The Night Listener : A Novel

intimate act for him.
    “You just need a break,” he insisted.
    I told him I’d had one for almost four months.
    “Then drive down the coast with…Jamie, is it?”
    “Jess.”
    “Yes. You two just charge off into the wild blue yonder. And don’t think about writing at all. I think you’ll be surprised how swiftly the urge will arise again.”
    “Maybe we’ll do that,” I said.
    “Is he okay, by the way?”
    “He’s fine,” I told him. “He feels better than he has in ages. He has to stay on top of things, of course, because you really never know…but…he’s doing fine…”
    As I droned away, my gaze straggled across the cityscape. Jess’s new place was an upended sugar cube against the primeval green of Buena Vista Park. Framed neatly in the window, it was visible from the bed—from our bed—the first thing I faced in the morning, the last thing I pondered at night. Such a deft stroke of melodrama, I thought; I might have concocted it myself.
    “I’m so glad,” said Ashe Findlay.
    I’d lost my way in the conversation. “Sorry, Ashe…about what?”
    “That Jamie’s doing well. I mean Jess. Damn it, why do I insist on calling him that?”
    I told him Jamie was the name of one of my characters.
    “Ah.”
    “He isn’t actually Jess per se. But I borrowed heavily.” To put it mildly. When Jess and I met, so did Jamie and Will, the happy homo couple on Noone at Night . And when Jess tested positive, Jamie did the same—and used the same beeping pillbox for his AZT.
    Though Jamie is a coppersmith, and physically the opposite of Jess, people tend to confuse the two. Even Ashe Findlay, who was hardly a devotee of my work, had made the graceless leap from fact to fiction.
    “It’s a natural mistake,” I told him.
    Whereupon he veered into a speech about the nature of fiction. I remember very little of it except the rousing conclusion, when he urged me to remain stalwartly in the moment, for that would be the place from which my writing would flow.
    “And it will flow, Gabriel. I promise you.” Sure thing, I thought, gazing out the window again.
    “And give my best to Jess, will you?”
    That afternoon my depression got worse, so I took Hugo to Golden Gate Park, where I came across a Hare Krishna festival on the lawn behind the tennis courts. The revelers were kids mostly, pale-skinned and pimply in their saffron robes, but I envied them their stupid bliss. I sat cross-legged on the grass and watched for a while, feeling like an impostor. I wanted to be one of them, to vanish in that vortex of gaudy color and burn out my grief in the sun, but I knew far too much about myself to make it happen.
    When I got back to the house, Anna was in the office. “I had to check some stuff,” she said, gazing up from the computer like a burglar caught with a sack of silverware.
    “Check away,” I told her. “You never have to call ahead.” It would have shamed me somehow to speak the whole truth: that I loved finding someone else at home, keeping my wobbly life on course the way Jess had always done.
    “Your father called, by the way.”
    This was the last thing I’d expected. “He did? When?”
    “Little while ago.”
    “Did you pick up?”
    She chuckled. “Had to. He kept saying ‘Are you theah, are you theah? Pick it up, goddammit, I know you’re theah!’”
    “That’s him,” I said.
    “He’s a nice ol’ coot.”
    I told her strangers always liked him.
    “What’s not to like?” she asked.
    “If he knew you,” I said, “he’d call you a cute little Chink gal behind your back.”
    She grinned and turned back to the computer. “I am a cute little Chink gal.”
    I didn’t press it. My father has always been a hit-and-run charmer, so most people just don’t get it. You have to know him for half a century before you can see how little he’s really giving you. “Why did he call, anyway?”
    “He saw you on Jeopardy .”
    For a moment I wondered if Pap had finally succumbed to the delusions that had consumed my grandmother back in the sixties.
    Dodie used to see the whole family on television. I was largely to blame for this, since I was a reporter then for a Charleston station, and the side of my head could sometimes be glimpsed during off-camera interviews. Dodie had been alerted to watch for me, and in no time at all she’d improved on the concept. In her cinder-block room at the Live Oaks Convalescent Home she saw my sister, Josie, on Bewitched , my great-uncle Gus