The Night Listener : A Novel (3 page)

“I’m so glad,” said Ashe Findlay.

I’d lost my way in the conversation. “Sorry, Ashe…about what?”

“That Jamie’s doing well. I mean Jess. Damn it, why do I insist on calling him that?”

I told him Jamie was the name of one of my characters.

“Ah.”

“He isn’t actually Jess per se. But I borrowed heavily.” To put it mildly. When Jess and I met, so did Jamie and Will, the happy homo couple on
Noone at Night
. And when Jess tested positive, Jamie did the same—and used the same beeping pillbox for his AZT.

Though Jamie is a coppersmith, and physically the opposite of Jess, people tend to confuse the two. Even Ashe Findlay, who was hardly a devotee of my work, had made the graceless leap from fact to fiction.

“It’s a natural mistake,” I told him.

Whereupon he veered into a speech about the nature of fiction. I remember very little of it except the rousing conclusion, when he urged me to remain stalwartly in the moment, for that would be the place from which my writing would flow.

“And it will flow, Gabriel. I promise you.” Sure thing, I thought, gazing out the window again.

“And give my best to Jess, will you?”

That afternoon my depression got worse, so I took Hugo to Golden Gate Park, where I came across a Hare Krishna festival on the lawn behind the tennis courts. The revelers were kids mostly, pale-skinned and pimply in their saffron robes, but I envied them their stupid bliss. I sat cross-legged on the grass and watched for a while, feeling like an impostor. I wanted to be one of them, to vanish in that vortex of gaudy color and burn out my grief in the sun, but I knew far too much about myself to make it happen.

When I got back to the house, Anna was in the office. “I had to check some stuff,” she said, gazing up from the computer like a burglar caught with a sack of silverware.

“Check away,” I told her. “You never have to call ahead.” It would have shamed me somehow to speak the whole truth: that I loved finding someone else at home, keeping my wobbly life on course the way Jess had always done.

“Your father called, by the way.”

This was the last thing I’d expected. “He did? When?”

“Little while ago.”

“Did you pick up?”

She chuckled. “Had to. He kept saying ‘Are you theah, are you theah? Pick it up, goddammit, I know you’re theah!’”

“That’s him,” I said.

“He’s a nice ol’ coot.”

I told her strangers always liked him.

“What’s not to like?” she asked.

“If he knew you,” I said, “he’d call you a cute little Chink gal behind your back.”

She grinned and turned back to the computer. “I
am
a cute little Chink gal.”

I didn’t press it. My father has always been a hit-and-run charmer, so most people just don’t get it. You have to know him for half a century before you can see how little he’s really giving you. “Why did he call, anyway?”

“He saw you on
Jeopardy
.”

For a moment I wondered if Pap had finally succumbed to the delusions that had consumed my grandmother back in the sixties.

Dodie used to see the whole family on television. I was largely to blame for this, since I was a reporter then for a Charleston station, and the side of my head could sometimes be glimpsed during off-camera interviews. Dodie had been alerted to watch for me, and in no time at all she’d improved on the concept. In her cinder-block room at the Live Oaks Convalescent Home she saw my sister, Josie, on
Bewitched
, my great-uncle Gus on
The Defenders
, my mother on
Connie’s Country Kitchen
.

Once she told me tearfully that my father—her son—had been killed by “a mob of radical nigras.” She’d seen this on TV, she said, and could not be convinced otherwise. Even when I brought her martyred child to the rest home, where he yelled at her like a man accused: “Goddammit, Mama, I’m not dead! Look at me! I’m here, goddammit!” But Dodie couldn’t stop crying, so Pap snatched a plastic lily from her dresser and reclined on her bed. “Okay,” he bellowed, erecting the lily over his chest, “I’m dead! Are you happy now, Mama?” After a moment or two, Dodie giggled like a girl, her demons expelled by her lingering grasp of the absurd. Sanity escaped her, but she knew a good laugh when she saw one.

“
Jeopardy
?” I said, blinking at my bookkeeper. “I’ve never been on
Jeopardy
.”

“You have now,” she replied. “Two days ago.”

“What do you mean?”

“You were a question. Or an answer, I guess. However they do it. You know, like: ‘This city is the setting for Gabriel Noone’s stories on
Noone at Night
.’ Your dad saw it. Him and your stepmom.”

