The Night Listener

  “Oh, c’mon now. He was a knockout when he was sixty-five.”

  “I’m fifty-four,” I said.

  “Oh, honey, same difference when you’re our age.” She took my arm and spun me around to face Josie. “Doesn’t he look just like him?”

  “Pretty much,” said my sister.

  I was deeply uncomfortable. Darlie and I were a year apart in age and had lived on different coasts since I’d known her, so she’d wisely never attempted an impersonation of motherhood. Still, it felt a little incestuous to be told, even jokingly, that she was turned on by my resemblance to Pap. I decided to change the subject: “How’s he doing?”

  “Oh, fine, right now. It was just a mini-stroke, and he’s tough as an old boot.”

  Josie’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean, right now?”

  “Nothing. He’s fine. C’mon, let’s get up there before he starts goosing the lunch nurse.”

  His room was on the third floor and suitably large. There were flowers on every surface, suggesting that this crisis had already been something of a local event. The old man was lying on his side with his back to the door, an anonymous white mound tethered to an IV

  pole. Darlie approached him like a lion tamer testing the mood of her grumpiest cat.

  “Honeypie?”

  My father stirred but didn’t turn around.

  “Look who’s here, sweetness.”

  He rolled over and grunted, then rubbed his eyes until he saw what she meant. “Well, I’ll be goddamned…”

  “Wouldn’t doubt it at all,” I said.

  He hooted in appreciation, and right away I saw the distortion of his features. “You son-of-a-bitch. What the hell you doing here, boy?”

  “Well, I heard there was this big sale on hoppin’ John at the Piggly Wiggly…”

  “Goddamn, it’s good to see you.” He sat up in bed and thrust out his hand, grabbing my shoulder with the other in the come-here-but-stay-away gesture I knew so well. “Seriously, son, you pushin’ a book or something?”

  I said I hadn’t done that for a good long while.

  “These crazy women didn’t tell you something was wrong with me, did they?”

  Darlie rolled her eyes at Josie. “Now why would we go and do a damn fool thing like that?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. Women get hysterical. That’s just the way they are.” The old man winked at me. “Right, sport?”

  “Don’t ask me,” I said. “I’m still working on men.” The old man flinched in a broad Three Stooges sort of way, as if to make it clear that he was not really to be taken seriously. “Christ, don’t be talkin’ like that in front of your pore ol’ sick father.”

  “Oh, now he’s sick,” laughed Josie.

  “Help me up,” said Pap, reaching for Josie. “I gotta piss before that little nigger gal gets here with my baloney sandwich.”

  “Lovely,” said Darlie, glancing my way.

  Pulling the IV stand, Josie steered the old man to the bathroom door, then let him navigate the rest on his own. When the door was closed, Darlie said: “That’s just a blood thinner, by the way. It’s standard for a stroke. Even a little one. He’ll be off it tomorrow or the next day.” Josie glanced at the clock. “We’re gonna leave you with him for a while. Is that okay?”

  This proposal felt so prearranged that it made me nervous. “What’s up?” I asked.

  “Nothing. We just have to go pay our respects to the Edwardses.

  Libby Edwards died.”

  My father, now peeing noisily in the bathroom, boomed a footnote through the door: “Hateful old bitch!”

  “Well,” said Darlie, “his hearing’s good as ever.”

  “What was that?” hollered Pap.

  “Nothing, sweetums.”

  The old man flushed the toilet and came lumbering back with his pole. His skimpy striped hospital gown made his gruffness seem comical, like a polar bear who’d been rudely anthropomorphized by Disney. “You know it’s the truth,” he said. “She behaved atrociously after Bo’s death.”

  “Bo Edwards died?” There was so much I didn’t know about Charleston society these days.

  Josie nodded, giving me a look I couldn’t quite read. “About three years ago.”

  “He killed himself,” Darlie added quietly.

