The Night Swimmer Read Free Page 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’smusic 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 wouldrevolve 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