. He had four boxes of notebooks
and journals stacked on the floor and his desk was covered with scraps of paper, bits of napkins, or gum wrappers that he carried in his pockets. They formed piles, settling like snowdrifts against his computer monitor. Every few weeks he'd sift through the piles of paper doing a sort of triage. The scraps with the most potential made it into the second round, which was his desk drawer, packed so tight he had to jam it closed. From these notes he would select pieces to enter into his word processor files, of which there were legion. While we were in graduate school Fred wrote at least three full novels and large chunks of several others. He wrote one about a dwarf in a small town in Wyoming who practices for his death by burying himself in a field with scuba gear, another about a gang of bootleggers in Depression-era Virginia, and another about an American Egyptologist working at the British Museum in London. They were getting progressively larger. He had them stacked up along one wall like a series of paper steps. The last one was over eight hundred pages.