The Night Listener : A Novel (18 page)

I was searching for my keys when the phone rang. Miffed that my mission had been delayed, I answered with a tart “Hello.”

“Gabriel?”

My ill will vanished on the spot. “Pete! Sweetie! Guess where I’m heading!”

“No,” came the voice at the other end. “It’s Donna.”

“Oh…of course…sorry.” Thank God she couldn’t see my face, which was traitorously aflame.

“No problem,” she said. “We’re used to it. Pete hates it when it happens, but that’s boys for you. They don’t wanna sound like some dorky girl. So it’s better you did it with me.” Calming myself, I told Donna about my own mother and the way we’d sometimes been mistaken for each other on the phone.

“Did you both grow up in the same neighborhood?” she asked.

“Not really. Her parents were English, but she was born in western North Carolina. I grew up in Charleston.”

“West Virginia?”

“No. The one in South Carolina.”

There, I thought. There’s your proof. Donna wouldn’t have asked that so casually if she and Pete were the same person. She would have known
exactly
which Charleston I meant, since I’d already talked to Pete about it at length…unless, of course, she had deliberately played dumb to throw me off track. She might have decided that such a ruse was necessary, since I’d just mistaken her voice for Pete’s. Then again, if she was a true multiple, she wouldn’t even
know
what I had told her other personality, so it was still possible that one person could be…

Stop it
, I ordered myself.

“Oh, I love
that
Charleston,” Donna purred. “So pretty. I went there once for a conference on child abuse…Look, I’d love to shoot the breeze, but I’m afraid I’m the bearer of bad tidings.” Did I suspect then what was coming next? I didn’t, as I recall. But I knew that
something
was seriously out of whack.

“I’m so sorry to do this, but we have to withdraw our invitation.

I’m afraid it’s just not the right time.”

“Oh…sure…other visitors or something?”

“God, no. We’re bored silly out here. A little stimulation would be wonderful. Especially from you. But Pete’s immunity is zilch right now, and I just can’t take the risk of outside contamination. I hope you can understand. I’m as disappointed as Pete is.” Disturbed as I was, I didn’t put up a fight. I did let her know that my health was excellent, just in case it mattered.

“That’s just the problem,” she said. “Your system can easily live with things that would kill Pete. You could pick up a simple flu bug on the plane that he wouldn’t be able to shake. One more strain on his system right now would be…all she wrote.”

“It’s that bad?”

She answered with a sigh. “I try to downplay it around him, so he doesn’t feel like a china doll. But it’s really precarious at the moment.”

I didn’t know
what
to feel: renewed concern for Pete’s health or frustration over a clever excuse I could never refute. I certainly didn’t want to infect Pete, but, until now, he hadn’t exactly sounded like a boy in a bubble. And what about all those trips to the hospital? He must have encountered new people all the time. Why would one more be so threatening?

“Even his buddies from the hospital have to keep their distance,” Donna went on. “They have to wear masks and wave at him from across the room. It cramps his style something awful. He loves being around people. Thank God he’s got the telephone.” Fine, I thought. But why did you even invite me in the first place?

“I don’t expect this to be permanent,” she added, as if in response to my silent rebuttal. “I’d love for you to visit soon. But we got some new tests back yesterday that were pretty disappointing, and I would never forgive myself if he were to…”

“I understand, Donna. Really.”

“Oh, I hope so, Gabe. I really do.”

There was something about the inflection of that phrase that sounded disturbingly like Pete.

But Pete, of course, would have known not to call me Gabe.

I called Jess to cancel his house-sitting duties, but there was no answer, so I left a message. He came by the house early that evening, obviously still uninformed, having spent the day on the run. I tried to ease into the news, but somehow he sniffed it out and jumped ahead of me: “She bailed on you, didn’t she?”

“Well, I wouldn’t put it that way, but—”

“I
knew
this would happen!” He wore a look of fiery triumph, as if some risky, far-flung investment was finally showing big di-vidends.

“Of course you knew,” I said darkly. “You always do.” He regarded me through half-lidded eyes. “Meaning?”

“You predict calamity, and calamity happens. It’s not that hard to do, you know. If you’re always suspecting the worst, every now and then you’re bound to be right.”

