The Night Listener

by Armistead Maupin

  “And this was for what, you said?”

  “A TV deal. He’s producing a special for us.”

  “Sounds great,” she said pleasantly.

  “A special what?” My father, no longer the focus of our attention, was cruising for some friendly friction.

  “I’m gonna do a reading on TV,” I told him. (This part was true, at least; Jess had been planning the special for months.) “Sort of a dramatized thing. With an armchair and a set. Like Alistair Cooke on Masterpiece Theatre. People will actually get to see me this time.”

  “Well, lucky them.”

  There was a trace of malice in this, but I let it go with a tart smile.

  I knew it wasn’t easy for Pap, having his name co-opted by such a conspicuous homo. I had been programmed to be him, after all: a partner in his bank, a conservative, a practicing aristocrat. But now, by his own account, he had become a road-show version of me.

  Dewy-eyed shopgirls and waiters, clocking the name on his credit card, would ask him for his autograph only to discover he wasn’t the Gabriel Noone. I liked to imagine this happening during one of his lunches with Strom Thurmond, when ol’ Strom had been ranting away about the evils of the Gay Agenda. But the senator probably avoided the subject altogether, recognizing, in his gentle-manly way, the cross his old friend had to bear.

  “We saw your books in Paris,” my father said. “Big pile of ‘em.

  Right there…you know…in that virgin place.” Darlie provided the translation: “The Virgin Megastore.”

  “Ah.”

  “I wanted the new Jimmy Buffett,” she explained.

  I gave her a private twinkle. “I thought maybe he was looking for Nine Inch Nails.”

  Darlie chuckled; my father’s eyes narrowed. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Nothing, sweetness. It’s just a musical group.”

  “Thank God. I thought you were talking about my prowess.”

  “No, believe me, nobody’s talking about that.”

  “Did you tell the boy about…?”

  “No, I did not.”

  “Good.”

  “Why on earth would—”

  “Remember ol’ Hubie Verner?” My father leaned closer, clearly intent upon telling me himself. Whatever the hell it was.

  “Yeah,” I said carefully. “Your doctor. Or used to be.”

  “Still is,” said Pap with a chuckle. “Must be ninety, if he’s day, but I’m still goin’ to him.”

  Darlie rolled her eyes. “He’s seventy-one, for God’s sake. He’s a lot younger’n you.”

  “Well, he looks ninety, poor bastard.” My father leaned closer in a moment of man-to-man lechery. “Wrote me a prescription for that Viagra stuff. Damnedest thing you’ve ever seen.”

  “Gabriel…”

  “Oh, hell, Darlie, he’s a grown man.”

  “Nobody cares if—”

  “You sure as hell cared. You were pretty damn impressed.” He turned back to me, his face rosy with revelation. “Took me one when she was out shoppin’ on the Rue de Rivoli. Had a big ol’ surprise waitin’ for her when she got back to the George Cinq.” My stepmother’s expression was flawlessly deadpan. “Now there’s an image we could all live without.”

  “Tell me,” I said, offering her a crooked smile.

  Darlie looked good for fifty-three, I thought. She had trimmed down considerably, and her strawberry-blond hair was cropped stylishly short. We had never been close, but I admired the way she let the old man’s crap roll off her back. My mother had spent her marriage tiptoeing around his anger and intolerance, making endless excuses and hoping, I suppose, for a miraculous conversion. Darlie just saw Pap as something elemental and unavoidable, like hur-ricanes and pluff mud, to be endured with stoic humor.

  Maybe it helped that Darlie wasn’t one of us. She wasn’t white trash, or even “common,” as we used to say, but had I brought her home during high school, she would surely have been assessed as someone whose family didn’t “go to the ball.” Darlie’s father had been a chief yeoman at the naval base, her mother a bank teller.

  Perfectly respectable, unless you grew up south of Broad, where

  “nice folks” were ruthlessly delineated by their attendance at the St.

