The Night Listener : A Novel

by Armistead Maupin

  “No,” I replied in a milder tone. “Of course not.”

  “But I’m sure you can see my concern, Gabriel.”

  “I can. Yes.”

  “I could lose my job over this. There’s no plainer way to put it.”

  “I understand. But…you’re convinced that…he exists?” How very peculiar it sounded to put the basic issue into words.

  “Yes. I am. I am convinced. I wouldn’t risk so much if I weren’t.”

  “Okay, then.”

  “So you won’t…”

  “Look, Ashe. If there’s even the slightest chance he exists, I wouldn’t dream of creating doubts about him. He’s suffered too much already. He had a hard enough time just finding his voice.”

  “That’s exactly right.”

  “I just wanted to be…completely comfortable with him. The way I have been.”

  “I think you can do that,” said Findlay. “I’ve done it for almost a year. Warren has done it. A lot of people have.”

  “Is Pete on the phone a lot?” I had felt a little jolt of jealousy, I realized. Who were these other people, anyway—these total strangers—who were calling Henzke Street and sharing confidences with my son?

  “Not a lot,” said Findlay. “He doesn’t open up to many people.

  He can be quite distrustful, in fact. Dismissive even. A girl here in the office read his stuff and asked me if she could speak to him. I’m afraid she laid on the sympathy far too thick.”

  “Oh, God,” I said. “He would hate that.”

  “Mmm. He asked me not to let her call back.”

  “He doesn’t appreciate pity,” I said. “And neither does Donna.”

  “No. They’re both quite refreshing that way.” We were talking about two different people again, so it seemed the natural place to sign off. “I have to go,” I said, “but thanks for listening.”

  “Of course. I’m sorry I couldn’t give you the resolution you wanted.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “If you’d like me to pull your blurb, by the way…”

  “Oh, no. Leave it.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Absolutely.”

  And that was the truth, largely.

  That afternoon Anna left a message on the machine about collecting my latest receipts. I picked up the phone as soon as I realized who it was.

  “Sure,” I said. “Drop by anytime.”

  “Oh…Jess…I didn’t think you’d be there.”

  “This is Gabriel,” I told her.

  “Oh…sorry. Wow, you guys sound just alike on the phone.”

  I laughed.

  “You’ve never been told that?”

  “Oh, yes. Many times. But it’s especially funny right now.” Why hadn’t I thought of that earlier? People who live together, who rely on each other for emotional support, often grow to sound alike. It had happened with me and Jess, and it had even happened to Anna, I learned.

  “My brother and I are like that,” she told me. “Drives people nuts.

  We’re twins, of course, so that helps, but you’d think it wouldn’t work that way when one’s a boy and one’s a girl.” And with those words she handily validated my thesis.

  “Boy, have I got a story for you,” I told her.

  I had coffee ready when Anna arrived, so she could sit and listen without interruption. I have to say I relished the telling of the tale.

  There were aspects of it that still disturbed me, even as I put it to bed, but it helped to study someone else’s reaction, to counter the chaos of real life with the symmetry of a neat little mystery, neatly resolved.

  “It makes so much sense,” I told her, “when you think about it.

  She gave Pete a whole new existence, a whole new family. She even gave him his name back. And after all those hours on the couch he must have…absorbed some of the qualities of her speech. There’s a name for it, isn’t there? Imprinting or something?” Anna gaped at me. “This was that kid on the machine? The one who called you Dicksmoker?” I chuckled. “Yeah.”

  “You thought that was a woman?”

  “I thought it could have been,” I said. “For a little while.” I was already beginning to be embarrassed. Talk about imprinting. Jess had implanted the idea of an elaborate hoax with barely any effort at all.

  “And you don’t think that anymore?”

  I shook my head. “It’s just too far-fetched.”

  “But if nobody’s ever seen him…”

  “Nobody I know has ever seen him. There’s a big difference.”

  “So why don’t you just call the hospital and ask if he’s a patient there?”

  It was such a no-nonsense Anna-like suggestion, but it instantly made me shudder. “I can’t do that,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know the hospital, for one thing. And they probably register him under an alias, anyway.”

  “You’ll never know until you ask.”

  “No. It might get back to him.”

  “What would be terrible about that?”

  “I’m way too close to him, Anna. He trusts me. And I want him to know I trust him. I don’t want to sneak around behind his back.” She gave me an off-kilter smile. “This person who might not exist.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you even know what he looks like?”

  I was ready for that one. I pulled out my wallet and produced the snapshot with the startling green eyes, handing it to her with a prideful smile. She studied it for a moment in silence.

  “He sent you this?”

  I nodded. “Well…Donna did.”

  She gave it back to me. “Sweet-looking kid.” She might as well have added: Whoever he is.

  I returned the snap to my wallet, feeling awkward and a little foolish. Anna peered into her coffee cup intently, as if there were vital clues swimming just below the surface. “You know who he reminded me of on the machine?”

  “Who?”

  “Bart Simpson.”

