The Night Listener : A Novel

I saw to my relief that we were headed for the far end of the restaurant, where two ban-quettes—the best in the house—commanded a stunning view of the Bay Bridge.
    “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