The Night Listener : A Novel (2 page)

Those jaunty appliances seemed the very essence of our lost domesticity, the dependable homeyness that had come and gone. I felt a clear sense of relief when Anna hit a key and made them disappear.

“Have you updated the Quicken files?” she asked.

“No,” I told her. “I don’t know how to get into that thing.” She batted her eyes at me dubiously.

“I’m an IBM person,” I said. “Jess always handled this.” She began clicking the mouse. “Save all your receipts, then. I’ll take care of the rest.”

“Great,” I said feebly.

“Why don’t you go kick back?” she said.

“You mean get out?”

“Yeah.”

The difficult child had been banished to his room.

So the dog and I went for our walk. The street we took—the one we always take—was dubbed an avenue early in the century, though it barely qualifies. True, it’s paved with red bricks and lined rather grandly with red-leafed plum trees, but it runs for only a block, dead-ending at the edge of Sutro Forest. The houses along the way are old shingled places with copper gutters bleeding green, but their foolproof charm wasn’t working that afternoon.

I reached the woods well ahead of Hugo. Below me lay a gorge furred with fog, where eucalyptus trees creaked like masts on a galleon. I stared at them for a moment, lost in their operatic gloom, then turned and looked for the dog. He was yards behind, too blind and dotty to get his bearings. When I whistled, his floppy ears rose to half-mast, but he promptly trotted off in the wrong direction. Poor old geezer, I thought. He seemed even more befuddled since Jess had left.

“Hey, beastlet! Turn your ass around.”

My voice was sounding disconnected again. I was halfway down the block before I realized why: I had sounded just like Jess. That gruff but folksy tone was precisely the one he had always used with Hugo. And no one else, I can assure you, had ever called the dog “beastlet.” There was nothing mystical about this, just a cheap trick of the mind that reconstructed Jess the only way I could manage.

How pathetic, I thought. And how like me to play the dummy to my own bad ventriloquism.

The fog was much thicker as I headed home. Out of habit, I approached the house from the sidewalk across the street, where I could see it in context: three narrow stories notched into the wooded slope. Its new cedar shingles were still too pallid for its dark green trim, but another season or two of rain would turn them into tar-nished silver. I’d been eagerly awaiting that. I’d wanted the place to look ancestral, as if we had lived there forever.

Upon moving in, three years earlier, we had thrown ourselves into a frenzy of renovation. Fences and decks sprang up overnight, and the garden arrived fully grown, an instant Eden of azaleas and black bamboo and Australian tree ferns the size of beach umbrellas.

We had already lived for seven years with Jess’s dwindling T cells and had no intention of waiting for nature to catch up with us.

Jess used to joke about this. Sometimes he called me Mrs. Winches-ter, after the loony old lady on the Peninsula who believed that constant home improvement would keep evil spirits away. And that was pretty close. My frantic agenda for the house had been my only insurance against the inevitable. Jess was bound to get sick, one of these days, but not until those shingles had mellowed and the new fountain was installed and the wisteria had gone ropy above the lych-gate. That was the deal: Jess could leave, but only when the dream was complete, when we were snug in a fortress of our own creation, barricaded against the coming storm.

It didn’t occur to me there were other ways of leaving.

But about that package:

It awaited me upon my return, having risen like a phoenix from the wastebasket to a place of prominence beside the fax machine.

Anna was gone, bound for another client, but her dry smile still lingered in the room. I sat at the desk and picked up the padded envelope, turning it over slowly in my hands. It had the feel of Christmas somehow, peculiar as that sounds, the brown-paper promise of wonders to come. Anna had been right, I decided; it wouldn’t do to stop being curious. Especially now.

I pulled the little tab and out fell a set of bound galleys with a light blue cover. The book was called
The Blacking Factory
. Its author was Peter Lomax, a name I didn’t recognize. According to the cover letter from Ashe Findlay (a stuffy but pleasant New York editor I’d seen several times at book fairs), this was indeed another memoir. But one with an arresting difference: its author, a survivor of long-term sexual abuse, was thirteen years old.