  I smiled. “That actually occurred to me, too.” She took a sip of her coffee as she considered something for a while. Then she looked back at me and widened those Olivia Hussey eyes for greater dramatic effect. “Bart Simpson is a woman, you know.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “On the cartoon. That’s actually a woman’s voice.” She had intended to rattle me, so I tried not to show how well she’d succeeded. “I guess I knew that,” I said evenly. “Or read it.

  Now that you mention it.”

  Her gaze returned to her coffee.

  “And you know who you remind me of?” I asked.

  “Who?”

  “Jess. He loves to tantalize me with that kind of shit, then see where I’ll run in my imagination.”

  “So where did you run?”

  “Nowhere. Except straight into a wall.”

  “Oh, well.”

  “This is a great parlor game, Anna, but it makes no sense at all, if you look at it logically.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because no one on earth would go to all that trouble.” Anna shrugged. “Maybe it’s no trouble. Maybe it comes to her naturally. Maybe she doesn’t even know she’s doing it.” This had not occurred to me, I must admit.

  “That’s it,” she said, warming to her theme. “Maybe she’s like a multiple or something!”

  “Anna…”

  “No, listen. This is totally logical. She had a kid once like Pete, who was abused and everything, and she was the one who saved him. So all of that is true. Only he didn’t live, he died of AIDS or whatever. And she loved him so much she just couldn’t accept his death. So she brought him back to life the only way she could… by becoming him.”

  “Stop it.”

  “Well, tell me that’s not logical.”

  “This woman is a psychologist, Anna.”

  “So? They can be wacko, too.”

  “Okay, but I seriously…”

  “She could even have him embalmed or some
thing. Like a doll she keeps around for company. Or a puppet that she can operate by—”

  “Would you stop it, please?” I winced at her in horror and annoyance.

  “Sorry.”

  “These are real people, Anna. With real problems. It’s not an episode of The X-Files.”

  “Sorry,” she repeated. “You just got me so…interested.” She was right about that; I had no one to blame but myself. I already knew the curious power of this riddle. All Anna had done, in her youthful morbidity, was provide one far-too-vivid answer.

  “Are you gonna talk to him again?” she asked.

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “It’s so weird.”

  “No it isn’t,” I said firmly. “Not if you don’t let it be. Not if you refuse to play this destructive game.”

  And who was I talking to now?

  I had a feeling he would call that night.

  You might assume that all this recurring doubt would disconnect us telepathically, or at least loosen our bond. But it didn’t work that way. Pete had become more three-dimensional than ever. The longer I thought about him the more I grew convinced that he could sense not only my distress but the reason behind it as well.

  The machine came on as I was rinsing Hugo in the bathtub. I paused and cocked an ear to identify the caller, giving the dog a fine opportunity for a good drenching shake. I muttered at him, then sprinted to the office. Pete was already gabbing away.

  “…so if you’re not there, you’d better be out buying me another Playboy, because I’ve already dumped Miss November and I—”

  “Pete!”

  “Well, holy fuck, you are there.” I sat down breathlessly. “I was washing the dog.”

  “Is that like spanking the monkey?”

  “Speak for yourself, Mr. Playboy.”

  He chortled. “You are one evil influence.”

  “We aim to please.”

  “The T-shirt is really cool, too. I’m wearing it right now. All the gay orderlies are jealous.”

  I laughed. “You’re still at the hospital, then?”

  “Yeah, but just for the morning. We go home this afternoon.”

  “Great.”

  “I’ll say.”

  “You sound so much better,” I told him. “You sound like yourself again.”

  Jesus, I thought. Of all the ways I could have put it…

  TWELVE

  LAURA

  WHEN I WAS PETE’S AGE people often mistook me for my mother on the phone. Ladies from the Colonial Dames or St. Michael’s Church would call the house on Meeting Street and chirp “Good morning, Laura” as soon as they heard my boyish soprano. But I was only mildly offended, since my mother was a celebrity of sorts, the moderator of a weekly panel discussion on WUTF Radio, whose call letters stood for We Uphold The Family.

  Mummie’s show was called Time for Teens and her four panelists were all of high school age: big, worldly kids with big, worldly problems to discuss, like the treatment of acne and whether necking would inevitably lead to more serious things, like petting. While it was just a public-affairs project for the Junior League, the show was so well received that older kids sometimes asked me if I had a sister named Laura. And once Mummie even posed for a picture that appeared on the front page of the News and Courier. She and her panelists were caught sipping soda in a booth at Hoffman’s Pharmacy, their straws thrust rakishly into the same glass.

  My mother’s parents were British immigrants, and she clung to her roots with a vengeance, as if to remind snobby little Charleston that she’d come from a far more cultivated milieu. (This was why her children were instructed to call her Mummie, though I rarely used the name in public after the age of eight; it made me sound too much like Little Lord Fauntleroy, and my mother like an Egyptian artifact.) This flaunting of all things English reached its fullest flower when Mummie was chosen to play Eliza Doolittle in the Dock Street Theatre’s 1954 production of Pygmalion. She spent hours at home running lines with me and practicing her cockney, which, I’ve since come to realize, consisted of little more than dropping her H’s. But I was so impressed that I studied her technique carefully and inflicted my own strangled cockney upon friends, as if it were some new form of pig Latin. And I remember what it was like at home on rehearsal nights when Mummie would leave a casserole in the fridge, or pay our maid, Lottie, to stay after work and fix us her fried chicken. My father would sulk in his den, his face buried in the latest tome on the Civil War. “Your mother’s off at the theater,” he would mutter, “with the fairies.” He was desolate without her, an orphaned wretch—even with three children in the house.

