The Night Listener : A Novel

gonna let that happen.”
    The color had risen in Jess’s cheeks. I couldn’t help smiling at his old Shiite zeal. He had always been a control freak with a short fuse—a reality I found nerve-racking in most circumstances (in traffic, for instance, and in crowded airports) but curiously comforting when it came to my career. His tough territorial nature made me feel protected, I suppose. Loved, even.
    “Did Passavoy go for that?” I asked.
    “What?”
    “My name in the title.”
    “Damn right. They wanna do this thing.”
    “They’re that serious, huh?”
    “Get this,” he said, and plunged into a rundown of the agents and producers who had swapped calls and taken meetings in recent days. While he talked, my eyes crept about the room, ransacking the place for clues. The pieces he’d brought from home (where they’d been in the basement) had assumed an odd new vitality in this setting. There was the bedside table Wayne and I had used on Telegraph Hill. And the little mica-shaded lamp I’d bought during my bachelor days. And some paisley pillows that hadn’t been compatible with the sofa Jess’s aunt had given us. They had all been disposable items, since this was to be a disposable room.
    Jess had bought a table, I noticed: blond and brand-new, but reassuringly flimsy. He could give that to a friend, I figured, or leave it on the street corner, when this was over. The same was true of his new fiberboard bookshelf, now the home of his vast array of self-help books, most of which had the word soul in the title. I saw some Jung there, too, and several scholarly books on masochism with creepy-sounding titles. And down near the floor, a homemade shrine with votive candles and a Tibetan Buddhist deity. Jess had renounced fundamentalism as a boy, but the need for religion had never stopped dogging him. I myself had lost that years earlier; our marriage had become the only deity I required.
    “Sounds great,” I told him, when he’d finished his rundown. “Go for it.”
    “I’m gonna need my computer.”
    “Fine. Whatever. It’s your office.”
    “No. I mean…I’m gonna need it here.”
    My heart sank. Until that moment, I’d found reassurance in the knowledge that—to Jess, at least—home was where his computer was. The clothes and furniture he’d brought here were of little import, but his computer was his central nervous system, his roaring hearth.
    I tried to stay nonchalant. “Won’t that be more trouble than it’s worth? Moving it, I mean?”
    He shook his head. “I can manage. When you’re at the gym or something.”
    “No…I don’t mind helping. I just meant…”
    “It’s no problem, really.”
    A silence followed that grew into a gaping void before I found the nerve to fill it. Finally I asked: “Do you have any sense of…how long this is going to take?”
    “The deal, you mean?”
    “No…your being away.”
    “Oh. No.”
    “I just wondered if…”
    “It’s gonna be a while.”
    “And how long is that?”
    “I don’t know, babe. I have a lot of sorting out to do. I barely know who I am right now.”
    I nodded.
    “I told you that before.”
    “I know, sweetie. I just thought that…maybe by now…” I couldn’t finish; I was sounding too pathetic to myself.
    “I know you think I’m going to an orgy every night. But I’m right here most of the time.”
    Okay, I thought, but what about that picture on your refrigerator?
    “Would you like to see a movie sometime? Or have dinner out?” He was asking me for a date, I realized, this man who’d shared a bed with me for a decade, who’d cried in my arms over his mother’s coffin. Whether the invitation signified a cautious renewal or a gentle retreat I couldn’t tell. And I was far too afraid to ask.
    “That would be nice,” I said.
    I saved Pete for last. Jess listened to the story with his mouth slightly open, a double line forming on his forehead. I had reached him, I realized, in a way that I hadn’t for months.
    “He thinks of us as role models,” I said.
    He blinked at me. “He’s gay, you mean?”
    “No. He just…he sees us as two people who love each other.”
    “Based on what?”
    I knew this wasn’t meant to be ugly, so I chose not to respond that way. “The show I guess. And interviews and things.”
    “How many times have you talked to him?”
    “Now you’re sounding like my father.”
    Jess frowned. “Your father knows about this?” I could’ve kicked myself. I’d intended to