The Night Swimmer (18 page)

Nell had been gazing at the sea for more than twenty years, and whatever world she inhabited before she moved to that house on the cliff was certainly a long way from the world she inhabited now.

When Bill barged in the peace would be shattered. Bill was a force of nature in a way similar to Fred, with one essential difference. He wanted Nell, the prettiest girl in town, and he got her. He wanted to become a marine, a war hero, and he did. He wanted to
retire to an island, so he moved to Clear. He wanted to become a writer, so he wrote novels, poems, and essays. He simply sat down and churned out everything he thought of and sent it everywhere possible. Bill published pieces in nearly every small newspaper, community newsletter, and local hash sheet in County Cork, as well as military journals, obscure literary journals, artists' collectives, sailing magazines, tourist pamphlets. He wrote like he lived, with an aggressive, grandstanding style. But he became what he wanted.

*  *  *

By December, Fred was going almost exclusively to bourbon, which was fine as no one else at the Nightjar was drinking it. He also seemed to have developed an adversarial relationship with the local patrons, what few there were, and a positive animosity toward the other pub owners in Baltimore. Our only business came from Bill, Dinny, the woofers, and the occasional groups of tourists who wandered in. We were losing money, and the coming months would only be worse.

Can't figure out what these people want, Fred said. We've got all the usual shit, fireplace, beer, cozy little tables. Maybe we need an old dog.

He dug around in the ice bin with his glass. He poured himself a four-count Maker's Mark and kicked a couple pieces of stray ice under the bar. It was two in the afternoon and the cleaning service was coming in later and it was sorely needed. The Nightjar wasn't more dirty than most pubs, but there was a growing look of disarray, especially as Fred's projects migrated downstairs. His end of the bar was presently covered with nautical charts and lengths of rope that he used to practice his knots. The pale winter light filtered through the grimy windows. Neko Case bellowed a rockabilly tune from the jukebox.

Maybe we should change up the music, I said. Or at least turn it down.

No way, Fred said. We play good music here.

We gotta do something.

Agreed. We'll brainstorm during the holidays, come back fresh.

I spent the next couple weeks at the Nightjar trying to get the place sorted. As the bar traffic diminished we cut back on the keg orders and food offerings. If you wanted something to eat at the Nightjar that winter, what you got would depend on what was in the fridge and what Fred felt like cooking. Though Fred claimed he had it under control, I went through the ordering logs to make sure we would have everything we needed come January, prepping the bar to shut down for the holidays. We had a flight out of Cork to Washington, DC, to stay with my parents for a week, then to see Fred's father up in Atlantic City.

On our next trip into Cork I picked up some nautical histories of the waters off southwestern Ireland and Baltimore. Essentially the stretch of North Atlantic surrounding Fastnet Lighthouse was arguably one of the most dangerous seas in the world, a whirling maw of currents and weather that sank thousand-ton tankers, destroyed frigates and yachts, that drove seasoned skippers into rocks or a thousand miles off course. The history books were full of tales of smashed ships, floating wreckage, distress signals in the night, hulls ripped wide open and the drowned sucked into the void without a sound. In 1979 a Force 10 gale ripped through the area, killing fifteen men participating in a yachting race and destroying dozens of boats. On Christmas Eve in 1972 there was a storm that measured Force 12, a remarkable occurrence, which meant hurricane-force winds and waves greater than fifty feet. A Cape Clear ferry was lost trying to reach the mainland. What was most notable about this storm was the suddenness of the rising winds and seas, taking a couple hours to reach its peak fury. It was the same day that Highgate was effectively banished to the island by his family.

As I read these horrid accounts, I strangely felt all the more confident of my ability to make the swim to Fastnet. I just knew that it wouldn't happen to me. It couldn't. It was as if these other people had engaged in some kind of tragic wager with the sea, putting up their lives in a foolish bet, and lost. But for me it wasn't like that. It wasn't
about odds, or my natural ability. The ocean was not my adversary. The sea would never destroy me.