He studied me, assessing my emotional state, and apparently decided that another raving madman would be more than the moment could safely support. “So what did she say?” he asked with uncommon calm.

“Does it matter?”

“I would be interested, yes. If you don’t mind.” I hesitated. “He got some tests back yesterday. She worried about him picking something up.”

“What sort of tests?”

“I don’t know, Jess. The usual, I guess. I didn’t ask.”

“Why not?”

“Because I didn’t want to sound like I was interrogating her. I didn’t want her to think I was suspicious.”

“
Are
you suspicious?”

“I don’t know
what
I am.”

“But you think she thinks you’re suspicious?”

“I don’t know. Probably not. I’m being way too paranoid, I guess.”

“Why should you be paranoid at all? You haven’t done anything.”

“I know. But I’m still…I dunno…afraid.”

“Of what? That she’ll figure out you’re on to her and won’t let you talk to him anymore?”

I shrugged. He’d come excruciatingly close to the truth.

“Do you know how strange that sounds?”

“Yes,” I said quietly. “I believe I do.”

“You’re never gonna meet him, you know.”

“Jess…”

“You know what else, sweetie? Someday soon she’s gonna call you and tell you that he died the night before, and that’s how she’ll end it. And you’ll just have to live with that, because you’ll never be able to prove it one way or the other.”

“Well, thank you so much for that. That helps a whole fucking lot.”

“No, listen to me. If you want to keep on talking to him, fine; enjoy it for what it is. But leave some room for disillusionment. And stop expecting to meet him, because it’s not gonna happen. Not in this lifetime. I don’t know what’s going on…if it’s a hoax or some sort of pathological thing, or just an overprotective mother. But whatever it is…”

“Why are you so determined to destroy this?”

“Because I see where you’re heading and it worries the fuck out of me. He’s not your son, sweetie. No matter how much you want him to be.”

I felt so exposed, so mortified, that all I could do was feign ignorance. “My
son
? Where the hell did you get that?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Had Pete told him? Or Donna? I couldn’t imagine either of them doing that. “Now you’re just making things up,” I said feebly.

“Why would I do that?”

“You tell me. Because someone else has my attention for once?

Because I have a relationship that you didn’t actually approve?” Jess stared at me as if I’d just announced my Martian origins.

“Okay…it’s not exactly an ordinary relationship. But it’s the first thing that’s made me feel human in months. I don’t know what’s happening any more than you do, but whoever that is on the phone has made a difference in my life, and I would think you’d be happy for me. Would that be so hard? Just to be happy for me?” Jess regarded me soberly. “I asked myself the same thing last month.”

“When?”

“When I told you I had a chance to live.”

My heart caved in. I’d hoped that Jess hadn’t clocked my shameful turmoil that day, the conflict I’d felt between his improving health and the fact that he was leaving me. As usual, he had read me like a large-type book. And, as usual, I couldn’t come clean. “I
was
happy for you,” I insisted. “I was happy for both of us. I
am
happy.” Jess shook his head with a thin smile. “You couldn’t even fake it.”

“You don’t know what it’s like,” I told him. “Loving someone for ten years, loving them more and more all the time, but expecting to lose them at any minute. Talk about room for disillusionment! I’m an expert at that! All I ever did was that. I couldn’t allow myself the luxury of thinking we would be forever. You had that luxury every single day. You
knew
you would have me until the end of your life, no matter what. How do you think it felt when you just…got better and changed your mind?”

“We
never
agreed to monogamy…”

“I’m not talking about monogamy! I’m talking about two people together, taking on the world together. We had that, Jess, more completely than anybody I’ve ever known. A lot of people never find it at all. I waited half of my life to find it, and I was so sure of it that I just…relaxed.” Angry tears flooded my face. “I had never allowed myself to give in to that dream, but I did with you. I put total faith in something for the first time in my life. And you just threw it away, so you could stomp around in jackboots and have your fucking New Life Crisis or whatever it is. We had something much stronger than sex, and it takes years to build that, and a lot of work. I’m fifty-four years old, Jess. This was it for me. For better or worse. I was ready for you to die in my arms.” Jess’s face had turned to stone. “Well, I’m sorry to spoil your plans.” That was a low blow, but it stung because there was truth to it. I
had
been planning his death, romanticizing it even, in a frenzied effort to contain the horror of losing him. It was impossible
not
to embrace his death before the fact, when there were so many living corpses walking the streets.

