The Night Listener : A Novel

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    SEVENTEEN

    JUST TURN THE PAGE

    JESS AND I ADDED THE LYCH-GATE several months after moving in.
    I had grown up with one in Charleston and had loved the cozy enchantment of it: the shadows under its eaves, the way the honey-suckle would pile up on its roof in a fragrant yellow avalanche. It wasn’t very grand—my father had built it over a weekend out of two-by-fours and asphalt shingles—but I remember being intensely proud of it. It was exotic to me, a fragment of Old Europe, like the porcelain fixture that sprouted mysteriously in my parents’ bathroom after their first trip to Paris. “You pronounce it bee-day,” my mother told me demurely, though she declined to explain its purpose.
    I knew the purpose of lych-gates. My English grandmother had told me that lych meant corpse , and these gates had been designed to keep coffins dry in rainy churchyards. Jess and I found another use for ours: repelling invaders. Before we built the gate visitors would zigzag all the way up through the garden to ring the doorbell.
    And since the front of the house is just a series of French doors, the living room was utterly exposed. It would only be a matter of time, we believed, before one of us would look up from a blow job on the sofa to find himself eye to eye with a volunteer from the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic.
    Or, with any luck at all, a Jehovah’s Witness.
    There was also the issue of my celebrity. From the second-floor bedroom we could already see discreet little groups of Noone at Night ers (identifiable by the books in their hands) casing the house from the sidewalk across the street. If we didn’t do something soon, Jess argued, I’d be signing autographs at the door in my nightshirt—whether I wanted to or not.
    So we found a craftsman who could design us something sturdy but graceful—more Japanese than English, really—that would accommodate a buzzer and an automatic lock. Once the lych-gate was installed, the garden became just another room of the house, afford-ing a whole new level of peace and security. Now, when we heard a noise at night, the gate at least assured us that it couldn’t be anything human; had to be just another skunk squeezing under the fence, or a bird sideswiping the house, or the black bamboo tapping softly against the window in the wind.
    Which was why, on this particular night, I leaped up from the sofa as if I’d just heard a scream:
    There was someone on the steps.
    Someone I hadn’t buzzed in.
    Someone I could barely make out through the filigree of the tree ferns, a shadowy figure in black, climbing swiftly to the porch.
    “Jesus!” I said. “You scared the fuck out of me.”
    “Sorry,” Jess said contritely, peering in through the French doors.
    “I wondered if I should buzz first.”
    In his leather jacket and bike helmet he looked like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Despite my shattered nerves I was glad that he’d used his key. It seemed to suggest that he hadn’t gone for good, still considered this place his home. “No, it’s okay,” I said. “I’m just jumpy.” He came into the living room holding a plastic bag, and set it down on the coffee table. Then he pulled off his helmet and placed it next to the bag, very delicately, as if it were a fragile heirloom. His face was a little blotchy from his ride, and he suddenly seemed older to me, more angular and careworn, closer to middle age than to the soft-featured boy I’d fallen in love with. I was unexpectedly touched by this, touched to be reminded how long we’d been fellow travellers, whatever our troubles were now.
    He pecked me on the lips. “Who did you think it was, anyway?” I rolled my eyes. “Nobody. Anybody. You don’t wanna know.” Meaning that I didn’t want to tell him; that I was too embarrassed to admit the depth of my paranoia. For the past five days my guilty mind had been conjuring up things that weren’t even faintly rational, much less possible.
    “I brought dinner,” said Jess, indicating the bag on the table, “in case you haven’t eaten.”
    I wanted to cry, or at least to hold him for a while, but I was wary of his rigid body language. What had prompted this visit, anyway?
    Was he feeling the remorse that I’d been feeling about our last conversation? Or was there