  I hesitated out of old habit, realizing how casually I’d led us into forbidden territory. I could feel my mother’s eyes boring into me from across the years, but I managed to ignore them. “Why did he do that?”

  Darlie replied with a single whispered word—”Prostate”—as if it explained everything. How thoroughly Southern that was: the assumption that an eighty-year-old who’d lost his “manhood” might naturally be driven to take his life.

  “How did she behave atrociously?” I asked.

  My father’s mind had ambled off. “Who?”

  “Libby Edwards.”

  “Oh, hell, she was just an angry bitch. Actin’ so pissed off all the time. You’d think she was the one who died.”

  “Pap.” Josie leveled those hazel eyes at the old man and spoke in a way that was both stern and gentle. “She had a perfect right to be pissed off.”

  “Well, she should’ve kept it to herself.”

  “Why? Why shouldn’t she say how she felt if—”

  “You don’t make a public spectacle of yourself. Drag the family name through all that crap. It’s common.” Josie sighed, then caught my eye, obviously worried that I was about to say what I was thinking: that the family name had been dragging us through crap for years. But we were saved by the arrival of a nurse—middle-aged and inarguably white—bearing a tray with my father’s sandwich.

  When the women were gone, I took a walk around the block to clear my head. I returned to find my father propped up in bed, staring out the window. There was a look in his eyes I couldn’t identify, but he blustered it away as soon as he saw me.

  “Hey, boy! What’s it like out there?”

  I told him something I knew he’d like to hear: that I’d missed these old sideways houses, and the true ocean smell of the Atlantic, and the way the oaks made shady tunnels out of the streets.

  “That’s right,” he said. “You ain’t got many big trees out there, except for…oh you know, what’s that damn place called? Oh, hell, what is it? Named after that naturalist fella. Up north, across the bridge.”

  “Muir Woods.”

  “That’s it! Muir Woods! Beautiful place.” Geography again. Hiding us from ourselves and each other.

  “Remember when we took your mama up there?”

  “Yeah, I do. That was nice.”

  “Duddn’ seem that long ago, does it?”

  I shook my head, smiling.

  “It goes awful fast, son.”

  I told him I knew that already.

  “But duddn’ it bother you?”

  I shrugged. “A lot of my friends died years ago. It seems like bad form to complain about getting older.”

  He paused a moment, assembling his words. “You know, I was mighty fucked up when your mama died. I didn’t know what I was gonna do with myself. I thought it was all over until that little gal came along.” He glanced toward the door as if he half expected to find Darlie hovering there, overhearing this endorsement. “Where the hell’d she go, anyway?”

  “Just to that funeral.”

  “What funeral?”

  “Libby Edwards.”

  “Oh, that awful old bitch. When she comin’ back?”

  “Libby? I seriously doubt she is.”

  It took him a moment to realize I was teasing. “I meant your mama, goddammit!”

  He meant Darlie, of course, but his confusion was understandable.

  One person can easily be mistaken for another when you require insurance against solitude at any cost. And I resented him for that more than ever, the nearly constant companionship that had allowed this wounded fledgling to impersonate an eagle all these years. He’d had it so easy, really.

  “She’
ll be back,” I said. “You can do without her for an hour or so.”

  “I wanna tell her something.”

  “You can do that later.”

  He’s just as scared as I am, I thought. He hates the thought of being alone with me and what we would do with the silences.

  “So when do you have to go back?”

  I shrugged. “A few days, I guess. I dunno. I’m on my own schedule.”

  “You’re a lucky son-of-a-bitch, you know.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “Oh, hell, almost forgot: Dick Burbage called. Wants you to come to the Centurion Feast.”

  This was the annual Christmas party of my father’s club, a quasi-military hereditary society that I joined on my return from Vietnam, mostly out of deference to the old man. The Centurions did a lot of drinking and ancestor worship but not much else. I’d remained a member in absentia when I moved to California, but they’d quietly asked me to resign in the late seventies when Noone at Night made my open queerness apparent.