  Cecilia Ball. Nowadays Darlie was nice by marriage, but Pap behaved as if she’d been born to the job, and defied anyone—from any class—to suggest otherwise. No one in his family could ever be less than aristocratic, just as no one could really be gay. When the truth locked horns with my father’s prejudices, it was always the truth that suffered.

  “Sometimes,” my sister, Josie, once remarked, “I wish I’d given him a black grandchild, just to see how he’d make it white.”

  Our food had arrived, but my father’s eyes had wandered out to the Embarcadero. A line of signal flags—plastic and strictly decorat-ive—was snapping in the night air like forgotten laundry.

  “India, Echo, Charlie,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Those three next to the lamppost. Right?” Pap and I had both served in the navy, once upon a time. This was our common currency, so I doled it out judiciously whenever I wanted to feel closer to him. Thirty years earlier, I had written long letters home from Vietnam, shamelessly dramatizing my circumstances, just to make him proud of me. Nothing could soften his heart like the memory of war.

  He squinted at the signal flags for a moment, then grunted. “Who the hell knows? That’s why you got signalmen.” I turned to my stepmother. “He found out about me that way, you know.”

  Darlie looked puzzled. “That you were gay?”

  “No,” I said with a brittle laugh. “That I was born.”

  “Christ.” My father flinched in delayed reaction to that word.

  “He was on his minesweeper in…where was it, Pap?”

  “Guadalcanal. Well…no, Florida Island, Tulagi…”

  “Anyway, he got word from the flagship that I’d been born. And they had to use semaphore to do it.”

  “No kidding,” said Darlie.

  I always loved the romance of this: the blue water and blazing heat, a strapping young signalman in his white sailor suit, brandish-ing flags with the news of me. It was the South Pacific of Nellie Forbush and Mr. Roberts, a showbiz entrance if ever there was one.

  “What was the message?” asked Darlie.

  “Hell,” said my father. “I don’t remember.”

  “Yes, you do,” I said. “‘Baby born, mother and son fine.’”

  “Yeah. Somethin’ like that.”

  I wondered if I’d embarrassed him with the mention of my mother; he rarely brought her up around Darlie. For years, I think, he’d felt guilty about remarrying after Mummie’s death, judging from the number of disclaimers he made to his children. “You know,” he would tell us, “this doesn’t change how I feel about your mother.” We understood that perfectly, and we approved of Darlie—age difference and all—in a way that much of Charleston did not. Pap was high maintenance, after all; we were just glad that someone young and vigorous had committed to the job.

  I changed the subject by inviting my father’s nostalgia. “It must have been a hell of a time.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Did he tell you about the billboard?” asked Darlie. She had taken the old man’s arm with easy affection. They really do love each other, I thought.

  And the sight of their obvious coupledom stung in a way that I hadn’t expected. Was it possible that they’d outlasted me and Jess?

  I did remember that billboard, but I pretended otherwise, just to give him some material to work with. “Don’t think so,” I said.

  “What billboard?” asked Pap.

  Darlie squeezed his arm. “In the harbor. You know.”

  “Oh.” My father chortled at the memory. “Damnedest thing you ever saw. The fleet commander was this tough ol’ son-of-a-bitch who knew how to get the job done. Named, uh…damn, what the hell was his name?”


  “We don’t care, hon.” Darlie was inspecting her lamb flatbread.

  “He was somethin’, though. A real kick-ass ol’ cuss. Had the Seabees build this enormous billboard at the entrance to the harbor at Guadalcanal. First thing we saw when we came sailin’ in. Said:

  ‘Kill the bastards, kill the bastards, kill the yellow bastards.’” I kept my expression blank. “An idealistic sort o’ guy.”

  “Hell, it was war.”

  “It was war,” I echoed, exchanging a wry look with Darlie.

  “Can’t hear that story too much,” she said.

  “Oh, go to hell, both of you,” said my father, and he plunged into his butterfly prawns.

  We were all a little high on wine by the end of dinner. Pap was the first to show it.

  “You know what, son?”

  “What?”

  “I’m damn proud of you.”

  “Well…good.” I tried to look into his eyes, but it was almost impossible. For both of us.

