The Night Listener : A Novel (7 page)

“Goddamn,” said my father, when the bridge was all his for the evening. “Just look at that, would you?”

“It used to be blocked,” I explained.

“What?” asked Darlie.

“The view. There was a freeway here, so all this was a cave, and you couldn’t see the bridge at all. And these places on the waterfront were really scuzzy, the cheapest real estate in town. But the earthquake messed up the freeway so badly that they had to—”

“Oh, God,” said Darlie. “When all those people were crushed?”

“No, not that one…same time, but not here. That was the Nimitz freeway. Across the bay.”

“Thank God,” she murmured. An odd reaction, but I knew what she meant. I had always been rather relieved myself that those ghosts had been confined to Oakland. We had enough ghosts as it was.

“What people were crushed?” asked my father.

“You know,” said Darlie. “In the earthquake.”

“Hell, how old do you think I am?”

“The
other
one,” said Darlie, rolling her eyes at her husband.

“The other what?”

“Earthquake.”

“There was another one?”

“In eighty-nine,” I offered, growing uneasy. I hadn’t seen Pap in three years. Maybe he’d finally begun to lose it; lots of folks did at his age. “You were here just after it happened. After your trip to—”

“
Eighty-nine?
” My father’s face clenched in confusion. “Mama was born in eighty-nine, for God’s sake! I sure as hell wasn’t around then.”

“Oh, just quit it, Gabriel.” Darlie shot a nonpoisonous dagger at him, then turned back to me. “He’s just teasing. He’s doing his Alzheimer’s routine. It’s his favorite new joke.” One glance at Pap proved the truth of this. His eyes were lit with sly conspiracy, a sight that filled me with unexpected nostalgia.

Joking had always been his way of avoiding intimacy, when anger wasn’t available. He looks just like me, I thought, studying his old face as if he were a newborn in my arms. He had my jawline and jowls, my droopy blue eyes, the same full silky head of hair, only white instead of gray. Here sat my past and my future, my inevitable twin, the face I was melting into with fierce efficiency. God help us, I thought. Someone left the cake out in the rain.

I turned back to Darlie, widening my eyes melodramatically.

“Maybe it’s not a routine. Maybe it’s the real thing.”

“Oh, go to hell, both of you!” The old man was in his element now, home free at last, swapping insults instead of endearments. “I remember that earthquake better than you do. We’d just got back from Kenya, and Darlie was wearing those ridiculous nigger clothes…”

“Gabriel!”

“Well, that’s what they were. That ugly damn sarong thing with the turban.” Pap turned to me. “And you had that little place with all the stairs…over there with all the funny fellas.”

I arched an eyebrow at my stepmother. “Gee. Wonder how I ended up
there
.” In my father’s eyes, his stalwart son would always be one thing, the funny fellas quite another.

“And Whatshisname showed us that big crack above your fire-place.”

Whatshisname. The love of my life.

“I’m sorry he’s out of town,” said Darlie, looking at me so directly that I wondered if she sensed something was wrong.

I did my damnedest to stay casual. “Oh, I know. He is, too. It was a last-minute thing.”

“You do a lot of business in L.A.?”

“A fair amount, yeah.”

“And this was for what, you said?”

“A TV deal. He’s producing a special for us.”

“Sounds great,” she said pleasantly.

“A special what?” My father, no longer the focus of our attention, was cruising for some friendly friction.

“I’m gonna do a reading on TV,” I told him. (This part was true, at least; Jess had been planning the special for months.) “Sort of a dramatized thing. With an armchair and a set. Like Alistair Cooke on
Masterpiece Theatre
. People will actually get to see me this time.”

“Well, lucky them.”

There was a trace of malice in this, but I let it go with a tart smile.

I knew it wasn’t easy for Pap, having his name co-opted by such a conspicuous homo. I had been programmed to be
him
, after all: a partner in his bank, a conservative, a practicing aristocrat. But now, by his own account, he had become a road-show version of me.

Dewy-eyed shopgirls and waiters, clocking the name on his credit card, would ask him for his autograph only to discover he wasn’t
the
Gabriel Noone. I liked to imagine this happening during one of his lunches with Strom Thurmond, when ol’ Strom had been ranting away about the evils of the Gay Agenda. But the senator probably avoided the subject altogether, recognizing, in his gentle-manly way, the cross his old friend had to bear.

“We saw your books in Paris,” my father said. “Big pile of ‘em.

