The Night Listener : A Novel

been reruns.”
    I issued a weary sigh. “Pitiful, isn’t it?”
    “Tell me about your dad, then.”
    A day or so earlier I would have offered a salty response, but so much about my relationship with the boy had already changed.
    Now it somehow seemed as if he were inquiring into his own ances-try, so I couldn’t very well disparage his grandfather. “What would you like to know?” I asked.
    “Did you ever go fishing with him?”
    I thought about that. “Maybe once or twice. I think he was the same way as me, actually.”
    “About the fish, you mean?”
    “Yeah. I know he hated hunting. He had no respect for men who went off into the woods with guns. And sports were no big deal either. He never inflicted that one on me, thank God. Which was a good thing, since I was a miserable athlete.”
    “What did he like, then?”
    “Oh…gardening, mostly, and worshipping our ancestors and being with my mother. He yelled at her a lot, but he adored her. He hated it when they were separated.”
    “Was he a writer, too?”
    “No, not really. Well, he wrote a family history once. And he was an excellent storyteller.”
    “Before bed, you mean.”
    “Oh, no. It was more like…you know, to the whole room.”
    “Like you.”
    I laughed. “Yeah, I guess. Like me.”
    “He sounds great.”
    “Well…a lot about him was, yes.”
    “He’s dead, you mean?”
    “Oh, no. Not by a long shot.”
    “Do you talk to him like this? On the phone.”
    “Well…yeah, if there’s a birthday or something. He’s no good at the spontaneous stuff. He has to have a reason. And I get a little tired of always being the one who calls.”
    “Oh, man, if I had a dad…”
    “Hey, I thought we’d just arranged that.” Another significant pause, and then: “That didn’t weird you out?”
    “No…well, maybe at first, but…I want you to call me that, okay?
    I want to be that person for you.”
    He started to cry again.
    “I know,” I said. “You could do a lot better.”
    “Fuck you,” he said.
    “Hey…that’s ‘Fuck you, Dad.’”
    We talked for another five minutes or so. Trivial stuff mostly, since I wanted to lessen the urgency of saying goodbye. The end announced itself naturally enough, when Pete’s voice began to dwindle.
    But he said “I love you” before we signed off, and I said it back to him.
    And I remember thinking how easily those words had come, and how preposterously true they seemed, and how they would seem that way for years to come, even if they proved to be our last.
     
    NINE

    MORE THAN ELEPHANTS

    THE SIDEWALK OUTSIDE Pasqua was bustling with Bears: big guys in beards and suspenders who would have been called portly in an earlier age. Though they often gathered here in—what? packs?—their furry-shouldered presence was especially evident this morning. Was there a convention in town, I wondered, some mass migration from the hinterlands? There was a distinct tribal hum in the coffeehouse, the kind you hear on an airplane when every passenger but you is travelling to the same ball game.
    I waited in line with a trio of grizzlies, then took my turkey pesto sandwich to a table in the corner, where I pondered my identity. At just under two hundred pounds I was certainly eligible for Beardom.
    What would it be like to abandon the gym, to sa yes to jelly doughnuts, to buy a pair of roomy overalls and learn to eroticize fat? Bears were supposed to be free of attitude, weren’t they? I liked the idea of that, and of reviving the carnal democracy of yore, before steroids and circuit parties had bullied so many men into seeking identical pneumatic bodies.
    Then again, I already knew how it felt to be thirty pounds heavier.
    At the height of my domesticity with Jess I had lost my body-consciousness to such an extent that I stopped consulting the scales and started wearing sweatpants. Jess found me sexy in any size, he claimed, so I relaxed and ignored the obvious. I didn’t realize how much had changed until I went on a book tour in Europe and read my own press profiles. Photographs can be denied as easily as mirrors, but even translated from the Finnish the word “fat” is sufficiently clear. So I joined a gym when I got home—not a gay one, which would have been too intimidating, but the gym down at the UC Medical Center, three blocks from the house. And I hired a trainer this time, adding financial commitment to my growing list of incentives.
    My body changed in subtle ways—and slowly—but