The Night Listener : A Novel (34 page)

“Do you understand me?”

“Yeah, but…I just don’t know. She never talks about her childhood.”

“Have you ever asked her?”

“No. It’s hard, man, when you know she doesn’t want to talk.” I hear you, I thought. I’ve been there myself.

“And she’s done so much for me, you know.”

“But maybe that’s why, Pete. Maybe her life was as bad as yours, and she wanted to make things easier for somebody else. Did she ever tell you what caused her blindness?”

“Some disease, I think, when she was little.”

“What about that scar on her arm?”

“She fell down the stairs.”

“It doesn’t look like that. It looks like it was—”

“Oh, shit!”

“What’s the matter?”

“She’s coming back. The post office must have been closed.”

“Well, can’t you just—”

“I gotta go, Dad.” His voice had lowered to a frantic whisper. “I’ll call you as soon as I can, okay?”

I didn’t have a chance to answer before he hung up. Or to reflect on the possibility that I might never hear from him again.

I awoke the next morning at nine, when Josie arrived at my room with a lavishly laid-out breakfast tray. I was on the verge of praising her when I noticed the ruined state of her eyes.

“You heard something,” I said, leaving off the question mark.

She nodded. “Several hours ago. I didn’t want to wake you. You looked so peaceful.”

Her lip began to tremble, so I pushed the tray aside, and held her in my arms while she cried.

TWENTY-NINE

FATHER, SON, AND HOLY

GHOST

THE FUNERAL WAS HELD at St. Michael’s and drew a standing-room-only crowd, a fact that would have pleased Pap no end. There were two former governors in attendance and ol’ Strom himself, thrilled to be working such an aristocratic crowd. The reception at the house began on an appropriately stately note and deteriorated sharply from there. By late afternoon it was just another shrill Charleston cocktail party, and it was hard to believe that Pap could no longer be found at the center of that cacophony. I stayed long enough to catch up with my brother and help Darlie evict the last mourners, then retreated to my room to check the airline schedules. As I’d expected, there were no available flights to San Francisco until Christmas Day.

I actually didn’t mind travelling then. Had I stayed on either coast that day someone would have tried to make it merry for me, and the effort would have been more painful than no Christmas at all. I did wonder what sort of reception awaited me, what I’d be asked about Pete. After all, I’d told Anna emphatically that Pete was dead, while Jess had apparently talked to him the following day, when Pete called the house looking for me.

I found signs of Jess’s brief reoccupation when I arrived home: a bag of potato chips in the cupboard, a new box of treats for Hugo, a general tidying-up of the items on the bulletin board. It felt sweetly reassuring to see his imprint on the house again, though that feeling was promptly trampled by errant thoughts of the men who might have been there with him.

Hugo didn’t greet me at the door, so I assumed he was out walking with Jess. But when I climbed to my writing room under the eaves, I found the dog curled in a ball on the sofa. Finally sensing my presence, he rose on wobbly legs and tried to wag his tailless rump, but this only sent him toppling to the floor with a whimper. I scooped him up in my arms and restored him to his spot on the sofa, where I stroked him carefully and nuzzled his graying face. “I know what you mean,” I said.

I heard the front door open and close. Jess, upon spotting my luggage, hollered up the stairwell at me.

“Where are you?”

“All the way up.”

He appeared in my aerie sporting a new accessory: a gleaming gold nose ring. And not one of those prissy little wires either; this was a meanest-bull-in-the-pasture number that pierced the middle of his nose and dangled like a door knocker out of both nostrils.

“Wow,” I said with less enthusiasm than the word usually demands.

“That’s new.”

Jess, of course, could tell what I was thinking, so he shrugged off the matter as unworthy of discussion. “Yeah. Fairly.” Then he stepped forward and embraced me, kissing me lightly on the lips.

“You okay?”

“Yeah. I’m fine.”

“I’m sorry about Pap.”

I’d never heard him call the old man that, and I was moved by the sound of it, the suggestion that he’d just lost an in-law.

“I guess it was time,” I said.

“I spoke to Josie this morning. She said you got to talk to him.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, that’s good.”