“No shit?”

Anna wiggled her eyebrows. “Way cool, huh?” I had to admit it was. I could see Pap slouched in front of the quiz show, his trousers undone at the waist, munching Triscuits out of the box. I imagined the little grunt of amazement he made when he heard Alex Trebek speak my name—his own name, in fact—and saw it spelled out on the screen in blazing blue and white. My Pe-abody Award had barely fazed him, but
Jeopardy
was different.

Jeopardy
swam freely in Pap’s mainstream, next to
Patton
and Roy Blount Jr. and
The Sound of Music
.

“Plus,” said Anna offhandedly, “he’s coming to town.”

“He said that?”

She nodded. “On their way to Tahiti.”

“When?”

“Two weeks, I think. He wants you to call him.”

“Fuckshitpiss.”

“Hey,” said Anna, turning back to the computer. “Don’t shoot the messenger.”

It was Jess, in fact, I wanted to shoot. How could he not be here for this—my champion and co-conspirator, my happy ending, my living proof that men could love each other deeply? My father would see this house at last, but with a vital piece missing: the one that had charged it with passion and politics. And I knew how he’d react to the separation. I could hear him already, telling me I was better off without the sorry bastard, ticking off the faults of a man he had never bothered to know. His long-stifled distrust of my “lifestyle” could flourish again in the name of taking my side.

“This is not good news,” I told Anna.

“How old is he?” she asked. “He must be ancient.” I gave her a look. “Because I am, you mean?”

“Well…yeah.”

“There
are
other bookkeepers, you know.” She wasn’t at all ruffled. “I just meant, I hope I’m over my parents by the time I’m your age.”

“Good luck,” I said.

Anna’s parents, as I remembered, were both women. She had a birth father in the East Bay who ran a chain of convenience stores, but she’d met him only once, just for curiosity’s sake. Her twin brother, who seemed as straight as she was, worked weekends at a center for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, and Questioning Youth. None of this struck her as especially unusual. She was a recent invention, placidly free from entanglements. Unlike me, she had never experienced the dark tidal pull of the past.

When I was little, I knew almost nothing about my grandfather, who died before I was born. In another family this might not have been odd, but ours was obsessed with the trappings of kinship. My father briefed us daily on our ancestors. We knew that a Noone had died of dysentery at Fort Moultrie, that another had been a dashing bachelor governor, that Granny Prioleau had been forced to quarter Yankees during Sherman’s March. Some of these figures, so help me, we could have picked out of a lineup, but not my father’s father. To my memory, I’d never even seen a picture of him.

He was just a grayish blur, an abstraction without a lore.

This didn’t change until I was twelve, when my friend Jim Huger buttonholed me on a school field trip to tell me what the rest of Charleston had known for decades: the original Gabriel Noone had blown his head off with a shotgun. There were several versions of this, Jim said. One held that my grandfather had done the deed in my father’s bedroom. Pap, scarcely out of his teens, had come home from a camping trip on Kiawah Island to find an old black retain-er—Dah, they called her—mopping gore off the wallpaper.

Another version placed the suicide in the garden after supper, when children were at play, and all of Meeting Street could hear the blast. Jim’s aunt Claire was out jarring lightning bugs at the time and remembers Dah’s terrible keening. Whichever rendition was true—if either—my father had been known to discuss the event only once in his life: with my mother, very briefly, on the night before their Eastertime wedding at St. Michael’s.

When I asked my mother why Grandpa Noone had killed himself, she told me he had lost money in the Depression. “And,” she added darkly, “there were too many women around.” (A mother-in-law and a maiden aunt had lived under the same roof with Dodie and Grandpa.) This, my mother suggested with breezy misogyny, was reason enough for any man to lose interest in living. But none of that mattered, she said. All that mattered was that Pap not have to think about this terrible thing again. So I joined her confederacy of silence, standing sentinel to a secret that wasn’t a secret at all.

I remember a night, not long after that, when my father and I were watching
Playhouse 90
together. The show, I realized to my horror, was about a man coping with his father’s suicide. (Forty years later, I can still invoke the title:
The Return of Ansel Gibbs
.) 

Too mortified to leave the room or change channels or even glance in my father’s direction, I held my breath for an hour and a half.