“That isn’t fair,” I said. “Nobody ever dreamed—”

“
I
dreamed. I dreamed all the time. I wanted to live and I worked like hell to do it. And sometimes I felt so alone, Gabriel. Because you just left it all up to me. You just made speeches about loving a dying man and forgot about the details. I was the one who took care of you.”

“Now wait a fucking minute—”

“No, I wanna say this. Last week Frank came over and we were lying there after some really great sex, and he turned and said to me: ‘I would take care of you if you’d let me,’ and I thought to myself how nice that would be for once. I’ve spent my whole life taking care of people. That’s what you and I were about from the beginning.

You cried in my arms the day after we met. You sensed that you could do that with me. You were so sad and lost that I thought: here’s somebody I can really take care of…”

“Jesus, Jess, how can you say that? All I ever wanted was to take care of you. You wouldn’t even let me half the time. You hated to be fussed over when you had the slightest little cold. You’d get all moody and withdrawn because you weren’t in control anymore. I used to worry what it would be like, in fact, when you really got sick, if all the tenderness would just disappear and…goddammit, Jess, I took care of you all the time. In every way. I loved you. I made it so you didn’t have to work in an office. I shared my income with you.” Jess gave me a pointed look. “
Your
income.”

“All right, ours. Whatever.”

“No, that means something, Gabriel. It’s always been
your
income.

That’s the way you see it, isn’t it?”

At that moment I couldn’t see anything but the “really great sex” with Frank that Jess had felt so driven to remark upon. “Well, I’m sorry,” I told him, “but I did write the goddamned books.”

“And I did nothing? Somebody else set up your IRA and organized your tours and your fucking publicity and held your hand at every taping and brainstormed with you every time you had something new to write? You established credit because of me, Gabriel. You bought this house. It’s even in your name, because I wanted to make things easier for you when I died. I spent a quarter of my life getting your life in order, and I’ve got nothing to show for it.”

“You had everything,” I told him bleakly. (And you threw it away, I thought, for the nearest swarthy man who would tie you to a cross and let you call him sir, someone, in other words, who would impersonate the father who had terrorized you.) “Am I supposed to feel sorry for you?” I asked. “You’re the one who’s leaving me, Jess. This has been your choice all the way. I was completely blindsided.”

“That is such bullshit.”

“Don’t tell me how I feel, please.”

“If you were blindsided, Gabriel, it’s because you chose to be. You don’t confront things at all. You live in your own little fantasy world.

You act like the tough stuff will just go away if you don’t acknowledge it. I dropped lots of hints about our sex life over the years, but you refused to pick up on them. So I avoided anything that made you uncomfortable. You think of me as a bull in a china shop, but I’m not—not all the time. I learned to be very careful about the stuff that you can’t handle.” Like what? I wondered, my guts twisting with the fear that he might actually tell me. What intrinsic flaw in my being had made me so impossible to live with? Was I just too old for him now, or too self-absorbed to be in a real partnership? My fame had once been a consolation in times of distress, but now it just made me feel worse.

For if Jess could walk out on the myth he’d helped create, the real me must be someone truly unlovable.

“This isn’t just about S/M,” he added with his customary clairvoy-ance. “There are things I have to figure out on my own.” He had omitted the ampersand, I noted, thereby reminding me that they call it S/M these days, not S & M.

I couldn’t even
say
it the right way.

I don’t remember how that conversation ended, only that I wanted out of it as quickly as possible. I do recall that Jess broached the subject of money and that I wrote him a check to cover his expenses for the next two months. It was agonizing for both of us. We had vowed in the past never to make an issue of money, which had always been easy enough for me, since Jess had been so conscientious in that regard;
I
was the one inclined toward overspending. Money, however, was the monster that loomed over us that afternoon, because I’d started to believe that Jess was as desperate as I was, but in a different way. Would he even be here at all, I wondered, trying to be civil with me, if he had any other means of staying alive?