The Night Listener

  “Right.”

  “She must come here a lot, actually. Donna Lomax?” The clerk took the cigarette from his mouth and ground it into a stray Snapple cap. “Know what she looks like?” I tried my best to reconstruct Pete’s description in The Blacking Factory. “Oh…brown eyes, lanky…attractive. She’s a psychologist.

  Has a kid she’s adopted.”

  He seemed to absorb that for a moment. “And you want her address?”

  “If…you know…it’s cool with you.” Cool with you? Why was I talking like a VJ from MTV? And why had I taken this idiotic approach? It sounded much too desperate and wormy.

  I was debating whether to reveal my benign homosexuality when I realized that the clerk was smirking at me. “You know why most people pay us, don’t you?”

  “Sorry, I…”

  “They pay us so they don’t hafta use their real address. That’s the whole point of this place.”

  “Well, of course, I understand that completely, but…Donna’s an old friend, and I’ve come a long way, and I’m sure she’d…”

  “I can’t make that judgment, pal.”

  “Not even if—”

  “Nope. Not even.”

  “Right.” I gave him an insipid smile. Now the people behind me had started to shuffle, fully aware that I had no valid business here.

  “You can use the phone,” the clerk offered, “if you wanna call her or something.”

  “You know her, then?”

  “Who?”

  “Donna Lomax? You recognize the name? She has a box here?”

  “Look, man, you’re gonna hafta…”

  “Okay. Fine. Sorry.”

  I slunk out without argument, my face as scarlet as the countertop, while the other customers witnessed my humiliation. I could feel their eyes on me as I left, hear their little grunts of disdain. And I knew what fine camaraderie they would share at my expense, once I was out the door.

  Dazed, I wandered without purpose or thought for at least ten minutes, finally seeking refuge in one of those Italian restaurants where Christmas decorations are all but lost amid the raging year-round gaudiness. There, over a cup of coffee, I faced the question of the hour:

  What, if anything, did I know for sure?

  I could see that house so clearly in my mind’s eye: a single-story bungalow with its scaffolded bed and its shelves full of Tom Clancy and The X-Files and me. I could see rooms that Pete had never described: a blue kitchen with a neat row of cereal boxes, and the bedroom across from Pete’s, where Donna probably slept. I could even see into the yard sometimes, especially at night, when the light from Pete’s window would cast a golden Rembrandt glow on the snow. There were trees in that yard, I imagined, evergreens and sturdy sentinel oaks that baffled the sound of the cars out on Henzke Street.

  No. Not Henzke Street. Somewhere else entirely. And who could say where that might be? It had to be here, though, somewhere, maybe only blocks away. Maybe I could find it. Wysong wasn’t huge, after all; I could walk around for a while, ring a few doorbells until someone recognized Donna’s name or knew of Pete’s predicament.

  Uh-huh. They’d call the cops the minute I left, tell them about this strange man from California who’d been asking about that poor little boy. I could explain myself, of course, but only after a great deal of trouble and public embarrassment. Should I care about that?

  Yes, I decided, I should. Donna and Pete might well be angry with me already, knowing more than I thought they knew. This was hardly the time to make a spectacle of myself.

  What about her car, then? People actually parked in front of their houses here, and Donna’s car could be the tip-off. But what did it look like? Pete had bitched about it, I remembered, annoyed by those long drives to the hospital in some totally uncool machine. Had he ever mentioned its make or color? And was it Donna’s car or someone else’s—like that friend across the street who rode with them sometimes: Margaret Something. No, Marsha. Marsha might help me, assuming she was listed in the phone book, assuming I could remember the rest of her name.

  I couldn’t, of course; I wasn’t even sure if Pete had ever told me.

  My memory of our conversations was anecdotal at best, too crowded with jewelled elephants to be useful now. And even those precious images felt perishable, shimmering and fading beyond recognition, like a photograph in a darkroom when the door is opened suddenly without warning.

  A boy came into the restaurant, stopped at the counter, asked something of the cashier.