Right there…you know…in that virgin place.” Darlie provided the translation: “The Virgin Megastore.”

“Ah.”

“I wanted the new Jimmy Buffett,” she explained.

I gave her a private twinkle. “I thought maybe he was looking for Nine Inch Nails.”

Darlie chuckled; my father’s eyes narrowed. “What the hell does
that
mean?”

“Nothing, sweetness. It’s just a musical group.”

“Thank God. I thought you were talking about my prowess.”

“No, believe me, nobody’s talking about that.”

“Did you tell the boy about…?”

“No, I did not.”

“Good.”

“Why on earth would—”

“Remember ol’ Hubie Verner?” My father leaned closer, clearly intent upon telling me himself. Whatever the hell it was.

“Yeah,” I said carefully. “Your doctor. Or used to be.”

“Still is,” said Pap with a chuckle. “Must be ninety, if he’s day, but I’m still goin’ to him.”

Darlie rolled her eyes. “He’s seventy-one, for God’s sake. He’s a lot younger’n you.”

“Well, he
looks
ninety, poor bastard.” My father leaned closer in a moment of man-to-man lechery. “Wrote me a prescription for that Viagra stuff. Damnedest thing you’ve ever seen.”

“Gabriel…”

“Oh, hell, Darlie, he’s a grown man.”

“Nobody cares if—”

“
You
sure as hell cared. You were pretty damn impressed.” He turned back to me, his face rosy with revelation. “Took me one when she was out shoppin’ on the Rue de Rivoli. Had a big ol’ surprise waitin’ for her when she got back to the George Cinq.” My stepmother’s expression was flawlessly deadpan. “Now
there’s
an image we could all live without.”

“Tell me,” I said, offering her a crooked smile.

Darlie looked good for fifty-three, I thought. She had trimmed down considerably, and her strawberry-blond hair was cropped stylishly short. We had never been close, but I admired the way she let the old man’s crap roll off her back. My mother had spent her marriage tiptoeing around his anger and intolerance, making endless excuses and hoping, I suppose, for a miraculous conversion. Darlie just saw Pap as something elemental and unavoidable, like hur-ricanes and pluff mud, to be endured with stoic humor.

Maybe it helped that Darlie wasn’t one of us. She wasn’t white trash, or even “common,” as we used to say, but had I brought her home during high school, she would surely have been assessed as someone whose family didn’t “go to the ball.” Darlie’s father had been a chief yeoman at the naval base, her mother a bank teller.

Perfectly respectable, unless you grew up south of Broad, where

“nice folks” were ruthlessly delineated by their attendance at the St.

Cecilia Ball. Nowadays Darlie was nice by marriage, but Pap behaved as if she’d been born to the job, and defied anyone—from any class—to suggest otherwise. No one in
his
family could ever be less than aristocratic, just as no one could really be gay. When the truth locked horns with my father’s prejudices, it was always the truth that suffered.

“Sometimes,” my sister, Josie, once remarked, “I wish I’d given him a black grandchild, just to see how he’d make it white.”

Our food had arrived, but my father’s eyes had wandered out to the Embarcadero. A line of signal flags—plastic and strictly decorat-ive—was snapping in the night air like forgotten laundry.

“India, Echo, Charlie,” I said.

“What?”

“Those three next to the lamppost. Right?” Pap and I had both served in the navy, once upon a time. This was our common currency, so I doled it out judiciously whenever I wanted to feel closer to him. Thirty years earlier, I had written long letters home from Vietnam, shamelessly dramatizing my circumstances, just to make him proud of me. Nothing could soften his heart like the memory of war.

He squinted at the signal flags for a moment, then grunted. “Who the hell knows? That’s why you got signalmen.” I turned to my stepmother. “He found out about me that way, you know.”

Darlie looked puzzled. “That you were gay?”

“No,” I said with a brittle laugh. “That I was born.”

“Christ.” My father flinched in delayed reaction to
that word
.

“He was on his minesweeper in…where was it, Pap?”

“Guadalcanal. Well…no, Florida Island, Tulagi…”

“Anyway, he got word from the flagship that I’d been born. And they had to use semaphore to do it.”

“No kidding,” said Darlie.

I always loved the romance of this: the blue water and blazing heat, a strapping young signalman in his white sailor suit, brandish-ing flags with the news of me. It was the South Pacific of Nellie Forbush and
Mr. Roberts
, a showbiz entrance if ever there was one.

