The Night Listener : A Novel

conversation. The heartfelt reunion I’d wanted had a witness now: some creep in the background called Tom from Down the Hall. And who was to say he wasn’t that guy I’d seen in Jess’s lobby, the cocky little leather number with the Shetland pony build?
    “What’s the matter?” asked Jess.
    “Nothing. This isn’t the time, that’s all.”
    “Oh, c’mon…” His voice was gentle. He knew how much I was hurting and he hated it, but he seemed incapable of comforting me.
    Just tell me you love me, I thought. Tell me you’ve made an awful mistake. Tell me that no one on earth has ever known you the way I have. Tell me that now in front of Tom from Down the Hall.
    “I hope you’re okay,” said Jess.
    “I’m fine,” I said. “I haven’t found him yet, but…” My voice trailed off, too weakened by my green-eyed demons.
    “He’s not there, you mean?”
    “I have to go, babe. I can’t do this.”
    “Fine. All right. Whatever.”
    “Take care,” I said.
    “Right,” he said and hung up.
    I had needed a good cry, and I got one, curled up there on my blue-and-mauve bedspread. I had run out of people to call. There was no one beyond Pete and Jess that I could trust with my pathetic dis-figured self. I lay there for almost an hour while the tears scalded their way out. When there were none left, I got up and went to the bathroom, threw water on my swollen eyes and returned. The room was dark now, so I snapped on the lamp by the bed, then went to the window to shut out the blackness.
    My hands were on the curtain cord when I saw it. It was fairly far away, almost overpowered by the lights of the gas station in the foreground, but I could make out its shape against the trees, hovering there above the town.
    I left the room, forgetting I had a telephone, and raced down three corridors to the lobby, where the pleasant Asian desk clerk was still on duty. She gazed up from a magazine with a concerned frown.
    “Is everything all right?” she asked.
    “That star,” I said. “Where is it?”
    “What star?”
    “The electric one. The one I can see from my window.”
    “Oh, the Christmas star.”
    “Right.”
    “That’s on the old water tank.”
    “But where is it?”
    “Oh, lord, lemme think. It’s a coupla blocks behind the high school, which means it would be on Curtis, or maybe McIntosh. No, here’s what you do: Go down to Henzke Street, just like I told you before, then take a left on Maple just past the BP station, and go four or five blocks to Simmons, no not Simmons at all, Regent Street, and head straight out until…” There’s no point in recreating this labored litany; I wasn’t even listening at the time. My mind was elsewhere entirely, wrestling with a fragment of memory that was trying hard not to reveal itself.
    But when it did come, it came with such sudden clarity that I spoke the words out loud:
    “Roberta Blows!”
    “Excuse me?” said the desk clerk.
     
    TWENTY-ONE

    FAMILY THINGS

    THE STAR I’D SEEN had been as literal as a star could be: five evenly spaced points pricked out with blue lightbulbs. We had a smaller version of this on our tree in Charleston that Pap extracted annually from the Gordian tangle of Christmas lights he kept stored in the attic. The installation of that star was the season’s first ordeal, a ritual so fraught with tension that it made me cringe before it began.
    The old man would perch on a step stool, cursing and grunting like a field hand as he teetered into the tree and tried to ram its apex into the tiny orifice of the star. Mummie would wait below, nervously cooing her appreciation but unable to refrain from asking if the tree might be a tiny bit crooked. And hearing another “Jesus H. Christ” from my father—a serious warning sign—we children would stay unnaturally still on the sofa, holding our breath until stellar penetration had been achieved.
    Christmases were like that: edgy and absurd, full of empty ritual.
    Even the presents under the tree were a false conceit, since Mummie bought most of them, certainly the ones that we children exchanged, and the ones that came from my father, and, for that matter, the ones we gave to him. The presents from distant relatives meant even less—socks and scarves and puzzles—and they stymied our orgy of greed, because my mother had to record all of them in a book, so she could write thank-you notes later. She carried Christmas on her back, Laura Noone, much as she carried our