*  *  *

The pile on Fred's desk grew each day like a fresh volcano flow, a river of paper, pamphlets, canceled checks, statements, mounds of paper clips, stapled pages crosshatched with Fred's heavy script, hardbound journals, wads of tissue, sticky mugs rimmed with collars of coffee tar, pens and markers, takeaway containers, a few tumblers with the resin of whiskey, cantilevered stacks of books feathered with Post-it notes, and a dense thatch of paper scraps covering the whole thing.

Do not trust your instincts. It is instinct that makes us want to lope through the night and burn down the barn. It is instinct that makes us act cruel to strangers at the breakfast table. Your instinct is wrong and because we know this we are human.

There are several species of animals, and loads of insects, that routinely eat their own offspring. Innocence has no rights in this world. We are all capable. Eat what you need.

Fred assured me that all was well. The mess on his desk, he contested, was mostly his novel. Or the first part of a three-novel triptych as he called it. He had over three hundred thousand words in first draft, another two hundred thousand in notes and scraps, and then there was all the stuff he had yet to transcribe. Fred blew his nose into a paper towel and tossed it behind his computer monitor. I was worried about our finances.

We're gonna be okay, he said. Hey, Bill said he'd give my manuscript to his publisher.

How are we gonna be okay? I asked. We haven't taken in any money.

It was after midnight and the wind rattled the windowpanes. Fred used a kitchen knife to open a box of books he'd ordered. He sifted through them, muttering, stacking them on a corner of his desk. I
knew that since we had no mortgage on the place, including no rent on our apartment, and the taxes and insurance were already paid up for three years by Murphy's, we simply needed to pull in enough to cover expenses and our own living costs. We had almost no savings except what we made on the sale of the Vermont house, and I knew that must have been gone by now. The trickle of money coming in couldn't possibly offset our expenses, especially several thousand dollars for holiday travel.

We can skip the holidays, I said. My parents will understand.

Fred held up a finger, head down in a book.

Let me worry about it, he said.

No, I'm worried, too.

He slapped the book closed and stacked it with the others.

Okay, he said, Ham sent me a check for it.

Ham is paying for our trip.

It's not a big deal. We just have to hold on till summer. Then we will rake it in. That's how everyone operates here.

Fred stood and hitched up his shorts. It was fucking fifty degrees out and my husband was wearing flip-flops. He was dressed like he was on vacation. His eyes were large and swimming, and I stepped into his bearish embrace.

Hang in there, little buddy, he said. Just hang in there. All under control.

He fell on the bed, put his feet up, and covered his face with the top book on the pile. DeLillo's
White Noise.

Fred was one of those readers that the writer dreams of: deeply serious, willing, and indefatigable. When he read an author he read every book in the oeuvre, regardless of reputation or worth. He consumed books, reading at all hours, through the night and into the morning, and Fred read
fast.
He could read a three-hundred-page novel in an afternoon. His retention, however, as he was quick to note, wasn't quite so admirable. This problem plagued him in nearly all things.

My sense of myself as a reader and writer in graduate school was shaped by Dr. Mark Facknitz. It was Facknitz who helped me understand
that I am no writer; rather I am a reader, and that is where my talents lie. He was a surly man, with a vast intellect and a broad red face and the habit of massaging his temples as he spoke, particularly when some simpleton graduate student tried to contest some notion about Hegel or Keats. Facknitz taught a fiction-writing class, and after reading my first attempt at a story, he rubbed his massive brow as we sat in his office and told me to read John Cheever. I went to the downtown bookstore that day and found solid hardback editions of his collected stories and journals. I still do not know what it was that Facknitz saw in my writing that suggested Cheever, more likely he was actually identifying my urges as a reader, and the next three years were so heavily imbued with Cheever that I cannot honestly separate him out from my waking life.

What I'm doing here is an act of admittance, something Fred would have approved of. Cheever's value to me is not merely as a storyteller but also as a model of the difficulties of navigating morality in an immoral world. Everyone has their moments of glad grace, the sudden clarity of vision, when all the world seems like crystal and wine, music from the hall, a man with a cigar on the balcony, the moon and the rain at the depot with a small child holding a basket of flowers. Those times when you are gifted to be alive in this terrible and unrelenting world of desire. His voice is the narrator of my life, and even now when I read his lines or just think of the gentle cadence of his syntax, my heart is rent with astonishing gratitude. As long as his work exists I have no need of a biographer.