He gazed out the window toward the tree line of Sutro Forest, where a pair of turkey vultures was making drunken figure eights above the valley. “She also said you were depressed about some kid who died.”

I nodded.

“She couldn’t have meant Pete,” he added.

I sighed in concession and headed for the stairs. “Let’s make coffee first.”

He let me tell the story without interruption, nodding me along while I shaped its themes and refined its details. The star in the east.

The sightless Madonna. The empty manager. That miraculous resur-rection.

“Father, son, and holy ghost,” said Jess.

I didn’t get it.

“Pap and you and Pete.”

“That’s good,” I said absently. “Clever.”

“Use it, then. You’re the writer.”

“Is that what you think?”

“That you’re a writer?”

“No. That he’s a ghost. That’s he’s imaginary.”

He shrugged. “That’s the fun of it, isn’t it?” I said it wasn’t fun anymore.

“Oh, I think it must be, or you would’ve tried to meet Marsha. Or gone to that hospital and asked if he was ever a patient there.”

“I had to go see my father, for God’s sake. And I don’t even know which hospital Pete was in.”

“And you never once asked him, did you? Or her.” I shook my head.

“See? You never wanted to know. You
require
mystery, babe. It’s like oxygen to you.”

“Forget about me,” I said irritably. “Tell me what
you
think.”

“Well…that it was probably a hoax of some sort, and once she knew you’d gotten wind of it, she killed him off.”

“But he called back.”

And he cried and said he missed me
.

“So,” said Jess. “She’s not an evil person, and you’re not an easy person to hurt. She probably felt bad, and this was her way of making it easier on you. She went for the slow fade-out instead.” Like you, I thought. Leaving without ever saying it was over. You knew that was one more thing I don’t want an answer about.

“But why would she do that?” I asked. “If it made her look like a liar in the process?”

“Because,” said Jess, “she’s not the one you have to believe. Pete is.”

I brooded for a moment, then made a feeble stab: “I saw his room, remember. His bed.”

“You saw
a
bed. It could have been a prop. She must’ve expected that sooner or later someone would come looking for him. Or maybe it
had
been his bed—or someone’s bed—once upon a time.” Another silence betrayed my decision to surrender. Finally, I asked, “Has Findlay called again?”

“Not that I know of,” said Jess.

“He still thinks Pete is dead. He hasn’t even heard the latest.”

“Why don’t you just leave it that way?”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “What’s the point? It’s not gonna change his mind about publishing the book. It just makes the whole thing more suspect than ever. And Findlay will just think you’re—” He cut himself off.

“What? Being gullible again?”

“Something like that.”

He was right, of course.

“Besides,” said Jess. “You don’t want to give away your best material. You’re gonna use all this in your book.” I flashed him a dead-eyed look.

“You need to write, Gabriel. You’ll feel better when you do. You know that as well as I do.”

“I do, do I?”

“I bought you some paper.” Jess nodded toward the computer.

“And there’s several more reams in the closet.”

“I’ll be writing about you,” I said darkly.

“Fine,” he replied with a smile. “I trust you.” I holed up in the aerie for two weeks, extracting the first chapter of this book. During that time, Hugo kept me constant company, hardly leaving his shepherd-shaped dent on the sofa. His efforts to pee outside were rarely successful, and the tortuous descent to the garden only made him yelp with pain. There was no longer any valid excuse for postponement, so I made a few inquiries with friends, then called Jess.

“I can’t do this alone,” I said.

“I wouldn’t let you,” he said. “Where do we go?”

“This guy comes to the house, apparently.”

“Well, that’s civilized.”

“Yeah,” I said with a sigh. “Dr. Kerbarkian.” Jess laughed weakly, and the joke distracted us until the day of the deed, when I could no longer suppress the feeling, however irrational, that I was betraying Hugo. (A day earlier I’d been chiding myself for having held off too long.) To make it even harder, the dog was more active than usual that morning, shambling out to greet the gardener—his friend of more than fourteen years—who’d come to dig his grave beneath the tree ferns. I didn’t cry, though, until Jess arrived in his best leathers bearing a pretty Tibetan prayer cloth. “I thought we could wrap him in this,” he said solemnly, and the floodgates burst for both of us.

