The Night Listener : A Novel

road-show version of me.
    Dewy-eyed shopgirls and waiters, clocking the name on his credit card, would ask him for his autograph only to discover he wasn’t the Gabriel Noone. I liked to imagine this happening during one of his lunches with Strom Thurmond, when ol’ Strom had been ranting away about the evils of the Gay Agenda. But the senator probably avoided the subject altogether, recognizing, in his gentle-manly way, the cross his old friend had to bear.
    “We saw your books in Paris,” my father said. “Big pile of ‘em.
    Right there…you know…in that virgin place.” Darlie provided the translation: “The Virgin Megastore.”
    “Ah.”
    “I wanted the new Jimmy Buffett,” she explained.
    I gave her a private twinkle. “I thought maybe he was looking for Nine Inch Nails.”
    Darlie chuckled; my father’s eyes narrowed. “What the hell does that mean?”
    “Nothing, sweetness. It’s just a musical group.”
    “Thank God. I thought you were talking about my prowess.”
    “No, believe me, nobody’s talking about that.”
    “Did you tell the boy about…?”
    “No, I did not.”
    “Good.”
    “Why on earth would—”
    “Remember ol’ Hubie Verner?” My father leaned closer, clearly intent upon telling me himself. Whatever the hell it was.
    “Yeah,” I said carefully. “Your doctor. Or used to be.”
    “Still is,” said Pap with a chuckle. “Must be ninety, if he’s day, but I’m still goin’ to him.”
    Darlie rolled her eyes. “He’s seventy-one, for God’s sake. He’s a lot younger’n you.”
    “Well, he looks ninety, poor bastard.” My father leaned closer in a moment of man-to-man lechery. “Wrote me a prescription for that Viagra stuff. Damnedest thing you’ve ever seen.”
    “Gabriel…”
    “Oh, hell, Darlie, he’s a grown man.”
    “Nobody cares if—”
    “ You sure as hell cared. You were pretty damn impressed.” He turned back to me, his face rosy with revelation. “Took me one when she was out shoppin’ on the Rue de Rivoli. Had a big ol’ surprise waitin’ for her when she got back to the George Cinq.” My stepmother’s expression was flawlessly deadpan. “Now there’s an image we could all live without.”
    “Tell me,” I said, offering her a crooked smile.
    Darlie looked good for fifty-three, I thought. She had trimmed down considerably, and her strawberry-blond hair was cropped stylishly short. We had never been close, but I admired the way she let the old man’s crap roll off her back. My mother had spent her marriage tiptoeing around his anger and intolerance, making endless excuses and hoping, I suppose, for a miraculous conversion. Darlie just saw Pap as something elemental and unavoidable, like hur-ricanes and pluff mud, to be endured with stoic humor.
    Maybe it helped that Darlie wasn’t one of us. She wasn’t white trash, or even “common,” as we used to say, but had I brought her home during high school, she would surely have been assessed as someone whose family didn’t “go to the ball.” Darlie’s father had been a chief yeoman at the naval base, her mother a bank teller.
    Perfectly respectable, unless you grew up south of Broad, where
    “nice folks” were ruthlessly delineated by their attendance at the St.
    Cecilia Ball. Nowadays Darlie was nice by marriage, but Pap behaved as if she’d been born to the job, and defied anyone—from any class—to suggest otherwise. No one in his family could ever be less than aristocratic, just as no one could really be gay. When the truth locked horns with my father’s prejudices, it was always the truth that suffered.
    “Sometimes,” my sister, Josie, once remarked, “I wish I’d given him a black grandchild, just to see how he’d make it white.”
    Our food had arrived, but my father’s eyes had wandered out to the Embarcadero. A line of signal flags—plastic and strictly decorat-ive—was snapping in the night air like forgotten laundry.
    “India, Echo, Charlie,” I said.
    “What?”
    “Those three next to the lamppost. Right?” Pap and I had both served in the navy, once upon a time. This was our common currency, so I doled it out judiciously whenever I wanted to feel closer to him. Thirty years earlier, I had written long letters home from Vietnam, shamelessly dramatizing my circumstances, just to make him proud of me. Nothing could soften his heart like the memory of war.
    He squinted at the signal flags for a moment, then grunted. “Who the hell knows?