  About thirteen, I figured. Dark-haired and handsome, but decidedly healthy-looking.

  I watched him from the corner of my eye, lifting my cup to my mouth as camouflage. His face was angled away from me, so I waited for his profile to appear in relief against the faux-grotto wall. My mind began to fidget with a troubling new possibility, until someone snapped me out of it: a man of forty or so, obviously the kid’s father, signalling to him from a table in the back.

  I looked away, ashamed of my ridiculous need, then slapped money on the table and left.

  It was snowing now, really hard, and the flakes were gross and misshapen, not at all the miracles of symmetry they’re supposed to be. The air was suddenly much colder, so I turned up my collar and hurried back to the car—or where I thought it should be—but the snowbank I’d parked against had disappeared. For a moment, I admit, it all seemed part of a theme, as if some giant celestial eraser was rubbing out everything familiar to me. Panicking a little, I picked up my pace and changed directions on Henzke Street, then studied the storefronts carefully until I found the Mail ‘n’ More. I sighed with relief when I spotted that anonymous white vehicle around the corner, just where I had parked it. This is my base camp, I thought, my only true constant in this shifting wilderness.

  I started the engine and turned on the heater full blast, rubbing my hands together furiously. The windshield had been whited out by the snow, so I reached for the wiper knob, only to stop when I noticed something strange: a pattern of sorts, like a runic inscription, etched on the glass. A passerby—some kid, no doubt—had written something there that was disappearing rapidly in the latest flurry.

  The letters were cursive and impossible to decipher in reverse, so I climbed out of the car and studied the thing head-on. It was a short word—no more than five or six letters—but its meaning wasn’t readily apparent. The second letter was probably an O, the last a D or a T, though I couldn’t tell anything for sure.

  What was wrong with me anyway? Why was I looking for clues in such a random and offhanded act? Worried for my sanity, I climbed into the car again and turned on the wipers without a second look.

  What now?

  I drove around for almost an hour, longing for the shock of recognition in a place I’d never seen. There were several streets with the kind of bungalows I’d envisioned, but many more were lined with new brick condos and town houses, any one of which could easily have harbored Pete. Meanwhile, the light was beginning to fade and the snow was becoming a serious threat. It led me into a ditch, in fact, when I could no longer distinguish the line between street and sidewalk. I escaped after a brief spinning of wheels, but the message had been delivered just the same: You don’t know where you are or where you’re going or even how to drive in this mess. Why don’t you go home, pilgrim?

  Home for the moment was the Lake-Vue. I took a hot shower, changed into sweats, and dug out a joint I had stashed in my shaving kit. I smoked it on the bed as I considered my options, wishing Jess were there to egg me on, to curb my unending cautiousness. Jess would have a plan, even now, some risky renegade scheme that would scare the shit out of me but end up, as usual, working very nicely.

  Why not call him? I needed to touch base again, if only to tell him he’d been on my mind in the midst of this frustrating quest.

  I picked up the phone and dialled. It was midafternoon in San Francisco, a good time to reach him usually, and I figured he’d be at his place then. He answered after three rings, laughing
uncontrollably. At least I assumed it was him.

  “Jess? What’s so funny?”

  “Who’s calling?” asked a man whose voice I didn’t recognize. He was laughing even harder, as if somebody there was goosing him repeatedly. Could this actually be Frank, the motorcycle buddy?

  My blood turned to ice water. “This is Gabriel…Noone.”

  “Oh…hang on.”

  A muffled moment or two, and then: “Hi. Where are you?”

  “Is this a bad time?” I asked coldly.

  “No…no…not at all.”

  “Sounds like it is.”

  “Oh, that’s just Tom from down the hall. Being silly.” Jess knew what I was thinking, and was trying hard to sound matter-of-fact, either because my fears were unfounded or because they weren’t.

  “He came over to watch a documentary on Jung,” Jess added. “He doesn’t have a TV.”

