The Night Listener : A Novel

our go-between, our facilitator, our guardian angel.
    For there was something magic about this boy.
    And nothing less than magic was required.
    “Hi.”
    “Oh…hey.”
    “Is this a bad time?”
    “No. It’s fine. How are you?”
    “Not great, actually.”
    “Yeah. Know what you mean.”
    Do you? I thought. Then why the fuck are we doing this? If you’re hurting as much as I am, you could fix us both in the blink of an eye.
    “Just thought I’d check in,” I said.
    “Good.”
    “There’s a letter here for you,” I said. “From your father, I think.”
    “Oh, yeah?”
    “Miracle of miracles, huh?”
    “Not really. He just wants to have his hand held.” Jess’s mother had died eight months earlier in a car wreck in Alabama, a trauma that had driven Jess’s father to finally seek connection with his children. Jess deeply resented this latter-day conversion. Here was the man who had beaten him routinely as a child, who had thrown him out of the house at sixteen, who had all but ignored Jess’s medical death sentence. He had no right to expect intimacy on demand, in Jess’s reckoning of things.
    “I thought I might bring it over,” I said.
    “Bring what?”
    “The letter.”
    “Over here?”
    “Yeah.” His apparent hesitation went straight to the pit of my stomach. “Unless, it’s not…”
    “No. That’d be great.”
    “You sure?”
    “Yeah. I’d like you to see the place. It’s a mess right now, but…”
    “God, Jess, I don’t care about that.”
    What I cared about, in truth, was not the state of his apartment but the fact that he already had enough pride in it to make apologies. This place was supposed to be an interim measure at best, a neutral space in which he could read and think and be alone.
    It made me crazy to hear him talk about it as if it were home.
    His lobby was one of those gilt-and-green caverns from the twenties, somewhere between Mandarin and Mesopotamian, with a dinosaur of an elevator at the far end. Next to the elevator stood the mailboxes, where a man was wriggling his key out of its lock. The guy was as stubby and well built as a Shetland pony, and completely up-holstered in leather. I couldn’t help wondering if he’d met Jess yet, if they lived on the same floor, or even if they had fucked each other.
    To make matters worse, he dismissed me with the briefest of glances as I crossed the lobby.
    Jess’s apartment was on the sixth floor, the top one. The corridor had new carpeting and sturdy industrial light globes that were a little too late-eighties for their deco setting. Despite this recent attention, a palpable shabbiness remained: too many ancient paint jobs clotting the corners, a frenzy of rust on the fire escape, the stinging smell of disinfectant. The place wasn’t nearly as fancy as I’d imagined, which both depressed and relieved me.
    Jess was waiting at his door, his head recently shaved to a high shine. He was wearing an old mint-green sport shirt he had bought for our cruise to Cozumel. It seemed in conflict with his Mr. Clean-from-Hell look, but it was nice to see this remnant of his earlier, softer self. I couldn’t help wondering if he knew that, if he’d consciously chosen the shirt to put me at ease.
    “Hey,” he said quietly, and gave me a hug.
    I held him longer than I should have, hoping that our touch still had a language of its own, embarrassing myself in the process.
    So I shifted our focus to the apartment. “Well, this is nice.”
    “Yeah,” he said, “the view’s good.”
    The huge iron window was the room’s best feature, lending it the air of a Parisian garret. But it was on the wrong side of the building to form a sight line with my house; the view was toward the south-east: SOMA and China Basin and the dull pewter plain of the bay.
    The window I’d imagined as his was somewhere else around the corner.
    “Can I get you anything?” he asked. “Juice or tea?”
    “Juice would be nice,” I said.
    I followed him through a stucco archway to his tiny galley of a kitchen, where I saw to my distress that he’d already begun to arrange snapshots on his refrigerator door. I spotted Hugo first, standing alone in our garden, his blind old eyes looking especially supernatural in the camera’s flash. (“Mongrel of the Corn,” Jess had dubbed that shot.) Then there was Seneca and Vance in a studio photo they’d had done as a Christmas present. And our godson, Jared, up in Inverness. And the silhouette of a man