“What was the message?” asked Darlie.

“Hell,” said my father. “I don’t remember.”

“Yes, you do,” I said. “‘Baby born, mother and son fine.’”

“Yeah. Somethin’ like that.”

I wondered if I’d embarrassed him with the mention of my mother; he rarely brought her up around Darlie. For years, I think, he’d felt guilty about remarrying after Mummie’s death, judging from the number of disclaimers he made to his children. “You know,” he would tell us, “this doesn’t change how I feel about your mother.” We understood that perfectly, and we approved of Darlie—age difference and all—in a way that much of Charleston did not. Pap was high maintenance, after all; we were just glad that someone young and vigorous had committed to the job.

I changed the subject by inviting my father’s nostalgia. “It must have been a hell of a time.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, shaking his head.

“Did he tell you about the billboard?” asked Darlie. She had taken the old man’s arm with easy affection. They really do love each other, I thought.

And the sight of their obvious coupledom stung in a way that I hadn’t expected. Was it possible that they’d outlasted me and Jess?

I did remember that billboard, but I pretended otherwise, just to give him some material to work with. “Don’t think so,” I said.

“What billboard?” asked Pap.

Darlie squeezed his arm. “In the harbor. You know.”

“Oh.” My father chortled at the memory. “Damnedest thing you ever saw. The fleet commander was this tough ol’ son-of-a-bitch who knew how to get the job done. Named, uh…damn, what the hell was his name?”

“We don’t care, hon.” Darlie was inspecting her lamb flatbread.

“He was somethin’, though. A real kick-ass ol’ cuss. Had the Seabees build this enormous billboard at the entrance to the harbor at Guadalcanal. First thing we saw when we came sailin’ in. Said:

‘Kill the bastards, kill the bastards, kill the yellow bastards.’” I kept my expression blank. “An idealistic sort o’ guy.”

“Hell, it was war.”

“It was war,” I echoed, exchanging a wry look with Darlie.

“Can’t hear that story too much,” she said.

“Oh, go to hell, both of you,” said my father, and he plunged into his butterfly prawns.

We were all a little high on wine by the end of dinner. Pap was the first to show it.

“You know what, son?”

“What?”

“I’m damn proud of you.”

“Well…good.” I tried to look into his eyes, but it was almost impossible. For both of us.

“I mean it.”

“I know.”

“You’re gettin’ rich, I guess.”

“Well…comfortable.”

“
Comfortable?
Your books are all over Harrods.”

“I know, but there’s a lotta folks to pay.”

“I hope you’re puttin’ some away. Not spendin’ it like a nigger, like you usually do.”

“Jesus, Gabriel. Give it up.” Darlie shot me a sympathetic glance.

“You don’t know,” my father told her. “Son-of-a-bitch bought a London taxicab when he was at Sewanee. Cost him more to ship the damn thing home than he paid for it. Broke down all the time, too.” He winked at me rakishly to convey his harmlessness.

“I’m a little more careful now,” I said.

“That boy’s keepin’ you in line, I hope.” He meant Jess, who had been cast as the Responsible One in our household. I had actually promoted this, since it was largely the truth, and it gave Pap an excuse to respect, however marginally, the funny fella who was sleeping with his son.

“He’s pretty conscientious,” I said.

“I’m sorry we missed him.” Pap connected with me briefly to show what he really meant: that he liked Jess just fine, that he was glad I had company on the journey, just like he did. He was giving us his blessing at last, now that it could do nothing but hurt.

“He’s okay, isn’t he?” Darlie had that expression some people use when they’re talking about AIDS.

“Oh, yeah, very much so. The cocktail seems to be working.” The old man frowned. “Cocktail?”

“You know about that.” Darlie scolded her husband with a glance.

No, he doesn’t, I thought. He may have been told, but he didn’t bother to store it, because it didn’t matter to him that much. “It’s a combination of drugs,” I explained. “So far it’s been fairly effective against the virus.”

“I knew they’d find something,” said my father. “Nobody believed me, but I said so all along, didn’t I?”

“It’s not a cure,” I told him.

“Well, just the same…”

Pap’s approach to mortal illness was to deny it outright, then accuse the world of unnecessary hysteria. He had done that the night my mother died in ‘79, when I’d been summoned to Charleston from California for reasons that were gruesomely obvious to everyone.