  And you do? I thought. When did you get a TV? You’re not even supposed to like TV. You gave me hell about it constantly, called it a drug and a depressant, a brain-rotting waste of time. And why would you lay out that kind of money, if you have any intention of coming home?

  “Have you found him?” asked Jess.

  “Who?”

  “Pete.”

  “Oh.” My mind was no longer working, at least not on our conversation. The heartfelt reunion I’d wanted had a witness now: some creep in the background called Tom from Down the Hall. And who was to say he wasn’t that guy I’d seen in Jess’s lobby, the cocky little leather number with the Shetland pony build?

  “What’s the matter?” asked Jess.

  “Nothing. This isn’t the time, that’s all.”

  “Oh, c’mon…” His voice was gentle. He knew how much I was hurting and he hated it, but he seemed incapable of comforting me.

  Just tell me you love me, I thought. Tell me you’ve made an awful mistake. Tell me that no one on earth has ever known you the way I have. Tell me that now in front of Tom from Down the Hall.

  “I hope you’re okay,” said Jess.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I haven’t found him yet, but…” My voice trailed off, too weakened by my green-eyed demons.

  “He’s not there, you mean?”

  “I have to go, babe. I can’t do this.”

  “Fine. All right. Whatever.”

  “Take care,” I said.

  “Right,” he said and hung up.

  I had needed a good cry, and I got one, curled up there on my blue-and-mauve bedspread. I had run out of people to call. There was no one beyond Pete and Jess that I could trust with my pathetic dis-figured self. I lay there for almost an hour while the tears scalded their way out. When there were none left, I got up and went to the bathroom, threw water on my swollen eyes and returned. The room was dark now, so I snapped on the lamp by the bed, then went to the window to shut out the blackness.

  My hands were on the curtain cord when I saw it. It was fairly far away, almost overpowered by the lights of the gas station in the foreground, but I could make out its shape against the trees, hovering there above the town.

  I left the room, forgetting I had a telephone, and raced down three corridors to the lobby, where the pleasant Asian desk clerk was still on duty. She gazed up from a magazine with a concerned frown.

  “Is everything all right?” she asked.

  “That star,” I said. “Where is it?”

  “What star?”

  “The electric one. The one I can see from my window.”

  “Oh, the Christmas star.”

  “Right.”

  “That’s on the old water tank.”

  “But where is it?”

  “Oh, lord, lemme think. It’s a coupla blocks behind the high school, which means it would be on Curtis, or maybe McIntosh. No, here’s what you do: Go down to Henzke Street, just like I told you before, then take a left on Maple just past the BP station, and go four or five blocks to Simmons, no not Simmons at all, Regent Street, and head straight out until…” There’s no point in recreating this labored litany; I wasn’t even listening at the time. My mind was elsewhere entirely, wrestling with a fragment of memory that was trying hard not to reveal itself.

  But when it did come, it came with such sudden clarity that I spoke the words out loud:

  “Roberta Blows!”

  “Excuse me?” said the desk clerk.

  TWENTY-ONE

  FAMILY THINGS

  THE STAR I’D SEEN had been as literal as a star could be: five evenly spaced points pricked out with blue lightbulbs. We had a smaller version of this on our tree in Charleston that Pap extracted annually from the Gordian tangle of Christmas lights he kept stored in the attic. The installation of that star was the season’s first ordeal, a ritual so fraught with tension that it made me cringe before it began.

  The old man would perch on a step stool, cursing and grunting like a field hand as he teetered into the tree and tried to ram its apex into the tiny orifice of the star. Mummie would wait below, nervously cooing her appreciation but unable to refrain from asking if the tree might be a tiny bit crooked. And hearing another “Jesus H. Christ” from my father—a serious warning sign—we children would stay unnaturally still on the sofa, holding our breath until stellar penetration had been achieved.

  Christmases were like that: edgy and absurd, full of empty ritual.