  I frowned. “Did you tell him I was here?”

  “Hell, no. He called me, I didn’t even know you were coming.

  Must’ve heard it through one of Walker’s friends.” I found myself grinning idiotically and sounding a lot like my father. “Well, if that don’t beat all.”

  “You wanna go, then?” The longing in his eyes was palpable. That damned club still mattered to him more than anything.

  “Sure,” I said. “Just as soon as Dick Burbage comes out of the closet.”

  “Now, wait a goddamn—”

  “And I want you to put it just that way.”

  “I won’t do anything of the kind!”

  “And while they’re at it, a written apology would be nice.”

  “That was twenty years ago, for God’s sake!”

  “So?”

  “So a lot’s changed.”

  “Yeah. I’m famous now. That’s what’s changed. So Dick Burbage gets to kill two birds with one stone: do you a favor and impress the twinkies he picks up down at Arcade.”

  “He’s not doing me a favor, I told you that.”

  “Fine. He’s not doing me one either.”

  “And you don’t know anything about…his private life.”

  “I wouldn’t lay money on that, Pap.”

  He regarded me with a wary scowl, obviously wondering if I spoke from personal experience. I didn’t bother to disabuse him, though Dick Burbage’s homohood was probably more aesthetic than carnal. Like a number of queers, he was drawn to the club by its lovely old house full of lovely old things. These guys were discreet around the dinosaurs, but even my father’s beloved Centurions had its own secret coterie of girly-men.

  “Jesus,” the old man muttered, “you’ve got the biggest goddamn chip on your shoulder.”

  I smiled at him. “I kind of enjoy it, too. I see why you like yours so much.”

  He let that pass. “The Centurions have been my life, you know.”

  “I know, Pap. Your life, not mine.”

  “Would it kill you to go down there and have a drink with them?” And would it have killed you, I thought, to defend me? To tell your buddies to go to hell when they ostracized your son for his honesty?

  “It seems like a compliment to me,” he added. “You should be happy they asked.”

  I was happy they had asked. It felt great to realize that these people no longer mattered to me at all. “Look,” I said. “I could easily go down there and be Scarlett O’Hara in my red dress, but there’s no point in…”

  “Red dress? What the hell you talkin’ about?”

  “Relax. It’s just a metaphor.”

  “Thank God.”

  “When is it, anyway?”

  “When’s what?”

  “The Feast.”

  “Oh…tomorrow night.”

  “Well, that settles it, then. I’d rather be here with you.” The old man sighed. “So what am I spose to tell Dick Burbage?”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ll tell him myself.”

  “Jesus, don’t tell him to come out of the closet!” I laughed. “All right. I promise.”

  “You’ll give the ol’ fruit a heart attack.” I just shook my head and smiled, recognizing one of his oldest oratorical tricks: a bait and switch that allowed his audience the briefest glimpse of what he really knew to be true.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  NO EPIPHANIES

  ANOTHER NURSE ARRIVED—the “little nigger gal,” I presumed—and began fiddling with my father’s IV line.

  “This is Sondra,” my father said in his best courtly fashion. “She’s a helluva fine nurse, and she comes from good folks out on Edisto.”

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “That’s my son, that distinguished-looking fella. He lives out in California, and he’s famous as all get-out. Just ask him.”

  “Pap…”

  “What do you do?” asked Sondra.

  “I’m a writer.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Same as mine,” said my father. “Gabriel Noone. Embarrasses the hell out of him.”

  This clearly rang no bells for Sondra, but she was gracious enough not to ask what I’d written. She gave me a friendly, knowing look as she plumped the old man’s pillow. “He’s a pistol, isn’t he?”

  “More like an Uzi.”

  “Lemme ask you this,” said my father. “Why do folks always talk about me like I ain’t here?”

  “Wishful thinking, I guess.”

  Sondra looked a little horrified at my wisecrack. “Now don’t be talking about your daddy that way.”