Were we mourning more than Hugo that day? I don’t recall ever feeling that kind of primal, scouring grief. Maybe our other losses were just too vast to articulate, so Hugo, in his sweet simplicity, became the safest repository for our pain. Or maybe it had more to do with our fading dream of coupledom; this dog, after all, had been the closest witness to our bliss.

Dr. Kerbarkian turned out to be a soft-eyed Chilean with a comically droopy mustache. There would be two shots, he explained, one to relax the dog, the other to do the job. So we spread the prayer cloth on the bed and lay on either side of Hugo, stroking him gently as the first shot was administered. Almost immediately his muscles relaxed and his face fell into what we chose to interpret as a smile.

This gave us a minute to say our goodbyes, to fill his deaf ears with endearments and let him soak up the smells of his family.

On the second shot, as we’d been warned, Hugo’s body stiffened in one brief, horrific spasm. When it was over, I glanced up at the doctor, who was holding the syringe in one hand and crossing himself with the other. Jess, thank God, missed this overt display of popery because his eyes were still fixed on Hugo. My own were lost in the gossamer web of tears dangling from Jess’s nose ring, the loveliest, silliest collision of tough and tender.

I continued to write into February, extruding the details of my breakup with Jess, the solace I’d received from those first playful exchanges with Pete. I still didn’t have a clue about the end, but I refused to lose faith. An ending could be forced, I believed, the way a bloom can be forced if you keep it out of the wind and shine enough light on it.

Then, on the day after Valentine’s Day, when the plum trees along the street were a volley of pale pink detonations, a letter appeared in my mailbox. Five words were written on a sheet of Days Inn stationery: “Roberta Blows. I love you.” The postmark said Tacoma, Washington. He was on this side of the continent now.

I told no one.

By April I had written five chapters. I asked Jess to read them and give me his thoughts, which he did with extraordinary detachment, considering the nature of the material. He spent a day with it, then called me in tears to say it was my best work yet and that we should start looking for an outlet. He pressed hard for his earlier scheme—a televised reading on the Curtain Call network—but I immediately rejected the idea.

“But it’s a done deal,” he argued. “They’re all set to go as soon as we give them the word.”

“I understand that,” I said, “but I’d rather do radio.”

“Why? You’re good with cameras.”

“I want this to be just my voice, Jess.”

“But you’ll reach a whole new audience.”

“I don’t want a new audience,” I told him. “I want my old one.” He knew what I was up to, but he didn’t give me a hard time. In a matter of days he was talking to my producers at NPR about a brand-new show with a brand-new name. They liked what they’d read so far, but were understandably nervous about starting a series that had yet to be completed. I reminded them that I work best under pressure and promised to deliver on time. So Jess contacted our local station—the site of my infamous meltdown—and set up a date for the first recording session.

When that day arrived, the two of us held court in the studio while a succession of engineers and secretaries made gracious remarks about my reemergence. “Jesus,” said Jess, when the last one had gone. “It’s like Norma Desmond returning to Paramount.”

“Thanks,” I said with a grin. “But that makes you Max, you realize.”

It felt good to be joking again, to feel the easy, immovable love beneath our jokes. And later, in the moment before we began to record, I relished the sight of him in the control room (his nose ring pushed into its cave for this professional moment), nodding his support through the glass.

The engineer signalled, so I took a sip of water and began to read:

“I know how it sounds when I call him my son. There’s something a little precious about it, a little too wishful to be taken seriously.

I’ve noticed the looks on people’s faces, those dim indulgent smiles that vanish in a heartbeat. It’s easy enough to see how they’ve pegged me: an unfulfilled man on the shady side of fifty, making a last grasp at fatherhood with somebody else’s child. That’s not the way it is…”

AFTERWORD

THE FIRST CHAPTER OF
The Night Listener
aired on NPR on May 16, 1999. An early broadcast this time—8 P.M.—to herald my return. I made a point of staying home that evening, but not to listen to the show. No, that’s not entirely true; I always listen to the show; my work doesn’t seem real to me until I hear it the way the public does, properly announced and placed in the context of “legitimate” programming. But mostly I stayed home to wait for the phone call I was almost certain would come later that night.