The Night Listener

by Armistead Maupin

  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?

  That night, as I lay on the sofa hoping that Pete would call, I remembered the time Jess first came down from Oregon to visit me.

  I had a tiny cottage on Noe Hill then, and it was riddled with mice, since I didn’t have the heart (or the stomach) to set traps. As we cuddled in bed that first night Jess was aghast at the chorus of squeaks that greeted us as soon as the lights went out. The next morning he went down to Cliff’s Hardware and bought several dozen mousetraps, all of which did their job within a matter of nights. I would lie in Jess’s arms, wincing and laughing at the horror, as the traps snapped away in the darkness, sometimes two at a time.

  How had I let it get so bad? And who was this sweet, volatile man who had come out of nowhere to slay my dragons? He’d taken care of me all right, and I’d loved every minute of it.

  FOURTEEN

  STRANGER AND STRANGER

  ASHE FINDLAY, POOR SOUL, could never have guessed how bad his timing would be when he called the next morning to update me on the progress of The Blacking Factory. I think he must have wanted some reassurance that my doubts had subsided, so he could proceed with Pete’s book without further anxiety. What he got, thanks to the state of my heart, was a cranky antagonist, desperate for a resolution of any kind.

  I guess I was provoked by his blithe description of the book’s cover design. They were featuring a photo of Pete, he said—”an utterly charming shot”—but they were altering his face, naturally, to protect the boy’s privacy.

  “Is he wearing a sweatshirt?” I asked, wondering if this was the same shot Donna had sent me.

  “Yes. I believe so.”

  That seemed evasive, as if I couldn’t be trusted with such ticklish information. My response was glacial. “You believe so?”

  “Well, it’s back with the art department now. I only had a quick glance at it.”

  “Were his eyes green? An unusual shade?”

  “Not that I remember, but of course they’d altered it by then.”

  “But you must’ve seen the original?”

  “Yes. I did. I think they were green, yes. Now that you mention it.

  Very striking.” His well-bred voice was positively writhing in discomfort.

  “I must tell you,” I said. “This whole thing is sounding stranger and stranger. And a little unprofessional on your part.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” the editor replied soberly. “You seemed fine about it last time. Would you like to reconsider your blurb?”

  “This isn’t about my blurb, Ashe. I need some answers here. You got me into this, and you’re gonna have to get me out. I’m tired of being jerked around.” This sounded a lot like a threat, I realized, and a not-so-veiled one at that. I started to soften it but changed my mind. A threat might be what it would take to get some action.

  “Has something else happened?” the editor asked.

  Has it ever, I thought. My life, I realized, had been reduced to a loose confederation of uncertainties, and I was sick to death of it. I wasn’t inclined to unload on this constipated Yankee, so I offered him only the hard facts: my invitation to visit Pete and its unceremonious withdrawal.

  “I believe I warned you,” Findlay said. “She’s extremely wary of him meeting people.”

  “So why didn’t she just say that to begin with? Why would she give me all that crap about her chili and let me make plans for several days, if she never intended for it to happen?”

  “I couldn’t tell you that.”

  “Well, I can. She did it because she wanted me to think it was possible. She wanted me to believe there was actually someone there I could visit.”

  “Gabriel, my friend, you’ll only make yourself crazy if you continue to dwell—”

  “Please don’t call me crazy, Ashe. I don’t think I’m the one who’s being crazy here. I think I’m being very sane, in fact. And very reasonable, under the circumstances.”

  Another silence, even longer. “What would you like me to do?” he said at last.

  “I don’t know. Poke around, at least. Be a little more aggressive about authenticating it. You’re in a position to do that. I’m not.”

  “Do you want me to say that you’re having—”

  “No! God, no! Leave me out of this. This is between you and one of your writers. If there’s anything left to salvage between me and Pete, I’d like to be able to do it.”

  “I understand.”

  “And get back to me, please. As soon as you can.” I spent the rest of the day in bed, inert and powerless. My only visual was Jess’s apartment building, suspended in the bedroom window. Its edges were blurred by swirling fog, and there were times when it disappeared completely, then magically rematerialized, as the moon can do. Unlike me, Jess dreaded the fog. It depressed him when it lasted too long, closing him in with his demons. He was up there right now, I imagined, staring out at this infinite grayness, feeling the sad fallout of our fight. I wanted so badly to call him, but I knew there was nothing more to be said, nothing that would fix us.

  I drifted into troubled sleep, only to be roused by Pete’s voice on the machine. And this time I was sure it was him.

  “…just had this funny feeling. So if you don’t feel like talking, I’ll try you again when—”

  “Pete?”

  “Oh, good, Dad. You’re there.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve been getting these signals all day. Something’s been bothering you big time.”

  Even in that groggy state I was completely unnerved, so I tried to jest my way out. “What is this? The Psychic Friends Network?”

  “I’m serious. What’s going on?”

  “Nothing…well…I’m disappointed, of course, that I won’t be seeing you.”

  “Me, too. But Mom says we can do it in a month, if you still want to. They’ve put me on a new protocol.”

  “Well, that’s good,” I said vaguely.

  “But that’s not it, is it?”

  “Not what?”

  “What’s bothering you. Have you had a fight with Jess?�
�� Astonished, I wondered for a moment if Jess had told Pete as much, but that didn’t seem likely given his skepticism about the boy. “I did, actually,” I said at last. “Yesterday.”

  “I knew it.”

  How could everyone around me be so rife with intuition when I felt like a blind man stumbling through a minefield?

  “We had a talk,” I admitted. “And we said some things we’ve never said before.”

  Pete took that in for a moment. “Well, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes it’s bad to leave too much unsaid.” Tell me about it, I thought, wondering if this was the wisdom of a therapist or just of a kid who’d been seeing a therapist. And did it matter, really, when I still had so much to get off my chest?

  “So what did you fight about?” asked Pete.

  “Oh, lots of stuff. He says I never confront things. That I don’t communicate what I’m really thinking.”

  “Is that true?”

  “Oh, yeah. I’m a big scaredy-cat.”

  “What were you afraid of with him?”

  “The usual. That he wouldn’t love me anymore if he knew what was really on my mind.” I could have been talking about Pete, I realized, and maybe I was, on some unconscious level—getting as close to the truth as I could get without tipping my hand. “You learn to camouflage when you’re a baby homo. You learn to tiptoe around things. At least I did. And it’s a hard habit to break, even when you’re grownup and out of the closet.”

  “What about yesterday? Did you tell him everything that was on your mind?”

  “Some of it. I said how hard it was to love someone who might be dying. To feel closer and closer to them but know you can’t count on them being there in your old age.”

  “Well, that was the truth, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but just part of it. Actually, I think it was easier for me to commit to Jess because I knew it wouldn’t have to last forever. And I could even feel a little noble in the process. I gave him hell yesterday for throwing away what we had, but you know what? When things got too depressing, I used to tell myself I’d have another shot at loving someone. I’d see myself back at the baths again, chasing my dick around one more time before it got too late to do it. And I would imagine this guy I’d meet someday, who wouldn’t carry the virus and wouldn’t be as angry as Jess, and we would get it right finally. I was disloyal, Pete. I accused him of that, but I did the same thing, really. I thought about a future he would never be part of. I dreaded his death, but I knew it would give me an out. I knew it would give me another shot at things.”