The Night Listener : A Novel

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.
    I wasn’t obsessive about it. I went about my usual rituals after the reading was over, washing dishes and sorting laundry and tidying up. And a few thoughtful friends did call to say that they’d heard the broadcast and couldn’t wait to find out where this new plotline was heading. But an hour passed and that hoped-for call never came, so I smoked a joint and went out to the hot tub for a moonlight soak.
    A spring’s worth of bamboo shoots, some as fat as broomsticks, had made a benign jail cell of the big redwood barrel. As I floated there in its amniotic warmth, watching a Japanese woodblock moon dawdle in the new leaves, I savored the thought that my story was finally out there in the ether, a self-sufficient organism beyond my control, changing shape in every new mind that absorbed it. And I was so much less afraid about everything, even my solitary state. It felt fine to be there,