When I finally dared look, his face told me nothing. The man who always talked back to the bad guys on
Gunsmoke
sat as mute and unblinking as a corpse.

I began to wonder if suicide, like everything else in the family, was hereditary. Pap kept a captured Japanese pistol in his desk that I regarded with mounting dread. It was there, he said, in case he had to “stop some crazy nigger from breaking in,” but it was
his
craziness that worried me. Whenever he stormed off to his study after one of his tantrums I would listen for gunfire. I think he knew this, too. “Don’t worry about me,” he was fond of saying. “I won’t be around much longer.” This could have been a reference to his famously high cholesterol, or just the onset of middle age, but I took it to mean he would someday become his father’s son.

I guess he felt outnumbered. The four of us—my mother and brother and sister and I—had united in the face of his helpless fury.

And the thing we could never mention had dredged a gulf so wide that none of us could bridge it. Pap tried, in his own way. He surprised us with pet ducks one Christmas. He drove us to Quebec in the Country Squire, belting out the same two sea shanties all the way. But he was always the outsider, the Caliban we fled when things got scary. My mother was our harbor. She was all we needed to divine—and forgive—my father’s mysteries. He loved us, of course, but in a growly, jokey, ceremonial way, since real feelings had already been proven to hurt too much. And this got worse as time went on. I remember being held by him when I was six or so, but not much later. When he and my mother met me at the airport after my first semester at Sewanee, I tried to hug him, but his arm shot out instead for a blustery handshake, as if to say,
Please, son, no closer, no closer
.

After that, I stopped trying.

“You have reached the Noones. At the tone, you have sixty seconds to leave a message.”

Pap’s new machine threw me. It was weird to hear his antebellum voice in such a postmodern context. And weirder yet to think that

“the Noones” meant him and Darlie Giesen, a classmate of mine in high school, circa 1962. December had met and courted May several years after my mother died of breast cancer in 1979. Now they owned a condo on the Battery in Charleston, the very spot where the first shots of the Civil War were fired. The very spot, I might add with no small degree of irony, where the third Gabriel Noone first discovered the pleasures of sucking cock.

“Hey,” I told the machine, “it’s Gabriel. Anna says you’re heading west. That’s great. It’s a real busy time for me, but maybe we can have dinner or something. I’m here most of the time, writing away, so…call when you can.” When I put the receiver down, Anna was smirking at me.

“Not a word out of you,” I said.

“They don’t know about Jess, do they?”

“No.”

“Are you gonna tell ‘em?”

I shrugged. “What’s to tell? I don’t know myself.”

“Won’t they wonder, if he’s not here?”

I told her they might not be coming to the house, that we might just meet somewhere for dinner. But what I was thinking was: Jess could be home in two weeks, and everything could be fine.

Back then, when the pain was new, I let myself believe that.

THREE

LIFE ISN’T RADIO

TWO DAYS AFTER his twelfth birthday, a fortnight before his father was jailed for debt, Charles Dickens was sent to work in a blacking factory. There, in a rat-infested room by the docks, he sat for twelve hours a day, labelling boot polish and learning the pain of abandon-ment. While he never spoke publicly of this ordeal, it would always be with him: in his social conscience and burning ambition, in the hordes of innocent children who languished and died in his fiction.

Pete thinks we all have a blacking factory: some awful moment, early on, when we surrender our childish hearts as surely as we lose our baby teeth. And the outcome can’t be called. Some of us end up like Dickens, others like Jeffrey Dahmer. It’s not a question of good or evil, Pete believes. Just the random brutality of the universe and our native ability to withstand it.

Is that true? I couldn’t say. I do know it was Dickens who sprang to mind when I first heard Pete’s voice on the phone. It was more childlike than I’d imagined, but scrappy as all get-out, like some latter-day urchin pickpocket. The Artful Dodger by way of Bart Simpson.

“This is Pete Lomax. The guy who wrote that book? My mom said I should call you.”

Thrown by his voice, and unsure of the tone I should take, I poured out my praise for
The Blacking Factory
. I was probably stiffer than usual—I’m sure I was, in fact—but I did my best to be specific, citing themes and passages, the rhythm of his language: the sorts of things I like to hear. I wanted him to feel the impact of what he had done, the enormity of it.