  If you’d known my mother, you’d understand. She was lovely, to begin with, in a creamy-skinned, hazel-eyed, Deborah Kerr kind of way. And she was such a light, such a beam of pure compassion, that darkness of any sort—even my father’s stubborn variety—didn’t stand a chance in her presence. Drawn to strays of any kind, she was a pillar of the SPCA, but she rescued a number of humans, as well—or attempted to—over the years. I came to refer to them as the Refugees, since, for some reason, they were usually European, perhaps because it offered Mummie the illusion of a larger world.

  The Refugees were divorcées, or in the process of becoming: vaguely scarlet women who had met their American husbands at military bases overseas. Lured to the Low Country by the promise of True Love and Tara-like plantations, they ended up in trailer parks and tract houses, married to some abusive Bible-spouting dickhead whose name seemed always to begin with O—an Orville or an Olin or an Otis.

  It was my mother’s mission, she believed, to pry these women from their personal hells, to offer comfort and conversation, to find them suitable mates among the well-bred bachelors of the Yacht Club. She rarely succeeded. More often than not she landed smack dab in the middle of some knock-down-drag-out marital fracas.

  “Your mother’s lost her goddamned mind,” my father once reported.

  “She’s hiding in a phone booth at a motel in Ravenel, and she won’t come home until Veronique comes out.” Exactly why Mummie was hiding—or what her Refugee was doing inside—I was never told, but my father did volunteer that Veronique was “common as pigs’

  tracks,” and that my mother would end up in a serious lawsuit if she didn’t mind her own goddamned business. I waited for all hell to break loose, but Mummie returned that evening in time to take her pot roast out of the oven and settle in for The Bob Cummings Show.

  As she snuggled up to my father on the sofa, all that betrayed her busy afternoon of espionage (and the apparent accomplishment of her mission) was the cryptic little half-smile blooming on her face.

  In later years Mummie’s caretaking was more confined to home.

  My father’s mother—the grandmother we called Dodie—had Parkinson’s disease and the beginnings of Alzheimer’s, though we thought of it then as garden-variety senility. Dodie was shaky and bent over, a human parenthesis with a hearing aid as big as a prayer book hitched to her bosom. She needed help getting out of chairs and going to the toilet and even walking—all of which services my mother provided with unending goodwill. As the two of them inched across a room together, Dodie, who had strived for gentility all her life, could sometimes be heard to emit a barrage of unladylike farts. “Oh, goodness me,” she would murmur in mortification. And Mummie would squeeze Dodie’s shoulder and say: “That’s all right.

  We’ll just hurry and get away from it.” Then they would both dis-solve in giggles, bowing in their mirth to the awful hopelessness of it all.

  Dodie’s failing mind sometimes fell prey to demons. When I was in my early teens she became convinced she was being investigated by St. Michael’s Church—by the Ladies’ Auxiliary, no less. “They think I’m an alcoholic,” I heard her tell my parents one night, and even then I guessed that this delusional nonsense was really about my grandfather and the firestorm of speculation that Dodie must have endured after his suicide. I had come across a bundle of old letters in the attic
several years earlier: proclamations from local civic organizations extolling the virtues of the first Gabriel Noone upon his untimely death. Though they all avoided the particulars, there was a tone of anxious overstatement to them that invited suspicion even before I knew how my grandfather had died. In its concerted effort to remove the shame, the town had merely made it official. And Dodie had borne it for almost a quarter of a century. I remember passing her room late one night and hearing a sound that rattled me to the core. At seventy-five she was whimpering in her sleep like a baby, curled up there in the big mahogany sleigh bed that her grandfather’s slaves had built.

  My mother took care of everyone, but her firstborn was especially blessed. When I was as young as eight, she would bring me breakfast in bed on Saturday mornings, so I could listen to Big John and Sparky in the alpine lair of my upper bunk. My father, who complained bitterly of her “mollycoddling,” had contributed to this indulgence by building a shelf near the ceiling that could hold both my short-wave radio and my vast collection of Hardy Boys books. Later, when I discovered The Big Show and its host, Miss Tallulah Bankhead, I would climb to my aerie after supper and surrender to the smoky-warm, mannish voice of a woman I worshipped as a goddess but had never actually seen.

  In Mummie’s version of things I was simply her eccentric child.

  My brother, Billy, was the athletic, methodical one, the natural heir to my father’s gift for finance, a lively, uncomplicated kid who spent hours moving marbles across the rug as if they were beads on an abacus. And Josie, by definition, was the Precious Little Girl, a role so exalted that no one could imagine a future for her beyond marriage and motherhood. Of the three children, I was the puzzlement: the one my mother dubbed Ferdinand, since, unlike the other little bulls, I preferred to sit alone in the pasture and smell the flowers.