I flipped through the galleys, as I invariably do, sampling passages here and there. When I had seen enough, I brewed a pot of coffee and climbed to my attic office. Hugo followed on my heels, whimpering anxiously, as if his only remaining human might also be on the verge of leaving. I made a nest for him on the sofa, using one of Jess’s unlaundered Tshirts. The scent calmed him right away, and he was soon fast asleep at my feet, snoring with gusto by the time I had opened the galleys. It was six o’clock, not yet dark. It would be past midnight when I next looked up.

It’s not an easy thing to trim Pete’s story to its barest bones, to trot out the horror for your examination, minus Pete’s wisdom and courage and disarming humor. But that’s what I have to do if you’re to understand how fiercely those galleys consumed me, and why I slept so uneasily that night, and why, above all, I went straight to the phone the following morning.

Pete was born in 1985. His father was a foreman in a hosiery factory, his mother a housewife. To their neighbors in Milwaukee Pete’s parents were nothing out of the ordinary, just average people who ate at the mall and shopped at the Price Club, and showed up at Mass with their cute kid in tow. They were a nice-looking couple, apparently, far too wholesome and all-American to be suspected of anything ghastly.

At home lay the truth. In the backyard was a soundproof shed where Pete was routinely sent for “discipline.” His father began beating him at two and raping him at four. His mother knew this; she videotaped the sessions, in fact, and shared them with other grownups who liked that sort of thing. And when money got tight, Pete himself was shared. People would drive across three states just to involve an eight-year-old in their games. Pete remembers waiting for them in the slushy parking lots of Holiday Inns. He remembers their grownup toys and the scary sounds of their pleasure and the rotten-fruit stink of amyl nitrite. And the way that afterward his mother would buy off his bruises with plastic dinosaurs.

It stopped when he was eleven. Two days after Christmas, in the midst of a snowstorm, he left the house and ran eight blocks to a public library with his backpack stuffed full of videotapes. There he phoned a child-abuse hot line and waited in the stacks until a lady doctor came to meet him. Her name was Donna Lomax. She wore jeans with a blazer, he remembers, and had brown eyes and listened quietly while he told his story. Then she took him to her office, where he read a
Star Wars
comic book and she and another doctor watched the tapes in a different room. That was it. He ate supper at Donna’s house that night, and slept there, too, in a room with clean sheets and a door he could lock from the inside.

Pete’s parents were arrested and jailed. They never saw their son again, unless you count the videotape on which he testified against them. Though Donna was divorced and had never particularly wanted children, she saw something remarkable in this child, something that reached a part of her that had never been reached before. When she offered to adopt Pete, he accepted almost immediately, but without a trace of emotion. Compassion was still alien to him; he had no precedent for trusting anyone, even this lanky angel who promised him safety and expected nothing in return.

So Pete became a Lomax, but in name only. He stayed locked in his room for weeks, leaving only for meals, and even then he would eye his new mother across the table like some dangerous wild thing.

Donna didn’t push; she let him wander out of the woods on his own, and in his own time. And when he finally did, she was there to meet him, the tenderest of certainties, rocking him in her arms while he cried.

It should have ended there, but didn’t. When Pete’s body had healed at last, when he had learned to laugh along with Donna, when he had begun the journal that would eventually become his book, he developed a troubling cough. Donna had to tell him what she already knew: that he had tested positive for AIDS.

At the hospital they treated Pete’s pneumonia and drained his lungs with tubes. As soon as he was able to sit up, he asked Donna to bring him his journal. She did more than that: she brought him a laptop computer. It became his obsession, then his salvation. He would write on it for hours at a time, oblivious to everything around him, dizzy with the discovery that words could contain his suffering.

And sometimes, when the ward was dark, he’d listen to the radio.

There was a TV above his bed, but he never turned it on. He had seen his own torment on such a screen, so its unrelenting literalness was not his idea of escape. But radio let his mind roam to a secret place where no one’s face reminded him of anyone else’s. His favorite show was a man who told stories late at night, stories about people caught in the supreme joke of modern life who were forced to survive by making families of their friends. The man’s voice was low and soothing, the voice of an understanding father.

And often, though Pete knew better, it seemed to be speaking to Pete alone.