  Even the presents under the tree were a false conceit, since Mummie bought most of them, certainly the ones that we children exchanged, and the ones that came from my father, and, for that matter, the ones we gave to him. The presents from distant relatives meant even less—socks and scarves and puzzles—and they stymied our orgy of greed, because my mother had to record all of them in a book, so she could write thank-you notes later. She carried Christmas on her back, Laura Noone, much as she carried our secrets.

  She carried mine long before I knew that she knew. Her early suspicions were confirmed by a girlfriend of mine—a friend, really, nothing more—who had flown out to San Francisco in the preposterous belief that I had seen the light and was ready to propose. All I’d wanted, in fact, was a generous listener, someone from home to witness my fledgling joy, to hear about this handsome doctor I’d met, this stalwart professional that even Pap would find acceptable.

  Becky Ravenel listened all right, her mouth slightly agape, pausing only to slip a Valium from her purse and gobble it dry like an after-dinner mint. The next day, when I was off at the radio station writing ads for waterbeds and singles bars, she phoned Charleston to break the news to the mother-in-law she would never have.

  Mummie, mind you, never told me this. She harbored the knowledge for three or four years as that malignancy grew in her breast.

  She wasn’t shocked, she told Josie later, but she was worried about the way the world would treat me, and the life I’d lead later. Maybe it seemed all right now, when I was young and reckless, but what would it be like when I was older, when I was fifty, say, and lonely and childless? She was just as worried about my father, resolving to keep the news from him at any cost, knowing how it would destroy him. But she did her best to educate herself, spending hours in the stacks of the Charleston library furtively reading books she was too ashamed to check out.

  The following summer my folks came to visit. I wanted them to see, if not the whole truth of my life, at least the effects of that truth: my charming little house on a rooftop, my circle of presentable friends, my blazingly evident happiness. I wanted them to feel what I’d been feeling in the hope that it might transform them, force them to see the rightness—the staggering simplicity—of this thing that I’d feared so foolishly for most of my life.

  So we took a drive up the coast, winding our way up Highway 1, where the golden hills and sparkling bays were certain to make my father a mellower man. Just outside Bolinas I spotted a teepee in the middle of a meadow. I had been to this place the month before, had met its occupants, in fact, and thought they would make the perfect field trip for my parents’ first vi
sit to Lotusland. Explaining nothing, I led them across the meadow—Pap in a business suit, Mummie in her black wet-look trench coat—and yelled out a greeting to the teepee. Within seconds, a lion-haired kid of twenty had emerged, soon to be flanked by his tentmates, tawny girls in stretched-out Tshirts—two of them—braless as the day they were born. When I asked if they’d mind visitors, they invited us in for chamomile tea.

  My folks handled it beautifully at first. Pap surveyed the teepee in silence, chuckling to himself, then finally declared it the damnedest thing he’d ever seen—his highest accolade. He asked questions about their water supply and what they used to protect their food from predators, and even made a sly joke about the utterly benign herbs drying above him on strings. Mummie exclaimed over the tea and the loveliness of the lagoon shimmering in the distance.

  And our hosts were so gracious, so courtly in their sweet hippie way, that I believed I’d pulled off something wonderful: a meeting of polar opposites that had somehow altered everyone for the better.

  Once we were back in the car, heading north to the Russian River, I could sense the sea change. Pap was quiet at first, then began to mutter about draft dodgers and degenerates, worthless little free-loading bastards who had never learned the value of hard work. I’d been trained not to argue with him, but it incensed me that he could be so charming and tolerant one moment and so bitterly condemning the next. I said as much, questioning his right to judge people he didn’t know, just because they were different, just because they weren’t like him. He called me a damn fool idiot, and his face turned dangerously red, and it just escalated from there.

  I stood my ground as never before; at thirty I was sick of his tantrums, tired of playing my mother’s old game of placation and retreat. This wasn’t about hippies, after all, at least not for me; it was about becoming my own version of Gabriel Noone, though I’d never actually suggested what that might be. On my father’s part, there may have been something else at play, something to do with being married and sixty. Maybe it had struck him—out there in the warmth of that sunlit meadow—that he would never again be young enough to live in a teepee with a couple of braless girls.