  “That’s right,” said the old man. “You tell him, Sondra. He’s got no respect for his elders.”

  “I’m outa here,” she said, heading for the door. “Too many roosters in this barnyard.”

  My father winked at me as soon as she was gone, as if our sparring exhibition had been staged for Sondra’s benefit alone. “She’s a sweet little gal,” he said. “And I’ll tell you something else: she’s a damn sight more efficient than the white ones.” It always touched me when he tried this hard to prove he wasn’t a racist. “She does seem nice,” I said.

  An awkward silence followed. My father looked nervous, fiddling with his sheet, glancing toward the window and back again. “You don’t have to stay, boy. The gals’ll be back in a little while.”

  “I’d like to stay.”

  “You gotta have some friends you wanna visit.”

  “Nope,” I said, smiling.

  A longer silence followed. There was nothing left to save us, nothing to muffle the taunts of things left unsaid. Then my father noticed the scab on the palm of my hand. “What the hell did you do to yourself?”

  “Oh…” I shrugged. “Just a roadside mishap.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Little bit.”

  “Least you can feel something. Lookee here.” His hand popped up from the sheets, as if he were about to recite the Boy Scout Pledge.

  “What is it?”

  “Damnedest thing. It’s all numb down one side.”

  “Was this from the stroke?”

  He grunted yes.

  “I thought it just affected your face.”

  “Well, I had another little one last night.”

  “Jesus, Pap.”

  “It wasn’t a big one.”

  “Does your doctor know?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Did you tell Darlie and Josie?”

  “Hell, they don’t need to know everything. They just get hysterical.”

  I gaped at him in amazement. “I’m gonna get that way myself in a minute.”

  “It’s nothing, I tell ya.”

  “So why tell me at all?”

  No answer.

  “Talk to me, Pap.”

  “I’m talking, goddammit. I talk all the time.”

  “Yeah. About stuff that doesn’t matter—communists and liberals and sce
nery. But you never talk about your feelings. If you’re scared, why don’t you just say so? I’d really like it if you could.” He grunted. “You’ve been out there way too long.”

  “No, Pap, this has been going on forever. I’ve accommodated your embarrassment for so long that I actually feel it myself. And that makes me crazy, because you’re the only person on earth I do this with.”

  “Embarrassment? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Maybe that’s not the word, I don’t know. There’s just this stiffness that happens. This dance of avoidance we do. You’re not comfortable with me. I used to think it was because I was a sissy and you knew it.”

  “That’s not true at all. Ask your mama…”

  “She’s dead, Pap.”

  “Well, she’d be glad to tell you if she was here.”

  “I want you to tell me. Were you afraid I’d just be a bigger sissy if you held me from time to time?”

  “Held you?”

  “Yeah. Held me.” How pathetic it felt to be having this over-wrought East of Eden conversation so late in both our lives.

  “I held you all the time, goddammit.”

  “When I was a baby, maybe. When you were posing for pictures.

  But I’ve never had so much as a hug from you that didn’t feel like an uncomfortable duty. I just waited for the moment when you’d have to pull away.”

  “That’s a damn lie.”

  “No, Pap. It always got to be too much for you.”

  “Well, I’m sorry if it seemed that way.”

  “It was that way. It is that way.”

  “Well, case closed. I guess I’m just a sorry bastard.”

  “No. Nobody thinks that. Why do you always do that?” (Jess did this too, I realized, retreating in a cloud of righteous anger whenever we swerved too close to the tender heart of things.) “Can’t you just say that it’s hard for you to be intimate?”

  “Well, that’s a fascinating theory, but—”

  “You wanna hear the rest of it?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “Well, yell for the nurse then, because you’re gonna get it.”

  “What the hell is the matter with you, anyway? You’re fifty years old, and you still care what your father thinks.” How mean he could be sometimes. And how accurate.

  “And you don’t?” I asked.

  “Don’t what?”