TWO

THE NOONES

“WELL,” SAID ASHE FINDLAY on the phone the next morning. “I thought I might be hearing from you.”

The editor’s voice was just as I’d remembered it: the tart nasality of a Yankee blue blood. I could all too easily sketch in the rest: the frayed pink oxford-cloth shirt, the crooked bow tie and brambled eyebrows, the whole tiresome Cheeveresque thing.

“That kid is amazing,” I said.

“Isn’t he, though?”

“I’d be glad to do a blurb.”

“Splendid.” He paused significantly before continuing. “I take it you got to the end.”

“I finished it, yes.”

“So you know what a fan you have.”

“Yes,” I said evenly. “I was touched.”

“Pete asked especially that you be sent the galleys. He’s never missed one of your shows.”

I fought the urge to bask in this flattery. I wanted Findlay to know that the boy’s talent alone was enough to sustain my interest. “Is he okay?” I asked. “His health?”

“For the moment. He’s a tough little fellow. A survivor, if ever there was one.”

I told him that’s what I loved about the book: the way Pete never stooped to self-pity, even in his bleakest moments. And he was so funny about it sometimes, so bluntly matter-of-fact about the most horrendous hardships. Who would have thought that the late discovery of love by a boy facing death could ever be construed as a happy ending?

“How in the world did you come by it?” I asked.

The editor indulged in a chuckle at his own expense. “An utter fluke. His AIDS counselor knows one of the secretaries in our trade division. It just landed on my desk.”

“Did it take a lot of editing?”

Another chuckle. “Hate to break it to you. It was one of the cleanest manuscripts I’ve handled all year.”

“Jesus.”

“I had to pull him back here and there. He’d use a ten-dollar word when a tencent one would do. But children do that, don’t they?”

“I’m completely in awe,” I said. “Actually…” I found myself fal-tering for reasons I couldn’t identify. Modesty? Embarrassment?

Some ancient, ingrained fear of rejection?

“What?” prompted the editor.

“Well, I just wondered if it would make sense for me to tell him this myself.”

“You mean call him?”

“Yeah.”

“I should think he’d be thrilled. Certainly. Let me check with Donna first. I’m sure it’ll be okay, considering…you know, how he regards you.”

“If it’s a bad time or something…”

“No, they’d be delighted. I’ll ring you in a day or two.”

“Great.”

“He’s a good kid. And you’ll like her, too.” I told him I couldn’t imagine that I wouldn’t.

“How’s your own writing coming along?”

This was a query born of etiquette, not interest. Findlay’s literary taste ran to Updike and Lessing, the (old)
New Yorker
and the
Paris
Review
. He couldn’t have cared less about my feel-good penny dreadfuls. Ours was just a marriage of convenience. If he valued me at all, it was because some clever person upstairs had decided to angle Pete’s book to “the AIDS market.” The fact that Findlay’s curiosity wasn’t genuine made it easier to answer him candidly. In fact, I confessed something that I had yet to tell my own editor: that I’d grown less and less in love with the act of arranging words on a page. And that it might be a permanent condition.

“You mean you’re blocked?”

“That’s a little optimistic,” I said. “It assumes there is something to block in the first place.”

“Oh, Gabriel, come now!”

“It’s the truth,” I said, oddly touched that he had used my name.

It seemed such an intimate act for him.

“You just need a break,” he insisted.

I told him I’d had one for almost four months.

“Then drive down the coast with…Jamie, is it?”

“Jess.”

“Yes. You two just charge off into the wild blue yonder. And don’t think about writing at all. I think you’ll be surprised how swiftly the urge will arise again.”

“Maybe we’ll do that,” I said.

“Is he okay, by the way?”

“He’s fine,” I told him. “He feels better than he has in ages. He has to stay on top of things, of course, because you really never know…but…he’s doing fine…”

As I droned away, my gaze straggled across the cityscape. Jess’s new place was an upended sugar cube against the primeval green of Buena Vista Park. Framed neatly in the window, it was visible from the bed—from
our
bed—the first thing I faced in the morning, the last thing I pondered at night. Such a deft stroke of melodrama, I thought; I might have concocted it myself.