Fred understood my compulsion for Cheever, and had a decent amount of respect for him, but Fred preferred the snarky postmodernism of Martin Amis, the catalogs of grit and filth, the juxtapositions of science and shit, math and murder, the endless puzzle of fragmented narratives. To me it too often seems like a lock to pick. Or an exercise in self-flagellation.

*  *  *

I called my parents to talk about plans for the holidays. My mother sounded stricken and tearful.

Oh, Elly. We think Beatrice lost the baby.

Oh god, no! What happened?

She hasn't told us anything. She just all of a sudden stopped talking about it. She's drinking, smoking again. It's not there.

What?

She . . . she was showing, you know? A nice round . . .

My mother blew her nose. In the background I could hear my father watching football.

Now it's gone, she said. It's gone.

I
n the first week of December the temperature was hovering around forty-five in the Ineer, and I had taken to wearing my 3/2 mm full-body wet suit, and even then I could only do about an hour before I lost sensation in my face. I was doing laps across the mouth of the bay, and after about a mile my eyes began to swell, filling my goggles, my fingers and toes sending faint prickling warnings like distant satellites. I told O'Boyle that I was going to reattempt the Fastnet swim in the spring, as soon as the gale season died down enough, and I wanted to get as much time in as possible before the Christmas holiday.

On my last day I staggered up the steps, slipped into the notch behind the Illaunfaha or Giant's Causeway, and stripped off my gear and laid it on the rocks to dry. The sun was out, so I spread myself on the rocks as well, my skin flushed beet red, letting my swimsuit dry on my body.

I was thinking about Virginia, the trip home, when I heard a scuffling of rock and realized someone was climbing over the causeway to my hidden spot. Occasionally a tourist or bird-watcher came across me while I was entering or leaving the water, and I often got bemused looks or even staring uncomprehension. We usually exchanged polite greetings and then continued on our way. A shadow raised itself above me, a man, and I tried to smile warmly, my face still mostly numb.

Hello, Elly, he said.

I sat up, trying to focus on his face. He had a bag slung around one shoulder, one hand on the rock, a knee bent.

It's me, he said. Sebastian.

Oh, Christ!

I sat up, bringing my knees to my chest, and wrapped my arms around my shins.

Sorry, he said. I didn't mean to . . . sorry.

But he didn't move, still standing there on the rock, looking down at me. I suddenly felt twelve again, an awkward crane stooping on the pool deck, my nipples burning in my suit.

It's okay, I said, grabbing a towel and my sweatshirt, I'm just drying off. While the sun is out.

Yes, he said, hell of a day.

Sebastian rearranged his position on the rock. I put on my sweatshirt and tied the towel around my waist.

I saw you swimming, he said, from over on Ballyieragh.

He patted his bag.

Have a pretty good lens so I could tell it was you. Though I don't know who else it would be. At first I figured you for a seal. I was going over to the Five Bells for some lunch and I saw you come out, so I figured I'd walk over.

Oh yeah?

I slipped my jeans on and fumbled with my shoes. I stood and tied my hair back while facing the water. The ocean was brisk and white-capped, the breeze westerly, insistent.

So, he said after a few endless moments, I guess I was checking to see if you needed a bite. A bit of lunch, anyway. Care to?

He stammered slightly. I watched him, his eyes round and alive.

I could eat a horse, I said. Starving.

Me too, he said. Right, off we go then?

*  *  *

Ariel brought us each a crowded plate containing a pair of whole roasted potatoes, a baseball-size clump of sautéed leeks with bacon, and a mound of spicy coleslaw. Two pints of Murphy's. My wet suit
was hanging over a few chairs, steaming by the peat fire. I went after the potatoes with my hands, breaking them open, and plying them with butter and sour cream. While they cooled I picked at the coleslaw, trying to resist gorging myself.