  “I mean it.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re gettin’ rich, I guess.”

  “Well…comfortable.”

  “Comfortable? Your books are all over Harrods.”

  “I know, but there’s a lotta folks to pay.”

  “I hope you’re puttin’ some away. Not spendin’ it like a nigger, like you usually do.”

  “Jesus, Gabriel. Give it up.” Darlie shot me a sympathetic glance.

  “You don’t know,” my father told her. “Son-of-a-bitch bought a London taxicab when he was at Sewanee. Cost him more to ship the damn thing home than he paid for it. Broke down all the time, too.” He winked at me rakishly to convey his harmlessness.

  “I’m a little more careful now,” I said.

  “That boy’s keepin’ you in line, I hope.” He meant Jess, who had been cast as the Responsible One in our household. I had actually promoted this, since it was largely the truth, and it gave Pap an excuse to respect, however marginally, the funny fella who was sleeping with his son.

  “He’s pretty conscientious,” I said.

  “I’m sorry we missed him.” Pap connected with me briefly to show what he really meant: that he liked Jess just fine, that he was glad I had company on the journey, just like he did. He was giving us his blessing at last, now that it could do nothing but hurt.

  “He’s okay, isn’t he?” Darlie had that expression some people use when they’re talking about AIDS.

  “Oh, yeah, very much so. The cocktail seems to be working.” The old man frowned. “Cocktail?”

  “You know about that.” Darlie scolded her husband with a glance.

  No, he doesn’t, I thought. He may have been told, but he didn’t bother to store it, because it didn’t matter to him that much. “It’s a combination of drugs,” I explained. “So far it’s been fairly effective against the virus.”

  “I knew they’d find something,” said my father. “Nobody believed me, but I said so all along, didn’t I?”

  “It’s not a cure,” I told him.

  “Well, just the same…”

  Pap’s approach to mortal illness was to deny it outright, then accuse the world of unnecessary hysteria. He had done that the night my mother died in ‘79, when I’d been summoned to Charleston from California for reasons that were gruesomely obvious to everyone.

  “She’s a whole lot better,” he whispered, pulling me aside at the hospital. “These damn doctors are a bunch of nervous nellies.”

  A decade later, when Josie found a lump in her breast, the old man had attempted a pathetic variation on the same theme. “You know,” he told me. “Your sister’s always been excitable.” I was sorry I’d provided another escape hatch. “A lot of people can’t use the cocktail,” I told him. “I know a thirteen-year-old who can’t.” This made Darlie frown, then put down her spoon. “Who has AIDS, you mean?”

  “Sure.”

  “From a transfusion or something?”

  “No. The usual way.”

  “My God.”

  “This town,” muttered my father.

  “It wasn’t here,” I said with a trace of righteous satisfaction. “It was out there in Amurrica. His father had been screwing him since he was four.”

  “Jesus,” said Darlie.

  “Can we talk about something pleasant?” said my father.

  But Darlie wanted to hear about it, so I assembled the story for her, sparing nothing as I gave it shape and color. I told her about the pedophile ring and the videotapes that had convicted Pete’s parents and the single mother who had come to his rescue when all hope seemed lost. I told her about a little straight boy who had felt like such an outcast that he had finally found fellowship in a ward full of AIDS fags. It gave me perverse pleasure to mess with the mythology of the nuclear family in my father’s presence. And I couldn’t help feeling proud of my role in Pete’s life, proud that someone so extraordinary had seen me as father material.

  “All because he heard you on the radio,” said Darlie.

  “It’s much more powerful medium than people think.” Pap’s discomfort was palpable. “I’d be careful if I were you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How many times have you talked to him?”

  “I don’t know. Six or seven, maybe. Why?”

  “Does his mother know you’re calling him?”

  “Of course. She arranged it. What are you getting at?” My father tore off a chunk of bread. “Well…you’re a middle-aged man, and he’s…well, people could get the wrong idea, that’s all.”

  “Like what?” I had caught on finally, and I was bristling.

