The Night Listener, Page 2

  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.”<
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  “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.

  “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 cente
r 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.