The Night Listener : A Novel

just right for us, I thought, the perfect metaphor for how we’d managed to coexist all these years. Histrionic but mute, we had signalled our deepest feelings through broad strokes of pantomime, and always from a distance.
    I dropped them off at the Huntington around eleven. We exchanged brisk, ritual hugs, and they promised to phone on their way back from Tahiti. Driving home in the fog, I had to ask myself why I’d chosen that night of all nights to tangle with the old man.
    After all, he’d mellowed a great deal in recent years, and I had long before stopped needing his approval, thanks largely to Jess. There was finally someone else to be proud of me, someone whose opinion mattered even more than Pap’s. Was that the reason for my outburst, then? Was I just angry at Jess for making the ground shaky again?
    And there was something else: Pap’s curiosity about Pete had made it clear how much the boy already mattered to me. He was no longer just an interesting story; he was a habit. Our visits on the phone had become almost nightly now, which spoke far less to my charity than to my need. He was the perfect listener, the only confid-ant with whom I felt utterly secure. That I had chosen someone so young and far away, someone I might never meet who could well be near death, only made it easier to tell him the truth.
     
    SIX

    WAYNE

    “WHO’S THAT?” I asked. “Anybody you know?” There was a dog barking in the background. A large one, from the sound of it.
    “That’s Janus,” Pete said. Then I heard him call out into the room,
    “Leave it, Janus! Leave it!”
    “What’s he got? A cat?”
    “No, the vacuum hose. Janus, leave it!” I laughed. “Ours used to do that. It’s something to do with the sound. It makes them crazy.”
    “But it’s not even on. He thinks it’s an anaconda or something.
    Janus, you fuckhead!”
    The dog barked once, for symbolism’s sake, then stopped.
    “He only listens to Mom,” Pete said. “He totally behaves around her. She’s had him for like a hundred years.” Unruly or not, the dog reassured me. I hadn’t forgotten my last talk with Donna, and the people who might still hold a grudge against Pete.
    “What is he?” I asked.
    “A Lab.”
    “What color?”
    “Yellow.”
    “Oh, they’re the best. So loyal. We have an old mutt named Hugo.
    Part Australian shepherd and part jackal.” The dog was curled up next to me, in fact, and his ear flicked in recognition of his name. I had detected a brand-new odor about him, sickly and disturbing, and wondered how much life he had left. Would he even last until Jess got home? I could remember a time, not that long ago, when I’d endured the certainty that Hugo would survive Jess. I’d written a poignant little essay about it, in fact.
    “Hugo,” Pete repeated. “As in Les Misérables .”
    “Close. He was named after Victor Hugo, but another one. A fashion designer in New York.”
    Pete grunted. “You like that fashion shit?”
    “Not even slightly. That’s one queer gene I missed completely.”
    “Then why did you…?”
    “A friend of mine named him.” And where are you now, Wayne?
    Why aren’t you here to get me through this? Almost nobody’s dying these days. If you’d hung around a little longer you would have made the cut.
    “He liked fashion, huh?”
    “Not really. Just the designer. He thought he was sexy.” Said sexy designer, if memory served, hadn’t survived nearly as long as Wayne had.
    “Man, is that all you guys think about?”
    “Don’t you think about girls all day?”
    “Well…yeah.”
    “Well, there you go.”
    “That’s all I can do, man. Think about ‘em.” I pictured Pete on his endless loop between Henzke Street and the hospital, frail and barely able to breathe, stealing glimpses of pretty girls along the way, girls who would find him pitiable, or never even notice him at all. He had reached the age of crushes and budding lust, but he’d been robbed of all that. Having been denied it myself—or at least the license to act upon it—I felt my heart rush out to him.
    “What about magazines?” I asked.
    “What do you mean?”
    “You must have a Playboy under your mattress.”
    “Are you nuts, man?”
    “You do, don’t you?” I chuckled knowingly.
    “My mom would skin my ass.”
    No way, I thought. Donna Lomax was a thoroughly modern woman, unflappable as she was kind, and anything but a prude. If she disapproved of skin magazines—which I doubted—she