  “I think you know.”

  “No, Pap. Tell me. What wrong idea will they get?” Darlie had stopped eating entirely and was watching us with a look of slack-mouthed alarm.

  “For God’s sake,” said my father, “use your damn head. The boy was abused by gays.”

  “He was abused by pedophiles. Have you been listening at all?”

  “They were men, weren’t they?”

  “Yeah. Straight men.”

  “How could they be straight, if they were messing with a boy?”

  “Because they called him a faggot while they were doing it.” Pap recoiled as if he’d been struck. For all his manly swagger, he was not about to venture into that territory. “Jesus,” he murmured.

  “You can make anything disgusting, can’t you?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said with the driest sarcasm I could muster. “Is that what I did? Let’s get back to something pleasant. Like killing Japs.”

  “C’mon, guys.” Darlie looked at her husband, then at me. “Be nice now.”

  “Somebody’s gotta tell him it’s not cute anymore.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” My father’s face was aflame.

  “All this nigger and Jap shit. It doesn’t make you a character, you know. It just makes you an asshole.”

  “Hey,” said Darlie mildly.

  “Do you think your children want their children to hear that kind of talk? They don’t, Pap. That got old a long time ago. Billy dreads it every time he brings his kids over, for fear you’ll be pulling that racist shit again. Talk about a lousy influence on children…” My father’s eyes narrowed. “Who said anything about a lousy influence?”

  “You implied…”

  “I didn’t imply shit. Jesus, you’re the most sensitive fella I ever met. All I said was, people might get the wrong idea. That’s all I said. If you wanna make it into somethin’ else…”

  “Why would they get the wrong idea? Because I’m gay?”

  “Well…that complicates it, yes.”

  Darlie pushed her chair back and stood up. “Time for me to go pee.” Neither of us acknowledged her efficient exit.

  “How does that complicate it?” I asked.

  “Just drop it.”

  “No. I wanna know. Would it be okay if I were straight?” Silence.

  “Or if Pete were a girl? W
ould that make it acceptable?”

  “This is ridiculous.”

  “What’s so ridiculous? The boy needs love. You don’t have to be straight to do that. Children will take it anywhere they can get it.

  And you don’t deny them just because you didn’t get it yourself.

  Just because somebody betrayed you. Sooner or later, you have to break the cycle, or the damage is just passed on from one generation to—”

  “Oh, blah, blah, blah. Where’d you get all that New Age crap?” How absurd it was to hear the term New Age tumble from my father’s lips. I was certain he’d never used it—or even heard it, for that matter—until the frothing fundamentalists in his party had identified it as the Antichrist. He was just a social Episcopalian, and a lapsed one at that; he didn’t give a damn about Christ or his Anti; he was simply baiting me.

  “It’s just common sense,” I replied.

  “You think I betrayed you?”

  “No,” I said quietly. “I think somebody betrayed you. And I’m the one who paid for it.”

  I was stunned by my own audacity. How had I summoned the nerve, or the sheer stupidity, to confront the unconfrontable? Without a moment’s thought I had led us to the edge of a precipice, and a single misstep could send us both tumbling into oblivion. Pap’s eyes were the true measure of our peril; them and his voice, which was so abnormally subdued that it scared me.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

  “I guess not,” I replied. “How could I?” Then we just stopped talking. We were both so embarrassed we might have been children caught white-handed in a flour-strewn kitchen. And we realized, too, that we were no longer alone; a presence hovered over us like some pale messiah who’d been sent to save us from ourselves.

  “Can I tempt you with dessert?” he asked.

  Somehow we found our way to safer footing. By the time Darlie returned from the john we were deep in a discussion about the charms of the Place des Vosges. Geography had often sheltered us. As a boy, I would sit in the garden while the old man mulched azaleas with pine straw, just to hear him rhapsodize about the Skyline Drive, or the wild ponies on Ocracoke Island, or the boxwood maze at Middleton Plantation. I loved him most then, I think, when he was musing about other places. The earth was a source of wonder and sustenance to him; it was people who let him down.