"Well," she said. "Go ahead."
"It's not awful," he said.
"It's awful."
"It's not awful. It's frightened. That's a different thing. Awful you can't fix. Frightened you can." He opened his eyes. "May I tell you the only thing I know? The only thing about the work I ever really learned, in nine years of it?"
"Please."
"You're talking to Buffalo," he said. "There's no such person. Nobody is awake at three in the morning called Buffalo. Buffalo's asleep. What's awake is one woman in a kitchen in Kenmore who can't sleep because her husband's on the night shift at the Chevy plant and the baby has croup. What's awake is one man in a tollbooth on the Thruway. One kid under the covers with a little green Philco." He said this last very gently. "You don't talk to the city. You talk to the one. You pick one, and you talk to them like you're sitting at their kitchen table, and you don't perform for them, because they'll know. People are never smarter than at three in the morning. They can hear a performance through a brick wall. They only want to know one thing."
"What?"
"That somebody else is awake," he said. "That's all. That they're not the only one."
She sat on the floor with the tape recorder in her lap. She thought of the green Philco, its dial glowing amber under the blanket, the warm smell of the tubes. She thought of the voice that had come out of it. She looked at the old man on her sofa, in her father's socks, with the colored tree lights moving on his face, and something rose in her, something she didn't have a word for yet, and she opened her mouth to say—what? She didn't know.
The telephone rang.
It was the wall phone in the kitchen, the beige one with the twenty-foot cord that Roman used to tie himself up like a mummy. At ten-forty on Christmas Eve, a ringing phone meant one of two things, and neither of them was good. Harper got up and got it on the fourth ring.